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fliptop writes:

The agency continues its post-quantum cryptography push as it looks to create guidance for all sectors:

The latest step in post-quantum cryptography guidance is helping organizations identify where current public-key algorithms will need to be replaced, as the National Institute of Standards and Technology continues its push to fortify U.S. digital networks ahead of the maturity of quantum computing.

A new draft document previews—and solicits public commentary on—NIST's current post-quantum cryptography guidance.

Current goals outlined in the working draft include helping entities locate where and how public key algorithms are utilized in encryption schemes, developing a strategy to migrate these algorithms to quantum-resilient substitutes and performing interoperability and performance testing.

[...] A major theme of the document is to help organizations understand the security architecture in their networks so that they firmly grasp where post-quantum security measures will need to be implemented and where to prioritize modernization. NIST also aims to compile a definitive inventory of software vendors to support post-quantum cryptography migration.

[...] The new guidance follows NIST's ongoing effort to finalize its quantum-resistant algorithms in 2024 after identifying four in 2022.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Related: 2023 Will See Renewed Focus on Quantum Computing

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

My wife just SMS'd me this, since I've never had one of those Tweeter things . . .

From JMS on Twitter . . .

BABYLON 5 ANIMATED MOVIE coming from Warner Bros. Animation & WB Home Entertainment! Classic B5: raucous, heartfelt, nonstop, a ton of fun through time and space & a love letter to the fans. Movie title, release date and other details coming one week from today.

#B5AnimatedMovie

JMS posts . . .

And just to be clear, this brand new original animated movie is already finished and in the can. So it's 100% real, happening, and coming out very soon.

Not what I imagined or wanted, but I'm not opposed to it. I would very much like to know more about the original story plan before JMS had to use some of his "trap doors" due to cast changes.

What animated movies would you like to see made? Alternatively, are there some stories that you think an animated movie would spoil as far as your are concerned? [JR]

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Photonic circuits are a very promising technology for neural networks because they make it possible to build energy-efficient computing units. For years, the Politecnico di Milano has been working on developing programmable photonic processors integrated on silicon microchips only a few mm2 in size for use in the field of data transmission and processing, and now these devices are being used to build photonic neural networks:

"An artificial neuron, like a biological neuron, must perform very simple mathematical operations, such as addition and multiplication, but in a neural network consisting of many densely interconnected neurons, the energy cost of these operations grows exponentially and quickly becomes prohibitive. Our chip incorporates a photonic accelerator that allows calculations to be carried out very quickly and efficiently, using a programmable grid of silicon interferometers. The calculation time is equal to the transit time of light in a chip a few millimeters in size, so we are talking about less than a billionth of a second (0.1 nanoseconds)," says Francesco Morichetti, Head of the Photonic Devices Lab of the Politecnico di Milano.

"The advantages of photonic neural networks have long been known, but one of the missing pieces to fully exploit their potential was network training.. It is like having a powerful calculator, but not knowing how to use it. In this study, we succeeded in implementing training strategies for photonic neurons similar to those used for conventional neural networks. The photonic 'brain' learns quickly and accurately and can achieve precision comparable to that of a conventional neural network, but faster and with considerable energy savings. These are all building blocks for artificial intelligence and quantum applications," adds Andrea Melloni, Director of Polifab the Politecnico di Milano micro and nanotechnology center.

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Journal Reference: Sunil Pai et al, Experimentally realized in situ backpropagation for deep learning in photonic neural networks, Science (2023). DOI: 10.1126/science.ade8450

Related: New Chip Can Process and Classify Nearly Two Billion Images Per Second

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A baby girl who developed a life-threatening brain condition was successfully treated before she was born:

Her parents signed up for a clinical trial of an in-utero surgical treatment to see if doctors could intervene before any of these outcomes materialized. It seems to have worked. The team behind the operation now plans to treat more fetuses in the same way. Other, similar brain conditions might benefit from the same approach. For conditions like these, fetal brain surgery could be the future.

The baby's condition, known as vein of Galen malformation, was first noticed during a routine ultrasound scan at 30 weeks of pregnancy. The condition occurs when a vein connects with an artery in the brain. These two types of vessels have different functions and should be kept separate—arteries ferry high-pressure flows of oxygenated blood from the heart, while thin-walled veins carry low-pressure blood back the other way.

When the two combine, the high-pressure blood flow from an artery can stretch the thin walls of the vein. "Over time the vein essentially blows up like a balloon," says Darren Orbach, a radiologist at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts, who treats babies born with the condition.

The resulting balloon of blood can cause serious problems for a baby. "It's stealing blood from the rest of the circulation," says Mario Ganau, a consultant neurosurgeon at Oxford University Hospitals in the UK, who was not involved in this particular case. Other parts of the brain can end up being starved of oxygenated blood, causing brain damage, and there's a risk of bleeding in the brain. The extra pressure put on the heart to pump blood can lead to heart failure. And other organs can suffer too—especially the lungs and kidneys, says Ganau.

Fetuses with the condition are thought to be protected by the placenta to some degree. But that changes from the moment the umbilical cord is clamped at birth. "All of a sudden there's this enormous burden placed right on the newborn heart," says Orbach. "Most babies with this condition will become very sick, very quickly."

Journal Reference:
Darren B. Orbach, Louise E. Wilkins-Haug, Carol B. Benson, et al., Transuterine Ultrasound-Guided Fetal Embolization of Vein of Galen Malformation, Eliminating Postnatal Pathophysiology [open], Stroke, 2023. DOI: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.123.043421

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The notorious Monopoly Market site has been seized and 288 suspects have been arrested:

Monopoly Market has been seized by authorities, while 288 suspects have been arrested. These individuals are believed to have bought or sold drugs on the dark web through this site.

The international operation – called SpecTor – involved "separate complementary actions" in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Brazil, the UK, the US and Switzerland. The information used to conduct the operation stemmed from "troves of evidence provided by German authorities", according to Europol which coordinated the international law enforcement action. These German authorities successfully seized "criminal infrastructure" in December 2021, which was used to create evidence for hundreds of national investigations.

"A number of investigations to identify additional individuals behind dark web accounts are still ongoing," Europol wrote in a statement. "As law enforcement authorities gained access to the vendors' extensive buyer lists, thousands of customers across the globe are now at risk of prosecution as well."

The US Department of Justice claims that Operation SpecTor led to more seizures "than any prior operation". The total seizures include 117 firearms, 850kg of different drugs and $53.4m in both cash and virtual currencies.

Commenting on the successful operation, Europol executive director Catherine De Bolle said the law enforcement coalition proves that "we all do better when we work together".

"This operation sends a strong message to criminals on the dark web: international law enforcement has the means and the ability to identify and hold you accountable for your illegal activities, even on the dark web," De Bolle said.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Hydrated dunes suggest water can persist on some parts of the Martian surface, according to data from China's troubled Zhurong rover:

China's Zhurong rover has found evidence of liquid water on present-day Mars, according to a team that reviewed data from the rover's cameras.

To be clear, the team claims they've collected evidence of liquid water on Mars—not the liquid water itself. Water was once plentiful on Mars. NASA, the European Space Agency, and others have found a plethora of evidence for ancient water on the planet; it's proving the recent presence of water that's trickier.

[...] "According to the measured meteorological data by Zhurong and other Mars rovers, we inferred that these dune surface characteristics were related to the involvement of liquid saline water formed by the subsequent melting of frost/snow falling on the salt-containing dune surfaces when cooling occurs," Qin Xiaoguang, a geophysicist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in an academy release.

Mars' atmosphere is only 1% the density of Earth's, making it difficult for liquid water to exist on Mars today. But frozen water crops up regularly, in the form of possible subsurface lakes and even relict glaciers on the planet's surface.

[...] Based on the age of the dunes, they may have been hydrated when water vapor moved from the planet's polar ice sheet to its equator, making the planet's lower latitudes more humid. Like the discovery of the glacial remnants on Mars, these findings boost humankind's hopes for water's ability to persist near Mars' relatively balmy equator, where potential human missions would be based.

Journal Reference:
Xiaoguang Qin, Xin Ren, Xu Wang, et al., Modern water at low latitudes on Mars: Potential evidence from dune surfaces [open], Sci. Adv., 2023. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add8868

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Samsung to pay out $303M for memory patent infringement:

Samsung Electronics has been stung for more than $303 million in a patent infringement case brought by US memory company Netlist.

Netlist, headquartered in Irvine, California, styles itself as a provider of high-performance modular memory subsystems. The company initially filed a complaint that Samsung had infringed on three of its patents, later amended to six [PDF]. Following a six-day trial, the jury found for Netlist in five of these and awarded a total of $303,150,000 in damages.

[...] The patents appear to apply to various aspects of DDR memory modules. According to reports, Samsung's representatives had argued that Netlist's patents were invalid because they were already covered by existing technology and that its own memory chips did not function in the same way as described by the patents, but this clearly did not sway the jurors.

[...] The company states that Samsung and Netlist were initially partners under a 2015 Joint Development and License Agreement (JDLA), which granted Samsung a five-year paid-up license to Netlist's patents.

[...] Under the terms of the agreement, Samsung was to supply Netlist certain memory products at competitive prices, but Netlist claimed Samsung repeatedly failed to honor these promises. As a result, Netlist claims, it terminated the JDLA on July 15, 2020.

Netlist alleged in its court filing that Samsung has continued to make and sell memory products "with materially the same structures" as those referenced in the patents, despite the termination of the agreement.

upstart writes:

Yet another piece of hardware becomes junk

Amazon Halo is dead, and it's a bigger deal than you think:

Does paying a subscription fee to own and use a piece of hardware feel reassuring? Does that monthly commitment make you feel safe, as the company has income past any original purchase, encouraging it to support and update the product so it never becomes useless?

As Amazon's decision to end support for its Halo line of health products proves, it absolutely shouldn't. What it should do, however, is make you seriously consider whether any subscription-based health and fitness product is a good idea at all.

On April 26, Amazon discontinued its Halo product line, which consists of the Halo Band, Halo View, and the Halo Rise. The app will stop working on August 1, when the hardware will also cease to provide any functionality. It's not good for owners and also bad news for staff at Amazon working on the projects, as many will lose their jobs.

[...] Halo is now a failure, and regardless of why it has happened, it's one that the subscription model couldn't help save. The Halo products weren't the best of their type you could get, but Amazon's massive reach, brand recognition, and willingness of its core customers to pay a subscription for its services should have helped mitigate at least some of that issue. But Amazon isn't going to discontinue successful product lines that make it money — it's going to get rid of the ones that do the opposite. The subscription fee absolutely wasn't a lifeline for Halo and provided no protection to you as a consumer at all.

upstart writes:

Neither war nor bad sensors nor a nautical journey will keep this probe from building a 3D map of space:

It's been a decade since it was announced, but the Euclid mission to build a 3D map of the universe is finally getting close to launch with the spacecraft landing in Florida ahead of an expected July liftoff.

The Euclid mission will send the eponymous probe to Earth-Sun Lagrange point 2 – the same spot as NASA's James Webb Telescope, where it will observe more than a third of the sky and detect galaxies as distant as 10 billion light years away.

[...] The ultimate goal of the European Space Agency mission – which has enjoyed important contributions from NASA – is to build a 3D map of the large-scale structure of the universe to help scientists better understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which make up more than 95 percent of the mass and energy of the universe. Scientists with the European Space Agency also hope Euclid will help them better understand how the expansion of the universe has changed over time, and whether we have a complete understanding of gravity.

"No test of the [general theory of relativity] has been made with high precision over the large distances and times that Euclid will cover. This way, Euclid will reveal if general relativity breaks down at the largest scales. If it does, physicists will need to go back to the drawing board," ESA said.

[...] If everything in the clean room goes to plan, Euclid will then be mounted atop its Falcon 9 ride to begin the final leg of its journey. If the James Webb's trip to L2 is any indicator, Euclid should reach its destination in around 30 days.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2022/11/a-bug-fix-in-8086-microprocessor.html

While reverse-engineering the 8086 from die photos, a particular circuit caught my eye because its physical layout on the die didn't match the surrounding circuitry. This circuit turns out to implement special functionality for a couple of instructions, subtlely changing the way they interacted with interrupts. Some web searching revealed that this behavior was changed by Intel in 1978 to fix a problem with early versions of the 8086 chip. By studying the die, we can get an idea of how Intel dealt with bugs in the 8086 microprocessor.

In modern CPUs, bugs can often be fixed through a microcode patch that updates the CPU during boot.1 However, prior to the Pentium Pro (1995), microprocessors could only be fixed through a change to the design that fixed the silicon.

Original Submission

TSMC May Charge 30 Percent More for Chips Made at its Arizona Fabs

upstart writes:

The chipmaker is looking for $15 billion in subsidies from the US government:

Setting up a chip factory in the US is an expensive endeavor, especially when compared to doing the same in Asia. Still, companies like TSMC are investing billions into doing just that, wooed by government subsidies and the idea of achieving a geographically diverse supply chain that is less prone to disruptions. As a result, chips made by the Taiwanese giant in the US could end up 30 percent more expensive than those made in its home country.

Back in December, TSMC announced it would pour no less than $40 billion into building two advanced chip factories in Arizona. In other words, the world's biggest chipmaker made the largest direct foreign investment in Arizona history and one of the largest in US history. When they become operational, the fabs will employ thousands of people and produce around 600,000 wafers per year.

The move represents a significant shift in mindset for TSMC leadership, which has traditionally been reluctant to establish chip manufacturing facilities in the US. One reason has to do with Taiwan's policy of keeping its most advanced technologies locally even as it builds external manufacturing arms for a more resilient global supply chain.

Another reason has to do with cost – setting up and operating a factory on American soil is up to 50 percent more expensive than in Taiwan. Then you'd need to source materials like rare earth metals and semiconductor-grade neon as well as a steady supply of water to keep the facility running at full capacity. And last but not least, you need a lot of skilled (and cheap) labor, something that is easier to find in Asia as opposed to North America and even Europe.

Naturally, this means TSMC will have extra costs in the US that will translate into higher prices for wafers made in Arizona as opposed to those made in Taiwan. Some industry insiders estimate that chips made in America on N5 and N4 process nodes will cost up to 30 percent more than those made in the Asian country.

It's not just the US that's more expensive than Taiwan for chip manufacturers, either. Chips made on older, more mature process technologies like N28, N22, N16, and N12 at TSMC's Japanese arm in Kumamoto are also 10-15 percent more expensive to make than similar chips made in the company's home country.

Just like the US, Japan is looking o reignite its once-dominant semiconductor industry. Last year, we learned the two countries kicked off a joint research and development arm for 2nm-class process technologies and beyond.

upstart writes:

Netflix Loses A Million Subscribers In Spain After Greedy Password Sharing Crackdown:

We've noted repeatedly how Netflix's password sharing crackdown is a stupid cash grab that alienates and annoys loyal customers, duplicates existing efforts to restrict "freeloaders," won't give the company the financial windfall it thinks, and just generally represents how the company has inevitably shifted from innovative disruptor to the kind of tone deaf cable giants it used to criticize.

The plan basically involves charging users an extra $2-$3 a month if it's found that someone is using your account outside of your home. The problem: Netflix has already been imposing blanket price hikes, and it already limits the number of simultaneously streams per account, forcing users to subscribe to more expensive tiers if they want to expand the limit.

While the crackdown isn't expected to hit U.S. subscribers until the end of the second quarter (aka soon), the effort has generally been a hot mess in the smaller countries Netflix first used as guinea pigs to test both the underlying tech and company messaging.

The company had to suspend the efforts in countries like Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic, after users were equal parts befuddled and annoyed. And in Spain, estimates are that the company saw a defection of more than one million subscribers largely due to the higher, unnecessary fees:

"There are of course inherent risks with clamping down on password sharing, particularly when back in 2017 Netflix was seen to be actively encouraging it. Some users were expected to be lost in the process but losing over 1 million users in a little over a month has major implications for Netflix and whether it decides to continue with its crackdown globally.

Interestingly, there is no strong demographic skew to those who cancelled, signaling a more outright rejection of the password sharing clampdown. In a worrying sign for the next quarter, 10% of remaining Netflix subscribers say they plan to cancel their plan in Q2 2023, which is well above the average seen in previous quarters."

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Original Submission

SpaceX Completes First Fully Expendable Falcon Heavy Mission

SpaceX Completes First Fully Expendable Falcon Heavy Mission:

The triple-core rocket blasted off on Sunday evening to deliver three satellites to a high Earth orbit.

SpaceX's giant Falcon Heavy rocket successfully delivered three satellites to high Earth orbit on April 30. The launch marked the first time that none of the rocket's boosters were recovered.

Wild SpaceX Video Shows Hottest Reentry Yet of Reusable Rocket Fairing

upstart writes:

Wild SpaceX Video Shows Hottest Reentry Yet of Reusable Rocket Fairing:

The dramatic footage shows a Falcon Heavy fairing blazing through the atmosphere at speeds reaching Mach 15.

The most recent flight of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy was historic in that it was the rocket's first fully expendable mission, and it was also the first Falcon Heavy mission to include previously flown fairings. As new footage attests, the fiery return of these fairings was a sight to behold.

After several delays, the Falcon Heavy blasted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, April 30 at 8:26 p.m. ET. The triple-core rocket successfully deployed its primary payload, the broadband ViaSat-3 Americas satellite, and two smaller satellites to geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO).

Key to SpaceX's ongoing success is its devotion to reusability—it's a lot cheaper to recover your engines and reuse them than to produce new ones for every launch. For this mission, however, none of the rocket's three booster stages could be recovered, as they expelled all their fuel in the effort to get the payloads to GEO. That said, SpaceX did make the attempt to recover the rocket's fairings, so in that sense it wasn't a fully expendable mission.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

T-Mobile disclosed the second data breach of 2023 after discovering that attackers had access to the personal information of hundreds of customers for more than a month, starting late February 2023.

Compared to previous data breaches reported by T-Mobile, the latest of which impacted 37 million people, this incident affected only 836 customers. Still, the amount of exposed information is highly extensive and exposes affected individuals to identity theft and phishing attacks.

"In March 2023, the measures we have in place to alert us to unauthorized activity worked as designed and we were able to determine that a bad actor gained access to limited information from a small number of T-Mobile accounts between late February and March 2023," the company said in data breach notification letters sent to affected individuals just before the weekend, on Friday, April 28, 2023.

T-Mobile said the threat actors didn't gain access to call records or affected individuals' personal financial account info, but the exposed personally identifiable information contains more than enough data for identity theft.

While the exposed information varied for each of the affected customers, it could include "full name, contact information, account number and associated phone numbers, T-Mobile account PIN, social security number, government ID, date of birth, balance due, internal codes that T-Mobile uses to service customer accounts (for example, rate plan and feature codes), and the number of lines."

After detecting the security breach, T-Mobile proactively reset account PINs for impacted customers and now offers them two years of free credit monitoring and identity theft detection services through Transunion myTrueIdentity.

Original Submission

IBM to Stop Hiring for Jobs That AI Could Do

upstart writes:

Routine tasks like transferring employees between departments are likely to be fully automated:

American tech major IBM anticipates pausing hiring for positions that it believes artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually take over.

In an interview with Bloomberg, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said the company will suspend or pause hiring for back-office functions such as human resources.

The company employs some 26,000 people in these non-customer-facing roles, Krishna said.

"I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," he added.

[...] Routine tasks like transferring employees between departments or providing letters of employment verification are likely to be fully automated, said the company's chief.

Over the next ten years, he continued, it is likely that some HR functions related to workforce composition analysis and productivity will not be replaced.