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upstart writes:

Isar Aerospace recently secured $165 million in funding to gear up for the inaugural launch of its Spectrum rocket:

German company Isar Aerospace has raised $165 million in order to ramp up the development of its Spectrum rocket, which is scheduled for its debut launch later this year. For Europeans needing access to space, the rocket's arrival will come not a moment too soon.

[...] Isar Aerospace has raised a total of $330 million so far, with $75 million raised during its previous round of funding in July 2021. The funds will go towards the development of Isar's Spectrum rocket, a two-stage launch vehicle designed to carry small and medium sized satellites to orbit. According to ISAR, Spectrum should be capable of carrying 2,205 pounds (1,000 kilograms) to low Earth orbit (LEO). By comparison, SpaceX's medium-lift Falcon 9 can hoist 50,265 pounds (22,800 kg) to LEO.

Spectrum's inaugural launch is planned for the second half of 2023. Isar Aerospace is currently running tests on the rocket's Aquila engine, which was developed and manufactured in-house. The company is also finalizing its infrastructure at the launch site in Andøya, Norway, which will host Spectrum's debut liftoff.

[...] Europe is desperately in need of its own launch vehicles, whether for small or medium lift, to provide local access to space. Spectrum won't be the most powerful rocket when it debuts, but it'll fill a troublesome gap, especially until Vega-C and Ariane 6 come through.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Food safety authorities in the US and Singapore have already approved synthetic meat and the EU is also expected to:

Italy's right-wing government has backed a bill that would ban laboratory-produced meat and other synthetic foods, highlighting Italian food heritage and health protection.

If the proposals go through, breaking the ban would attract fines of up to €60,000 (£53,000).

Francesco Lollobrigida, who runs the rebranded ministry for agriculture and food sovereignty, spoke of the importance of Italy's food tradition.

The farmers' lobby praised the move.

But it was a blow for some animal welfare groups, which have highlighted lab-made meat as a solution to issues including protecting the environment from carbon emissions and food safety.

[...] The proposals, approved by ministers on Tuesday, seek to ban synthetic foods produced from animal cells without killing the animal, and would apply to lab-produced fish and synthetic milk too.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A rare 'ultramassive' black hole, 30 billion times the mass of the Sun, is lurking in the cosmos:

Holy smokes. A group of astronomers have found a black hole containing (checks notes) 30 billion times the mass of our Sun. That's more than seven thousand times the size of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

The team used gravitational lensing to see the black hole. In this natural phenomenon, massive objects' gravitational fields bend photons of light magnifying and warping them—making it possible to see object that would otherwise be hidden or too faint. Last year, a team spotted the oldest known star in an arc of gravitationally lensed light.

According to a Durham University release, the newly detected black hole is the first ever found using gravitational lensing. A paper about the discovery is published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

[...] The team identified the black hole by modeling the different pathways light might take through the universe, depending on the presence of black holes of varying mass. They then compared the computer data with images of the cosmos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Lo and behold, they found a match.

[...] "Gravitational lensing makes it possible to study inactive black holes, something not currently possible in distant galaxies," Nightingale added. "This approach could let us detect many more black holes beyond our local universe and reveal how these exotic objects evolved further back in cosmic time."

A brief video explaining the process

Journal Reference:
James. W. Nightingale, Russell J. Smith, Qiuhan He, et al., Abell 1201: Detection of an Ultramassive Black Hole in a Strong Gravitational Lens, arXiv:2303.15514 [astro-ph.GA], https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.15514

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Netflix has been releasing mobile video games since 2021, but this would be the company's first attempt at TV-based video games:

Higher quality TV and movies? No. A standard of not cancelling shows after a single season? Nah. Mobile games on your TV? Yup. That appears to be Netflix's plan after a developer found some hidden code while digging through the platform. The company's actually been offering games on mobile since 2021, but given paltry player numbers, the effort to bring them to TVs, where most subscribers actually use Netflix, might be the best way to remind people that they're even there.

App developer Steve Moser—who shared his findings with Bloomberg—found some sneaky lines of code during some digging into Netflix's back end. One line of the code allegedly read "A game on your TV needs a controller to play. Do you want to use this phone as a game controller?," indicating that a user's smartphone would serve as the controller for a game hosted on Netflix's interface.

Currently, Netflix's gaming service is relegated to mobile, and while there's critically acclaimed titles like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge and Immortality in there, you can only get at them either by stumbling on Netflix's games on your phone's app store or through a single row in the Netflix app. As such, it's easy to miss out on this side of Netflix entirely. According to recent data, only one percent of subscribers are playing games on Netflix.

upstart writes:

New research into aspirin might one day lead to safer painkillers or even new cancer treatments:

We still have more to learn about one of the world's oldest drugs: aspirin. In research out this week, researchers say they've uncovered more about how the drug reduces inflammation. The findings might pave the way toward creating similar but safer treatments for inflammation and possibly even cancer, according to the team.

Also known as acetylsalicylic acid, aspirin was first synthesized around the turn of the 20th century, though a precursor to it—derived from willow plants—has been used by humans for thousands of years. It's a type of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), and, like other NSAIDs, it can treat fever, inflammation, and pain. It also has a unique blood-thinning effect.

Aspirin remains one of the most widely used medications in the world, both as a short-term option for various ailments and as a preventative treatment for people at high risk of cardiovascular disease. But it's not without side effects—namely an increased risk of gastrointestinal bleeding. Last year, U.S. experts even stopped recommending a daily dose of baby aspirin for older adults without a history of heart attack or stroke, citing evidence that any modest benefits for the typical person would be outweighed by the known risks.

[...] Aspirin is known to inhibit enzymes called cyclooxygenase, or COX. These enzymes play a vital role in producing other chemicals that cause inflammation. The researchers say they discovered several ways that aspirin influences this process, from controlling transcription factors that allow the expression of cytokines (proteins involved in inflammation and our immune response) to slowing the breakdown of the amino acid tryptophan, another important player in inflammation. It also seems to accomplish the latter by inhibiting the production of indoleamine dioxygenases (IDOs), particularly IDO1, during the inflammatory process.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

gCaptcha is the leading rival for quality captcha services against Google's renowned and universally despised recaptcha. When Google increased the price for recaptcha competing services took off taking what Google started from to improve the experience significantly. Some experiences with smiling dogs and cloudy horses were deemed to take this too far but these experiments showed that there are improvements to be made in the captcha game.

With hackers out to solve any captcha programmatically captcha services need to stay one step ahead. The slider method was found to be easily bypassed. Rotating puzzle pieces is harder to solve but involves more user interaction and has moving parts in the code that can break.

Recently hCaptcha has introduce a test that challenges the user to click on the center of an owl's head. This is an improvement over selecting a type of ball from a grid of 9 or going through the excruciating experience Google inflicts on users. There must be a better way to prove that the person viewing the web page is a human and not a bot. How about it, Soylentils? What's your best idea for a captcha system given the state of the systems we have today?

[Ed's Comment: Bonus points if you can suggest a system that does not rely on graphics (not everyone uses the latest browsers or even anything more than a simple line of text) to access some sites - our own included. We have the need for a robust captcha system for people creating accounts in order to reduce the number of fake accounts being created by a bot.]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Stop Blaming the End User for Security Risk:

It's common among cybersecurity professionals to point to the end user as a top area of risk in securing the organization. This is understandable. Systems and software are under our control, but users are unpredictable, that unruly variable that expands our threat surface to each geographically dispersed user, personal device, and all-too-human foibles and flaws.

Certainly, threat actors target our users quite successfully — I'm not here to dismiss this obvious truth. But what is equally certain is this:We cannot train our way out of this problem. Enterprises pour significant investments into user security-awareness training, and still, they suffer embarrassing, costly breaches. So, focusing primarily on securing the end user isn't a sound strategy.

Fact: your users are a major risk factor. According to Verizon's "2022 Data Breach and Investigations Report," 35% of ransomware infections began with a phishing email. Fact: This is despite escalating investments in security-awareness training over many years. The cybersecurity awareness training market is projected to grow from $1,854.9 million in 2022 to $12,140 million by 2027. Fact: Even with all these investments, ransomware (just as one attack type) is also expected to grow aggressively, despite many organizational efforts, including training.

Sad, unavoidable fact: Our users are still going to make mistakes — we're all human, after all. A survey conducted to prove the need for more security training, in my view, proved its inability to stop the cyber crisis: Four out of five surveyed had received security awareness training; between 26% and 44% (based on age demographic) continued to click on links and attachments from unknown senders anyway.

NotSanguine writes:

Ars Technica is reporting that Twitter has convinced a judge to issue a subpoena to Github, requiring them to provide all personal details in their possession of a user called "FreeSpeechEnthusiast".

Twitter has obtained a subpoena compelling GitHub to provide identifying information on a user who posted portions of Twitter's source code.

Twitter on Friday asked the US District Court for the Northern District of California to issue a subpoena to GitHub. A court clerk signed off on the subpoena [PDF] yesterday.

GitHub user "FreeSpeechEnthusiast" posted Twitter source code in early January, shortly after Elon Musk bought Twitter and laid off thousands of workers. Twitter reportedly suspects the code leaker is one of its many ex-employees.

GitHub removed the code repository on Friday shortly after Twitter filed a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notice. Twitter's takedown notice also requested identifying information on FreeSpeechEnthusiast, but GitHub didn't provide those details to Twitter immediately.

With the subpoena now issued, GitHub has until April 3 to provide all identifying information, "including the name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), email address(es), social media profile data, and IP address(es), for the user(s) associated with" the FreeSpeechEnthusiast account. GitHub was also ordered to provide the same type of information on any "users who posted, uploaded, downloaded or modified the data" at the code repository posted by FreeSpeechEnthusiast.

upstart writes:

TSMC may not expand in US if double taxation rule continues:

As Apple's major chip manufacturer TSMC nears the opening of its Arizona plant, US officials want it to build more — but US versus China politics are complicating matters.

Taiwanese company TSMC has already invested $40 billion in its new Arizona factory, which it says will open in 2024. But since the US does not have a income tax agreement with Taiwan, TSMC faces double taxation on its profits from this or any other factory it could build in the States.

According to the Financial Times, unless there is a change in the law, TSMC will be paying out over 50% of its profits earned in the US. In comparison, Samsung pays much less because its home country of South Korea has a tax treaty with the States.

Naturally, then, US politicians who want to see the firm expand in the States argue that President Biden should negotiate a tax accord with Taiwan. TSMC officials have reportedly also asked for such an agreement to ease this double taxation burden.

However, at present the US does not recognize Taiwan as a separate country or sovereign nation. Instead, it sees it as part of China.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Newly Declassified Government Report Suggests Havana Syndrome Might Be Caused by an Energy Weapon:

After years of debate about the cause of the strange malady, a recently declassified document points the finger (once again) at "electromagnetic energy."

Several weeks after the intelligence community came out to disavow claims that "Havana Syndrome"—the bizarre rash of neurological disorders plaguing U.S. foreign service officers—was the result of a directed energy weapon, a newly declassified report alleges that may very well be what it is.

The group behind the report, the Intelligence Community Experts Panel on Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs), was established by the government to figure out just what the heck had happened to the 1,000-ish American officials who claim to have suffered from "Havana"'s bizarre symptoms. Those symptoms, which first cropped up at a U.S. embassy in Cuba in 2016 and soon spread to other parts of the globe, include a rash of inexplicable ailments—things like hearing and memory loss, severe headaches, light sensitivity, nausea, and a host of other debilitating issues.

Well, after a substantial research effort to get to the bottom of Havana Syndrome's seemingly impenetrable mystery, the IC panel ultimately released their findings to the government, but the contents of the report have remained classified—until now, that is.

[...] According to the report, a plausible explanation for the disorders may be "pulsed electromagnetic energy." It reads:

Electromagnetic energy, particularly pulsed signals in the radio frequency range, plausibly explains the core characteristics, although information gaps exist. There are several plausible pathways involving forms of electromagnetic energy, each with its own requirements, limitations, and unknowns. For all the pathways, sources exist that could generate the required stimuli, are concealable, and have moderate power requirements.

upstart writes:

DRAM got cheaper and prices will continue to fall:

While prices for computer hardware have remained relatively high in the past few years, the slowing of PC and component sales are starting to take effect. DRAM is the latest piece of hardware to become even cheaper, and projections show that prices will continue to fall in the coming months.

According to a report from TrendForce, DRAM prices have fallen 20% in the first quarter of 2023. This is a continued decline for the DRAM market as sales have been slowing for all sectors of the industry. Some DRAM manufacturers have already started layoffs as they see their revenues on a steep decline. For the second quarter of 2023, TrendForce says that prices are expected to fall another 10 to 15%.

Despite production cuts already in effect, PC makers still have between 9 and 13 weeks of DRAM inventory. The mobile sector seems to be having healthier levels of inventory as mobile manufacturers were more conservative in their plans.

Nonetheless, mobile DRAM pricing is also expected to decline by 10 to 15%. As consumer demand for DRAM was sluggish, suppliers looked to the server side of the business for sales, however this simply resulted in a huge pile-up of inventory for server DRAM.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Jenny Blessing and Ross Anderson have evaluated the security of systems designed to allow the various Internet messaging platforms to interoperate with each other:

The Digital Markets Act ruled that users on different platforms should be able to exchange messages with each other. This opens up a real Pandora's box. How will the networks manage keys, authenticate users, and moderate content? How much metadata will have to be shared, and how?

In our latest paper, One Protocol to Rule Them All? On Securing Interoperable Messaging, we explore the security tensions, the conflicts of interest, the usability traps, and the likely consequences for individual and institutional behaviour.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

One Protocol to Rule Them All? On Securing Interoperable Messaging, Jenny Blessing, Ross Anderson https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.14178

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Seattle-area county plans 'world leading' sustainable aviation fuel R&D center:

Washington state wants to create a "world leading" research and development center focused on low-carbon, sustainable aviation fuels. The facility is planned for Snohomish County's Paine Field — Boeing's historic home and a hub for low-carbon aerospace startups including ZeroAvia and MagniX.

Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers on Tuesday announced plans for the center, which would be built in partnership with Washington State University. Sen. Marko Liias and Rep. Brandy Donaghy, both leaders from the county, are calling for $6.5 million in the state's transportation budget to get the project rolling.

"We have been at the forefront of the aviation industry for decades and this will now put us in a place to lead the world in shaping the future of clean aviation," said Liias, chair of the Washington State Senate Transportation Committee.

WSU has a Bioproducts, Science, and Engineering Laboratory at its Tri-Cities campus. One of the focal areas for the lab is biofuels, which includes sustainable aviation fuels.

Liquid Salts Bring Pushbutton Lenses Into Focus

upstart writes:

First-ever piezoelectric liquids could spark new technologies in optics and hydraulics:

Scientists have discovered the first known piezoelectric liquids, which are able to convert mechanical force to electric charge, and vice versa. The generally environmentally friendly nature of these materials suggests they may find many applications beyond standard piezoelectric compounds, such as novel, electrically controlled optics and hydraulics. However, much remains unknown about how they work, and therefore what they may be capable of.

Piezoelectricity was first discovered in 1880. The effect has since found a wide range of applications, including cellphone speakers, inkjet printers, ultrasound imaging, sonar equipment, pressure sensors, acoustic guitar pickups, and diesel fuel injectors.

Until now, all known piezoelectric materials were solid. Now scientists have for the first time discovered piezoelectric liquids. They detailed their findings in a study online 9 March in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

The researchers experimented with ionic liquids. These fluids are salts—compounds that are each made of both a positively charged cation and a negatively charged anion—that are liquid at unusually low temperatures. In comparison, table salt melts at roughly 800 ºC.

"They are often relatively viscous—think about them like motor oil, or maple syrup," says Gary Blanchard, one of the authors of the study and a professor of chemistry at Michigan State University, in East Lansing.

upstart writes:

If you believe, they'll put 4G internet on the moon:

A Nokia executive recently confirmed the company is preparing to launch 4G internet on the moon, hopefully before the end of 2023. We put a man on the moon in 1969, and now the Finnish Telecom company wants to give the rock an internet connection.

For those unaware, Nokia announced these bold ambitions back in 2020 when NASA selected it for the project, and now it sounds like things are moving in the right direction.

According to CNBC, this is a big undertaking and will be a joint mission by Nokia, NASA, SpaceX, and others. The company Intuitive Machines’s upcoming IM-2 mission, currently scheduled to launch in November aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, will carry the 4G payload.

Once delivered, Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lunar lander will be able to have an active connection with its Rovers, helping aid in lunar discoveries, not to mention developing a human presence on the surface of the moon.

The hope is that this system can meet the needs of future space missions, including NASA's Artemis mission. If everything goes according to plan, Nokia's moon 4G signal will improve critical command and control functions, give teams remote control of rovers, and offer real-time navigation, not to mention stream back HD video of the moon's surface (and more) to Earth.

Original Submission