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upstart writes:

Forget state surveillance. Our tracking devices are now doing the same job:

Way back in 2009 the German Green politician Malte Spitz went to court to obtain the data that his mobile phone operator, Deutsche Telekom, held on him and then collaborated with the newspaper Die Zeit to analyse and visualise it. What emerged was a remarkably detailed timeline of his daily life, a timeline that would have been readily available to state authorities if they had come for it with appropriate legal authorisation.

But in internet time 2009 was aeons ago. Now, intensive surveillance is available to anyone. And you don't have to be a tech wizard to do it. In mid-January this year, Kashmir Hill, a talented American tech reporter, used three bits of everyday consumer electronics – Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker – to track her husband's every move. He agreed to this in principle, but didn't realise just how many devices she had planted on him. He found only two of the trackers: a Tile he felt in the breast pocket of his coat and an AirTag in his backpack when he was looking for something else. "It is impossible to find a device that makes no noise and gives no warning," he said when she showed him the ones he missed.

canopic jug writes:

The annual Linux Questions software poll results are in for the year 2021.

The polls are closed and the results are in. We once again had some extremely close races (and multiple ties) and the large number of new categories this year certainly kept things interesting. Congratulations to each and every nominee. The official results:

[...] If you have any questions or suggestions on how we can improve the MCA's next year, do let us know. Visit https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ce-awards-133/ to view the individual polls, which contain the complete results. Visit http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/2021mca.php for a visual representation of each category on a single page.

There are just over 40 categories, from Desktop Distribution to Log Management Tool and many in between.

Do you have your own favourites that are different from those shown in the polls published here?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA's Perseverance celebrates first year on Mars by learning to run:

NASA's Perseverance rover has notched up a slew of firsts since touching down on Mars one year ago, on Feb. 18, 2021, and the six-wheeled scientist has other important accomplishments in store as it speeds toward its new destination and a new science campaign.

Weighing roughly 1 ton (1,025 kilograms), Perseverance is the heaviest rover ever to touch down on Mars, returning dramatic video of its landing. The rover collected the first rock core samples from another planet (it's carrying six so far), served as an indispensable base station for Ingenuity, the first helicopter on Mars, and tested MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), the first prototype oxygen generator on the Red Planet.

Perseverance also recently broke a record for the most distance driven by a Mars rover in a single day, traveling almost 1,050 feet (320 meters) on Feb. 14, 2022, the 351st Martian day, or sol, of the mission. And it performed the entire drive using AutoNav, the self-driving software that allows Perseverance to find its own path around rocks and other obstacles.

upstart writes:

ConocoPhillips is selling extra gas to bitcoin miners in North Dakota:

Oil and gas major ConocoPhillips is in the bitcoin mining fuel business.

The company said in a statement to CNBC on Tuesday that it has one bitcoin pilot project currently operating in the Bakken, a region in North Dakota known as an important source of new oil production in the U.S.

A representative for ConocoPhillips said the company is not operating the crypto mine itself. Instead, it sells gas that would otherwise have been burned off to a bitcoin processor that is owned and managed by a third party.

[...] The push into bitcoin mining dovetails with an initiative by the oil and gas major to reduce routine flaring, or burning off extra gas, to zero by 2030.

The company has published reports about efforts to phase out the practice of routinely flaring natural gas in the "Lower 48" states, which represents the largest segment in ConocoPhillips today, based on production. It is comprised of two regions covering the Gulf Coast and Great Plains — an area that includes the Bakken.

upstart writes:

Scientists identify how caffeine reduces bad cholesterol:

[...] Observations are one thing, but scientists hadn't identified many mechanisms for how compounds in coffee, particularly caffeine, might bestow these benefits. So for the new study, researchers at McMaster University investigated what might be behind caffeine's apparent knack for preventing cardiovascular disease.

The team found that regular caffeine consumption was linked to lower levels of a protein called PCSK9 in the bloodstream. Lower levels of this protein boosts the liver's ability to break down LDL cholesterol, the "bad" type that can block arteries and lead to cardiovascular disease. Not only did caffeine and derivatives of it work directly on PCSK9, but the researchers found that it also blocked the activation of another protein called SREBP2. This in turn also reduces levels of PCSK9 in the blood.

"These findings now provide the underlying mechanism by which caffeine and its derivatives can mitigate the levels of blood PCSK9 and thereby reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease," said Richard Austin, senior author of the study. "Given that SREBP2 is implicated in a host of cardiometabolic diseases, such as diabetes and fatty liver disease, mitigating its function has far reaching implications."

Of course, it's not as simple as guzzling coffee to stave off heart disease. Mixing it with cream or sugar (or a donut on the side) may cancel out any positive health effects – and that's especially true if your caffeine delivery method of choice is soft drinks or energy drinks. Too much caffeine can also be a bad thing, and scientists aren't yet settled on how much is too much. All up, if improving your heart health is the goal, there are probably far more direct methods you could take.

Journal Reference:
Paul F. Lebeau, Jae Hyun Byun, Khrystyna Platko, et al. Caffeine blocks SREBP2-induced hepatic PCSK9 expression to enhance LDLR-mediated cholesterol clearance [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-28240-9)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Free Cybersecurity Services and Tools:

"As part of our continuing mission to reduce cybersecurity risk across U.S. critical infrastructure partners and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments, CISA [*] has compiled a list of free cybersecurity tools and services to help organizations further advance their security capabilities. This living repository includes cybersecurity services provided by CISA, widely used open source tools, and free tools and services offered by private and public sector organizations across the cybersecurity community. CISA will implement a process for organizations to submit additional free tools and services for inclusion on this list in the future.

The list is not comprehensive and is subject to change pending future additions. CISA applies neutral principles and criteria to add items and maintains sole and unreviewable discretion over the determination of items included. CISA does not attest to the suitability or effectiveness of these services and tools for any particular use case. CISA does not endorse any commercial product or service. Any reference to specific commercial products, processes, or services by service mark, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply their endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by CISA."

[*] Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act "is a United States federal law designed to "improve cybersecurity in the United States through enhanced sharing of information about cybersecurity threats, and for other purposes".

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Easy aluminum nanoparticles for rapid, efficient hydrogen generation from water:

For years, researchers have tried to find efficient and cost-effective ways to use aluminum's reactivity to generate clean hydrogen fuel. A new study by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows that an easily produced composite of gallium and aluminum creates aluminum nanoparticles that react rapidly with water at room temperature to yield large amounts of hydrogen. The gallium was easily recovered for reuse after the reaction, which yields 90% of the hydrogen that could theoretically be produced from reaction of all the aluminum in the composite.

"We don't need any energy input, and it bubbles hydrogen like crazy. I've never seen anything like it," said UCSC Chemistry Professor Scott Oliver.

Oliver and Bakthan Singaram, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, are corresponding authors of a paper on the new findings, published February 14 in Applied Nano Materials.

The reaction of aluminum and gallium with water has been known since the 1970s, and videos of it are easy to find online. It works because gallium, a liquid at just above room temperature, removes the passive aluminum oxide coating, allowing direct contact of aluminum with water. The new study, however, includes several innovations and novel findings that could lead to practical applications.

[...] Previous studies had mostly used aluminum-rich mixtures of aluminum and gallium, or in some cases more complex alloys. But Singaram's lab found that hydrogen production increased with a gallium-rich composite. In fact, the rate of hydrogen production was so unexpectedly high the researchers thought there must be something fundamentally different about this gallium-rich alloy.

Journal Reference:
Gabriella Amberchan, Isai Lopez, Beatriz Ehlke, et al. Aluminum Nanoparticles from a Ga–Al Composite for Water Splitting and Hydrogen Generation, ACS Applied Nano Materials (DOI: 10.1021/acsanm.1c04331)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Multiple vulnerabilities found in Snap-confine function on Linux systems:

Qualys' security researchers have discovered several vulnerabilities affecting Canonical's Snap software packaging and deployment system.

In a blog post, Qualys director of vulnerability and threat research, Bharat Jogi, explained that they found multiple vulnerabilities in the snap-confine function on Linux operating systems, "the most important of which can be exploited to escalate privilege to gain root privileges." Jogi added that Snap was developed by Canonical for operating systems that use the Linux kernel.

"The packages called snaps, and the tool for using them, snapd, work across a range of Linux distributions and allow upstream software developers to distribute their applications directly to users. Snaps are self-contained applications running in a sandbox with mediated access to the host system. Snap-confine is a program used internally by snapd to construct the execution environment for snap applications," Jogi said, noting that the main issue was CVE-2021-44731.

"Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows any unprivileged user to gain root privileges on the vulnerable host. Qualys security researchers have been able to independently verify the vulnerability, develop an exploit, and obtain full root privileges on default installations of Ubuntu."

upstart writes:

Innovation is slowing down—and Big Tech is to blame:

[...] This greater industry dominance by top firms is accompanied by a corresponding decline in the risk that they will be disrupted, a prospect that has obsessed corporate managers ever since Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma came out in 1997. At the time Christensen wrote his book, disruption was on the rise. But since about 2000—when top firms started their investment spree in proprietary systems—this trend has declined sharply. In a given industry, the chance that a high-ranking firm (as measured by sales) will drop out of one of the top four spots within four years has fallen from over 20% to around 10%. Here, too, investments by dominant firms in their internal systems largely account for the change. While some new technologies disrupt entire industries—think of what the internet did to newspapers or DVDs—others are now suppressing the disruption of dominant firms.

How does this happen, and why does it apparently affect so much of the economy? It is because these business systems address a major shortcoming of modern capitalism. Beginning in the late 19th century, innovative firms found that they could often achieve dramatic cost savings by producing at a large scale. The shift dramatically reduced consumer prices, but there was a trade-off: in order for companies to achieve those large volumes, products and services needed to be standardized. Henry Ford famously declared that car buyers could have "any color so long as it is black." Retail chains achieved their efficiencies by providing a limited set of products to their thousands of stores. Finance companies offered standard mortgages and loans. As a result, products had limited feature sets; stores had limited selection and were slow to respond to changing demand; and many consumers could not get credit or obtained it only on terms that were costly and not suited for their needs.

upstart writes:

Want to be a developer? These are the coding skills that can get you hired:

Technology recruiters say they are struggling to find experienced full-stack engineers to meet the growing demand for web app development in a candidate-driven tech jobs market.

Developer recruitment platform CodinGame and online technical assessment platform CoderPad surveyed 4,000 tech recruiters to identify the most in-demand tech roles, technical skills, programming languages and frameworks in 2022.

Over 10,000 developers were also polled to identify whether their skillsets and professional aspirations were aligned with the needs of employers.

The top three skills recruiters are looking to hire for this year are web development, DevOps and AI/machine learning, the survey found.

More than a third of tech recruiters (36%) polled said that they were struggling to find experienced full-stack engineers in a competitive hiring market, while 35% of recruiters said there was strong demand for back-end engineers.

upstart writes:

Classic Chat: Preserving Computer History:

Among the many facets of modern technology, few have evolved faster or more radically than the computer. In less than a century its very nature has changed significantly: today's smartphones easily outperform desktop computers of the past, machines which themselves were thousands of times more powerful than the room-sized behemoths that ushered in the age of digital computing. The technology has developed so rapidly that an individual who's now making their living developing iPhone applications could very well have started their career working with stacks of punch cards.

With things moving so quickly, it can be difficult to determine what's worth holding onto from a historical perspective. Will last year's Chromebook one day be a museum piece? What about those old Lotus 1-2-3 floppies you've got in the garage? Deciding what artifacts are worth preserving in such a fast moving field is just one of the challenges faced by Dag Spicer, the Senior Curator at the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California. Dag stopped by [...] to talk about the role of the CHM and other institutions like it in storing and protecting computing history for future generations.

[...] In addition to the hardware itself, the CHM also maintains a collection of ephemera that serves to capture some of the institutional memory of the era. Notebooks from the R&D labs of Fairchild Semiconductor, or handwritten documents from Intel luminary Andrew Grove bring a human touch to a collection of big iron and beige boxes.

[...] Quoting the the words of early Digital Equipment Corporation engineer Gordon Bell, Dag says these computers are "beautiful sculptures" that "reflect the times of their creation" in a way that can't easily be replicated. They represent not just the technological state-of-the-art but also the cultural milieu in which they were developed, with each and every design decision taking into account a wide array of variables ranging from contemporary aesthetics to material availability.

Some, in the Hackaday comments to this story, said "Why people obsess over keeping technology from the past I will never understand. It's old, its useless, just pitch it and lets move on. Keeping crap like this is like trying to preserve a fart. Its useless & pointless." Personally I disagree with this view, but what do you think of the idea of preserving items of technology as historical reminders of what once was? What items would you suggest should be kept?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Paradox of the Lizard Tail, Solved:

When choosing between life and limb, many animals willingly sacrifice the limb.

[...] But lizards may be the best-known users of autotomy. To evade predators, many lizards ditch their still-wiggling tails. This behavior confounds the predator, buying the rest of the lizard time to scurry away. While there are drawbacks to losing a tail — they come in handy for maneuvering, impressing mates and storing fat — it beats being eaten. Many lizards are even capable of regenerating lost tails.

[...] Yong-Ak Song, a biomechanical engineer at New York University Abu Dhabi, calls this the "paradox of the tail": It must be simultaneously adherent and detachable. "It has to detach its tail quickly in order to survive," Dr. Song said of the lizard. "But at the same time, it cannot lose its tail too easily."

Recently, Dr. Song and his colleagues sought to solve the paradox by examining several freshly amputated tails. They did not want for test subjects — according to Dr. Song, the N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi campus is crawling with geckos. Using tiny loops attached to fishing rods, they rounded up several lizards from three species: two types of geckos and a desert lizard known as Schmidt's fringe-toed lizard.

[...] Back at the lab, they pulled the lizards' tails with their fingers, coaxing them into acts of autotomy. They filmed the resulting process at 3,000 frames per second using a high-speed camera. (The lizards were soon returned to where they were first found.) Then the scientists stuck the squirming tails under an electron microscope.

upstart writes:

World funds own destruction with $1.8 tn subsidies: study:

The world must slash $1.8 trillion in annual subsidies that destroy the environment, according to a study Thursday from business groups including one founded by tycoon Richard Branson.

[...] The vast subsidies, totalling two percent of global GDP, fund the "global destruction of nature" and governments worldwide must act, the two organisations added in a statement.

The study "finds the fossil fuel, agriculture and water industries receive more than 80 percent of all environmentally harmful subsidies per year", the organisations concluded.

And they called upon governments to "redirect, repurpose or eliminate" those subsidies by 2030 to help "finance a net zero global economy".

[...] "Nature is declining at an alarming rate, and we have never lived on a planet with so little biodiversity," said Christiana Figueres, head of The B Team's climate working group.

"At least $1.8 trillion is funding the destruction of nature and changing our climate, while creating huge risks for the very businesses who are receiving the subsidies."

She added that "harmful subsidies must be redirected towards protecting the climate and nature, rather than financing our own extinction".

Here's a high-level list of the top three and what they support:

• $640 billion: fossil fuels (climate change, air and water pollution, etc.)
• $520 billion: agriculture (soil erosion; water pollution, etc.)
• $350 billion: water industry (water pollution; risk to ocean and aterway ecosystems)

Original Submission

owl writes:

Dad takes down town's internet by mistake to get his kids offline:

A French dad faces jail time and a hefty fine after using a signal jammer to prevent his kids from going online and taking the rest of a nearby town down with them.

Starting at midnight and until 3 AM every day of the week, the French town of Messanges found that their cellular and Internet service were no longer working.

After a mobile carrier reported the issue to the Agence nationale des fréquences (ANFR), a public agency responsible for managing the radioelectric spectrum in France, it was determined that a signal jammer was being used to block radio frequencies in the town.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The surprising structural reason your kitchen sponge is disgusting:

In a series of experiments, the scientists show how various microbial species can affect one another's population dynamics depending on factors of their structural environment such as complexity and size. Some bacteria thrive in a diverse community while others prefer a solitary existence. And a physical environment that allows both kinds to live their best lives leads to the strongest levels of biodiversity.

Soil provides this sort of optimal mixed-housing environment, and so does your kitchen sponge.

[...] The results, You says, create a framework for researchers working with diverse bacterial communities to begin testing what structural environments might work best for their pursuits. They also point toward why a kitchen sponge is such a useful habitat for microbes. It mimics the different degrees of separation found in healthy soil, providing different layers of separation combined with different sizes of communal spaces.

[...] To prove this point, the researchers also ran their experiment with a strip of regular household sponge. The results showed that it's an even better incubator of microbial diversity than any of the laboratory equipment they tested.

"As it turns out, a sponge is a very simple way to implement multilevel portioning to enhance the overall microbial community," You said. "Maybe that's why it's a really dirty thing -- the structure of a sponge just makes a perfect home for microbes."

Journal Reference:
Wu, Feilun, Ha, Yuanchi, Weiss, Andrea, et al. Modulation of microbial community dynamics by spatial partitioning, Nature Chemical Biology (DOI: 10.1038/s41589-021-00961-w)

Original Submission