SoylentNews

fliptop writes:

On April 1, Amazon will be permanently closing some of its Amazon Go stores in major cities on both coasts:

The locations include two stores in Seattle, two stores in New York City and four in San Francisco.

"Like any physical retailer, we periodically assess our portfolio of stores and make optimization decisions along the way. In this case, we've decided to close a small number of Amazon Go stores in Seattle, New York City and San Francisco," an Amazon spokesperson told FOX Business in a Saturday email.

[...] The e-commerce giant is still opening new Amazon Go stores.

"We remain committed to the Amazon Go format, operate more than 20 Amazon Go stores across the U.S., and will continue to learn which locations and features resonate most with customers as we keep evolving our Amazon Go stores," the spokesperson said.

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Related: Amazon to Slash More Than 18,000 Jobs in Escalation of Cuts

Original Submission

upstart writes:

'Firemode reset' sees Interstellar Boundary Explorer back on the job:

NASA engineers have managed to restore the Interstellar Boundary Explorer spacecraft to working condition by using the oldest trick in the computing book.

IBEX was put into contingency mode in February after NASA reset its onboard systems and the almost 15-year-old spacecraft's flight computer subsequently failed to respond to commands uploaded from mission control. Engineers have since performed a so-called "firecode reset" as the craft's orbit reached its closest point to Earth.

"To take the spacecraft out of a contingency mode, the mission team performed a firecode reset (which is an external reset of the spacecraft) instead of waiting for the spacecraft to perform an autonomous reset and power cycle on March 4," NASA confirmed on Monday.

"After the firecode reset, command capability was restored. IBEX telemetry shows that the spacecraft is fully operational and functioning normally."

Launched in 2008, the IBEX spacecraft carries instruments to detect energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) that form when hot ions from the solar wind collide with cold gaseous atoms from the interstellar medium, the stuff in-between stars in outer space.

Using data collected from the IBEX-Hi and IBEX-Lo sensors, astronomers can plot the boundaries of the Solar System. All the planets and other astronomical objects are encased in a bubble known as the "heliosphere" created by the solar wind.

[...] Fixing the satellite will allow astronomers to continue gathering data on the Sun's activity and solar wind for a while yet.

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Original Submission

SomeGuy writes:

The NZ Herald reports:

An electric humming vibrator designed to upset neighbors operated for about a month inside New Zealand's tallest apartment tower, sending 25 neighbors "just about insane" before it was discovered and disabled, a resident says.

[...] The device was plugged into the mains and had a metal rod nearly the height of the window and a purple plastic device on the end.

A resident explained a man had installed it in a window cavity, behind a blind, specifically to aggravate his upstairs neighbors for unknown reasons: "The device causes a low vibrating-type hum at about 35-40 cycles per minute at about 80hz. It sounded like a cellphone ringing on vibrate stuck in the wall, but it never stopped and just continued all day, all night."

[...] Ceiling vibrators have a long, height-adjustable rod to run from floor to ceiling and make vibrations or a knocking noise from the head. They can be remote controlled and once switched on, they transmit to upstairs neighbors. Thumpers were said to be invented in China and are sometimes referred to as "noisemaker revenge machines".

[...] "It just about sent 25 residents insane because it took a month for it to be located. Everyone thought it was an electrical or mechanical issue that created a dull, repetitive noise 24 hours a day. I know of residents who couldn't sleep and abandoned parts of their apartments," the resident said.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Once praised for its generous social safety net, the country now collects troves of data on welfare claimants:

Denmark's Public Benefits Administration employs hundreds of people who oversee one of the world's most well-funded welfare states. The country spends 26 percent of its GDP on benefits—more than Sweden, the United States, and the United Kingdom. It's been hailed as a leading example of how governments can support their most vulnerable citizens. Bernie Sanders, the US senator, called the Nordic nation of 6 million people a model for how countries should approach welfare.

But over the past decade, the scale of Denmark's benefits spending has come under intense scrutiny, and the perceived scourge of welfare fraud is now at the top of the country's political agenda. Armed with questionable data on the amount of benefits fraud taking place, conservative politicians have turned Denmark's famed safety net into a polarizing political battleground.

It has become an article of faith among the country's right-wing politicians that Denmark is losing hundreds of millions of euros to benefits fraud each year. In 2011, KMD, one of Denmark's largest IT companies, estimated that up to 5 percent of all welfare payments in the country were fraudulent. KMD's estimates would make the Nordic nation an outlier, and its findings have been criticized by some academics. In France, it's estimated that fraud amounts to 0.39 percent of all benefits paid. A similar estimate made in the Netherlands in 2016 by broadcaster RTL found the average amount of fraud per benefit payment was €‎17 ($18), or just 0.2 percent of total benefits payments.The perception of widespread welfare fraud has empowered Jacobsen to establish one of the most sophisticated and far-reaching fraud detection systems in the world. She has tripled the number of state databases her agency can access from three to nine, compiling information on people's taxes, homes, cars, relationships, employers, travel, and citizenship. Her agency has developed an array of machine learning models to analyze this data and predict who may be cheating the system.

Documents obtained by Lighthouse Reports and WIRED through freedom-of-information requests show how Denmark is building algorithms to profile benefits recipients based on everything from their nationality to whom they may be sleeping next to at night. They reveal a system where technology and political agendas have become entwined, with potentially dangerous consequences.

upstart writes:

The sanctions are having a huge impact:

[...] According to China's General Administration of Customs data published Tuesday (via The South China Morning Post), the country imported 67.6 billion integrated circuits (IC) in January and February. That's down 26.5% from the same period last year, and higher than the 15.3% fall recorded for the entirety of 2022.

The total value of these imports also declined, from $68.8 billion last year to $47.8 billion, a drop of 30.5%. That's partly due to chip prices that have fallen due to oversupply and the general economic downturn.

China's IC exports also fell in the first two months, down 20.9% to 37.3 billion units, while the total value of the exports dropped 25.8%.

The US has been tightening its restrictions on China's chip industry over the last 12 months, which the United States says will prevent its global rival from developing semiconductors for military applications, including supercomputers, nuclear weapons modeling, and hypersonic weapons.

October's restrictions on chipmaking tools from the Bureau of Industry and Security were some of the harshest, designed to cap China's logic chips at the 14-nanometre node, DRAM at 18nm, and 3D NAND flash at 128 layers. The US has also prohibited AMD and Nvidia from selling some of its high-performance AI-focused GPUs to China, including team green's A100 GPUs.

Original Submission

After Nearly a Decade in Development, Japan's New Rocket Fails in Debut

upstart writes:

Japan's science minister said the failure was "extremely regrettable:

The launch of Japan's H3 rocket on Tuesday morning failed after the vehicle's second stage engine did not ignite.

In a terse statement on the failure, Japanese space agency JAXA said, "A destruct command has been transmitted to H3 around 10:52 a.m. (Japan Standard Time), because there was no possibility of achieving the mission. We are confirming the situation."

The Japanese space agency, in concert with the rocket's manufacturer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has spent about $1.5 billion developing the H3 rocket over the last decade. Much of the challenge in building the new rocket involved development of a new LE-9 engine, which is fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, to power the first stage. This appeared to perform flawlessly. The second-stage engine that failed, the LE-5B, was a more established engine.

The country has sought to increase its share of the commercial launch market by building a lower-cost alternative to its older H2-A vehicle to more effectively compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster. Mitsubishi's goal was to sell the H3 at $51 million per launch in its base configuration. This would allow the company to supplement its launches of institutional missions for the Japanese government with commercial satellites. Tuesday's debut flight of the H3 rocket carried the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-3 for the Japanese government. It was lost.

[...] The failure is just the latest challenge for the H3 rocket. A fundamental problem with the booster is that, even if it were to fly safely, the H3 rocket has no clear advantages over the Falcon 9, which now has a streak of more than 170 consecutive successful launches. The new H3 rocket is also fully expendable, unlike the Falcon 9 and many newer boosters in development in the United States and China.

upstart writes:

Washington judge issued an arrest warrant and ordered her to involuntary detention:

A judge in Washington issued an arrest warrant Thursday for a Tacoma woman who has refused to have her active, contagious case of tuberculosis treated for over a year, violating numerous court orders. The judge also upheld an earlier order to have her jailed, where she can be  tested and treated in isolation.

On Thursday, the woman attended the 17th court hearing on the matter and once again refused a court order to isolate or comply with testing and treatment—an order that originally dates back to January 19, 2022. Pierce County Superior Court Judge Philip Sorensen rejected her objections to being treated and upheld a finding of contempt. Though it remains unclear what her objections are, the woman's lawyer suggested it may be a problem with understanding, according to The News Tribune. The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, however, argued that she "knowingly, willfully, and contemptuously violated this court's orders," noting the lengthy process and numerous proceedings and discussions in which interpreters, translated documents, and speakers of her native language were made available.

[...] As Ars previously reported, the court had renewed orders for her isolation and treatment on a monthly basis since January of 2022. The health department had always said it was approaching the problem cautiously, working to keep a "balance between restricting somebody's liberty and protecting the health of the community." It sees detention as the "very, very last option."

upstart writes:

50 Years Later, We're Still Living in the Xerox Alto's World:

[...] I'm talking about the Xerox Alto, which debuted in the early spring of 1973 at the photocopying giant's newly established R&D laboratory, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The reason it is so uncannily familiar today is simple: We are now living in a world of computing that the Alto created.

The Alto was a wild departure from the computers that preceded it. It was built to tuck under a desk, with its monitor, keyboard, and mouse on top. It was totally interactive, responding directly to its single user.

[...] The people who developed the Alto came to Xerox PARC from universities, industrial labs, and commercial ventures, bringing with them diverse experiences and skills. But these engineers and programmers largely shared the same point of view. They conceived and developed the Alto in a remarkable burst of creativity, used it to develop diverse and pathbreaking software, and then moved out of Xerox, taking their achievements, design knowledge, and experiences into the wider world, where they and others built on the foundation they had established.

[...] The type of computing they envisioned was thoroughly interactive and personal, comprehensively networked, and completely graphical—with high-resolution screens and high-quality print output.

[...] Oddly, at the time, an expensive new laboratory was also immediately financially attractive: R&D expenditures were frequently counted as assets instead of business expenses, all with Wall Street's approval. The more you spent, the better your balance sheet looked.

upstart writes:

Dutch Officials Warn That Big Telecom's Plan To Tax 'Big Tech' Is A Dangerous Dud:

For much of the last year, European telecom giants have been pushing for a tax on Big Tech company profits. They've tried desperately to dress it up as a reasonable adult policy proposal, but it's effectively just the same thing we saw during the U.S. net neutrality wars: telecom monopolies demanding other people pay them an additional troll toll — for no coherent reason.

To sell captured lawmakers on the idea, telecom giants have falsely claimed that Big Tech companies get a "free ride" on the Internet (just as they did during the U.S. net neutrality wars). To fix this problem they completely made up, Big Telecom argues Big Tech should be forced to help pay for the kind of broadband infrastructure upgrades the telecoms have routinely neglected for years.

It's a big, dumb con. But yet again, telecom lobbyists have somehow convinced regulators that this blind cash grab is somehow sensible, adult policy. Dutifully, European Commission's industry chief Thierry Breton (himself a former telecom exec) said last September he would launch a consultation on this "fair share" payment scheme in early 2023, ahead of any proposed legislation.

[...] But they're often not looking at the real problem. Both in the EU and North America, regulators routinely and mindlessly let telecom giants consolidate and monopolize an essential utility. Those monopolies then work tirelessly to drive up rates and crush competition. And, utilizing their lobbying power, they've also routinely gleamed billions in subsidies for networks they routinely half-complete.

[...] If the EU successfully implements such a scheme, you can be absolutely sure the next step will be the U.S., with captured regulators like Brendan Carr (who has been beating this idiotic drum for a few years now) at the front of the parade at Comcast's and AT&T's behest.

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission