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upstart writes:

CD sales rose for the first time in 17 years:

While streaming is the music industry's cash cow these days, CDs aren't dead yet. According to the Recording Industry Association of America's annual sales report, revenue from CDs grew by 21 percent to $584 million in 2021. That marked the first annual increase in CD revenue in the US since 2004. The RIAA notes that many record stores opened back up and artists sold music at shows again after COVID-19 put everything on hold in 2020.

As has been the case for the last 15 years, vinyl sales are continuing to grow too. Revenue rose by a whopping 61 percent in 2021 to $1 billion. It's the first time vinyl sales have reached that milestone since 1986. Including other formats, physical music sales totaled $1.66 billion in the US last year.

The RIAA notes that the only major recorded music format to see a revenue decline last year was digital downloads. Sales dropped by 12 percent to $587 million — only $3 million more than CD revenue for 2021.

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upstart writes:

Making bug-checking in software and hardware design cheaper and more efficient:

The development of complex hardware and software is error-prone and costly. Testing can detect the presence of bugs in these designs, but it cannot prove their absence. One technique that can provide worthful feedback on the correctness of system designs is model checking. Model checking is an automated reasoning technique to find flaws in hardware and software systems. Ph.D. candidate Muhammad Mahmoud has redesigned algorithms to make them more suitable for model checking using GPUs, which allow for parallel computing at low cost.

Model checking is used to catch potential bugs as early as possible—preferably at the design phase—to make the necessary modifications quickly and cost-effectively. Successful examples of model checking include verifying CERN controllers, railway interlockings, nuclear control systems, and medical imaging. Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook use and develop model checking technology to ensure their products behave functionally correct.

[...] In this thesis, Muhammad Mahmoud, of the research group Software Engineering and Technology at the department of Mathematics and Computer Science, investigated how Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) can be employed effectively for [bounded model checking (BMC)], focusing on the reasoning on SAT. GPUs offer great potential for parallel computation, while keeping power consumption low.

upstart writes:

Lyft follows Uber in adding temporary fuel surcharge:

Lyft will soon add a temporary fuel surcharge to rides. The company will give the fees to drivers to offset the cost of gas, which has increased sharply following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The company hasn't revealed how much the surcharge will cost users per ride, how long the measure will likely be in place or whether rides in electric vehicles will be affected.

The addition of a surcharge follows a similar move by Uber. Starting this Wednesday, customers who take an Uber ride will pay a fuel surcharge of between 45 cents and 55 cents. Uber Eats deliveries will cost between 35 cents and 45 cents more too. Uber says it will reevaluate the fee after 60 days and, as with Lyft, all of the surcharge fees will go to drivers and couriers.

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upstart writes:

Google "hijacked millions of customers and orders" from restaurants, lawsuit says:

Google is being sued by a Florida restaurant group alleging that the tech company has been setting up unauthorized pages to capture food orders rather than directing them to the restaurant's own site.

Google uses "bait-and-switch" tactics to get customers to place takeout or pickup orders through "new, unauthorized, and deceptively branded webpages," according to the lawsuit, filed on behalf of Left Field Holdings, a restaurant company that runs Lime Fresh Mexican Grill franchises. On those pages, customers are prompted with large buttons to order with food delivery companies like GrubHub, DoorDash, or Seamless.

"Google never bothered to obtain permission from the restaurants to sell their products online," the lawsuit says. "Google purposefully designed its websites to appear to the user to be offered, sponsored, and approved by the restaurant, when they are not—a tactic, no doubt, employed by Google to increase orders and clicks."

In a statement to Ars, Google disputed "the mischaracterizations of our product" and said it would be defending itself against the lawsuit. "Our goal is to connect customers with restaurants they want to order food from and make it easier for them to do it through the 'Order Online' button," spokesperson José Castañeda told Ars. "We provide tools for merchants to indicate whether they support online orders or prefer a specific provider, including their own ordering website. We do not receive any compensation for orders or integrations with this feature."

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upstart writes:

As China quietly joins sanctions against Russia, Xi might be too rational to risk arming Putin:

The protracted war in Ukraine has plainly caught China off guard and led to some confusion and mixed reports about the extent to which President Xi Jinping's regime supports Moscow's offensive. China continues to withhold explicit criticism of the Russian invasion and may still be working to formulate a coherent response. But beyond the rhetoric out of Beijing, the evidence suggests China is not acting to undermine the economic and financial sanctions on Russia and indeed has moved to support the drive to isolate Russia economically.

We believe this is the result of a cost-benefit calculation by Xi, who appears to be far more rational than Russia's President, Vladimir Putin.

Consider the following. From the outset of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, two major Chinese state-controlled banks have reportedly refused to provide US dollar-denominated letters of credit to finance imports from Russia. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, in which China is the largest shareholder, announced a suspension of any new lending to Russia. The New Development Bank (the so-called BRICS Bank), which is headquartered in Shanghai, made a similar announcement.

upstart writes:

Wormholes – Shortcuts Connecting Two Points in Spacetime – Help Resolve Black Hole Information Paradox:

A RIKEN physicist and two colleagues have found that a wormhole—a bridge connecting distant regions of the Universe—helps to shed light on the mystery of what happens to information about matter consumed by black holes.

Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that nothing that falls into a black hole can escape its clutches. But in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking calculated that black holes should emit radiation when quantum mechanics, the theory governing the microscopic realm, is considered. "This is called black hole evaporation because the black hole shrinks, just like an evaporating water droplet," explains Kanato Goto of the RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences.

This, however, led to a paradox. Eventually, the black hole will evaporate entirely—and so too will any information about its swallowed contents. But this contradicts a fundamental dictum of quantum physics: that information cannot vanish from the Universe. "This suggests that general relativity and quantum mechanics as they currently stand are inconsistent with each other," says Goto. "We have to find a unified framework for quantum gravity."

[...] When physicists simply combine quantum mechanics with the standard description of a black hole in general relativity, Page appears to be wrong—the entropy continually grows as the black hole shrinks, indicating information is lost.

upstart writes:

QNAP warns severe Linux bug affects most of its NAS devices:

Taiwanese hardware vendor QNAP warns most of its Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices are impacted by a high severity Linux vulnerability dubbed 'Dirty Pipe' that allows attackers with local access to gain root privileges.

The 'Dirty Pipe' security bug affects Linux Kernel 5.8 and later versions, even on Android devices. If successfully exploited, it allows non-privileged users to inject and overwrite data in read-only files, including SUID processes that run as root.

[...] Dirty COW, a similar Linux vulnerability fixed in 2016, was previously used by malware to root Android devices and plant backdoors, although it was harder to exploit.

While a patch was released for the security flaw one week ago with Linux kernels versions 5.16.11, 5.15.25, and 5.10.102, QNAP says that its customers will have to wait until the company releases its own security updates.

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DannyB writes:

Researchers Could Lure Murder Hornets to Their Deaths with Sex

Birds do it, bees do it—even the wasps that kill bees do it. A clever team of scientists now has an idea to use the Asian giant hornets' horniness against them, in hopes of stopping the invasive species from decimating U.S. bee populations. They've identified the sex pheromones of the queen and propose trapping the hornet drones that are lured in by the pheromones.

The Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) preys on bees, and its stings are pretty painful to humans (they can kill people who are allergic to their venom). The hornets are native to Asia but have recently spread into the U.S.; they were first caught in Washington State in August 2020, and since then, they've spread across the American northwest. This invasion is worrying, since the hornets can slaughter a honeybee hive in a matter of hours.

Recently, a team of entomologists caught a bunch of virgin giant hornet queens and their drones from colonies in Yunnan, China. They swabbed the queens' sex glands and used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to identify pheromone compounds from six of the queens. The team's findings were published today in Current Biology.

"We were able to isolate the major components of the female sex pheromone, a odor blend that is highly attractive to males who compete to mate with virgin queens,"

This may be an effective way to eradicate an invasive foreign bee species. As long as the hornet males can't stop pollen in love with the queen.

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upstart writes:

Julian Assange denied permission to appeal US extradition decision at Supreme Court:

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been denied permission to appeal at the Supreme Court against a decision to extradite him to the United States, the court said on Monday.

US authorities want Australian-born Assange, 50 to face trial on 18 counts relating to WikiLeaks' release of vast troves of confidential US military records and diplomatic cables which they said had put lives in danger.

In December, the High Court in London overturned a lower court's ruling that he should not be extradited because his mental health problems meant he would be at risk of suicide.

"The application has been refused by the Supreme Court and the reason given is that application did not raise an arguable point of law" a supreme court spokesperson said.

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upstart writes:

APC UPS zero-day bugs can remotely burn out devices, disable power:

A set of three critical zero-day vulnerabilities now tracked as TLStorm could let hackers take control of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) devices from APC, a subsidiary of Schneider Electric.

[...] Two of the vulnerabilities, CVE-2022-22805 and CVE-2022-22806 are in the implementation of the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol that connects the Smart-UPS devices with the "SmartConnect" feature to the Schneider Electric management cloud.

The third one, identified as CVE-2022-0715, relates to the firmware of "almost all APC Smart-UPS devices," which is not cryptographically signed and its authenticity cannot be verified when installed on the system.

owl writes:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-is-testing-ads-in-the-windows-11-file-explorer/

Microsoft has begun testing promotions for some of its other products in the File Explorer app on devices running its latest Windows 11 Insider build.

The new Windows 11 "feature" was discovered by a Windows user and Insider MVP who shared a screenshot of an advertisement notification displayed above the listing of folders and files to the File Explorer, the Windows default file manager.

[...] As you can imagine, the reaction to this was adverse, to say the least, with some saying that "File Explorer one of the worst places to show ads," while others added that this is the way to go if Microsoft wants "people ditching Explorer for something else."

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upstart writes:

US astronaut to ride Russian spacecraft home during tensions:

U.S. astronaut Mark Vande Hei has made it through nearly a year in space, but faces what could be his trickiest assignment yet: riding a Russian capsule back to Earth in the midst of deepening tensions between the countries.

NASA insists Vande Hei's homecoming plans at the end of the month remain unchanged, even as Russia's invasion of Ukraine has resulted in canceled launches, broken contracts and an escalating war of words by the Russian Space Agency's hardline leader. Many worry Dmitry Rogozin is putting decades of a peaceful off-the-planet partnership at risk, most notably at the International Space Station.

Vande Hei—who on Tuesday breaks the U.S. single spaceflight record of 340 days—is due to leave with two Russians aboard a Soyuz capsule for a touchdown in Kazakhstan on March 30. The astronaut will have logged 355 days in space by then, setting a new U.S. record. The world record of 438 continuous days in space belongs to Russia.

upstart writes:

Ford will introduce seven new EVs in Europe by 2024:

Ford is quickly making good on its promise to go all-electric in Europe. The company now plans to introduce seven new EVs in Europe by 2024. The lineup will focus on crossovers, including an electric version of the compact Puma as well as a five-seat "medium-size" and "sport" models. You can also expect new editions of the Transit and Tourneo vans, including smaller Courier trims as well as Custom models.

The medium crossover will be the first mass-produced passenger EV from Ford's new Cologne facility and will include five seats and a claimed 310-mile range. Ford will formally reveal the vehicle later this year and start production in 2023.

The Transit Custom and Tourneo Custom are also slated to arrive in 2023, while the Puma, the sport crossover, the Transit Courier and the Tourneo Courier are due in 2024. The Mustang Mach-E and E-Transit are already part of Ford's European lineup. Ford hopes to move to an all-EV passenger range in Europe by 2030, and to completely eliminate gas and diesel from its stable by 2035.

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/03/ars-talks-to-werner-herzog-about-space-colonization-its-poetry/

Last Exit: Space is a new documentary on Discovery+ that explores the possibility of humans colonizing planets beyond Earth. Since it is produced and narrated by Werner Herzog (director of Grizzly Man, guest star on The Mandalorian) and written and directed by his son Rudolph, however, it goes in a different direction than your average space documentary. It's weird, beautiful, skeptical, and even a bit funny.

In light of the film's recent streaming launch, father and son Herzog spoke with Ars Technica from their respective homes about the film's otherworldly hopes, pessimistic conclusions, and that one part about space colonists having to drink their own urine.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Linux 5.17 delayed after vulnerability discovered in AMD processors:

The resurgence of Spectre-like malware has pushed the release date for the next iteration of Linux for at least a week, its creator has confirmed.

In the 5.17-rc8 announcement, the kernel development head Linus Torvalds explained that the discovery of CVE-2021-26341 - a vulnerability in some AMD processors that resembles the dreaded Spectre/Meltdown fiasco, meant the team needed to apply certain patches, which complicated things for the 5.17 version of the OS.

"Last weekend, I thought I'd be releasing the final 5.17 today. That was then, this is now," he writes.

"Last week was somewhat messy, mostly because of embargoed patches we had pending with another variation of specter attacks. And while the patches were mostly fine, we had the usual "because it was hidden, all our normal testing automation did not see it either".

Once automation sees "things", all the possible and impossible combinations get tested, resulting in a "(small) flurry of fixes for the fixes."

Despite the unforeseen circumstances, Torvalds considered releasing 5.17 anyway, but decided against it, in the end.

Original Submission