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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

This story is part of Crossing the Broadband Divide, CNET's coverage of how the country is working toward making broadband access universal.

The US Federal Communications Commission wants to make it easier for tribal communities to get access to wireless spectrum to provide broadband and mobile service in areas where traditional broadband and wireless providers don't offer it. 

On Thursday, the agency voted unanimously to establish the Enhanced Competition Incentive Program, or ECIP, which will offer incentives to large carriers like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile to make their unused wireless spectrum available to small carriers and tribal groups so they can establish service in unserved areas. The hope is that this program, along with other FCC programs like the Universal Service Fund, as well as newer efforts like the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment Program and Affordable Connectivity Program, will help close the digital divide.

[...] Building networks in rural America is incredibly expensive, and in some places it's nearly impossible. The terrain can be a problem, with mountain ranges or inclement weather making deployment difficult and more costly. But the bigger barrier in rural and tribal regions is more often due to low population density. Broadband providers simply won't offer service if they can't get enough customers to pay for it. 

upstart writes:

Ex-CIA Employee Convicted of Leaking 'Vault 7' Secrets to Wikileaks:

The leak, among the largest ever to affect the CIA, showed the agency could hack smart TVs, Skype accounts, and lots of common web applications.

A former Central Intelligence Agency computer engineer has been convicted of leaking a large tranche of classified material that revealed some of the agency's most powerful hacking techniques. Joshua Schulte, 33, worked for an elite software team within the CIA when he stole a cache of documents in 2016 and shared them with Wikileaks, which published the material in 2017. It was one of the worst breaches in the CIA's history.

Schulte was found guilty of nine charges, including illegally gathering and distributing national defense information, by a federal jury in Manhattan on Wednesday. The convictions could net him up to 80 years in prison.

[...] "Vault 7" consisted of some 9,000 pages and shed light on a host of creepy hacking techniques used by the agency. The leak demonstrated that the CIA had developed the capability to hack into smart TVs and turn them into a surveillance devices (very 1984), that it had enlisted a previously unknown army of hackers, and that those keyboard warriors work around the clock to penetrate all sorts of smart phones, operating systems, popular communication services like Skype, and even common anti-virus software. According to Wikileaks, the CIA also "hoarded" zero-day vulnerabilities—unknown bugs that could be exploited to gain access to technical systems with extreme speed. The government says that these tactics are used to break into the networks of terrorists and foreign adversaries.

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upstart writes:

Airbus A380 Completes Flight Powered By Cooking Oil:

Fossil fuels are making news for all the wrong reasons of late. Whether it's their contribution to global climate change or the fact that the price and supply hinges on violent geopolitics, there are more reasons than ever to shift to cleaner energy sources.

In the world of aviation, that means finding a cleaner source of fuel. A test earlier this year took place in pursuit of that very goal, where an Airbus A380 airliner was flown solely on fuel derived from cooking oil.

[...] The fuel supplied for the test came from French company TotalEnergies. The specific type of SAF fuel used is known as HEFA-SPK, or Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids – Synthetic Paraffinic Kerosene. It's made by chemical treatment of waste cooking oils and fats, which processes it into a usable substitute for kerosene-type jet fuels.

They're not the only company working in this space, either. Where Airbus elected to run just one engine on SAF, others are going further. Swedish SAF supplier Neste recently completed a test in partnership with ATR and Braathens Regional Airlines. The successful test ran both engines of a ATR 72-600 small regional airliner on SAF. It builds on several prior tests on single engines, and the companies hope to get certified for 100% SAF use by 2025.

There needs to be more sustainable fuel options, but do you think the economics of this could ever work out, or is this just some startup company PR and perhaps a bit of Airbus greenwashing thrown in?

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upstart writes:

Influencers are supposed to disclose their ads, but nothing happens when they don't:

In spring 2020, several large, family-friendly TikTok accounts posted videos where they pulled pranks on their friends and family members. They all used toys from Basic Fun!'s Joker Prank Shop line, and all of the videos prominently featured them buying the merchandise at their local Walmart.

The posts sure seemed like ads, but few of them indicated that their creators were paid to promote the toys to an especially vulnerable audience: kids. Many of the creators themselves were kids.

But they were ads, according to Influencer Marketing Factory, an agency that took credit for the campaign on its website and its own TikTok account. [...]

Very few parties seem interested in knowing or following the rules. So much so that a marketing agency seems perfectly comfortable displaying what appear to be violations of them that it helped to create. [...]

This problem isn't unique to TikTok. Instagram has been dealing with it for years, giving brands plenty of time to figure out influencer advertising strategies before TikTok came along. By the time the platform was just a year old, it was already awash in sponsored content — some labeled, some not.

owl writes:

https://hackaday.com/2022/07/11/burn-pictures-on-a-cd-r-no-special-drive-needed/

When we routinely carry devices holding tens or hundreds of gigabytes of data, it's sometimes a shock to remember that there was once a time when 650 MB on a CD was a very big deal indeed. These now archaic storage media came first as silver pre-recorded CD-ROMs, then later as recordable CD-Rs. Most people eventually owned CD writer drives, and some fancy ones came with the feature of etching pictures in the unused portions of the disc.

Haven't got a fancy drive and desire an etched CD-R? No worries, [arduinocelentano] has a solution, in software which writes a disk image for a standard CD writer whose data makes the visible image on the disc.

[Ed: I didn't quite grasp what this was about until clicking through to the project page. Very cool way to be artistic, assuming you still have a CD drive and CD-R disks available. --hubie]

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upstart writes:

Former bosses of Fukushima operator ordered to pay $97 billion damages:

A Tokyo court Wednesday ordered former executives from the operator of the devastated Fukushima nuclear plant to pay 13.32 trillion yen ($97 billion) for failing to prevent the disaster, plaintiffs said.

Four ex-bosses from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) were ordered to pay the damages in a suit brought by shareholders over the nuclear disaster triggered by a massive tsunami in 2011.

Plaintiffs emerged from the Tokyo court holding banners reading "shareholders win" and "responsibility recognised".

Lawyers for the plaintiffs hailed the ruling, and said they believed it to be the largest amount of compensation ever awarded in a civil lawsuit in Japan.

"Nuclear power plants can cause irreparable damage to human lives and the environment," the plaintiffs said in a separate statement after the ruling.

"Executives for firms that operate such nuclear plants bear enormous responsibility, which cannot compare with that of other companies."

The shareholders argued that the disaster could have been prevented if TEPCO bosses had listened to research and carried out preventative measures like placing an emergency power source on higher ground.

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upstart writes:

Even DOOM Can Now Run DOOM!:

For years now, the standard test of any newly hacked piece of hardware has been this: can it run DOOM? id Software's 1993 classic first-person shooter has appeared on everything, but here's one from [kgsws] that's a bit special. It's DOOM, running inside DOOM itself.

So how has this feat been achieved? There's a code execution exploit inside the original DOS DOOM II executable, and that has been used to run the more modern Chocolate Doom within the original. [...]

The video below the break shows the game-in-game in action, but the real value lies in its in-depth description of the exploit, that takes us through some of the inner workings of the game and ably explains what's going on. It finishes up with a specially made cinema WAD in which to play DOOM-in-DOOM, and even Hexen-in-DOOM. [...]

Video

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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/07/ea-pulls-a-reverse-ubisoft-makes-some-old-bioware-dlc-free/

Single-player downloadable content for the PC versions of Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age II, Mass Effect 2, and Mass Effect 3 will be available for free going forward. The change—which EA is announcing via apparent emails to some Origin users—comes alongside the pending shutdown of the BioWare Points digital currency system.

Those BioWare Points used to be the only way to purchase DLC for the developer's legacy titles. And because those points rarely went on sale, the price of that DLC relative to the heavily discounted base games would sometimes get a little ridiculous. As an angry change.org petition noted in 2015, "to purchase enough BioWare Points to own all DLC for the [Mass Effect] series would total $105; over 3 times the cost of all three base games."

[...] DLC and other content previously purchased with BioWare Points will still be accessible, EA writes. That's in sharp contrast to Ubisoft, which announced last week that a coming server shutdown means DLC purchases from PC games like Assassin's Creed 3 and Far Cry 3 will no longer be playable after September 1.

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upstart writes:

Online orders, which ramped up with the start of the pandemic, are still clogging city streets:

Amazon, Hello Fresh, Stitch Fix. Click a button, and it's there in three to five days—perhaps even one. Packages, packages, and more packages—goods from all over the world, delivered after just a couple of clicks. But this height of consumer convenience has been complicating urban life for years, giving rise to increased theft and traffic, package waste, and a landscape of struggling local businesses. Some cities, especially in Europe and Japan, are implementing regulations that dramatically curtail package-related stress. But not New York City—not yet.

Three years ago, more than 1.8 million packages were delivered to the Big Apple on a typical day, according to data collected by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems. [...] Altogether, with groceries and prepared food, total daily deliveries stacked up to more than 3.7 million, the center estimates. That's nearly enough to deliver one item each to half the people in New York every day.

Noticing the increase in e-commerce delivery traffic, then-mayor Bill de Blasio allocated $38 million in the November 2021 budget to shipping these packages via the "blue highway"––by ferry instead of by truck. [...] Other attempts to reduce delivery-truck congestion have popped up. There are cargo bikes, for example, and a potential $3 surcharge on every "nonessential" package delivered. Lockers are also a key player; they help tackle the "last mile" problem—or the last leg of the delivery process—by centralizing drop-off locations to save the door-to-door toil. [...]

Arthur T Knackerbracket and upstart submitted stories that come from the same press release:

Wildfires and climbing temperatures have caused a 6.7 percent decline since 1985:

The State of California is banking on its forests to help reduce planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But that element of the state's climate-change solution arsenal may be in jeopardy, as new research from the University of California, Irvine reports that trees in California's mountain ranges and open spaces are dying from wildfires and other pressures -- and fewer new trees are filling the void.

[...] For the study, the UCI-led team used satellite data from the USGS and NASA's Landsat mission to study vegetation changes between 1985 and 2021. They found that one of the starkest declines in tree cover was in Southern California, where 14 percent of the tree population in local mountain ranges vanished, potentially permanently.

[...] The rate and scale of decline varies across the state. Tree cover in the Sierra Nevada, for instance, stayed relatively stable until around 2010, then began dropping precipitously. The 8.8 percent die-off in the Sierra coincided with a severe drought from 2012 to 2015, followed by some of the worst wildfires in the state's history, including the Creek Fire in 2020.

Fortunately "in the north, there's plenty of recovery after fire," said Wang, perhaps because of the region's higher rainfall and cooler temperatures. But even there, high fire years in 2018, 2020 and 2021 have taken a visible toll.

[...] "This threat to California's climate solutions isn't going away anytime soon," Wang said. "We might be entering a new age of intense fire and vulnerable forests."

Journal Reference:
Jonathan A. Wang et al, Losses of Tree Cover in California Driven by Increasing Fire Disturbance and Climate Stress, AGU Advances (2022). DOI: 10.1029/2021AV000654">10.1029/2021AV000654

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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