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upstart writes:

Billions of dollars to be invested in new submarine internet cables:

Investment in submarine cables could reach $10 billion over the next two years, as telecoms providers and technology companies seek to increase capacity for global data traffic.

Undersea cables were first used in the 19th century to transmit telegrams across oceans and have since provided the foundation for global telephone and internet networks.

[...] TeleGeography's 2022 cable map now indicates 486 cable systems and 1,306 landings globally, with $12 billion worth added in the past five years.

It is predicated that subsea cable spending will increase as hyperscalers shift their position from generating demand to generating supply as mobile data traffic continues to grow and cloud adoption increases.

There are now more than 1.3 million km of submarine cables worldwide.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Google Warns Billions That Chrome Has Been Hacked, Patch This Version ASAP:

[...] The Stable Channel for the desktop edition of Chrome had an update on April 26, 2022. That update includes 30 security fixes, some of them so bad that Google is urging all users to update immediately.

The release notes for Google's Chrome v101.0.4951.41 for Windows, Mac, and Linux has a long list of bug fixes; you can view it here. However, there's also a key statement in that page.

"Note: Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix. We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven't yet fixed."

Effectively the the non-developer translation of the quote above is that these are serious enough to keep the details hidden from the public to avoid bad actors pouncing on them with exploits. We can tell you a good portion of the bugs that have been published lately have to do with memory manipulation and memory overflow errors, a pretty popular way for malware developers to inject code into memory and allow for arbitrary execution, which is bad. [...]

[Editor's note (hubie): On 5/22 the original article author stepped back from their initial headline and stance. The SN headline here has been changed to reflect the current article headline and relevant text updated. I moved the original text below for posterity.]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

World leaders sign landmark 'future of the internet' pact:

World leaders from more than 60 countries including the US and the UK have come together to commit to a new agreement aimed at safeguarding the future of the internet.

The so-called Declaration of the Future of the Internet (PDF) will help strengthen democracy online as the countries that have agreed to its terms have promised not to undermine elections by running online misinformation campaigns or illegally spying on people according to the White House.

At the same time, the declaration commits to promote safety and the equitable use of the internet, with the countries involved agreeing to refrain from imposing government-led shutdowns while providing both affordable and reliable internet services.

While the Declaration of the Future of the Internet isn't legally binding, the principles set forth within it will serve as a reference for public policy makers, businesses, citizens and civil society organizations.

US tech giants support the declaration with Google saying in a blog post that the private sector must also play an important role when furthering internet standards while Microsoft president Brad Smith explained in a separate blog post that governments cannot manage the global challenges facing the internet on their own.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Cloudflare just mitigated one of the most powerful DDoS attacks ever:

Earlier this week, Cloudflare engineers identified one of the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks ever attempted. The attack, made against an unidentified cryptocurrency platform, was identified and mitigated in under 20 seconds. The individuals behind the act flooded the network with more than 15 million requests.

In addition to the attack's size, the use of HTTPS rather than typical HTTP requests further complicated the issue—the secure protocol results in more resource overhead due to the compute-intensive nature of the secure HTTPS request. According to Cloudflare, the botnet responsible for carrying out the attack represented 6,000 bots from 112 countries around the world.

The attack is believed to have leveraged servers from hosting providers running vulnerable Java-based applications. Those servers were likely unpatched or not updated and susceptible to CVE-2022-21449, Psychic Signatures in Java. The vulnerability allows attackers to use the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) to forge SSL certificates and other authentication-based information in order to obtain unwanted access.

The sharp spike in Cloudflare's traffic analytics shows just how quickly the attack was able to ramp up. At 22:21:15 the platform recorded between 500,000 and 1 million requests. Within five seconds, that number grew to almost 3 million requests. At this point the attack's intensity escalated, generating approximately 15.3 million requests within the next five seconds. Several seconds later, Cloudflare was able to mitigate the attack, bringing traffic patterns back to expected levels.

I am no fan of Cloudflare, but they seem to have done what they said they could do in this particular case.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

An article about how the Russian military stole farm equipment from a John Deere dealership in the Ukraine, only to find it all remotely disabled when trying to use/sell it on the other side:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/01/europe/russia-farm-vehicles-ukraine-disabled-melitopol-intl/index.html

Russian troops in the occupied city of Melitopol have stolen all the equipment from a farm equipment dealership -- and shipped it to Chechnya, according to a Ukrainian businessman in the area.

But after a journey of more than 700 miles, the thieves were unable to use any of the equipment -- because it had been locked remotely.

Over the past few weeks there's been a growing number of reports of Russian troops stealing farm equipment, grain and even building materials - beyond widespread looting of residences. But the removal of valuable agricultural equipment from a John Deere dealership in Melitopol speaks to an increasingly organized operation, one that even uses Russian military transport as part of the heist.

[...] Other sources in the Melitopol region say theft by Russian military units has extended to grain held in silos, in a region that produces hundreds of thousands of tonnes of crops a year.

Are there other examples like this justifying some sort of limited DRM? How prominent do you think this will be held up as an example in lobbying efforts to justify not passing "Right To Repair" laws?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Huge new ichthyosaur, one of the largest animals ever, uncovered high in the Alps:

Huge new ichthyosaur, one of the largest animals ever, uncovered high in the Alps

Paleontologists have discovered sets of fossils representing three new ichthyosaurs that may have been among the largest animals to have ever lived, reports a new paper in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Unearthed in the Swiss Alps between 1976 and 1990, the discovery includes the largest ichthyosaur tooth ever found. The width of the tooth root is twice as large as any aquatic reptile known, the previous largest belonging to a 15-meter-long ichthyosaur.

Other incomplete skeletal remains include the largest trunk vertebra in Europe that demonstrates another ichthyosaur rivaling the largest marine reptile fossil known today, the 21-meter long Shastasaurus sikkanniensis from British Columbia, Canada.

upstart writes:

Anesthetic drastically diverts the travels of brain waves:

Imagine the conscious brain as a sea roiling with the collisions and dispersals of waves of different sizes and shapes, swirling around and flowing across in many different directions. Now imagine that an ocean liner lumbers through, flattening everything that trails behind with its powerful, parting wake. A new study finds that unconsciousness induced by the commonly used drug propofol has something like that metaphorical effect on higher frequency brain waves, appearing to sweep them aside and, as an apparent consequence, sweeping consciousness away as well.

[...] Traveling waves are hypothesized to perform many important functions as they coordinate the activity of brain cells over the areas of the brain they cover. These include reading information out from memory and holding it there while it waits to be used in cognition. They may also aid in perception and act as a means of time keeping in the brain. The findings therefore illustrate how profoundly anesthesia alters the state of the state of the brain as it induces and maintains unconsciousness, said senior author Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor of Neuroscience in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

"The rhythms that we associate with higher cognition are drastically altered by propofol," Miller said. "The beta traveling waves seen during wakefulness are pushed aside, redirected by delta traveling waves that have been altered and made more powerful by the anesthetic. The deltas come through like a bull in a china shop."

Journal Reference:
Bhattacharya, Sayak, Donoghue, Jacob A., Mahnke, Meredith, et al. Propofol Anesthesia Alters Cortical Traveling Waves, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1162/jocn_a_01856)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Hidden No Longer, Eyes Reveal Rare Mental Condition:

Australian researchers have made a breakthrough in a rare mental condition, aphantasia, that makes people unable to visualise images.

Previously thought to be difficult to diagnose, researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have discovered a method for proving and diagnosing the rare mental condition via a person’s eyes’ responsiveness to light.

Those who do not have aphantasia can visualize a bright and dark object, which evokes a visible pupillary reflex of contraction or dilation as it would if they walked out into the sun or into a dark room. Professor Joel Pearson the senior author of the paper publishing the results of the study said in a UNSW media release that this reflex exists in the human eye to optimize the amount of light hitting the retina.

However, people with aphantasia can not visualize bright or dark objects so their pupils do not change.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Texas Blockchain Council has donated three S9 bitcoin miners to Fort Worth, Texas for a six-month trial allowing the city to experience mining from within:

Fort Worth, Texas has officially become the first city government in the U.S. to mine bitcoin today. Three S9 bitcoin mining rigs will be deployed to run 24/7 in a closed environment on a private network operated by the Information Technology Solutions Department Data Center located at Fort Worth City Hall.

The S9 bitcoin miners were donated by the bitcoin and blockchain advocacy group, Texas Blockchain Council. The donation has formally been accepted today.

[...] The program starts with only the three machines so the city of Fort Worth can monitor performance, energy requirements, and familiarize itself with the process of bitcoin mining over a six-month period.

Fort Worth estimates that the individual energy required to mine bitcoin from each of the mining rigs will be equal to that of a household vacuum cleaner, according to the release. This nominal energy-usage is expected to be offset by the profits obtained from mining bitcoin.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://retrorepairsandrefurbs.com/2022/04/29/1974-sinclair-scientific-calculator-repair-restoration/

I recently acquired a Sinclair Scientific calculator from 1974, alongside a large bundle of vintage computers – this was an unexpected (but very welcome) surprise and is in fact my first vintage calculator, though it is basically a pocket computer, so it is certainly in keeping with the rest of my collection. The calculator was in good condition and came with its original box, user manual, and carry case, however it was bought sold-as-seen and had several corroded and damaged battery contacts.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Lab-grown meat and insects 'good for planet and health':

Dining on the likes of lab-grown meat or ground-up insects could lead to big savings in carbon emissions and water, as well as freeing up land for nature.

That's the finding of a study calculating the environmental benefits of "greener" foods hitting our plates.

Scientists say pressures on the planet could fall by more than 80% with such foods, compared with the typical European diet.

But it's not yet clear if consumers will want to shift their eating habits.

Yet another article about how lab-grown meat is good for you and good for the planet so you really should eat it. But yet somehow nobody appears to be wanting to eat it. Do the people that write these papers eat it? More then for testing? There is the usual yuck factor involved considering that some of the yummy foods suggested are ground-up flies and crickets. Then various forms of lab-grown cells (chickens, eggs, milk, meat and berries (cause apparently berries are no longer from plants?)). The usual seafood stuff like various forms of seaweed and algae, which people already eat so I don't even know why this is included.

Will people get over the yuck by pricing? I doubt this will take off until the time when this stuff becomes so ridiculously cheap they more or less are giving it away. Cause there is no way I'm paying meat prices for fake-meat. When will you start to eat lab-food-stuffs?

upstart writes:

Building 'nanofactories' to help make medicines and more:

Thanks to a lesser-known feature of microbiology, Michigan State University researchers have helped open a door that could lead to medicines, vitamins and more being made at lower costs and with improved efficiency.

The international research team, led by Henning Kirst and Cheryl Kerfeld in the College of Natural Science, have repurposed what are known as bacterial microcompartments and programmed them to produce valuable chemicals from inexpensive starting ingredients.

[...] "The microcompartments, they're like nanoreactors or nanofactories," said Kirst, a senior research associate in Kerfeld's lab, which operates at both MSU and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Kirst, Kerfeld and their teammates saw the microcompartments as an opportunity to take important chemical reactions to the next level. Over the past few decades, researchers have harnessed the power of enzymes found in bacteria to create valuable chemical products including biofuels and medicines.

In those industrial applications, though, chemists often rely on the entire microorganism to produce the desired compound, which Kirst said can lead to complications and inefficiencies.

upstart writes:

Researchers build a portable desalination unit that generates clear, clean drinking water without the need for filters or high-pressure pumps:

MIT researchers have developed a portable desalination unit, weighing less than 10 kilograms, that can remove particles and salts to generate drinking water.

[...] Commercially available portable desalination units typically require high-pressure pumps to push water through filters, which are very difficult to miniaturize without compromising the energy-efficiency of the device, explains Yoon.

Instead, their unit relies on a technique called ion concentration polarization (ICP), which was pioneered by Han's group more than 10 years ago. Rather than filtering water, the ICP process applies an electrical field to membranes placed above and below a channel of water. The membranes repel positively or negatively charged particles — including salt molecules, bacteria, and viruses — as they flow past. The charged particles are funneled into a second stream of water that is eventually discharged.

[...] But ICP does not always remove all the salts floating in the middle of the channel. So the researchers incorporated a second process, known as electrodialysis, to remove remaining salt ions.

Yoon and Kang used machine learning to find the ideal combination of ICP and electrodialysis modules. The optimal setup includes a two-stage ICP process, with water flowing through six modules in the first stage then through three in the second stage, followed by a single electrodialysis process. This minimized energy usage while ensuring the process remains self-cleaning.

upstart writes:

Fast-acting enzyme breaks down plastics in as little as 24 hours:

The idea of deploying enzymes to break down plastic waste is gaining momentum through a string of breakthroughs demonstrating how they can do so with increasing efficiency, and even reduce the material to simple molecules. A new study marks yet another step forward, with scientists leveraging machine learning to engineer an enzyme that degrades some forms of plastic in just 24 hours, with a stability that makes it well-suited to large-scale adoption.

[...] A team at the University of Texas set out to address some of the shortcomings of these enzymes so far. According to the scientists, the application of the technology has been held back by an inability to function well at low temperatures and different pH ranges, lack of effectiveness directly tackling untreated plastic waste, and slow reaction rates.

To resolve these problems, the team developed a machine learning model that could predict which mutations in a PETase enzyme would afford it these capabilities. This involved closely studying a range of PET plastic products, including containers, water bottles and fabrics, and then using the model to design and engineer a new and improved enzyme dubbed FAST-PETase (functional, active, stable and tolerant PETase).

hubie writes:

Scientists with NASA's MMS Mission Crack 60-Year Mystery of Fast Magnetic Explosions

In just minutes, a flare on the Sun can release enough energy to power the whole world for 20,000 years. An explosive process called magnetic reconnection triggers these solar flares and scientists have spent the last half-century trying to understand how the process happens.

It's not just a scientific curiosity: A fuller understanding of magnetic reconnection could enable insights into nuclear fusion and provide better predictions of particle storms from the Sun that can affect Earth-orbiting technology.

Now, scientists with NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, or MMS, think they've figured it out. The scientists have developed a theory that explains how the most explosive type of magnetic reconnection – called fast reconnection – occurs and why it happens at a consistent speed. The new theory uses a common magnetic effect that's used in household devices, such as sensors that time vehicle anti-lock braking systems and know when a cell phone flip cover is closed.