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upstart writes:

Russia finds 40% of its Chinese chip imports are defective:

As reported by The Register, pro-Putin newspaper Kommersant writes that the percentage of defective imported chips into Russia before the war was just 2%, which isn't very good considering how many components are found in today's electronic items. Now, almost eight months after the country invaded Ukraine, it stands at 40%.

Russia blames these failure rates on the pandemic impacting the supply chain and sanctions forcing it to import chips from the Chinese gray market, an area that not only comes with the threat of faulty products but is also unreliable and slow.

Many businesses have quit Russia as a result of the import restrictions, and those that are left must deal with sanction-skirting Chinese companies for semiconductors. Given that some of these duds were likely intended for military hardware supporting the war in Ukraine, one wonders if Russia and China's "friendship without limits" extends to imports of non-borked chips.

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upstart writes:

How the World Will Know If Russia Is Preparing to Launch a Nuke:

This week, NATO is conducting its regular, long-planned nuclear strike exercise known as "Steadfast Noon" to practice deploying fighter jets used to carry nuclear weapons. And Russia is expected to conduct its own nuclear drills sometime this month—as it typically does—in reaction to NATO's exercises.  While these rehearsals don't involve actual bombs, they come at a fraught moment, given Russian president Vladimir Putin's recent suggestion that the Kremlin could deploy nuclear weapons in its war against Ukraine.

Officials from the United States and the United Kingdom have emphasized that they do not see indications that Russia is actively preparing to launch a nuclear strike. And the signals the global community has to draw on in monitoring the Russian nuclear weapons program, while not infallible, are robust. That means the world would likely know if a nuclear attack were imminent.

"We take any nuclear weapons or nuclear saber-rattling very seriously here," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters earlier this month. But, she added, "we have not seen any reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture, nor do we have any indication that Russia is preparing to imminently use nuclear weapons."

Similarly, Jeremy Fleming, director of the UK's GCHQ intelligence agency, said last week, "I would hope that we will see indicators if they started to go down that path." He added that there would be a "good chance" of detecting Russian preparations.

upstart writes:

USB-C can hit 120Gbps with newly published USB4 Version 2.0 spec:

We've said it before, and we'll say it again: USB-C is confusing. A USB-C port or cable can support a range of speeds, power capabilities, and other features, depending on the specification used. Today, USB-C can support various data transfer rates, from 0.48Gbps (USB 2.0) all the way to 40Gbps (USB4, Thunderbolt 3, and Thunderbolt 4). Things are only about to intensify, as today the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) published the USB4 Version 2.0 spec. It adds optional support for 80Gbps bidirectional bandwidth as well as the optional ability to send or receive data at up to 120Gbps.

The USB-IF first gave us word of USB4 Version 2.0 in September, saying it would support a data transfer rate of up to 80Gbps in either direction (40Gbps per lane, four lanes total), thanks to a new physical layer architecture (PHY) based on PAM-3 signal encoding. For what it's worth, Intel also demoed Thunderbolt at 80Gbps but hasn't released an official spec yet.

USB4 Version 2.0 offers a nice potential bump over the original USB4 spec, which introduced optional support for 40Gbps operation. You just have to be sure to check the spec sheets to know what sort of performance you're getting.

Once USB4 Version 2.0 products come out, you'll be able to hit 80Gbps with USB-C passive cables that currently operate at 40Gbps, but you'll have to buy a new cable if you want a longer, active 80Gbps.

Today, the USB-IF confirmed that USB4 Version 2.0 will take things even further by optionally supporting a data transfer rate of up to 120Gbps across three lanes.

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upstart writes:

Germany dismisses cybersecurity chief over alleged Russian ties:

Germany's government has sacked its cybersecurity chief after reports of possible ties with Russian intelligence.

An interior ministry spokesperson said on Tuesday that Arne Schoenbohm had been relieved of his duties as president of the Federal Office for Information Security with immediate effect.

Media outlets reported last week that Schoenbohm could have had contacts with people involved with Russian security services through the Cyber Security Council of Germany.

The group brings together experts from public institutions and the private sector, and Schoenbohm co-founded it in 2012. Media reports said one of its members is a German company that is a subsidiary of a Russian cybersecurity firm founded by a former KGB employee.

The group, which describes itself as politically neutral, has rejected such connections as absurd.

Schoenbohm, who had been head of the German cybersecurity agency since 2016, has not commented on the reports so far. There was no immediate word on who would succeed the 53-year-old.

[...] Having said that, the ministry said it would "thoroughly investigate all known accusations".

Germany has in recent years repeatedly accused Russia of cyber espionage attempts.

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takyon writes:

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss resigns after failed budget and market turmoil

U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned Thursday following a failed tax-cutting budget that rocked financial markets and which led to a revolt within her own Conservative Party.

Truss said in a statement outside Downing Street: "We set out a vision for a low-tax, high-growth economy that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit."

"I recognize though, given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party. I have therefore spoken to His Majesty the King to announce that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative Party."

The party is now due to complete a leadership election within the next week, faster than the usual two-month period. Graham Brady, the Conservative politician that is in charge of leadership votes and reshuffles, told reporters he was now looking at how the vote could include Conservative MPs and the wider party members.

Truss was in office for just 44 days, on 10 of which government business was paused following the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

Live updates: BBC, The Guardian, CNN, NYT.

Liz Truss resigns as prime minister after Tory revolt
Liz Truss: UK prime minister resignation speech in full
Pound rallies as Liz Truss announces resignation

Liz Truss (Wikipedia).

Original Submission

takyon writes:

SpaceX's Rideshare program will now allow customers to launch a 50 kilogram payload for $275,000, down from a previous minimum of 200 kilograms for $1.1 million.

SpaceX slashes base price of smallsat rideshare program, adds "Plates"

SpaceX has rolled out an upgraded version of its Rideshare program that will allow even more small satellite operators to send their spacecraft to orbit for extremely low prices.

[...] While it technically hasn't reduced its prices, SpaceX will now allow satellites as small as 50 kilograms to book directly through the company at its virtually unbeatable rate of $5500 per kilogram. Before this change, customers with small satellites would either have to pay for all the extra capacity they weren't using, boosting their relative cost per kilogram, or arrange their launch services with a third-party aggregator like Spaceflight or Exolaunch.

Aggregators purchase slots on SpaceX's rideshare missions and then seek out numerous small satellites (usually well under 50 kilograms each) to try to reach their 200-kilogram minimum, thus ensuring that even the smallest satellites can launch for close to the advertised rate of $5500 per kilogram. As is always the case, a subcontractor has its own bills to pay and profit margins to seek, so aggregators likely charge customers quite a bit more than SpaceX's base price.

fliptop writes:

A Greek financial journalist is one of several who believe they have been targeted for surveillance by the nation's government with the help of Intellexa:

In late March 2021, Thanasis Koukakis was notified by a team of digital researchers that his phone had been infected with malware. A reporter who typically covers finance, Koukakis had been in the midst of investigating corruption issues when his device was infected. Research later showed that his phone had been under surveillance for approximately two months.

It turned out that he had been targeted with "Predator," a commercial spyware capable of infiltrating mobile phones and stealing pretty much everything inside of them—videos, pictures, text messages, search history, passwords, call logs, and more. Like a lot of other commercial spyware tools, Predator is typically sold to high-paying government clients—in this case, by a company called Cytrox. A secretive surveillance firm based in North Macedonia, Cytrox is owned by an Israeli parent company called Intellexa.

[...] The Greek government has, however, admitted to spying on Koukakis. In a parliamentary committee hearing in August, the head of the Greek equivalent of the CIA confessed that his agency had surveilled the journalist. However, the government has denied that it uses Predator or maintains any association with Intellexa.

Some interesting comments on Bruce Schneier's blog. Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Aridity appears to configure landscapes with a greater diversity of plant species that rely on symbiotic bacteria for nitrogen:

In Death Valley National Park, which straddles the California-Nevada border, mesquite plants (genus Prosopis) thrive in extreme aridity. While most vegetation types must extract most of their nutrients from fertile soil, mesquites and similar plants receive additional nitrogen from symbiotic bacteria, which enzymatically fix atmospheric nitrogen into an easily absorbed form in exchange for sugars produced during photosynthesis.

[...] Doby and his colleagues initially hypothesized that nitrogen-deficient soils would prompt an increase in nitrogen-fixing plant diversity. The results, however, showed “that aridity is actually the primary driver” of phylogenetic diversity, Doby says. As conditions became drier, the ratio of nitrogen-fixing to non-fixing plant species increased even as overall plant diversity declined.

Because these plants have access to atmospheric nitrogen from their symbiotic bacteria, their leaves contain more nitrogen than other plants, and this buffers them against aridity by helping them retain water, says Mark Adams, an ecologist at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia who was not involved in this research. [...]

These findings add to prior evidence suggesting that nitrogen-fixing plants will outcompete non-fixers as the planet continues to warm, says Adams. However, future research should assess whether fixers generate a nitrogen surplus that could fertilize the soil, helping other plants withstand harsher conditions too, he adds. “That’s [the] bigger question.”

Journal Reference:
J.R. Doby et al., Aridity drives phylogenetic diversity and species richness patterns of nitrogen-fixing plants in North America, Glob Ecol Biogeogr, 2022. DOI: 10.1111/geb.13535

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Shahed-136 drones are made in Iran, which is reportedly supplying Russia in its ongoing assault of Ukraine:

Reports started to surface last month that Iran was supplying Russia with so-called suicide drones, sent to attack civilian targets in Ukraine. And now stunning new images of what those drones look like in the air have been captured by photographers in Kyiv as the city suffered fresh attacks on Monday.

[...] The drones appear to match the physical description of Iran's HESA Shahed-136 drone, a so-called "swarming" aerial weapon that's launched almost horizontally and contains a warhead in its nose. Russia has renamed the Shahed drones Geran-2, according to the Associated Press. Officially, Iran has denied supplying weapons to Russia since it first invaded Ukraine on February 24.

I am surprised that some sort of low-tech solution (besides a shotgun) hasn't been found against these relatively slow and vulnerable vehicles, and hopefully blanket drone bans aren't the result of this. [hubie]

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

According to the researchers, blood vessel cells are a key regulator of brown fat and energy metabolism:

Insulin resistance, a significant risk factor for diabetes, develops when the body’s cells do not react to insulin and are unable to use the glucose (sugar) in the bloodstream. The condition has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and atherosclerosis, which is an accumulation of fats within blood arteries that can restrict blood flow to the body’s tissues. However, the precise mechanism through which insulin and the cells lining vascular walls interact is unclear.

Joslin Diabetes Center scientists describe a series of studies designed to investigate the link between insulin, fats, and the vascular system in a paper published in Circulation Research. The group, led by Dr. George King, chief scientific officer and director of research at Joslin, discovered a brand-new method by which the body’s metabolism is controlled by endothelial cells, which line blood vessels. The results challenge scientific dogma by suggesting that, contrary to what was previously believed, vascular dysfunction may really be the root cause of the undesirable metabolic changes that can result in diabetes.

“In people with diabetes and insulin resistance, the idea has always been that white fat and inflammation causes dysfunction in the blood vessels, leading to the prevalence of heart disease, eye disease, and kidney disease in this patient population,” said King, the Thomas J. Beatson, Jr. Professor of Medicine in the Field of Diabetes at Harvard Medical School. “But we found that blood vessels can have a major controlling effect here, and that was not known before.”

upstart writes:

Impressive distro is somewhere between a tech demo and a power user's tool:

While many Ubuntu remixes just switch the desktop or replace a few default apps, Zinc changes some of the fundamentals. The result is impressive.

Teejeetech is a small computer consultancy in Kerala, India, run by programmer Tony George. Zinc isn't the company's first distro, nor is this the company's first mention on The Register. We previously mentioned their earlier Unity-based remix, U-Mix, as well as originally developing the Timeshift backup tool included in Linux Mint. We thought we'd come back for a proper look at Zinc, the company's second-generation distro.

Unlike U-Mix, Zinc is a free download. It's based on the current long-term support version of Xubuntu, 22.04.1, so it uses a customized Xfce desktop, plus quite a few additional apps and changed components. Perhaps its biggest change from mainstream Ubuntu is in packaging tools: it includes neither Canonical's own Snap format nor the GNOME/Red Hat alternative Flatpak.

[...] For installing software from the Ubuntu repositories, Zinc has an improved command-line package manager called Nala, which we mentioned recently. Nala is a Python-based replacement for the apt command, which integrates some of the features of Fedora's dnf tool, such as parallel downloads and more readable output.

hubie writes:

Mysterious ripples in the Milky Way were caused by a passing dwarf galaxy:

Using data from the Gaia space telescope, a team led by researchers at Lund University in Sweden has shown that large parts of the Milky Way's outer disk vibrate. The ripples are caused by a dwarf galaxy, now seen in the constellation Sagittarius, that shook our galaxy as it passed by hundreds of millions of years ago.

[...] "We can see that these stars wobble and move up and down at different speeds. When the dwarf galaxy Sagittarius passed the Milky Way, it created wave motions in our galaxy, a little bit like when a stone is dropped into a pond", Paul McMillan, the astronomy researcher at Lund Observatory who led the study, explains.

[...] The researchers were surprised by how much of the Milky Way they could study using the data from Gaia. To date the telescope, which has been in operation since 2013, has measured the movement across the sky of approximately two billion stars and the movement towards or away from us of 33 million.

"With this new discovery, we can study the Milky Way in the same way that geologists draw conclusions about the structure of the Earth from the seismic waves that travel through it. This type of "galactic seismology" will teach us a lot about our home galaxy and its evolution", Paul McMillan concludes.

Journal Reference:
Paul J McMillan, Jonathan Petersson, Thor Tepper-Garcia, et al., The disturbed outer Milky Way disc [open], MNRAS, Volume 516, Issue 4, November 2022, Pages 4988–5002. DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stac2571

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The supply chain it needs simply doesn't exist, but that could work to GM's advantage:

Cruise never planned to make its own silicon. But in the quest to commercialize robotaxis — and make money doing it — those never planned pursuits can suddenly seem a lot more appealing.

Cruise realized that the price of chips from suppliers was too high, the parts were too big and the reliability of the third-party technology just wasn't there, Carl Jenkins, Cruise's vice president of hardware, told TechCrunch during a tour of the company's hardware lab last month.

Amid a hiring spree that began in 2019 and continued into 2020, Cruise doubled down on its own hardware, including its own board and sensors. The investment has helped the company develop smaller, lower cost hardware for its vehicles. It has also resulted in its first production board the C5, which is powering the current generation of autonomous Chevy Bolts.

When the company's purpose-built Origin robotaxi starts hitting the streets in 2023, it will be outfitted with the C6 board. That board will eventually be replaced with the C7 which will have Cruise's Dune chip. Dune will process all of the sensor data for the system, according to Cruise.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Linus Torvalds has announced the version 6.1 release candidate for the Linux kernel, and added a stern message to developers: stop submitting code at the last minute. 

This release isn't that big, Torvalds noted, as it only features 11,500 non-merge commits during the merge window, versus 13,500 last time. But he's been  dealing with hardware problems  while getting the infrastructure set up for developers to use the Rust programming language for updating the kernel. On top of these hardware glitches, he said he was "somewhat frustrated with various late pull requests." 

"I've mentioned this before, but it's _really_ quite annoying to get quite a few pull requests in the last few days of the merge window," wrote Torvalds in his usual Sunday evening update. Work started on Linux 6.1 at the beginning of October. 

"Yes, the merge window is two weeks, but that's very much to allow me time to look things over, not "two weeks to hurriedly put together a branch that you send Linus on Friday of the second week". The whole "do an all-nighter to get the paper in the day before the deadline" is something that should have gone out the window after highschool. Not for kernel development."

[...] "With some slack for 'life happens', of course, but I really get the feeling that a few people treat the end of the merge window as a deadline, missing the whole 'it was supposed to be ready before the merge window'."

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.leadedsolder.com/2022/10/15/pwp50sx-nec-mini5-psu-repair-pickup.html

In order to get a copy of Tetris for the NEC mini5 series of word processors, I had to buy it along with a whole word processor set from the previous owner. This LCD-based mini5SX is sleek, attractive, surprisingly heavy, and broken. Very, very broken. Let's see if we can fix up this grey beast, and dump its ROMs.

[...] Unlike some other computers in the hoard, the mini5SX was bought on Mercari, where it was being sold by the owner and not some nth-generation reseller or junkyard. This person was nice enough to explain the fault in the ad. Their word processor used to work, and they'd test it once in awhile, but the last time they took their beloved companion out (to play Tetris of course,) it wouldn't start up. There would be a dim flicker of the power light, it would extinguish, and then no response. Thus, the sale.

[...] Not knowing much about the mini5's internal structure, I decided to start by opening it up and finding the power supply. I hoped that I would find something incredibly obvious to replace, like a vented capacitor.

[...] Although I bought this machine only to get Tetris, I couldn't bear to see it in such poor condition. Now I have two Bungos, which I think we can all agree is what makes a house a home.

Original Submission