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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

After NASA’s Moon-faring, water-hunting probe faced an untimely demise before it was ever able to reach its final destination, mission scientists have officially declared that clogged propellant lines led to the mission’s failure.

SpaceNews reports that Celeste Smith and Nathan Cheek of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced the finding during a presentation at the 37th Annual Small Satellite Conference earlier this week. Lunar Flashlight first began facing issues with blockages in three of of the four lines that provide propellant to its thrusters just three days after it launched in December 2022. The pair said that the blockages were likely caused by titanium particles that became loose as the spacecraft vibrated before and during launch, and that these thruster issues ultimately led to the death of the mission.

While Lunar Flashlight had its fair share of trouble, JPL and project collaborators at Georgia Tech were never ready to immediately give up on the probe. After the team began detecting trouble with Lunar Flashlight’s propellant lines, NASA took a new approach to push the probe into a high Earth orbit instead of the planned near-rectilinear halo orbit. There, Lunar Flashlight would still have a view of the Moon, but only through monthly flybys of the lunar South pole. All the while, NASA continued attempts to clear the propellant lines of debris.

[...] Lunar Flashlight was a briefcase-sized satellite fitted with an instrument called a four-laser reflectometer. With this device, the probe would have used lasers to scan the Moon’s surface in near-infrared wavelength in an attempt to find water ice hidden in the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions. Infrared wavelengths are absorbed by water, so data collected by Lunar Flashlight would be able to delineate water ice from lunar rocks and soil.

Previously: Recent NASA CubeSat Challenges

Original Submission

owl writes:

http://www.righto.com/2023/08/intel-8086-bus-hold.html

The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) revolutionized computing by founding the x86 architecture that continues to this day. One of the lesser-known features of the 8086 is the "hold" functionality, which allows an external device to temporarily take control of the system's bus. This feature was most important for supporting the 8087 math coprocessor chip, which was an option on the IBM PC; the 8087 used the bus hold so it could interact with the system without conflicting with the 8086 processor.

This blog post explains in detail how the bus hold feature is implemented in the processor's logic. (Be warned that this post is a detailed look at a somewhat obscure feature.) I've also found some apparently undocumented characteristics of the 8086's hold acknowledge circuitry, designed to make signal transition faster on the shared control lines.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/how-an-unpatched-microsoft-exchange-0-day-likely-caused-one-of-the-uks-biggest-hacks-ever/

It's looking more and more likely that a critical zero-day vulnerability that went unfixed for more than a month in Microsoft Exchange was the cause of one of the UK's biggest hacks ever—the breach of the country's Electoral Commission, which exposed data for as many as 40 million residents.

Electoral Commission officials disclosed the breach on Tuesday. They said that they discovered the intrusion last October when they found "suspicious activity" on their networks and that "hostile actors had first accessed the systems in August 2021." That means the attackers were in the network for 14 months before finally being driven out. The Commission waited nine months after that to notify the public.
[...]
Some online sleuthing independently done by TechCrunch reporter Zack Whittaker and researcher Kevin Beaumont suggests that a pair of critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server, which large organizations use to manage email accounts, was the cause.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Plastics and soaps tend to have little in common when it comes to texture, appearance, and, most importantly, how they are used. But there is a surprising connection between the two on a molecular level: The chemical structure of polyethylene—one of the most commonly used plastics in the world today—is strikingly similar to that of a fatty acid, which is used as a chemical precursor to soap. Both materials are made of long carbon chains, but fatty acids have an extra group of atoms at the end of the chain.

Guoliang "Greg" Liu, associate professor of chemistry in the Virginia Tech College of Science, had long felt this similarity implied that it should be possible to convert polyethylene into fatty acids—and with a few additional steps to the process—to produce soap. The challenge was how to break a long polyethylene chain into many short—but not too short—chains and how to do it efficiently. Liu believed there was the potential for a new upcycling method that could take low-value plastic waste and turn it into a high-value, useful commodity.

[...] With the help of Zhen Xu and Eric Munyaneza, two Ph.D. chemistry students in Liu's lab, Liu built a small, oven-like reactor where they could heat polyethylene in a process called temperature-gradient thermolysis.

At the bottom, the oven is at a high enough temperature to break the polymer chains, and at the top, the oven is cooled to a low enough temperature to stop any further breakdown. After the thermolysis, they gathered the residue—similar to cleaning soot from a chimney—and found that Liu's hunch had been right: It was composed of "short-chain polyethylene," or more precisely, waxes.

[...] "Our research demonstrates a new route for plastic upcycling without using novel catalysts or complex procedures. In this work, we have shown the potential of a tandem strategy for plastic recycling," said Xu, lead author on the paper. "This will enlighten people to develop more creative designs of upcycling procedures in the future."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Asus has released a new addition to its Tinker Board line of Arm-based single-board computer (SBC) systems, giving hobbyists and embedded developers another design option with a plethora of ports.

The Tinker Board range launched by by Asus in 2017, but while previous models have typically followed a similar form factor to the popular Raspberry Pi – slightly smaller than a playing card – the latest Tinker Board 3N series sports a larger 100 x 100mm (4 x 4in) footprint described by Asus as NUC-sized.

Like earlier models, the Tinker Board 3N is based on a system-on-chip (SoC) from Rockchip, in this case the RK3568 which features a quad-core Cortex-A55 CPU cluster plus a Mali-G52 GPU, while the board itself supports 2GB, 4GB or 8GB of LPDDR4 or LPDDR4X memory.

[...] Speaking of operating systems, Asus claims support for the Tinker Board 3N with Debian or Yocto Linux, plus Android. It also claims to support firmware over the air (FOTA) updates for both Android and Linux.

Asus says that Tinker Board 3N will be available in three versions "to meet diverse project requirements," comprising Tinker Board 3N PLUS, Tinker Board 3N and Tinker Board 3N LITE, but offers no information on what the differences between these models are.

[...] While most Tinker Boards are based on an Arm SoC, the previous model Asus released earlier this year was based on a RISC-V chip. The Tinker V has a 1GHz single-core Renesas RZ/Five processor with 1GB of DDR4 memory and supports Yocto and Debian Linux.

Asus and Intel also disclosed last month that they were in negotiations for Asus to take on the Intel NUC brand from Intel, following the chipmaker's decision to cease development of that product line.

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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