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An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Guardian website is now available to Tor users as an "onion service", at the address:

https://www.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3oqfoprid.onion

The Tor network helps conceal its users' locations, which makes tracking their internet activity much more difficult. Tor also makes it harder for internet service providers to identify what their users are accessing. This means users can bypass censorship in parts of the world where access to independent news might be difficult or if certain websites and services are banned.

Guardian readers have always been able to access https://www.theguardian.com using tools such as Tor Browser. These browsers route their communications over the Tor network – thereby concealing the reader's location. But the browsers' communications have to exit the Tor network for the final leg of the journey in order to get to the site on the normal world wide web.

The introduction of a Guardian onion service means that the entire communication pathway between a reader and the Guardian takes place within the Tor network, thereby avoiding potential risks with the "hop" between the Tor network and the world wide web service. An example of such a risk could be that the "exit node" – the gateway between the normal web and the Tor network – could contain malicious software or be located somewhere that is subject to censorship.

Article: https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2022/may/30/guardian-launches-tor-onion-service

Two other large news sites of note also have .onion addresses:

BBC: https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccijh7745uqd.onion/
NYTimes: https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion/

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Why the search for a privacy-preserving data sharing mechanism is failing:

From banking to communication our modern, daily lives are driven by data with ongoing concerns over privacy. Now, a new EPFL paper published in Nature Computational Science argues that many promises made around privacy-preserving mechanisms will never be fulfilled and that we need to accept these inherent limits and not chase the impossible.

Data-driven innovation in the form of personalized medicine, better public services or, for example, greener and more efficient industrial production promises to bring enormous benefits for people and our planet and widespread access to data is considered essential to drive this future. Yet, aggressive data collection and analysis practices raise the alarm over societal values and fundamental rights.

As a result, how to widen access to data while safeguarding the confidentiality of sensitive, personal information has become one of the most prevalent challenges in unleashing the potential of data-driven technologies and a new paper from EPFL's Security and Privacy Engineering Lab (SPRING) in the School of Comupter and Communication Sciences argues that the promise that any data use is solvable under both good utility and privacy is akin to chasing rainbows.

Head of the SPRING Lab and co-author of the paper, Assistant Professor Carmela Troncoso, says that there are two traditional approaches to preserving privacy, "There is the path of using privacy preserving cryptography, processing the data in a decrypted domain and getting a result. But the limitation is the need to design very targeted algorithms and not just undertake generic computations."

The problem with this type of privacy-preserving technology, the paper argues, is that they don't solve one of the key problems most relevant to practitioners: how to share high-quality individual-level data in a manner that preserves privacy but allows analysts to extract a dataset's full value in a highly flexible manner.

DannyB writes:

Phys.org
How electric fish were able to evolve electric organs

Electric organs help electric fish, such as the electric eel, do all sorts of amazing things: They send and receive signals that are akin to bird songs, helping them to recognize other electric fish by species, sex and even individual. A new study in Science Advances explains how small genetic changes enabled electric fish to evolve electric organs. The finding might also help scientists pinpoint the genetic mutations behind some human diseases.

Evolution took advantage of a quirk of fish genetics to develop electric organs. All fish have duplicate versions of the same gene that produces tiny muscle motors, called sodium channels. To evolve electric organs, electric fish turned off one duplicate of the sodium channel gene in muscles and turned it on in other cells. The tiny motors that typically make muscles contract were repurposed to generate electric signals, and voila! A new organ with some astonishing capabilities was born.

[....] researchers from UT Austin and Michigan State University describe discovering a short section of this sodium channel gene—about 20 letters long—that controls whether the gene is expressed in any given cell. They confirmed that in electric fish, this control region is either altered or entirely missing. And that's why one of the two sodium channel genes is turned off in the muscles of electric fish.

[....] "This control region is in most vertebrates, including humans," Zakon said. "So, the next step in terms of human health would be to examine this region in databases of human genes to see how much variation there is in normal people and whether some deletions or mutations in this region could lead to a lowered expression of sodium channels, which might result in disease."

[....] Zakon said the sodium channel gene had to be turned off in muscle before an electric organ could evolve.

"If they turned on the gene in both muscle and the electric organ, then all the new stuff that was happening to the sodium channels in the electric organ would also be occurring in the muscle," Zakon said. "So, it was important to isolate the expression of the gene to the electric organ, where it could evolve without harming muscle."

[....] "If you rewound the tape of life and hit play, would it play back the same way or would it find new ways forward? Would evolution work the same way over and over again?" said Gallant, who breeds the electric fish from South America that were used in part of the study.

It is shocking that electric organs are not only for musicians.

More information: Sarah LaPotin et al, Divergent cis-regulatory evolution underlies the convergent loss of sodium channel expression in electric fish, Science Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm2970 or www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm2970

Journal information: Science Advances

Original Submission

owl brings us an interesting bit of space history for your weekend enjoyment:

https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/us-military-launched-needles-space/

In the early 1960s, international communications were limited to transmissions through undersea cables or occasionally unreliable radio signals bounced off of the ionosphere. As you might imagine from this, many in the Western world weren't too keen on the state of the situation given that were to someone, say, the Soviet Union, cut those cables before launching an attack, international communications with overseas forces and foreign allies would have to rely on the mood of said ionosphere.

[...] Developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Labs, the project was initially called "Project Needles" by Professor Walter E. Morrow in 1958 when he first dreamed up the idea. It was later re-named "West Ford", presumably after Westford, Massachusetts, a nearby town. The idea was to place potentially even billions of tiny (1.78 centimeters 0.7 inches long and microscopically thin) copper antennae or dipoles in a medium Earth orbit to be used for communication signals at 8 Ghz.

The first set of well over a hundred million needles was launched on Oct. 21, 1961, but unfortunately this test failed when the needles didn't disperse as planned.

On a second attempt in May 9, 1963, a batch of 350 million needles was placed on the back of an Air Force satellite and sent into orbit. Once dispersed, properly this time, the needles spread to form a sparsely concentrated belt with approximately 50 dipoles per cubic mile.

[...] early results of the experiment were extremely promising, with communication established using the needle array from California to Massachusetts [...]

An interesting and entertaining read about that Wild West era of the Space Age and how events like this eventually brought us the first Outer Space Treaty.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/05/the-mystery-of-chinas-sudden-warnings-about-us-hackers/

For the best part of a decade, US officials and cybersecurity companies have been naming and shaming hackers they believe work for the Chinese government. These hackers have stolen terabytes of data from companies like pharmaceutical and video game firms, compromised servers, stripped security protections, and highjacked hacking tools, according to security experts. And as China's alleged hacking has grown more brazen, individual Chinese hackers face indictments. However, things may be changing.

Since the start of 2022, China's Foreign Ministry and the country's cybersecurity firms have increasingly been calling out alleged US cyberespionage. Until now, these allegations have been a rarity. But the disclosures come with a catch: They appear to rely on years-old technical details, which are already publicly known and don't contain fresh information. The move may be a strategic change for China as the nation tussles to cement its position as a tech superpower.

"These are useful materials for China's tit-for-tat propaganda campaigns when they faced US accusation and indictment of China's cyberespionage activities," says Che Chang, a cyber threat analyst at the Taiwan-based cybersecurity firm TeamT5.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

SpaceNews.com: NASA selects Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace for spacesuit contracts

NASA awarded contracts to Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to provide spacesuits for International Space Station spacewalks and Artemis moonwalks, although neither the agency nor the winning companies offered many technical or financial details.

NASA announced June 1 it selected the two companies for Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services, or xEVAS, contracts to support the development of new spacesuits as well as purchasing spacesuit services. The companies will own the suits they develop and will effectively rent them to NASA for space station and Artemis missions, while also being able to offer the suits to other customers.

The goal, NASA officials said at a briefing about the awards, is to have lunar spacesuits ready for the Artemis 3 lunar landing mission, currently scheduled for no earlier than 2025. NASA will also conduct an "orderly transition" from existing, decades-old suits on the ISS to the new suits around the same time.

[....] the companies provided few technical details about their suit designs, and NASA did not even have illustrations of the winning designs to show, electing instead to release an illustration of two moonwalking astronauts wearing suits not necessarily associated with either company.

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

For decades, paleobotanist David Greenwood has collected fossil plants from Australia—some so well preserved it's hard to believe they're millions of years old. [...]

The fossils date back 55 to 40 million years ago, during the Eocene epoch. At that time, the world was much warmer and wetter, and these hothouse conditions meant there were palms at the North and South Pole and predominantly arid landmasses like Australia were lush and green. [...]

To sustain a lush green landscape, the continent required a steady supply of precipitation. Warmth means more evaporation, and more rainfall was available to move into Australia's continental interior. Higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the time, 1500 to 2000 parts per million, also contributed to the lushness via a process called carbon fertilization. Reichgelt explains that with the sheer abundance of CO2, plants were basically stuffing their faces.

"Southern Australia seems to have been largely forested, with primary productivity similar to seasonal forests, not unlike those here in New England today," Reichgelt says. "In the Northern Hemisphere summer today, there is a big change in the carbon cycle, because lots of carbon dioxide gets drawn down due to primary productivity in the enormous expanse of forests that exists in a large belt around 40 to 60 degrees north. In the Southern Hemisphere, no such landmass exists at those same latitudes today. But Australia during the Eocene occupied 40 degrees to 60 degrees south. And as a result, there would be a highly productive large landmass during the Southern Hemisphere summer, drawing down carbon, more so than what Australia is doing today since it is largely arid."

DannyB writes:

From Tom's Hardware:

Intel and the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) said they would invest €400 million (around $426 million) in a laboratory that will develop RISC-V-based processors that could be used to build zettascale supercomputers. However, the lab will not focus solely on CPUs for next-generation supercomputers but also on processor uses for artificial intelligence applications and autonomous vehicles.

The research laboratory will presumably be set up in Barcelona, Spain, and will receive €400 million from Intel and the Spanish Government over 10 years. The fundamental purpose of the joint research laboratory is to develop chips based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) that could be used for a wide range of applications, including AI accelerators, autonomous vehicles, and high-performance computing.

The creation of the joint laboratory does not automatically mean that Intel will use RISC-V-based CPUs developed in the lab for its first-generation zettascale supercomputing platform but rather indicates that the company is willing to make additional investments in RISC-V. After all, last year, Intel tried to buy SiFive, a leading developer of RISC-V CPUs and is among the top sponsors of RISC-V International, a non-profit organization supporting the ISA.

[....] throughout its history, Intel invested hundreds of millions in non-x86 architectures (including RISC-based i960/i860 designs in the 1980s, Arm in the 2000s, and VLIW-based IA64/Itanium in the 1990s and the 2000s). Eventually, those architectures were dropped, but technologies developed for them found their way into x86 offerings.

I would observe that a simple well designed instruction set could require less silicon. Possibly more cores per chip using same fabrication technology. Or more speculative execution branch prediction using up some of that silicon. I would mention compiler back ends, but that is a subject best not discussed in public.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

What's in a name?

Maverick was first used as a baby name after a television show called "Maverick" aired in the 1950s, but its popularity rose meteorically in 1986 with the release of the movie "Top Gun." Today, it is even used for baby girls.

[...] So, what's in a name—or, at least, what's in a baby name trend? University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Mitchell Newberry has found that the more popular a name becomes, the less likely future parents are to follow suit. Same goes for popular dog breeds: Dalmatians today are a tenth as popular as they were in the 1990s.

Newberry, an assistant professor of complex systems, says examining trends in the popularity of baby names and dog breeds can be a proxy for understanding ecological and evolutionary change. The names and dog breed preferences themselves are like genes or organisms competing for scarce resources. In this case, the scarce resources are the minds of parents and dog owners. His results are published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

[...] Newberry used the Social Security Administration baby name database, itself born in 1935, to examine frequency dependence in first names in the United States. He found that when a name is most rare—1 in 10,000 births—it tends to grow, on average, at a rate of 1.4% a year. But when a name is most common—more than 1 in 100 births—its popularity declines, on average, at 1.6%.

Ometecuhtli writes:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-06-01/worlds-largest-plant-seagrass-meadow-shark-bay-giant-clone/101112726

"[...] But researchers have today revealed there's a plant about 4,500 years old and measuring 180 kilometres across living right under our noses in Western Australia.

Genetic testing has revealed that what was once thought to be part of a giant seagrass meadow in the shallow waters of Shark Bay, near Carnarvon, was actually a single massive clone of Posidonia australis seagrass

[...] "We were a bit suspicious because the plants around there don't act like normal seagrass," Dr Breed said. "They don't flower as much, don't seed as much, so these signs of reproductive activity were a little bit unremarkable."

But when they took samples from 10 meadows throughout the Shark Bay area, they never expected nine of them to return a genetic match.

Instead, they were planning to use their research to inform which plants to use for restoration of the meadows, to help with their resilience against threats like bleaching...

[...] Being a clone probably helps to explain why this single plant has been so successful.

[...] Polyploidy in this case has occurred because at some stage, a Posidonia plant has hybridised with another related species.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Taiwan Restricts Russia, Belarus to CPUs Under 25 MHz Frequency

From now on, Russian and Belarusian entities can only buy CPUs operating at below 25 MHz and offering performance of up to 5 GFLOPS from Taiwanese companies. This essentially excludes all modern technology, including microcontrollers for more or less sophisticated devices.

[...] Starting today, Russian entities cannot buy chips that meet one of the following conditions from Taiwanese companies, reports DigiTimes:

• Has performance of 5 GFLOPS. To put it into context, Sony's PlayStation 2 released in 2000 had peak performance of around 6.2 FP32 GFLOPS.
• Operates at 25 MHz or higher.
• Has an ALU that is wider than 32 bits.
• Has an external interconnection with a data transfer rate of 2.5 MB/s or over.
• Has more than 144 pins.
• Has basic gate propagation delay time of less than 0.4 nanosecond.

In addition to being unable to buy chips from Taiwanese companies, Russian entities will not be able to get any chip production equipment from Taiwan, which includes scanners, scanning electron microscopes, and all other types of semiconductor tools that can be used to make chips locally or perform reverse engineering (something that the country pins a lot of hopes on).

Also at Wccftech.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Code execution 0-day in Windows has been under active exploit for 7 weeks:

A critical code execution zero-day in all supported versions of Windows has been under active exploit for seven weeks, giving attackers a reliable means for installing malware without triggering Windows Defender and a roster of other endpoint protection products.

The Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool vulnerability was reported to Microsoft on April 12 as a zero-day that was already being exploited in the wild, researchers from Shadow Chaser Group said on Twitter. A response dated April 21, however, informed the researchers that the Microsoft Security Response Center team didn't consider the reported behavior a security vulnerability because, supposedly, the MSDT diagnostic tool required a password before it would execute payloads.

On Monday, Microsoft reversed course, identifying the behavior with the vulnerability tracker CVE-2022-30190 and warning for the first time that the reported behavior constituted a critical vulnerability after all.

"A remote code execution vulnerability exists when MSDT is called using the URL protocol from a calling application such as Word," the advisory stated. "An attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability can run arbitrary code with the privileges of the calling application. The attacker can then install programs, view, change, or delete data, or create new accounts in the context allowed by the user's rights."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

UK, EU Cars (But Not Bikes, Yet) to be Fitted With Speed Limiters:

This comes as part of the General Safety Regulation passed in the EU. Mandates state "new models/types of vehicles introduced on the market," beginning in July 2022, must arrive outfitted with this software. It will be mandatory for all new cars beginning in July 2024, ostensibly to give manufacturers time to retrofit their existing production models.

[...] The European Commission describes the way a car outfitted with ISA behaves in one of four ways: cascaded acoustic warning; cascaded vibrating warning; haptic feedback through the acceleration pedal; or speed control function. Manufacturers choose their own adventure there. The first two only provide audible or tactile feedback to the driver. "Haptic feedback through the acceleration pedal" means the pedal pushes back against your foot. "Speed control function" means the car slows down for you.

https://etsc.eu/intelligent-speed-assistance-isa/

[...] ISA uses a speed sign-recognition video camera and/or GPS-linked speed limit data to advise drivers of the current speed limit and automatically limit the speed of the vehicle as needed. ISA systems do not automatically apply the brakes, but simply limit engine power preventing the vehicle from accelerating past the current speed limit unless overridden. Vehicles with this kind of ISA system factory fitted are already on sale[...].

Freeman writes:

Trafficked data could lead to subsequent attacks, agency warns:

The FBI on Friday said that thousands of compromised credentials harvested from US college and university networks are circulating on online crime forums in Russia and elsewhere—and could lead to breaches that install ransomware or steal data.

[...] Login names and passwords are routinely harvested in phishing attacks, which may use fake claims of an account breach or a COVID-themed pitch to lure victims. Often, the threat actors who conduct these attacks sell the data on crime forums. The data can then be scooped up by fellow threat actors who focus on server infections for purposes of ransomware, cryptojacking, or espionage.

[...] "The FBI is informing academic partners of identified US college and university credentials advertised for sale on online criminal marketplaces and publicly accessible forums," the agency said.

[Ed. question: Is username/password the primary way VPN access is given at these schools with thousands of transient students from all over the world? Wouldn't requiring a physical token, such as adding PKI certs to their student ID cards, be a far superior and secure solution? --hubie]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Only ambitious climate protection measures can still save a third of the tundra:

The climate crisis can especially be felt in the Arctic: in the High North, the average air temperature has risen by more than two degrees Celsius over the past 50 years – far more than anywhere else. And this trend will only continue. [...]

"For the Arctic Ocean and the sea ice, the current and future warming will have serious consequences," says Prof Ulrike Herzschuh, Head of the Polar Terrestrial Environmental Systems Division at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI). "But the environment on land will also change drastically. The broad expanses of tundra in Siberia and North America will be massively reduced, as the treeline, which is already slowly changing, rapidly advances northward in the near future. In the worst-case scenario, there will be virtually no tundra left by the middle of the millennium." [...]

The tundra is home to a unique community of plants, roughly five percent of which are endemic, i.e., can only be found in the Arctic. Typical species include the mountain avens, Arctic poppy and prostrate shrubs like willows and birches, all of which have adapted to the harsh local conditions: brief summers and long, arduous winters. It also offers a home for rare species like reindeer, lemmings and insects like the Arctic bumblebee.