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guest reader writes:

Nvidia tweaks flagship H100 chip for export to China as H800:

U.S. regulators last year put into place rules that stopped Nvidia from selling its two most advanced chips, the A100 and newer H100, to Chinese customers. Such chips are crucial to developing generative AI technologies like OpenAI's ChatGPT and similar products.

Reuters in November reported that Nvidia had designed a chip called the A800 that reduced some capabilities of the A100 to make the A800 legal for export to China.

On Tuesday, the company confirmed that it has similarly developed a China-export version of its H100 chip. The new chip, called the H800, is being used by the cloud computing units of Chinese technology firms such as Alibaba Group Holding, Baidu Inc and Tencent Holdings, a company spokesperson said.

U.S. regulators last fall imposed rules to slow China's development in key technology sectors such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence, aiming to hobble the country's efforts to modernize its military.

The rules around artificial intelligence chips imposed a test that bans those with both powerful computing capabilities and high chip-to-chip data transfer rates. Transfer speed is important when training artificial intelligence models on huge amounts of data because slower transfer rates mean more training time.

A chip industry source in China told Reuters the H800 mainly reduced the chip-to-chip data transfer rate to about half the rate of the flagship H100.

The Nvidia spokesperson declined to say how the China-focused H800 differs from the H100, except that "our 800 series products are fully compliant with export control regulations."

Related:
US Wins Support From Japan and Netherlands to Clip China's Chip Industry

Original Submission

upstart writes:

65 AA batteries and $10 Arduino processor power space debris solution:

A tiny satellite with a drag chute built by a team of students has been held up as one small possible solution to the thorny issue of space junk caused by defunct hardware cluttering up Earth's orbit.

SBUDNIC, a "Sputnik-like CubeSat," was built by students at Brown University, Rhode Island, from low-cost commercial off-the-shelf parts. It has successfully demonstrated the use of a simple drag sail that helps to degrade the satellite's orbit and push it back into the planet's atmosphere faster than would otherwise have occurred.

[...] The idea behind SBUDNIC was to demonstrate how future satellites could avoid adding to this problem by including a mechanism to help de-orbit them at the end of their life span. The aerodynamic drag device pulls the satellite out of orbit approximately three times faster than comparable satellites, according to Brown University.

[...] The satellite itself is a 3U Cubesat (where 1U is 10 cm x 10 cm x 10 cm, not to be confused with a datacenter rack unit). According to details given by the university, it includes a $10 Arduino microprocessor, 65 AA Energizer lithium batteries and a variety of 3D printed parts produced with consumer-grade printers.

Also 3D printed is the drag sail, made from Kapton polyimide film, which apparently has the right combination of properties to withstand extreme temperature and vibration. This was folded flat along the satellite's frame prior to deployment, using spring-loaded structural masts made of thin aluminum tubing designed to extend out upon triggering of the release mechanism.

[...] Initial computational predictions suggest that the drag device will decrease the orbital lifetime of SBUDNIC from over 20 years to as few as 6.5 years, depending on fluctuations of atmospheric density.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The fate of a nonprofit online book library is in the hands of a judge after four book publishers filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement:

A federal judge heard oral arguments in a lawsuit filed by four major book publishers against Internet Archive for alleged copyright infringement on Monday. The lawsuit was first filed in 2020 and could be a landmark case when it comes to digital libraries and copyright.

According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge John Koeltl seemed skeptical about whether copyright law's fair use doctrine allows Internet Archive to offer the scanned books without the publishers' permission.

The lawsuit was filed by Hatchette Book Group, John Wiley & Sons Inc., Penguin Random House, and HarperCollins Publishers, all of whom say that digitizing books without requiring payment hurts writers and the publishers who lose out on payout. The lawsuit claims Internet Archive's "actions grossly exceed legitimate library services, do violence to the Copyright Act, and constitute willful digital piracy on an industrial scale."

[...] The lawsuit says although Internet Archive claims it works to promote education, that has been a long-running function and aim of publishing houses who have invested time, money, and resources into creating and distributing books, not to mention the researching and writing efforts of the author.

upstart writes:

The satellite helped scientists learn more about polar mesospheric clouds:

It looks to be the end of the line for NASA's Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere, or AIM, spacecraft. The mission launched on April 25, 2007, as part of the Small Explorer program (the 90th such mission since 1958). The satellite featured three science instruments designed to study polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs) that form high above Earth in the polar regions.

The satellite was put into orbit 312 miles up. Data from the long-running mission helped scientists better understand the formation of these unique clouds, also called night-shining or noctilucent clouds, and was featured in 379 peer-reviewed scientific papers over the years.

AIM had a planned mission duration of just 26 months but has been operating mostly issue-free for nearly 16 years. In 2019, however, NASA noticed the satellite's batteries were starting to degrade but were still functional enough to continue to collect a significant amount of data and return it to Earth.

NASA said the craft's battery has reached a point where it is no longer able to receive commands or collect data. The space agency will monitor the satellite for a two-week period and attempt to reboot it, but it isn't looking good.

[...] The near-term fate of the AIM satellite wasn't mentioned, and it's unclear if NASA has the ability to bring it back down to Earth like it has with other decommissioned craft. The satellite measures roughly 1.4m x 1.1m (4 ft 7 in × 3 ft 7 in) and weighs 197 kg (434 pounds). If left unaddressed, it'd add to the growing list of space junk orbiting our planet.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Utility began as a personal project, found its way into billions of devices:

Daniel Stenberg has observed the 25th anniversary of the curl open source project with the publication of curl 8.0.0, the 215th release of the command line tool, and a modest tele-celebration.

The name curl, originally rendered as "cURL" to emphasize its function, stands for "Client for URLs" or "Client URL Request Library" or its recursive form, "curl URL Request Library."

It's a command line tool and library for transferring data with URLs. Once installed on a device with command line access, curl can be used, through a text command, to send or fetch data to and from a server using a variety of network protocols.

Any developer who is serious about writing code that interacts over a network has probably used curl, or does so regularly. Presently, billions of devices rely on curl – cars, mobile phones, set top boxes, routers, and other such items use it internally for data transfer.

"The curl project started out very humbly as a small renamed URL transfer tool that almost nobody knew about for the first few years," said Stenberg in a blog post. "It scratched a personal itch of mine."

The first version of curl debuted on March 20, 1998 as version 4.0. It had 2,200 lines of code and had been adapted from projects known as httpget and urlget. As Stenberg explained, curl 4.0 supported just three protocols, HTTP, GOPHER and FTP, and 24 command line options. Version 8.0.0 can handle 28 protocols and 249 command line options.

"The first release of curl was not that special event since I had been shipping httpget and urlget releases for over a year already, so while this was a new name it was also 'just another release' as I had done many times already," he wrote.

upstart writes:

Metallica Is Selling so Many Vinyl Records It Bought Its Own Factory:

Despite technology bringing new recording media formats and improved compression algorithms, there is certainly a growing demand for vinyl again despite its death being announced several times over recent decades.

Metallica has bought a majority stake in Furnace Record Pressing, one of the biggest and most important vinyl records companies in the U.S. If anyone had any doubts about the growth of the vinyl sales, which last year outpaced CD sales for the first time since 1987, Metallica's new purchase just gave them a very loud reminder that what's old is new again.

Vinyl records are experiencing a renaissance among music lovers. Although Metallica hasn't released a new album since Hardwired...To Self-Destruct in 2016, it sold more than 387,000 vinyl albums in 2022, according to data from Billboard. That year, it ranked sixth on the list of most albums sold in the U.S., topping the 337,000 albums it sold in 2021. The price Metallica paid for Furnace was not disclosed; members of the band will now sit on Furnace's board.

Metallica is expected to release its first album in seven years sometime over the next few weeks, setting the stage for the band to sell to many, many more vinyl records in 2023.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Amazon will cut another 9,000 jobs bringing the total to 27,000 jobs culled so far as part of the 'tech wreck' sweeping the world.

The cuts will take place in coming weeks and are mainly concentrated in Amazon's web, HR and advertising team. Staff who look after Amazon's foray into Twitch livestreaming are also set to be impacted.

CEO Andy Jassy said the decision was made to ensure the company remained "streamlined" as tough market conditions bite across the globe.

Six days ago, another massive tech giant, Facebook owner Meta, also announced mass job redundancies. Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg told employees that his company was laying off another 10,000 employees and closing about 5000 additional open roles in its own second major round of job cuts.

Closer to home, Australia has also been pummelled by the tough economic conditions. Earlier this month, ASX-listed software firm Xero announced that it was going to reduce its headcount by 700 to 800 roles, which was a 15 per cent cut to the overall workforce. A few days earlier, software giant Atlassian slashed 500 roles, which represents five per cent of its total global workforce. Another software development company, Kinde, laid off 28.5 per cent of staff at the end of last month.

I would certainly feel 'streamlined' or perhaps in free fall if I no longer had a job.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The mantle is predominately silicate, but its concentrations of so-called "iron-loving," or siderophile, elements have mystified scientists for decades:

A new technique developed by Carnegie's Yingwei Fei and Lin Wang provides fresh insight into the process by which the materials that formed Earth's core descended into the depths of our planet, leaving behind geochemical traces that have long mystified scientists. Their work is published by Science Advances.

Earth accreted from the disk of dust and gas that surrounded our Sun in its youth. As Earth grew from smaller objects over time, the densest material sank inward, separating the planet into distinct layers—including the iron-rich metal core and silicate mantle.

"The segregation of the core and mantle is the most important event in the geologic history of Earth," explained Fei. "Convection in the outer core powers the Earth's magnetic field, shielding us from cosmic rays. Without it, life as we know it could not exist."

Each of our planet's layers has its own composition. Although the core is predominantly iron, seismic data indicates that some lighter elements, like oxygen, sulfur, silicon and carbon, were dissolved into it and brought along for the ride into the planet's center. Likewise, the mantle is predominately silicate, but its concentrations of so-called "iron-loving," or siderophile, elements have mystified scientists for decades.

[...] Using these tools, Wang and Fei developed a new method of tracing the movement of the core-forming liquid metal in their sample as it migrated inward. They showed that much like water filtering through coffee grounds, under the dynamic conditions found on early Earth, iron melts could have passed through the cracks between a layer of solid silicate crystals—called a grain boundary—and exchanged chemical elements.

takyon writes:

Zipline's new drones release tethered mini-drones for precision package deliveries

Zipline is revealing its new drone delivery platform today that the company says is capable of making a 10-mile delivery in 10 minutes, precisely placing packages on small targets like a patio table or the front steps of a home.

The new drone, which Zipline calls the Platform 2 (P2) Zip, uses a system of wires that lets down the package inside a cute little mini-bus-looking container the company describes as a "delivery droid." The P2 Zip hovers more than 300 feet above the ground at the delivery point, keeping its blades and noise away from people (and trees and wires and buildings) to let down its tethered droid instead.

The droid has the ability to steer with propellers as it's coming down, then lands and softly drops its payload.

[...] Similar to Wing's newly announced delivery network, Zipline says its P2 can dynamically move from dock to dock to charge up as needed and be ready to take orders. P2 can travel up to 24 miles one way without a payload and up to 10 miles while carrying six to eight pounds of weight. In comparison, Wing's drone can carry about three pounds and is technically capable of up to 12 miles of flight one way.

upstart writes:

Ex-Googler says she was laid off from her hospital bed shortly after giving birth:

Would you believe that Google's mass firings from January are still going on? Google's reported mishandling of its biggest round of layoffs ever has employees up in arms, and they're doing everything from walking out on the job to sending angry letters to management.

First up, European Googlers are just now being laid off due to the January announcement. Reuters reports that more than 200 workers were laid off from the Zurich, Switzerland, branch of the company this week. The employees at that office walked out for a second time in protest of the move and even offered to take pay cuts or reduce working hours to stave off the job cuts. Google's layoffs seem driven by a desire to placate the stock market, though, so it's no surprise that these offers fell on deaf ears.

[...] Making Google honor its previous leave agreements isn't just about employees getting paid when they have medical or family issues; it's also about having continual medical care when they need it most. As part of Google's (seemingly discarded) plan to offer employees every perk imaginable, the company has on-site medical facilities that many employees make use of.

While employees' severance packages might come with a few more months of health insurance, being fired means instantly losing access to Google's facilities. If that's where a laid-off Googler's primary care doctor works, that person is out of luck, and some employees told CNBC they lost access to their doctors the second the layoff email arrived. Employees on leave also have a lot to deal with. One former Googler, Kate Howells, said she was let go by Google from her hospital bed shortly after giving birth. She worked at the company for nine years.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

The goal, federal prosecutors said, was to suppress votes for Ms. Clinton by persuading her supporters to falsely believe they could cast presidential ballots by text message:

The misinformation campaign was carried out by a group of conspirators, prosecutors said, including a man in his 20s who called himself Ricky Vaughn. On Monday he will go on trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn under his real name, Douglass Mackey, after being charged with conspiring to spread misinformation designed to deprive others of their right to vote.

"The defendant exploited a social media platform to infringe one of the most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution," Nicholas L. McQuaid, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Criminal Division, said in 2021 when charges against Mr. Mackey were announced.

Prosecutors have said that Mr. Mackey, who went to Middlebury College in Vermont and said he lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, used hashtags and memes as part of his deception and outlined his strategies publicly on Twitter and with co-conspirators in private Twitter group chats.

[...] Mr. Mackey's trial is expected to provide a window into a small part of what the authorities have described as broad efforts to sway the 2016 election through lies and disinformation. While some of those attempts were orchestrated by Russian security services, others were said to have emanated from American internet trolls.

Just a few days ago the trial was delayed after a witness was allegedly intimidated into withdrawing his testimony.

Related:

• The Strong Case That Twitter Censorship Violates California's Civil Rights Laws
• Twitter Fights Trolls, Invites Trolls, and Trolls U.S.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA's commercial partner to visit the far side of the moon:

NASA has big plans for the moon. From sending the first crewed mission to land on its surface in 50 years to setting up a space station in orbit, the agency has multiple missions planned for exploring our planet's satellite. These include partnerships with a number of private companies as well as NASA-developed projects, such as under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program which will contract out the transportation of small payloads to the moon.

This week, NASA announced it has selected the company Firefly Aerospace to develop a commercial lander for the far side of the moon. The lander, called Blue Ghost, will be used to deliver several NASA payloads to the moon, including a radio observation mission which is placed on the far side of the moon to minimize the radio noise coming from Earth. This natural radio quiet zone will let the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night) telescope detect faint radio waves from an early period of the universe known as the cosmic dark ages.

[...] As well as LuSEE-Night, Firefly will also be tasked with carrying a communications and data relay satellite called Lunar Pathfinder, which is a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, and which will be deployed into orbit before the lander sets down on the moon's surface. In addition, the NASA User Terminal payload will assist with communications, and there will be up to seven other payloads from private companies included as well.

[...] Firefly had a troubled start to its orbital ambitions when its first attempt to reach orbit with its Alpha rocket in September 2021 ended in an explosive failure. But a year later, its second attempt at orbital launch was successful and the rocket was able to deploy its orbital payloads.

The aim is for Firefly to launch its lunar mission, Blue Ghost Mission 1, in 2024.

Original Submission

guest reader writes:

Open-source tool from MIT's Senseable City Lab lets people check air quality, cheaply.

Air pollution is a major public health problem: The World Health Organization has estimated that it leads to over 4 million premature deaths worldwide annually. Still, it is not always extensively measured. But now an MIT research team is rolling out an open-source version of a low-cost, mobile pollution detector that could enable people to track air quality more widely.

The detector, called Flatburn, can be made by 3D printing or by ordering inexpensive parts. The researchers have now tested and calibrated it in relation to existing state-of-the-art machines, and are publicly releasing all the information about it - how to build it, use it, and interpret the data.

The Flatburn concept at Senseable City Lab dates back to about 2017, when MIT researchers began prototyping a mobile pollution detector, originally to be deployed on garbage trucks in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The detectors are battery-powered and rechargable, either from power sources or a solar panel, with data stored on a card in the device that can be accessed remotely.

In both cases, the detectors were set up to measure concentrations of fine particulate matter as well as nitrogen dioxide, over an area of about 10 meters. Fine particular matter refers to tiny particles often associated with burning matter, from power plants, internal combustion engines in autos and fires, and more.

"The goal is for community groups or individual citizens anywhere to be able to measure local air pollution, identify its sources, and, ideally, create feedback loops with officials and stakeholders to create cleaner conditions," says Carlo Ratti, director of MIT's Senseable City Lab.

Journal Reference:
An Wang, Yuki Machida, Priyanka deSouza, Simone Mora, Tiffany Duhl, Neelakshi Hudda, John L. Durant, Fábio Duarte, Carlo Ratti, Leveraging machine learning algorithms to advance low-cost air sensor calibration in stationary and mobile settings [open], Atmospheric Environment, Volume 301, 2023, 119692, ISSN 1352-2310, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2023.119692

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Why sleeper trains are being revived across Europe:

[...] Living in the Swedish capital Stockholm, the 33-year-old regularly travels by rail, not only to visit her family in Luxembourg, but also to her holiday destinations.

She favours train travel over flying mainly for environmental reasons. Yet she adds that trains are simply more enjoyable, especially sleeper services.

[...] The carbon footprint is just a fraction of a flight. Flying from Stockholm to Hamburg results in around 250kg of carbon dioxide emissions per passenger, according to calculation website EcoPassenger. By contrast, the C02 released by travelling via electric-powered train is just 26kg.

The SJ night train has nine coaches, and capacity to carry 400 passengers. Dan Olofsson, head of tendered services at SJ, says the new service was proposed by the Swedish government, "as they wanted to move more people towards climate-friendly travelling, and one of the solutions was the night train between Sweden and Germany".

The service is powered by renewable energy, and Mr Olofsson says it is typically being used by Swedes to connect them to other rail services from Hamburg.

"Hamburg isn't the main destination for most travellers, but is an important hub for people to reach more destinations in Germany and France and so on," he says.

[...] However, depending on the location, and especially if starting from the UK, travelling by train can often be more expensive than flying. Trains fares in the UK can in fact be 50% more costly than flights, according to a 2021 study by consumer choice magazine Which?.

"Like flying, you do need to book ahead to find a cheaper price," says Mark Smith, founder of train guide website Seat61. "But you need to remember airlines pay no duty on fuel.

Original Submission

Rich writes:

German company Musical Bits https://musicalbits.de/ has released the first single of their AI virtual heavy metal band "Frostbite Orckings". https://www.orckings.org/?view=article&id=37&catid=8.

Musical Bits creates software that creates music, with the support of AI. Our Maisterstück platform uses AI technology to model all layers of creativity of a human composer and implements these layers as reusable and combinable software components. Maisterstück's functionality can be accessed via a service oriented API.

The Musical Bits software can create music from real time data, from various user interfaces or from our own emotion modelling engine EME. We even create full virtual bands, albums and songs. For example, check out the Frostbite Orckings.

Their sound could be described as a keyboard-heavy version of viking metal, like a mellower spin of Amon Amarth. Along with the song comes an also AI generated video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EaJCt2GpVc of orcs playing along. At this time, it is unclear what input has gone into the AI to generate the production, and how much post processing is done.

The path seems to be set into a direction where we simply can run text-to-song AI ("AI, play me a new Motorhead song with lyrics about whiskey") in the foreseeable future and get convincing results.

Original Submission