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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A security researcher says that Apple's iOS devices don't fully route all network traffic through VPNs, a potential security issue the device maker has known about for years.

Michael Horowitz, a longtime computer security blogger and researcher, puts it plainly—if contentiously—in a continually updated blog post. "VPNs on iOS are broken," he says.

Any third-party VPN seems to work at first, giving the device a new IP address, DNS servers, and a tunnel for new traffic, Horowitz writes. But sessions and connections established before a VPN is activated do not terminate and, in Horowitz's findings with advanced router logging, can still send data outside the VPN tunnel while it's active.

In other words, you'd expect a VPN to kill existing connections before establishing a connection so they can be re-established inside the tunnel. But iOS VPNs can't seem to do this, Horowitz says, a finding that is backed up by a similar report from May 2020.

"Data leaves the iOS device outside of the VPN tunnel," Horowitz writes. "This is not a classic/legacy DNS leak, it is a data leak. I confirmed this using multiple types of VPN and software from multiple VPN providers. The latest version of iOS that I tested with is 15.6."

Privacy company Proton previously reported an iOS VPN bypass vulnerability that started at least in iOS 13.3.1. Like Horowitz's post, ProtonVPN's blog noted that a VPN typically closes all existing connections and reopens them inside a VPN tunnel, but that didn't happen on iOS. Most existing connections will eventually end up inside the tunnel, but some, like Apple's push notification service, can last for hours.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

After dealing with booming demand and global shortages since the start of the pandemic, the semiconductor industry is facing a sudden downturn.

But even for an industry accustomed to frequent cyclical slumps, this one has defied easy analysis and left researchers struggling to predict how the setback will play out.

The sudden glut in memory chips, PC processors, and some other semiconductors has come at a time when manufacturers in many automotive and industrial markets still lack a reliable supply of chips.

It has also forced some of the biggest US chipmakers to slash billions of dollars from planned capital spending, at the very moment that Washington has passed a long-awaited law to subsidize a huge increase in domestic chip manufacturing capacity.

The speed of the turn, and the conflicting forces at work, had been unprecedented, said Dan Hutcheson, the veteran chief executive of VLSI Research who has analyzed chip cycles since the 1980s.

“I’ve never seen a time when we had excessive inventory and we had shortages,” he said.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Researchers at UCLA have created an edible particle that helps make lab-grown meat, known as cultured meat, with more natural muscle-like texture using a process that could be scaled up for mass production.

Led by Amy Rowat, who holds UCLA's Marcie H. Rothman Presidential Chair of Food Studies, the researchers have invented edible particles called microcarriers with customized structures and textures that help precursor muscle cells grow quickly and form muscle-like tissues. Edible microcarriers could reduce the expense, time, and waste required to produce cultured meat with a texture that appeals to consumers. The results are published in the journal Biomaterials.

[...] Mass production of cultured meat will involve surmounting several challenges. Current methods can produce a cultured steak that mimics the structure of T-bone, but not at the volume needed for food production. In an animal's body, the muscle cells most commonly eaten as food grow on a structure called the extracellular matrix, which determines the shape of the mature tissue. Animal tissue can be grown in a lab using scaffolds made from collagen, soy protein or another material to replace the extracellular matrix. This process, necessary to produce whole tissues resembling steaks or chops, is labor intensive and takes weeks, making it hard to scale up for industrial production. It takes about 100 billion muscle cells to produce a single kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of cultured meat.

upstart writes:

Physical buttons are increasingly rare in modern cars. Most manufacturers are switching to touchscreens – which perform far worse in a test carried out by Vi Bilägare.:

The screens in modern cars keep getting bigger. Design teams at most car manufacturers love to ditch physical buttons and switches, although they are far superior safety-wise.

That is the conclusion when Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare performed a thurough test of the HMI system (Human-Machine Interface) in a total of twelve cars this summer.

Inspiration for the screen-heavy interiors in modern cars comes from smartphones and tablets. Designers want a "clean" interior with minimal switchgear, and the financial department wants to lower the cost. Instead of developing, manufacturing and keeping physical buttons in stock for years to come, car manufacturers are keen on integrating more functions into a digital screen which can be updated over time.

So in what way have these screens affected safety? Vi Bilägare gathered eleven modern cars from different manufacturers at an airfield och measured the time needed for a driver to perform different simple tasks, such as changing the radio station or adjusting the climate control. At the same time, the car was driven at 110 km/h (68 mph). We also invited an "old-school" car without a touchscreen, a 17-year-old Volvo V70, for comparison.

takyon writes:

Official Ubuntu RISC-V Images Released For StarFive's VisionFive Board

Canonical engineers spent the past few months back-porting various patches and ensuring that Ubuntu 22.04 LTS could run well on this RISC-V board. The StarFive VisionFive is a currently $179 USD RISC-V board that is intended to run full-blown RISC-V Linux distributions. The board is powered by a dual-core SiFive U74 RV64 SoC @ 1.0GHz, there is 8GB of system memory, a NVDLA deep learning accelerator engine, Tensilica-VP6 Vision DSP, and a neural network engine. The board also has WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.2, HDMI output, four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and powered via USB-C or from the 40-pin GPIO header.

[...] Meanwhile StarFive is already teasing that the VisionFive V2 RISC-V SBC will be coming out soon as its successor.

Now you can run Ubuntu on a VisionFive single-board PC with a RISC-V processor

Aimed at developers, the first model launched last year with a dual-core processor, while a second-gen version with a quad-core chip and other upgrades is expected to be announced August 23, 2022.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

We often think of astronomy as a visual science with beautiful images of the universe. However, astronomers use a wide range of analysis tools beyond images to understand nature at a deeper level.

Data sonification is the process of converting data into sound. It has powerful applications in research, education and outreach, and also enables blind and visually impaired communities to understand plots, images and other data.

[...] Imagine this scene: you're at a crowded party that's quite noisy. You don't know anyone and they're all speaking a language you can't understand—not good. Then you hear bits of a conversation in a far corner in your language. You focus on it and head over to introduce yourself.

While you may have never experienced such a party, the thought of hearing a recognizable voice or language in a noisy room is familiar. The ability of the human ear and brain to filter out undesired sounds and retrieve desired sounds is called the "cocktail party effect".

Similarly, science is always pushing the boundaries of what can be detected, which often requires extracting very faint signals from noisy data. In astronomy we often push to find the faintest, farthest or most fleeting of signals. Data sonification helps us to push these boundaries further.

[...] Data sonification is useful for interpreting science because humans interpret audio information faster than visual information. Also, the ear can discern more pitch levels than the eye can discern levels of color (and over a wider range).

upstart writes:

Assange lawyers sue CIA for spying on them:

Lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sued the US Central Intelligence Agency and its former director Mike Pompeo on Monday, alleging it recorded their conversations and copied data from their phones and computers.

[...] They said the CIA worked with a security firm contracted by the Ecuadoran embassy in London, where Assange was living at the time, to spy on the Wikileaks founder, his lawyers, journalists and others he met with.

[...] Richard Roth, the New York attorney representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said the alleged spying on Assange's attorneys means the Wikileaks founder's right to a fair trial has "now been tainted, if not destroyed."

[...] It said Undercover Global, which had a security contract with the embassy, swept information on their electronic devices, including communications with Assange, and provided it to the CIA.

In addition it placed microphones around the embassy and sent recordings, as well as footage from security cameras, to the CIA.

This, Roth said, violated privacy protections for US citizens.

Anyone knowledgeable on the law who can help unpack all the legal angles here (non-US citizen, US lawyers, in an embassy in a foreign country involving a private company)?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Planned Obsolescence Rears Its Ugly Head in Epson Printer Spat - ExtremeTech:

A recent tweet about a self-bricking Epson printer has reminded everyone how important the right to repair is. The printer in question alerted its owners that it had reached the end of its lifespan, and then promptly stopped working. Epson's response is a reminder that many of the devices you own come with secret expiration dates.

While most technologies have become more versatile and reliable over the years, printers are an outlier: They're terrible. In this instance, the cause of the end-of-life message is the ink pads. These components are designed to soak up excess ink so it doesn't get smeared on your pages or leak from the printer. Epson has determined how long these parts usually last, and when the timer is up, the printer just stops working.

The solution is also a problem: Epson says you can ship the printer back for service or have a certified repair technician replace the parts. In either case, the parts, labor, and shipping won't be cheap. [...]

[...] According to The Verge, Epson has updated a support article to downplay the ludicrousness of its decisions. Previously, the page noted that servicing an aging printer is often not worth the money, so most people just buy new ones. This is, of course, entirely thanks to the way Epson has opted to design its printers. The page does point out you can recycle the old printer, and recycling is good. True, Epson, but continuing to use a device that's perfectly functional is better.

At least I'm not getting robocalls telling me my Epson printer is about to expire.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Ask meat eaters and most would likely agree that one of the carnivorous delights non-meat-eaters are most missing out on is bacon. Salty, smoky, chewy, delectable on sandwiches, crumbled up in recipes, or eaten by hand—there’s really nothing like it.

Except now there is, according to startup MyForest Foods and its customers in New York and Massachusetts. The clincher? The vegetarian-friendly bacon substitute is made from mushroom roots.

Mushroom roots are technically called mycelium, which isn’t the sort of root you’d see attached to most plants or trees; rather, it’s a root-like structure of fungus composed of a mass of branching, thread-like strands called hyphae. The hyphae absorb nutrients from soil or another substrate so the fungus can grow.

[...] A batch of the mycelium MyForest Foods is using to make its bacon grows in 12 days. Last month the company announced the opening of a vertical farm near Albany, New York where it plans to grow around three million pounds of mycelium a year, enough for a million pounds of imitation bacon.

hubie writes:

New Curtin research has provided the strongest evidence yet that Earth's continents were formed by giant meteorite impacts:

Dr Tim Johnson, from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the idea that the continents originally formed at sites of giant meteorite impacts had been around for decades, but until now there was little solid evidence to support the theory.

"By examining tiny crystals of the mineral zircon in rocks from the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, which represents Earth's best-preserved remnant of ancient crust, we found evidence of these giant meteorite impacts," Dr Johnson said.

"Studying the composition of oxygen isotopes in these zircon crystals revealed a 'top-down' process starting with the melting of rocks near the surface and progressing deeper, consistent with the geological effect of giant meteorite impacts.

"Our research provides the first solid evidence that the processes that ultimately formed the continents began with giant meteorite impacts, similar to those responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, but which occurred billions of years earlier."

[...] "These mineral deposits are the end result of a process known as crustal differentiation, which began with the formation of the earliest landmasses, of which the Pilbara Craton is just one of many.

Journal Reference:
Johnson, T.E., Kirkland, C.L., Lu, Y. et al. Giant impacts and the origin and evolution of continents. Nature 608, 330–335 (2022). 10.1038/s41586-022-04956-y

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Late one evening in June of 2016, John Barentine stood alone at Mather Point, an iconic and rarely empty overlook at Grand Canyon National Park. The moon slid away, leaving the darkness of a crisp, clear sky. The stars that make up our galaxy seemed to align overhead. The inky chasm of the ancient canyon spread out below, and he marveled at a feeling of being unmoored in time and space.

An astronomer who worked for the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), Barentine had a special reason to revel in the scene. With his help, the park had recently been given provisional status as an International Dark Sky Park, a designation given to public land that exhibits “exceptional” starry nights. Few publicly accessible places on Earth experience this kind of pristine darkness. Indeed, the view is quite different 200 miles away in Tucson. There, photons from the city’s lights scatter in the sky, forming an obscuring dome of light called sky glow—a feature now common to major cities.

Scientists have known for years that such light pollution is growing and can harm both humans and wildlife. In people, increased exposure to light at night disrupts sleep cycles and has been linked to cancer and cardiovascular disease, according to a 2016 report by the American Medical Association. Meanwhile, the ecological impacts of light pollution span the globe. It can affect the reproduction patterns of male crickets, causing them to chirp during the daytime instead of at night, when they typically call mates. Baby sea turtles, which have evolved to evade predators by rushing to the ocean upon hatching, can be disoriented by lights near the shore. Owls lose their stealthy advantage over prey. Even trees can struggle, holding onto leaves longer and budding earlier than they should because the brightness of their surroundings gives them incorrect information on the time of year. 

Astronomers, policymakers, and lighting professionals are all working to find ways to reduce light pollution. Many of them advocate installing light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, in outdoor fixtures such as city streetlights. Watt for watt, LED streetlights are now comparable in efficiency to traditional sodium vapor streetlights—and are in some cases more efficient. But the crucial difference is that they are better at directing light to a targeted area, which means less light and energy are needed overall to achieve the desired illumination. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Startups are exploring how electric planes could clean up air travel, which accounts for about 3% of worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions. The problem is that today’s electric aircraft could safely carry you and about a dozen fellow passengers only around 30 miles, according to a recent analysis. 

The limiting factor is the battery, in particular the amount of energy that can be stored in a small space. If you’ve folded your legs into a cramped window seat or been charged extra for overweight luggage, you’re probably familiar with the intense space and weight constraints on planes. 

[...] Batteries have been packing more power into smaller spaces for about 30 years, and continuing improvements could help electric planes become a more feasible option for flying. But they’re not there yet, and ultimately, the future of electric planes may depend on the future of progress in battery technology. 

The prospect of electric flight is appealing in many ways. Aviation contributes a growing share of the global greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change, and battery-powered planes could help speed decarbonization in a growing sector. 

hubie writes:

Extraterrestrial cement:

Sustained space exploration will require infrastructure that doesn't currently exist: buildings, housing, rocket landing pads.

[...] "If we're going to live and work on another planet like Mars or the moon, we need to make concrete. But we can't take bags of concrete with us — we need to use local resources," said Norman Wagner, Unidel Robert L. Pigford Chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware.

Researchers are exploring ways to use clay-like topsoil materials from the moon or Mars as the basis for extraterrestrial cement. To succeed will require a binder to glue the extraterrestrial starting materials together through chemistry. One requirement for this out-of-this-world construction material is that it must be durable enough for the vertical launch pads needed to protect man-made rockets from swirling rocks, dust and other debris during liftoff or landing. Most conventional construction materials, such as ordinary cement, are not suitable under space conditions.

UD's Wagner and colleagues are working on this problem and successfully converted simulated lunar and Martian soils into geopolymer cement, which is considered a good substitute for conventional cement. [...]

Geopolymers are inorganic polymers formed from aluminosilicate minerals found in common clays everywhere from Newark, Delaware's White Clay Creek to Africa. When mixed with a solvent that has a high pH, such as sodium silicate, the clay can be dissolved, freeing the aluminum and silicon inside to react with other materials and form new structures — like cement.

upstart writes:

Judge orders Twitter to give Elon Musk former executive's documents:

Twitter Inc (TWTR.N)needs to give Elon Musk documents from a former Twitter executive who Musk said was a key figure in calculating the amount of fake accounts on the platform, according to a Monday court order.

Bot and spam accounts on Twitter have become a central issue in the legal fight over whether Musk, who is Tesla Inc's (TSLA.O) chief executive, must complete his $44 billion acquisition of the social media company.

Twitter was ordered to collect, review and produce documents from former General Manager of Consumer Product Kayvon Beykpour, according to the order from Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery.

[...] Beykpour, who left Twitter after the social media company agreed in April to be acquired by Musk, was described in Musk's court filings as one of the executives "most intimately involved with" determining the amount of spam accounts.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Military Satellites Will Now Be Operated by the Space Force:

The U.S. Army transferred its satellite ground stations to the Space Force on Monday as the latest step in establishing the sixth branch of the U.S. military devoted to demonstrating national dominance in space.

The U.S. Department of Defense announced the transfer last year, which took effect on August 15. All in all, 15 global units with 319 military and 259 civilian personnel from the Army and Navy will transfer to the Space Force's Space Delta 8, the unit responsible for satellite communications, as stated in the announcement. Space Delta 8 is now in charge of the Wideband Global Satcom and Defense Satellite Communications System, a constellation of military communication satellites, as well as the Global Positioning System constellation for both military and civilian users, among other communication satellites, according to Space News. These satellites were originally built by the U.S. Air Force, and later operated by the military for decades.

In addition to the satellites, the U.S. Army also transferred $78 million to the Space Force's budget to cover their costs.

[...] But other branches of the military aren't totally out of the satellite game just yet. DARPA, part of the department of defense for military research, recently announced that it's working on a plan to standardize communication between satellites in Earth orbit (including civil, government, and military satellites). The U.S. Army is also looking into ways to use space technology for nontraditional warfare.

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