SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 is Deceitful and Threatening:

Manifest V3, Google Chrome's soon-to-be definitive basket of changes to the world of web browser extensions, has been framed by its authors as "a step in the direction of privacy, security, and performance." But we think these changes are a raw deal for users.  We've said that since Manifest V3 was announced, and continue to say so as its implementation is now imminent. Like FLoC and Privacy Sandbox before it, Manifest V3 is another example of the inherent conflict of interest that comes from Google controlling both the dominant web browser and one of the largest internet advertising networks.

Manifest V3, or Mv3 for short, is outright harmful to privacy efforts. It will restrict the capabilities of web extensions—especially those that are designed to monitor, modify, and compute alongside the conversation your browser has with the websites you visit. Under the new specifications, extensions like these– like some privacy-protective tracker blockers– will have greatly reduced capabilities. Google's efforts to limit that access is concerning, especially considering that Google has trackers installed on 75% of the top one million websites.

upstart writes:

"Newer, nimbler, faster:" Venus probe will search for signs of life in clouds of sulfuric acid:

With multiple rovers landed and a mission set to return samples to Earth, Mars has dominated the search for life in the solar system for decades. But Venus has some fresh attention coming its way.

In a new report published today, a team led by MIT researchers lays out the scientific plan and rationale for a suite of scrappy, privately-funded missions set to hunt for signs of life among the ultra-acidic atmosphere of the second planet from the sun.

"We hope this is the start of a new paradigm where you go cheaply, more often, and in a more focused way," says Sara Seager, Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and principal investigator for the planned Venus Life Finder Missions. "This is a newer, nimbler, faster way to do space science. It's very MIT."

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2021/08/reverse-engineering-vintage-power.html

I recently did a PC power supply teardown so I figured it would be interesting to go deeper and see what happens inside the power supply's control IC. The die photo below shows the UC3842 chip, which was very popular in older PC power supplies.1 (The chip was introduced in 1984 but this die has a date of 2000.) The tiny silicon die is patterned to create the transistors, resistors and capacitors that make up the circuit. The lighter-colored lines are the metal layer on top of the silicon, forming the chip's wiring. Around the edges, square pads provide the connections from the die to the IC's external pins; tiny bond wires connect the pads to the chip's external pins.

One for the real hardware geeks...:

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The hand-cranked calculator invented by a Nazi concentration camp prisoner:

It's no bigger than a drinking glass, and it fits easily in the palm of the hand. It resembles a pepper grinder—or perhaps a hand grenade.

The diminutive "Curta" is a striking machine, a mechanical calculator that combines the complexity of a steamship engine and the precision craftsmanship of a fine pocket watch. It first appeared in 1948, and for the next two decades—until it was displaced by the electronic calculator—it was the best portable calculating machine on the planet. And its story is all the more compelling in light of the extraordinary circumstances in which it was invented.

The idea of the Curta came to its Austrian-born inventor in the darkness of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

[...] Today, we take number-crunching for granted. Our smartphones have calculator apps, and most of us have a pocket calculator somewhere in our home or office. But it wasn't always so easy. For centuries, anything more than simple addition was painfully time-consuming. The first slide rules appeared in the 17th century, not long after John Napier's invention of the logarithm, but they could only handle a couple of positions beyond the decimal place. There were also various kinds of mechanical adding machines, but most were crudely built and unsuited to scientific work. By the late 19th century, more reliable desktop calculators began to appear, but they were heavy and expensive.

The shortcomings of these machines were very much on the mind of the young Curt Herzstark, whose family was in the business of making and selling calculating machines and other office equipment. Born in 1902 in Vienna, Herzstark was running the family business by the 1930s. He traveled extensively across Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, selling mechanical calculators to banks and factories.

[...] "People said again and again, 'Yes, that is nice, but isn't there anything smaller?'" Herzstark recalled. Slide rules were not good enough; his customers wanted precise figures, not approximations. Simply taking existing designs and making all of the various parts smaller wouldn't do the trick; the keys and knobs would be too small to use. A radical redesign was needed.

[ED NOTE: Editors discussed whether we should even run this story. I decided to take a chance. BUT, it's up to the community how this goes. Feel free to downmod comments that attack the *commenter* rather than *add* something to the discussion.--martyb]

gznork26 writes:

Growing extremism can and has turned almost anything into a political struggle in which people pay diminishing attention to the topics and more to the 'tribal' group that they may be associated with. We've seen the effects on the functioning on the US congress, as well as in how laws on various topics have been playing out lately.

But the idea that without a center, things fall apart, may be more real than we thought, as this article at ScienceBlog about a Cornell study describes: https://scienceblog.com/527200/tipping-point-makes-partisan-polarization-irreversible/

It seems that up to a point, it is possible to reverse the polarization. Beyond that tipping point, it cannot. From what I've seen, the US is probably in the vicinity of that tipping point. The pattern described here sounds an awful lot like the period-doubling path to chaos, a mathematical construct in which a function that has a single stable state in one range of numbers starts developing two stable states, and then four, until stability is lost and the set devolves into chaos. If this reflection has any validity in the political or social realms, then we should also have seen the same pattern play out within discussions that turn to chaos.

Is there predictive power in this observation by the researchers at Cornell? If so, can anything be done to head it off, or are we all doomed to watch it play out?

Journal Reference:
Michael W. Macy, Manqing Ma, Daniel R. Tabin, et al. Polarization and tipping points [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2102144118)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

At least 100 feared dead after tornadoes devastate six US states:

US President Joe Biden has pledged support to states affected by a swarm of devastating tornadoes that demolished homes, levelled businesses and left at least 100 people feared dead.

Describing the tornadoes as likely "one of the largest" storm outbreaks in history, Biden on Saturday approved an emergency disaster declaration for the worst-hit state of Kentucky, where at least 22 people have been confirmed dead.

"It's a tragedy," said a shaken Biden. "And we still don't know how many lives are lost and the full extent of the damage."

He added, "I promise you, whatever is needed – whatever is needed – the federal government is going to find a way to provide it."

The powerful twisters, which weather forecasters say are unusual in cooler months, destroyed a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky, ripped through a nursing home in neighbouring Arkansas, and killed at least six workers at an Amazon warehouse in Illinois.

upstart writes:

Government to push for international ban of autonomous weapons, or killer robots:

The [New Zealand] Government will push for an international ban on fully autonomous weapons, or killer robots, that use artificial intelligence to target and kill people without any human decision-making.

New Zealand has for decades advocated for disarmament in international forums, after declaring the country a nuclear-free zone in the 1980s. Autonomous weapons are seen as a new frontier in the arms race between major military powers.

Disarmament Minister Phil Twyford on Tuesday said the Government had decided to take a "tough and uncompromising" stance on autonomous weapons, and seek a ban of fully autonomous weapons on the international stage. He said there was a realistic prospect that large-scale wars could soon be waged by killer robots.

"There's a fundamental ethical objection to delegating to machines the decision to take a human life. When a machine is activated and can then identify and engage a human target, without any human intervention in that decision-making chain, that is, I think, profoundly concerning.

"Many people, and I think New Zealand is in this camp, seriously question whether it's possible for autonomous weapon systems to comply with the fundamental tenets of international humanitarian law – the rules around protecting civilians, of military action being proportionate, accountability for one's actions in the battlefield.

"There's a third objection ... Mass-produced killer robots in the battlefield will lower the threshold for war. Without human beings in the decision-making chain, controlling these things, it raises the fearful possibility of warfare by robots on a massive scale."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Water's ultimate freezing point just got lower:

Knowing how and why water transforms into ice is essential for understanding a wide range of natural processes. Climate fluctuations, cloud dynamics and the water cycle are all influenced by water-ice transformations, as are animals that live in freezing conditions.

Wood frogs, for example, survive the winter on land by allowing their bodies to freeze. This allows them to come out of hibernation faster than species that spend the winter deep underwater without freezing. But ice crystals can rupture cell membranes, so animals that use this technique need to find a way to prevent ice from forming in their cells and tissues. A better understanding of how water freezes could lead to a better understanding of these extreme species.

While the rule of thumb is that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius), water can actually stay liquid over a range of chilly temperatures under certain conditions. Until now, it was believed that this range stopped at minus 36 F (minus 38 C); any lower than that, and water must freeze. But in a study published Nov. 30 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers managed to keep droplets of water in a liquid state at temperatures as low as minus 47.2 F (minus 44 C).

'The Internet is on Fire'

upstart writes:

'The Internet Is on Fire':

The problem lies in Log4j, a ubiquitous, open source Apache logging framework that developers use to keep a record of activity within an application. Security responders are scrambling to patch the bug, which can be easily exploited to take control of vulnerable systems remotely. At the same time, hackers are actively scanning the internet for affected systems. Some have already developed tools that automatically attempt to exploit the bug, as well as worms that can spread independently from one vulnerable system to another under the right conditions.

Log4j is a Java library, and while the programming language is less popular with consumers these days, it's still in very broad use in enterprise systems and web apps. Researchers told WIRED on Friday that they expect many mainstream services will be affected.

For example, Microsoft-owned Minecraft on Friday posted detailed instructions for how players of the game's Java version should patch their systems. "This exploit affects many services—including Minecraft Java Edition," the post reads. "This vulnerability poses a potential risk of your computer being compromised." Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince tweeted Friday that the issue was "so bad" that the internet infrastructure company would try to roll out a least some protection even for customers on its free tier of service.

All an attacker has to do to exploit the flaw is strategically send a malicious code string that eventually gets logged by Log4j version 2.0 or higher. The exploit lets an attacker load arbitrary Java code on a server, allowing them to take control.

"It's a design failure of catastrophic proportions," says Free Wortley, CEO of the open source data security platform LunaSec. Researchers at the company published a warning and initial assessment of the Log4j vulnerability on Thursday.

upstart writes:

FAA to end commercial astronaut wings program - SpaceNews:

The FAA announced Dec. 10 that it will award wings to all non-government individuals that flew on FAA-licensed commercial vehicles to date in 2021, as well as those who fly on any remaining launches through the end of the year. However, it will not award wings to anyone, either crew members or spaceflight participants, that flies on FAA-licensed vehicles after this year.

The decision means that 15 people who flew on Blue Origin's New Shepard, SpaceX's Crew Dragon and Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo and who had not previously earned FAA wings will receive them. They include Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and actor William Shatner.

The six people flying on Blue Origin's next New Shepard flight, NS-19, would also be eligible if their flight takes place before the end of the year. That flight is scheduled for Dec. 11 from the company's Launch Site One in West Texas after a two-day delay because of winds.

upstart writes:

watching the grass grow and how 19th century scientists were right

Scientists solve the grass leaf conundrum:

Grass is cut regularly by our mowers and grazed on by cows and sheep, yet continues to grow back.

The secret to its remarkable regenerative powers lies in part in the shape of its leaves, but how that shape arises has been a topic of longstanding debate.

[...] Flowering plants can be categorised into monocots and eudicots. Monocots, which include the grass family, have leaves that encircle the stem at their base and have parallel veins throughout.

Eudicots, which include brassicas, legumes and most common garden shrubs and trees, have leaves that are held away from the stem by stalks, termed petioles, and typically have broad laminas with net-like veins.

In grasses, the base of the leaf forms a tube-like structure, called the sheath. The sheath allows the plant to increase in height while keeping its growing tip close to the ground, protecting it from the blades of lawnmowers or incisors of herbivores.

[...] They modelled different hypotheses for how grass leaves grow, and tested the predictions of each model against experimental results.

To their surprise, they found that the model based on the 19th century idea of sheath-petiole equivalence was much more strongly supported than the current view.

[...] The grass study shows how simple modulations of growth rules, based on a common pattern of gene activities, can generate a remarkable diversity of different leaf shapes, without which our gardens and dining tables would be much poorer.

Journal Reference:
A. E. Richardson, J. Cheng, R. Johnston, et al. Evolution of the grass leaf by primordium extension and petiole-lamina remodeling, Science (DOI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abf9407)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Forbes accidentally exposed '30 Under 30' winners' private info, honoree finds:

The publication behind the annual 30 Under 30 list, which Forbes calls "the definitive list of young people changing the world," is itself receiving notoriety after one of its awardees discovered the site exposed a decade's worth of private data. Jane Manchun Wong, a 2022 30 Under 30 honoree and security researcher recognized for (among other things) her ability to undercover hidden features in apps, said that the Forbes list exposed the emails and birthdates of all awardees — both past and present.

"I discovered a personal data exposure in Forbes 30 Under 30 Directory while looking for my entry, including ~4000 emails and ~7000 birthdates of the honorees over the past 10 years," she wrote on Friday.

Jane discovered — and reported — the leak to Forbes on December 2. She did not receive a direct response.

[...] “Forbes was alerted that there was some information rendered deep in the JavaScript," replied a spokesperson. "When we were notified, we took immediate action and quickly corrected the problem. To the best of our knowledge, the data was not accessed by anyone else."

[Personal disclosure: I have an acquaintance who was on a prior year's list; I've sent them notice about the leak. --martyb]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

As Facebook plans the metaverse, it struggles to combat harassment in VR:

Sydney Smith had dealt with lewd, sexist remarks for more than a month while playing the Echo VR video game. But the 20-year-old reached her breaking point this summer.

[...] Smith tried to figure out which player had harassed her, so she could file a report. But that was tough because multiple people were talking at the same time. Since she hadn't been recording the match, Smith couldn't rewatch the encounter and look for a username.

[...] Smith isn't the only virtual reality player who's had trouble reporting an ugly run-in. Though Oculus and Echo VR, both owned by Facebook, have ways to report users who violate their rules, people who've experienced or witnessed harassment and offensive behavior in virtual environments say a cumbersome process deters them from filing a report. Content moderators have to examine a person's behavior, as well as words. (Oculus' VR policy says users aren't allowed to follow other users against their wishes, make sexual gestures or block someone's normal movement.)

As Facebook focuses on creating the metaverse -- a 3D digital world where people can play, work, learn and socialize -- content moderation will only get more complex. The company, which recently rebranded as Meta to highlight its ambitions, already struggles to combat hate speech and harassment on its popular social media platforms, where people leave behind a record of their remarks. The immersive spaces such as Horizon Worlds envisioned by CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be more challenging to police.

upstart writes:

Two-year follow up shows delaying umbilical cord clamping saves babies' lives: A minute's delay could make a lifetime of difference:

The new study compared outcomes for over 1500 babies from the initial study, 767 with caregivers aiming for 60 second delay in clamping and 764 with caregivers aiming for cord clamping before 10 seconds after delivery.

Researchers found that delaying clamping reduces a child's relative risk of death or major disability in early childhood by 17 percent. This included a 30 percent reduction in mortality before the age of two.

In addition, 15 percent fewer infants in the delayed-clamping group needed blood transfusions after birth.

The study is published in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health today.

It is coordinated by the University of Sydney's NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre in collaboration with the IMPACT Clinical Trials Network of the Perinatal Society of Australia and New Zealand and the Australian and New Zealand Neonatal Network.

Study lead, Professor William Tarnow-Mordi, Head of Neonatal and Perinatal Trials at the Clinical Trials Centre and Professor of Neonatal Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine and Health said the simple process of aiming to wait a minute before clamping will have significant impact worldwide.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The move is the latest effort by the country to rein in the power of technology companies.

Australia will create a licensing framework for cryptocurrency exchanges and consider launching a retail central bank digital currency as part of the biggest overhaul of its payments industry in a quarter of a century.

The country will also broaden its payment laws to cover online transaction providers like Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google as well as buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) providers like Afterpay Ltd, ending their run of operating without direct supervision.

“If we do not reform the current framework, it will be Silicon Valley that determines the future of our payment system,” Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said in prepared speech notes supplied to Reuters. “Australia must retain its sovereignty over our payment system.”

Australia’s conservative coalition government has been at the forefront of global efforts to rein in large technology companies as it prepares for a federal election by next May.

Original Submission