SoylentNews

owl writes:

https://newart.press/p/photocopiers-terrified-the-publishing

"What Hath Xerox Wrought" asked a 1976 Time Magazine headline, the proceeding article prompted readers to imagine if: "some inventive and omnipotent god offered the nation a device that would greatly advance the spread of information."

There was a catch though: the promethean powers afforded by this "green-eyed deus ex machina" would also bring chaos: "In return, the deity required that the President resign, that stacks of sensitive Government and corporate secrets be made public."

The writer was of course referring to the Watergate scandal and Daniel Ellsberg's use of photocopiers to leak the Pentagon Papers to the press. The hypothetical was actually a reality. While the USSR kept strict control over the technology, highly regulating the machines until 1989, the free world was left to deal with the 'consequences' of freedom.

Downsides of this supposed double edge sword - cited in Time - would be encouraging waste and slothfulness, on top of stifling creativity and punching holes in copyright laws. This last issue was of particular concern to publishers and authors, one that had been growing for more than a decade because, as Malcolm McLaren would put it in 1993, "Gutenberg made everyone a reader, Xerox made everyone a publisher..."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Adverts said Onavo Protect user data would be kept a secret – just didn't say from whom:

On Wednesday, Australia's Federal Court ordered two Meta subsidiaries to pay $14 million after an over two and a half year legal battle instigated by the country's competition regulator found the pair misled users on the data collection of a now defunct VPN app.

[...] Israel-based web analytics company Onavo, maker of free downloadable software application Onavo Protect, was acquired by Facebook in 2013. The narrative from Onavo at the time was that privacy was king. Meanwhile Facebook promised the company would be a separate brand.

But by 2018, researchers were onto the tall tale and found Onavo Protect sent user data to Facebook even when turned off – a situation that was outlined and permitted through its terms and conditions.

According to the ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission], information collected and aggregated included "users' internet and app activity, such as records of every app they accessed and the number of seconds each day they spent using those apps" for Facebook's commercial benefit.

[...] On Wednesday, the Australian court said that Onavo Inc. and Facebook Israel promoted the VPN during 2016 and 2017 without sufficiently disclosing that data would be used outside of the app.

"If an Australian user of Onavo Protect had a Facebook account, Meta was also able to combine that user's Onavo Protect Data with information that Meta maintained about the user's Facebook account, using an algorithm," wrote Judge Wendy Abraham.

She further noted that internal Meta documents referred to Onavo Protect as a "business intelligence tool," providing "a sample of users who we are able to know nearly everything they are doing on their mobile device." The data was then used for advertising, marketing and improvement of products, services and strategies.

According to the Australian court, the terms and conditions disclosing data use were not sufficient enough to counter advertisements to the contrary. Court documents state that both Facebook Israel and Onavo admit that ads and statements were likely to mislead or deceive.

[...] Abraham said in court documents the fine "carries with it a sufficient sting to ensure that the penalty amount is not such as to be regarded by the parties or others as simply an acceptable cost of doing business."

Original Submission

"Arthur T Knackerbracket" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A recently disclosed bug in many of AMD's newer consumer, workstation, and server processors can cause the chips to leak data at a rate of up to 30 kilobytes per core per second, writes Tavis Ormandy, a member of Google's Project Zero security team. Executed properly, the so-called "Zenbleed" vulnerability (CVE-2023-20593) could give attackers access to encryption keys and root and user passwords, along with other sensitive data from any system using a CPU based on AMD's Zen 2 architecture.

[...] The bad news is that the exploit doesn't require physical hardware access and can be triggered by loading JavaScript on a malicious website (according to networking company Cloudflare). The good news is that, at least for now, there don't seem to be any cases of this bug being exploited in the wild yet, though this could change quickly now that the vulnerability has been disclosed, and the bug requires precise timing to exploit.

"AMD is not aware of any known exploit of the described vulnerability outside the research environment," the company told Tom's Hardware. Cloudflare also says there is "no evidence of the bug being exploited" on its servers.

Since the vulnerability is in the hardware, a firmware update from AMD is the best way to fully fix it; Ormandy says it is also fixable via a software update, but it "may have some performance cost." The bug affects all processors based on AMD's Zen 2 architecture, including several Ryzen desktop and laptop processors, EPYC 7002-series chips for servers, and Threadripper 3000- and 3000 Pro WX-series CPUs for workstations.

The article mentions that the firmware update for EPYC 7002 is already out, but updates for consumer-market chips may not be available until December.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://vivaldi.com/blog/googles-new-dangerous-web-environment-integrity-spec/

Google seems to love creating specifications that are terrible for the open web and it feels like they find a way to create a new one every few months. This time, we have come across some controversy caused by a new Web Environment Integrity spec that Google seems to be working on.

​At this time, I could not find any official message from Google about this spec, so it is possible that it is just the work of some misguided engineer at the company that has no backing from higher up, but it seems to be work that has gone on for more than a year, and the resulting spec is so toxic to the open Web that at this point, Google needs to at least give some explanation as to how it could go so far.

Original Submission

ElizabethGreene writes:

From Hackaday:
The newest winner of the World's Largest wind turbine title is the Ming Yang MySE 16-260 that came online last week in the Taiwan Strait. Its 16-megawatt generator is driven by a 260-meter diameter rotor and is projected to pump 66 Gigawatt-hours of electricity annually. This surpasses the previous record holder, the Vesta V236-15.0MW that came online in January with a 231 meter rotor disc.

(Local seabird populations could not be reached for comment on this story.)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Overture Maps Foundation took info from Microsoft, Meta, and more to help more developers create a new wave of map apps:

If you're not Google (or, to a much lesser extent, Apple), map apps are damned hard to make. Last year, several major heavy hitters in tech, including the likes of Meta, Microsoft, TomTom, and Amazon, decided to lay down their arms and meet under a flag of parlay held aloft by the Linux Foundation to make mapping just a little easier, cheaper, and less dominated by two companies. Alone, none could establish a big enough data pool to rival the likes of Google Maps, but with their individual hoards of business location data, satellite mapping tech, and more support from smaller tech firms, they could perhaps gather enough data together to help create a whole new series of up-to-date map apps.

On Wednesday, this pooled initiative, called the Overture Maps Foundation, shared its first alpha release for its mapping data. It contains millions of examples for buildings, roads, and geographic boundaries. It's only the first large release for the planned massive dataset, but the hope is there will be much more to come as companies sign on.

[...] "The hardest thing in mapping is knowing what's changed in the world," Prioleau told Gizmodo in a video chat. Essentially, map apps are some of the hardest to design simply because of the massive amount of data required to build the systems. Not only do they need to be accurate, but they need to be constantly updated when businesses close and new ones open.

The first Overture release contains about 59 million points of interest that the group claims has not yet been released as open data before. A POI could be anything—a public landmark, a specific building, or a local business. Otherwise, the data contains about 750 million building footprints alongside road data that's mostly collated from the crowdsourced OpenStreetMap project.

The date, time, and place for the upcoming SoylentNews PBC meeting mentioned in a previous meta post from Tuesday, July 25th were announced today:

• Date and Time: Monday, July 31 at 1:30pm PDT (4:30pm EDT / 8:30pm UTC)
• Place: #meeting on irc.soylentnews.org (SoylentNews IRC)

More details:

The upcoming meeting will be to nominate one or more qualified candidates to serve on the Board. The PBC exists to define what and how SoylentNews will be and to enforce that vision. Ultimately the Board is responsible for the high-level oversight that ensures the bylaws are fulfilled. The purpose of the expansion is to include more voices from the community so they will be directly represented in the decision making [affecting] the community. The next meeting will be held over IRC and will be answering and addressing your questions and concerns from any of the comments posted in this article.

For further information, see the previous meta post.

Community participation is essential, so I hope we'll see as many of you there as possible.

upstart writes:

NASA briefly lost contact with International Space Station after power outage:

A brief power outage at NASA's Mission Control in Houston meant that the space agency lost contact with the International Space Station on Tuesday. During the outage, flight controllers were able to talk to the crew through Russian Space Agency Roscosmos's channels.

"A power issue in Mission Control Houston resulted in the loss of command, telemetry, and voice from the ground to the International Space Station," said the American space agency in a blog post. The outage was short-lived as the mission control team transitioned to back-up hardware for telemetry, commanding and audio.

NASA power outage temporarily halts contact with space station:

Space station program manager Joel Montalbano said neither the astronauts nor station were ever in any danger and that backup control systems took over within 90 minutes. The crew was notified of the problem through Russian communication systems, within 20 minutes of the outage.

It's the first time NASA has had to fire up these backup systems to take control, according to Montalbano.

[...] NASA maintains a backup control center miles from Houston in the event a hurricane or other disaster requiring evacuations. But in Tuesday's case, the flight controllers stayed at Mission Control since the lights and air-conditioning still worked.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Teen Wins Scholarship for His Glaucoma-Detection Device:

After one of teenager Rohan Kalia's family members was diagnosed with glaucoma, he began researching an affordable technology that could be used for early detection. Kalia is a sophomore at Wheeler High School in Marietta, Ga. He built a portable, inexpensive device that can accurately diagnose the condition.

Kalia's EyePal was showcased at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) held in May in Dallas.

Eyepal, described as a novel multimodal diagnosis and prevention system to enable accessible and individualized glaucoma detection, won this year's IEEE Presidents' Scholarship of US $10,000. The IEEE Foundation established the award to acknowledge a deserving student whose project demonstrates an understanding of electrical or electronics engineering, computer science, or other IEEE field of interest.

[...] EyePal also came in third place in the ISEF's systems software category, earning Kalia a $1,000 award.

[...] The EyePal uses a quality camera, a Raspberry Pi minicomputer, machine-learning technology, and a mobile app. The camera takes photos of the fundus and sends them to a mobile device that can be examined by a specialist. EyePal showed a 95 percent accuracy when tested on sets of fundus images, Kalia says.

Original Submission

mendax writes:

Ars recently published a story that goes in-depth into the alleged dinosaurs of the computing world, the lowly IBM mainframe computer:

Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines—practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they're dinosaurs, they're T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot. It's estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They're used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world's top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM. In this explainer, we'll look at the IBM mainframe computer—what it is, how it works, and why it's still going strong after over 50 years.

Original Submission

sonamchauhan writes:

A paper uploaded to the Arxiv preprint repository claims South Korean scientists have created the world's first room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. The superconducting material, dubbed 'LK-99', is synthesized in a fairly simple manner from lead-apatite. As yet, there seems to be no independent verification of the claims of their paper.

See also:
https://thequantuminsider.com/2023/07/26/researchers-claim-they-developed-a-room-temperature-superconductor/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36864624

Original Submission

liar and Isia wrote in with the same story:

Companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.

[...] Don't drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don't found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders.
Go meta.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Ubisoft will delete your account, along with your game library, if it's inactive for too long:

Has it been a while since you signed into your Ubisoft account? It might be prudent to log in as soon as possible; otherwise, there's a risk of it being deleted and your purchased games along with it.

Twitter user @PC_enjoyer, a piracy and anti-DRM advocate, tweeted a very phishing-like email from Ubisoft informing them that they have not been using their Ubisoft account. As such, the company has temporarily suspended the inactive account and said it would be closed in 30 days in accordance with the Terms of Use.

UBISOFT closes your account if you haven't logged in for some time.

You will lose all your games purchased forever. pic.twitter.com/exC78bUt93

– AntiDRM (@PC_enjoyer) July 19, 2023

The message includes a Cancel button for the user to keep their Ubisoft account open. Again, this all looks pretty suspicious, but the company's support staff later confirmed it's not a scam.

Hey there. We just wanted to chime in that you can avoid the account closure by logging into your account within the 30 days (since receiving the email pictured) and selecting the Cancel Account Closure link contained in the email. We certainly do not want you to lose access to...

– Ubisoft Support (@UbisoftSupport) July 20, 2023

hubie writes:

Although the two types of training produce similar metabolic stress, muscle activation is different:

Which kind of resistance training promotes more muscle growth: low load with many repetitions or high load with fewer repetitions? According to a study conducted at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in São Paulo state, Brazil, it makes no difference.

The study lasted eight weeks and involved 18 volunteers in two different training protocols. One group performed high-load (HL) exercises with fewer repetitions, while the other did low-load (LL) exercises with more repetitions. Muscle mass was measured in the first and last exercise sessions. A comparison of the two groups did not show any difference in muscle growth or metabolic stress, measured in an analysis of substances released into the bloodstream by the exercises.

In the HL group, each individual lifted up to 80% of their own weight. In the LL group, the limit was 30%, but they repeated the exercises until their muscles could no longer lift the loads.

[...] "Resistance training is known to promote muscle growth, but it's still not completely clear whether the key to muscle hypertrophy is the load or the number of repetitions. Our study supports the theory that both types have the same effect. We also showed that muscle activation occurs in a different manner in each type, although metabolic stress is the same and the effect on hypertrophy is therefore also the same," said Renato Barroso, a professor at UNICAMP's School of Physical Education.

[...] Although the researchers found no differences in the overall metabolic response, they observed that some metabolites correlated with muscle hypertrophy in both groups. Some of these correlations, they concluded, may be associated with the characteristics of the muscle fibers activated by exercise (type 1 or type 2) as well as the metabolic demands of the training protocols used in the study.

upstart writes:

Thousands of Chromebooks Are 'Expiring,' Forcing Schools to Toss Them Out:

As thin, light, and inexpensive as Chromebooks can be, they come with a major caveat: short life expectancies. Chromebooks aren't just a little flimsier than the average laptop—they're shipped with software "death dates" that render them useless three to six years after release. And because schools are some of Chromebooks' biggest customers, they're now swamped with bricked hardware.

The Chromebook crisis is apparent at northern California's Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), where thousands of laptops have reportedly stopped working. Sam Berg, the district's computer science coordinator, told Silicon Valley's Mercury News that while Oakland students can gain tech repair experience through an OUSD internship, the expired Chromebooks simply aren't fixable. "They're designed to be disposable," Berg said.

The district was forced to replace 3,851 laptops last year after the Chromebooks reached their built-in death dates. Over the next five years, that number will skyrocket to 40,000 as more than 60 Chromebook models expire. The district's tech internship for teenagers will attempt to salvage as much hardware as possible, but most will need to be recycled.

Google told OUSD the baked-in death dates are necessary for security and compatibility purposes. As Google continues to iterate on its Chromebook software, older devices supposedly can't handle the updates. But this illustrates a particularly contentious issue in modern technology: planned obsolescence. From smartphones and computers to printers and even kitchen appliances, consumers have learned to purchase things with the knowledge that they'll need to be replaced in just a few years. Not only is this expensive, but it produces a shocking amount of e-waste, less than a quarter of which is recycled.

Also submitted as: Built-in software 'death dates' are sending thousands of schools' Chromebooks to the recycling bin

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2