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takyon writes:

For Linux Enthusiasts Especially, The Steam Deck Is An Incredible & Fun Device

The most fun and promising Linux-powered gaming device for the masses though is launching today: Valve's Steam Deck. I've been fortunate to be testing out this Arch Linux derived handheld game console the past month and it has been working out very well -- both as a portable Steam gaming device but making it even more compelling from the Linux enthusiast angle is its "developer mode" that effectively turns it into a general Linux handheld and also being free to load your own Linux distribution of choice.

[...] [The] much anticipated Valve handheld gaming computer that features a 7-inch 1280 x 800 display, gaming-optimized controls, 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, 64GB to 512GB of storage depending on model, and is powered by a custom AMD APU. The AMD APU is made up of four Zen 2 cores (8 threads) and an AMD RDNA2 GPU with 8 compute units.

[...] On the software side, the Steam Deck is using SteamOS 3.0 that in turn is based on Arch Linux. SteamOS 3.0 is a complete overhaul compared to Valve's prior SteamOS work that is based on Debian GNU/Linux. SteamOS 3.0 with Arch Linux is much more fast-moving and has been seeing near-daily updates in preparation for launch.

Steam Deck.

See also:
Valve releases Steam Deck handheld PC to select few
Steam Deck review: it's not ready
The Steam Deck is already the emulation system of my dreams
Steam Deck: The comprehensive Ars Technica review
Steam Deck Review: Valve's Handheld Has Big PC Energy
Gabe Newell talks Steam Deck, crypto risks and why the PC industry "won't tolerate" closed platforms
Developers praise the Steam Deck: 'It just works, for real'
Valve Steam Deck Hardware Review & Analysis: Thermals, Noise, Power, & Gaming Benchmarks (Gamers Nexus, 35m30s video)
Steam Deck Tear-Down: Build Quality, Disassembly, & VRM Analysis (Gamers Nexus, 34m24s video)
Steam Deck 1-Month Review: SteamOS Difficulties, Software, & User Experience (Gamers Nexus, 34m28s video)

upstart writes:

NASA Opens Second Phase of $5 Million Lunar Power Prize Competition:

Under Artemis, NASA plans to return to the Moon using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before. This will require lunar surface systems that can deliver continuous, reliable power to support mining and construction, research activities, and human habitation.

The newest phase of NASA's Watts on the Moon Challenge offers up to $4.5 million in prizes to design, build, and demonstrate a prototype that addresses technology gaps in power transmission and energy storage. Maximizing system efficiency and minimizing system mass will be an important part of what the challenge participants address in their designs, given that transporting all the needed equipment to sustain human presence on the lunar surface will require multiple missions. This challenge seeks advanced technology that is well-positioned to progress toward flight readiness and future operation on the lunar surface after the challenge.

[...] Phase 1 of Watts on the Moon opened in September 2020 and focused on the ideation of energy management, distribution, and storage solutions. In May 2021, seven winners were awarded a total of $500,000. To compete in Phase 1, teams had to submit ideas to support aspects of a hypothetical mission scenario – harvesting water and oxygen from a dark crater at the Moon's South Pole with energy generated by a power plant located on the crater's outer rim.

NASA invites previous participants as well as new teams to compete in Phase 2. For more information about the challenge, go to https://nasa.gov/wattson

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upstart writes:

New imager microchip helps devices bring hidden objects to light:

The team is working on a device for industrial applications that require imaging up to 20 meters away. The technology could also be adapted for use in cars to help drivers or autonomous vehicle systems navigate through hazardous conditions that reduce visibility. On an automotive display, for example, the technology could show pixelated outlines and shapes of objects, such as another vehicle or pedestrians.

"The technology allows you to see in vision-impaired environments. In industrial settings, for example, devices using the microchips could help with packaging inspections for manufacturing process control, monitoring moisture content or seeing through steam. If you are a firefighter, it could help you see through smoke and fire," said Dr. Kenneth K. O, professor of electrical and computer engineering[...] .

[...] The microchip emits radiation beams in the terahertz range (430 GHz) of the electromagnetic spectrum from pixels no larger than a grain of sand. The beams travel through fog, dust and other obstacles that optical light cannot penetrate and bounce off objects and back to the microchip, where the pixels pick up the signal to create images. Without the use of external lenses, the terahertz imager includes the microchip and a reflector that increases the imaging distance and quality and reduces power consumption.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Researchers have found a way to remotely determine if protected female bottlenose dolphins are expecting a calf using aerial photos taken from drones.

By measuring the body width of the cetaceans captured in the aerial images the scientists can establish which females in the group are pregnant.

[...] Scientists from the University have been monitoring the bottlenose dolphin population that uses the Moray Firth Special Area of Conservation for more than 30 years.

For this study the researchers compared the aerial images to information from this long-term study including whether the females had had a calf and their age.

Research Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences Dr. Barbara Cheney, who is based at the University's Lighthouse Field Station, explains: "Previously we only knew if female bottlenose dolphins were pregnant if they were later seen with a calf. As a result, we only knew about successful pregnancies, and didn't know how many pregnancies failed or how many calves died before we saw them.

"The main aim of the study was to explore whether we could remotely determine pregnancy status from aerial photographs taken using an unoccupied aerial system or drone.

Journal Reference:
Barbara J. Cheney, Julian Dale, Paul M. Thompson, et al. Spy in the sky: a method to identify pregnant small cetaceans, Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation (2022). DOI: 10.1002/rse2.258

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upstart writes:

USPS Blows Off EPA, White House Requests To Reconsider Postal Vehicle Contract:

We recently wrote about the boondoggle that is the United States Postal Service's new postal vehicle and its, frankly, abysmal fuel economy. In that article, we mentioned that the Biden administration and the EPA had both strongly encouraged the USPS to reevaluate its decision to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on buying and supporting gas-guzzling mail trucks.

Unfortunately, those pleas seem to have gone ignored because, as The Verge reported on Wednesday, the USPS will be moving forward with the Oshkosh designed and built internal combustion-powered mail trucks. Yeah, we're disappointed, too.

[...] Of the 165,000 new postal vehicles that are planned for purchase, only potentially around 10% will be battery-electric, and the rest can only manage an abysmal 8.6 mpg average.

Entire USPS statement.

Also at The Washington Post and Ars Technica.

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upstart writes:

Gpu Giant Nvidia Is Investigating A Potential Cyberattack:

US chipmaker giant Nvidia confirmed today it's currently investigating an "incident" that reportedly took down some of its systems for two days.

Systems impacted in what looks like a cyberattack include the company's developer tools and email systems, as first reported by The Telegraph.

The reported outage is the result of a network intrusion, and it is still not known if any business or customer data was stolen during the incident.

Nvidia told BleepingComputer that the nature of the incident is still being evaluated and that the company's commercial activities were not affected.

"We are investigating an incident. Our business and commercial activities continue uninterrupted," an Nvidia spokesperson told BleepingComputer.

"We are still working to evaluate the nature and scope of the event and don't have any additional information to share at this time."

An insider has described this incident as having "completely compromised" Nvidia's internal systems.

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upstart writes:

Finding MH370: New breakthrough could finally solve missing flight mystery (Video) - Technology Org:

A retired British aerospace engineer and physicist Richard Godfrey claims he has estimated the location of the airliner Boeing 777 that vanished almost eight years ago. According to the specialist, the key to solving this long-standing puzzle lies within the principles of so-called amateur radio, otherwise known as ham radio, where people communicating one with another have to determine the right signal within a strong background noise.

[...] Records of these disturbances can be used to identify the path of MH370.

Video on YouTube from 60 Minutes Australia.

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takyon writes:

US, EU, UK to sanction Russian central bank, block SWIFT

The United States, European Union and United Kingdom on Saturday agreed to put in place crippling sanctions on the Russian financial sector, including a block on its access to the global financial system and, for the first time, restrictions on its central bank in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine.

[...] Saturday's move includes cutting key Russian banks out of the SWIFT financial messaging system, which daily moves countless billions of dollars around more than 11,000 banks and other financial institutions around the world. The fine print of the sanctions was still being ironed out over the weekend, officials said, as they work to limit the impact of the restrictions on other economies and European purchases of Russian energy.

Allies on both sides of the Atlantic also considered the SWIFT option in 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed Ukraine's Crimea and backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine. Russia declared then that kicking it out of SWIFT would be equivalent to a declaration of war. The allies — criticized ever after for responding too weakly to Russia's 2014 aggression — shelved the idea. Russia since then has tried to develop its own financial transfer system, with limited success.

See also: It is incomprehensible that Russia is still being allowed to use the Swift system

Previously: Russia Has Launched Full Scale Invasion of Ukraine - Multiple Sources

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upstart writes:

Fujitsu is ending its mainframe and Unix services:

Fujitsu has quietly revealed its plans to shutter both its mainframe and Unix server system business by the end of this decade.

In a notice posted to the Japanese IT giant's website, the company announced its plans to stop selling its mainframes and Unix server systems by 2030 though support systems will continue for an additional five years.

Fujitsu will stop manufacturing and selling its mainframe systems by 2030 as well as discontinue its Unix server systems by the end of 2029. As support services for both portfolios will extend for another five years, 2034 will mark the end of support for its Unix servers while 2035 will be the end of its mainframes.

In its notice, Fujitsu argues that "everything in society will be connected by digital touchpoints" in the near future which will require new, robust digital infrastructure. As such, businesses will need to reevaluate their existing core systems and embrace a fully digital, hybrid IT model to remain competitive and sustainable.

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upstart writes:

Webb Telescope reaches major milestone: All its light is in one place:

Today, NASA shared an image indicating that it had successfully completed the image alignment stage of commissioning the James Webb Space Telescope. The Webb's primary mirror is composed of 18 individual segments, and, as of today's update, all of those segments are aligned so that a single star shows up as a single object. While there are still several more focusing steps required, the path to commissioning the telescope keeps getting shorter.

[...] Earlier this month, however, tweaks to the mirrors created a hexagonal array of smears that replicated the arrangement of the primary mirror segments. Today's announcement saw the segments shifted so that each of the smears was partly focused and moved to the center of the secondary mirror. The result? The star that's being imaged for this process is now a single dot at the center of the telescope's field of view.

NASA isn't done just yet, however. Although all the images are in the same place, they're simply superimposed there. The ultimate goal is to have the segments behave as a single mirror, which requires more careful focusing. To do so, engineers will image the spectra of the light, looking for slight shifts of the image locations at different wavelengths. From that, it's possible to figure out which way the mirrors must be shifted to fine-tune the mirror segments.

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upstart writes:

This Linux backdoor went undetected for 10 years:

New details have emerged regarding a previously undetected Linux backdoor that is believed to have been created by the notorious Equation Group which has ties to the US National Security Agency (NSA).

According to a new report from the cybersecurity firm Pangu, security researchers from its Advanced Cyber Security Research team first found the malware behind the backdoor back in 2013 while conducting a "forensic investigation of a host in a key domestic department". At that time, the team decided to name the malware Bvp47 due to the fact that the most common string in the sample was "Bvp" and 0x47 was the numerical value used in its encryption algorithm.

[...] Now that Bvp47's Linux backdoor has finally come to light, security researchers will likely conduct further analysis on it and we could see more evidence that it was used in other past attacks as well.

Bvp47 - a Top-tier Backdoor of US NSA Equation Group

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Full Report Download: The Bvp47 Technical Paper (PDF)

In a certain month of 2013, during an in-depth forensic investigation of a host in a key domestic department, researchers from the Pangu Lab extracted a set of advanced backdoors on the Linux platform, which used advanced covert channel behavior based on TCP SYN packets, code obfuscation, system hiding, and self-destruction design. In case of failure to fully decrypt, It is further found that this backdoor needs the check code bound to the host to run normally. Then the researchers cracked the check code and successfully ran the backdoor. Judging from some behavioral functions, this is a top-tier APT backdoor, but further investigation requires the attacker's asymmetric encrypted private key to activate the remote control function. Based on the most common string "Bvp" in the sample and the numerical value 0x47 used in the encryption algorithm, the team named the corresponding malicious code "Bvp47" at the time.

In 2016 and 2017, "The Shadow Brokers" published two batches of hacking files claimed to be used by "The Equation Group". In these hacking files, researchers form Pangu Lab found the private key that can be used to remotely trigger the backdoor Bvp47. Therefor, It can be concluded that Bvp47 is a hacker tool belonging to "The Equation Group".

Through further research, the researchers found that the multiple procedures and attack operation manuals disclosed by "The Shadow Broker" are completely consistent with the only identifier used in the NSA network attack platform operation manual [References 3 and 4] exposed by CIA analyst Snowden in the "Prism" incident in 2013.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The new FreeDOS 1.3 which is a MS-DOS compatible free software operating system is now available for download.

"This contains a bunch of great new features and improvements since the 1.2 release, including: new FreeCOM 0.85a, new Kernel 2043 and an 8086 version with FAT32 support, floppy Edition now uses compression and requires about half as many diskettes, the return of networking, some new programs and games, many many many package updates, some updates and improvements to NLS, improved install process, especially with the MBR, some support to automatically set the COUNTRY.SYS information, improved CD initialization for the boot media and installed system, .. and much, much more"

It also including a Live mode on the CD.

Get it from the official FreeDOS site.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Telemedicine leaves behind non-English speakers, study shows:

People who speak limited English struggled to access telehealth services in the US. "That was really a concern of ours — who is getting left out?" says Denise Payán, an assistant professor of health, society, and behavior at the University of California, Irvine, who worked on the study. The researchers spoke with 15 clinic workers and nine patients. Clinic patients who spoke limited English struggled to set up and use platforms like Zoom for health visits, the researchers found. "Things like not being able to read FAQs," Payán says. People who speak limited English are at risk of bad health outcomes without them because they can't understand their medical providers as well. The findings of the study show how important it is for telehealth platforms to consider their most vulnerable users while developing tools. People who speak languages other than English should be included in pilot tests, for example, Payán says.

"Increasingly, the focus in Silicon Valley is on diversity, equity inclusion, this is clearly it — are you actually meeting the needs of a diverse set of patients?" she says.

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hubie writes:

A news article over at Science talks about new research demonstrating that after only a few minutes of mopping the floors indoors using a delightfully-lemon-scented cleaner can generate as many harmful airborne particles as vehicles driving on busy streets.

The air in homes, schools, and offices can sometimes be dirtier than the air outdoors, even in cities with pollution problems. Any kind of burning—candles, incense, cigarettes—is bad. Gas stoves and cooking food also spew unhealthy particles into the air, which can cause asthma and other health problems when breathed in. Other significant sources of indoor air pollution include personal care and cleaning products, whose fragrances contain volatile organic chemicals that react with ozone in the air to form small particles known as aerosols.

One molecule of concern is limonene, a commonly added to cleaners and furniture polish to help remove oil and grease. The lemon-scented molecule reacts readily with ozone, an outdoor pollutant that is the main ingredient in smog. When ozone wafts into buildings, it reacts with limonene and similar molecules called monoterpenes, turning them into peroxides, alcohols, and other molecules that grow into airborne particles. Small particles can lodge deep in the lungs, irritating cells and—at high enough exposure—leading to health problems, such as asthma. In vulnerable people, particulate air pollution can cause heart attacks and strokes.

The study did show that as the particles grow in size, after a few hours they eventually fall out of the air onto surfaces where they are harmless.

Journal Reference:
Colleen Marciel F. Rosales, Jinglin Jiang, Ahmad Lahib, et al. Chemistry and human exposure implications of secondary organic aerosol production from indoor terpene ozonolysis, Science Advances (DOI: http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj9156)

Original Submission

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