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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Musk is working on enabling money transfers in Twitter

Just like Weibo. Similar to Applepay. The ultimate goal of this expansion is to transform Twitter into a comprehensive payment gateway solution, incorporating traditional bank accounts, cryptocurrencies, and other financial services.Musk's goal is to generate $1.3 billion in payments revenue for Twitter by 2028. The news came after Musk revealed he will to allow users to tweet a whopping 4,000 characters making Twitter posts more like Facebook. If this works it could be the western version of Weibo opening up a dominant income stream for the beleaguered platform.

Over the past few months, Twitter has been working towards obtaining the necessary licenses to allow money transfers between its users. This would allow users to send and receive payments through their Twitter profiles.

[...] It remains uncertain whether Twitter will be granted the necessary licenses and if it will successfully navigate through this new venture. Perhaps Musk is merely testing the waters and gauging the market before making a full-fledged commitment, as he has done with other changes he has proposed in the past.

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upstart writes:

The feds' actions saved victims over $130 million:

What just happened? In what could be described as beautifully ironic, a notorious ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gang has been brought down after the FBI infiltrated its systems, disrupted operations, and seized its sites. Or, as the Deputy US Attorney General put it, they "hacked the hackers."

Speaking at a news conference, US Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Deputy U.S. Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced that the government secretly infiltrated the Hive ransomware gang's networks in July 2022 before launching a six-month monitoring operation.

During this infiltration, the government was able to steal more than 300 decryption keys from Hive and distribute them to victims who were under attack, preventing around $130 million in ransom payments, including $5 million from a Texas school district. The feds also distributed over 1,000 additional decryption keys to previous Hive victims.

The FBI used its access to Hive's infrastructure to warn targets about impending attacks, giving them time to bolster their systems and prepare. Hive's Tor payment and data leak sites were also seized.

As per Bleeping Computer, the FBI gained access to two dedicated servers and one virtual private server at a hosting provider in California that were leased using email addresses belonging to Hive members. In a coordinated move, Dutch police also gained access to two dedicated backup servers hosted in the Netherlands. Law enforcement confirmed that these servers acted as the main data leak site, negotiation site, and web panels for Hive and its affiliates.

[...] The gang had collected more than $100 million in ransomware payments, and while no arrests have been announced, a department official suggested that would soon change. Unlike other ransomware operators, Hive never stated any intent to avoid targeting hospitals or emergency services.

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upstart writes:

TikTok's CEO agrees to testify before Congress for the first time in March:

As Congress prepares to vote on a nationwide TikTok ban next month, it looks like that ban may already be doomed to fail. The biggest hurdle likely won't be mustering enough votes, but drafting a ban that doesn't conflict with measures passed in the 1980s to protect the flow of ideas from hostile foreign nations during the Cold War.

These decades-old measures, known as the Berman amendments, were previously invoked by TikTok creators suing to block Donald Trump's attempted TikTok ban in 2020. Now, a spokesperson for Representative Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the incoming chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Ars that these measures are believed to be the biggest obstacle for lawmakers keen on blocking the app from operating in the United States.

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that lawmakers' dilemma in enacting a ban would be finding a way to block TikTok without "shutting down global exchanges of content—or inviting retaliation against US platforms and media." Some lawmakers think that's achievable by creating a narrow carve-out for TikTok in new legislation, but others, like McCaul, think a more permanent solution to protect national security interests long-term would require crafting more durable and thoughtful legislation that would allow for bans of TikTok and all apps beholden to hostile foreign countries.

upstart writes:

Fermi Space Telescope Detects First-Ever Gamma-Ray Eclipses in 'Spider' Systems:

Pulsars are some of the most extreme and fascinating objects in the universe, and NASA's Fermi Space Telescope has just unlocked a new way to study them. Using the orbiting observatory, astronomers have identified the first gamma-ray eclipses in "spider systems," consisting of a pulsar and a smaller main sequence star. These are so-named as a reference to the arachnid tendency to consume one's companion, which is what happens in these solar systems, too.

Before Fermi came online in 2008, science knew of just a few pulsars that emitted gamma rays. Today, Fermi has identified more than 300 of them. An international team of experts combed through a decade of Fermi data in search of something specific: a gamma-ray eclipse. The end goal is to accurately calculate the mass and velocity of these extreme stellar remnants, and the eclipses help get us there.

In some alien solar systems, there are two stars that age at very different rates. That can lead to a situation in which the larger of the pair may go supernova while the smaller one is still fusing hydrogen like the sun. This can lead to a spider system — the pulsar feeds off its smaller companion while superheating one side of it. According to NASA, scientists even have sub-categories based on the relationship between the two. A "Black widow" system has a star with less than 5% of the sun's mass. A "Redback" spider system has a stellar companion weighing between 10% and 50% of a solar mass.

[...] The team believes that once the models are fine-tuned, Fermi will be able to answer some nagging questions about spider systems. For example, does the mass stolen from the companions make them the most massive population of pulsars? B1957 ended up smaller than we thought, but it could go the other way just as easily.

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upstart writes:

The countries have agreed to further restrict what chip-manufacturing equipment can be supplied to China:

The US has convinced two other countries to join it in expanding a ban on exports of chip-making technology to China, according to a report by Bloomberg. The move could cramp China's home-grown chip industry as there are few, if any, other sources for the sophisticated technologies required for modern semiconductor manufacturing.

As part of a broader trade war with China, the US sought for its chip technology embargo from Japan and the Netherlands, where some of the world's largest manufacturers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment are headquartered. It first imposed restrictions on exports of chips to China in 2015, extending them in 2021 and twice in 2022. The most recent restrictions were introduced in December.

It has already banned exports of artificial intelligence hardware, such as graphical processing units (GPUs), tensor processing units (TPUs) and other advanced application-specific integrated circuits (ASICS), and the latest extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) equipment used to make them, and the Dutch government has followed suit. The Netherlands is home to ASML, the only manufacturer of EUV tools.

The US has now persuaded the Netherlands and Japan join it in banning transfers of some slightly older deep ultraviolet lithography (DUV) equipment. ASML makes this too, while Japan is home to DUV equipment makers such as Canon, Nikon and Tokyo Electron Ltd., making the two countries key to the US plan to gnaw away at China's dominance in the broader microchip market.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/massive-yandex-code-leak-reveals-russian-search-engines-ranking-factors/

Nearly 45GB of source code files, allegedly stolen by a former employee, have revealed the underpinnings of Russian tech giant Yandex's many apps and services. It also revealed key ranking factors for Yandex's search engine, the kind almost never revealed in public.
[...]
As detailed by Buraks (in two threads), Yandex's engine favors pages that:

• Aren't too old
• Have a lot of organic traffic (unique visitors) and less search-driven traffic
• Have fewer numbers and slashes in their URL
• Have optimized code rather than "hard pessimization," with a "PR=0"
• Are hosted on reliable servers
• Happen to be Wikipedia pages or are linked from Wikipedia
• Are hosted or linked from higher-level pages on a domain
• Have keywords in their URL (up to three)

I'm not sure how different these differ from our own search engines. Does anyone have any insights?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The war in Ukraine has exposed that widely available, inexpensive drones are being used not just for targeted killings but for wholesale slaughter:

When the United States first fired a missile from an armed Predator drone at suspected Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan on November 14, 2001, it was clear that warfare had permanently changed. During the two decades that followed, drones became the most iconic instrument of the war on terror. Highly sophisticated, multimillion-dollar US drones were repeatedly deployed in targeted killing campaigns. But their use worldwide was limited to powerful nations.

Then, as the navigation systems and wireless technologies in hobbyist drones and consumer electronics improved, a second style of military drone appeared—not in Washington, but in Istanbul. And it caught the world's attention in Ukraine in 2022, when it proved itself capable of holding back one of the most formidable militaries on the planet.

[...] The TB2 is built in Turkey from a mix of domestically made parts and parts sourced from international commercial markets. Investigations of downed Bayraktars have revealed components sourced from US companies, including a GPS receiver made by Trimble, an airborne modem/transceiver made by Viasat, and a Garmin GNC 255 navigation radio. Garmin, which makes consumer GPS products, released a statement noting that its navigation unit found in TB2s "is not designed or intended for military use, and it is not even designed or intended for use in drones." But it's there.

Commercial technology makes the TB2 appealing for another reason: while the US-made Reaper drone costs $28 million, the TB2 only costs about $5 million. Since its development in 2014, the TB2 has shown up in conflicts in Azerbaijan, Libya, Ethiopia, and now Ukraine. The drone is so much more affordable than traditional weaponry that Lithuanians have run crowdfunding campaigns to help buy them for Ukrainian forces.

upstart writes:

iPhone 14 Crash Detection false positives are now a problem in Japan:

False positives by the Crash Detection system in the iPhone 14 series is causing problems in Japan, with fire departments near skiing areas dealing with more emergency call-outs than normal due to the automated calls.

The Fire and Disaster Management Agency of the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry has put out a call for smartphone owners to be cautious about crash detection features in smartphones and other devices, due to an influx of automated attempts to call for help in situations when it's not needed.

The problem has been an issue for the Fire Department of Kita-Alps Nagano, which covers five municipalities in Nagano Prefecture, reports the Yomiuri Shimbun on Sunday. Between December 16 and January 23, 919 emergency calls were made, but 134 were false calls, with most triggered by Crash Detection within a skiing area.

Gujo City Fire Department in Gifu Prefecture had 351 emergency calls from January 1 to January 23, but 135 of the calls were similarly false alarms.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A new study reveals the profound properties of a simple metal alloy:

Scientists have measured the highest toughness ever recorded, of any material, while investigating a metallic alloy made of chromium, cobalt, and nickel (CrCoNi). Not only is the metal extremely ductile – which, in materials science, means highly malleable – and impressively strong (meaning it resists permanent deformation), its strength and ductility improve as it gets colder. This runs counter to most other materials in existence.

The team, led by researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published a study describing their record-breaking findings in Science on Dec. 2, 2022. "When you design structural materials, you want them to be strong but also ductile and resistant to fracture," said project co-lead Easo George, the Governor's Chair for Advanced Alloy Theory and Development at ORNL and the University of Tennessee. "Typically, it's a compromise between these properties. But this material is both, and instead of becoming brittle at low temperatures, it gets tougher."

CrCoNi is a subset of a class of metals called high entropy alloys (HEAs). All the alloys in use today contain a high proportion of one element with lower amounts of additional elements added, but HEAs are made of an equal mix of each constituent element. These balanced atomic recipes appear to bestow some of these materials with an extraordinarily high combination of strength and ductility when stressed, which together make up what is termed "toughness." HEAs have been a hot area of research since they were first developed about 20 years ago, but the technology required to push the materials to their limits in extreme tests was not available until recently.

upstart writes:

Russia's Elbrus-8SV CPU goes retro gaming:

Russia doesn't have many homegrown processors — the Elbrus and Baikal are probably the two most popular chips in the country. While they may not be among the best CPUs, their importance has grown now that major chipmakers AMD and Intel halted processor sales to the country. They're also apparently capable of gaming, as we can see from a series of gaming benchmarks from a Russian YouTuber. They even used Russia's own domestic operating system for the tests.

The Elbrus-8SV, a product of TSMC's 28nm process node, comes with eight cores at 1.5 GHz. Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies(MCST) developed the Elbrus-8SV to be the successor to the original Elbrus-8S, which had eight cores at 1.3 GHz. As a result, the Elbrus-8SV arrives with double the performance of the Elbrus-8S. The Elbrus-8SV offers 576 GFLOPs of single precision and 288 GFLOPs of double precision. In addition, the octa-core processor rocks 16 MB of L3 cache shared between each core, contributing to 2 MB per core.

By default, the Elbrus-8SV supports up to four channels of DDR4-2400 ECC memory with a memory throughput of 68.3 GBps. It's a significant upgrade over the Elbrus-8S that embraced DDR3-1600 memory. The Elbrus-8SV's attributes may not sound impressive, but there aren't many options in the Russian market.

YouTube channel Elbrus PC Play (opens in new tab) put the Elbrus-8SV through its paces in some childhood classic titles, such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. The reviewer paired the Elbrus-8SV processor with 32 GB of DDR4 ECC memory and an aging Radeon RX 580. The test system was on Russia's domestic Elbrus OS 7.1 operating system, based on Linux 5.4.

upstart writes:

U.S. Sanctions Against China Could Hurt Own Domestic Industry: SIA:

While the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) — the organization that represents 99% of chip companies in America — understands how important national security is, it believes that curbs against potentially hostile nations could hurt the U.S. semiconductor industry as a whole.

After the U.S. government imposed strict sanctions against Chinese chip and supercomputer sectors, various semiconductor companies lost some $240 billion of stock value nearly overnight. Among those who suffered are various companies, including developers of electronics design automation (EDA) tools, chip designers, wafer fab equipment (WFE) producers, and chipmakers themselves. Without money from Chinese clients, the U.S. semiconductor industry will certainly live and prosper, but with them, it would develop quicker, SIA notes.

"U.S. semiconductor companies are dependent on a "virtuous cycle" of innovation that includes large investments into research and development and access to global markets," a press release by SIA reads. "Historically, U.S. semiconductor companies have consistently invested about one-fifth of their revenues in research and development, among the highest shares of any industry."

So it's been awhile since I last wrote, and I'm a bit overdue for a status update. So, let me give you all the short version on what's been going on.

First, I've been doing a lot of backend work to drastically reduce the size of the SoylentNews bill month to month. We had a lot of infrastructure that was either unnecessary, or have gotten so many free tier upgrades that they were being vastly underutilized. Along the way, I've given a lot of fine tuning to bits, although I won't say its been problem free, since we went a few weeks without working sidebars. I'm truly sorry for the delays in getting up and running. My personal life chose to become very exciting in December, and I'm still dealing with the fallout of that entire mess. As such, what I had planned went a bit pear-shaped, and I went unexpectedly radio silent. ...

More past the break ...

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Australian authorities on Wednesday found a radioactive capsule that was lost in the vast Outback after nearly a week-long search along a 1,400 km (870-mile) stretch of highway. The capsule was taken to a secure facility in Perth. The radioactive capsule was part of a gauge used to measure the density of iron ore feed from Rio Tinto's Gudai-Darri mine in the state's remote Kimberley region. The silver capsule, 6 mm in diameter and 8 mm long, contains Caesium-137 which emits radiation equal to 10 X-rays per hour.

[...] Officials from Western Australia's emergency response department, defence authorities, radiation specialists and others have been combing the a stretch of highway for the tiny capsule that was lost in transit more than two weeks ago.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Nepenthes are tropical pitcher plants which are known for trapping and digesting not only insects but even small mammals and amphibians. In some environments and microclimates where prey is scarce, several species have recently been found to double their nitrogen intake not from trapping visiting animals but by trapping their excrement as they feed on nectar provided by the traps.

"A handful of Nepenthes species have evolved away from carnivory towards a diet of animal scats," says Alastair Robinson, a botanist from the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria in Australia.

"We found that nitrogen capture is more than two times greater in species that capture mammal droppings than in other Nepenthes."

The team looked at six species and four hybrids of Nepenthes in Malaysian Borneo, analyzing tissue samples to look at the amount of nitrogen and carbon that had been captured from outside the plants.

This Species of Carnivorous Plant Evolved Into a Toilet And Is Now Winning at Life. Science Alert.

The collection of mammal faeces clearly represents a highly effective strategy for heterotrophic nitrogen gain in Nepenthes. Species with adaptations for capturing mammal excreta occur exclusively at high elevation (i.e. are typically summit-occurring) where previous studies suggest invertebrate prey are less abundant and less frequently captured. As such, we propose this strategy may maximize nutritional return by specializing towards ensuring the collection and retention of few but higher-value N sources in environments where invertebrate prey may be scarce.

Capture of mammal excreta by Nepenthes is an effective heterotrophic nutrition strategy. Annals of Botany

Previously:
(2021) Venus Flytraps Produce Magnetic Fields When They Eat
(2020) How Venus Flytraps Snap
(2019) Little Swamp of Horrors? Researchers Find Salamander-Eating Plants in Ontario, Canada

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Unused bandwidth in neurons can be tapped to control extra limbs:

What could you do with an extra limb? Consider a surgeon performing a delicate operation, one that needs her expertise and steady hands—all three of them. As her two biological hands manipulate surgical instruments, a third robotic limb that's attached to her torso plays a supporting role. Or picture a construction worker who is thankful for his extra robotic hand as it braces the heavy beam he's fastening into place with his other two hands. Imagine wearing an exoskeleton that would let you handle multiple objects simultaneously, like Spiderman's Dr. Octopus. Or contemplate the out-there music a composer could write for a pianist who has 12 fingers to spread across the keyboard.

Such scenarios may seem like science fiction, but recent progress in robotics and neuroscience makes extra robotic limbs conceivable with today's technology. Our research groups at Imperial College London and the University of Freiburg, in Germany, together with partners in the European project NIMA, are now working to figure out whether such augmentation can be realized in practice to extend human abilities. The main questions we're tackling involve both neuroscience and neurotechnology: Is the human brain capable of controlling additional body parts as effectively as it controls biological parts? And if so, what neural signals can be used for this control?

[...] Two practical questions stand out: Can we achieve neural control of extra robotic limbs concurrently with natural movement, and can the system work without the user's exclusive concentration? If the answer to either of these questions is no, we won't have a practical technology, but we'll still have an interesting new tool for research into the neuroscience of motor control. If the answer to both questions is yes, we may be ready to enter a new era of human augmentation. For now, our (biological) fingers are crossed.

Original Submission