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upstart writes:

CERN spots strange Higgs boson decay behavior:

Evidence discovered at CERN of a rare form of Higgs boson decay may be just what scientists need to prove the existence of particles beyond those predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics – indirectly, at least.

[R]esearchers working on a pair of CERN experiments – ATLAS and CMS – said their combined datasets offer the first evidence of a Higgs boson decaying into a Z boson (an electrically neutral carrier of the weak force) and a photon.

Higgs bosons decay in various ways. They can split into four electrons, for example, or a pair of the electron's heavier cousin, muons. It's also possible for a Higgs boson to decay into two photons, but here's where things start to get tricky and weird: a Higgs boson doesn't decay directly into two photons.

Instead of going from Higgs directly to photons, "the decays proceed via an intermediate 'loop' of 'virtual' particles that pop in and out of existence and cannot be directly detected. These virtual particles could include new, as yet undiscovered particles that interact with the Higgs boson," CERN said.

Last night, Linode restarted beryllium, the chat server, to do emergency maintenance on the host. At the time, I was doing work on creating the new staging and development environment and didn't think much of it at the time at 3am. Not long after, I got notification that the machine was restarting. I went to sleep, and put it out of my mind. What I didn't notice, since this is the first unexpected reboot in awhile was that there was no startup script for the IRCd, due to the migration from CentOS 6 to Ubuntu 22.04. I got messages via Discord and SMS around 2PM EST (that is to say 12 hours later) that the IRC was down, so I got back home as quickly as possible and got it restarted.

I will add "getting someone else beside me onto the backend" on the things to do in the very short term.

~ NCommander

upstart writes:

Qualcomm imagines Snapdragon devices sharing workloads:

Computex Qualcomm has used its Computex keynote to pitch the ubiquity of its Snapdragon platform as its challenge to x86 CPUs as the engine of PCs – by enabling more efficient AI through offloading workloads to a constellation of devices.

Senior veep and general manager for mobile, compute, and XR Alex Katouzian opened with a humblebrag that people may have a Snapdragon CPU in a PC, smartphone, smartwatch and extended reality glasses. Katouzian then observed rising demand for AI workloads, and made the obvious point that such workloads are very demanding.

Speaking before a Computex crowd less than half the size of that which gathered to hear Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Katouzian outlined a plan to have Qualcomm enable AI workloads to move around Snapdragon-powered devices – assuming a user possesses several of them.

Offloading AI in this way, he said, will mean XR glasses can become smaller because they can be simpler devices once they offload some AI workloads.

Kedar Kondap, Qualcomm's senior veep and GM for compute and gaming, pointed out that local devices offer superior performance per watt compared to cloudy datacenters. He therefore predicted that AI workloads will be shared between client devices and clouds – in real time, if doing so enables the best and most efficient experience.

Qualcomm has dabbled in datacenter processors, but the chip shop's reps made no mention of such devices in the keynote. So while Kondap and Katouzian suggested Snapdragon-powered PCs are redefining the category, at this stage Qualcomm appears not to be contemplating a full-stack attack.

Original Submission

We have no access to the servers any more. We can't fix things. There is no IRC - so you cannot submit things via the upstart bot. So...

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Can someone please return some sanity to the current situation? We are prepared to keep the site going until you have negotiated the future - just let us get on with today.

We will process the stories that are currently in the submission queue but they will become more out of date as time passes.

upstart writes:

Understanding how couples integrate finances:

When it comes to how couples manage money, not everyone jumps to join their accounts.

New research from the University of Georgia looked at demographic and personal factors that revealed what makes couples more or less likely to pool finances.

A survey of more than 600 married or cohabitating individuals found that moving in together was not enough of a reason to combine finances. While some traditional indicators of stability—marriage, more dependents and higher net worth—increased the likelihood of joint accounts, having two sources of income made couples more likely to split finances.

"I just always assumed, based on my family background, that couples always pool their money. If they were married, they just pooled assets and income and made joint decisions," said the study's co-author John Grable, an endowed professor in UGA's College of Family and Consumer Sciences. "That's not always the case, and this study shows we can actually identify groups of people or profiles of individuals and couples where pooling resources is not as common."

The study's authors believe these results can not only help other researchers and financial counselors gain insight into financial integration styles, but they could help couples understand their approach to joint finances.

"Our research does suggest that people have a really hard time talking about money," said co-author, Ph.D. graduate, UGA part-time lecturer and financial planner Michelle Kruger. "So, if they're able to even establish whether they have the same kind of goals and values when it comes to spending money, that probably indicates a level of cohesiveness." Combining resources or keeping accounts separate

The study found that married participants were 4.5 times more likely to have pooled finances, which Grable said is expected.

"Pooling assets in a case where there's not a marital agreement can be really dangerous for the couple and the individual because the law doesn't provide the same protection for unmarried cohabitating couples as it would for a married couple," Grable said.

The impact of net worth, on the other hand, was more surprising.

upstart writes:

Nvidia is now a $1 trillion company thanks to the AI boom:

Nvidia has just become a $1 trillion company, with its rising valuation fueled by tech companies big and small racing to add generative artificial intelligence tools to their products. AI tools made up the vast bulk of recent Google I/O and Microsoft Build presentations, and Nvidia's chips make it a key supplier for companies trying to build something with AI.

The last quarterly earnings report from Nvidia noted over $2 billion in profit in three months. This latest push comes after Nvidia's business boomed early in the pandemic during a GPU shortage while they were in demand for PC gaming and cryptocurrency mining before those markets fell back throughout 2022.

Last fall, CEO Jensen Huang said it had built too many gaming GPUs and was forced to sell them for less money. However, by the time of Nvidia's next report in February, with ChatGPT all over the news, the outlook was more promising as Huang hyped the potential of Nvidia's data center growth, and the most recent report showed a new record in data center revenue.

Over the weekend, Nvidia's Computex 2023 keynote was full of AI announcements, including a demo of games using its Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) for Games to support natural language both for input and responses and a new DGX GH200 supercomputer built around its latest Grace Hopper Superchip that's collectively capable of an exaflop of AI performance.

Its valuation pushed past the trillion-dollar benchmark as trading opened today at over $400 per share, putting it in the rarified air previously occupied by only a few large companies such as Apple and Microsoft after they surpassed the significant mark in August 2018 and August 2019, respectively. Amazon and Google are the other tech stocks in the club, and Meta is a former member.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

On tech, the EU doesn't speak for Europe:

The European Commission of President Ursula von der Leyen vowed in 2019 to make "a Europe fit for the digital age," dubbing the 2020s Europe's "digital decade."

Building on the European Union's flagship privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Brussels's regulatory race to the top gained historic momentum over the past four years. And from digital markets to content moderation, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, computer chips and data governance, the Commission has left little on the table in terms of regulation.

Bolstered by mended ties with the administration of United States President Joe Biden and increased coordination with the U.S. through the Trade and Technology Council (TTC), the von der Leyen Commission seems to have achieved the impossible in an often rancorous 27-member bloc — a unified Europe around a common digital agenda.

But this narrative of unity obfuscates a much more complex reality in which the Commission's policies are dominated by its two largest — and most zealously regulatory — countries: France and Germany. In fact, Europe's smaller but most tech-oriented members rarely feel heard in the halls of Brussels, even as they often disagree with the Commission's agenda.

Privately, officials from these countries say the Commission's strategy will hamper innovation by imposing complex compliance rules on smaller companies that can't afford to implement them. They also worry that foreign investment — particularly from U.S. investors, which are responsible for a whopping 76 percent of foreign investment in European tech companies — will wane as the Commission goes after large American tech firms. And many lament that Brexit took away the United Kingdom's counterbalancing voice, leaving a vacuum for France and Germany to fill.

While these concerns are rarely aired publicly, simply put, Central and Northern Europe know that when it comes to tech, the EU doesn't speak for Europe.

upstart writes:

Mars Helicopter went silent for six sols, risked rover:

NASA has revealed a six-day stretch during which it could not contact its Ingenuity Mars helicopter.

In a lengthy post, chief engineer Travis Brown explained that after the copter's 49th flight, radio contact was lost for six sols – just short of six days and six hours of terrestrial time.

Initially, NASA's Mars boffins weren't unduly concerned. The Perseverance Rover had moved behind a rocky outcrop that created a "communication shadow." Brown wrote that since Sol 685 the helicopter "had unfortunately been drifting in and out of night-time survival mode" which made daily contact with the craft difficult. So a day or two without contact wasn't worrying.

But once Perseverance moved to another location and Ingenuity still could not be found, Brown wrote "the situation began to generate some unease."

"Poor telecom performance was seen as a plausible explanation, but there were reasons to doubt it," he wrote. "In more than 700 sols operating the helicopter on Mars, not once had we ever experienced a total radio blackout. Even in the worst communications environments, we had always seen some indication of activity."

But the signal received on that day, sol 761, was just a simple ACK (acknowledgement). The next day, the copter again acknowledged a command, but did little else.

Mission staff determined that the ridge separating Ingenuity and Perseverance was a challenge for the copter's radio. It didn't help that Perseverance's helicopter base station (HBS) antenna is mounted low on the vehicle's right and is subject to occlusion effects.

Our IRC server has disappeared. We are not sure of the reason yet but we will keep you informed. Lets not jump to any hasty conclusions. It will affect how we manage the site but we will let you know how to restore some kind of IRC access shortly.

upstart writes:

It doesn't work on iOS devices:

We tend to believe that if our Android phones are lost or stolen, a fingerprint lock will ensure that the sensitive data they hold stays safe. But Chinese researchers have found a way to break through this protection by using a brute-force attack.

[...] To protect against brute-force attacks, Android phones usually have safeguards such as limiting the number of attempts a user can make, as well as liveness detection. But the researchers bypassed these by using two zero-day vulnerabilities dubbed Cancel-After-Match-Fail (CAMF) and Match-After-Lock (MAL).

As per Bleeping Computer, it was also discovered that biometric data on the fingerprint sensors' Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) lacked comprehensive protection, thereby allowing a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack to steal the fingerprints.

The researchers tested the brute-force attack, called BrutePrint, on ten popular smartphone models. They were able to perform an unlimited number of fingerprint login attempts on the Android and HarmonyOS (Huawei) phones. iOS devices fared much better, allowing just ten additional attempts on the iPhone SE and iPhone 7, bringing the total to 15, which isn't enough for a brute-force attack.

[...] The good news is that this isn't the easiest attack to pull off. Not only would someone need physical access to a target phone and a some time, but they'd also require access to a fingerprint database from either biometric data leaks or academic datasets. Some hardware is also required, though it only costs around $15. However, the technique could find use with law enforcement and state-sponsored actors.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.carpeludum.com/m-u-l-e-40th-anniversary-special/

To mark the 40th anniversary of M.U.L.E., we are dedicating this special write-up to the history of the game's development, taking a look behind the scenes with reports and new 2023 interviews with those involved. As well as to all the original versions of the game, we introduce you to the officially licensed remakes and the 'clones' that excellent games inevitably spawn. Finally, we round off the anniversary celebrations with a test of the brand new M.U.L.E. Online.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Japan will try to beam solar power from space by 2025:

Japan and JAXA, the country's space administration, have trying to make it possible to beam solar energy from space. In 2015, the nation made a breakthrough when JAXA scientists successfully beamed 1.8 kilowatts of power, enough energy to power an electric kettle, to a wireless receiver. Now, Japan is poised to bring the technology one step closer to reality.

[...] The project, led by Naoki Shinohara, a Kyoto University professor who has been working on space-based solar energy since 2009, will attempt to deploy a series of small satellites in orbit. Those will then try to beam the solar energy the arrays collect to ground-based receiving stations hundreds of miles away.

Using orbital solar panels and microwaves to send energy to Earth was first proposed in 1968. Since then, a few countries, including and the US, have spent time and money pursuing the idea. The technology is appealing because orbital solar arrays represent a potentially unlimited renewable energy supply. In space, solar panels can collect energy no matter the time of day, and by using microwaves to beam the power they produce, clouds aren't a concern either. However, even if Japan successfully deploys a set of orbital solar arrays, the tech would still be closer to science fiction than fact. That's because producing an array that can generate 1 gigawatt of power – or about the output of one nuclear reactor – would cost about $7 billion with currently available technologies.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Shocking Leaked Tesla Documents Hint at Cybertruck Problems:

Cars crashing into bollards, brakes slamming on to avoid imaginary collisions, and more than 2,400 complaints of cars accelerating out of their owner's control. The 100 gigabytes worth of internal Tesla documents leaked to the German newspaper Handelsblatt present a sobering picture of the EV company's technical limitations.

The 23,000 files obtained by Handelsblatt cover issues in Europe, the US, and Asia between 2015 and March 2022, and they seem to show serious flaws in Tesla's Autopilot technology. The revelations could see the company facing new pressure from regulators, who are likely to pore over the reports looking for evidence that the company has misled authorities or customers over the safety of its vehicles.

The leaks may also reinforce a pervasive concern among Tesla investors and analysts that the company has lost its way. Its vaunted self-driving technology seems a long way from being safe enough for the road, and it can't seem to move viable new products from the drawing board to the showroom. Tesla hasn't launched a new consumer vehicle since 2020, and it's widely seen as falling behind other automakers, who are stepping up their development of new EVs to meet surging demand. Half-hidden within the rush of revelations is a teaser for a secret report on Tesla's long-awaited "Cybertruck," a weirdly angular pickup truck announced in 2019. It's unlikely to be good news.

RunningWithWind writes:

https://media.defense.gov/2023/May/24/2003229517/-1/-1/0/CSA_Living_off_the_Land.PDF

Volt Typhoon is being hunted by the Five Eyes partnership after attacking critical infrastructure in Guam and other locations. NSA is leading U.S. and Five Eyes partner agencies in publicly releasing the "People's Republic of China State-Sponsored Cyber Actor Living off the Land to Evade Detection" Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) today. The partner agencies include:

• U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
• U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
• Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC)
• Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS)
• New Zealand National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NZ)
• United Kingdom National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-UK)

"For years, China has conducted operations worldwide to steal intellectual property and sensitive data from critical infrastructure organizations around the globe," said Jen Easterly, CISA Director.

[...] One of the actor's primary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) is living off the land, which uses built-in network administration tools to perform their objectives. This TTP allows the actor to evade detection by blending in with normal Windows system and network activities, avoid endpoint detection and response (EDR) products that would alert on the introduction of third-party applications to the host, and limit the amount of activity that is captured in default logging configurations. Some of the built-in tools this actor uses are: wmic, ntdsutil, netsh, and PowerShell. The advisory provides examples of the actor's commands along with detection signatures to aid network defenders in hunting for this activity.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

MediaTek says its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 rival will be a beast:

MediaTek's Dimensity 9200 is one of the most powerful smartphone processors of 2023, taking the fight to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in a few areas. Now, the Taiwanese chipmaker has shed more light on its next-generation chipset.

MediaTek announced on Weibo that its next-generation flagship Dimensity chipset would be powered by Arm's newly announced Cortex-X4 CPU core, Cortex-A720 CPU core, and Arm Immortalis Mali-G720 GPU. Check out the accompanying video below(*).

This isn't a surprise, as MediaTek has utilized the latest CPU and GPU tech in its flagship silicon for the past two years. But the news means that you can expect the next-generation Dimensity chipset (presumably called the Dimensity 9300) to be a major rival to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor.

The Taiwanese chipmaker also noted that the new chipset will offer a "groundbreaking" architecture, adding that the processor will enable improved multitasking and better performance in "heavily" multi-threaded apps and games.

MediaTek didn't mention whether its new processor will use the brand-new Cortex-A520 little CPU core which debuted alongside the Cortex-X4 and A720. This could be a case of the company not wanting to reveal too many major details right now. It's also theoretically possible (but unlikely) that the new processor simply doesn't have little cores, although we haven't seen a major flagship chipmaker ditch these little cores before.

In saying so, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 switched from four little CPU cores to three (adding a fourth medium core instead). Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 leaks also point to the company switching to just two little cores (adding a fifth medium CPU core). So it certainly seems like there's a trend to reduce the number of little cores, but cutting them all together would be an aggressive move and potentially have ramifications for efficiency and multi-core performance.

(*) Video

Original Submission