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NotSanguine writes:

John Brodkin at Ars Technica is reporting on the shady practices of ISPs.

Ryan Grewell, who runs a small wireless Internet service provider in Ohio, last month received an email that confirmed some of his worst suspicions about cable companies.

Grewell, founder and general manager of Smart Way Communications, had heard from some of his customers that the Federal Communications Commission's new broadband map falsely claimed fiber Internet service was available at their homes from another company called Jefferson County Cable. Those customer reports spurred Grewell to submit a number of challenges to the FCC in an attempt to correct errors in Smart Way's service area.

One of Grewell's challenges elicited a response from Jefferson County Cable executive Bob Loveridge, who apparently thought Grewell was a resident at the challenged address rather than a competitor.

"You challenged that we do not have service at your residence and indeed we don't today," Loveridge wrote in a January 9 email that Grewell shared with Ars. "With our huge investment in upgrading our service to provide xgpon we reported to the BDC [Broadband Data Collection] that we have service at your residence so that they would not allocate addition [sic] broadband expansion money over [the] top of our private investment in our plant."
[...]
Speaking to Ars in a phone interview, Grewell said, "This cable company happened to just say the quiet part out loud." He called it "a blatant attempt at blocking anyone else from getting funding in an area they intend to serve."

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/01/understanding-x86s-decimal-adjust-after.html

I've been looking at the DAA machine instruction on x86 processors, a special instruction for binary-coded decimal arithmetic. Intel's manuals document each instruction in detail, but the DAA description doesn't make much sense. I ran an extensive assembly-language test of DAA on a real machine to determine exactly how the instruction behaves. In this blog post, I explain how the instruction works, in case anyone wants a better understanding.

The DAA (Decimal Adjust AL1 after Addition) instruction is designed for use with packed BCD (Binary-Coded Decimal) numbers. The idea behind BCD is to store decimal numbers in groups of four bits, with each group encoding a digit 0-9 in binary. You can fit two decimal digits in a byte; this format is called packed BCD. For instance, the decimal number 23 would be stored as hex 0x23 (which turns out to be decimal 35).

The 8086 doesn't implement BCD addition directly. Instead, you use regular binary addition and then DAA fixes the result. For instance, suppose you're adding decimal 23 and 45. In BCD these are 0x23 and 0x45 with the binary sum 0x68, so everything seems straightforward. But, there's a problem with carries. For instance, suppose you add decimal 26 and 45 in BCD. Now, 0x26 + 0x45 = 0x6b, which doesn't match the desired answer of 0x71. The problem is that a 4-bit value has a carry at 16, while a decimal digit has a carry at 10. The solution is to add a correction factor of the difference, 6, to get the correct BCD result: 0x6b + 6 = 0x71.

Intel Cuts Pay to Cut Costs

upstart writes:

Intel Cuts Pay to Cut Costs:

New intel from Intel says that some employees at the company will be taking a pay cut—even the CEO.

Layoffs are ravaging the tech industry due to the wildly abstract threat posed by "the economy," but Intel is taking a different approach. Instead of laying off thousands of its workforce, the company has seemingly decided to make sweeping pay cuts from 5% to 25%.

Dylan Patel first reported on the pay cuts in his newsletter SemiAnalysis yesterday. Patel says that multiple employees have relayed to him that Intel is looking to cut costs to meet its quarterly dividend, and some employees are the ones footing the bill. According to a source within Intel, employees below and including Principal Engineer will be receiving a 5% pay cut with the exception of hourly and junior-level employees, who will not be affected by the cuts. Glassdoor and a Google Jobs posting reveal that Principal Engineers can make upwards of $170,000 at a minimum.

Likewise, VPs are taking a 10% hit, the executive leadership team is taking a 15% cut, and CEO Pat Geslinger will cut his salary by 25%. In addition to the pay cuts, there will be no quarterly or annual bonuses for now, merit-based raises are paused, and 401k match is is being reduced from 5% to 2.5%. Intel is still reportedly planning to lay off several hundred employees in California according to local media, which is still drastically less than other tech companies.

And it isn't only pay that is being cut...

upstart writes:

Twitter is replacing free access to its API with a new paid tier:

Twitter will no longer provide free access to the Twitter API from February 9th. As announced by the official Twitter Developer account late Wednesday night, Elon Musk's social media hobby will stop supporting free access to the Twitter API and will instead provide a "paid basic tier." Twitter hasn't provided any information regarding pricing, but said that it will provide "more details on what you can expect next week."

[...] Twitter's API — abbreviated from Application Programming Interface — allows third parties to retrieve and analyze public Twitter data, which can then be used to create programmable bots and separate applications that connect to the platform, such as Pikaso, Thread Reader, and RemindMe_OfThis. Twitter currently provides limited free access to its API alongside premium, scalable tiers for developers that need to lift restrictions on accessing endpoints and unlock additional enterprise features. Twitter does not publicly disclose the price of its premium API tiers, though it was reported in February last year that fees start from $99 a month and increase depending on the level of access required.

[...] Many small developers have used Twitter's free API access to create fun tools and useful bots like novelty weather trackers and black-and-white image colorizers which are not intended to earn income or turn a profit. As a result, it's likely that many bots and tools utilizing Twitter's free API access will need to charge a fee or be shut down. It would also impact third parties like students and scientists who use the platform to study online behavior and gather information for research papers.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mummification specialists had distinct concoctions for specific parts of the body:

Scientists have unwrapped long-sought details of embalming practices that ancient Egyptians used to preserve dead bodies.

Clues came from analyses of chemical residue inside vessels from the only known Egyptian embalming workshop and nearby burial chambers. Mummification specialists who worked there concocted specific mixtures to embalm the head, wash the body, treat the liver and stomach, and prepare bandages that swathed the body, researchers report February 1 in Nature.

"Ancient Egyptian embalmers had extensive chemical knowledge and knew what substances to put on the skin to preserve it, even without knowing about bacteria and other microorganisms," Philipp Stockhammer, an archaeologist at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, said at a January 31 news conference.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

After being acquired by Red Ventures, staff say editorial firewalls have been repeatedly breached:

Last October, CNET's parent company, Red Ventures, held a cross-department meeting to discuss the AI writing software it had been building for months. The tool had been in testing internally ahead of public use on CNET, and Red Ventures' early results revealed several potential issues.

[...] Red Ventures executives laid out all of these issues at the meeting and then made a fateful decision: CNET began publishing AI-generated stories anyway.

"They were well aware of the fact that the AI plagiarized and hallucinated," a person who attended the meeting recalls. (Artificial intelligence tools have a tendency to insert false information into responses, which are sometimes called "hallucinations.") "One of the things they were focused on when they developed the program was reducing plagiarism. I suppose that didn't work out so well."

[...] Multiple former employees told The Verge of instances where CNET staff felt pressured to change stories and reviews due to Red Ventures' business dealings with advertisers. The forceful pivot toward Red Ventures' affiliate marketing-driven business model — which generates revenue when readers click links to sign up for credit cards or buy products — began clearly influencing editorial strategy, with former employees saying that revenue objectives have begun creeping into editorial conversations.

Reporters, including on-camera video hosts, have been asked to create sponsored content, making staff uncomfortable with the increasingly blurry lines between editorial and sales. One person told The Verge that they were made aware of Red Ventures' business relationship with a company whose product they were covering and that they felt pressured to change a review to be more favorable.

Original Submission

China balloon: US shoots down airship over Atlantic

The US has shot down a giant Chinese balloon that it says has been spying on key military sites across America.

The Department of Defense confirmed its fighter jets brought down the balloon over US territorial waters.

Three airports were shut and airspace was closed off the coast of North and South Carolina as the military carried out the operation on Saturday.

Footage on US TV networks showed the balloon falling to the sea after a small explosion.

An F-22 jet fighter engaged the high-altitude balloon with one missile - an AIM-9X Sidewinder - and it went down about six nautical miles off the US coast at 14:39 EST (19:39 GMT), a defence official told reporters.

US President Joe Biden had been under pressure to shoot the balloon down since defence officials first announced they were tracking it on Thursday.

Second balloon spotted over Latin America:

On Friday, the Pentagon said a second Chinese spy balloon had been spotted - this time over Latin America with reported sightings over Costa Rica and Venezuela.

upstart writes:

The marks might be one of the earliest examples of a coherent notational system:

As far back as roughly 25,000 years ago, Ice Age hunter-gatherers may have jotted down markings to communicate information about the behavior of their prey, a new study finds.

These markings include dots, lines and the symbol "Y," and often accompany images of animals. Over the last 150 years, the mysterious depictions, some dating back nearly 40,000 years, have been found in hundreds of caves across Europe.

Some archaeologists have speculated that the markings might relate to keeping track of time, but the specific purpose has remained elusive (SN: 7/9/19). Now, a statistical analysis, published January 5 in CambridgeArcheological Journal, presents evidence that past people may have been recording the mating and birthing schedule of local fauna.

By comparing the marks to the animals' life cycles, researchers showed that the number of dots or lines in a given image strongly correlates to the month of mating across all the analyzed examples, which included aurochs (an extinct species of wild cattle), bison, horses, mammoth and fish. What's more, the position of the symbol "Y" in a sequence was predictive of birth month, suggesting that "Y" signifies "to give birth."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Cord Cutting Is Hitting Comcast Harder Than Ever:

For a while there, everybody's least favorite cable company, Comcast, was weathering the cord cutting revolution fairly well. The company's losses on the cable TV side could simply be recouped over on its broadband side, where a monopoly protected it from having to actually, you know, try.

Things have shifted. Last year, Comcast saw a record 11 percent of its customer base cancel their Comcast cable service in favor of streaming video, over the air broadcasts, or free services like TikTok. And the company lost lost 440,000 traditional video customers in the fourth quarter of 2022 alone, a big bump over the 227,000 customers it lost in the last three months of 2021.

[...] At this rate Comcast may, someday in the not so distant future, be required to actually try.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The newly developed method links quantum and classical worlds and may enhance measurements for quantum computers and other applications:

[...] Our vision is made possible by the specialized cells in our retina that absorb light. But, can one see without any absorption of light or even a single photon? Surprisingly, the answer is yes.

Suppose you have a camera cartridge that could hold a roll of photographic film. The film is so delicate that even a single photon could damage it. Using conventional methods, it's impossible to determine if there's film in the cartridge. However, in the quantum world, it can be achieved. Anton Zeilinger, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics 2022, was the first to experimentally implement the idea of an interaction-free experiment using optics.

Now, in a study exploring the connection between the quantum and classical worlds, Shruti Dogra, John J. McCord, and Gheorghe Sorin Paraoanu of Aalto University have discovered a new and much more effective way to carry out interaction-free experiments. The team used transmon devices –superconducting circuits that are relatively large but still show quantum behavior– to detect the presence of microwave pulses generated by classical instruments. Their research was recently published in Nature Communications.

Journal Reference:
Dogra, Shruti, McCord, John J., Paraoanu, Gheorghe Sorin. Coherent interaction-free detection of microwave pulses with a superconducting circuit [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-35049-z)

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Did users change their Wi-Fi password, or did they see the nature of IoT privacy?

Appliance makers like Whirlpool and LG just can't understand. They added Wi-Fi antennae to their latest dishwashers, ovens, and refrigerators and built apps for them—and yet only 50 percent or fewer of their owners have connected them. What gives?

The issue, according to manufacturers quoted in a Wall Street Journal report (subscription usually required), is that customers just don't know all the things a manufacturer can do if users connect the device that spins their clothes or keeps their food cold—things like "providing manufacturers with data and insights about how customers are using their products" and allowing companies to "send over-the-air updates" and "sell relevant replacement parts or subscription services."

"The challenge is that a consumer doesn't see the true value that manufacturers see in terms of how that data can help them in the long run. So they don't really care for spending time to just connect it," Henry Kim, US director of LG's smart device division ThinQ, told the Journal.

[...] While the manufacturers blame technical constraints, some customers may simply not want to provide companies with vague privacy policies or bad histories with security access to their networks.

[...] Appliance makers are eager for buyers to connect their smart devices, but at least some may think they've done the smart thing by letting them work offline.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

More supposition than superposition as local media goes on Sci-Fi journey:

Quantum computers have started rolling off the production line in China, according to local media reports.

Global Times offers one of many such accounts and China Television has also covered the news.

None of the reports offer concrete detail. Indeed, many open with a reference to the presence of a quantum computer in the recently released Chinese action blockbuster "Wandering Earth 2" then enthuse about that science fiction vision having become reality.

All report that the computer was produced in the city of Hefei, which is in Anhui province where the local government is known to have funded a quantum computer lab. Some quote an outfit called Origin Quantum as having been informed of the debut by Anhui quantum lab.

Others suggest the computers were quietly slipped into production at Chinese organizations in 2021 and are now available for other buyers.

[...] In the real world, meanwhile, analysts suggest one of China's main interests in quantum computers is breaking classical encryption.

China has lots of big challenges that quantum computing could help to address. It also has enormous military ambitions, and a lengthy track record of using technology to surveil and oppress its citizens.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

With 12 Newfound Satellites, Jupiter Quietly Takes Crown for Most Moons:

Some planets just seem to have it all. Jupiter is the largest in the solar system, spotting a distinctive and fashionable red spot, subtle but elegant rings and dozens of moons.

As if that wasn't enough, it looks as though Jupiter has 12 more small moons in its orbit, bringing the total number of natural satellites within its grasp to a whopping 92.

Astronomer Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, reported observations of the system over the last two years that reveal a dozen new moons. The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center has quietly been publishing the orbits of the new, unnamed moons in recent weeks, giving their existence the stamp of confirmation from humanity's officialdom on the matter.

Jupiter takes the crown from Saturn in terms of moon count. The rival ringed gas giant has 83 known moons.

All of the moons are probably too small to be named and take more than 340 days to orbit, according to Sky and Telescope.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Geofence warrants that allow law enforcement to collect location data on mobile device users for criminal probes are under attack by civil rights groups and public defenders:

The ACLU and eight federal public defenders are asking the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to exclude mobile device location data obtained from Google via a so-called geofence warrant that helped law enforcement catch a bank robbery suspect.

The first geofence civil rights case to reach a federal court of appeals raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns against unreasonable search and seizure related to the location and personal information of mobile device users.

Geofence warrants have primarily been issued for Google to hand over data about every cell phone or other mobile device within a specific geographical region and timeframe. The problem: location data on every person carrying a mobile device in that area is scooped up in a wide net and their data is then handed over en masse to law enforcement.

"These warrants are patently unconstitutional," said Tom McBrien, a law fellow with the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington DC. "They look through everyone's location history within that geographical area to see where they were at the time."

Geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution on several fronts, McBrien argued. First, the amendment requires that evidentiary warrants meet the "particularity requirement," meaning police must be specific about what and who they're seeking to find with the data. The warrants can't turn into "fishing expeditions," McBrien said.

Secondly, probable cause requires law enforcement to link a specific person or persons to a crime. Only in that case does the law allow the invasion of privacy that comes with geofence data access.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

He codesigned the Internet protocol and transmission control protocol:

IEEE Life Fellow Vinton "Vint" Cerf, widely known as the "Father of the Internet," is the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Medal of Honor. He is being recognized "for co-creating the Internet architecture and providing sustained leadership in its phenomenal growth in becoming society's critical infrastructure."

[...] While working as a program manager at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office in 1974, Cerf and IEEE Life Fellow Robert Kahn designed the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. TCP manages data packets sent over the Internet, making sure they don't get lost, are received in the proper order, and are reassembled at their destination correctly. IP manages the addressing and forwarding of data to and from its proper destinations. Together they make up the Internet's core architecture and enable computers to connect and exchange traffic.

[...] Together with Kahn, Cerf founded the nonprofit Internet Society in 1992. The organization helps set technical standards, develops Internet infrastructure, and helps lawmakers set policy.

Cerf served as its president from 1992 to 1995 and was chairman of the board of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers from 2000 to 2007. ICANN works to ensure a stable, secure, and interoperable Internet by managing the assignment of unique IP addresses and domain names. It also maintains tables of registered parameters needed for the protocol standards developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Cerf has received several recognitions for his work, including the 2004 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. The honor is known as the Nobel Prize of computing. Together with Kahn, he was awarded a 2013 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, a 2005 U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a 1997 U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Original Submission