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upstart writes:

Use of Meta tracking tools found to breach EU rules on data transfers:

Austria's data protection authority has found that use of Meta's tracking technologies violated EU data protection law as personal data was transferred to the US where the information was at risk from government surveillance.

The finding flows from a swathe of complaints filed by European privacy rights group noyb, back in August 2020, which also targeted websites' use of Google Analytics over the same data export issue. A number of EU DPAs have since found use of Google Analytics to be unlawful — and some (such as France's CNIL) have issued warnings against use of the analytics tool without additional safeguards. But this is the first finding that Facebook tracking tech breached the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

All the decisions follow a July 2020 ruling by the European Union's top court that struck down the high level EU-US Privacy Shield data transfer agreement after judges once again identified a fatal clash between US surveillance laws and EU privacy rights. (A similar finding, back in 2015, invalidated Privacy Shield's predecessor: Safe Harbor.)

noyb ['none of your business' * see below. --Ed] trumpets the latest data transfer breach finding by an EU DPA as "groundbreaking" — arguing that the Austrian authority's decision should send a signal to other sites that it's not advisable to use Meta trackers (the complaint concerns Facebook Login and the Meta pixel).

[...] "Facebook has pretended that its commercial customers can continue to use its technology, despite two Court of Justice judgments saying the opposite. Now the first regulator told a customer that the use of Facebook tracking technology is illegal," said Max Schrems, chair of noyb.eu, in a statement.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Monopoly giant can't stand it when anyone else has a monopoly:

Microsoft Edge has been spotted inserting a banner into the Chrome download page on Google.com begging people to stick with the Windows giant's browser.

As noted this week by Neowin, an attempt to download and install Chrome Canary using Edge Canary – both experimental browser builds – led to the presentation in the Edge browser window of a banner graphic celebrating the merits of Edge.

"Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft," the banner proclaims atop a button labeled "Browse securely now."

This was on a Google web page, google.com/chrome/canary/thank-you.html, and it's not clear how this ad surfaced. Edge appears to display the banner by itself when the user surfs to the Chrome download page on Google.com, which is just a little bit aggressive.

[...] An individual familiar with browser development confirmed to The Register that he could reproduce the ad, which was said to be written in HTML but wasn't placed "in" the page. He described the ad as its own browser window that, surprisingly, was viewable with Edge's "Inspect" option for viewing source code.

Our source speculated the ad was implemented in a way that pushes down the "Content area" – the space where loaded web pages get rendered – to make space for a second rendering area that holds the ad.

[...] Among those who concern themselves with the nuances of browser behavior, it's argued that blurring the boundaries between what the browser presents and what the website presents is both confusing and a potential security risk.

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chromas writes:

Exposure to Perfluoroalkyl Substances and Women's Fertility Outcome:

Hundreds of everyday products are made with highly toxic fluorinated chemicals called PFAS. They build up in our bodies and never break down in the environment. Very small doses of PFAS have been linked to cancer, reproductive and immune system harm, and other diseases.

For decades, chemical companies covered up evidence of PFAS' health hazards. Today nearly all Americans, including newborn babies, have PFAS in their blood, and more than 200 million people may be drinking PFAS-tainted water. What began as a "miracle of modern chemistry" is now a national crisis.

In 1946, DuPont introduced nonstick cookware coated with Teflon. Today the family of fluorinated chemicals that sprang from Teflon includes thousands of nonstick, stain-repellent and waterproof compounds called PFAS, short for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances.

PFAS are used in a staggering array of consumer products and commercial applications. Decades of heavy use have resulted in contamination of water, soil and the blood of people and animals in the farthest corners of the world. PFAS are incredibly persistent, never breaking down in the environment and remaining in our bodies for years.

DuPont invented the PFAS chemical patented as Teflon, but 3M became its main manufacturer. In 2001, a scandal erupted in Parkersburg, W.Va., after discovery of the Teflon chemical in the drinking water of tens of thousands of people near a DuPont plant. (The story is documented in the film "The Devil We Know.")

A class-action lawsuit uncovered evidence DuPont knew PFAS was hazardous and had contaminated tap water but didn't tell its workers, local communities or environmental officials. The lawsuit also triggered studies linking the Teflon chemical to cancer and other diseases.

Feds Arrest Alleged BreachForums Owner Linked to FBI Hacks

upstart writes:

Feds arrest alleged BreachForums owner linked to FBI hacks:

The FBI has arrested the person allegedly in charge of the BreachForums online hacking community, as reported earlier by Krebs on Security and Bleeping Computer. Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, also known online as "Pompompurin," was arrested at his New York home on Wednesday and charged with conspiracy to commit access device fraud, according to a pair of court filings.

In a sworn statement, the FBI agent involved in the case claims Fitzpatrick admitted to owning BreachForums at the time of his arrest and identified himself as Pompompurin. Pompompurin created BreachForums after the FBI seized RaidForums, a similar hacking site that also sold leaked information.

The hacker is implicated in a number of breaches, with many of them targeting the FBI. In 2021, Pompompurin took responsibility for a hack that sent out thousands of fake cybersecurity warnings from the FBI's email address, and is also linked to the breach of Infragard, the FBI's information-sharing program that aims to raise awareness about physical and digital threats to government organizations and independent companies.

The hacking forum was recently involved in the breach of DC Health Link

Additionally, Bleeping Computer notes that Pompompurin is connected to the 2021 Robinhood breach that exposed the information of millions of its users, as well as the leak of Twitter user handles and email addresses that occurred in November 2022.

fliptop writes:

Don't miss the planet parade taking place at the end of March:

Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Uranus, and Mars are set to align in an arc formation on the nights of March 25 through 30, alongside the Moon.

Jupiter may sink into the sunset and get lost in sunlight after the 28th, though, so aim to see this relatively rare cosmic event by then.

If you want to spot all five planets in one night, timing, dark skies, and a clear view of the horizon are key.

[...] Shortly after the Sun dips below the horizon, look to the west. Low in the sky, where the Sun just set, Jupiter and Mercury will appear side-by-side.

Dwindling sunlight might make them hard to see with the naked eye. So, if you can't spot them at first, try binoculars. Just make sure the Sun is below the horizon so you don't potentially harm your eyes by looking at it through binoculars.

Linked story includes more info and a star map to assist your celestial gaze.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/feral-hogs-are-the-invasive-menace-youve-never-thought-about/

Think of the worst invasive species you know. Kudzu: smothering trees and houses, growing a foot a day. Burmese pythons: stripping the Everglades of small animals. Asian carp: hoovering streams clean of plankton and swimming toward the Great Lakes.

They all came from somewhere else, arrived with no natural predators, outcompeted local flora and fauna, and took over whole ecosystems. But they all have their limitations: Kudzu dies in a hard freeze, carp can't tolerate salt water, and pythons can't cover long distances very fast. (Thankfully.)

Now imagine a species with all those benefits—foreign origin, no enemies—and no roadblocks to dominance: One that is indifferent to temperature, comfortable in many landscapes, able to run a lot faster than you, and muscular enough to leave a big dent in your car. That describes any of the possibly 6 million feral hogs in the United States, the most intractable invasives that most people have never heard of.
[...]
USDA research estimates that, on their own, hog populations will expand their range by about 4 to 8 miles per year. But Mayer jokes darkly that they have relocated at "about 70 miles per hour—which is the speed of the pickups taking them down the highway."
[...]
This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Original Submission

guest reader writes:

Uracil found in Ryugu samples:

Researchers have analyzed samples of asteroid Ryugu collected by the Japanese Space Agency's Hayabusa2 spacecraft and found uracil—one of the informational units that make up RNA, the molecules that contain the instructions for how to build and operate living organisms. Nicotinic acid, also known as Vitamin B3 or niacin, which is an important cofactor for metabolism in living organisms, was also detected in the same samples.

This discovery by an international team, led by Associate Professor Yasuhiro Oba at Hokkaido University, adds to the evidence that important building blocks for life are created in space and could have been delivered to Earth by meteorites.

"Scientists have previously found nucleobases and vitamins in certain carbon-rich meteorites, but there was always the question of contamination by exposure to the Earth's environment," Oba explained. "Since the Hayabusa2 spacecraft collected two samples directly from asteroid Ryugu and delivered them to Earth in sealed capsules, contamination can be ruled out."

"We found uracil in the samples in small amounts, in the range of 6–32 parts per billion (ppb), while vitamin B3 was more abundant, in the range of 49–99 ppb," Oba elaborated. "Other biological molecules were found in the sample as well, including a selection of amino acids, amines and carboxylic acids, which are found in proteins and metabolism, respectively." The compounds detected are similar but not identical to those previously discovered in carbon-rich meteorites.

"The discovery of uracil in the samples from Ryugu lends strength to current theories regarding the source of nucleobases in the early Earth," Oba concludes. "The OSIRIS-REx mission by NASA will be returning samples from asteroid Bennu this year, and a comparative study of the composition of these asteroids will provide further data to build on these theories."

Journal Reference:
Oba, Y., Koga, T., Takano, Y. et al. Uracil in the carbonaceous asteroid (162173) Ryugu. Nat Commun 14, 1292 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36904-3

Related:
Building Blocks of Life Found in Meteorite Which Crashed Landed in Gloucestershire
Asteroid Material Returned by Japan Probe is Oldest Material Identified and Contains 23 Amino Acids
All Five DNA and RNA Nucleobases Found in Meteorites

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Russia has spent nearly $1 billion on the development of the new Soyuz-5 rocket:

The Soviet Union created the Baikonur Cosmodrome in 1955 to serve as a test site for intercontinental ballistic missiles. A few years later it became the world's first spaceport with the launch of the historic Sputnik 1 and Vostok 1 missions. The sprawling cosmodrome was a mainstay of the Soviet space program.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia began to lease the spaceport from the government of Kazakhstan and currently has an agreement to use the facilities through the year 2050. Russia pays an annual lease fee of about $100 million. Neither country is particularly happy with the relationship; the Kazakh government feels like it is under-compensated, and the Russian government would like it to be in its own country, which is why it has moved in recent years to build a new launch site for most of its rockets in the Far East of Russia, at Vostochny.

[...] Earlier this month a Kazakh news site, KZ24, reported that the Republic of Kazakhstan had seized the property of TsENKI, the Center for Utilization of Ground-based Space Infrastructure, in Kazakhstan. This firm, which is a subsidiary of Roscosmos, is responsible for launch pads and ground support equipment for the Russian space corporation. According to the report, which was translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell, TsENKI is barred from removing any assets or materials from Kazakhstan.

[...] Russia has already spent nearly $1 billion on the development of the new Soyuz-5 rocket and plans for its launch site and ground services. When Ars wrote about the rocket's development back in 2017, it was slated for a debut in 2021. Now it is unlikely to debut before at least 2024—and given the current dispute with Kazakhstan, it likely will be delayed much longer into the future.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

More than a trillion insects are raised each year as high-protein, low-carbon animal feed, but the practice might have an ethical blind spot:

Insects are strange wondrous beings. Butterflies can see parts of the light spectrum that are invisible to human eyes and use these ultraviolet patterns to find their way to tasty plants. Moths use the Earth's magnetic field to orient themselves on journeys of hundreds of miles. Bees waggle their butts to tell their hive-mates where to find a juicy stash of nectar. Insects live in our world—or humans live in theirs—yet we inhabit completely different sensory universes.

But just as we are starting to understand insect senses, something is shifting in the way we treat these creatures. Insect farming is booming in a major way. By one estimate, between 1 trillion and 1.2 trillion insects are raised on farms each year as companies race to find a high-protein, low-carbon way to feed animals and humans. In terms of sheer numbers of animals impacted, this is a transformation of a speed and scale that we've never seen before.

It's a weird twist in our already strange relationship with bugs. We squash them, spray them, eat them, and crush them to make pretty dyes. But we also fret about plummeting wild insect populations and rely on them to pollinate the crops we eat. And with the industrialization of insect farming, bugs are being offered up as a solution to the human-caused climate crisis. But before we go down that route, we need to ask some really basic questions about insects. Can they feel? And if so, what should we do about it?

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