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upstart writes:

Chamberlain packed its app with ads while disabling third-party access:

Chamberlain Group—the owner of most of the garage door opener brands like LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco—would like its customers to stop doing smart home things with its "myQ" smart garage door openers. The company recently issued a statement decrying "unauthorized usage" of its smart garage door openers. That's "unauthorized usage" by the people who bought the garage door opener, by the way. Basically, Chamberlain's customers want to trigger the garage door and see its status through third-party smart home apps, and Chamberlain doesn't want that.

Here's the statement:

Chamberlain Group recently made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of our myQ ecosystem through third-party apps.

This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience for our 10 million+ users, as well as our authorized partners who put their trust in us. We understand that this impacts a small percentage of users, but ultimately this will improve the performance and reliability of myQ, benefiting all of our users.

We encourage those who were impacted to check out our authorized partners here: https://www.myq.com/works-with-myq.

We caught wind of this statement through the Home Assistant blog, a popular open source smart home platform. The myQ integration is being stripped from the project because it doesn't work anymore. Allegedly, Chamberlain has been sabotaging Home Assistant support for a while now, with the integration maintainer, Lash-L, telling the Home Assistant blog, "We are playing a game of cat and mouse with MyQ and right now it looks like the cat is winning."

Our immediate question is why would any garage opener company care about customers using its garage door opener. You sell garage door openers—isn't usage the goal? A quick perusal through the app store reviews reveals what's going on. The iOS app is sitting pretty at 4.8 stars, but the Android app has suffered a wave of one-star reviews starting in October.

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/space/outsize-black-hole-supermassive-james-webb/

Astronomers have discovered evidence of a theorized type of black hole lurking in the distant universe. Known as an "Outsize Black Hole," this object could help explain some fundamental cosmic mysteries, including how supermassive monsters form.

Black holes as we know them tend to fall into two categories: there's the stellar mass black holes, which as the name suggests have masses equivalent to a few stars. They form when large stars die in a supernova. Up the other end of the scale sits supermassive black holes, which contain the mass of millions or even billions of stars. These are found at the center of many galaxies, including our own.

It was long thought that supermassive black holes form by growing out of stellar mass black holes as they slurp up matter over billions of years. This hypothesis was seemingly bolstered by recent observations of intermediate mass black holes, rare objects that slot in the middle of the mass range.

But as astronomers peer farther away in space and time, they've increasingly spotted signs that the story isn't that simple. In 2017, a black hole with a mass of 800 million Suns was discovered in a distant corner of space that meant it grew that big just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang – a growth rate that should be impossible according to our models. And it's far from alone, with over 100 contemporary giants found since then.

One possible explanation is that some black holes may form through other methods, giving them a larger starting mass than a regular old supernova would allow. If massive clouds of gas collapse, the hypothesis goes, they could form black holes with masses between about 10,000 and 100,000 Suns.

"There are physical limits on how quickly black holes can grow once they've formed, but ones that are born more massive have a head start," said Andy Goulding, co-author of the study. "It's like planting a sapling, which takes less time to grow into a full-size tree than if you started with only a seed."

Now astronomers claim to have discovered the first evidence for just such an object, which they call an Outsize Black Hole. It's located in a galaxy called UHZ1, at the incredible distance of 13.2 billion light-years from Earth – which also means we're seeing it as it was 13.2 billion years ago, or less than 500 million years after the Big Bang.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Letters confiscated by Britain's Royal Navy before they reached French sailors during the Seven Years' War [(1756–1763)] have been opened for the first time.

The messages were seized by Britain's Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War, taken to the Admiralty in London and never opened. The collection is now held at the National Archives in Kew.

"I only ordered the box out of curiosity," Morieux said. "There were three piles of letters held together by ribbon. The letters were very small and were sealed so I asked the archivist if they could be opened and he did.

So in the National Archive in Kew (UK) they found a box of letters sent during the seven years' war between France and the UK. Long lost correspondence.

Perhaps it's not that they are lost for 250ish years that is the interesting part. But how little things change. People still communicate about more or less the same things then as now, it's just the way we communicate that change for technological reasons.

Nothing in there though if they tracked down the offspring, relatives etc of the letters and returned them to them. Guess that isn't a service offered.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67341309

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/french-love-letters-confiscated-by-britain-read-after-265-years

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Researchers worry the controversy is damaging the field's reputation:

Nature has retracted a controversial paper claiming the discovery of a superconductor — a material that carries electrical currents with zero resistance — capable of operating at room temperature and relatively low pressure.

The text of the retraction notice states that it was requested by eight co-authors. "They have expressed the view as researchers who contributed to the work that the published paper does not accurately reflect the provenance of the investigated materials, the experimental measurements undertaken and the data-processing protocols applied," it says, adding that these co-authors "have concluded that these issues undermine the integrity of the published paper". (The Nature news team is independent from its journals team.)

It is the third high-profile retraction of a paper by the two lead authors, physicists Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester in New York and Ashkan Salamat at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Nature withdrew a separate paper last year and Physical Review Letters retracted one this August. It spells more trouble in particular for Dias, whom some researchers allege plagiarized portions of his PhD thesis. Dias has objected to the first two retractions and not responded regarding the latest. Salamat approved the two this year.

[...] This year's report by Dias and Salamat is the second significant claim of superconductivity to crash and burn in 2023. In July, a separate team at a start-up company in Seoul described a crystalline purple material dubbed LK-99 — made of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen — that they said showed superconductivity at normal pressures and at temperatures up to at least 127 °C (400 kelvin). There was much online excitement and many attempts to reproduce the results, but researchers quickly reached a consensus that the material was not a superconductor at all.

canopic jug writes:

Last week, Professor Eugene "spaf" Spafford published an article, Reflecting on the Internet Worm at 35, on the Morris Internet worm which hit the net back on November 2, 1988 back when there were likely fewer than 100k systems connected to the Internet, though maybe even as few as 60k. Some estimates suggest that around 1 out of 10 of those systems were infected, due to several holes in the target systems. Those which were infected ground to a halt due to a mistake in the worm itself.

Nonetheless, the event and its aftermath were profound for those who lived through it. No major security incident had ever occurred on such a scale before. The Worm was the top news story in international media for days. The events retold in Cliff Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg were only a few years earlier but had affected far fewer systems. However, that tale of computer espionage heightened concern by authorities in the days following the Worm's deployment regarding its origin and purpose. It seeded significant changes in law enforcement, defense funding and planning, and how we all looked at interconnectivity. In the following years, malware (and especially non-virus malware) became an increasing problem, from Code Red and Nimda to today's botnets and ransomware. All of that eventually led to a boom in add-on security measures, resulting in what is now a multi-billion dollar cybersecurity industry.

[...] The Worm provided us with an object lesson about many issues that, unfortunately, were not heeded in full to this day. That multi-billion dollar cybersecurity industry is still failing to protect far too many of our systems. Among those lessons: [...]

Via Bruce Schneier's blog.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-willow-bark-broad-spectrum-antiviral-effect.html

From a seasonal cold to a stomach bug, nobody likes catching a virus—and epidemics can be devastating. We need safe, sustainable antiviral options to treat the outbreaks of the future. Scientists in Finland have now shown that an extract of willow bark—a plant that has already provided several medicines, including the precursor to modern aspirin—has a broad-spectrum antiviral effect in cell sample experiments.

The extract worked both on enveloped coronaviruses, which cause colds as well as COVID-19, and non-enveloped enteroviruses, which cause infections such as flu and meningitis. There are no clinically approved drugs that work against enteroviruses directly, so this extract could be a future game-changer.

"We need broadly acting and efficient tools to combat the virus load in our everyday life," said Prof Varpu Marjomäki of the University of Jyväskylä, senior author of the study in Frontiers in Microbiology. "Vaccinations are important, but they cannot deal with many of the newly emerging serotypes early enough to be effective on their own."

The scientists had previously tested willow bark extract on enteroviruses, and found it was highly successful. In this new study, they expanded the remit of their research to look at additional kinds of virus and to try to understand the mechanism of the extract's action.

To make the extract, they harvested commercially grown willow branches. The bark was cut into pieces, frozen, ground, and then extracted using hot water. This produced the extract samples that the scientists tested against enteroviruses—strains of Coxsackievirus A and B—and coronaviruses—a seasonal coronavirus and COVID-19.

More information: Willow (Salix spp.) bark hot extracts inhibit both enveloped and nonenveloped viruses: study on its anti-coronavirus and anti-enterovirus activities, Frontiers in Microbiology (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2023.1249794

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/data-brokers-staggering-sale-of-sensitive-info-exposed-in-unsealed-ftc-filing/

One of the world's largest mobile data brokers, Kochava, has lost its battle to stop the Federal Trade Commission from revealing what the FTC has alleged is a disturbing, widespread pattern of unfair use and sale of sensitive data without consent from hundreds of millions of people.

US District Judge B. Lynn Winmill recently unsealed a court filing, an amended complaint that perhaps contains the most evidence yet gathered by the FTC in its long-standing mission to crack down on data brokers allegedly "substantially" harming consumers by invading their privacy.

The FTC has accused Kochava of violating the FTC Act by amassing and disclosing "a staggering amount of sensitive and identifying information about consumers," alleging that Kochava's database includes products seemingly capable of identifying nearly every person in the United States.
[...]
the FTC is seeking a permanent injunction to stop Kochava from its allegedly unfair use and sale of consumer data.

Winmill wrote in an order to unseal the amended complaint that the FTC still has to prove that Kochava has violated the FTC Act, but its arguments are sufficient to survive Kochava's motion for sanctions, which the judge's order also denied.

According to Winmill, Kochava "has not offered any compelling reason to maintain the amended complaint under seal."

"Certainly, the FTC's allegations cast Kochava's services in an unfavorable light," Winmill wrote. "But that is no reason to shield the complaint from public view."

Experts told The Record that the ruling was "a promising turnaround in a landmark FTC action against a major data broker" and noted that unsealing the complaint has now revealed "Kochava's shocking appetite for the most sensitive details of lives and the ways the company uses that data to profile, target, discriminate, and profit."
[...]
Winmill said that for now, the FTC has provided enough support for its allegations against Kochava for the lawsuit to proceed.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

So much for the temporary delay or ban on AI. Musk named his AI Grok. I'm surprised by the lack of X:es in the name. Perhaps it would have looked odd considering the name of the Musk AI Company is xAI.

Somewhat unclear if the Grok is referring to Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy Grok or to Heinleins Stranger in a Strange Land. If you take inspiration from Hitchhikers then it shouldn't be that hard to program. If all else fails, the answer to a query is always 42. So I guess we'll know what it will default to when it starts looping hallucinations.

Also Grok should apparently be really into sarcasm, so that will end well and not lead to any kind of misunderstandings or interpretations. None.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/05/elon-musk-unveils-grok-an-ai-chatbot-with-a-rebellious-streak

https://grok.x.ai/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Attempting to catch up on sleep over the weekend is insufficient to return cardiovascular health measures to normal:

Whether it's work or play that prevents us from getting enough shut-eye during the week, assuming we can make up for it by sleeping in over the weekend is a mistake. New research led by Penn State reveals that cardiovascular health measures, including heart rate and blood pressure, worsen over the course of the week when sleep is restricted to five hours per night, and attempting to catch up on sleep over the weekend is insufficient to return these measures to normal.

"Only 65% of adults in the U.S. regularly sleep the recommended seven hours per night, and there's a lot of evidence suggesting that this lack of sleep is associated with cardiovascular disease in the long term," said Anne-Marie Chang, associate professor of biobehavioral health and co-author of the work, published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. "Our research reveals a potential mechanism for this longitudinal relationship, where enough successive hits to your cardiovascular health while you're young could make your heart more prone to cardiovascular disease in the future."

[...] Chang explained that the team's study is unique because it measured heart rate and blood pressure multiple times throughout the day for the duration of the study, which enabled them to account for any effects that time of day might have on heart rate and blood pressure. For example, heart rate is naturally lower upon waking than later in the day, so measuring heart rate multiple times throughout the day can account for this difference.

[...] "Both heart rate and systolic blood pressure increased with each successive day and did not return to baseline levels by the end of the recovery period," Reichenberger said. "So, despite having additional opportunity to rest, by the end of the weekend of the study, their cardiovascular systems still had not recovered."

canopic jug writes:

In part 5 of his "Keropunk" series, blogger Russell Graves, covers mantle lanterns.

All of the previous lanterns I've talked about use the flame as a source of light - carbureted in various ways, but "carbon in the flame glowing directly." A mantle is a device that, when heated, glows brightly in the visible regions - it puts out more light than a blackbody radiator at a given temperature, because it uses materials that are low emissivity in the infrared spectrum (heat), and high emissivity in the visible spectrum (light, useful to humans). There are also some benefits from helping contain the flame and the heat within the enclosure, but the end result is rather more light for a given amount of heat than you'd otherwise get.

Earlier parts in his "Keropunk" series:

• Keropunk Part 4: Kerosene Heaters Thermal Images and Operating Notes
• Keropunk Part 3: Kerosene Radiant Heaters
• Keropunk Part 2: Lantern Analysis
• Keropunk Part 1: Lanterns

Be careful of the thorium in some mantles.

I remember similar lanterns from my childhood, including the Tilley Lamp, but how many of our community have ever seen these lanterns anywhere other than on TV or in movies? Does anyone here still use a similar lamp? - JR

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://blog.jgc.org/2023/11/my-1976-kim-1.html

Some years ago I wrote about programming a KIM-1 in 1985. By that time the KIM-1 was old, and definitely not state of the art. After all, it was released in 1976.

But it's a machine I enjoyed programming (which required punching in code via the hex keypad, or, if you were lucky, connecting a terminal (via a 20mA current loop designed to talk to an actual Teletype) to it and using the very basic monitor program). The KIM-1 could also interface to a paper-tape reader/punch and a cassette for storing and loading programs.

I have a tiny collection of machines that matter in my personal computing history: a Sharp MZ-80K, a Research Machines 380Z, a Research Machines 480Z, my original BBC Micro and a KIM-1 (that's a picture of my machine above). The (fully working) KIM-1 was made in 1976 and is serial number 2,793. It's still sitting in its original packaging:

Original Submission

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Today, Wednesday, November 8th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete. Note that due to the time change back to standard tine, this will be 4pm eastern time where it previously fell at 5pm eastern.

The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance

The community is welcome to observe and participate, and is invited to the meeting.

takyon writes:

Ariane 6 cost and delays bring European launch industry to a breaking point

European space officials will convene on Monday and Tuesday to discuss the future of space policy for the continent. The "Space Summit" gathering in Seville, Spain, will encompass several topics, including the future of launch.

[...] In the decade since [the Ariane 6] agreement was reached there have been at least three factors that have precipitated a crisis in European launch. One is the rise of SpaceX, which, through its reusable Falcon 9 rocket, has come to dominate the commercial market with prices about half those offered by the Ariane rockets. Because it has optimized for speed, SpaceX can also launch far more frequently and efficiently than Europe.

Secondly, the Ariane 6 rocket has been delayed from its original goal of launching in 2020. Now, if hot-fire tests late this year go well, it is possible that the Ariane 6 rocket could make its debut launch by mid-2024, or about four years late. With the retirement of the Ariane 5, and the Russian Soyuz rocket off the market due to the war in Ukraine, Europe finds itself in the embarrassing position of having to rely on SpaceX to get some of its most valuable missions into orbit.

Finally, there is the cost issue. The goal of reducing operations costs by 50 percent has dropped to 40 percent. And now, citing inflation, European officials say those cost cuts are not sustainable. In fact, the Ariane 6 rocket's primary contractor, ArianeGroup—which is co-owned by Airbus and Safran—is asking for a significant subsidy to operate the rocket. It wants 350 million euros a year, which would essentially wipe out any cost savings from going to the Ariane 6 rocket.

So Europe has spent a decade and many billions of euros developing the Ariane 6 rocket, but all it has gotten them to date is a gap in the capability of launching satellites to orbit. This has ratcheted up tensions heading into Seville this week.

Update: After the sting of Ariane 6, Europe finally embraces commercial rockets

Representatives from 22 European countries reached an agreement Monday to change the way the continent's rockets are developed, moving from a government-driven approach to a commercial paradigm that appears to be modeled after how NASA and the US military do business.

Original Submission

SomeGuy writes:

Australia's news.com.au reports:
During the Covid pandemic, restaurants introduced QR Code menu ordering in an attempt to minimize contact between staff and patrons. Australian restaurants have continued this trend while taking it to new levels of absurdity, sparking a recent flurry of criticism on social media.

"I'm so f***ing tired of 'tech' being used to solve an 'issue' but only making everything worse and more inconvenient for everybody," one Aussie wrote. Followed by a deluge of replies and comments.

His comment was in response to going to a restaurant and having only a QR code to order from - literally a menu at the table with only the QR code on it. The app required to order from it "proceeded to charge a 6.5% venue surcharge, a 2% payment processing fee, and then had the audacity to ask for a tip (10%, 15%, 25%) as the cherry on top.

Hundreds of others enthusiastically agreed and many added they also didn't like being asked to enter their personal details. "You're waiting your own table and paying an extra fee for the privilege. It's f***ed," one person responded. "It's also a big stinking FU to anyone old or not tech savvy. All just to hoover up your data," another added.

Some, however, shared they preferred using QR codes to order their food - they removed the need to move to order more and limited engagement with staff. "I actually like the QR ordering because I don't like people, but the surcharges and tipping can f*** off," one said. "I love the QR codes - don't need to leave the table to order another beer," someone else wrote...

Jonathan Holmes-Ross, owner of board game restaurant, The Lost Dice in Adelaide told news.com.au that the use of QR code ordering had let his eatery "reduce costs by around 25%... We no longer have to take orders, work out bills and manually take payments," he said. "This gives our wait staff more time to look after our customers, and the kitchen has excellent order information as the accuracy of the orders is great. We now have very few mistakes saving us time and waste. We can also mark items that have run out instantly on the app by using stock levels, again avoiding the disappointment of (the) customer."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Amazon and Meta have agreed to not use data collected from their marketplaces to unfairly benefit themselves, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority announced on Friday.

The monopoly watchdog launched separate investigations into both internet giants' business practices, and accused the Big Tech duo of not only gathering up information about sellers using their respective online souks, they also - surprise, surprise - exploited that info to get a commercial advantage.

In Amazon's case, the e-commerce giant used vendors' sales figures to decide which items it should sell, and how much to price products to get an edge over everyone else. The internet behemoth also promoted its own products with its Buy Box feature and it further cut into retailers' margins by charging extra costs if they wanted to use Amazon's Prime delivery services, the CMA said. 

Now Amazon has committed to doing less of that. The CMA said the online souk will be prevented from using third-party seller data that gives it an unfair commercial advantage, and will allow rivals to negotiate rates with independent delivery contractors working on behalf of Amazon. 

[...] Meanwhile, similar agreements have been negotiated between the CMA and Facebook's parent biz Meta too. 

The social media mega-corp was accused of exploiting advertisers hawking wares on Facebook Marketplace, and using competitors' data to improve its own products or services. 

"Going forward, competitors of Facebook Marketplace that advertise on Meta platforms can 'opt out' of their data being used to improve Facebook Marketplace. Without these measures in place, Meta risks having an unfair competitive advantage that could distort competition," the CMA said.

"Having assessed the commitments and the feedback received, including from sellers, advertisers and customers, we believe both sets of commitments address the specific competition concerns we had here in the UK," Ann Pope, the watchdog's senior director for antitrust enforcement, concluded.

Original Submission