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Freeman writes:

Driver that promised faster Ethereum mining for Nvidia GPUs is full of viruses:

Both Nvidia and AMD have made changes to their gaming GPU lineups in an effort to make them less appealing to cryptocurrency miners, including releasing mining-specific GPU models and making entry-level GPUs with specs that aren't good enough for mining. One of the most significant changes came in mid-2021, when Nvidia released "Lite Hash Rate" (LHR) versions of its RTX 3000-series GPUs that halved their performance when mining Ethereum or similar coins but didn't affect their gaming performance.

[...] a hacker by the name of Sergey released an "Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker" that promised to remove the hash-rate limits on most Nvidia cards using a combination of BIOS updates and specially modified drivers.

Surprising no one, the sketchy drivers with the too-good-to-be-true performance promises turned out to be full of viruses. An extensive report shows that the software package modifies Windows Powershell policies, deletes and creates new files in system directories, and causes abnormally high CPU usage, among other things.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Backups 'no longer effective' for stopping ransomware attacks:

The growth of double extortion – and even triple extortion – ransomware attacks is in danger of rendering common, traditional methods of mitigating the impact of a ransomware hit, such as well-maintained backups, less efficacious, according to a report from machine identity specialist Venafi.

Data collated from Venafi's worldwide survey of IT and security decision-makers reveal that 83% of successful ransomware attacks now involve alternative extortion methods – for example, using stolen data to extort customers (38%), leaking data to the dark web (35%), and informing customers that their data has been compromised (32%). A mere 17% of attacks merely ask for money for a decryption key.

Venafi said that this means that because ransomware attacks now rely on data exfiltration, effective backup strategies are therefore to some extent "no longer effective" for containing a breach.

"Ransomware attacks have become much more dangerous. They have evolved beyond basic security defences and business continuity techniques like next-gen antivirus and backups," said Kevin Bocek, vice-president of business development and threat intelligence at Venafi.

Venafi also found that cyber criminals are increasingly following through on their threats whether or not they get paid. Indeed, 18% of victims had their data leaked despite paying, while more than the 16% who refused outright to pay anything and had their data leaked. Some 8% refused outright, but then had their customers extorted; and 35% paid, but were left hanging, unable to retrieve their data.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Intel might be about to make a major Linux move:

Intel has quietly acquired a German software developer with the aim of bringing fresh life to a key, decades-old Linux kernel project.

In a blog post, vice president and general manager of system software engineering at Intel's Software and Advanced Technology Group, Mark Skarpness revealed that the company had acquired the German firm Linutronix which provides services for Linux-powered industrial systems and also specializes in real-time Linux applications.

While neither Intel nor Linutronix disclosed the financial terms of the deal, the acquisition is a sign that the chip giant wants to further commit to an incredibly important yet often overlooked Linux kernel project.

According to Intel, Linutronix is the "architect of PREEMPT_RT (Real Time)" and this patch set can be used to make low-latency communication possible between controllers, sensors, robots and tooling and other equipment in real-time industrial applications running on Linux.

When enabled, PREEMPT_RT changes the way the Linux kernel handles interrupts and locks to allow threads to to get additional time on a CPU core with little latency. As a result, developers can use it to configure the Linux kernel for real-time use-cases without having to worry about out-of-tree patches, new kernel versions or other disruptions resulting from new point releases.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Dominique Lord and Soheil Sohrabi, with funding from the A.P. and Florence Wiley Faculty Fellow at Texas A&M, designed a study to examine the safety of navigational tools. Comparing the safest and shortest routes between five metropolitan areas in Texas -- Dallas-Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, Houston and Bryan-College Station -- including more than 29,000 road segments, they found that taking a route with an 8% reduction in travel time could increase the risk of being in a crash by 23%.

"As route guidance systems aim to find the shortest path between a beginning and ending point, they can misguide drivers to take routes that may minimize travel time, but concurrently, carry a greater risk of crashes," said Lord, professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The researchers collected and combined road and traffic characteristics, including geometry design, number of lanes, lane width, lighting and average daily traffic, weather conditions and historical crash data to analyze and develop statistical models for predicting the risk of being involved in crashes.

The study revealed inconsistencies in the shortest and safest routes. In clear weather conditions, taking the shortest route instead of the safest between Dallas-Fort Worth and Bryan-College Station will reduce the travel time by 8%. Still, the probability of a crash increases to 20%. The analysis suggests that taking the longest route between Austin and Houston with an 11% increase in travel time results in a 1% decrease in the daily probability of crashes.

[...] "Given the fact that crashes can affect not only those involved but also other road users, leaving the choice between safety and time to the users may result in unethical decisions and unfair consequences," Sohrabi said.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

X-rays help unlock secrets of King Tut's iron dagger, made from a meteorite:

Among the many items recovered from King Tut's tomb was a dagger made of iron, which is a material that was rarely used during Egypt's 18th dynasty. That iron likely came from a meteorite, and a recent paper published in the journal Meteorites and Planetary Science sheds further light on precisely how that iron dagger was forged, as well as how it came into Tut's possession.

Tutankhamen was the son of Akhenaten and ascended to the throne when he was just 8 or 9 years old. He wasn't considered an especially important pharaoh in the grand scheme of things, but the treasures that were recovered from his tomb in the 1920s are what led to his fame.

[...] These became part of a global touring exhibition, which received worldwide press coverage during the 1960s and 1970s in particular. The mummy even inspired a couple of songs: Steve Martin's hit "King Tut" (which debuted on Saturday Night Live in 1978) and the lesser-known "Dead Egyptian Blues," by the late folk rock singer Michael Peter Smith (which contains the immortal line, "Your sarcophagus is glowing, but your esophagus is showing").

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Very low concentrations of the popular organic insecticide spinosad have profound effects on beneficial insect species, including vision loss and neurodegeneration, new research led by the University of Melbourne has found.

The study, published in eLife, used the vinegar fly Drosophila to analyze the impact of chronic exposure to low concentrations (0.2 parts per million) of spinosad and the resulting physiological impacts on the brain and other tissues.

Spinosad is commonly used to control insect pests including thrips, leafminers, spider mites, mosquitoes, ants and fruit flies, in both commercial and domestic settings.

"Within a matter of 20 days, tiny doses of spinosad can have an alarming impact on the brains of adult Drosophila. Observing sections of brain tissue under microscope demonstrated there was an average of 17% of the fly brains destroyed due to exposure," said Dr. Felipe Martelli from Monash University, who completed this work as part of his Ph.D. at the University of Melbourne.

"Neurons that serve vital functions die leaving large vacuoles, fluid-filled sacs, in the brain. This leads to neurodegeneration, blindness and behavioral changes in adult vinegar flies. Due to the Drosophila's genetic and biochemical similarities to other insects, the research indicates that these impacts could be translated to other beneficial insects such as bees," Dr. Martelli said.

[...] "When you look at insect species disappearing it's almost like randomly pulling blocks out of a Jenga tower; its destabilizing ecosystems making them vulnerable to collapse."

Journal Reference:
Felipe Martelli, Natalia H. Hernandes, Zhongyuan Zuo, et al. Low doses of the organic insecticide spinosad trigger lysosomal defects, elevated ROS, lipid dysregulation, and neurodegeneration in flies, (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.73812)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Police forces 'must' do data protection due diligence checks before using PDS-backed AWS cloud:

Police forces across England and Wales are being cautioned to remember that the onus is on them to ensure their use of the Police Digital Service's (PDS) Amazon-powered cloud platform is in compliance with Part 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018.

This is in the wake of ongoing concerns about whether police forces across the UK are doing enough to ensure compliance with the required data protection laws before adopting public cloud services.

PDS went public earlier this month with the news that the latest iteration of its Amazon Web Services (AWS)-powered cloud platform is now available for use by all 43 police forces across England and Wales.

The platform, known as the Police Assured Landing Zone (PALZ), is designed to provide forces with access to a suite of tools – spanning online storage, compute capacity and cloud-based collaboration – that will allow them to incorporate cloud technologies into their ICT systems.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA’s plans to shift from the International Space Station to commercial space stations may force one key partner to rethink how it cooperates in low Earth orbit.

Speaking at a panel on space diplomacy organized by George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute Feb. 23, Sylvie Espinasse, head of the European Space Agency’s Washington office, said the current arrangements between ISS partners to barter resources won’t work well on future commercial stations in low Earth orbit.

“ESA-NASA cooperation on the ISS is based on non-exchange of funds and barter of goods and services between the partners,” she said. “This allows ESA to use its asset in orbit, the Columbus module, and to fly its European astronauts.”

Once NASA shifts to commercial stations, though, “ESA will probably not be in a position to buy commercial services from U.S. providers for its research activities in LEO or to fly its astronauts,” she warned. “This will probably not be acceptable for our member states.” Buying services from U.S. companies, she explained, would contradict an ESA mandate to support Europe’s space industry.

upstart writes:

Largest ever human family tree: 27 million ancestors:

The past two decades have seen extraordinary advancements in human genetic research, generating genomic data for hundreds of thousands of individuals, including from thousands of prehistoric people. This raises the exciting possibility of tracing the origins of human genetic diversity to produce a complete map of how individuals across the world are related to each other.

Until now, the main challenges to this vision were working out a way to combine genome sequences from many different databases and developing algorithms to handle data of this size. However, a new method published today by researchers from the University of Oxford's Big Data Institute can easily combine data from multiple sources and scale to accommodate millions of genome sequences.

Dr Yan Wong, an evolutionary geneticist at the Big Data Institute, and one of the principal authors, explained: "We have basically built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all of humanity that models as exactly as we can the history that generated all the genetic variation we find in humans today. This genealogy allows us to see how every person's genetic sequence relates to every other, along all the points of the genome."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Dymo causes a stir by adding DRM to printer paper:

[...] But some people do need a printer, and it seems that label printer maker Dymo is giving us yet another reason to hate printers.

It's building DRM directly into the printer paper. Or in this case, rolls of labels.

Yes, that's right, according to author, journalistc, and activist Cory Doctorow writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Dymo is putting RFID readers into its latest label printers, and using those to prevent owners from putting third-party labels through their printers.

"The new label rolls come with a booby-trap," writes Doctorow, "a RFID-equipped microcontroller that authenticates with your label-maker to attest that you bought Dymo's premium-priced labels and not a competitor's. The chip counts down the labels as you print them (so you can't transplant it to a generic label roll)."

This goes back to the original question that gets asked a lot around here, who owns the products that you buy?

Also, as the video points out, it's possible that the anti-circumvention law of the DMCA may possibly make it illegal for you to circumvent these restrictions(?). As the video points out, these corporations are huge on free market capitalism but only when it suits them. When it doesn't they're suddenly in favor of more government restrictions.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Peloton Outage Prevents Customers From Using $2,500 Exercise Bikes:

Peloton hasn't been having a great run lately. While business boomed during the pandemic, things have taken a sour turn of late on a bizarre host of fronts.

[...] adding insult to injury, connectivity issues this week prevented Peloton bike and treadmill owners from being able to use their $2000-$5000 luxury exercise equipment for several hours Tuesday morning. The official Peloton Twitter account tried to downplay the scope of the issues:

We are currently investigating an issue with Peloton services. This may impact your ability to take classes or access pages on the web.

We apologize for any impact this may have on your workout and appreciate your patience. Please check https://t.co/Dxcht2tQB0 for updates.

— Peloton (@onepeloton) February 22, 2022

[...] For much of Tuesday morning the pricey equipment simply wouldn't work. While the company's app still worked (For some people), Bike, Bike+, and Peloton Tread owners not only couldn't ride in live classes, they couldn't participate in recorded classes because there's no way to download a class to local storage (despite the devices being glorified Android tablets). The outage (which occurred at the same time as a major Slack outage) was ultimately resolved after several hours, but not before owners got another notable reminder that dumb tech can often be the smarter option.

Perhaps one day in the future, scientists will invent a way to make exercise machines that do not require internet access. Such a fantastic invention would be locked up behind patents.

See also:
Peloton Admits It's in Hot Water With DOJ, DHS, and SEC Over Its Treadmill Mess
Peloton treadmill owners will be able to run again without a subscription
Peloton disabled a free running feature on its treadmills, forcing owners to pay up
Peloton disabled a free feature on its $4,000 Tread+, forcing owners to pay a $39 monthly fee to use the machine
Peloton faces backlash after disabling free running feature on its $4,000 treadmills
Music Publishers Say Peloton Stole Even More Music, Ask for $300 Million
Peloton's Countersuit Against Music Publishers Over Song Copyrights Just Got Thrown Out

Original Submission

upstart writes:

An Optical Spy Trick Can Turn Any Shiny Object Into A Bug:

At the Black Hat Asia hacker conference in Singapore this May, researchers from Israel's Ben Gurion University of the Negev plan to present a new surveillance technique designed to allow anyone with off-the-shelf equipment to eavesdrop on conversations if they can merely find a line of sight through a window to any of a wide variety of reflective objects in a given room. By pointing an optical sensor attached to a telescope at one of those shiny objects—the researchers tested their technique with everything from an aluminum trash can to a metallic Rubik's cube—they could detect visible vibrations on an object's surface that allowed them to derive sounds and thus listen to speech inside the room. Unlike older experiments that similarly watched for minute vibrations to remotely listen in on a target, this new technique let researchers pick up lower-volume conversations, works with a far greater range of objects, and enables real-time snooping rather than after-the-fact reconstruction of a room's audio.

[...] The researchers' trick takes advantage of the fact that sound waves from speech create changes in air pressure that can imperceptibly vibrate objects in a room. In their experimental setup, they attached a photodiode, a sensor that converts light into voltage, to a telescope; the longer-range its lenses and the more light they allow to hit the sensor, the better. That photodiode was then connected to an analog-to-digital converter and a standard PC, which translated the sensor's voltage output to data that represents the real-time fluctuations of the light reflecting from whatever object the telescope points at. The researchers could then correlate those tiny light changes to the object's vibration in a room where someone is speaking, allowing them to reconstruct the nearby person's speech.

The researchers showed that in some cases, using a high-end analog-to-digital converter, they could recover audible speech with their technique when a speaker is about 10 inches from a shiny metallic Rubik's cube and speaking at 75 decibels, the volume of a loud conversation. With a powerful enough telescope, their method worked from a range of as much as 115 feet. Aside from the Rubik's cube, they tested the trick with half a dozen objects: a silvery bird figurine, a small polished metal trash can, a less-shiny aluminum ice-coffee can, an aluminum smartphone standard, and even thin metal venetian blinds.

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The automation of U.S. manufacturing—robots replacing people on factory floors—is fueling rising mortality rate among America's working-age adults, according to a new study by researchers at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.

The study, published Feb. 23 in the journal Demography, found evidence of a causal link between automation and increasing mortality, driven largely by increased "deaths of despair," such as suicides and drug overdoses. This is particularly true for males and females aged 45 to 54, according to the study. But researchers also found evidence of increased mortality across multiple age and sex groups from causes as varied as cancer and heart disease.

[...] To understand the role of automation on increased mortality, O'Brien and co-authors Elizabeth F. Blair and Atheendar Venkataramani, both of the University of Pennsylvania, used newly available measures that chart the adoption of automation across U.S. industries and localities between 1993 and 2007. They combined these measures with U.S. death-certificate data over the same time period to estimate the causal effect of automation on the mortality of working age adults at the county level and for specific types of deaths.

According to the study, each new robot per 1,000 workers led to about eight additional deaths per 100,000 males aged 45 to 54 and nearly four additional deaths per 100,000 females in the same age group. The analysis showed that automation caused a substantial increase in suicides among middle-aged men and drug overdose deaths among men of all ages and women aged 20 to 29. Overall, automation could be linked to 12% of the increase in drug overdose mortality among all working-age adults during the study period. The researchers also discovered evidence associating the lost jobs and reduced wages caused by automation with increased homicide, cancer, and cardiovascular disease within specific age-sex groups.

Journal Reference:
O'Brien, Rourke, Bair, Elizabeth F., Venkataramani, Atheendar S.. Death by Robots? Automation and Working-Age Mortality in the United States [open], Demography (DOI: 10.1215/00703370-9774819)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

RNA Molecules Control Repair of Damaged Human DNA in Cancer Cells:

It was long assumed that RNA molecules – basic molecules that exist in all living organisms – only participated in protein synthesis. New research demonstrates, however, that RNA molecules have a much broader function and can play a key role in the development of disease.

One such disease in cancer, where damage to our cells' DNA can be a contributing factor. DNA damage occurs and is repaired continuously, but in some cases it can lead to carcinogenic mutations in the genome. A fundamental understanding of how our cells repair DNA is therefore key to the design of new treatments.

In this current study, the researchers examined how certain RNA molecules affected the ability of the cancer cells to repair radiation-damaged or broken DNA strings. They discovered that two molecule types – small Cajal body-specific RNA 2 (scaRNA2) and WRAP53 – interacted to regulate the enzyme DNA-dependent protein kinase (DNA-PK), which in turn affected the DNA-repair mechanisms.

quietus writes:

European airplane maker Airbus and a 50/50 joint partnership between General Electric (GE) and Safran Aircraft Engines are going to equip an A380 superjumbo with a hydrogen engine, by 2026. The plan is to go the cryogenic route with hydrogen: using its liquid form at -253°C (-425°F), and burning it directly in a GE Passport turbofan.

The modified A380 will keep its 4 conventional turbines, with an additional fifth being the hydrogen-powered one.

The number of technical challenges are large. Under the plans, 400kg of liquid hydrogen will be stored in four tanks at minus 253 degrees Celsius. A new cryogenic distribution system will need to be developed. The hydrogen will also need to be converted into a gas before it is burnt. The gas burns at a much higher temperature than conventional jet fuel, so special cooling and coating materials will also need to be developed.

The modified GE Passport jet engine needs a complete overhaul of its combustor, fuel system and controls system to make them compatible with liquid hydrogen fuel. The group picked the Passport because of its size, advanced turbomachinery and ability to operate at the appropriate pressures and temperatures for the flight platform. As the liquid hydrogen needs to be vaporized into gas to be used as fuel, certain parts of the engine could see temperature differences of some 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.