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hubie writes:

UChicago research offers first concrete explanation for difference, and show it is getting even stormier over time:

For centuries, sailors who had been all over the world knew where the most fearsome storms of all lay in wait: the Southern Hemisphere. "The waves ran mountain-high and threatened to overwhelm [the ship] at every roll," wrote one passenger on an 1849 voyage rounding the tip of South America.

Many years later, scientists poring over satellite data could finally put numbers behind sailors' intuition: The Southern Hemisphere is indeed stormier than the Northern, by about 24%, in fact. But no one knew why.

A new study led by University of Chicago climate scientist Tiffany Shaw lays out the first concrete explanation for this phenomenon. Shaw and her colleagues found two major culprits: ocean circulation and the large mountain ranges in the Northern Hemisphere.

The study also found that this storminess asymmetry has increased since the beginning of the satellite era in the 1980s. The increase was shown to be qualitatively consistent with climate change forecasts from physics-based models.

[...] Looking over past decades of observations, they found that the storminess asymmetry has increased over the satellite era beginning in the 1980s. That is, the Southern Hemisphere is getting even stormier, whereas the change on average in the Northern Hemisphere has been negligible.

[...] It may be surprising that such a deceptively simple question—why one hemisphere is stormier than another—went unanswered for so long, but Shaw explained that the field of weather and climate physics is relatively young compared to many other fields.

But having a deep understanding of the physical mechanisms behind the climate and its response to human-caused changes, such as those laid out in this study, are crucial for predicting and understanding what will happen as climate change accelerates.

Journal Reference:
Tiffany A. Shaw, Osamu Miyawaki, and Aaron Donohoe, Stormier Southern Hemisphere induced by topography and ocean circulation, PNAS, 119, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2123512119

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Study: When employees don't have to commute, they work:

When employees are allowed to work remotely, they most often use the time they would have spent commuting to the office working.

On average, employees save 72 minutes in commute time every day when they're allowed to work from home rather than in the office, according to the Global Survey of Working Arrangements (G-SWA) study performed by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

"That's a large time savings, especially when multiplied by hundreds of millions of workers around the world," the study said. "These results suggest that much of the time savings flow back to employers, and that children and other caregiving recipients also benefit."

On average, those who work from home devote 40% of their commute time savings to primary and secondary job tasks, 34% to leisure, and 11% to caregiving.

[...] The data was collected from a survey of about 19,000 to 35,000 employees based on two survey periods. The G-SWA survey took place in 15 countries in late July and early August 2021 and in an overlapping set of 25 countries in late January and early February 2022. The workers surveyed were 20 to 59 years of age, and all had finished primary school. In addition to basic questions on demographics and labor market outcomes, the survey asked about current and planned work-from-home levels, commute time, and more.

Other recent studies have arrived at similar conclusions.

upstart writes:

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU security crusade:

Opinion: The European Union has a commendable love for the safety of its citizens. Armed with the keys to a market of 300 million of the world's richest consumers, the EU has merely to scent danger to bravely regulate. Food, consumer goods, financial markets and data processing: if it can bite the punter, the EU has a legal muzzle to hand.

[...] The EU has now turned its attention to cybersecurity and more especially the lack thereof. It's certainly dangerous enough to merit attention. A proposed Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) making its way through Brussels says that for "products with digital elements" to be allowed on the EU market, manufacturers have to demonstrate they follow best practice in four areas. These are improving the security of a product through the whole life cycle, following a coherent cybersecurity framework to measure compliance, demonstrate transparency about cybersecurity efforts, and lastly to make sure customers can use products securely.

Which sounds fair enough, considering some of the horrors visited upon us in the past – and today. Cheap "smart" electronics running out-of-date Android that nobody's patched since Noah? Phones studded with "I bring you the best wishes of the People's Liberation Army" mystery-meat bloatware? Big name, big ticket office software that keeps making headlines for all the wrong reasons? Who could argue with bringing these into line?

There are just two questions that need to be answered: will the proposed regulations do the job they set out to do, and what effect will they have on the market? Here, it's not so much the devil in the details as the entire population of all seven layers of Dante's Inferno.

MSG probed over use of facial recognition to eject lawyers from show venues

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/msg-probed-over-use-of-facial-recognition-to-eject-lawyers-from-show-venues/

The operator of Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall is being probed by New York's attorney general over the company's use of facial recognition technology to identify and exclude lawyers from events. AG Letitia James' office said the policy may violate civil rights laws.
[...]
In December, attorney Kelly Conlon was denied entry into Radio City Music Hall in New York when she accompanied her daughter's Girl Scout troop to a Rockettes show. Conlon wasn't personally involved in any lawsuits against MSG but is a lawyer for a firm that "has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment," NBC New York reported.

upstart writes:

A Tiny but Deadly Radioactive Capsule Has Gone Missing in Australia:

The western end of Australia is dominated by a sweltering desert of ochre-colored soil and hearty shrubs, but there's something new hiding in the outback: a radioactive capsule. Australian officials are frantically searching for the object, which was being transported between two mines when it went missing. They're warning people in the region to steer clear of the object if they see it, as even brief exposure can be dangerous.

The capsule is tiny, just 6 x 8 mm in size. Inside the ceramic enclosure is a sample of cesium-137, a highly radioactive isotope that is used in mining equipment. Australia's Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES) says the capsule was being moved from a mine near the town of Newman to one near Perth earlier this month. However, the capsule never made it, suggesting it fell off the truck somewhere on road.

Despite being so small, the capsule has a big radioactive footprint, according to DFES. The cesium-137 inside emits about 2 millisieverts per hour, which is the same dose as 10 medical X-rays or an entire year of normal background radiation at sea level. Officials say that holding the container even for a short time could cause radiation burns and increase the risk of severe illness.

[...] A similar radioactive capsule was lost in a Ukrainian quarry in the late 1970s. Authorities there gave up after a week of searching and went back to business as usual. The capsule eventually ended up in concrete that was used to construct an apartment building in the eastern city of Kramatorsk. From 1980 to 1989, the cesium-137 poisoned the residents of apartment 85. In all, four people died of leukemia, and 17 more received heavy doses of radiation before the object was found.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

SpaceX said it loaded more than 10 million pounds of fuel onto the vehicle:

SpaceX on Tuesday confirmed that it fully fueled its Starship launch system during a critical test on Monday and is now preparing to take the next step toward launch.

The company shared images and video of its fully fueled Starship upper stage and Super Heavy first stage in South Texas. The shiny, stainless steel vehicles appeared frosty as they were loaded with super-cold liquid oxygen and methane propellants.

During this "wet-dress rehearsal" test, SpaceX said it loaded more than 10 million pounds (about 4.6 million kg) of propellant onboard the vehicle, which, when fully stacked, stands 120 meters tall. Essentially then, over the course of a little more than an hour, the company filled a skinny, 30-story skyscraper with combustible liquid propellants—and nothing blew up.

[...] Nevertheless, it is clear that SpaceX is making excellent progress toward the much-anticipated liftoff of Starship, which will be the heaviest, tallest, most capable, and most powerful rocket to ever take off from Earth.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scheduled for launch in October, AstroForge's prospector spacecraft will seek to inspect an asteroid located 22 million miles from Earth:

AstroForge has announced an ambitious commercial mission to observe a distant asteroid—an important step for the California startup as it strives to become the world's first deep space mining company.

AstroForge seeks to capitalize on the rapidly evolving state of the spaceflight industry and become the first firm to mine for metals in deep space. The California startup raised $13 million in seed funding last year—its first year of existence—and has now formally announced two mining-related missions that are scheduled to launch within the calendar year. The company is partnering with several others to make it happen, including OrbAstro, Dawn Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines.

Space is the place, as Sun Ra famously said, and it most certainly has plenty to offer, including rare-earth metals like platinum, gold, iridium, palladium, and osmium, among other minerals. Materials on a single asteroid could fetch trillions of dollars, making asteroid mining a tantalizing prospect. This idea has been around for decades, but the excessive costs associated with the endeavor have largely made it impossible. That's changing, however, as it's never been more affordable to launch rockets and manufacture satellites and spacecraft.

[...] "With a finite supply of precious metals on Earth, we have no other choice than to look to deep space to source cost-effective and sustainable materials," Matt Gialich, CEO and co-founder of AstroForge, said in a statement.

upstart writes:

Data Privacy Day rolls around year after year, and data privacy breaches likewise:

There are continued breaches of data privacy, and according to Omdia's Security Breaches Tracker, approximately two-thirds of security breaches involve data exposure, many of these of personally identifiable information (PII). Data Privacy Day serves to highlight the inadequacies of data protection and to support the confidentiality of information.

Omdia's Cybersecurity Decision Maker survey, conducted in the second quarter of 2022, found that 32% of organizations are "extremely confident" in their organization's security controls, and a further 58% describe themselves as "reasonably confident." However, this confidence is likely misplaced. The same survey found that 77% of organizations have suffered numerous security incidents and breaches, some with a severe impact on the organization. Realistically, strong security controls should be preventing some of these incidents and breaches.

[...] Better cyber hygiene would result in few breaches of data privacy; however, cyber hygiene is not a one-and-done task. Cyber hygiene can be defined as the good practice that all organizations can follow to minimize the opportunity for cybersecurity incidents to materialize. Examples include timely patching, password management, backups, and more.

[...] Data privacy legislation has been enacted around the world, and there are plenty of examples of breaches of data privacy legislation. A significant fine of €390 million was issued to Meta (which owns Facebook) for breaking EU data laws on using personal data to deliver targeted advertisements. The ruling rejected Meta's argument that when people engage with social media platforms, such as accepting terms and conditions, they are actually agreeing to receive personalized ads. The ruling was made this month (January 2023), and Meta plans to appeal the decision.

hubie writes:

New research in Science is showing how the rise of modern agriculture has turned a North American native plant, common waterhemp, into a problematic agricultural weed:

An international team led by researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) compared 187 waterhemp samples from modern farms and neighbouring wetlands with more than 100 historical samples dating as far back as 1820 that had been stored in museums across North America. Much like the sequencing of ancient human and neanderthal remains has resolved key mysteries about human history, studying the plant's genetic makeup over the last two centuries allowed the researchers to watch evolution in action across changing environments.

"The genetic variants that help the plant do well in modern agricultural settings have risen to high frequencies remarkably quickly since agricultural intensification in the 1960s," said first author Dr. Julia Kreiner, a postdoctoral researcher in UBC's Department of Botany.

The researchers discovered hundreds of genes across the weed's genome that aid its success on farms, with mutations in genes related to drought tolerance, rapid growth and resistance to herbicides appearing frequently. "The types of changes we're imposing in agricultural environments are so strong that they have consequences in neighbouring habitats that we'd usually think were natural," said Dr. Kreiner.

[...] Common waterhemp is native to North America and was not always a problematic plant. Yet in recent years, the weed has become nearly impossible to eradicate from farms thanks to genetic adaptations including herbicide resistance.

[...] Agricultural practices have also reshaped where particular genetic variants are found across the landscape. Over the last 60 years, a weedy southwestern variety has made an increasing progression eastward across North America, spreading their genes into local populations as a result of their competitive edge in agricultural contexts.

Journal Reference:
Julia M. Kreiner, Sergio M. Latorre, Hernán A. Burbano, et al., Rapid weed adaptation and range expansion in response to agriculture over the past two centuries, Science, 378, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abo7293

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/01/reverse-engineering-intel-8086.html

The 8086 processor was introduced in 1978 and has greatly influenced modern computing through the x86 architecture. One unusual instruction in this processor is HLT, which stops the processor and puts it in a halt state. In this blog post, I explain in detail how the halt circuitry is implemented and how it interacts with the 8086's architecture.

In this section, I'll explain how the HLT instruction is decoded and handled in the Execution Unit. The 8086 uses a combination of lookup ROMs, logic, and microcode to implement instructions. The process starts with the loader, a state machine that provides synchronization between the prefetch queue and the decoding circuitry. When an instruction byte is available, the loader provides a signal called First Clock that loads the instruction into the Instruction Register and starts the instruction decoding process.

Before microcode gets involved, the Group Decode ROM classifies instructions by producing about 15 signals, indicating properties such as instructions with a Mod R/M byte, instructions with a byte/word bit, instructions that always act on a byte, and so forth. For the HLT instruction, the Group Decode ROM provides two important signals. The first is one-byte logic (1BL), indicating that the instruction is one byte long and is implemented with logic circuitry rather than microcode.1 The second signal is produced for the HLT instruction specifically and generates the internal HALT signal. This signal travels to various parts of the 8086 to halt the processor.

Original Submission

hendrikboom writes:

I found this on one of Devuan's forums

There's a software package called Zeitgeist that's been finding its way into nearly every Linux and BSD package repository. It's also on Devuan. Be sure to read the note at the bottom of this post even if you are not impacted by this.

It reads your emails, it monitors the websites you visit, listens to private conversations, and logs the files on your computer. and then it shares this information freely over D-Bus to any application that wishes to use it. You are given no warning and have no option to say which software can access it, and which can't. Any software can access D-bus, including closed-source software like Discord or Telegram (whether they do or not, who knows).

From the description, it looks as if it is designed to make spyware's job easy. Do you have it on your system? Do you want it on your system?

[Editor's Comment: The package has been around for quite some time (since at least 2012) without any security problems being reported. Ubuntu's repo describes it as:

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the user's activities and events (files opened, websites visited, conversations held with other people, etc.) and makes the relevant information available to other applications.

It does not appear to be installed as default on the small number of distros that I have looked at but it might be installed on others.]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Intel's two biggest business units were hit hard during the last three months of 2022:

Poor sales of PC and server chips caused Intel's revenue for the fourth quarter of 2022 to dive 32% year on year, leading to a $664 million net loss for the quarter.

The outlook for Q1 of 2023 is not an optimistic one either, with CEO Pat Gelsinger telling analysts in a call, "Our results and our Q1 guidance are below what we expect of ourselves."

However, he said that Intel is "working diligently to address the challenges brought on by current demand trends" and the company continues to have confidence in its long-term plans and trajectory.

Intel took the biggest hits across its two largest business units, with the chip maker's Client Computing Group (CCG) and Data Center and AI group (DCAI) posting year-on-year revenue drops of 36% and 33%, respectively.

The CCG business unit, which makes desktop and laptop CPUs, posted $6.6 billion in revenue, down from $10.3 billion a year earlier. This freefall can largely be attributed to a significant and ongoing slump in the PC market. A report from IDC found that sales of PCs had fallen by 28.1% during the same period, findings that were echoed by research firms Canalys and Gartner, whose estimates showed a 29% and 28.5% drop, respectively. Gartner reported that this was the steepest decline since it started tracking the PC market in the mid-1990s.

This trend is likely to carry on into the first quarter of 2023, Gelsinger said on the call with analysts.

upstart writes:

Wizards of the Coast changes course, gamers win:

Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast will abandon attempts to alter the Open Gaming License (OGL). The announcement, made Friday, comes after weeks of virulent anger from fans and third-party publishers caused the story to make international headlines — and on the eve of a high-profile movie starring Chris Pine.

The OGL was developed and refined in the lead-up to D&D's 3rd edition, and a version of it has been in place for more than 20 years. It provides a legal framework by which people have been able to build their own tabletop RPGs alongside the Hasbro-owned brand. It has also buoyed the entire role-playing game industry, giving rise to popular products from Paizo, Kobold Press, and many individual creators. But proposed changes to the OGL, leaked to and first reported on by io9 on Jan. 5, seemed like they would create an adversarial relationship between Wizards and its community. The story has since made headlines around the world — including a nearly 10-minute segment this week on NPR's All Things Considered and lengthy write-ups by organizations such as CNBC.

Previously:

• Dungeons & Dragons' New OGL Will be 'Irrevocable' and Bring Mechanics to Creative Commons
• Dungeons & Dragons' New License Tightens its Grip on Competition

Original Submission

upstart writes:

That's conditional hands-free driving and only in Nevada for now:

At CES earlier this January, Mercedes announced that it would become the first car company to achieve certification from the SAE for a Level 3 driver assist system. That became official on Thursday when the automaker confirmed its Drive Pilot ADAS (automated driver assist system) now complies with the requirements of Nevada Chapter 482A, which governs the use of autonomous vehicle technology on the state's roads. That makes Drive Pilot the only legal Level 3 system in the US for the moment.

[...] Level 3 capabilities, as defined by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), would enable the vehicle to handle "all aspects of the driving" when engaged but still need the driver attentive enough to promptly take control if necessary. That's a big step up from the Level 2 systems we see today such as Tesla's "Full Self-Driving," Ford's Blue Cruise, and GM's Super Cruise. All of those are essentially extra-capable highway cruise controls where the driver must maintain their attention on driving, typically keeping their hands on or at least near the wheel, and be responsible for what the ADAS is doing while it's doing it. That's a far cry from the Knight Rider-esque ADAS outlook Tesla is selling and what Level 2 autonomy is actually capable of.

[...] Drive Pilot is only available on the 2024 S-Class and EQS Sedan for now. Those are already in production and the first cars should reach the Vegas strip in the second half of this year.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

In three-dimensional space, the surface of a black hole must be a sphere. But a new result shows that in higher dimensions, an infinite number of configurations are possible.

The cosmos seems to have a preference for things that are round. Planets and stars tend to be spheres because gravity pulls clouds of gas and dust toward the center of mass. The same holds for black holes — or, to be more precise, the event horizons of black holes — which must, according to theory, be spherically shaped in a universe with three dimensions of space and one of time.

But do the same restrictions apply if our universe has higher dimensions, as is sometimes postulated — dimensions we cannot see but whose effects are still palpable? In those settings, are other black hole shapes possible?

The answer to the latter question, mathematics tells us, is yes. Over the past two decades, researchers have found occasional exceptions to the rule that confines black holes to a spherical shape.

Now a new paper goes much further, showing in a sweeping mathematical proof that an infinite number of shapes are possible in dimensions five and above. The paper demonstrates that Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity can produce a great variety of exotic-looking, higher-dimensional black holes.

[...] As with so many stories about black holes, this one begins with Stephen Hawking — specifically, with his 1972 proof that the surface of a black hole, at a fixed moment in time, must be a two-dimensional sphere. (While a black hole is a three-dimensional object, its surface has just two spatial dimensions.)

Little thought was given to extending Hawking's theorem until the 1980s and '90s, when enthusiasm grew for string theory — an idea that requires the existence of perhaps 10 or 11 dimensions. Physicists and mathematicians then started to give serious consideration to what these extra dimensions might imply for black hole topology.