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NASA, Boeing Ready for Long-Delayed, High-Stakes Starliner Test Flight

takyon writes:

NASA, Boeing ready for long-delayed, high-stakes Starliner test flight

Running years late, Boeing's Starliner crew capsule program is poised for a crucial unpiloted test flight to the International Space Station set for launch Thursday, a do-over of an abbreviated 2019 demo mission that has cost the aerospace contractor nearly $600 million.

The Starliner crew capsule is scheduled for liftoff on the Orbital Flight Test 2, or OFT-2 mission, from Cape Canaveral at 6:54 p.m. EDT (2254 GMT) Thursday on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.

ULA, Boeing, and NASA, which oversees the Starliner commercial crew contract, gave a green light Tuesday to proceed with final launch preparations. Managers convened for a launch readiness review and gave a "go" to press on with the mission.

The review "went really well," said Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager. "It was short. It was very clean. There are really no issues that ULA, Boeing, or NASA are working for the launch coming up."

Boeing Starliner Nears Launch As ISS Astronauts Work on Space Botany and Human Research

Phoenix666 writes:

SciTechDaily:

The International Space Station (ISS) is preparing for the targeted arrival of Boeing's Starliner crew ship on the company's Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) mission. Meanwhile, the Expedition 67 crew is continuing its ongoing life science research while maintaining orbital lab systems.

Weather forecasters anticipate a 70% likelihood of favorable weather when Boeing's OFT-2 mission is scheduled to launch at 6:54 p.m. EDT (3:54 p.m. PDT) on Thursday. The Starliner spacecraft will lift off atop the Atlas-V rocket from United Launch Alliance at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Starliner will take a 24-hour automated trip to the station where it will dock to the Harmony module's forward port for five to 10 days of cargo and test operations.

The mission will be carrying materials for the station's botany experiments.

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Phoenix666 writes:

BBC:

The lure of making a quick buck has always attracted young people to invest in risky assets. For Generation Z, it is the volatility - and the decentralised nature - of digital assets such as cryptocurrency and NFTs which appeals. But they are unregulated, meaning there is little investor protection.

"All my friends were talking about [cryptocurrency] so one day I just decided why not just jump in and see if I can make some money," says 20-year-old Paxton See Tow.

All he needed was his phone and trading thousands of dollars' worth of assets was only a click away.

The gamification of trading is cited as a key attractant for Gen Z investors. Is that good, because it draws more people into investing, or dangerous?

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://greekreporter.com/2022/04/20/minoan-language-linear-a-linear-b/

The Minoan language known as "Linear A" may finally be deciphered with the help of the internet which can be used to uncover previously-hidden links to the much-better understood Linear B language. Linear B developed later in the prehistoric period.

The puzzle of Linear A has tormented linguists for many decades, as they attempted to link it somehow to Linear B, which was translated successfully for the first time in the 1950s. Linear B was used on the Greek mainland and Crete 50-150 years later than Linear A.

Understanding the link between them and decoding the secrets of Linear A would allow experts to paint a much more complete picture of Minoan civilization going back as far as 1,800 BC.

Linear A, which was used by the Minoans during the Bronze Age, exists on at least 1,400 known inscriptions made on clay tablets. The language has baffled the world's top archaeologists and linguistic experts for many years.

hubie writes:

Researcher warns of risks with using alternative data in lending:

Traditional credit scoring is based on a person's demonstrated ability to take on debt and pay it off. But with the dawn of larger data pools and access to more sophisticated modeling programs, lenders and credit agencies are taking more nonfinancial factors into rating creditworthiness, particularly those without an extensive credit history. This group tends to include vulnerable populations who are often more susceptible to predatory lending practices.

The problem is the systems developing these alternative scores can be like a black box, according to University of Georgia financial regulation researcher Lindsay Sain Jones. With the pool of personal data available growing, Jones argues that it's time to take a second look at how the American credit scoring system works and is regulated.

[...] In their recent paper, Jones and her co-author argue further regulation of financial reporting entities — both large credit bureaus and new data collectors — is needed in the same way gas, electric and water providers regulated their services. They argue participation in the credit system has become as necessary as having a phone or electricity.

[...] Jones and her co-author are also concerned that much of the lifestyle-related data points lenders correlate with creditworthiness can connect to race, gender, age, socioeconomic status, a person's ZIP code or where they attended college. Successfully challenging this kind of disparate impact under the ECOA [Ed: Equal Credit Opportunity Act] is nearly impossible.

One agency pulled information on how often people pay for gas at the pump versus paying inside the store. People who paid at the pump were deemed more creditworthy.

"There are all kinds of factors that can be correlated with creditworthiness, but that doesn't mean they should be used," Jones said.

When they factor in the web sites that people visit, do you suppose SN would be an asset or liability towards creditworthiness?

[ed note: See also Black Mirror, Season 3 Episode 1, "Nosedive". - fnord]

Journal Reference:
Janine S. Hiller and Lindsay Sain Jones, Who's Keeping Score?: Oversight of Changing Consumer Credit Infrastructure [open], Am. Bus. Law J., 2022
DOI: 10.1111/ablj.12199

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upstart writes:

Researcher uses 379-year-old algorithm to crack crypto keys found in the wild:

Cryptographic keys generated with older software now owned by technology company Rambus are weak enough to be broken instantly using commodity hardware, a researcher reported on Monday. This revelation is part of an investigation that also uncovered a handful of weak keys in the wild.

The software comes from a basic version of the SafeZone Crypto Libraries, which were developed by a company called Inside Secure and acquired by Rambus as part of its 2019 acquisition of Verimatrix, a Rambus representative said. That version was deprecated prior to the acquisition and is distinct from a FIPS-certified version that the company now sells under the Rambus FIPS Security Toolkit brand.

Researcher Hanno Böck said that the vulnerable SafeZone library doesn't sufficiently randomize the two prime numbers it used to generate RSA keys. (These keys can be used to secure Web traffic, shells, and other online connections.) Instead, after the SafeZone tool selects one prime number, it chooses a prime in close proximity as the second one needed to form the key.

"The problem is that both primes are too similar," Böck said in an interview. "So the difference between the two primes is really small." The SafeZone vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-26320.

Cryptographers have long known that RSA keys that are generated with primes that are too close together can be trivially broken with Fermat's factorization method. French mathematician Pierre de Fermat first described this method in 1643.

A little old but interesting nonetheless. Implementation details matter.

[ed. note. - The youtube channel ComputerPhile also has a decent video explaining the issue. - fnord]

Original Submission

maxwell demon writes:

The site Tanya Goodin tells us that Zoom might soon monitor your emotions:

Imagine being on a Zoom call and the person [at]sic the other end is getting real-time messages from an artificial intelligence (AI) that's analysing your face and indicating when you're bored, annoyed, or even lying. A creepy prospect, but one that sounds slightly far-fetched?

Well, no, this 'emotion AI' is something Zoom is considering building into their product right now, with research currently underway on how they can do that.

Human rights organizations are not happy about it:

More than 25 human and digital rights organisations including the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Privacy Information Center and Fight for the Future have sent a letter to Zoom demanding the company end their plans to incorporate these emotion AI features into their software.

"This software is discriminatory, manipulative, potentially dangerous and based on assumptions that all people use the same facial expressions, voice patterns, and body language," wrote the groups in the letter sent on Wednesday to Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom.

But the technology is not restricted to Zoom:

AI-based features for assessing people's emotional states are already showing up in remote classroom platforms like Intel's 'Class' and will be mandatory in new EU vehicles from 2022 to detect driver distraction, signs of drunkenness and road rage. Like it or not these technologies are coming – many of them are here already.

So next time you are facing any camera, better control your facial expression well.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Dwarf planet Ceres was formed in coldest zone of Solar System and thrust into Asteroid Belt:

Ceres is the largest object in the Asteroid Belt, a collection of celestial bodies located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It is roughly spherical and comprises a third of the Asteroid Belt's total mass, with a diameter of almost 1,000 km, less than a third of the Moon's.

[...] The dwarf planet's core is probably made up of heavy matter – iron and silicates – but what differentiates it from nearby objects is its mantle of ammonia and water ice. Most bodies in the Asteroid Belt do not have ammonia, so the hypothesis is that Ceres was formed outside it, in the colder region beyond Jupiter's orbit, and then thrust into the middle of the Asteroid Belt by the huge gravitational instability caused by the formation of gas giants Jupiter and Saturn.

"The presence of ammonia ice is strong observational evidence that Ceres may have been formed in the coldest region of the Solar System beyond the Frost Line, in temperatures low enough to cause condensation and fusion of water and such volatile substances as carbon monoxide [CO], carbon dioxide [CO₂] and ammonia [NH₃]," Ribeiro de Sousa said.

[...] "In our article, we propose a scenario to explain why Ceres is so different from neighboring asteroids. In this scenario, Ceres began forming in an orbit well beyond Saturn where ammonia was abundant. During the giant planet growth stage, it was pulled into the asteroid Belt as a migrant from the outer Solar System, and survived for 4.5 billion years until now," Ribeiro de Sousa said.

[...] "Our main finding was that in the past there were at least 3,600 Ceres-like objects beyond Saturn's orbit. With this number of objects, our model showed that one of them could have been transported and captured in the Asteroid Belt, in an orbit very similar to Ceres's current orbit," he said.

Journal Reference:
Rafael Ribeiro de Sousa, Alessandro Morbidelli, Rodney Gomes et al., Dynamical origin of the Dwarf Planet Ceres, Icarus, 379, 2022
DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2022.114933

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Backdoor in public repository used new form of attack to target big firms:

A backdoor that researchers found hiding inside open source code targeting four German companies was the work of a professional penetration tester. The tester was checking clients' resilience against a new class of attacks that exploit public repositories used by millions of software projects worldwide. But it could have been bad. Very bad.

[...] A few weeks later, a different researcher uncovered evidence that showed that Amazon, Slack, Lyft, Zillow, and other companies had been targeted in attacks that used the same technique. The release of more than 200 malicious packages into the wild indicated the attack Birsan devised appealed to real-world threat actors.

Dependency confusion exploits companies' reliance on open source code available from repositories such as NPM, PyPI, or RubyGems. In some cases, the company software will automatically connect to these sources to retrieve the code libraries required for the application to function. Other times, developers store these so-called dependencies internally. As the name suggests, dependency confusion works by tricking a target into downloading the library from the wrong place—a public source rather than an internal one.

To pull this off, hackers scour JavaScript code, accidentally published internal packages, and other sources to discover the names of internally stored code dependencies by the targeted organization. The hackers then create a malicious dependency and host it on one of the public repositories. By giving the malicious package the same name as the internal one and using a higher version number, some targets will automatically download it and update the software. With that, the hackers have succeeded in infecting the software supply chain the targets rely on and getting the target or its users to run malicious code.

Previously:
Open-Source Security: It's Too Easy to Upload 'Devastating' Malicious Packages, Warns Google
Dependency Yanked Over Licensing Mishap Breaks Rails Worldwide
More Than 75% of All Vulnerabilities Reside in Indirect Dependencies

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Work challenges popular idea that breeds have specific, reliable behaviors:

When Kathleen Morrill was 12, she decided she needed a puppy. [...] And so, the family ended up with its first dog—a 2-month-old pup she named Tod.

Tod was registered with the American Kennel Club (AKC), whose website describes his breed as "curious" and "friendly" with a "hardy constitution." But the puppy was shy and scared of strangers, and he developed separation anxiety as he aged. [...] "Breed can be important," Morrill says, "but it's not the full picture of a dog's behavior."

Now, she has the science to back that up. In a new study, Morrill and her colleagues show that almost none of the behaviors we associate with dog breeds—from lovable Labradors to pugnacious pit bulls—are hard-wired. Aside from a few ancient traits, environment seems to play a much larger role than pedigree.

[...] In the largest study of its kind, the team compared the genetic and survey data of nearly 2000 dogs—most of which had their entire genomes sequenced—and survey results from an additional 16,000 pooches. The pups included mixes and purebreds, with 128 breeds represented.

When it came to physical traits, such as size and floppy ears, genes ruled. At least 80% of a dog's appearance can be tied to its DNA, the team found.

[...] Behavior was another story. Less than one-quarter of the differences in personality from dog to dog could be explained by genetics. [...]

[...] And when it came to dog breeds, personality varied widely within the same pedigree.

[...] The bottom line, she says: If you're looking for a dog with a specific personality, "you shouldn't shop out of a catalog. Each dog is an individual."

Still, after decades of treating, showing, and judging countless breeds, AKC's chief veterinary officer, Jerry Klein, disputes the study's conclusions. "I think most dogs conform to the personality standard of their breed," he says. Purportedly older breeds, he says, such as Tibetan mastiffs and basenjis—few of which were enrolled in the study—may have more hardwired personalities because they've been around longer.

Klein also contends that if the researchers look beyond breed to classes of dogs—such as sporting dogs (which include a variety of spaniels) and scent hounds (such as basset hounds and beagles)—they would find their behaviors are more similar to each other than they are to other dogs. "It's not as simple as just the breeds."

For the reading-averse, there is also a nice YouTube summary of the research.

Journal Reference:
Kathleen Morrill et al., Ancestry-inclusive dog genomics challenges popular breed stereotypes, Science, 376, 2022
DOI: 10.1126/science.abk0639

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The dust-covered spacecraft detected landmark geophysical events on Mars, despite significant obstacles:

NASA officials announced in a press conference today that the InSight lander on Mars will likely stop operating at the end of 2022, following three years of scientific work on the surface of the Red Planet.

InSight arrived on Mars in November 2018, and during its time on the Martian surface it has collected remarkable data on the planet's structure and the seismic events that emanate from its interior. [...]

But now, the lander is beset with dust that has settled on its solar panels, hindering its ability to take in light and generate power. The InSight team came up with a McGuyver-esque way of shaking some of that dust off: by scooping up Martian soil and dropping it on the dust, they were able to marginally clean up the panels. That maneuver was done successfully six times, according to Kathya Zamora Garcia, the Deputy Project Manager for InSight.

In its tenure, the lander has detected 1,313 marsquakes to date. When it began its science, InSight was capable of running for about 5,000 watt-hours per sol (Martian day); now, overwhelmed by the Martian dust, the lander can only manage 500 watt-hours per sol. [...]

Barring any Martian miracles, the fastidious InSight lander is on its last legs. For every one of its struggles and failures, the lander produced a bevy of data on the buried secrets of rocky worlds beyond our own. So thanks, InSight, for all your unheralded perseverance.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Angry IT admin wipes employer's databases, gets 7 years in prison:

Han Bing, a former database administrator for Lianjia, a Chinese real-estate brokerage giant, has been sentenced to 7 years in prison for logging into corporate systems and deleting the company's data.

Bing allegedly performed the act in June 2018, when he used his administrative privileges and "root" account to access the company's financial system and delete all stored data from two database servers and two application servers.

[...] Surprisingly, Bing had repeatedly informed his employer and supervisors about security gaps in the financial system, even sending emails to other administrators to raise his concerns.

However, he was largely ignored, as the leaders of his department never approved the security project he proposed to run.

This was confirmed by the testimony of the director of ethics at Lianjia, who told the court that Han Bing felt that his organizational proposals weren't valued and often entered arguments with his supervisors.

In a similar case from September 2021, a former New York-based credit union employee avenged her supervisors for firing her by deleting over 21.3GB of documents in a 40-minute attack.

Anyone have stories of any interesting employee departures that they have exprienced?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Hebrew University Discovers New Magnetic Phenomenon:

Nanotechnology is a wonderland for physicists. At this small scale, where materials as thin as 100 atoms are studied, totally new and unexpected phenomena are discovered. Here, nature ceases to behave in a way that is predictable by the macroscopic law of physics, unlike what goes on in the world around us or out in the cosmos.

[...] The images showed that the magnetic material the HU researchers were studying only retained magnetism on its edge—in fact only within 10 nanometers of the edge (for reference, a human hair is around 100,000 nanometers). Their results were published in the prestigious journal Nano Letters.

This nano-effect, although very small, could actually have wide applications in our daily lives. "In today's technological race to make every component smaller and more energy-efficient, effort is focused towards small magnets with different shapes," Anahory shared. The new edge magnetism offers the possibility of making long wire magnets only 10 nanometers thick, which could curve into any shape. "It could revolutionize the way we make spintronics devices," added Anahory, referring to the next-generation nano-electronic devices with reduced power consumption and increased memory and processing capabilities.

Journal Reference: Interior and Edge Magnetization in Thin Exfoliated CrGeTe3 Films. Avia Noah, Hen Alpern, Sourabh Singh, Alon Gutfreund, Gilad Zisman, Tomer D. Feld, Atzmon Vakahi, Sergei Remennik, Yossi Paltiel, Martin Emile Huber, Victor Barrena, Hermann Suderow, Hadar Steinberg, Oded Millo, and Yonathan Anahory, Nano Letters
DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c04665

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Europeans' data shared 376 times daily in advertising sales, report says:

The study, by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), found that the average European user's data is shared 376 times per day.

The figure rises to 747 times daily for US-based users, the report claims.

The revenue from digital adverts is what keeps most internet services free to use.

The ICCL is currently engaged in legal action with the digital ad industry and the Data Protection Commission against what it describes as an epic data breach, arguing that nobody has ever specifically consented to this practice.

It includes information about the device the page is loading on, some details about where that device is, and other information such as previous websites visited and their subject matter.

[...] The report claims that:

• data about US web users' habits are shared in advert sales processes 107 trillion times per year. European users' data is shared 71 billion times
• Germany's individual internet users' data is shared once every minute that they are online, using a calculation based on averages

Tech reporter Parmy Olson, writing for Bloomberg, said: "If the exhaust of our personal data could be seen in the same way pollution can, we'd be surrounded by an almost impenetrable haze that gets thicker the more we interact with our phones."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A Spanish teen's genome may hold the secret to lupus:

Researchers may have finally discovered a genetic cause of lupus, the autoimmune disorder (and elusive enemy of Dr. Gregory House).

Their study, published in Nature, points to a mutation in a gene that senses viral RNA.

Previous studies have implicated the gene, called TLR7, in lupus before, El Pais reports, but this new study identified a previously unknown variant of the gene in a Spanish teenager who was diagnosed with lupus as a child.

"We have shown for the first time how rare gene variants that occur in less than one per cent of the population cause lupus and how these variants drive the disease in the body," Simon Jiang, a researcher at Australian National University's Centre for Personalised Immunology and study author, said in a statement.

The discovery may help researchers develop a targeted treatment for lupus, Jiang said — and not just for patients with this exact rare mutation.

[...] The mutation increases the immune system's sensitivity to guanosine, one of the building blocks of DNA and RNA, Hudson expert Michael Gantier explained. This causes the infection sensor to become switched on even if there is no viral RNA present, which is what it is designed to look out for.

Confused about their target, the misdirected immune cells then begin to attack the healthy tissues.

If the researchers are correct, it may solve another vexing lupus question as well: The disease is 10x more frequent in women than men, and TLR7 sits on the X chromosome — making a possible mutation twice as likely.

Journal Reference:
Brown, Grant J., Cañete, Pablo F., Wang, Hao, et al. TLR7 gain-of-function genetic variation causes human lupus [open], Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04642-z)

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A single neutron moves along two paths simultaneously, in clearly quantifiable proportions:

The double-slit experiment is the most famous and probably the most important experiment in quantum physics: individual particles are shot at a wall with two openings, behind which a detector measures where the particles arrive. [...]

"In the classical double-slit experiment, an interference pattern is created behind the double slit," explains Stephan Sponar from the Atomic Institute at TU Wien. "The particles move as a wave through both openings at the same time, and the two partial waves then interfere with each other. In some places they reinforce each other, in other places they cancel each other out."

[...] Of course, this wave distribution cannot be seen by looking at a single particle. Only when the experiment is repeated many times does the wave pattern become increasingly recognisable point by point and particle by particle.

They set up a double-slit experiment using neutrons as a source, but they also manipulated the spin of the neutron. If you flip the spin on only one of the two paths, you can tell which path the neutron took; however, when you do this, the double-slit interference pattern disappears due to quantum complementarity. Instead of flipping the neutron spin, they only change the spin a little bit, which preserves the interference pattern, but they only gain a little bit of information about which path the neutron took, so they still have to use many neutrons to build up the interference pattern.