SoylentNews

hubie writes:

OSU research shows how hackers can target smart meters to destabilize electricity grid:

A power transmission grid can be destabilized by hackers who manipulate smart meters to create an oscillation in electricity demand, researchers in the Oregon State University College of Engineering have shown.

[...] A smart meter is a digital device that collects electricity usage data and sends it to a local utility through a telecommunications connection. The meters can help customers learn more about their electricity use, and they can also be used to remotely shut off customers' power, such as in the case of unpaid bills.

Like circuit breakers in a household panel, power grid components can "trip" and shut off when demand, or load, is too high or problematic for some other reason. The result is load being passed on to other parts of the grid network, which may also shut down, creating the possibility of a domino effect that can lead to a blackout.

[...] One of the types of attacks made possible by the new technologies involves hacking into the advanced metering infrastructure, often abbreviated as AMI, and controlling the smart meter switches to cause load oscillations.

"Imagine calling everyone you know and saying, 'OK, at 6 p.m. we are all going to turn the lights on," Cotilla-Sanchez said. "Even if you got a couple thousand people to do that, it would be unlikely to cause much instability because the grid is able to absorb fairly big changes in supply and demand – for example solar panels at the end of the day do not produce electricity and we are able to anticipate and compensate for that.

"But if a person were to remotely coordinate a large number of smart meters to switch customers on and off at a particular frequency, that would be a problem."

acid andy writes:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a44128093/what-caused-iowa-apartment-collapse/

The exterior center section of a 100-year-old, six-story building in Davenport, Iowa collapsed on May 29, leaving its apartment interiors exposed to the elements and three people dead. In its previous life, the Renaissance Revival-style brick-and-steel structure was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

[...] Some residents said they had been experiencing water damage, and several tenants were afraid of the building collapsing. One resident said her bathroom caved in last December.

[...] Inspectors and a private-sector structural engineer discovered on May 23 that the brick façade, painted scarlet red in recent years, was separated from the interior wall and appeared "ready to fall imminently," according to a CNN article about the report. The interior wall was losing stability and causing deformation. A beam possibly bearing down on the affected wall needed a steel column for extra support, the structural engineer recommended. City inspectors took photos on May 25 showing a void between the façade and interior wall; the gap contained crumbled bricks.

Bricks were falling off the building's facade as early as August 2020, so the sidewalk around this area was closed, according to an analysis by The Architect's Newspaper.

"The collapsed wall is the only wall that was painted, and while the brick was clearly damaged prior to this painting, many types of paint that are not breathable can trap moisture in brick," the newspaper reported.

Moisture normally passes through a building's walls. Bricks are like sponges; their porous structure is great at both absorbing water and drying out completely. However, if moisture beneath the brick surface is unable to evaporate—say, because it hits a layer of paint—then the water builds up. Eventually, water erodes brick over a period of years. "Painting over brick is essentially a death sentence for brick," according to McGill Restoration, a repair and restoration company based in Nebraska.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Man's WW2 codebook unearths St Erth's 'best-kept secret':

Mike Griffiths unearthed the secret existence of the MI6 outstation in St Erth when his late father, Harry Griffiths, left him his code book. He has revealed the role his father and others played in providing intelligence for code-breakers at Bletchley Park. Mr Griffiths said he "couldn't be prouder" of what his father achieved.

The St Erth Radio Security Service Station - which Mr Griffiths said had about 100 employees - was a secret to anyone outside the village, but to those who lived there, it was common knowledge.

"It was quite remarkable," Mr Griffiths said. He added: "I think almost if you like, the boundary of the village, the secret didn't go beyond the boundary of the village."

[...] Mr Griffiths, who lives in Plymouth, said one of the main roles of the station was to listen to the German Secret Service discussing major military campaigns and building a "complete picture of the German war machine".

He said: "At the end of the war, when the German officers were being interrogated, they were staggered by how much the British actually knew. "They knew more about the German war machine than the Germans did themselves - quite staggering."

Harry Griffiths worked at the listening station from 1939 to 1946, when he was in his late twenties. He was recruited because of his aptitude with Morse code.

[...] He described the listening station as "the ears" of Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, known as the home of the codebreakers.

His son said: "They were being told, home in on this particular agent, wherever they are in Europe, home in on these and find out who they're talking to."

[...] He said his advice to others was to ask their loved ones about their memories while they still could. "I would urge you, if you know somebody who went through the war, sit down with them, make a cup of tea, buy a bun - a saffron bun preferably, talk to them and say 'right actually, what did you do?', because I so wish I'd talked to him about it," Mr Griffiths said, about his late father.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/apple/2023/06/apple-has-a-proton-like-game-porting-toolkit-for-getting-windows-games-on-mac/

There was so much packed into Apple's WWDC presentation Monday that it's hard to believe there are still major pieces of it left to uncover. And yet, as part of a developer presentation, Apple has quietly announced what could be major news for PC games on Mac hardware—its own SteamOS-like Windows compatibility initiative, but for millions of Apple Silicon Macs instead of Steam Decks.

"Bring your game to Mac" is laid out over three videos covering a game controller guide, a Game Porting Toolkit (Apple developers only), and a converter for making games' shaders work with Apple's Metal hardware acceleration API. Apple claims you "have everything you need to deliver an amazing gaming experience" with Apple-Silicon-based Macs and that its toolkit provides "an emulation environment to run your existing, unmodified Windows game."
[...]
At the core of Apple's Game Porting Toolkit is CodeWeavers' open source code for CrossOver. CodeWeavers writes on its site that the company is "ecstatic" that Apple "is recognizing that Wine is a fantastic solution for running Windows games on MacOS." CodeWeavers "did not work with Apple on this tool, but we would be delighted to work with any game developers" who want to work with the company's PortJump team to refine their Windows-to-Mac translation.

Original Submission

Reddit Cuts 90 Workers While API Pricing Shift Sours Devs

upstart writes:

Two third-party Reddit apps have thrown in the towel over increased expenses:

Social media community Reddit plans to lay off about 90 employees, amounting to about five percent of its 2,000-person staff.

A company spokesperson confirmed the cuts in an email to The Register, stating that the whole company's restructuring is part of changes to Reddit's data, API and mod tools projects. Word of the job cuts came in the form of an email sent to employees by CEO Steve Huffman that was obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

[...] Reddit filed to go public in late 2021 but has not yet done so. It may yet list, however, in the second half of 2023.

In April, finance firm Fidelity, lead investor in the company's August 2021 funding round, revised the value of its $28.2 million stake to $16.6 million, a 41 percent decline.

Meanwhile Reddit's announcement of a new API usage policy, said to have followed from the desire to seek payment from makers of AI models that train on Reddit posts, has been causing trouble.

The company characterized its revised API terms of service as an effort to "build a more sustainable, healthy ecosystem around data on Reddit."

But the decision looks as if it will lead to fewer third-party apps working with Reddit. Under the new terms, app developers will need to pay plenty to ingest data from Reddit through its API. As a result many major forums on the site will be staging a 48-hour blackout next week, beginning on June 12.

[...] Developer Christian Selig published a lengthy post on Reddit to explain the situation. At a price of $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, he projects the cost of Reddit's API would be almost $2 million per month or over $20 million annually.

Selig said the cost "was not far off Twitter's outstandingly high API prices."

canopic jug writes:

Phys.org has a short summary of research into patterns of fiber transfer across clothing during different types of assaults. The club members wore specially dyed uniforms and then enacted various styles of assault and defense to allow researchers to observe how clothing fibers transferred as a result.

Researchers from Northumbria University and King's College London have published findings outlining the extent that textile fibers transfer during controlled assault scenarios.

Their work, recently published in the academic journal Science & Justice, is the first time the number of fibers transferred between garments during physical assaults has been assessed by simulating the act with real people through Northumbria University's Jiu Jitsu club.

[...] "The importance of this research is that many experimental studies in forensic science are often a far cry from real-life situations, and we wanted to address that in this study," [lead study author Dr. Kelly] Sheridan said. "We wanted to investigate the extent of fiber transfer during different types of physical assaults using real people for the first time and Dr. David Chalton, who leads the Jiu Jitsu club, made it possible."

Apparently thousands of fibers were cross-transferred between the participants' garments each time, varying per attack/defense scenario.

Journal Reference:
Sheridan, Kelly J., Ray Palmer, et. al, A quantitative assessment of the extent and distribution of textile fibre transfer to persons involved in physical assault, Science & Justice (DOI: 10.1016/j.scijus.2023.05.001)

Original Submission

hubie writes:

I first saw a link to this paper from a Mastodon post by John Carlos Baez:

For millennia people have been saying that morality has declined during their lifetime. But there's not much evidence for this continuing decline of morality.

If morality has not declined, then why do people think it has? Although there are surely many good answers to this question, we suggest that one of them has to do with the fact that when two well-established psychological phenomena work in tandem, they can produce an illusion of moral decline. First, numerous studies have shown that human beings are especially likely to seek and attend to negative information about others, and mass media indulge this tendency with a disproportionate focus on people behaving badly. As such, people may encounter more negative information than positive information about the morality of 'people in general', and this 'biased exposure effect' may help explain why people believe that current morality is relatively low. Second, numerous studies have shown that when people recall positive and negative events from the past, the negative events are more likely to be forgotten, more likely to be misremembered as their opposite and more likely to have lost their emotional impact. This 'biased memory effect' may help explain why people believe that past morality was relatively high.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/06/supplier-sues-boeing-over-alleged-theft-of-sls-rocket-tools/

A Colorado-based company, Wilson Aerospace, is suing Boeing for what it claims to be "theft" of its intellectual property. At issue is a specific tool, known as a Fluid Fitting Torque Device-3, that Wilson developed and Boeing said it needed to attach four main engines to the Space Launch System rocket.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in US District Court in Seattle, where Boeing was originally based. The lawsuit alleges that Boeing reached out to Wilson in March 2014 after learning that the company had created the special torque device, which can precisely install high-torque fittings and nuts in tightly confined spaces.

[...] For example, the lawsuit states, "Boeing's mismatched tools of inferior quality were a cause of the leaks experienced in the SLS projects, and likely caused leaks in equipment of Boeing's joint venture partners and licensees, which discovery will uncover."

Also at CNBC

Also see Complaint PDF

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/06/heres-what-happens-when-you-send-a-nascar-stock-car-to-le-mans/

When Le Mans renovated its facilities in 2012, it built 55 pit garages for regular entrants in its annual 24-hour race and one more for entrants that want to demonstrate something new (there are actually a total of 62 entrants this year, but the special one is still called Garage 56).

These have included the pint-size Nissan Deltawing in 2012 and the closely related electric Nissan ZEOD RC in 2014. In 2016, quadruple amputee Frédéric Sausset did something neither of those two Nissans could manage, finishing the race in a specially modified prototype with the SRT 41 team, which repeated the feat with a pair of paraplegic drivers in 2021. And there have been attempts to run a hydrogen-powered racer from Garage 56. But this year's entry is a bit different—and a little more familiar to Americans. It's a NASCAR stock car.

[...] While it will be racing on the same track at the same time as the other 61 cars in the race, the Garage 56 entry is in its own class, and it's there to entertain the fans and hopefully finish the race rather than fight for overall victory. The drivers appear to be having fun, too.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Barracuda Urges Replacing — Not Patching — Its Email Security Gateways:

It's not often that a zero-day vulnerability causes a network security vendor to urge customers to physically remove and decommission an entire line of affected hardware — as opposed to just applying software updates. But experts say that is exactly what transpired this week with Barracuda Networks, as the company struggled to combat a sprawling malware threat which appears to have undermined its email security appliances in such a fundamental way that they can no longer be safely updated with software fixes.

Campbell, Calif. based Barracuda said it hired incident response firm Mandiant on May 18 after receiving reports about unusual traffic originating from its Email Security Gateway (ESG) devices, which are designed to sit at the edge of an organization's network and scan all incoming and outgoing email for malware.

On May 19, Barracuda identified that the malicious traffic was taking advantage of a previously unknown vulnerability in its ESG appliances, and on May 20 the company pushed a patch for the flaw to all affected appliances (CVE-2023-2868).

In its security advisory, Barracuda said the vulnerability existed in the Barracuda software component responsible for screening attachments for malware. More alarmingly, the company said it appears attackers first started exploiting the flaw in October 2022.

But on June 6, Barracuda suddenly began urging its ESG customers to wholesale rip out and replace — not patch — affected appliances.

"Impacted ESG appliances must be immediately replaced regardless of patch version level," the company's advisory warned. "Barracuda's recommendation at this time is full replacement of the impacted ESG."

upstart writes:

Critical Schrödinger Cat Code: Quantum Computing Breakthrough for Better Qubits:

What is a "critical Schrödinger cat code?"

In 1935, physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment as a critique of the prevailing understanding of quantum mechanics at the time – the Copenhagen interpretation. In Schrödinger's experiment, a cat is placed in a sealed box with a flask of poison and a radioactive source. If a single atom of the radioactive source decays, the radioactivity is detected by a Geiger counter, which then shatters the flask. The poison is released, killing the cat.

According to the Copenhagen view of quantum mechanics, if the atom is initially in superposition, the cat will inherit the same state and find itself in a superposition of alive and dead. "This state represents exactly the notion of a quantum bit, realized at the macroscopic scale," says Savona.

In past years, scientists have drawn inspiration from Schrödinger's cat to build an encoding technique called "Schrödinger's cat code." Here, the 0 and 1 states of the qubit are encoded onto two opposite phases of an oscillating electromagnetic field in a resonant cavity, similar to the dead or alive states of the cat.

"Schrödinger cat codes have been realized in the past using two distinct approaches," explains Savona. "One leverages anharmonic effects in the cavity, the other relying on carefully engineered cavity losses. In our work, we bridged the two by operating in an intermediate regime, combining the best of both worlds. Although previously believed to be unfruitful, this hybrid regime results in enhanced error suppression capabilities." The core idea is to operate close to the critical point of a phase transition, which is what the 'critical' part of the critical cat code refers to.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/06/rejoice-its-2023-and-you-can-still-buy-a-22-volume-paper-encyclopedia/

These days, many of us live online, where machine-generated content has begun to pollute the Internet with misinformation and noise. At a time when it's hard to know what information to trust, I felt delight when I recently learned that World Book still prints an up-to-date book encyclopedia in 2023. Although the term "encyclopedia" is now almost synonymous with Wikipedia, it's refreshing to see such a sizable reference printed on paper.
[...]
Its fiercest competitor of yore, The Encyclopedia Britannica, ended its print run in 2012 after 244 years in print.

In a nod to our present digital age, World Book also offers its encyclopedia as a subscription service through the web. Yet it's the print version that mystifies and attracts my fascination. Why does it still exist?

"Because there is still a demand!" Tom Evans, World Book's editor-in-chief, told Ars over email.
[...]
A World Book rep told Quartz in 2019 that the print encyclopedia sold mostly to schools, public libraries, and homeschooling families. Today, Evans says that public and school libraries are still the company's primary customers. "World Book has a loyal following of librarians who understand the importance of a general reference encyclopedia in print form, accessible to all."

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Technology Review is running an unusual book review -- books about learning math, pure math, not applied math, https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/24/1071371/book-reviews-math-education/
The author admits to being adrift,

As a graduate student in physics, I have seen the work that goes into conducting delicate experiments, but the daily grind of mathematical discovery is a ritual altogether foreign to me. And this feeling is only reinforced by popular books on math, which often take the tone of a pastor dispensing sermons to the faithful.

An initial attempt led to a MasterClass by a "living legend of contemporary math", but the master is seated in a white armchair with no blackboards, pens or paper and does not enlighten.

A side story covers a writer for the New Yorker who plans a year to go back and learn the high school algebra/geometry/calculus that escaped him, but mostly fails. For backup he has a niece who is a math professor...but after months without getting it, he complains. Her answer?

"For a moment, think of it as a monastic discipline. You have to take on faith what I tell you." Where his niece and others see patterns and order, he perceives only "incoherence, obfuscation, and chaos"; he feels like a monk who sees lesser angels than everybody around him.

I won't spoil the end, but the author does make some progress with books by mathematician and concert pianist Eugenia Cheng, starting with "Cakes, Custard and Category Theory", where each chapter starts with an analogy to baking.

Unfortunately, for the SN audience, the article does not include any car analogies...

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/a-telescope-happened-to-be-pointing-at-the-brightest-supernova-yet-observed/

Supernovae are some of the most energetic events in the Universe. And a subset of those involves gamma-ray bursts, where a lot of the energy released comes from extremely high-energy photons. We think we know why that happens in general terms—the black hole left behind after the explosion expels jets of material at nearly the speed of light. But the details of how and where these jets produce photons are not at all close to being fully worked out.

Unfortunately, these events happen very quickly and very far away, so it's not easy to get detailed observations of them. However, a recent gamma-ray burst that's been called the BOAT (brightest of all time) may be providing us with new information on the events within a few days of a supernova's explosion.

[...] The "telescope" mentioned is the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). Based nearly three miles (4,400 meters) above sea level, the observatory is a complex of instruments that aren't a telescope in the traditional sense. Instead, they're meant to capture air showers—the complex cascade of debris and photons that are produced when high-energy particles from outer space slam into the atmosphere.

Original Submission

Google DeepMind's Game-Playing AI Just Found Another Way to Make Code Faster

upstart writes:

Google DeepMind's game-playing AI just found another way to make code faster:

It has also found a way to speed up a key algorithm used in cryptography by 30%. These algorithms are among the most common building blocks in software. Small speed-ups can make a huge difference, cutting costs and saving energy.

"Moore's Law is coming to an end, where chips are approaching their fundamental physical limits," says Daniel Mankowitz, a research scientist at Google DeepMind. "We need to find new and innovative ways of optimizing computing."

"It's an interesting new approach," says Peter Sanders, who studies the design and implementation of efficient algorithms at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and who was not involved in the work. "Sorting is still one of the most widely used subroutines in computing," he says.

DeepMind published its results in Nature today. But the techniques that AlphaDev discovered are already being used by millions of software developers. In January 2022, DeepMind submitted its new sorting algorithms to the organization that manages C++, one of the most popular programming languages in the world, and after two months of rigorous independent vetting, AlphaDev's algorithms were added to the language. This was the first change to C++'s sorting algorithms in more than a decade and the first update ever to involve an algorithm discovered using AI.