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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/08/russia-heads-back-to-the-moon-with-luna-25/

Russia's space agency successfully launched a robotic spacecraft Thursday on a journey to the Moon, the country's first lunar explorer since the Soviet Union's Luna 24 sample return mission in 1976.

The Luna 25 mission lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, located in Russia's Far East, at 7:10 pm ET (23:10 UTC). Heading east, a Soyuz-2.1b rocket propelled Luna 25 through an overcast cloud deck and into the stratosphere, then shed its four first-stage boosters about two minutes into the flight. A core stage engine fired a few minutes longer, and the Soyuz rocket jettisoned its payload shroud.
[...]
Russia would like the Luna 25 mission to rekindle the country's once-stellar record in the realm of interplanetary exploration. Luna 24, the Soviet-era mission that was Russia's last probe to land on the Moon, returned lunar soil samples to Earth on a robotic spacecraft in August 1976, nearly four years after NASA's last Apollo landing with astronauts. That feat was not repeated until China's Chang'e 5 sample return mission scooped up lunar soil and brought it back to Earth in 2020.
[...]
An agreement between Russia and China on robotic and eventual human lunar exploration in 2021 was seen by many as an initiative to potentially rival the US-led Artemis program. Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the Vostochny Cosmodrome, where Luna 25 launched on Thursday, and vowed to "resume the lunar program" abandoned by the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
[...]
A report released by the Center for Strategic & International Studies last December found that the Russia-China partnership in space "may well be exaggerated," citing declining Russian space budgets, the drain on Russia's space program caused by the war in Ukraine, and persisting mistrust between the two countries.
[...]
The Moon is getting to be a busy place. China has landers operating on the near and far side of the Moon, and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been observing there for 14 years. In April, a Japanese commercial spacecraft narrowly missed making a successful landing.

Now Luna 25 is on the way and is scheduled to land on the Moon just two days before India's Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft is due to make its descent on August 23.

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fliptop writes:

Experts closing in on potentially identifying new force after surprise wobble of subatomic particle:

The tantalising theory that a fifth force of nature could exist has been given a boost thanks to unexpected wobbling by a subatomic particle, physicists have revealed.

[...] Dr Mitesh Patel, from Imperial College London, said: "We're talking about a fifth force because we can't necessarily explain the behaviour [in these experiments] with the four we know about."

The data comes from experiments at the Fermilab US particle accelerator facility, which explored how subatomic particles called muons – similar to electrons but about 200 times heavier – move in a magnetic field.

Patel says the muons behave a bit like a child's spinning top, in rotating around the axis of the magnetic field. However, as the muons move, they wobble. The frequency of that wobble can be predicted by the standard model.

But the experimental results from FermiLab do not appear to match those predictions.

Prof Jon Butterworth of University College London, who works on the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, said: "The wobbles are due to the way the muon interacts with a magnetic field. They can be calculated very precisely in the standard model but that calculation involves quantum loops, with known particles appearing in those loops.

"If the measurements don't line up with the prediction, that could be a sign that there is some unknown particle appearing in the loops – which could, for example, be the carrier of a fifth force."

Related:

• Making Sense of the Muon's Misdemeanours
• Shock Result in Particle Experiment Could Spark Physics Revolution (0.1% Difference in W Boson Mass)
• Latest Muon Measurements Hint at Cracks in the Standard Model

Also Submitted As: Scientists at Fermilab close in on fifth force of nature

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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

HP all-in-one printer owners, upset that their devices wouldn't scan or fax when low on ink, were handed a partial win in a northern California court this week after a judge denied HP's motion to dismiss their suit.

The plaintiffs argued in their amended class action complaint [PDF] that HP withheld vital information by including software in its all-in-one printer/scanner/fax machines that disabled non-printing functions when out of ink and not telling buyers that was the case.

"It is well-documented that ink is not required in order to scan or to fax a document, and it is certainly possible to manufacture an All-in-One printer that scans or faxes when the device is out of ink," the plaintiffs argued in their complaint. The amended complaint was filed in February this year after US federal Judge Beth Labson Freeman dismissed the suit on the grounds that it hadn't properly stated a claim.

Armed with their amended complaint, lawyers for San Francsican Gary Freund and Minneapolis resident Wayne McMath have succeeded at not only making relevant claims, but also surviving an attempt by HP to have the entire case dismissed for a second time. 

In the amended complaint, Freund and McMath's lawyers argue that HP's move to disable devices that were low on ink was intentional, citing HP's own comments from a support forum post in which an HP support agent told a user complaining of similar issues that their "HP printer is designed in such a way that with the empty cartridge or without the cartridge [the] printer will not function." 

[...] This isn't the first time HP has been taken to court over claims it improperly locked printers down. In 2022 the IT giant settled a European lawsuit for $1.35 million alleging it used security chips and DRM-like software to prevent any third-party cartridges from functioning in HP printers. The US corporation has dealt with similar cases in Australia and America, which were settled. 

HP hasn't responded to our questions about the latest lawsuit.

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taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-two-thirds-world-biodiversity-soil.html

Coral reefs, the deep sea or the treetops of the rainforests are considered the main hotspots of biodiversity. However, they all trail behind the soils. According to a new study, soils are the most species-rich ecosystems worldwide. Their importance for human nutrition is enormous, and the proportion of soils worldwide that are considered degraded or destroyed is growing steadily. A trio of researchers led by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL has now made the first estimate of global soil biodiversity.

[...] Since the data on soil diversity is extremely patchy—especially in the global South—the results of the study show huge ranges in some cases. For bacteria, for example, the mean value is 40% of species living in the soil—but the range extends from 25% to 88%. The uncertainties are also enormous for viruses, which are mainly studied as human pathogens. Accordingly, the authors are bracing themselves for some criticism of their methods and conclusions. "Our work is a first but important attempt to estimate what proportion of global biodiversity lives in the soil," says Anthony.

The goal, he says, is to provide the basis for much-needed decisions to protect soils and their creatures worldwide. "Soils are under enormous pressure, whether from agricultural intensification, climate change, invasive species and much more," Anthony points out. "Our study shows that the diversity in soils is great and correspondingly important, so they should be given much more consideration in conservation."

Journal Reference:
Mark A. Anthony et al, Enumerating soil biodiversity, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2304663120

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upstart writes:

Regulators give green light to driverless taxis in San Francisco:

California regulators gave approval Thursday to two rival robotaxi companies, Cruise and Waymo, to operate their driverless cars 24/7 across all of San Francisco and charge passengers for their services.

The much-anticipated vote, which followed roughly six hours of public comment both for and against driverless taxis, came amid clashes between the robotaxi companies and some residents of the hilly city. San Francisco first responders, city transportation leaders and local activists are among those who shared concerns about the technology.

The California Public Utilities Commission regulates self-driving cars in the state and voted 3-to-1 in favor of Waymo and Cruise expanding their operations.

[...] Genevieve Shiroma, the dissenting commissioner in the 3-1 vote, recommended the commission delay the vote until they received a "better understanding of the safety impacts" of the vehicles.

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fab23 writes:

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/08/11/x-marks-the-verb

A few weeks ago when Twitter was renamed to X, and we learned that Elon Musk somehow thinks people are going to use "x" as both a verb and noun, I recalled having once stumbled upon this 1983 "On Language" column from the late great William Safire:

"The Federal bureaucracy has invented a new verb," says Charles DeLaFuente of Kew Gardens, N.Y., who had just sent in his 1040 income-tax return to the Internal Revenue Service. He attached an addressed envelope that he had received from the I.R.S.; in the upper left-hand corner, where the return address of the taxpayer belongs, is the heavy black outline of a box. Next to the box are the words "X box if refund."

"Never mind the unanswered question, 'If refund what?'," the irate taxpayer observed. "We all know they mean to x the box if you have a refund coming. Maybe the ink they saved on those instructions will pay for the next round of tax cuts."

Mr. DeLaFuente — his name means "of the fountain" — is blowing his geyser for the wrong reason. The verb to x is not new. In 1849, Edgar Allan Poe wrote in one of his tales: "'I shell have to x this ere paragrab,' said he to himself, as he read it over." In 1935, Jonas Bayer carried that crossing-out metaphor into the mechanical age in Startling Detective magazine: "An imported hatchet man with a .45-caliber typewriter can x out the dangerous canary." Merriam-Webster's first citation in the one-letter verb's literal sense is from Henry Cassidy's 1943 book "Moscow Dateline": "I x'd out the word 'west' in the third question, changing it to 'east.'"

The whole column is a goldmine, including a section on the Philly accent (Eagles = "Iggles") and another referencing perhaps the coolest-named American who ever lived, Pussyfoot Johnson. (NYT subscribers can read the scans of the original Sunday magazine issue.)

Have any of our community got other examples of 'x' being a verb, or of other unusual language examples that are strange but seem to be understood? - JR

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/08/getting-aaa-games-working-in-linux-sometimes-requires-concealing-your-gpu/

Linux gaming's march toward being a real, actual thing has taken serious strides lately, due in large part to Valve's Proton-powered Steam Play efforts. Being Linux, there are still some quirks to figure out. One of them involves games trying to make use of Intel's upscaling tools.

Intel's ARC series GPUs are interesting, in many senses of the word. They offer the best implementation of Intel's image reconstruction system, XeSS, similar to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR. XeSS, like its counterparts, utilizes machine learning to fill in the pixel gaps on anti-aliased objects and scenes. The results are sometimes clear, sometimes a bit fuzzy if you pay close attention. In our review of Intel's A770 and A750 GPUs in late 2022, we noted that cross-compatibility between all three systems could be in the works.

That kind of easy-swap function is not the case when a game is running on a customized version of the WINE Windows-on-Linux, translating Direct3D graphics calls to Vulkan and prodding to see whether it, too, can make use of Intel's graphics boost. As noted by Phoronix, Intel developers contributing to the open source Mesa graphics project added the ability to hide an Intel GPU from the Vulkan Linux driver.

[...] Relying on upscaling to bolster performance, especially at lower resolutions, may be unwise. But nearly every major game release brings with it news of which vendor's upscaling system is included or preferred. It's still impressive how many games simply run at all on an OS for which they were never built, but it might never stop being a tricky challenge.

Related:
Apple Has a Proton-Like Game Porting Toolkit for Getting Windows Games on Mac - 20230612

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The site It's FOSS is reporting that India's Defense Services are switching to GNU/Linux, ditching an insecure legacy operating system, with an August 15 deadline. Little is known about their home spun distro except that it seems to be based on Ubuntu.

What's Happening: According to a recent report, the Defence Ministry of India has decided to replace Windows with an in-house developed Linux distro called 'Maya' on all computers that are connected to the Internet.

Also reported at The Hindu, Defence Ministry to switch to locally built OS Maya amid threats, which explains that this move is a reaction to increasingly successful attacks against a certain, pervasive, desktop legacy operating system. x

Currently, Maya is being installed only in Defence Ministry systems and not on computers connected to the networks of the three Services. On this, the official said the three Services had also vetted it and would adopt it on service networks as well soon. The Navy had already cleared it and the Army and the Air Force were currently evaluating it, the official added.

Maya was developed by government development agencies within six months, the official said. Maya would prevent malware attacks and other cyberattacks which had seen a steep increase, the official noted.

However, the attacks in and of themselves are less of a problem than the fact that a large, and increasing, number of them are successful against that aging legacy desktop operating system.

For India to pull this off successfully, they must study how their opponent has maneuvered over the years against GNU/Linux deployments and in particular look at case studies like Kerala, Munich, Lower Saxony, Vaasa, and Turku. India's opponent in this move has had many programmes, years ago one was EDGI, and a long standing mandate that "under NO circumstances lose against Linux".

Previously:
(2018) German Documentary on Relations Between Microsoft and Public Administration Now Available in English
(2018) German State of Lower Saxony Plans to Switch From Linux to Windows
(2017) Munich Switching From Linux to Windows 10
(2017) Linux Champion Munich Takes Decisive Step Towards Returning to Windows
(2016) Draft Report Doesn't Say -Which- Software is Causing Problems in Munich
(2016) Munich: The High Cost of Having Committed to Closed-Source Software
(2014) Another German Town Says It Has Completed Its Switch To FOSS

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/scam-victim-cant-stop-endless-stream-of-unwanted-amazon-packages/

Amazon ships more than a million packages daily, but there's at least one person in a million who frowns when she encounters a smiling box placed on her doorstep.

A Canadian woman, Anca Nitu, told CBC that over the past two months, more than 50 packages have arrived at her home. Each package contained a return slip and a pair of shoes from an Amazon buyer located in North America who wrongly shipped their rejected shoes to Nitu's address.
[...]
Amazon said that typically the company advises any recipient of an unwanted package to fill out a Report Unwanted Package form. That Amazon page says to report any unsolicited packages "immediately," confirming that "third-party sellers are prohibited from sending unsolicited packages to customers."

For Nitu, her worries won't necessarily end, even if the packages ever do stop coming. She told CBC that she has no idea whether the Amazon sellers that are using her information to ship unwanted return items are doing anything else with her information. She also worries that if Amazon doesn't unlink her name from the seller accounts, she could one day be charged Amazon seller fees.

Related:
'It's an absurdity': Oak Park woman says unwanted shoes keep showing up on doorstep

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Other peoples code might look good at a glance but is wrong at least half the time. AI or help sites don't offer as much help as one would think.

"Among other findings, the authors found ChatGPT is more likely to make conceptual errors than factual ones. "Many answers are incorrect due to ChatGPT's incapability to understand the underlying context of the question being asked," the paper found."

""Stack Overflow's annual Developer Survey of 90,000 coders recently found that 77 percent of developers are favorable of AI tools, but only 42 percent trust the accuracy of those tools. OverflowAI developed with community at the core and with a focus on the accuracy of data and AI-generated content."

https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/07/chatgpt_stack_overflow_ai/
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.02312

Original Submission

PiMuNu writes:

Fermilab's g-2 experiment has released a new round of data. Physicists now have a brand-new measurement of a property of the muon called the anomalous magnetic moment that improves the precision of their previous result by a factor of 2. The result is in tension with Standard Model predictions.

An international collaboration of scientists working on the Muon g-2 experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced the much-anticipated updated measurement on Aug. 10. This new value bolsters the first result they announced in April 2021 and sets up a showdown between theory and experiment over 20 years in the making.

"We're really probing new territory. We're determining the muon magnetic moment at a better precision than it has ever been seen before," said Brendan Casey, a senior scientist at Fermilab who has worked on the Muon g-2 experiment since 2008.

Press release:
https://news.fnal.gov/2023/08/muon-g-2-doubles-down-with-latest-measurement/

Paper:
https://muon-g-2.fnal.gov/result2023.pdf

A seven-minute video that provides additional information about muons and the new result by the Muon g-2 collaboration.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

"The sun is more surprising than we knew," said Mehr Un Nisa, a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University. "We thought we had this star figured out, but that's not the case."

Nisa, who will soon be joining [Michigan State University's] faculty, is the corresponding author of a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters that details the discovery of the highest-energy light ever observed from the sun.

The international team behind the discovery also found that this type of light, known as gamma rays, is surprisingly bright. That is, there's more of it than scientists had previously anticipated.

Although the high-energy light doesn't reach the Earth's surface, these gamma rays create telltale signatures that were detected by Nisa and her colleagues working with the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, or HAWC.

[...] "We now have observational techniques that weren't possible a few years ago," said Nisa, who works in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Natural Science. "In this particular energy regime, other ground-based telescopes couldn't look at the sun because they only work at night," she said. "Ours operates 24/7."

[...] "After looking at six years' worth of data, out popped this excess of gamma rays," Nisa said. "When we first saw it, we were like, 'We definitely messed this up. The sun cannot be this bright at these energies.'"

[...] The gamma rays that Nisa and her colleagues observed had about 1 trillion electron volts, or 1 tera electron volt, abbreviated 1 TeV. Not only was this energy level surprising, but so was the fact that they were seeing so much of it.

[...] "This shows that HAWC is adding to our knowledge of our galaxy at the highest energies, and it's opening up questions about our very own sun," Nisa said. "It's making us see things in a different light. Literally."

Journal Reference:
A. Albert et al, Discovery of Gamma Rays from the Quiescent Sun with HAWC, Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.051201)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA hopes to launch a near-infrared laser transceiver to test a system that could one day be used to communicate with astronauts on Mars.

The Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment will head off into the void with Psyche, an asteroid-chasing probe that is scheduled to blast off on October 5. While they journey toward 16 Psyche, a metal-rich asteroid, the DSOC system will spend two years attempting to communicate via laser with two ground stations in Southern California.

NASA believes DSOC's near-infrared lasers can trounce the data transmission speeds achieved using radios.

"DSOC was designed to demonstrate 10 to 100 times the data-return capacity of state-of-the-art radio systems used in space today," enthused Abi Biswas, DSOC's project technologist working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "High-bandwidth laser communications for near-Earth orbit and for Moon-orbiting satellites have been proven, but deep space presents new challenges."

NASA's most recent Mars rover, Perseverance, can communicate with orbiters at two megabits per second. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can chat to Earth at between 0.5 to 4 megabits per second.

Improving those speeds by a factor of between 10 and 100 with lasers therefore has an obvious benefit – even if the pesky limit that is the speed of light means it won't allow synchronous comms with the Red Planet.

[...] "Every component of DSOC exhibits new technology – from the high-power uplink lasers to the pointing system on the transceiver's telescope and down to the exquisitely sensitive detectors that can count the single photons as they arrive," explained Bill Klipstein, the DSOC project manager at JPL. "The team even needed to develop new signal-processing techniques to squeeze information out of such weak signals transmitted over vast distances."

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

A team of researchers from British universities has trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keyboard keystrokes recorded using a microphone with an accuracy of 95%:

When Zoom was used for training the sound classification algorithm, the prediction accuracy dropped to 93%, which is still dangerously high, and a record for that medium.

Such an attack severely affects the target's data security, as it could leak people's passwords, discussions, messages, or other sensitive information to malicious third parties.

Moreover, contrary to other side-channel attacks that require special conditions and are subject to data rate and distance limitations, acoustic attacks have become much simpler due to the abundance of microphone-bearing devices that can achieve high-quality audio captures.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Reference: Joshua Harrison, Ehsan Toreini, and Maryam Mehrnezhad, A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards. arXiv:2308.01074v1

Original Submission

evilcam writes:

Science Alert has a story on a paper suggesting the use of asteroids for space stations.

The basic idea of turning an asteroid into a rotating space habitat has existed for a while. Despite that, it's always seemed relatively far off regarding technologies, so the concept hasn't received much attention over the years.
...
David W. Jensen, a retired Technical Fellow at Rockwell Collins ... released a 65-page paper that details an easy-to-understand, relatively inexpensive, and feasible plan to turn an asteroid into a space habitat.
...
Dr. Jensen breaks the discussion into three main categories – asteroid selection, habitat style selection, and mission strategy to get there (i.e., what robots to use).
...
After a relatively in-depth selection process, Dr. Jensen decided on one in particular as a good candidate – Atira. This S-type asteroid has an entire class of asteroids named after it. Atira comes in at about a 4.8 km diameter and even has its own moon – a 1 km diameter asteroid that orbits it closely.
...
He eventually settled on a torus as the ideal habitat type and then dives into calculations about the overall station mass, how to support the inner wall with massive columns, and how to allocate floor space. All important, but how exactly would we build such a massive behemoth?
Self-replicating robots are Dr. Jensen's answer. The report's third section details a plan to utilize spider robots and a base station that can replicate themselves. He stresses the importance of only sending the most advanced technical components from Earth and using materials on the asteroid itself to build everything else, from rock grinders to solar panels.

The numbers seem wildly out to me but I'm not an expert by any stretch. Feels as feasible as living on Mars...

Original Submission