SoylentNews

upstart writes:

NSA offers security guidelines for IPv6 migration:

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has published a guidance document for system administrators to help them mitigate potential security issues as their organizations transition to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).

The prosaically named "IPv6 Security Guidance" [PDF] was compiled for admins inside the Department of Defense (DoD), but is likely to prove useful as a quick reference for anyone managing the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, which could turn out to be a more drawn-out experience than was originally anticipated.

"The Department of Defense will incrementally transition from IPv4 to IPv6 over the next few years and many DoD networks will be dual-stacked," NSA Cybersecurity Technical Director Neal Ziring said in a statement accompanying the publication of the document.

"It's important that DoD system admins use this guidance to identify and mitigate potential security issues as they roll out IPv6 support in their networks."

One of the recommendations is pretty basic: education. Successfully securing an IPv6 network requires, at a minimum, a fundamental knowledge of the differences between the IPv4 and IPv6 protocols and how they operate, the NSA says, so all network administrators should receive proper training.

It advises that security methods used in IPv4 networks will largely also be used with IPv6, but with adaptations to address where there are differences.

upstart writes:

Memory safe programming languages are on the rise. Here's how developers should respond:

Developers across government and industry should commit to using memory safe languages for new products and tools, and identify the most critical libraries and packages to shift to memory safe languages, according to a study from Consumer Reports.

The US nonprofit, which is known for testing consumer products, asked what steps can be taken to help usher in "memory safe" languages, like Rust, over options such as C and C++. Consumer Reports said it wanted to address "industry-wide threats that cannot be solved through user behavior or even consumer choice" and it identified "memory unsafety" as one such issue.

The report, Future of Memory Safety, looks at range of issues, including challenges in building memory safe language adoption within universities, levels of distrust for memory safe languages, introducing memory safe languages to code bases written in other languages, and also incentives and public accountability.

During the past two years, more and more projects have started gradually adopting Rust for codebases written in C and C++ to make code more memory safe. Among them are initiatives from Meta, Google's Android Open Source Project, the C++-dominated Chromium project (sort of), and the Linux kernel.

upstart writes:

Procrastination may harm your health. Here's what you can do:

The worst procrastinators probably won't be able to read this story. It'll remind them of what they're trying to avoid, psychologist Piers Steel says.

[...] In a study of thousands of university students, scientists linked procrastination to a panoply of poor outcomes, including depression, anxiety and even disabling arm pain. "I was surprised when I saw that one," says Fred Johansson, a clinical psychologist at Sophiahemmet University in Stockholm. His team reported the results January 4 in JAMA Network Open.

The study is one of the largest yet to tackle procrastination's ties to health. Its results echo findings from earlier studies that have gone largely ignored, says Fuschia Sirois, a behavioral scientist at Durham University in England, who was not involved with the new research.

For years, scientists didn't seem to view procrastination as something serious, she says. The new study could change that. "It's that kind of big splash that's ... going to get attention," Sirois says. "I'm hoping that it will raise awareness of the physical health consequences of procrastination."

upstart writes:

Google is being sued by the DOJ over alleged digital ad monopoly:

On Tuesday, the US Department of Justice announced that it would be joining eight states in filing a civil antitrust suit against Google over its monopoly on digital advertising. The lawsuit claims that Google abuses its power to put website publishers and advertisers at a disadvantage if they "dare to use" competing advertising technology products.

"Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful conduct to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies," said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in a statement. "No matter the industry and no matter the company, the Justice Department will vigorously enforce our antitrust laws to protect consumers, safeguard competition, and ensure economic fairness and opportunity for all."

The suit alleges that Google has been engaging in anticompetitive behavior for years. Some of that alleged anticompetitive conduct includes acquiring competitors to obtain their digital ad tech, forcing publishers to adopt its tools, distorting auction competition by limiting real-time bidding on publisher inventory, and manipulating auction mechanics.

"The complaint filed today alleges a pervasive and systemic pattern of misconduct through which Google sought to consolidate market power and stave off free-market competition," said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco.

According to the DOJ and the eight Attorneys General of California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia, Google violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, which concern contracts in restraint of trade and monopolization.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Rocket Lab has aces its first launch from U.S. soil:

Rocket Lab has completed its maiden mission from its new launch site in the U.S., marking a big step forward for the company as it seeks to better compete with the likes of SpaceX.

[...] The spaceflight company used its trusty Electron rocket to deploy three satellites for Hawkeye 360, a radio frequency geospatial analytics company, to an orbit of 342 miles (550 kilometers) above Earth.

It means Rocket Lab has now launched 33 Electron missions from three different pads in two countries — the U.S. and New Zealand — deploying a total of 155 satellites to orbit.

Rocket Lab livestreamed the mission, which showed the early stages of the Electron's flight. You can watch the launch below. There was, however, a longer than usual — and rather tense — wait for confirmation of the mission's success. The delay was put down to a ground station malfunction that temporarily prevented communications between the satellite and the team on the ground. Thankfully, around 90 minutes after launch, a relieved team was able to confirm that everything had gone to plan.

Now with two launch complexes in two countries, the SpaceX rival says it will be able to support more than 130 launches annually for government and commercial satellite operators.

Besides expanding its satellite-launch service using the Electron, Rocket Lab is also building its next-generation rocket, the Neutron, which will also launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, with its first test launch targeted for 2024.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Mystery of the Radeon RX 6000 Mass Extinction Event May Have Been Solved:

Earlier this month, there was a widely reported story regarding a large batch of AMD Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards (all Navi 21 models) that had mysteriously but catastrophically died. These were some of the best graphics cards, up until the latest generation parts started launching. German electronics repair shop KrisFix.de received 61 broken or malfunctioning RX 6900 / 6800 family graphics cards and found 48 of them suffered from physically cracked GPU silicon. The mystery regarding these ruined GPUs may now have been solved, with the likely culprits being the terrible twosome of crypto mining and high humidity storage.

[...] According to KrisFix, these cards were likely stored for a few weeks or months since GPU-based cryptomining became uneconomical. The problem is that they seem to have been stored in an environment with inappropriate temperatures / humidity levels. The experienced electronics repairer says he has seen this exact symptom of chips cracking and popping up from the PCB after being used in the wake of this kind of inappropriate storage.

[...] Readers need to be wary of the used GPUs market, but the post-crypto world has been both a source of great bargains and ticking time bombs with regard to product durability. Miners will go to extraordinary lengths to clean up and sell on their old GPUs, but thankfully we haven't heard too many tales like this one from KrisFix.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/ftc-shkreli-may-have-violated-lifetime-pharma-ban-should-be-held-in-contempt/

Infamous ex-pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli is yet again in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission, which announced today that the convicted fraudster has failed to cooperate with the commission's investigation into whether he violated his lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry by starting a company last year called "Druglike, Inc."
[...]
At the center of the dispute is whether Shkreli's co-founding of Druglike runs afoul of his lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry, which was in response to Shkreli's infamous move to raise the price of the cheap, life-saving anti-parasitic drug, Daraprim, from $17.50 a pill to $750 a pill in 2015.
[...]
The FTC also noted in its court filing that Shkreli has so far failed to pay any of the $64.6 million in disgorgement he was ordered to pay alongside his lifetime ban.

Previously:
Martin Shkreli Launches Blockchain-Based Drug Discovery Platform
Martin Shkreli Accused of Running Business From Prison With a Smuggled Smartphone
Sobbing Martin Shkreli Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison for Defrauding Investors
Martin Shkreli's $5 Million Bail Revoked for Facebook Post Seeking Hillary Clinton's Hair
Martin Shkreli Lists Unreleased Wu-Tang Clan Album on eBay
Martin Shkreli Convicted of Securities Fraud Charges, Optimistic About Sentencing
Martin Shkreli Points Fingers at Other Pharmaceutical Companies

Related:
U.S. Hospitals Band Together to Form Civica Rx, a Non-Profit Pharmaceutical Company
FDA Has Named Names of Pharma Companies Blocking Cheaper Generics [Updated]
EpiPen Maker is Facing Shareholder Backlash
Mylan Overcharged U.S. Government on EpiPens
Drug Firm Offers $1 Version of $750 Turing Pharmaceuticals Pill

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Revealing the Start of Time Itself: Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe May Peer Back to the Beginning of Everything We Know:

Scientists have advanced in discovering how to use ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves to peer back to the beginning of everything we know. The researchers say they can better understand the state of the cosmos shortly after the Big Bang by learning how these ripples in the fabric of the universe flow through planets and the gas between the galaxies.

"We can't see the early universe directly, but maybe we can see it indirectly if we look at how gravitational waves from that time have affected matter and radiation that we can observe today," said Deepen Garg, lead author of a paper reporting the results in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. Garg is a graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, which is based at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).

Garg and his advisor Ilya Dodin, who is affiliated with both Princeton University and PPPL, adapted this technique from their research into fusion energy, the process powering the sun and stars that scientists are developing to create electricity on Earth without emitting greenhouse gases or producing long-lived radioactive waste. Fusion scientists calculate how electromagnetic waves move through plasma, the soup of electrons and atomic nuclei that fuels fusion facilities known as tokamaks and stellarators.

It turns out that this process resembles the movement of gravitational waves through matter. "We basically put plasma wave machinery to work on a gravitational wave problem," Garg said.

[...] The scientists now plan to use the technique to analyze data in the near future. "We have some formulas now, but getting meaningful results will take more work," Garg said.

Journal Reference:
Deepen Garg and I.Y. Dodin, Gravitational wave modes in matter, J Cosmol Astropart P, 10 August 2022. (DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2022/08/017)

Original Submission

The lower Niagara River (below/north of Niagara Falls and the Rapids) has been a favored location for trade and smuggling for centuries. It seems to have taken a new turn recently, per this story, https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2023/01/17/drones-carry-mdma-into-america-via-niagara-falls/?sh=7b39ea602c83 also covered by BuffaloNews.com and other outlets.

The neighbors thought it odd that no one seemed to live in the capacious, quintessential American family house in Lewiston, New York, a small town that sits on the Niagara River, just east of Ontario, Canada. Whoever owned the $650,000 property appeared neither to reside there nor care about upkeep, its lawn unmowed to the point of being "unmanageable," locals later told police. Even odder, they told the cops, were the monthly arrivals of individuals driving expensive-looking cars, only for the visitors to leave a few days later.

Then in the early hours of September 21 last year, the house became the subject of a police raid, according to a recently unsealed search warrant obtained by Forbes. In the middle of the night, using a surveillance tool that could "recognize drone signatures, map their flight path and identify starting and stopping points via GPS," border patrol watched an unmanned aerial vehicle flying over the Niagara River and into the house's garden, according to the warrant. When the cops arrived, the pilot and two other individuals tried to flee, but were caught and taken in for questioning. The police found that attached to the drone was a package of MDMA with an approximate street value of $110,000. A subsequent search of the house recovered multiple webcams watching over entrances and exits, a number of commercial drones and paracord, a kind of rope originally designed for parachutes.

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/01/reverse-engineering-conditional-jump.html

Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978 and it had a huge influence on computing. I'm reverse-engineering the 8086 by examining the circuitry on its silicon die and in this blog post I take a look at how conditional jumps are implemented. Conditional jumps are an important part of any instruction set, changing the flow of execution based on a condition. Although this instruction may seem simple, it involves many parts of the CPU: the 8086 uses microcode along with special-purpose condition logic.

Most people think of machine instructions as the basic steps that a computer performs. However, many processors (including the 8086) have another layer of software underneath: microcode. One of the hardest parts of computer design is creating the control logic that directs the processor for each step of an instruction. The straightforward approach is to build a circuit from flip-flops and gates that moves through the various steps and generates the control signals. However, this circuitry is complicated, error-prone, and hard to design.

The alternative is microcode: instead of building the control circuitry from complex logic gates, the control logic is largely replaced with code. To execute a machine instruction, the computer internally executes several simpler micro-instructions, specified by the microcode. In other words, microcode forms another layer between the machine instructions and the hardware. The main advantage of microcode is that it turns design of control circuitry into a programming task instead of a difficult logic design task.

The 8086 uses a hybrid approach: although the 8086 uses microcode, much of the instruction functionality is implemented with gate logic. This approach removed duplication from the microcode and kept the microcode small enough for 1978 technology. In a sense, the microcode is parameterized. For instance, the microcode can specify a generic Arithmetic/Logic Unit (ALU) operation, and the gate logic determines from the instruction which ALU (Arithmetic/Logic Unit) operation to perform. More relevant to this blog post, the microcode can specify a generic conditional test and the gate logic determines which condition to use. Although this made the 8086's gate logic more complicated, the tradeoff was worthwhile.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Work is part of research and conservation project Operation Night Watch:

One of the most famous paintings from the Dutch Golden Age is Rembrandt van Rijn's 1642 masterpiece The Night Watch. An interdisciplinary team of researchers has conducted a fresh, in-depth analysis and found rare traces of a compound called lead formate in the painting, according to a recent paper published in the journal Angewandte Chemie. The work was part of the Rijksmuseum's Operation Night Watch, the largest multidisciplinary research and conservation project yet undertaken for Rembrandt's famous painting, devoted to its long-term preservation.

"In Operation Night Watch we focus on Rembrandt's painting technique, the condition of the painting, and how we can best preserve it for future generations," said Katrien Keune, head of science at Rijksmuseum and professor at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). "The lead formate gives us valuable new clues about the possible use of lead-based oil paint by Rembrandt and the potential impact of oil-based varnishes from past conservation treatments, and the complex chemistry of historic oil paintings."

Science has become a valuable tool for art conservationists, especially various X-ray imaging methods. For instance, in 2019, we reported on how many of the oil paintings at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, had been developing tiny, pin-sized blisters, almost like acne, for decades. Conservationists and scholars initially assumed the blemishes were grains of sand trapped in the paint. Chemists concluded that the blisters are actually metal carboxylate soaps, the result of a chemical reaction between metal ions in the lead and zinc pigments and fatty acids in the binding medium used in the paint. The soaps start to clump together to form the blisters and migrate through the paint film.

owl writes:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

[...] Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for "cat bed" are 50% ads.

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/openai-and-microsoft-reaffirm-shared-quest-for-powerful-ai-with-new-investment/

On Monday, AI tech darling OpenAI announced that it received a "multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment" from Microsoft, following previous investments in 2019 and 2021. While the two companies have not officially announced a dollar amount on the deal, the news follows rumors of a $10 billion investment that emerged two weeks ago.

[...] "The past three years of our partnership have been great," said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in a Microsoft news release. "Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone."

In particular, the two companies say they will work on supercomputing at scale to accelerate OpenAI's research, integrating OpenAI's technology into more Microsoft products and "digital experiences" and keeping Microsoft as OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider with Azure. "OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train its breakthrough models, which are now deployed in Azure to power category-defining AI products like GitHub Copilot, DALL·E 2, and ChatGPT," wrote Microsoft.

Related:
Microsoft Announces 10,000 Layoffs, 5% of its Workforce

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Brain interfaces could let paralyzed people speak at almost normal speeds.:

In the new research, the Stanford team wanted to know if neurons in the motor cortex contained useful information about speech movements, too. That is, could they detect how "subject T12" was trying to move her mouth, tongue, and vocal cords as she attempted to talk?

These are small, subtle movements, and according to Sabes, one big discovery is that just a few neurons contained enough information to let a computer program predict, with good accuracy, what words the patient was trying to say. That information was conveyed by Shenoy's team to a computer screen, where the patient's words appeared as they were spoken by the computer.

The new result builds on previous work by Edward Chang at the University of California, San Francisco, who has written that speech involves the most complicated movements people make. We push out air, add vibrations that make it audible, and form it into words with our mouth, lips, and tongue. To make the sound "f," you put your top teeth on your lower lip and push air out—just one of dozens of mouth movements needed to speak.

Chang previously used electrodes placed on top of the brain to permit a volunteer to speak through a computer, but in their preprint, the Stanford researchers say their system is more accurate and three to four times faster.

"Our results show a feasible path forward to restore communication to people with paralysis at conversational speeds," wrote the researchers, who included Shenoy and neurosurgeon Jaimie Henderson.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

An extra seat will accommodate a NASA astronaut left stranded after a micrometeorite damaged a Russian Soyuz spacecraft last month:

A seat liner from the damaged Soyuz MS-22 capsule at the International Space Station has been relocated to Endurance, converting the SpaceX Crew Dragon to a five-person "lifeboat" should the crew be forced to evacuate in the event of an extreme emergency.

The International Space Station mission management team made the decision to relocate the seat liner from Soyuz MS-22 to the Endurance Crew Dragon on January 12, according to a NASA statement. The seat liner in question belongs to NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who flew to the ISS on September 21, 2022 aboard the Russian Soyuz craft. This is being done to "provide lifeboat capabilities in the event Rubio would need to return to Earth because of an emergency evacuation from the space station," the space agency said.

An apparent micrometeorite struck the Soyuz in December, damaging its cooling system. Roscosmos deemed the spacecraft as being unsafe for a crew ride back to Earth, forcing the Russian space agency and NASA to come up with a solution. That solution is MS-23—an uncrewed replacement Soyuz vehicle that won't launch to the ISS until February 22 at the earliest.

[...] The replacement MS-23 Soyuz is expected to arrive at the ISS in late February, but that doesn't mean the three-person crew will immediately return to Earth. A replacement crew was supposed to fly on MS-23, but that mission now likely won't fly until the fall of 2023. A consequence of this is that the MS-22 trio might have to stay on the ISS for an entire year. Dina Contella, ISS program operations integration manager, hinted as much during a news briefing held on Tuesday, saying Rubio, Prokopyev, and Petelin will "probably" return to Earth in September, as reported in Ars Technica.

Original Submission