SoylentNews

janrinok writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/southeast-us-has-hit-the-roof-of-cdcs-respiratory-illness-level-scale/

The US continues to see a dramatic and early surge in respiratory illnesses, which is hitting young children particularly hard and setting records for the decade.

The Southeast region is the most affected by the surge, which is driven by cases of flu, RSV (respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus), and other seasonal respiratory viruses. Seven southern states—Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia—have reached the highest level of respiratory-illness activity on the scale from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The states are colored a deep purple on the national map, representing the highest of sub-level of "Very High" activity.

Overall, 25 states are experiencing "High" or "Very High" levels of respiratory illness activity, while six have reached the moderate category.

Original Submission

Well, the time is coming, I'm going to be livestreaming on YouTube starting at 2PM ET to try to re-habitate the infrastructure, and get ready for steps going forward. I'm going to be streaming this as part of an ongoing charity stream, and VTubing, as show of solidary with others who get harassed because they choose to use an avatar than not. I'll talk more about this at the start, and then we're going to do what we can to try and at least make the situation "less bad". Current goals is to try and at least get the machines to more up-to-date software, rebuild the nginx web frontend, and determine a long term plan for handling email

Hope to see you all there, ~ N

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Scientists at the University of Cologne and the University of Osnabrück have demonstrated for the first time, in biological systems with a single species, that chaos-like unpredictable dynamics can arise under completely constant external conditions. Such dynamics, for example fluctuations in population density, occur even without interactions with the environment or other species.

This may explain why such an enormous diversity of species has evolved on our planet. If, contrary to earlier assumptions, different species and evolutionary lineages are subject to irregular chaotic dynamics in and of themselves, they never encounter each other at the same time with the same number of individuals. Since direct competition among species thus becomes rare, they can coexist and evolve for much longer time periods. The current study has appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Biodiversity refers to the variety of life at all levels, from genes to entire ecosystems. It encompasses evolutionary, ecological, and cultural processes. It is not just about species we consider rare, threatened or endangered, but about all living things—from humans to organisms we know little about, such as microorganisms, fungi, and small invertebrates.

Biodiversity is an essential part of our lives. In addition to maintaining the stability of our own habitat, it also contributes to the fulfillment of many basic human needs, including as food, and serves as a supplier of energy or as a basis for medicines. In addition, biodiversity is important for pollination and seed dispersal and for controlling agricultural pests.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/amazon-unveils-smaller-delivery-drone-that-can-fly-in-rain/#ftag=CAD590a51e

Amazon on Thursday unveiled the design for a new delivery drone that promises to be smaller, quieter and capable of flying in light rain.

The drone, called the MK30, is due to go into service in 2024, the tech giant said in a blog post Thursday. It's smaller and lighter than the MK27-2, the drone that'll be used to make deliveries in Lockeford, California, and College Station, Texas, later this year.

The new design allows for increased range, expanded temperature tolerance and new safety features, Amazon said.

Amazon helped kick off the drone delivery idea with the 2013 announcement of Prime Air, promising one-hour delivery times for thousands of items in Amazon's warehouses. In 2020, it gained approval for the drones from the Federal Aviation Administration, before scaling back the project the following year.

Its current fleet of delivery drones fly 400 feet above the ground at speeds up to 50 mph carrying packages up to 5 pounds within a range of about 9 miles.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An enormous neutrino observatory buried deep in the Antarctic ice has discovered only the second extra-galactic source of the elusive particles ever found.

In results published today in Science, the IceCube collaboration reports the detection of neutrinos from an “active galaxy” called NGC 1068, which lies some 47 million light-years from Earth.

Neutrinos are very shy fundamental particles that don’t often interact with anything else. When they were first detected in the 1950s, physicists soon realized they would in some ways be ideal for astronomy.

Because neutrinos so rarely have anything to do with other particles, they can travel unimpeded across the universe. However, their shyness also makes them difficult to detect. To catch enough to be useful, you need a very big detector.

That’s where IceCube comes in. Over the course of seven summers from 2005 to 2011, scientists at America’s Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station bored 86 holes in the ice with a hot-water drill. Each hole is almost 2.5 kilometers deep, about 60 centimeters wide, and contains 60 basketball-sized light detectors attached to a long stretch of cable.

How does this help us detect neutrinos? Occasionally, a neutrino will bump into a proton or neutron in the ice near a detector. The collision produces a much heavier particle called a muon, travelling so fast it emits a blue glow, which the light detectors can pick up.

So, quick update here. The site was down for most of the night because the database cluster shot itself in the head. I had restarted a machine to install updates, and this caused the backend cluster to entire to entirely loose its mind. Unfortunately, I didn't have a manual dump of the database made, just a VM snapshot, since, well, I wasn't tinkering with it directly. I've mostly been trying to patch things to the point that I can sleep, and leaving things down like IRC and email which need to be seriously overhauled before they can go back up.

As far as damages go, it looks like we lost 10 or so days of messages, which uh, sucks for multiple reasons. We're currently on ##soylentnews on Libera.Chat while I pull bits of the site out of the flames, but I'm at the point that if I don't sleep, I will make things worse. Corruption in the production database is very much not what I wanted, and we're very much in limp mode for the moment. I'm going to let staff handle IRC and comments while I sleep, and then I'll post another update when I'm awake.

See you in a few hours

~ NCommander

It's been a long while since I wrote one of these, and well, to say things are depressing is very much an understatement. It's been over eight years since we first went online, and the world has literally changed several times over. Presidential elections, a global pandemic, war in Europe, and well, we've been here through it all. It's a testament to our staying power that SN has remained online through it all, as a volunteer and community driven project.

That's not to say it's all been good news though ...

About two years ago, I de-facto resigned from the project after internal conflicts, and SoylentNews has slowly been rotting to death. To say the state of the backend is bad is very much an understatement. I found the SN emails were on spam blocklists, and well, I won't even talk about the state of the software ATM. It's holding together mostly out of the sheer amount of overengineering, and good intentions. The last major overhaul was I did when the site was migrated to rehash 7 years ago ... yeah it's been awhile ...

At this point, I think we need to talk about where we're going, because its either going to be long slow painful death, an execution, or an attempted comeback tour. This is your host NCommander, and today, we're going to look towards the future ...

upstart writes:

Anti-Cheat Software Continues To Be The New DRM In Pissing Off Legit Customers:

Long-time readers here will know that one of the consistent themes over the years when it comes to video game DRM has been the absolute plethora of anecdotal stories you get about how DRM screwed up the playing experience for legitimate customers. Performance issues, inability to play online or single-player campaigns due to DRM failures, intrusive kernel-level access issues; the list goes on and on.

Well, if you've been paying attention over the last couple of years, anti-cheat software is quickly becoming the new DRM. Access to root layers of the computer complaints, complaints about performance effects, complaints about how the software tracks customer behavior, and now finally we have the good old "software isn't letting me play my game" type of complaint. This revolves around Kotaku's Luke Plunkett, whose writing I've always found valuable, attempting to review EA's latest FIFA game.

I have reviewed FIFA in some capacity on this website for well over a decade, but regular readers who are also football fans may have noticed I haven't said a word about it this year. That's because, over a month after the PC version's release, I am still locked out of it thanks to a broken, over-zealous example of anti-cheat protection.

Publisher EA uses Easy Anti-Cheat, which has given me an error preventing me from even launching the game that every published workaround—from running the program as an administrator to disabling overlays (?) to editing my PC's bios (??!!)—hasn't solved. And so for one whole month, a game that I own and have never cheated at in my life, remains unplayable. I've never even made it to the main menu.

upstart writes:

Poliovirus that paralyzed unvaccinated NY man in July is still spreading:

The same strain of poliovirus that paralyzed an unvaccinated young man in New York's Rockland County this summer is still spreading in several areas of the state as of early October, according to a wastewater surveillance study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday.

The finding suggests that the virus continues to pose a serious threat to anyone in the area that is unvaccinated or under-vaccinated. The three counties with sustained transmission—Rockland, Orange, and Sullivan—have pockets of alarmingly low vaccination rates.

In Rockland, for instance, one county zip code has a polio vaccination rate among children under 2 years old of just 37 percent, according to state data. In Orange, a zip code has a vaccination rate of just 31 percent. County-wide vaccination rates of Rockland and Orange are 60 percent and about 59 percent, respectively.

Sullivan County hasn't provided the state with zip code-level vaccination rate data. But in a press release from August, the county's Public Health Director, Nancy McGraw, suggested some areas of the county have low rates similar to Rockland and Orange.

"Sullivan County has an overall 62.33 percent vaccination rate for polio, but there are some areas of the County with lower vaccination rates, and because polio can spread very easily, it's important that everyone is vaccinated," McGraw said at the time. "Public Health is offering a safe and proven vaccine available to children two months of age or older. We are working with the State to get vaccine to providers for adults. If adults need vaccine, we encourage then [sic] to contact their healthcare provider."

Most adults and children in the US are vaccinated against polio. Since 2000, the country has relied on inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which is given in three doses before the age of 24 months, with a fourth shot between the ages of 4 and 6. Just the first three doses are 99 percent to 100 percent effective at preventing paralytic disease, though, and vaccination coverage rates report the percentage of 2-year-olds that have followed the recommended vaccination schedule for the first three shots.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

OpenSSL Release Patches Critical Vulnerability:

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in current versions of OpenSSL and will need to be patched immediately. The OpenSSL Project will release version 3.0.7 on Tuesday, November 1st, 2022. This is a critical update that needs to be made immediately.

To unpack that for you a little bit, OpenSSL is a software library that is widely leveraged to enable secure network connections. And by widely leveraged, I mean almost completely ubiquitous, if you're using HTTPS, chances are you're using OpenSSL. Almost everyone is.

[...] "CRITICAL Severity. This affects common configurations and which are also likely to be exploitable. Examples include significant disclosure of the contents of server memory (potentially revealing user details), vulnerabilities which can be easily exploited remotely to compromise server private keys or where remote code execution is considered likely in common situations. These issues will be kept private and will trigger a new release of all supported versions. We will attempt to address these as soon as possible."

As is pretty standard in these security situations, specifics are not available as to what the exact threat is or where the weakness may lie because they're trying to avoid tipping off opportunistic bad actors that could exploit the vulnerability before it's patched.

[...] Unfortunately, just how much time or how involved this update will be isn't something the OpenSSL project has told us yet. Regardless, Tuesday is going to be an important day, as the longer you go before updating the longer your network will potentially be vulnerable.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Feds open criminal investigation into Tesla Autopilot claims:

Tesla's controversial Autopilot driver assist might have just gotten even more controversial. According to Reuters, the company has been under federal criminal investigation since 2021 for misleading people about Autopilot's capabilities. It's the latest in a string of state and federal investigations, coming at a time when the automaker is removing more sensors from the cars while increasing the price of its "full self-driving" (FSD) feature.

The safety of Tesla's electric vehicles has been repeatedly extolled by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who claimed his EVs are the safest cars on sale. However, those claims have been challenged by regulators such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as well as by collated crash data.

Now, Reuters reports that "Justice Department prosecutors in Washington and San Francisco are examining whether Tesla misled consumers, investors and regulators by making unsupported claims about its driver assistance technology's capabilities," the sources said.

Although Tesla's website states that Autopilot requires active supervision and is not autonomous, it also features a video that claims, "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself," and Musk has repeatedly been interviewed from the driver's seat of a Tesla hands-free.

Whether the Department of Justice's investigation will result in criminal prosecutions is unknown.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Scientists from Skoltech developed a self-assembled 3D nanocomposite with outstanding in-plane and out-of-plane heat conductivity, high electrical resistivity, and good hydrophobicity, which have a wide range of potential uses in packaging and electronics for thermal management applications.

The last few decades have witnessed an advance in electronics technology, with the development of devices that are highly integrated, lightweight, and portable. However, as the devices get smaller, so does the space for accommodating the internal working components. This has created an issue of improper heat dissipation in devices, since conventional heat sink materials are bulky and cannot be integrated into them. Currently, several substrate materials can act as heat diffusers as thin films, but most diffuse heat in the in-plane direction isotropically. This could create thermal interference with neighboring components of a device.

Researchers from Skoltech found a solution to this problem through the development of 3D polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) aligned boron nitride (BN) aerogel framework nanocomposites. The composite showed excellent thermal conductivity, stability and wettability behavior, which is extremely pertinent to thermal management in electronics.

[...] Apart from the optimized thermal properties, other major advantages of the nanocomposite are high electrical resistivity and good hydrophobicity, explains Owais. "Good wettability and electrical insulation are significant parameters of the composite when the electronic motherboard with integrated circuits is vulnerable to short-circuiting and malfunctioning. We need thermal interface materials with good hydrophobicity when the ICs are subjected to water, making them water resilient."

More information:Mohammad Owais et al, Scalable Fabrication of Thermally Conductive Layered Nacre-like Self-Assembled 3D BN-Based PVA Aerogel Framework Nanocomposites, Polymers (2022). DOI: 10.3390/polym14163316

Original Submission

upstart writes:

RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language:

Obituary Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100.

Kathleen Hylda Valerie Britten was born in Worcestershire, England, on July 9, 1922. During the Second World War, she studied at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she got a BSc in mathematics in 1944. After graduating, she became a junior scientific officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, a research organization in Farnborough. Two years later she moved to Birkbeck College, first as a research assistant, and later a lecturer and then research fellow.

She also worked at the British Rubber Producers' Research Association (BRPRA), where she met and worked with mathematician and physicist Andrew Donald Booth, who later became her husband. After studying with X-ray crystallographer Professor J D Bernal – inventor of the Bernal Sphere – A D Booth was working out crystal structures using X-ray diffraction data, and finding the manual calculations very tedious; he built an analog computer to automate part of this.

In 1946, Britten and Booth collaborated at Birkbeck on a very early digital computer, the Automatic Relay Calculator (ARC), and in doing so founded what is now Birkbeck's Department of Computer Science and Information Systems.

The ARC was constructed in Welwyn Garden City, close to the BRPRA's headquarters. A D Booth designed it, but Kathleen Britten and her fellow research assistant Xenia Sweeting built the hardware. Bernal obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation for Booth and Britten to visit the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, where Booth reported that only Bernal's friend John von Neumann gave them any time. Von Neumann explained his concept of what is now called the von Neumann computer architecture.

[...] Youtube Video

[...] The Booth family moved to Canada in the early 1960s, where Kathleen and Andrew continued working in academia; she retired in the late 1970s.

Kathleen Booth died September 29, 2022, and is survived by a daughter as well as her son. ®

Original Submission

upstart writes:

SpaceX becomes NASA’s second-largest vendor, surpassing Boeing:

NASA obligated $2.04 billion to SpaceX in fiscal year 2022, which ended last month, according to new federal procurement data.

For the first time, the amount paid by the space agency to SpaceX exceeds that paid to Boeing, which has long been the leading hardware provider to NASA. Boeing received $1.72 billion during the most recent fiscal year, based on data first reported by Aviation Week's Irene Klotz.

The California Institute of Technology, which manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory field center for NASA, remains the agency's No. 1 contractor, with $2.68 billion in funding. The academic institution is responsible for operating the California-based NASA field center and distributing funding for myriad robotic spacecraft missions such as Mars Perseverance and the Europa Clipper.

On the one hand, the ascension of SpaceX to the No. 2 spot on NASA's contractor list represents a major shakeup in the order of things. For a long time, NASA's human spaceflight and exploration programs were dominated by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Aerojet, Northrop Grumman, and a handful of other traditional defense aerospace contractors.

upstart writes:

Leaked data from TheTruthSpy stalkerware network reveals its Android apps tracked the calls, locations, and other information of hundreds of thousands of people:

A massive cache of leaked data reveals the inner workings of a stalkerware operation that is spying on hundreds of thousands of people around the world, including Americans.

The leaked data includes call logs, text messages, granular location data and other personal device data of unsuspecting victims whose Android phones and tablets were compromised by a fleet of near-identical stalkerware apps, including TheTruthSpy, Copy9, MxSpy and others.

These Android apps are planted by someone with physical access to a person's device and are designed to stay hidden on their home screens but will continuously and silently upload the phone's contents without the owner's knowledge.

Given that victims had no idea that their device data was stolen, TechCrunch extracted every unique device identifier from the leaked database and built a lookup tool to allow anyone to check if their device was compromised by any of the stalkerware apps up to April 2022, which is when the data was dumped.

TechCrunch has since analyzed the rest of the database. Using mapping software for geospatial analysis, we plotted hundreds of thousands of location data points from the database to understand its scale. Our analysis shows TheTruthSpy's network is enormous, with victims on every continent and in almost every country. But stalkerware like TheTruthSpy operates in a legal gray area that makes it difficult for authorities around the world to combat, despite the growing threat it poses to victims.