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upstart writes:

The United Nations estimated Monday that the world's population will reach 8 billion on Nov. 15 and that India will replace China as the world's most populous nation next year:

In a report released on World Population Day, the U.N. also said global population growth fell below 1% in 2020 for the first time since 1950.

According to the latest U.N. projections, the world's population could grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050 and a peak of around 10.4 billion during the 2080s. It is forecast to remain at that level until 2100.

The report says more than half the projected increase in population up to 2050 will be concentrated in just eight countries: Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania.

The report, "World Population Prospects 2022," puts the world's population at 7.942 billion now and forecasts it will reach 8 billion in mid-November.

[...] "This is an occasion to celebrate our diversity, recognize our common humanity, and marvel at advancements in health that have extended lifespans and dramatically reduced maternal and child mortality rates," [U.N. Secretary-General] Guterres said in a statement. "At the same time, it is a reminder of our shared responsibility to care for our planet and a moment to reflect on where we still fall short of our commitments to one another."

fliptop writes:

Critics say the law gives police too much discretion:

The same week that a federal judge sentenced ex-cop Derek Chauvin to more prison time for killing George Floyd, Arizona passed a law making it harder to record police by limiting how close bystanders can be while recording specified law enforcement activity. Chauvin was convicted in part because a recording showing his attack on Floyd at close proximity went viral. It was filmed by a teenager named Darnella Frazier while she was standing "a few feet away."

The new Arizona law requires any bystanders recording police activity in the state to stand at a minimum of 8 feet away from the action. If bystanders move closer after police have warned them to back off, they risk being charged with a misdemeanor and incurring fines of up to $500, jail time of up to 30 days, or probation of up to a year.

Sponsored by Republican state representative John Kavanagh, the law known as H.B. 2319 makes it illegal to record police at close range. In a USA Today op-ed, Kavanagh said it is important to leave this buffer for police to protect law enforcement from being assaulted by unruly bystanders. He said "there's no reason" to come closer and predicted tragic outcomes for those who do, saying, "Such an approach is unreasonable, unnecessary, and unsafe, and should be made illegal."

Some exceptions: a person being questioned, arrested or otherwise handled by police can record, "as long as it doesn't interfere with police actions." The same exception extends to anyone recording while in a vehicle involved in a police stop. If you're inside an enclosed structure on private property you also have an exception. The caveats "unless law enforcement determines that the person is interfering" or "it is not safe" for them to be in the area potentially gives police a lot of discretion over who can record and when.

Original Submission

upstart writes with an interesting read on the trials and tribulations of Virgin Galactic:

It has been 12 months to the day since Sir Richard Branson briefly departed this world, only to make a feathery return back to Earth, landing on a hot, dusty runway in rural New Mexico.

The flight marked a triumphant moment for Branson, who, just a week before turning 71 years old, fulfilled a childhood dream of going to space. In doing so, Branson beat fellow space-obsessed billionaire Jeff Bezos to the punch. The exuberance about his flight—and what it promised for Virgin Galactic—helped push his company's stock above $50 a share.

As Richard Branson went to space, he and his company seemed to be on top of the world.

But it has been a rough ride in the year since. Most crucially, Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity spaceship has yet to fly a single time again, and it may not do so until this winter. In the meantime, Bezos' space tourism company, Blue Origin, has started to regularly fly paying customers into space, higher than Virgin Galactic, on a fully reusable spacecraft. Partly as a result, Virgin Galactic's stock price has crashed, now trading at about $7 a share.

[...] "They've always overpromised and undelivered on their flight schedule, so I never expected their promised flight cadence," said Laura Forczyk, a space industry analyst. But the long delay between Branson's flight and a successor mission raises red flags, she said.

"Going a full year without even setting a date for their next flight is not a good sign," she said. "It leads me to conclude there really were serious structural or operational issues with Virgin Galactic's recent flights, despite their denial."

upstart writes:

China's Surveillance State Hits Rare Resistance From Its Own Subjects:

Chinese artists have staged performances to highlight the ubiquity of surveillance cameras. Privacy activists have filed lawsuits against the collection of facial recognition data. Ordinary citizens and establishment intellectuals alike have pushed back against the abuse of Covid tracking apps by the authorities to curb protests. Internet users have shared tips on how to evade digital monitoring.

As China builds up its vast surveillance and security apparatus, it is running up against growing public unease about the lack of safeguards to prevent the theft or misuse of personal data. The ruling Communist Party is keenly aware of the cost to its credibility of any major security lapses: Last week, it moved systematically to squelch news about what was probably the largest known breach of a Chinese government computer system, involving the personal information of as many as one billion citizens.

The breach dealt a blow to Beijing, exposing the risks of its expansive efforts to vacuum up enormous amounts of digital and biological information on the daily activities and social connections of its people from social media posts, biometric data, phone records and surveillance videos. The government says these efforts are necessary for public safety: to limit the spread of Covid, for instance, or to catch criminals. But its failure to protect the data exposes citizens to problems like fraud and extortion, and threatens to erode people's willingness to comply with surveillance.

upstart writes:

CrowPi L Raspberry Pi Laptop Review: A Lean Mean STEM Learning Machine:

The CrowPi L is a powerful Raspberry-Pi powered laptop and effective STEM kit for kids, but you'll need to pay a premium to take advantage of the available hardware tutorials the system has to offer.

The CrowPi L is a Raspberry Pi-powered laptop built to educate, engage and entertain young minds and usher them into the world of programming and electronics. It incorporates fun activities and interactive lessons to teach kids how to code. The kit includes lots of tutorials to try and a wide range of projects that would appeal to a variety of different interests. From lessons on how to design and program games, to hands-on projects that explain electronic concepts and how circuitry works, there's a lot for kids to learn and enjoy.

[...] The CrowPi L is available in a few different configurations. You can choose from the basic model or advanced model, which costs about $60 more because it includes the Crowtail Starter Kit for Raspberry Pi. Shipped in a separate box, this kit contains the different motors and sensors you will need for the Letscode (Elecrow's custom version of the Scratch programming language) and Python hardware projects.

[...] While the previous versions of the CrowPi came packed with built-in modules, the CrowPi L's design has been simplified to look like a regular laptop. It has an all-white exterior with a light gray interior that surrounds the 11.6-inch display and white keyboard keys. It is a compact system that looks sleek and could nicely double up as a child's first laptop.

At 11.46 x 7.5 x 1.8 inches, the CrowPi L is just the right size to fit on a child's lap and is light enough (at a little over 2 pounds) for them to carry around. The plastic chassis feels very strong and solid. But it is not a quiet system. You can hear the fan humming underneath so you have to be careful not to put it in a place that will obstruct the airflow.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Atomically-smooth gold crystals help to compress light for nanophotonic applications:

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) researchers and their collaborators at home and abroad have successfully demonstrated a new platform for guiding the compressed light waves in very thin van der Waals crystals. Their method to guide the mid-infrared light with minimal loss will provide a breakthrough for the practical applications of ultra-thin dielectric crystals in next-generation optoelectronic devices based on strong light-matter interactions at the nanoscale.

Phonon-polaritons are collective oscillations of ions in polar dielectrics coupled to electromagnetic waves of light, whose electromagnetic field is much more compressed compared to the light wavelength. Recently, it was demonstrated that the phonon-polaritons in thin van der Waals crystals can be compressed even further when the material is placed on top of a highly conductive metal. In such a configuration, charges in the polaritonic crystal are "reflected" in the metal, and their coupling with light results in a new type of polariton waves called the image phonon-polaritons. Highly compressed image modes provide strong light-matter interactions, but are very sensitive to the substrate roughness, which hinders their practical application.

Challenged by these limitations, four research groups combined their efforts to develop a unique experimental platform using advanced fabrication and measurement methods. Their findings were published in Science Advances on July 13.

A KAIST research team led by Professor Min Seok Jang from the School of Electrical Engineering used a highly sensitive scanning near-field optical microscope (SNOM) to directly measure the optical fields of the hyperbolic image phonon-polaritons (HIP) propagating in a 63 nm-thick slab of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) on a monocrystalline gold substrate, showing the mid-infrared light waves in dielectric crystal compressed by a hundred times.

upstart writes:

Uncontrolled rocket descents pose a 10% risk of killing one or more people over the next ten years:

A quartet of researchers at the University of British Columbia in Canada has calculated that the risk of one or more people being killed by uncontrolled rocket descents over the next decade is approximately 10%. In their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, Michael Byers, Ewan Wright, Aaron Boley and Cameron Byers, describe their study of casualty risk in the coming years due to rocket parts falling from the sky and what governments could do to make spaceflight safer for people on the ground.

Over the past several decades, rocket parts, satellites and even space stations have fallen back to the Earth after fulfilling their missions. To date, no one has ever been killed by falling space debris, though one person is believed to have been struck: Lottie Williams was hit by debris while walking in a park in 1997. But as the space age has matured, more rockets and satellites have been sent aloft, and that trend is expected to continue. In this new effort, the researchers calculated the likelihood of one or more people being struck or killed by such objects if current practices continue.

The researchers looked at the current number of rocket launches and the number expected to go up over the next decade. They also looked at what happens to rocket parts when they fall back to Earth and where they tend to land. The researchers found, as expected, that the majority fall into the ocean, because it covers so much of the planet. But they also found that as the number of rockets launched rises, so does the chance of one or more of them coming down in a populated area—they report that the chance of one or more fatalities in the coming decade is approximately 10%.

Journal Reference:
Byers, Michael, Wright, Ewan, Boley, Aaron, et al. Unnecessary risks created by uncontrolled rocket reentries [open], Nature Astronomy (DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01718-8)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

MPs call for ban on Chinese surveillance camera technology:

A cross-party group of MPs has called on the government to ban the sale and operation of CCTV surveillance cameras linked to human rights abuses in China.

Surveillance cameras supplied by Chinese manufacturers Hikvision and Dahua are widely used in state "re-education" camps, which have been accused of subjecting Uyghur Muslims to forced labour and torture.

The cameras have been banned in the US, but are widely used in the UK across government departments and companies.

[...] They also called on the government to commission an independent national review of the scale, capabilities, ethics and human rights impact of modern CCTV in the UK.

[...] "This technology comes equipped with advanced surveillance capabilities, such as facial recognition, person tracking and gender identification," he said. "These pose a significant threat to civil liberties in our countries.

"These companies, Hikvision and Dahua, are Chinese state-owned companies, raising urgent questions over whether they also pose a threat to national security."

The MPs' call to action follows research by campaign group Big Brother Watch that found the cameras have been widely deployed by government bodies including councils, secondary schools, NHS trusts, universities and police forces in the UK.

[...] The campaign group said the Chinese companies supply rebranded cameras that are sold under other names, including Honeywell and Toshima, so that the true number of Hikvision and Dahua cameras used in the UK public sector may be significantly higher.

Previously: The World's Biggest Surveillance Company You've Never Heard of

Original Submission

NPC-131072 writes:

Over the span of three seconds, there were nine individual bursts:

Fast radio bursts are exactly what their name implies: a sudden surge of photons at radio frequencies that often lasts for less than a second. Once scientists had finished convincing themselves that they weren't looking at equipment glitches, the search was on for what was producing the vast amounts of energy involved in a fast radio burst (FRB).

The discovery of the first repeating FRB told us that the process that generates an FRB doesn't destroy the object that does the producing. Eventually, an FRB was found that was associated with events at additional wavelengths, allowing the source to be identified: a magnetar, a subset of neutron stars that has the Universe's most extreme magnetic fields. While that represents excellent progress, it still doesn't tell us anything about the physics of how the burst is produced - knowledge that would presumably tell us why most magnetars don't produce them and why the burst tends to start and stop so suddenly.

Now, researchers have identified an FRB that helps limit our ideas about what can produce them. The FRB itself appears to be a single event, but it's composed of nine individual bursts separated by about 215 milliseconds. The rapid pace means that the source of the burst almost certainly has to be near the surface of the magnetar.

Journal Reference:
The CHIME/FRB Collaboration., Andersen, B.C., Bandura, K. et al. Sub-second periodicity in a fast radio burst. Nature 607, 256–259 (2022). DOI: 10.103/s41586-022-04841-8

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Apple's New Lockdown Mode for iPhone Fights Hacking:

Apple for years has marketed its iPhones, iPads and Mac computers as the most secure and privacy-focused devices on the market. Last week, it bolstered that effort with a new feature coming this fall called Lockdown Mode, designed to fight targeted hacking attempts such as the Pegasus malware, which some governments reportedly used on human rights workers, lawyers, politicians and journalists around the world. Apple also announced a $10 million grant and up to $2 million bug bounty to encourage further research into this growing threat.

The tech giant said that Lockdown Mode is designed to activate "extreme" protections to its phones, such as blocking attachments and link previews in messages, potentially hackable web browsing technologies, and incoming FaceTime calls from unknown numbers. Apple devices will also not accept accessory connections unless the device is unlocked, and people can't install new remote management software on the devices while they're in Lockdown Mode as well. The new feature is already available in test software being used by developers this summer and will be released for free publicly in the fall as part of iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and MacOS Ventura. Here's how to use Apple's Lockdown mode on an iPhone.

[...] The company's efforts to enhance its device security comes at a time when the tech industry is increasingly confronting targeted cyberattacks from oppressive governments around the world. Unlike widespread ransomware or virus campaigns, which are often designed to indiscriminately spread furthest and quickest through homes and corporate networks, attacks like those using Pegasus are designed for quiet intelligence gathering.

owl writes:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/08/media/hollywood-china-censors-box-office-intl-hnk/index.html

Hollywood has long bent over backwards to give Chinese censors what they want. Not anymore.

Over the past year, producers behind some of the hottest US blockbusters have kept in scenes that could irk China's censors, apparently less concerned about the potential loss of access to theaters across the country of 1.4 billion people.

As a result, some of the most anticipated movies released in recent months — including "Top Gun: Maverick," "Spider-Man: No Way Home" and "Lightyear" — have not, and may never, hit the world's second largest box office.

All films publicly screened in China need a permit from regulators. Censorship is rife, with authorities increasingly clamping down on what they perceive to be inappropriate, including in some cases the appearance of cleavage, tattoos or people smoking, as well as more obviously politically sensitive elements.

[...] So why would these companies push back, putting tens or hundreds of millions of dollars at risk? For one, industry veterans say that China's movie market isn't what it used to be.

[...] "Pleasing Beijing no longer guarantees big revenues in China," he told CNN Business. "Such risk and effort no longer guarantee results, and I expect this lack of certainty to prolong this era of pushback for quite some time."

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

Ars Technica is reporting on a paper published on 7 July 2022 in the journal Science, where researchers believe they've identified one of the first vertebrates.

From the article:

A group of organisms called yunnanozoans had gills, precursor to jaws.

Because we're a member of the group, it's easy to see vertebrates as the pinnacle of evolution, a group capable of producing bats, birds, and giant whales in addition to ourselves. But when they first evolved, vertebrates were anything but a sure thing. They branched off from a group that lived in the mud and didn't need to tell its top from its bottom or its left from its right, and so ended up losing an organized nerve cord. Our closest non-vertebrate relatives re-established a nerve cord (on the wrong side of the body, naturally) but couldn't be bothered with niceties like a skeleton.

How exactly vertebrates came out of this hasn't been clear, and the probable lack of a skeleton in our immediate ancestors has helped ensure that we don't have a lot of fossils to help clarify matters.

But in Thursday's issue of Science, researchers have re-evaluated some enigmatic fossils that date back to the Cambrian period and settled several arguments about exactly what features the yunnanozoans had. The answers include cartilaginous structures that supported gills and a possible ancestor to what became our lower jaw. In the process, they show that yunnanozoans are likely the earliest branch of the vertebrate tree.
[...]
You can get a sense of what a yunnanozoan looks like from the image above. The soft tissue down its flanks was divided into segments, a feature in both our closest living non-vertebrate relatives (the amphioxus or lancelet) and is present in vertebrate embryos but generally gets lost as they proceed through development into adults. Near the animal's head—and it does have a clear head and mouth—there's also an array of arched structures that look a lot like the similarly located gill arches found near the head of modern fish.

Journal Reference:
Qingyi Tian, Fangchen Zhao, Han Zeng, et al., Ultrastructure reveals ancestral vertebrate pharyngeal skeleton in yunnanozoans, Science, 377, 6602, 2022. DOI: 10.1126/science.abm2708

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/07/intel-and-amd-cpus-vulnerable-to-a-new-speculative-execution-attack/

Some microprocessors from Intel and AMD are vulnerable to a newly discovered speculative execution attack that can covertly leak password data and other sensitive material, sending both chipmakers scrambling once again to contain what is proving to be a stubbornly persistent vulnerability.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have named their attack Retbleed because it exploits a software defense known as retpoline, which was introduced in 2018 to mitigate the harmful effects of speculative execution attacks.

Speculative execution attacks, also known as Spectre, exploit the fact that when modern CPUs encounter a direct or indirect instruction branch, they predict the address for the next instruction they're about to receive and automatically execute it before the prediction is confirmed. Spectre works by tricking the CPU into executing an instruction that accesses sensitive data in memory that would normally be off-limits to a low-privileged application. Retbleed then extracts the data after the operation is cancelled.

hubie writes:

Vestibular function expert says the young are better equipped to handle carnival rides:

Is the classic Tilt-A-Whirl now more of a Tilt-and-Hurl? Has a ride on the Zipper become a stomach flipper?

Take solace, aging Calgary Stampede midway fans: finding nausea where you once sought the thrills-and-spills joy of carnival rides is not only common, it's also as much a part of getting older as wrinkles and grey hair.

"I suspect it is some degree of sensory incongruence that crops up when older adults hop on a midway ride, which is something they likely don't do very often in everyday life," says Dr. Ryan Peters, PhD, assistant professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and a member of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute in the Cumming School of Medicine.

Peters has spent a lot of time studying the vestibular system, part of your inner ear that senses head motion and relays this to the brain to help regulate balance, and compensate for external forces like those experienced on a ride and Earth's gravity.

[...] "This is analogous to the hearing loss we experience with age — both the auditory and vestibular systems rely on tiny, delicate, hair cell receptors in the inner ear to detect sound pressure waves and head motion," says Peters. "We lose these hair cells across the lifespan at a steady rate."

In basic terms, we need those receptors to help our brain deal with the sensory information that comes with a thrill ride at the Stampede, and when the vestibular system can't keep up, we get sick.

[...] The good news? Practice can reduce this effect, with the human nervous system able to adjust and compensate for this type of incongruence.

[...] "That would mean that older adults should just hop on more and more midway rides to alleviate their symptoms," says Peters.

The Calgary Stampede is a large annual festival held in July in Calgary, Canada that includes midway rides such as the Zipper.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft: Phishing bypassed MFA in attacks against 10,000 orgs:

Microsoft says a massive series of phishing attacks has targeted more than 10,000 organizations starting with September 2021, using the gained access to victims' mailboxes in follow-on business email compromise (BEC) attacks.

The threat actors used landing pages designed to hijack the Office 365 authentication process (even on accounts protected by multifactor authentication (MFA) by spoofing the Office online authentication page.

In some of the observed attacks, the potential victims were redirected to the landing pages from phishing emails using HTML attachments that acted as gatekeepers ensuring the targets were being sent via the HTML redirectors.

After stealing the targets' credentials and their session cookies, the threat actors behind these attacks logged into the victims' email accounts. They subsequently used their access in business email compromise (BRC) campaigns targeting other organizations.

"A large-scale phishing campaign that used adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing sites stole passwords, hijacked a user's sign-in session, and skipped the authentication process even if the user had enabled multifactor authentication (MFA)," the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team and Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) said.

"The attackers then used the stolen credentials and session cookies to access affected users' mailboxes and perform follow-on business email compromise (BEC) campaigns against other targets."

Original Submission