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JoeMerchant writes:

Elliptic Curves Yield Their Secrets in a New Number System

https://www.quantamagazine.org/elliptic-curves-yield-their-secrets-in-a-new-number-system-20230706/

Caraiani and Newton achieved modularity — for all elliptic curves over about half of all imaginary quadratic fields — by figuring out how to adapt a process for proving modularity pioneered by Wiles and others to elliptic curves over imaginary quadratic fields.

[...] The work is a technical achievement in its own right, and it opens the door to making progress on some of the most important questions in math in the imaginary setting.

[...] In the late 1950s, Yutaka Taniyama and Goro Shimura proposed that there is a perfect 1-to-1 matching between certain modular forms and elliptic curves. The next decade Robert Langlands built on this idea in the construction of his expansive Langlands program, which has become one of the most far-reaching and consequential research programs in math.

If the 1-to-1 correspondence is true, it would give mathematicians a powerful set of tools for understanding the solutions to elliptic curves. For example, there's a kind of numerical value associated with each modular form. One of math's most important open problems (proving it comes with a million-dollar prize) — the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture — proposes that if that value is zero, then the elliptic curve associated to that modular form has infinitely many rational solutions, and if it's not zero, the elliptic curve has finitely many rational solutions.

But before anything like that can be tackled, mathematicians need to know that the correspondence holds: Hand me an elliptic curve, and I can hand you its matching modular form. Proving this is what many mathematicians, from Wiles to Caraiani and Newton, have been up to over the last few decades.

[...] Their result provides a foundation for investigating some of the same basic questions about elliptic curves over imaginary quadratic fields that mathematicians pursue over the rationals and the reals. This includes the imaginary version of Fermat's Last Theorem — though additional groundwork needs to be laid before that is approachable — and the imaginary version of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.

----

The elliptic curve equation used in Bitcoin's cryptography is called secp256k1 which uses this equation: y²=x³+7, a=0 b=7.

Journal Reference:
Ana Caraiani and James Newton, On the modularity of elliptic curves over imaginary quadratic fields, arXiv:2301.10509 [math.NT]

Original Submission

hubie writes:

This bias can be explained by the way our brain is organized, but its evolutionary significance is not yet known:

Sounds that we hear around us are defined physically by their frequency and amplitude. But for us, sounds have a meaning beyond those parameters: we may perceive them as pleasant or unpleasant, ominous or reassuring, and interesting and rich in information, or just noise.

One aspect that affects the emotional 'valence' of sounds – that is, whether we perceive them as positive, neutral, or negative – is where they come from. Most people rate looming sounds, which move towards us, as more unpleasant, potent, arousing, and intense than receding sounds, and especially if they come from behind rather than from the front. This bias might give a plausible evolutionary advantage: to our ancestors on the African savannah, a sound approaching from behind their vulnerable back might have signaled a predator stalking them.

Now, neuroscientists from Switzerland have shown another effect of direction on emotional valence: we respond more strongly to positive human sounds, like laughter or pleasant vocalizations, when these come from the left. The results are published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

"Here we show that human vocalizations that elicit positive emotional experiences, yield strong activity in the brain's auditory cortex when they come from the listener's left side. This does not occur when positive vocalizations come from the front or right," said first author Dr Sandra da Costa, a research staff scientist at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

takyon writes:

Android phone hits 24GB of RAM, as much as a 13-inch MacBook Pro

Android manufacturers tend to love big spec sheets, even if those giant numbers won't do much for day-to-day phone usage. In that vein, we've got the new high-water mark for ridiculous amounts of memory in a phone. The new Nubia RedMagic 8S Pro+ is an Android gaming phone with an option for 24GB of RAM.

The base model of the RedMagic 8S Pro+ starts with 16GB of RAM, but GSMArena has pictures and details of the upgraded 24GB SKU, which is the most amount of memory ever in an Android phone. Because we're all about big numbers, it also comes with 1TB of storage. [...] This suped-up 24GB version of the phone appears to be a China-exclusive, with the price at CNY 7,499 (about $1,034), which is a lot for a phone in China.

You definitely want an adequate amount of RAM in an Android phone. All these apps are designed around cheap phones, though, and with Android's aggressive background app management, there's usually not much of a chance to use a ton of RAM. Theoretically, a phone like this would let you multitask better, since apps could stay in memory longer, and you wouldn't have to start them back up when switching tasks. Most people aren't quickly switching through that many apps, though, and some heavy apps, games especially, will just automatically turn off a few seconds once they're in the background.

There were a few smartphones on the market with 18 GB, but it looks like 20 GB has been skipped entirely by Nubia.

Now we need to be on the lookout for 32 GB of RAM and alien technology in upcoming smartphones.

Previously: SK Hynix Begins Production of 18 GB LPDDR5 Memory... for Smartphones
Samsung Announces Development of LPDDR5X Memory

Original Submission

upstart writes:

After Decades of Observations, Astronomers have Finally Sensed the Pervasive Background Hum of Merging Supermassive Black Holes:

We've become familiar with LIGO/VIRGO's detections of colliding black holes and neutron stars that create gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time. However, the mergers between supermassive black holes – billions of times the mass of the Sun — generate gravitational waves too long to register with these instruments.

But now, after decades of careful observations, astronomers around the world using a different type of gravitational wave detection method have finally gathered enough data to measure what is essentially a gravitational wave background hum of the Universe, mostly from supermassive black holes spiraling toward collision.

Scientists say the newly detected gravitational waves are by far the most powerful ever measured, and they persist for years to decades. They carry roughly a million times as much energy as the one-off bursts of gravitational waves from black hole and neutron star mergers detected by LIGO and Virgo.

"It's like a choir, with all these supermassive black hole pairs chiming in at different frequencies," said scientist Chiara Mingarelli, who worked about 190 other scientists with the NANOGrav (North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves). "This is the first-ever evidence for the gravitational wave background. We've opened a new window of observation on the universe."

[...] For this collaboration, 25 years of observing 25 pulsars revealed the gravitational waves with wavelengths much longer than those seen by other experiments.

[...] Since they are long-lasting, the gravitational-wave signals from these gigantic binaries are expected to overlap, like voices in a crowd or instruments in an orchestra, producing an overall background hum that imprints a unique pattern in pulsar timing data.

owl writes:

WSJ link https://www.wsj.com/articles/publishers-and-advertisers-push-back-at-ftcs-click-to-cancel-proposal-de96960b

Archive link https://archive.is/Lv2wG

Mandating a simpler cancellation process would confuse consumers and create problems for businesses, trade groups say

Trade groups representing publishers, advertisers and videogame companies have come out against the Federal Trade Commission's proposed requirement that companies offer consumers an easy click-to-cancel way to get out of subscriptions and memberships.

The FTC earlier this year proposed a rule that would require companies to make it as easy for customers to stop recurring charges as it is to sign up to them. That would mean an end to onerous "click to subscribe, call to cancel" routines and other systems designed to introduce friction into the cancellation process.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Scientists Intrigued by Glacier Bleeding Red Fluid:

For over a century, scientists have been puzzling over a mysterious, blood-red liquid that's been seeping out of a glacier in Antarctica.

The weird site, later dubbed "Blood Falls," has confounded researchers. But now, a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins may have shed new light on the strange discharge.

[...] "As soon as I looked at the microscope images, I noticed that there were these little nanospheres and they were iron-rich, and they have lots of different elements in them besides iron — silicon, calcium, aluminum, sodium — and they all varied," said Ken Livi, a research scientist and coauthor of a new paper about the glacier published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, in a statement.

The existence of these mysterious nanospheres, which haven't been detected until now, runs counter to the prevailing theory that the blood-red liquid was caused by an abundance of minerals.

Minerals are crystalline in nature, while these nanospheres, which are 100 times smaller than red blood cells, aren't.

Their existence also sheds new light on the microorganisms and bacteria that have lived for "potentially millions of years underneath the saline waters of the Antarctic glacier," according to Livi.

Journal Reference:
Elizabeth C. Sklute, Jill A. Mikucki, M. Darby Dyar, et al. A Multi-Technique Analysis of Surface Materials From Blood Falls, Antarctica [open], Front. Astron. Space Sci., 30 May 2022 Volume 9 - 2022 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fspas.2022.843174

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Earth's Jet Streams Look as Chaotic as a Van Gogh:

The currents of air that wrap around our planet are becoming unrecognizable to climate scientists.

Some have even compared the chaotic pattern of the jet streams to a Van Gogh painting.

The southern part of the jet stream over North America has completely broken apart and is currently trapped in a vicious revolution that has triggered an off-the-chart heatwave.

While it's normal for the air currents to stop, split apart, recombine and flow in opposite directions, on average these tropospheric air streams are typically quite continuous over long distances with an overall west to east flow.

The current fragmentation is unlike anything specialists have seen before.

[...] Jet streams are known to get 'blocked' on occasion, trapping weather systems in certain regions for days on end. But recent evidence suggests climate change could cause more blockages than usual by slowing down jet streams so they break apart, causing chaotic weather on the ground.

That seems to be what's happening right now in North America, and it's not just climate change that's contributing.

Mann explains that El Niño has likely exacerbated the situation, too.

"I'm honestly at a loss to even characterize the current large-scale planetary wave pattern," he tweeted.

Even the average layperson can clearly see the differences when comparing a normal pattern of jet streams to what's occurring today.

[...] In the past, strange jet stream patterns in Earth's atmosphere have coincided with extreme weather events in both the northern and southern hemispheres, although usually not in both at the same time.

Right now, though, even the southern hemisphere's jet streams look out of whack, experts note.

[...] "It is now clear that Earth's climate system is way out of kilter and we should be very concerned," Central Queensland University Environmental Geographist Steve Turton explained for The Conversation.

From pole to pole, the winds of change are here. The climate crisis is no longer a future problem. It's happening now, right before our eyes.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://halestrom.net/darksleep/blog/052_rn988_keyboard/

The Respawn Ninja RN988 is a whitelabel by mwave (an Australian online computer parts retailer). I'm not entirely sure of the OEM, I have not been able to find any matching products with the extra 4th status LED for locking (disabling) the Win key.

After plugging it in I immediately noticed two problems:

1. The switches were definitely not brown-style (tactile bump halfway through being pressed), they were instead red-style (smooth when pressed). Not quite what I wanted but hey for this price I'll happily try it out.

2. The Pause, Home, End and numpad * keys were permanently lit up and did not work when pressed.

The faulty keys were a serious problem. Every few hours they might fix themselves for a while, but then occasionally spam lots of keyboard input before returning to being broken.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Multiple sites are reporting on The Netherlands' recent decision on the need to ban mobile and "smart" devices from Dutch classrooms.

"Even though mobile phones are almost intertwined with our lives, they do not belong in the classroom," Education Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf said .

"Students must be able to concentrate there and be given every opportunity to learn well. We know from scientific research that mobile phones disrupt this," he added.

-- The Star

Mobiles, tablets and smartwatches are getting in the way of students' learning and will not be allowed in class from next year, the Dutch government said.

"There is increasing evidence that mobile phones have a harmful effect during lessons", it said.

-- The Straits Times

Mobile phones, tablets and smartwatches will be largely banned from classrooms in the Netherlands from Jan. 1, 2024, the Dutch government said on Tuesday, in a bid to limit distractions during lessons.

Devices will only be allowed if they are specifically needed, for instance during lessons on digital skills, for medical reasons or for people with disabilities.

-- Reuters

The Dutch government is banning mobile phones, tablets and smartwatches from classrooms to minimize distractions, unless the electronic devices are of solid need to the students.

The Education Ministry of the Netherlands said on Tuesday the ban will be enforced starting January 1, 2024. Exceptions will be made for lessons on digital skills, or if students with disabilities or other medical conditions need the devices.

-- Deutsche Welle

Previously:
(2023) Getting Outdoors Reduces Smartphone Use—But Only If You Go Wild
(2023) Research Shows Mobile Phone Users Do Not Understand What Data They Might be Sharing
(2022) PHK on Surveillance Which Is Too Cheap to Meter
(2020) U.S. Schools Are Buying Phone-Hacking Tech That the FBI Uses to Investigate Terrorists
(2019) Medical Students Losing Dexterity to Perform Surgeries Due to Smartphone Usage

Original Submission

An anonymous user writes:

Motor Trend is running this story, https://www.motortrend.com/features/tesla-full-self-driving-ban-attempt-elon-musk-dan-odowd While it starts out about Tesla self-driving software, it seems that the Dawn Project is also taking on security for safety critical software in general -- a topic near and dear to many at SN.

Dan O'Dowd is a man on a mission: to get Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology outlawed. He's likely spent millions of his own money—including a reported $600K on a recent Super Bowl ad and full-page ad in The New York Times last November—to accomplish this goal via his nonprofit group The Dawn Project. And he's incurred the wrath of Elon Musk and the Tesla co-founder and CEO's most rabid fans.

[...] Last August The Dawn Project conducted tests and shot a video showing a Tesla Model 3 using FSD plowing into a mannequin meant to represent a child. Tesla sent The Dawn Project a cease-and-desist letter calling the videos "defamatory." O'Dowd responded in a tweet by calling Musk a "crybaby" for complaining about the test and offered to reproduce tests for the media and regulators.

That's what brought us to Santa Barbara last week, where Green Hills Software, which O'Dowd founded in 1982 and is president and CEO, is based. Green Hills develops ultra-secure software for aviation, including the operating system (OS) for the Boeing 787 and B1-B bomber and the Orion crew exploration vehicle manufactured by Lockheed Martin and operated by NASA. Green Hills is also the first and only software company to develop an OS that meets the NSA's certification for EAL 6+ High Robustness, making it almost impossible to hack.

[...] O'Dowd isn't critical of Tesla vehicles and owns five of them: two Roadsters, two Model 3s, and a Model S. The Dawn Project is not only attacking Tesla FSD but any computer system it deems a danger. "Connecting the power grid, hospitals, and millions of cars to the Internet with software riddled with bugs and security defects has turned these systems into potential weapons of mass destruction at the mercy of hackers," the organization says on its website.

"We've been taking all the things that our lives depend on—water treatment plants and hospitals—where when something fails thousands or even millions of people could die," O'Dowd said.

Just a guess, Mr. O'Dowd is probably not a fan of Microsoft...

Original Submission

upstart writes:

An update to Google's privacy policy suggests that the entire public internet is fair game for its AI projects:

Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools. If Google can read your words, assume they belong to the company now, and expect that they're nesting somewhere in the bowels of a chatbot.

"Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public," the new Google policy says. "For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google's AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities."

[...] Previously, Google said the data would be used "for language models," rather than "AI models," and where the older policy just mentioned Google Translate, Bard and Cloud AI now make an appearance.

This is an unusual clause for a privacy policy. Typically, these policies describe ways that a business uses the information that you post on the company's own services. Here, it seems Google reserves the right to harvest and harness data posted on any part of the public web, as if the whole internet is the company's own AI playground. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Original Submission

acid andy writes:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/29/a-war-on-nature-rangers-build-mountain-out-of-wildlife-traps-found-in-uganda-park

"Over the past 10 years, we've removed about 47 tonnes of snares and bear traps," says Michael Keigwin, the founder of Uganda Conservation Foundation (UCF), a charity that works with the country's wildlife authorities.

Speaking from the Ugandan capital, Kampala, Keigwin is referring to a set of photographs showing a 12-tonne pile of tangled snares and metal traps. The images, showing Ugandan government rangers posing with the traps, illustrate an African success story and a world of pain, say those who helped create it.

The pile, nicknamed "snare mountain", was collected over 12 months as part of continuing conservation efforts at Uganda's Murchison Falls national park. At the bottom are so-called bear traps, used by poachers to catch elephants, hippos and lions. At the top are wire snares used for smaller animals.

[...] To put the reusable traps beyond the reach of poachers for good, the pile, like others before it, is being buried in the foundations of the park's new buildings, which include ranger accommodation, an armoury, a veterinary lab and a police station.

As well as funding trap collection, Global Conservation is providing Keigwin's UCF team with close to $1m (£800,000) for park management, ranger and anti-poaching equipment, community development and "ecoguard" training. Ecoguards live in the surrounding communities and their jobs include snare collection and alerting rangers to wildlife that wander out of the park's protected zone and need to be returned.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The sun hasn't produced this many sunspots in a single month since 2002:

The sun produced over 160 sunspots in June, the highest monthly number in more than two decades.

The data confirm that the current solar cycle, the 25th since records began, is picking up intensity at a much quicker pace than NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecasted, sparking concerns of severe space weather events in the months and years to come.

While the space agencies predicted a maximum monthly number of sunspots during the 25th solar cycle's maximum to reach a modest 125, the star is now on a trajectory to peak at just under 200 monthly sunspots, and some scientists think this peak may arrive in just one year.

[...] And contrary to the original NASA and NOAA forecast, this maximum might get rather fiery. More sunspots means not only more solar flares but also more coronal mass ejections, powerful eruptions of charged particles that make up solar wind. And that can mean bad space weather on Earth. Intense bursts of solar wind can penetrate Earth's magnetic field and supercharge particle's in Earth's atmosphere, which triggers mesmerizing aurora displays but also causes serious problems to power grids and satellites in Earth's orbit.

upstart writes:

India signing the Artemis Accords is a historic win for space exploration:

A few days after Ecuador signed the Artemis Accords, India signed as well. Not only that, the United States and India will embark on a number of space cooperation initiatives, including a visit to the International Space Station by Indian astronauts.

India is one of the world's most advanced space powers, just behind the United States and China. Russia used to be second, behind the United States, but its status as any kind of space power has steadily deteriorated.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has grown tremendously since its humble beginnings in the 1970s. With the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) and the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) (renamed as the Launch Vehicle Mark 3) India has its own launch industry and is therefore not dependent on foreign providers.

[...] All in all, India's space program is a burgeoning powerhouse that is returning value on a number of levels to that South Asia nation. But what does India gain by signing the Artemis Accords? What does NASA gain by the ISRO becoming a closer partner in the quest to return humans to the moon and eventually send them to Mars?

As Space News notes, India's joining the Artemis Accords is just part of an expanded space cooperation regime between that country and the United States. An Indian astronaut will, in short order, visit the International Space Station. India will gain expanded access to NASA technology. Ultimately, that country will be part of the greatest adventure humankind has ever undertaken, the Artemis return to the moon program, provided that Congress doesn't cripple or kill it for budget reasons.

upstart writes:

VMware, Other Tech Giants Announce Push for Confidential Computing Standards:

In conjunction with the 2023 Confidential Computing Summit last week, VMware announced a partnership with tech giants to accelerate the development of confidential computing applications.

Confidential computing relies on a trusted execution environment that ensures the integrity and confidentiality of applications and data, even in the cloud and on third-party infrastructure.

With the emergence of multi-cloud deployments and machine learning, confidential computing is expected to help protect intellectual property and sensitive data, but its adoption lags due to difficulties in creating applications for it.

To help overcome obstacles in implementing confidential computing, VMware has been working on a developer-focused Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing project that now has support from AMD, Samsung, and members of the RISC-V Keystone community.

In a push for the adoption of confidential computing, the open source Certifier Framework provides a standardized, platform-agnostic API for building and operating confidential computing applications, which is paired with a policy evaluation server, the Certifier Service.

[...] The accompanying Certifier Service supports trust management, including attestation evaluation, application upgrade, and other related services.

[...] VMware is inviting the community to review and contribute to the open source Certifier Framework, to standardize the platform-independent APIs and to drive the development of confidential computing code for x86, Arm, and RISC-V ecosystems.

"Confidential Computing has the potential to secure workloads no matter where they run including in multi-cloud and edge settings. The challenge has been to help customers adopt and implement the standard with ease," VMware CTO Kit Colbert said.

Original Submission