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Anonymous writes:

After a huge backlash Blizzard reversed its decision to require a phone number to play Overwatch 2 — but only for existing accounts. New accounts still require it. Blizzard announced that it would be removing SMS Protect for Overwatch 1 players, but keeping the restriction for new Overwatch 2 accounts.

SMS Protect requires players to link their Overwatch accounts to a non-prepaid phone number, which excludes a large population who cannot afford cellphone plans. The intent behind this system is to cut back on "smurfing," a term used to identify high-skill, high-rank players who create new accounts to beat up on newer players. The move was seen to be equivalent to Google requiring an active phone service to "prevent spamming".

History has shown that this type of two factor authentication does not deliver the outcome desired. Users who want to use and abuse systems will just get a new phone number.

At a first (very brief) glance it might have seemed like a 'good idea' - but it obviously isn't. What other practices have you seen creeping into people's lives where technology (perhaps unintentionally) appears to be disadvantaging a specific group of people?

Original Submission

Snotnose and an AC write:

Adafruit's Cheekmate gets to the bottom (ahem) of chess cheating controversy:

The Internet has been abuzz for weeks about a particularly juicy chess cheating controversy that erupted last month. The reigning chess world champion, Magnus Carlsen, lost in the third round to a 19-year-old upstart, Hans Niemann, in what was widely considered to be a shocking upset. Carlsen withdrew from the tournament the next day, and his cryptic comments on Twitter fueled rampant speculation that Niemann had cheated. The fact that Niemann admitted to cheating in online chess matches didn't help his case, but he steadfastly insisted he never cheated in over-the-board games.

The fierce debate eventually produced a bizarre viral conspiracy theory that Niemann had used anal beads to receive coded messages during the match. But would that even be possible? The folks at Adafruit Industries were sufficiently intrigued to put the theory to the test—you know, just to get to the bottom of the matter. The result is a prototype device called Cheekmate—because the Adafruit team rightfully loves their punny innuendoes—complete with a step-by-step guide for those who might want to build their own prototype.

This device, Adafruit insists, is not for actual cheating: "That would be asinine... in brief, a stain on the sport, but to record for posterior whether this sort of backdoor intrusion is even plausible or just an Internet myth." Lacking any willing human volunteers to test the prototype, they ended up embedding Cheekmate in a big, juicy slab of pork butt.

[...] Enter Adafruit, which naturally designed the Cheekmate prototype around the company's own products, assuming a one-way communication with an accomplice for testing the core idea. (The project also requires a soldering iron.) That includes an Adafruit QT Py ESP32-S2 with built-in Wi-Fi, capable of communicating with any mobile hotspot—like a cell phone with Wi-Fi tethering capability, presumably carried by the cheater's accomplice.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA Wants To Mine The Moon, But Law Experts Say It's Not That Simple:

Exploration in the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond is often the subject of science fiction. Space exploration is a common theme in the genre, and millions of readers flock to new titles in this space on a regular basis — SFWA noted that those who say they read science fiction amounted to about 21% of the U.S. population.

[...] The first roadblock facing humans as we seek to expand our presence in the solar system lies in technology. NASA reports that it takes about seven months (measured in Earth days) to travel from our planet's surface to Mars. Thrillist notes that travel to the Moon only requires a three-day journey, while exploration of Jupiter or Saturn (the next bodies out from Mars) would require a lengthy, six- or seven-year voyage, respectively. On a technical level, our current means of launching satellites and humans at these distant bodies is exactly that, a launch (via NASA). In order to make space travel more feasible for human explorers, we would need to develop a propulsion system that could continually deliver powered flight to a spacecraft, or at least the ability to continually augment flight speed, rather than simply relying on initial launch velocity to carry the craft along to its final destination.

[...] A secondary roadblock stands in the way of human exploitation in regard to these extraterrestrial resources. During the Cold War, great efforts were undertaken by the United States and the Soviet Union to explore distant planets and the Moon. The politics of space exploration are complicated, but suffice to say, world leaders across the globe quickly became worried about the potential for conflict expanding beyond the boundaries of our world. For one thing, warfare in outer space would place human lives in grave jeopardy. But one natural extent of this conflict would be the ability to simply drop ordnance directly over combatant nations (via U.S. Naval War College), threatening to eviscerate the planet in the process. As a result, more than 100 countries including the United States and Russia have signed an agreement barring claims of sovereignty beyond the physical territory of the planet Earth, according to the United Nations.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Drinking two to three cups of coffee a day is linked with a longer lifespan and lower risk of cardiovascular disease compared with avoiding coffee:

"In this large, observational study, ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee were associated with equivalent reductions in the incidence of cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular disease or any cause," said study author Professor Peter Kistler of the Baker Heart and Diabetes Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia. "The results suggest that mild to moderate intake of ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle."

There is little information on the impact of different coffee preparations on heart health and survival. This study examined the associations between types of coffee and incident arrhythmias, cardiovascular disease and death using data from the UK Biobank, which recruited adults between 40 and 69 years of age. Cardiovascular disease was comprised of coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure and ischaemic stroke.

[...] A total of 27,809 (6.2%) participants died during follow up. All types of coffee were linked with a reduction in death from any cause. The greatest risk reduction seen with two to three cups per day, which compared to no coffee drinking was associated with a 14%, 27% and 11% lower likelihood of death for decaffeinated, ground, and instant preparations, respectively.

upstart writes:

Taken as a share of the market price, the climate change impacts of mining the digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin is more comparable to the impacts of extracting and refining crude oil than mining gold:

In the paper titled, Economic estimation of Bitcoin mining's climate damages demonstrates closer resemblance to digital crude than digital gold, the authors suggest that rather than being considered akin to 'digital gold', Bitcoin should instead be compared to much more energy-intensive products such as beef, natural gas, and crude oil.

"We find no evidence that Bitcoin mining is becoming more sustainable over time," said UNM Economics Associate Professor Benjamin A. Jones. "Rather, our results suggest the opposite: Bitcoin mining is becoming dirtier and more damaging to the climate over time. In short, Bitcoin's environmental footprint is moving in the wrong direction."

[...] "Globally, the mining, or production, of Bitcoin is using tremendous amounts of electricity, mostly from fossil fuels, such as coal and natural gas. This is causing huge amounts of air pollution and carbon emissions, which is negatively impacting our global climate and our health," said Jones. "We find several instances between 2016-2021 where Bitcoin is more damaging to the climate than a single Bitcoin is actually worth. Put differently, Bitcoin mining, in some instances, creates climate damages in excess of a coin's value. This is extremely troubling from a sustainability perspective."

upstart writes:

The countries say the pact will help combat serious crimes, but privacy advocates have raised concerns:

As of today, a data-sharing pact between the US and the UK is in effect, five years after it was first floated. The two sides claim that the Data Access Agreement, which was authorized by the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act in the US, will help law enforcement to combat serious crimes in both countries. The Department of Justice called the initiative the first of its kind, adding that it would enable investigators "to gain better access to vital data" to fight serious crimes in a manner that's "consistent with privacy and civil liberties standards."

Under the agreement, authorities in one country can request data from ISPs in the other country, as long as it's related to preventing, detecting, investigating and prosecuting serious crimes including terrorism, transnational organized crime and child exploitation. US officials can't submit data requests targeting people in the UK and vice-versa — presumably the requests can either be used to assist domestic investigations or investigations into foreign nationals. Authorities also need to adhere to certain requirements, limitations and conditions when they access and use data.

[...] The US is looking to forge pacts with other countries under the CLOUD Act. It signed a deal with Australia last December and entered negotiations with Canada earlier this year.

Previously:
    Responsibility Deflected, the CLOUD Act Passes
    U.S. law to Snoop on Citizens' Info Stored Abroad

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Exoplanet hunters should check for N₂O:

Scientists at UC Riverside are suggesting something is missing from the typical roster of chemicals that astrobiologists use to search for life on planets around other stars — laughing gas.

Chemical compounds in a planet's atmosphere that could indicate life, called biosignatures, typically include gases found in abundance in Earth's atmosphere today.

"There's been a lot of thought put into oxygen and methane as biosignatures. Fewer researchers have seriously considered nitrous oxide, but we think that may be a mistake," said Eddie Schwieterman, an astrobiologist in UCR's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

[...] "In a star system like TRAPPIST-1, the nearest and best system to observe the atmospheres of rocky planets, you could potentially detect nitrous oxide at levels comparable to CO₂ or methane, [CH₄]" Schwieterman said.

[...] Others who have considered N₂O as a biosignature gas often conclude it would be difficult to detect from so far away. Schwieterman explained that this conclusion is based on N₂O concentrations in Earth's atmosphere today. Because there isn't a lot of it on this planet, which is teeming with life, some believe it would also be hard to detect elsewhere.

"This conclusion doesn't account for periods in Earth's history where ocean conditions would have allowed for much greater biological release of N₂O. Conditions in those periods might mirror where an exoplanet is today," Schwieterman said.

[...] The research team believes now is the time for astrobiologists to consider alternative biosignature gases like N₂O because the James Webb telescope may soon be sending information about the atmospheres of rocky, Earth-like planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system.

Journal Reference:
Edward W. Schwieterman et al 2022 Evaluating the Plausible Range of N₂O Biosignatures on Exo-Earths: An Integrated Biogeochemical, Photochemical, and Spectral Modeling Approach [open] ApJ 937 109. DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac8cfb

Original Submission

owl writes:

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/pc-mos386-source-code/

I missed this when it was initially announced. The source code for PC-MOS/386 version 5.01 is now available on github under the GPLv3 license. It requires the user to supply Borland C++ 3.1 in order to build, but there are binaries checked in as well, including a bootable floppy image.

PC-MOS is a multi-tasking/multi-user DOS clone. It was one of the first commercial products which used the 386's virtual-8086 mode when it was released in early 1987 (but not the first, that was almost certainly CEMM in 1986).

Are there any [gray|grey|white]-beards here who remember using this old version? What is the oldest version you used?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA's DART asteroid impact test left a trail over 6,000 miles long:

NASA's successful asteroid impact test created a beautiful mess, apparently. As the Associated Press reports, astronomers using the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope in Chile have captured an image revealing that DART's collision with Dimorphos left a trail of dust and other debris measuring over 6,000 miles long. The spacecraft wasn't solely responsible — rather, the Sun's radiation pressure pushed the material away like it would with a comet's tail.

[...] The capture was about more than obtaining a dramatic snapshot, of course. Scientists will use data collected using SOAR, the Astronomical Event Observatory Network and other observers to understand more about the collision and Dimorphos itself. They'll determine the amount and speed of material ejected from the asteroid, and whether or not DART produced large debris chunks or 'merely' fine dust. Those will help understand how spacecraft can alter an asteroid's orbit, and potentially improve Earth's defenses against wayward cosmic rocks.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Biomarkers used to track benefits of anti-ageing therapies can be misleading:

We all grow old and die, but we still don't know why. Diet, exercise and stress all effect our lifespan, but the underlying processes that drive ageing remain a mystery. Often, we measure age by counting our years since birth and yet our cells know nothing of chronological time—our organs and tissues may age more rapidly or slowly regardless of what we'd expect from counting the number of orbits we tale around the sun.

For this reason, many scientists search to develop methods to measure the "biological age" of our cells -– which can be different from our chronological age. In theory, such biomarkers of ageing could provide a measure of health that could revolutionize how we practice medicine. Individuals could use a biomarker of ageing to track their biological age over time and measure the effect of diet, exercise, and drugs and predict their effects to extend lifespan or improve quality of life. Medicines could be designed and identified based on their effect on biological age. In other words, we could start to treat ageing itself.

However, no accurate and highly predictive test for biological age has been validated to date. In part, this is because we still don't know what causes ageing and so can't measure it. Definitive progress in the field will require validating biomarkers throughout a patient's lifetime, an impractical feat given human life expectancy.

[...] Describing their results in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, the research team found that nematodes have at least two partially independent ageing processes taking place at the same time – one that determines VMC [vigorous movement cessation] and the other determines time of death. While both processes follow different trajectories, their rates are correlated to each other, in other words, in individuals for whom VMC occurred at an accelerated rate, so did time of death, and vice versa. In other words, the study revealed that each individual nematode has at least two distinct biological ages.

canopic jug writes:

The New Yorker has a non-technical article, The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet's Time, about the Network Time Protocol (NTP) from both the software and protocol perspectives. It gives a surprisingly good summary of the background of both as well as the current situation and the issues holding back the next steps. If you have networked computers, especially servers, in any capacity then you are certainly familiar with the NTP or at least its supporting utilities. NTP was developed by David Mills, who by the late 1970s, after a *little*-bit-of-improvementer his PhD, eventually ended up at COMSAT where he started working on it for ARPANET. He still works on it despite failed eyesight.

In N.T.P., Mills built a system that allowed for endless tinkering, and he found joy in optimization. "The actual use of the time information was not of central interest," he recalled. The fledgling Internet had few clocks to synchronize. But during the nineteen-eighties the network grew quickly, and by the nineties the widespread adoption of personal computers required the Internet to incorpoa-*little*-bit-of-improvementrate millions more devices than its first designers had envisioned. Coders created versions of N.T.P. that worked on Unix and Windows machines. Others wrote "reference implementations" of N.T.P.—open-source codebases that exemplified how the protocol should be run, and which were freely available for users to adapt. Government agencies, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Naval Observatory, started distributing the time kept by their master clocks using N.T.P.

A loose community of people across the world set up their own servers to provide time through the protocol. In 2000, N.T.P. servers fielded eighteen billion time-synchronization requests from several million computers—and in the following few years, as broadband proliferated, requests to the busiest N.T.P. servers increased tenfold. The time servers had once been "well lit in the US and Europe but dark elsewhere in South America, Africa and the Pacific Rim," Mills wrote, in a 2003 paper. "Today, the Sun never sets or even gets close to the horizon on NTP." Programmers began to treat the protocol like an assumption—it seemed natural to them that synchronized time was dependably and easily available. Mills's little fief was everywhere.

NTP servers keep the world's computers' clocks in synchrony, but there has been negligible amount of money kicked upstream to the project or even to Mills. Poul-Henning Kamp (PHK) gave a talk in 2015 at FOSDEM, Ntimed, an NTPD replacement, about where he saw things heading back in 2015 and how refactoring NTPd would be neither time nor resource efficient.

Previously:
(2015) New Attacks on Network Time Protocol can Defeat HTTPS and Create Chaos
(2015) Finance, Workload Troubles for Developer of Reference NTP Implementation
(2015) OpenNTPD 5.7p1 Released
(2014) What Time Is It? Time for Multiple NTP Vulnerabilities!

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Uber's Former Security Chief Convicted of Covering Up 2016 Data Breach:

The firm's former chief information security officer was found guilty of hiding a massive data breach from federal investigators.

A federal jury has convicted Uber's former security chief of charges related to a 2016 cover-up involving the ride-share giant, according to journalists present in the courtroom.

Joe Sullivan, who was found guilty of one count of obstruction and one count of misprision of a felony on Wednesday, helped to conceal a massive 2016 data breach from authorities, while also obstructing a Federal Trade Commission investigation.

[...] Federal prosecutors alleged that Sullivan subsequently attempted to "conceal, deflect, and mislead the Federal Trade Commission about the breach." Sullivan's charges stem from the cover-up, not paying the hackers. The latter has become increasingly common in the cybersecurity industry in recent years.

The case has decidedly split those in the cybersecurity community. The New York Times reports that this could be the first time that a security executive was held liable for a hacking incident in this way. The episode could ultimately set a new precedent for future cases in which CISOs must face legal consequences over data breaches.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Samsung announces 36 Gbps GDDR7 memory standard, aims to release V-NAND storage solutions with 1000 layers by 2030

The new 36 Gbps GDDR7 standard offers 50% improved speeds over the current 24 Gbps GDDR6X one from Micron. Peak GDDR7 bandwidth could reach 1.7 TB/s with a 384-bit bus. Samsung also plans to release 32 Gb DDR5 chips this year, and envisions a future where 1000-layer V-NAND storage could be possible by 2030.

[...] Furthermore, the 8.5 Gbps LPDDR5X DRAM solutions for mobile phones and ultrabooks are also expected to see increased adoption throughout the coming year.

The latest graphics cards from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel use GDDR6 or GDDR6X memory.

24 Gb DDR5 chips have already been announced as a stopgap between 16 Gb and 32 Gb, enabling memory modules with unusual capacities, e.g. 48 GiB instead of 32 or 64.

The 3D NAND currently in use by the industry has around 176 to 232 layers, so reaching 1000 layers could lead to quintupled SSD capacities.

upstart writes:

The first step will be figuring out the extent of the damage and then the difficulties really begin:

Until Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines were a key part of Europe's energy infrastructure. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the Nord Stream lines supplied 18% of all Europe's gas imports. [...]

Since then, Nord Stream has become a geopolitical pawn as Russia has retaliated for economic sanctions imposed upon it after the invasion. [...]

Then, in late September, unexpected damage caused four leaks in the subsea pipeline system. Everyone except Russia believes it's sabotage by the pariah state as it attempts to squeeze supplies ahead of a tricky winter energy shortage in Europe, where countries are already planning to cut back on energy use.

[...] What we do know is that any mission will be an unprecedented challenge for the oil and gas sector, requiring complex robotics and imaginative engineering.

And while we don't even know for sure how bad the situation is, the damage is expected to be significant: the September 26 blasts believed to have caused the pipeline ruptures registered 2.2 on the Richter scale, according to the Swedish National Seismic Network. [...]

No matter who did it, it was deliberate, says van der Beukel. "These pipelines normally simply don't break down," he says. The steel Nord Stream pipes are 1.6 inches thick, with up to another 4.3 inches of concrete wrapped around them. Each of the 100,000 or so sections of the pipeline weighs 24 metric tons.

upstart writes:

The American chess grandmaster at the centre of the sport's biggest scandal has been accused of cheating more than 100 times on a major online platform:

Hans Niemann, 19, has been the talk of the chess world after five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen accused him of cheating during their Sinquefield Cup game in September.

Niemann denied he cheated and even offered to play naked to prove he was clean, but did admit to cheating twice in his life, aged 12 and 16.

However, major website Chess.com has released a 72-page report that highlights more than 100 games where the platform believes Niemann cheated.

The games are dated between July 2015 and August 2020.

[...] "We present evidence in this report that Hans likely cheated online much more than his public statements suggest," the report states.

[...] Niemann categorically denied that he cheated in the Sinquefield Cup, which was played over-the-board and not online.

Chess.com in its report said it had no evidence that Niemann had ever cheated over-the-board or in his game against Carlsen.

However, the report said Chess.com found aspects of the Sinquefield Cup game "suspicious".