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upstart writes:

Expect the saga of this release to stretch out a bit over northern summer:

Linux kernel overseer Linus Torvalds has delivered the first release candidate for version 6.5 of the kernel, but warned this release may not go entirely smoothly.

Torvalds's headline assessment of rc1 is "none of it looks hugely unusual."

"The biggest single mention probably goes to what wasn't merged, with the bcachefs pull request resulting in a long thread (we didn't hit a hundred emails yet, but it's not far away)."

As The Register reported in 2022, bcachefs is a filesystem that's been in development for nigh on a decade without being added to the kernel.

[...] In his announcement post for rc1, Torvalds wrote "Let's calm this party down."

[...] The release candidate is yours for the downloading here.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Plus: Facebook corp loses appeal on crossing data streams in Germany:

Elon Musk's Twitter can breathe easy when it comes to the European Union – Meta's "Threads" will be steering clear.

This is because Mark Zuckerberg's company – which owns Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and more – will not launch its new Twitter-like service anywhere in the EU for the foreseeable future. But yes, it has arrived in Britain, London vultures have informed us.

Ireland's data protection watchdog, which oversees all the tech giants headquartered in the corporate tax-light country, told The Register that Meta had "confirmed to the DPC that they have no plans to roll out the service in the EU at present."

While it's hitting the US and the UK tomorrow – British and American influencers have reportedly already been offered early access – this Berlin-based vulture can confirm there's none of that here, not unless you wish to pipe your data across via VPN.

[...] Data privacy laws in the US are very loose, especially on a federal level, which is part of the reason why the various frameworks for data exchange between the European Union's member states and the United States keep failing when challenged in court.

However, it might come as a surprise to some that Meta doesn't appear to anticipate any regulatory trouble in the UK.

It's a signal that at least one tech giant expects the UK's "replacement for GDPR" – the second take on the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill (DPDIB II) – to be more sympathetic than current British privacy legislation. Brexit dividend, anyone?

Meanwhile, over in Germany, Meta can't combine the data it collects about you on Facebook with the stuff you spill on Instagram and WhatsApp, or with other websites and apps you use, without getting your explicit permission.

[...] Back in January, Ireland's regulator stopped Meta from launching advertising services on WhatsApp that uses data from Facebook or Instagram.

The crossing of the data streams is not a problem for the Facebook giant in the US and UK, it seems.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Plastic production is skyrocketing, pushing microplastic pollution to dangerous new levels:

Not even the Arctic Ocean is immune to the incessant growth of microplastic pollution. In a new study that analyzed sediment core samples, researchers quantified how many of the particles have been deposited since the early 1930s. As scientists have shown elsewhere, the team found that microplastic contamination in the Arctic has been growing exponentially and in lockstep with the growth of plastic production—which is now up to a trillion pounds a year, with the global amount of plastic waste projected to triple by 2060.

These researchers analyzed the seawater and sediment in the western part of the Arctic Ocean, which makes up 13 percent of its total area. But in just that region, they calculated that 210,000 metric tons of microplastic, or 463 million pounds, have accumulated in the water, sea ice, and sediment layers that have built up since the 1930s. In their study, published last week in the journal Science Advances, they cataloged 19 synthetic polymer types in three forms: fragments, fibers, and sheets. That reflects a dizzying array of microplastic sources, including fragments from broken bottles and bags and microfibers from synthetic clothing.

Overall, the team found that microplastic levels have been doubling in Arctic Ocean sediments every 23 years. That mirrors a previous study of ocean sediments off the coast of Southern California, which found concentrations to be doubling every 15 years. Other researchers have found an exponential rise in contamination in urban lake sediments.

[...] The atmosphere, too, is increasingly infested with microplastics. By one calculation, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of disintegrated plastic bottles could be falling on the United States alone. A study of a peatland area in the Pyrenees found that in the 1960s, less than five atmospheric microplastics were being deposited per square meter of land each day. It's now more like 180.

oumuamua writes:

[This is mix of an advertisement and a blog post, rather than an actual story, but it piqued my interest by including 3 different text-to-image generators in one package. Some of us are already learning the limits of, and skills required for, image generation, and I suspect that it will not be too long before collaborative mixes of AI language generation will be appearing, at least in the areas of research. Anyway, lets see what you make of it... JR]

Genolve.com is jumping into the generative AI game with a version upgrade that integrates three major players in AI art:

Genolve, a platform for creating professional designs, has just released a major version upgrade which integrates three popular AI text-to-image generators: DALL-E 2, Stability.ai and Midjourney! Just type in a description of the desired image and generate it in seconds for pennies per image. Still, it can be tricky to get exactly what you need and in this blog post you'll learn the tricks and techniques to coax the AI to generate mind-blowing results through prompt engineering. You'll also learn step-by-step how to AI edit your own photos to remove unwanted items or add something extra using a technique called inpainting.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A Canadian judge ruled that a thumbs-up emoji could be considered an agreement to a contract:

A Canadian judge has ordered a farmer to pay more than $CAD82,000 ($92,000) in damages following a legal battle over what the thumbs-up emoji means.

Chris Achter, the owner of a farming company in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, had sent a thumbs-up emoji in response to a photograph of a flax-buying contract from a grains buyer in 2021.

Months later, the buyer — which had been doing business with Mr Achter for several years — did not receive the flax as expected.

That started a dispute that led to "a far-flung search" to unearth what the thumbs-up emoji means, according to the June court ruling that surfaced in local media this week.

The buyer, South West Terminal, argued that the emoji implied acceptance of contractual terms, while Mr Achter said he used it only to indicate that he had received the contract, but not to indicate his agreement.

[...] He [the judge] said: "I am satisfied on the balance of probabilities that Chris okayed or approved the contract just like he had done before except this time he used a thumbs-up emoji."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

GCC Adopts A Code of Conduct:

While a few years late compared to many other open-source projects adopting a Code of Conduct, the GCC Steering Committee has now adopted a Code of Conduct "CoC" for this open-source compiler project.

Passionate compiler developers and other GCC stakeholders are encouraged to remind themselves to be civil in their discussions and follow other recommendations to foster their community. Jason Merrill of the GCC Steering Committee wrote in their announcement of this CoC:

"The vast majority of the time, the GCC community is a very civil, cooperative space. On the rare occasions that it isn't, it's helpful to have something to point to to remind people of our expectations. It's also good for newcomers to have something to refer to, for both how they are expected to conduct themselves and how they can expect to be treated.

  More importantly, if there is offensive behavior that isn't corrected immediately, it's important for there to be a way to report that to the project leadership so that we can intervene.

  At this time the CoC is preliminary: the code itself should be considered active, but the CoC committee (and so the reporting and response procedures) are not yet in place."

The draft GCC CoC can be viewed here.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Wildfires in Canada have broken records for area burned, evacuations and cost, official says:

Wildfires raging across Canada have already broken records for total area burned, the number of people forced to evacuate their homes and the cost of fighting the blazes, and the fire season is only halfway finished, officials said Thursday.

"It's no understatement to say that the 2023 fire season is and will continue to be record breaking in a number of ways," Michael Norton, director general, Northern Forestry Centre, Canadian Forest Service, said Thursday during a briefing.

[...] The fires have burned 8.8 million hectares (27.7 million acres) an area about the size of the state of Virginia. This already exceeds the record of 7.6 million hectares (18.7 million acres) set in 1989 and is 11 times the 10-year average experienced by this date.

"The final area burned for this season may yet be significantly higher," said Norton. "What we can say with certainty right now is that 2023 is a record-breaking year since at least since 1986 when accurate records started to be kept."

Allen said the fine particles found in fire smoke not only have the ability to penetrate deep into airways, they also can travel long distances meaning they could drift far into the U.S.

There have been reports that fires in Eastern Canada and Quebec are affecting air quality in Europe.

[...] There are about 3,790 provincial firefighters battling the blazes across the country being assisted by Canadian Armed Forces personnel. Another 3,258 firefighters from Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, the U.S., Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, South Korea and the European Union have travelled to Canada to fight fires.

Norton said the cost of fighting wildfires has steadily grown and is approaching about CDN$1 billion (US$750 million) a year.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NHTSA reminds Tesla to cough up data for Autopilot probe:

An investigation by America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) into the safety of Tesla Autopilot has led to a threat of fines if Elon Musk's electric car company doesn't hand over the data requested.

If Tesla doesn't comply with the order in the NHTSA's July 3 letter [PDF], the agency said it could issue fines and penalties that could reach as high as $26,315 per violation per day – capping out at $131.5 million.

That's not to suggest that Tesla has been avoiding giving US highway regulators the data they've asked for. Documents from the investigation indicate Tesla has turned over information several times already. The NHTSA told The Register that fine warnings are a standard part of such letters no matter which manufacturer is getting them.

Among the data requested by the NHTSA is a full rundown of information on vehicles included in the investigation, which is a lot: "All Tesla vehicles, model years 2014–2023, equipped with [Autopilot] at any time."

The NHTSA wants to know the software, firmware and hardware versions of each and every Tesla that falls into its investigative purview, whether the vehicles have a cabin camera installed, when the vehicle was admitted into Tesla's full-self-driving beta, and dates of the most recent software/firmware/hardware updates.

upstart writes:

On a shoestring budget, Chandrayaan-3 aims to observe Luna, Earth, even exoplanets:

India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will next week launch Chandrayaan-3, a mission that aims to land on the moon and deploy a rover.

ISRO yesterday announced that Chandrayaan-3 had been tucked into its capsule and mated with the (LVM-3) launcher that will take it into space. Liftoff from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre has been scheduled for July 14 at 2:35pm IST (09:05 Friday UTC).

The ridiculously economical $74.5 million mission aims to land near Luna's south pole in August. From a ramped compartment, the lander will deploy a 26 kilogram rover outfitted with instruments including an Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS).

The lander contains an accelerometer, Ka-band and laser altimeters, Doppler velocimeter, star sensors, inclinometer, touchdown sensor, and cameras for hazard avoidance and positional knowledge.

The lander also boasts several instruments including Chandra's Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE) to measure surface thermal properties, Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA) to measure tremors around the landing site, Radio Anatomy of Moon Bound Hypersensitive ionosphere and Atmosphere (RAMBHA) to study the gas and plasma environment, and a NASA-provided passive Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) for lunar ranging studies.

A propulsion module that carries the rover and lander will stay in a 100km lunar orbit, where it will act as a communication relay satellite, complete with a payload – known as the Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) – that studies spectral and polarimetric measurements of Earth from roughly 362,000 to 405,000 kilometers away.

[...] Only three countries - the USA, Russia, and China, have successfully landed missions on the Moon. Good luck, Chandrayaan-3!

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Magic: The Gathering's most coveted collectible The One Ring Card has been found. There is only one copy and version of this card, making it highly collectable. The owner wishes to remain anonymous, and multiple resellers are already offering millions to buy it.

The One Ring, a singular, serialized, one-of-a-kind card for Magic: The Gathering, has been found. Proof comes via the grading company PSA, which posted an image of the card Friday morning.

Magic's latest set of cards, titled The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, was created in coordination with Middle-earth Enterprises (MEE) to celebrate the original novels by J.R.R. Tolkien. The set includes many copies of The One Ring, including perforated versions meant to be torn apart at the table. But publisher Wizards of the Coast also created a singular copy, covered in gold foil and etched with the original Elvish Black Speech inscription.

If this is up your alley then the owner is accepting serious offers via their attorney through an email address hello@thenotablegroup.com, noting that no offers above one million dollars have currently been tabled and accepted.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

There are 12,000 types of PFAS, the USGS tested for 32 types across the country:

The U.S. ecosystem is riddled with PFAS. And a new study released this week by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) revealed that these toxic chemicals are in almost half of the country's tap water.

This is the first time a government agency has tested for and compared PFAS found in private and public water supplies throughout the country. 45% of the locations tested positive for PFAS chemicals. This stands for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances. They're also commonly known as 'forever chemicals' because they don't break down over time in nature or in the human body. It is also used to describe over 12,000 different chemicals that can be found in everyday items like packaging and cosmetics. The use of these chemicals has been linked to various public health concerns, including cancer and birth defects.

[...] There are some steps that individual households can take to improve the quality of their tap water. Research from Duke University has found that at-home filters can remove some PFAS from drinking water, but they don't completely remove all of the chemicals from the water. And personal filters don't address the larger problem, which is the fact that companies are allowed to use PFAS in the first place, years after the public has known that major corporations have lied about the dangers of these chemicals.

3M, one of the country's largest PFAS manufacturers, recently said it would stop producing forever chemicals by 2026. Retailer REI also recently announced that it would ban all PFAS from its items including clothing by 2024. Major companies including DuPont and 3M have recently agreed to pay out billions of dollars in settlements due to the use of forever chemicals in their products. But this comes a little too late. Major manufacturers have known about the public health risks their products posed to the public for decades. The chemicals are already in our environment, the exposure risk will continue to persist until stricter regulations are put in place throughout the country.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/07/8086-pins.html

The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) started the x86 architecture that continues to this day. In this blog post, I'm focusing on a small part of the chip: the address and data pins that connect the chip to external memory and I/O devices. In many processors, this circuitry is straightforward, but it is complicated in the 8086 for two reasons. First, Intel decided to package the 8086 as a 40-pin DIP, which didn't provide enough pins for all the functionality. Instead, the 8086 multiplexes address, data, and status. In other words, a pin can have multiple roles, providing an address bit at one time and a data bit at another time.

The second complication is that the 8086 has a 20-bit address space (due to its infamous segment registers), while the data bus is 16 bits wide. As will be seen, the "extra" four address bits have more impact than you might expect. To summarize, 16 pins, called AD0-AD15, provide 16 bits of address and data. The four remaining address pins (A16-A19) are multiplexed for use as status pins, providing information about what the processor is doing for use by other parts of the system. You might expect that the 8086 would thus have two types of pin circuits, but it turns out that there are four distinct circuits, which I will discuss below.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

They're requesting a temporary injunction blocking the law:

Uber, DoorDash and Grubhub are suing for an injunction to stop New York City's new $18 minimum wage law for food delivery app workers, The Washington Post has reported. The app delivery platforms are asking for a temporary restraining order against the new rules, set to be implemented on July 12th. "We will not stand by and let the harmful impacts of this earnings standard on New York City customers, merchants, and the delivery workers it was intended to support go unchecked," a DoorDash spokesperson told CNN.

The Worker's Justice Project that backed the survey decried the new lawsuit. "This latest legal maneuver to prop up their business model comes at the expense of workers who can barely survive in a city facing a massive affordability crisis," director Ligia Guallpa told the Post.

New York became the first US city to mandate a minimum wage for food delivery workers, ordering platforms to pay workers $17.96 per hour, plus tips, by July 12th. The minimum wage in the city is $15 per hour, but the extra amount accounts for the fact that delivery workers are usually paid as contractors, so have higher taxes and must pay work-related expenses out of pocket. According to an estimate from the DCWP (NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection), NYC has more than 60,000 food delivery workers who earn an average of $7.09 per hour.

[...] App services like Uber have fought for years against regulations against the "gig worker" economy. Earlier this year, a court ruled that Uber and Lyft could keep treating drivers as contractors, rather than reclassifying them as salaried employees.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Will people ever learn?:

Facepalm: When will people who smuggle hardware into China learn that strapping thousands of dollars of components to your body often leads to arrest? Once again, the country's customs have caught someone trying the same old trick. On this occasion, a trafficker had 420 M.2 SSDs attached to his torso using tape.

[...] The 420 M.2 SSDs are said to be worth around HK$258,000 or $32,984.94. That works out to an average of $78.53 each, so they're likely on the higher end of the quality scale.

[...] Smugglers have been trying imaginative ways of sneaking tech goods into China for years. In 2015, a man was caught with an impressive 146 iPhones strapped to his body. A woman attempted the same thing a few years later, reducing the number of iPhones to 102.

Taping CPUs to one's body is also popular. A pair of men tried to smuggle 256 Intel Core i7-10700 and Core i9-10900K processors, then worth $123,000, by attaching them to their calves and torsos at the height of the chip shortage in 2021. Another man did the same thing a year later, wrapping 160 CPUs and 16 folding phones to his body, and it was only in March when someone tried this with 239 CPUs.

Not everyone goes for the taping method. A woman in 2022 tried to enter China with over 200 Intel CPUs hidden in a fake pregnant belly, and a man this year tried to sneak 84 SSDs past Chinese customs by stuffing them inside an electric scooter. Some people are just lazy and simply lie about what's inside the crates they are transporting, like the man who tried to smuggle HK$30 million (about $3.8 million) of electronics through Man Kam To Control Point from Hong Kong into mainland China a few months ago.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Blockchain technology, investor sentiment, and economic stress are useful for forecasting, while bitcoin's detachment from economic fundamentals make it a poor safe-haven asset:

Blockchain technology, investor sentiment, and economic stress levels are significant predictors of bitcoin returns, according to a groundbreaking paper from Illinois Institute of Technology researchers that provides empirical evidence to help guide investors, economists, and academics.

Sang Baum "Solomon" Kang, associate professor of finance at Illinois Tech's Stuart School of Business and co-author of the paper, also found that the cryptocurrency is detached from economic fundamentals and therefore may not effectively serve as a diversifier or safe-haven asset. Additionally, Kang reported that returns on commodities, securities, and other assets do not predict bitcoin returns well.

[...] The team used predictive analytics techniques and dimension-reduction models on data from January 2011 to January 2020, analyzing 25 information variables under the categories macroeconomics, blockchain technology, other assets, stress level, and investor sentiment.

"We find that blockchain technology, investor sentiment, and stress level have predictive power for bitcoin returns," says Kang. "Similar to traditional assets, bitcoin shows higher return predictability with longer return horizons. These findings support the dual nature of bitcoin as a technical artifact and speculative asset."