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owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/02/8086-modrm-addressing.html

One interesting aspect of a computer's instruction set is its addressing modes, how the computer determines the address for a memory access. The Intel 8086 (1978) used the ModR/M byte, a special byte following the opcode, to select the addressing mode.1 The ModR/M byte has persisted into the modern x86 architecture, so it's interesting to look at its roots and original implementation.

In this post, I look at the hardware and microcode in the 8086 that implements ModR/M2 and how the 8086 designers fit multiple addressing modes into the 8086's limited microcode ROM. One technique was a hybrid approach that combined generic microcode with hardware logic that filled in the details for a particular instruction. A second technique was modular microcode, with subroutines for various parts of the task.

I've been reverse-engineering the 8086 starting with the silicon die. The die photo below shows the chip under a microscope. The metal layer on top of the chip is visible, with the silicon and polysilicon mostly hidden underneath. Around the edges of the die, bond wires connect pads to the chip's 40 external pins. I've labeled the key functional blocks; the ones that are important to this discussion are darker and will be discussed in detail below. Architecturally, the chip is partitioned into a Bus Interface Unit (BIU) at the top and an Execution Unit (EU) below. The BIU handles bus and memory activity as well as instruction prefetching, while the Execution Unit (EU) executes instructions and microcode. Both units play important roles in memory addressing.

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upstart writes:

The corridor is 30 feet long and likely slopes upward. Where it leads is still a mystery.

In 2016, scientists using muon imaging picked up signals indicating a hidden corridor behind the famous chevron blocks on the north face of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The following year, the same team detected a mysterious void in another area of the pyramid, believing it could be a hidden chamber. Two independent teams of researchers, using two different muon imaging methods, have now successfully mapped out the corridor for the first time, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's former antiquities minister, called it "the most important discovery of the 21st century." [So far - Ed]

As we've reported previously, there is a long history of using muons to image archaeological structures, a process made easier because cosmic rays provide a steady supply of these particles. An engineer named E.P. George used them to make measurements of an Australian tunnel in the 1950s. But Nobel-prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez really put muon imaging on the map when he teamed up with Egyptian archaeologists to use the technique to search for hidden chambers in the Pyramid of Khafre at Giza. Although it worked in principle, they didn't find any hidden chambers.

There are many variations of muon imaging, but they all typically involve gas-filled chambers. As muons zip through the gas, they collide with the gas particles and emit a telltale flash of light, which is recorded by the detector, allowing scientists to calculate the particle's energy and trajectory. It's similar to X-ray imaging or ground-penetrating radar, except with naturally occurring high-energy muons rather than X-rays or radio waves. That higher energy makes it possible to image thick, dense substances like the stones used to build pyramids. The denser the imaged object, the more muons are blocked, casting a telltale shadow. Hidden chambers in a pyramid would show up in the final image because they blocked fewer particles.

upstart writes:

Huge lithium find may end world shortage – there's a catch:

Lithium, sometimes hyped as white gold, has been highly sought after for its role in battery production, and other things.

Global demand is expected to continue to outstrip supply in the years to come. Albemarle Corporation projects [PDF] lithium demand will rise from 1.8 million metric tons in 2025 to 3.7 million metric tons in 2030 largely due to its role in electric vehicles and other battery dependent devices.

The White House last year said critical minerals – rare earth metals, lithium, and cobalt – "are essential to our national security and economic prosperity."

Alas for the US, the latest cache of this malleable metal has turned up in Iran – one of just four countries America has designated a state sponsor of terrorism.

According to The Financial Tribune, an English language news publication focused on Iran that's operated by Tehran-based Donya-e-Eqtesad, Ebrahim Ali Molla-Beigi, director general of the Exploration Affairs Office of the Ministry of Industries, Mining and Trade, said that Iran has discovered its first lithium reserve in Hamedan Province, in the western part of the country.

The reserve is said to be 8.5 million metric tons, which – if accurate – would be among the largest known deposits yet discovered.

According to the US Geological Survey [PDF], the top five identified lithium reserves are: Bolivia, 21 million tons; Argentina, 20 million tons; Chile, 11 million tons; Australia, 7.9 million tons, and China, 6.8 million tons.

hubie writes:

Scientists are aiming to revolutionise British diets by slipping more UK-grown beans into our daily bread:

Researchers and chefs at the University of Reading aim to encourage British consumers and food producers to switch to bread containing faba beans (commonly known as broad beans), making it healthier and less damaging to the environment.

[...] Five teams of researchers within the University of Reading, along with members of the public, farmers, industry, and policy makers, are now working together to bring about one of the biggest changes to UK food in generations.

[...] This is by increasing pulses in the UK diet, particularly faba beans, due to their favourable growing conditions in the UK and the sustainable nutritional enhancement they provide.

Despite being an excellent alternative to the ubiquitous imported soya bean, used currently in bread as an improver, the great majority of faba beans grown in the UK go to animal feed at present.

[...] "96% of people in the UK eat bread, and 90% of that is white bread, which in most cases contains soya. We've already performed some experiments and found that faba bean flour can directly replace imported soya flour and some of the wheat flour, which is low in nutrients. We can not only grow the faba beans here, but also produce and test the faba bean-rich bread, with improved nutritional quality."

For those who prefer their information in YouTube format

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upstart writes:

In-hardware security can be defeated with just two extra bytes:

The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) secure crypto-processor became a topic for public debate in 2021 when Microsoft forced TPM 2.0 adoption as a minimum requirement for installing Windows 11. The dedicated hardware controller should provide "extra hard" security to data and cryptographic algorithms, but the official specifications are bugged.

Security researchers recently discovered a couple of flaws in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 reference library specification, two dangerous buffer overflow vulnerabilities that could potentially impact billions of devices. Exploiting the flaws is only possible from an authenticated local account, but a piece of malware running on an affected device could do exactly that.

The two vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2023-1017 and CVE-2023-1018, or as "out-of-bounds write" and "out-of-bounds read" flaws. The issue was discovered within the TPM 2.0's Module Library, which allows writing (or reading) two "extra bytes" past the end of a TPM 2.0 command in the CryptParameterDecryption routine.

By writing specifically crafted malicious commands, an attacker could exploit the vulnerabilities to crash the TPM chip making it "unusable," execute arbitrary code within TPM's protected memory or read/access sensitive data stored in the (theoretically) isolated crypto-processor.

In other words, successful exploitation of the CVE-2023-1017 and CVE-2023-1018 flaws could compromise cryptographic keys, passwords and other critical data, making security features of modern, TPM-based operating systems like Windows 11 essentially useless or broken.

upstart writes:

Arm says it decided a sole US listing in 2023 was "the best path forward":

[...] Arm's decision not to pursue a listing on the London Stock Exchange this year has raised concerns that the UK market is not doing enough to attract tech company stock offerings, with US exchanges seen to offer higher profiles and valuations.

SoftBank Group Corp's founder and chief executive Masayoshi Son said last year he would probably look to the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange for a potential Arm listing.

[...] "Arm is proud of its British heritage, and continues to work with the British Government," he said. "We will continue to invest and play a significant role in the British tech ecosystem."

A Government spokesperson said: "The UK is taking forward ambitious reforms to the rules governing its capital markets, building on our continued success as Europe's leading hub for investment, and the second largest globally."

They added the UK "continues to attract some of the most innovative and largest companies in the world" and acknowledged Arm's commitment to its UK presence with more jobs and investment.

[...] Russ Shaw CBE, founder of Tech London Advocates and Global Tech Advocates, said Arm's statement offered "glimpses of hope" for its commitment to its British roots, but Arm and SoftBank's decision to opt for a sole US listing is "a significant blow to the UK tech sector".

[...] He added Arm's decision "must be upheld as a case study for the UK Government of how 'not to do it'" - citing the company's sale to SoftBank in 2016 as a factor determining its US-only listing.

"Nations like the US and China that recognise the strategic value of chip companies would not have allowed such decisions to be made - then or now - and the UK must now endeavour to proactively protect its semiconductor industry," said Mr Shaw.

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upstart writes:

The Foss community is giving yet another try with an app store for all Linux OSes:

Some influential people in the open-source community are pushing for the adoption of a one-stop app store for Linux-based operating systems. The store would be built on Flatpak, a popular software deployment and package management utility, and it could provide customers with the same user-friendly approach other popular app stores in the consumer market are known for.

[...] The proposal's main goal is to "promote diversity and sustainability" in the Linux desktop community by "adding payments, donations and subscriptions" to the Flathub app store. Flathub is the standard app repository for Flatpak, a project described as a "vendor-neutral service" for Linux application development and deployment.

[...] The universal app store proponents say that "a healthy application ecosystem is essential for the success of the OSS desktop," so that end-users can "trust and control" their data and development platforms on the device they are using. Flathub has been jointly built by the GNOME foundation and KDE, and it isn't the only app store available in the Linux world.

Alternative solutions like Canonical's Snaps, however, are sitting under the control of a single corporation and aren't designed as a universal Linux app store from the get-go. Canonical has recently decided that neither Ubuntu, nor the other Ubuntu-based distros (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, etc.), will give their official support to Flatpak. Users can manually add the tool after installing the operating system, though.

Besides providing a universal app store for the entire Linux world, Flatpak supporters also want to "incentivize participation in the Linux application ecosystem," and remove financial barriers that prevent diverse participation. For this reason, the proponents are planning to add a new way to send donations and payments via Stripe within this year.

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NASA: DART Mission Proves Kinetic Impact Can Save Earth From Incoming Asteroids

upstart writes:

NASA's DART mission was a smashing success:

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test ended last year with the spacecraft colliding with an asteroid known as Dimorphos. NASA announced in the following weeks that DART had altered the asteroid's trajectory, and now we have four peer-reviewed papers that explore just how successful the mission was. The news is good — NASA has confirmed that DART validates kinetic impact as a viable way to deflect dangerous asteroids.

[...] Scientists are working to reconstruct the impact to evaluate DART's autonomous targeting ability. The authors of this study concluded that a DART-like mission to redirect a dangerous asteroid could theoretically do so without an advanced reconnaissance flight. [...]

Another of the four studies confirmed via two different measurement techniques that Dimorphos' orbit shifted by 33 minutes. NASA had expected the impact to push the asteroid by at least seven minutes, but the recoil effect of ejecta blasted off the surface had a greater effect than predicted. [...]

A separate study looked at the momentum transfer from the impact. The researchers found that DART instantly altered Dimorphos' orbit, slowing it by 2.7 millimeters per second. [...] The final study discusses what we can learn from DART beyond the planetary defense angle. Dimorphos it's now an "active asteroid" surrounded by a cloud of dust. The authors say analysis of this comet-like tail could help us learn more about the natural processes at work on asteroids.

Luckily, there are no known asteroid threats for at least the next century, but our catalog of near-Earth objects is incomplete. We could discover an asteroid with a high chance of impact tomorrow. It's happened before, and it'll happen again. For decades, kinetic redirection was seen as a potential way to save Earth from those rare but inevitable events, but no one knew if it would work. Now we do — humanity has the tools to prevent at least one kind of doomsday.

upstart writes:

Dish Network Finally Acknowledges Huge Hack After Days Of Not Answering Questions:

Early this week reports began to emerge that Dish Network was suffering from a widespread outage that effectively prevented a large chunk of the company's employees from being able to work for more than four days. Initially, Dish tried to downplay the scope of the problem in press reports, only stating that they'd experienced an ambiguous "systems issue."

Five days in and it was finally revealed that the company had been hacked, subjected to a ransomware attack, and subscriber data had been compromised. But, of course, customers didn't find out from Dish, they only learned about it via leaked internal communications:

Dish has told employees that it's "investigating a cybersecurity incident" and that it's "aware that certain data was extracted" from its IT systems as a result of this incident, according to an internal email sent by CEO Erik Carlson and obtained by The Verge. This comes on the fifth day of an internal outage that's taken down some of the company's internal networks, customer support systems, and websites such as boostinfinite.com and dish.com.

Employees have been completely locked out of their systems, telling Bleeping Computer that they're seeing blank screen icons common during ransomware attacks. As of this writing, things are so bad at Dish that their primary website is a placeholder page, though at least they finally got around to confirming things in an ambiguous statement.

You might recall that Dish Network was part of a doomed Trump-era plan to justify the T-Mobile Sprint merger by encouraging Dish to build its own 5G network. That plan isn't going so well either, and similar to T-Mobile's comical inability to secure its network, you have to wonder how much merger logistics distracted the company from competent revisions to its privacy and security standards.

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fliptop writes:

Europe's original plan to bring AI under control is no match for the technology's new, shiny chatbot application:

Artificial intelligence's newest sensation — the gabby chatbot-on-steroids ChatGPT — is sending European rulemakers back to the drawing board on how to regulate AI.

[...] The technology has already upended work done by the European Commission, European Parliament and EU Council on the bloc's draft artificial intelligence rulebook, the Artificial Intelligence Act. The regulation, proposed by the Commission in 2021, was designed to ban some AI applications like social scoring, manipulation and some instances of facial recognition. It would also designate some specific uses of AI as "high-risk," binding developers to stricter requirements of transparency, safety and human oversight.

[...] These AIs "are like engines. They are very powerful engines and algorithms that can do quite a number of things and which themselves are not yet allocated to a purpose," said Dragoș Tudorache, a Liberal Romanian lawmaker who, together with S&D Italian lawmaker Brando Benifei, is tasked with shepherding the AI Act through the European Parliament.

Already, the tech has prompted EU institutions to rewrite their draft plans. The EU Council, which represents national capitals, approved its version of the draft AI Act in December, which would entrust the Commission with establishing cybersecurity, transparency and risk-management requirements for general-purpose AIs.

[...] Professionals in sectors like education, employment, banking and law enforcement have to be aware "of what it entails to use this kind of system for purposes that have a significant risk for the fundamental rights of individuals," Benifei said.

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upstart writes:

Air Force has already successfully tested and approved the sustainable aviation fuel:

As more companies focus on lowering their own carbon emissions, one startup is looking to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and create sustainable aviation fuel. It already has a small-scale working process and says that if it and other manufacturers scale up production, it could "mitigate" at least 10 percent of carbon emissions.

A startup specializing in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) signed a $65 million contract with the US Department of Defense to create jet fuel out of thin air. The contract will provide a startup called Air Company funds to advance research and development of a system that can extract CO2 from the air and convert it into fuel-grade alcohols and paraffin.

Air Company already has a process of converting CO2 to jet fuel and published a white paper on the procedure. The company claims to have eliminated a step in the nearly 100-year-old Fischer-Tropsch process. It involves creating, harvesting, and storing CO2 from industrial corn fermentation. It then uses water electrolysis to produce hydrogen gas (H2) and oxygen (O2).

The O2 is released into the atmosphere, and the H2 feeds into a reactor with the captured CO2 and a catalyst. The chemical reaction produces ethanol, methanol, water, and paraffin. Distillation separates these components for use in other products, including vodka, perfume, hand sanitizer, and SAF.

The company cannot yet produce at the scale needed to impact global CO2 levels. However, CEO Gregory Constantine says that if Air Company and others can build to scale and all fuel-dependant industries switch to SAF, it could mitigate over 10 percent of carbon emissions.

hubie writes:

A physicist's task is to constantly create equations that keep up with our observations of physical phenomena:

Researching a cosmic mystery like dark matter has its downsides. On the one hand, it's exciting to be on the road to what might be a profound scientific discovery. On the other hand, it's hard to convince people it's worth studying something that's invisible, untouchable, and apparently made of something entirely unknown.

While the vast majority of physicists find the evidence for dark matter's existence convincing, some continue to examine alternatives, and the views in the press and the public are significantly more divided. The most common response I get when I talk about dark matter is: "isn't this just something physicists made up to make the math work out?"

The answer to that might surprise you: yes! In fact, everything in physics is made up to make the math work out.

[...] This level of abstraction is especially apparent in particle physics, because the existence or non-existence of a single particle on a subatomic scale is a rather fuzzy notion. The equations describing the motion of an electron through space don't actually include a particle at all, but rather an abstract mathematical object called a wavefunction that can spread out and interfere with itself.

Is it ever true, then, to say that an electron is 'real' when it's in motion? If we believe that electrons are real things, have we just made up the wavefunction to make the math work out? Absolutely – that was, in fact, the whole point. We couldn't get the equations to work if the electron was a solid, isolated particle, so we made up something that wasn't, and then the numbers started making sense.

upstart writes:

Russian Nuclear Company Tests 'Beaver' PCs With Homegrown Baikal CPUs:

A daughter company of Rosatom, a nuclear energy company owned by the Russian government, is testing PCs from Delta Computers called Beaver that are based on a processor designed by Russia's Baikal Microelectronics and a Linux distribution approved for use by state agencies. The company is trying to replace PCs designed by Western companies with something domestic, reports 3DNews. But they may have an obstacle in their way.

Delta Computers' Beaver is a small form-factor PC running Baikal Electronics's Baikal-M1 (BE-M1000) chip and the Astra Linux Special Edition operating system. The Beaver can have up to 64GB of DDR4 memory and up to 16TB of HDD and SSD storage. The machine has multiple USB Type-A 2.0/3.0 ports, PS/2 connectors, an RS-232 header, two Ethernet ports, an HDMI output, and two 3.5-mm audio connectors for headphones and microphones. The PC can be upgraded with low-profile PCIe 3.0 x8 add-in-boards, such as graphics cards. The system uses an LCD display, a corded keyboard, and a corded mouse.

"The concern has purchased the first batch of 'Beaver' domestic personal computers based on the Baikal processor and is getting ready to introduce them into the infrastructure of the Rosenergoatom energy generating company," a statement by Rosatom reads.

Delta's Beaver is nothing special if not for its Baikal-M1 SoC. The Baikal-M1 is a rather well-known processor that packs eight Arm Cortex-A57 cores with an 8MB L3 cache operating at 1.50 GHz and mated with an eight-cluster Arm Mali-T628 GPU with two display pipelines. The SoC, which uses technologies from 2014 – 2015, is made by TSMC using one of its 28nm-class process technologies. But such processors cannot be shipped to a Russian or a Belarussian entity from Taiwan due to restrictions imposed by the government.

While Rosatom might have procured samples of Beaver (Bober in Russian), Delta Computers can't get enough processors as the owner of Baikal Microelectronics went bankrupt in late 2022.

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upstart writes:

Droughts, flash floods the future for the Midwest ... probably:

A climate model developed by researchers at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Labs, projects prolonged droughts across much of the US which will be followed by brief but devastating floods. But these events won't happen overnight.

Instead, they're forecast to place with increasing frequency over the next 50 years. But even by the middle of the century — just a short 27 years from now — simulations suggest that large portions of the Midwest will be in a state of persistent drought, and the American West isn't looking much better off, despite recent rainstorms that have raised hopes of more lush times ahead.

[...] However, extreme drought isn't the only thing Argonne researchers' models forecast. They also predict brief but intense periods of precipitation — a characteristic of many drought prone areas — leading to extensive flooding.

According to researchers, the American Midwest could bear the brunt of these extreme weather events as the climate continues to shift. While precipitation might sound like a reprieve from drought conditions, the researchers note that as the soil dries out, it becomes hydrophobic, causing it to repel water. They note that similar phenomena have been observed with wildfires in California.

Ultimately, scientists hope that improved models will give policymakers something to think about when approaching climate issues.

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upstart writes:

Interstate feuds threaten to complicate the already-difficult task of getting regional power grids off fossil fuels:

In early February, lawmakers in Minnesota passed a law requiring the state's power utilities to supply customers with 100 percent clean electricity by 2040 — one of the more ambitious clean energy standards in the United States. Democrats, who clinched control of the state legislature in last year's midterm elections, were euphoric. But not everyone in the region is enthused about Minnesota's clean energy future. The state may soon face a legal challenge from its next-door neighbor, North Dakota.

Not long after Minnesota's governor signed the law, the North Dakota Industrial Commission, the three-member body that oversees North Dakota's utilities, agreed unanimously to consider a lawsuit challenging the new legislation. The law, North Dakota regulators said, infringes on North Dakota's rights under the Dormant Commerce Clause in the United States Constitution by stipulating what types of energy it can contribute to Minnesota's energy market.

"This isn't about the environment. This is about state sovereignty," North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, the chair of the Industrial Commission, said. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a longtime proponent of clean energy legislation, was quick to respond. "I trust that this bill is solid," he told reporters. "I trust that it will stand up because it was written to do exactly that."

[...] It's no mystery why North Dakota was so quick to go on the offensive. Most of the state's power comes from coal, and it sells some 50 percent of the electricity it generates to nearby states. Its biggest customer is Minnesota. [...]

"Minnesota is under no legal duty to prop up North Dakota power plants," Michael Gerrard, founder of Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told Grist. The state would find itself in legal trouble if it discriminated between in-state and out-of-state power plants, he said. [...]

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