SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Amazon on Thursday released photos of its newest delivery drone, the MK 30, and announced will expand its Prime Air drone delivery operations to Italy, the UK, and an unnamed American city in 2024.

“The new locations add to our existing drone delivery operations in the U.S., where we’ve been using drones to safely deliver packages weighing up to five pounds in one hour or less, for almost a year,” detailed Amazon.

The MK30 doesn't improve that payload capacity, or volume. But Amazon touts the design as “quieter, smaller and lighter” than the previous model.

The MK30 also doubles the range of previous Prime Air drone models, with roughly half the noise, and in more diverse weather conditions. The previous version did not allow delivery in light rain, wind, hot temperatures or other adverse conditions.

Noise is important because complaints about sound levels have already seen Google cancel a drone trial.

The new drone is equipped with sense and avoid technology to dodge obstacles. Its design takes on a tiltrotor concept, acting as a helicopter upon takeoff and transitioning into horizontal wing-borne flight once in the air.

[...] The drones and their opt-in service will be integrated into Amazon’s delivery network, alongside vans and other vehicles within Same-Day Delivery stations, which are a mini version of Amazon's colossal fulfillment centers.

Amazon hopes to deliver 500 million packages on autonomous aircraft by 2030. Doing so requires overcoming some regulatory obstacles. Amazon needs hundreds of incident-free flights to expand services and reportedly only clocked 100 by mid 2023. The service has been 10 years in the making, having been first promised in 2013, proving that Jeff Bezos's cut price retail outfit is learning in real time exactly how long aerospace development and certification actually takes.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Researchers have tested the software of three satellites and they found many standard security mechanisms missing:

Thousands of satellites are currently orbiting the Earth, and there will be many more in the future. Researchers from Ruhr University Bochum and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Saarbrücken have assessed the security of these systems from an IT perspective. They analysed three current low-earth orbit satellites and found that, from a technical point of view, hardly any modern security concepts were implemented. Various security mechanisms that are standard in modern mobile phones and laptops were not to be found: for example, there was no separation of code and data. Interviews with satellite developers also revealed that the industry relies primarily on security through obscurity.

[...] Satellites orbiting the Earth can only be reached by their ground station on Earth within a time window of a few minutes. The systems must be robust against the radiation in space, and, since they can only consume a small amount of energy, they have a low power output. "The data rates are like those of modems in the 1990s," as Holz elaborates the challenges satellite developers face.

Based on the findings gained from the software analysis, the researchers worked out various attack scenarios. They showed that they could cut off the satellites from ground control and seize control of the systems, for example in order to take pictures with the satellite camera. "We were surprised that the technical security level is so low," points out Thorsten Holz, adding the following caveat with regard to potential ramifications: "It wouldn't be all that easy to steer the satellite to another location, for example, to crash it or have it collide with other objects."

To find out how the people who develop and build satellites approach security, the research team compiled a questionnaire and submitted it to research institutions, the ESA, the German Aerospace Centre and various enterprises. Nineteen developers participated anonymously in the survey. "The results show us that the understanding of security in the industry is different than in many other areas, specifically that it's security by obscurity," concludes Johannes Willbold. Many of the respondents therefore assumed that satellites could not be attacked because there is no documentation of the systems, i.e., nothing is known about them. Only a few said that they encrypt data when communicating with satellites or use authentication in order to ensure that only the ground station is allowed to communicate with the satellite.

This work was presented in an IEEE conference paper. [PDF]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Since 2011, California has significantly reformed its criminal justice system, reducing the size of its prison population, with no effect on violent crime and only marginal impacts on property crime statewide. The COVID-19 pandemic furthered decarceration as the state reduced state prison and jail populations to slow the spread of the virus.

Concerns emerged that releases under the auspices of COVID mitigation harmed public safety. A new study explored this notion and found no consistent relation between COVID-19-related jail decarceration and violent or property crime at the county level in the state.

The study, by researchers at the University of California (UC) Irvine and the University of Arizona, is published in the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice. Their work is promoted by the Crime and Justice Research Alliance, which is funded by the National Criminal Justice Association.

"California's efforts to reduce overcrowding as a way to limit the spread of COVID-19 reduced the correctional population more severely and abruptly than any of the state's previous decarceration reforms," according to Charis E. Kubrin, professor of criminology, law, and society at UC Irvine, who led the study. "Concerns about what impact these actions would have on crime rates were widespread, and although violent and property crime in large cities declined during the pandemic, homicide and car theft rose significantly."

Because these increases mirrored national trends, it was unclear whether California's pandemic-related decarceration efforts were responsible. In this study, researchers sought to determine whether COVID-19 jail downsizing measures were related to crime trends in the state, estimating the effect of the measure on crime in the state's 58 counties and isolating the impact of decarceration on crime from other shocks affecting the state as a whole.

[...] The study did not find a consistent relation between COVID-19 jail decarceration and crime at the county level, suggesting that downsizing, on average, did not drive crime increases statewide.

Among the study's limitations, the authors note that because they used a synthetic control adaptation, the treated and synthetic series did not reflect the fully treated and completely untreated versions of county crime rates that are generally produced via synthetic controls. The authors also note they measured COVID-19 mitigation efforts only from March through December 2020—a relatively short period—in order to minimize the effects of crime associated with summer 2020 protests following the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and others.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Colorado’s Supreme Court this week had the opportunity to hand down a historic judgment on the constitutionality of “reverse keyword search warrants,” a powerful new surveillance technique that grants law enforcement the ability to identify potential criminal suspects based on broad, far-reaching internet search results. Police say the creative warrants have helped them crack otherwise cold cases. Critics, which include more than a dozen rights organizations and major tech companies, argue the tool’s immense scope tramples on innocent users’ privacy and runs afoul of Fourth Amendment Protections against unreasonable searches by the government.

With eager eyes watching them, Colorado’s court ultimately opted to kick the can down the road.

Civil liberties and digital rights experts speaking with Gizmodo described the court’s “confusing” decision to punt on the constitutionality of reverse keyword search this week as a major missed opportunity and one that could inevitably lead to more cops pursuing the controversial tactics, both in Colorado and beyond. Critics fear these broad warrants, which compel Google and other tech companies to sift through its vast cornucopia of search data to sniff out users who’ve searched for specific keywords, could be weaponized against abortion seekers, political protestors, or even everyday internet users who inadvertently type a result that could someday be used against them in court.

“These are situations where private industry has amalgamated these unbelievably huge databases of an uncountable number of people and the government, without a suspect, is able to go through everybody’s information to try to pluck targets out,” ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel Jennifer Granick told Gizmodo.

In a 74-page, 5-2 opinion released Monday, Colorado’s Supreme Court said Denver police officers were justified and acted “in good faith” when they served Google with a reverse keyword search warrant back in 2021 as part of an investigation into a deadly arson that claimed the lives of five Senegalese immigrants. The ruling came in response to a motion to suppress evidence from one of the suspects in the case, who argued the sweeping nature of the keyword search violated his Fourth Amendment protections.

“At every step, law enforcement acted reasonably to carry out a novel search in a constitutional manner,” the court wrote in its majority opinion. “Suppressing the evidence here wouldn’t deter police misconduct.”

The court validated the police conduct but punted entirely on the constitutionality of the reverse keyword searches in question. Though police have increasingly deployed the technique and other tactics like it in recent years, courts still haven’t settled on its actual legality. Despite pressure from the legal community to weigh in, the court threw up its hands and said it neither condoned nor condemned the practice. Future abuses of the warrant that may occur, they said, were a topic for another day.

hubie writes:

An a short but interesting paper recently posted to arXiv finds when most people flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side from which the toss started. Their observations are based upon analysis of 350,757 coin flips.

A coin flip—the act of spinning a coin into the air with your thumb and then catching it in your hand—is often considered the epitome of a chance event. It features as a ubiquitous example in textbooks on probability theory and statistics and constituted a game of chance ('capita aut navia' – 'heads or ships') already in Roman times.

The simplicity and perceived fairness of a coin flip, coupled with the widespread availability of coins, may explain why it is often used to make even high-stakes decisions. For example, in 1903 a coin flip was used to determine which of the Wright brothers would attempt the first flight; in 1959, a coin flip decided who would get the last plane seat for the tour of rock star Buddy Holly (which crashed and left no survivors); in 1968, a coin flip determined the winner of the European Championship semi-final soccer match between Italy and the Soviet Union (an event which Italy went on to win); in 2003, a coin toss decided which of two companies would be awarded a public project in Toronto; and in 2004 and 2013, a coin flip was used to break the tie in local political elections in the Philippines.

[...] The standard model of coin flipping was extended by Diaconis, Holmes, and Montgomery (D-H-M) who proposed that when people flip an ordinary coin, they introduce a small degree of 'precession' or wobble—a change in the direction of the axis of rotation throughout the coin's trajectory. According to the D-H-M model, precession causes the coin to spend more time in the air with the initial side facing up. Consequently, the coin has a higher chance of landing on the same side as it started (i.e., 'same-side bias').

Their analysis agrees with the D-H-M model that suggests a coin will land 51 percent of the time on the same side it started.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An extreme drought in parts of the Amazon has led to a dramatic drop in river water levels, exposing dozens of usually submerged rock formations with carvings of human forms that may date back some 2,000 years.

[...] The rock carvings are not usually visible because they are covered by the waters of the Negro River, whose flow recorded its lowest level in 121 years last week.

The surfacing of the engravings on the riverbank have delighted scientists and the general public alike but also raised unsettling questions.

"We come, we look at (the engravings) and we think they are beautiful. But at the same time, it is worrying... I also think about whether this river will exist in 50 or 100 years," Ribeiro said.

[...] According to experts, the dry season has worsened this year due to El Niño, an irregular climate pattern over the Pacific Ocean that disrupts normal weather, adding to the effect of climate change.

The engravings comprise an archaeological site of "great relevance," said Jaime Oliveira of the Brazilian Institute of Historical Heritage (Iphan).

[...] Most of the engravings are of human faces, some of them rectangular and others oval, with smiles or grim expressions.

"The site expresses emotions, feelings, it is an engraved rock record, but it has something in common with current works of art," said Oliveira.

For Beatriz Carneiro, historian and member of Iphan, Praia das Lajes has an "inestimable" value in understanding the first people who inhabited the region, a field still little explored.

"Unhappily it is now reappearing with the worsening of the drought," Carneiro said. "Having our rivers back (flooded) and keeping the engravings submerged will help preserve them, even more than our work."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Intel's futuristic 20A and 18A process nodes are expected to debut in new CPUs in 2024 or 2025. However, TSMC has already declared victory over the US company, with plans to introduce comparable manufacturing technology within the same timeframe, but with improvements across the board.

During a recent earnings call, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei stated that their internal assessment confirmed the enhancements of the N3P technology. TSMC's 3nm-class manufacturing node demonstrated "comparable PPA" (power performance area) to Intel's 18A node. N3P is expected to be even better, arriving earlier on the market, boasting "better technology maturity," and offering significant cost advantages.

Wei emphasized that TSMC doesn't underestimate or take the competition lightly. He also mentioned that the company's 2-nanometer technology, while still a work in progress, is expected to surpass both N3P and 18A. TSMC's 2nm-class manufacturing process is on track to become the most advanced technology in the semiconductor industry when it's introduced in 2025.

[...] Wei mentioned that N3 is expected to contribute to a "mid-single-digit percentage" of TSMC's total wafer revenue in 2023, with a significantly higher percentage anticipated for 2024. There is strong demand for 3nm products from various customers who are seeking improved performance, power efficiency, yield, and "comprehensive platform support" for both high-performance computing (HPC) and smartphone applications.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A new Google Search malvertizing campaign targets users looking to download the popular Notepad++ text editor, employing advanced techniques to evade detection and analysis:

Threat actors have been increasingly abusing Google Ads in malvertising campaigns to promote fake software websites that distribute malware.

According to Malwarebytes, which spotted the Notepad++ malvertising campaign, it has been live for several months but managed to fly under the radar all this time.

The final payload delivered to victims is unknown, but Malwarebytes says it's most likely Cobalt Strike, which usually precedes highly damaging ransomware deployments.

The Notepad++ malvertizing campaign promotes URLs that are obviously unrelated to the software project yet use misleading titles displayed in Google Search result advertisements.

[...] Once victims click on any of the ads, a redirection step checks their IP to filter out users likely to be crawlers, VPNs, bots, etc., leading them to a decoy site that does not drop anything malicious.

In contrast, legitimate targets are redirected to "notepadxtreme[.]com" which mimics the real Notepad++ site, featuring download links for various versions of the text editor.

[...] Victims who are marked as suitable targets are then served an HTA script, which is assigned a unique ID, likely to enable the attackers to track their infections. That payload is served only once per victim, so a second visit results in a 404 error.

[...] To avoid downloading malware when looking for specific software tools, skip promoted results on Google Search and double-check that you have landed on the official domain.

If unsure about the project's real website, check its "About" page, documentation, Wikipedia page, and official social media channels.

And don't forget that Google doesn't want you using an ad blocker.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/10/covid-antiviral-paxlovid-to-see-price-increase-following-400-vaccine-hike/

After raising the price of COVID-19 vaccines more than fourfold this year, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told investors Monday that the company will also likely hike the price of its lifesaving COVID-19 antiviral treatment, Paxlovid, raising further concern about access and health care costs.

The price of the drug is already $530 for a treatment course.
[...]
In a company investor call Monday, Bourla said only that the "pandemic price" of $530 is likely to be "lesser" than the commercial price and that negotiations are beginning.

One financial analyst who follows the company, Evercore ISI's Umer Raffat, told CNN that the price could go up roughly three- to fivefold, to as much as $2,500 per course.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

SpaceBorn United wants to conduct an IVF experiment in Earth's orbit to pave the way for long-term space missions:

Egbert Edelbroek was acting as a sperm donor when he first wondered whether it's possible to have babies in space.

Curious about the various ways that donated sperm can be used, Edelbroek, a Dutch entrepreneur, began to speculate on whether in vitro fertilization technology was possible beyond Earth—or could even be improved by the conditions found there. Could the weightlessness of space be better than a flat laboratory petri dish?

Now Edelbroek is CEO of SpaceBorn United, a biotech startup seeking to pioneer the study of human reproduction away from Earth. Next year, he plans to send a mini lab on a rocket into low Earth orbit, where in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will take place. If it succeeds, Edelbroek hopes his work could pave the way for future space settlements.

"Humanity needs a backup plan," he says. "If you want to be a sustainable species, you want to be a multiplanetary species."

Beyond future space colonies, there is also a more pressing need to understand the effects of space on the human reproductive system. No one has ever become pregnant in space—yet. But with the rise of space tourism, it's likely that it will eventually happen one day. Edelbroek thinks we should be prepared.

[...] If it is able to pull off this test, SpaceBorn United plans to move forward with additional test flights following the plan for its mission, known as ARTIS (Assisted Reproductive Technology in Space). As described on its website, the first few ARTIS missions will involve rodent embryos fertilized in space using simulated gravity equivalent to that on Earth. Next, the embryos that were formed in space and cryogenically frozen for their return to Earth will be implanted into a rodent mother. If this results in the birth of healthy pups, later ARTIS missions will include human embryos fertilized under Earth-like gravity and, eventually, partial gravity similar to that of the moon or Mars.

If these experiments show that human embryos can be formed under those low-gravity conditions, Edelbroek believes, it would be a major advance toward demonstrating the feasibility of multigenerational space settlements.

Snotnose writes:

Apple's new iPhone 15 marks a disruptive departure from previous models. The 11-year reign of the Lightning cable is over, and the USB-C era has begun — leaving us wondering what sets one charger apart from another.

Does Apple's Thunderbolt 4 cable really warrant its $129 price tag? Or does a $5 cable get the job done just as well? We've used our Neptune industrial X-ray CT scanner to uncover the hidden engineering differences between them.

This article explains some of the confusion around USB-C. Unfortunately the article is very light on details, but the pictures are interesting.

See Also: Exploring Thunderbolt 5: The Future of Connectivity

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA's Lucy spacecraft is preparing for its first close-up look at an asteroid. On Nov. 1, it will fly by asteroid Dinkinesh and test its instruments in preparation for visits in the next decade to multiple Trojan asteroids that circle the sun in the same orbit as Jupiter.

Dinkinesh, less than half a mile, or 1 kilometer, wide, circles the sun in the main belt of asteroids located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Lucy has been visually tracking Dinkinesh since Sept. 3; it will be the first of 10 asteroids Lucy will visit on its 12-year voyage. To observe so many, Lucy will not stop or orbit the asteroids, instead it will collect data as it speeds past them in what is called a "flyby."

"This is the first time Lucy will be getting a close look at an object that, up to this point, has only been an unresolved smudge in the best telescopes," said Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, which is headquartered in San Antonio. "Dinkinesh is about to be revealed to humanity for the first time."

The primary aim of the Lucy mission, which launched Oct. 16, 2021, is to survey the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, a never-before-explored population of small bodies that orbit the sun in two "swarms" that lead and follow Jupiter in its orbit. However, before Lucy gets to the Trojans, it will fly by another main belt asteroid in 2025 called Donaldjohanson for additional in-flight tests of the spacecraft systems and procedures.

[...] After the Dinkinesh encounter, the Lucy spacecraft will continue in its orbit around the sun, returning to the Earth's vicinity for its second gravity assist in December 2024. This push from Earth will send it back to the main asteriod belt for its 2025 Donaldjohanson flyby, and then on to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids in 2027.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The United States Justice Department reports that North Korean nationals have been using fake identities to work remotely for US companies as IT professionals in a scheme to fund weapons of mass destruction programs. At a news conference in St. Louis, Missouri, the FBI alleged that thousands of individuals have moved to countries such as Russia and China and posed as freelance IT workers living in the US. Companies in St. Louis and around the US were targeted in this plot.

The bad actors used false information for emails, payment platforms and websites — sometimes paying Americans to use their Wi-Fi and setting up proxy computers. Along with funneling their income to North Korea's weapons programs, some workers also hacked their employers' computer networks to take private information and leave the possibility for other schemes, such as extortion.

Special Agent in Charge Jay Greenberg of the FBI St. Louis Division went so far as to say that any company that employs freelance IT workers "more than likely" hired one of these bad actors. "This scheme is so prevalent that companies must be vigilant to verify whom they're hiring," Greenberg stated. "At a minimum, the FBI recommends that employers take additional proactive steps with remote IT workers to make it harder for bad actors to hide their identities. Without due diligence, companies risk losing money or being compromised by insider threats they unknowingly invited inside their systems."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A small, wrinkly yellow-green pepper known as Pepper X is now officially the hottest chili pepper in the world:

Ed Currie, founder of PuckerButt Pepper Company in South Carolina, appeared on the YouTube show Hot Ones to receive the Guinness award and announce the spicy new variety to the world.

To measure the intensity of Pepper X, officials at Guinness turned to what's known as the Scoville Scale. Developed in 1912, the scale determines the heat of a pepper by measuring the concentration of its heat-wielding chemical compounds called capsaicinoids.

Pepper X measures an average of 2.693 million Scoville Heat Units. A jalapeño, by comparison, measures just 2,000 to 8,000 SHUs, while a serrano can land between 10,000 and 23,000 SHUs.

The previous record holder, the Carolina Reaper, which was also developed by Currie, averaged 1.64 million SHUs.

"But that scale's logarithmic, so it's more like three times hotter than a Reaper," Currie said on the show.

Currie described the feeling of eating a whole Pepper X: "There's an intense burn that happens immediately. Then your head kind of feels like, 'Oh no! What's going on?' And then your body just starts reacting. You get it in your arms, you get it in your chest," he said.

"It has no real throat burn like the Reaper, but that comes on later when you're in pain."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A team of astronomers claim to have detected the most distant fast radio burst to date, which could be used to measure the matter between galaxies.

The researchers first discovered the energy burst in June 2022 with the Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope. It is believed that the energy was created from a powerful cosmic event that released the equivalent of 30 years of our sun’s total emission in milliseconds.

[...] The astronomers claim that this burst of energy is older and further away than any other fast radio burst detected to date. It is believed to have originated from a small group of merging galaxies.

[...] The team said that current methods for estimating the mass of the universe give conflicting answers and challenge the standard model of cosmology. But the latest discovery suggests that these radio bursts can be used to measure the “missing” matter between galaxies to accurately weigh up the universe.

“If we count up the amount of normal matter in the Universe – the atoms that we are all made of – we find that more than half of what should be there today is missing,” said Prof Ryan Shannon who co-led the study. “We think that the missing matter is hiding in the space between galaxies, but it may just be so hot and diffuse that it’s impossible to see using normal techniques.”

The team said that in 2020, the late Australian astronomer Jean-Pierre Macquart showed that fast radio bursts reveal more diffuse gases between galaxies if they are further away. The team claims their latest discovery helps to confirm this Macquart relation.

“While we still don’t know what causes these massive bursts of energy, the paper confirms that fast radio bursts are common events in the cosmos and that we will be able to use them to detect matter between galaxies, and better understand the structure of the universe.”

However, the team believes that the latest result represents the limit of what we can spot with modern telescopes and that more powerful devices will be needed to measure more distant fast radio bursts.

Original Submission