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upstart writes:

Nintendo says announcement on Switch successor 'this fiscal year':

Nintendo said Tuesday it will make an announcement about a highly anticipated new console by the end of March 2025 as sales decline of the hugely popular Switch, which is now in its eighth year.

Despite logging a record net profit in the year to March, helped by the weak yen, the game giant expects net profit to drop nearly 40% in the current financial year.

Players and investors have been hungry for news about a successor to the Switch, and the company said a statement was finally forthcoming.

[...] Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Nathan Naidu said before the earnings release that Nintendo consoles typically have a "six-to-seven year lifecycle."

"Given hardware drives about 40% of total sales, its drag on (the) overall top line might extend into fiscal 2025 absent a new gaming gadget," he said.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://adamjones.me/blog/dont-use-contact-forms/

Contact forms are almost always worse for users than just putting an email on your website. I explore why they're terrible, why you've done it anyway, and what to do about it.

Why your contact form sucks

Your contact form is completely broken

It's remarkable how many contact forms are just straight-up broken. A WordPress upgrade here, a change to your CRM there, and your contact form silently breaks.

At time of writing, B&Q's contact form just plainly doesn't work1. I am fairly amazed that a retailer with revenues in the billions doesn't notice written queries have stopped coming in.

[...] Contact forms are hard to get right, and often just a worse experience for everyone involved. Go forth and remove your contact form and list your email on your website now!

[Ed. comment: click through and read the lengthy, but hard to argue against, complaints about web-based contact forms]

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/environment/plastic-embedded-bacteria-spores-degradable-tougher/

Scientists have demonstrated a creative solution to plastic pollution, one of our most pressing environmental problems. Plastic was embedded with spores of plastic-eating bacteria that are activated when dumped in landfill, biodegrading 90% of the material in five months. Weirder still, this actually made the plastic tougher and stronger during use.

Plastic is a strong, versatile material, but the same properties that make it useful also make it hard to dispose of. It famously takes decades or centuries to degrade, so huge amounts of plastic waste are clogging up landfill and oceans.

Intriguingly, it seems like nature is adapting, as it so often does. In recent years scientists discovered bacteria that have evolved the ability to break down plastic, isolated the enzymes that do it, and even ramped up their efficiency. This could potentially make for more efficient recycling centers where plastic is treated with enzymes and bacteria. But what about plastic that doesn't make it to these facilities? Thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) is a tough type of plastic commonly used to make things like shoes, sporting goods, phone cases and car parts, but can't currently be recycled.

So for the new study, the team investigated a new potential method to dispose of TPU – embedding spores of the plastic-eating bacteria Bacillus subtilis right into the plastic itself. Ideally, you'd be able to use the plastic products as normal, without them breaking down too early, and only when they were dumped in landfill or natural environments would they start biodegrading.

fliptop writes:

The TunnelVision vulnerability has existed since 2002 and may already be known to attackers:

Researchers have devised an attack against nearly all virtual private network applications that forces them to send and receive some or all traffic outside of the encrypted tunnel designed to protect it from snooping or tampering.

TunnelVision, as the researchers have named their attack, largely negates the entire purpose and selling point of VPNs, which is to encapsulate incoming and outgoing Internet traffic in an encrypted tunnel and to cloak the user's IP address. The researchers believe it affects all VPN applications when they're connected to a hostile network and that there are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user's VPN runs on Linux or Android. They also said their attack technique may have been possible since 2002 and may already have been discovered and used in the wild since then.

The effect of TunnelVision is "the victim's traffic is now decloaked and being routed through the attacker directly," a video demonstration explained. "The attacker can read, drop or modify the leaked traffic and the victim maintains their connection to both the VPN and the Internet."

The attack works by manipulating the DHCP server that allocates IP addresses to devices trying to connect to the local network. A setting known as option 121 allows the DHCP server to override default routing rules that send VPN traffic through a local IP address that initiates the encrypted tunnel. By using option 121 to route VPN traffic through the DHCP server, the attack diverts the data to the DHCP server itself.

[...] Interestingly, Android is the only operating system that fully immunizes VPN apps from the attack because it doesn't implement option 121. For all other OSes, there are no complete fixes.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

A press release from Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) details findings based on data collected by the ChemCam instrument on NASA's Curiosity rover

From the press release:

A research team using the ChemCam instrument onboard NASA's Curiosity rover discovered higher-than-usual amounts of manganese in lakebed rocks within Gale Crater on Mars, which indicates that the sediments were formed in a river, delta, or near the shoreline of an ancient lake. The results were published today in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

"It is difficult for manganese oxide to form on the surface of Mars, so we didn't expect to find it in such high concentrations in a shoreline deposit," said Patrick Gasda, of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Space Science and Applications group and lead author on the study. "On Earth, these types of deposits happen all the time because of the high oxygen in our atmosphere produced by photosynthetic life, and from microbes that help catalyze those manganese oxidation reactions.

"On Mars, we don't have evidence for life, and the mechanism to produce oxygen in Mars's ancient atmosphere is unclear, so how the manganese oxide was formed and concentrated here is really puzzling. These findings point to larger processes occurring in the Martian atmosphere or surface water and shows that more work needs to be done to understand oxidation on Mars," Gasda added.

ChemCam, which was developed at Los Alamos and CNES (the French space agency), uses a laser to form a plasma on the surface of a rock, and collects that light in order to quantify elemental composition in rocks.
[...]
"The Gale lake environment, as revealed by these ancient rocks, gives us a window into a habitable environment that looks surprisingly similar to places on Earth today," said Nina Lanza, principal investigator for the ChemCam instrument. "Manganese minerals are common in the shallow, oxic waters found on lake shores on Earth, and it's remarkable to find such recognizable features on ancient Mars."

More evidence that Mars was once a warm and wet world. Sadly, we'll likely never know whether or not life actually got started there.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-05-australian-ultrasonic-cold-brew-coffee.html

A new method to deliver a quality cold brew coffee in less than three minutes solidifies Australia's position as the innovators of modern coffee, according to researchers from The University of Queensland.

Engineers from University New South Wales developed an ultrasonic machine to speed up the cold brew of ground coffee beans—a process that normally takes 12 to 24 hours. The research was published in Ultrasonics Sonochemistry.

Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Jaqueline Moura Nadolny said UQ scientists then tested this brew, finding the taste would satisfy fans of cold brew who rave about its smoother, less acidic and less bitter qualities.

"Once again, Australia has new technology at our fingertips that moves us from traditional methods of coffee making to modern methods, giving consumers a new premium experience," Dr. Nadolny said.

"Our trained sensory panel tastings proved that we can achieve a taste profile very similar to either a traditional cold brew or an espresso in the time it takes to brew a hot espresso."

The UNSW team led by Dr. Francisco Trujillo superimposed their own patented sound transmission system on an existing coffee machine model. The system connects a bolt-clamped transducer with the brewing basket via a metallic horn—transforming the coffee basket into a powerful ultrasonic reactor.

Dr. Trujillo said the ultrasound process speeds up the extraction of the oils, flavors and aroma of the ground coffee.

"We're able to demonstrate that this can be adapted to an existing espresso machine," he said. "We are very excited about developing this technology, which can be used by companies that already manufacture coffee machines, so consumers will be able to enjoy a 3-minute ultrasonic cold brew at home. This also opens the door for coffee shops and restaurants to produce on-demand brews comparable to 24-hour cold brews, supplying the rising demand while eliminating the need for large semi-industrial brewing units and extensive refrigeration space."

More information: Shih-Hao Chiu et al, Coffee brewing sonoreactor for reducing the time of cold brew from several hours to minutes while maintaining sensory attributes, Ultrasonics Sonochemistry (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.ultsonch.2024.106885

Original Submission

liar writes:

https://gizmodo.com/new-fusion-record-achieved-tungsten-encased-reactor-1851457745

A tokamak in France set a new record in fusion plasma by encasing its reaction in tungsten, a heat-resistant metal that allows physicists to sustain hot plasmas for longer, and at higher energies and densities than carbon tokamaks.

[...] "The recent achievement was made in WEST (tungsten (W) Environment in Steady-state Tokamak), a tokamak operated by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). WEST was injected with 1.15 gigajoules of power and sustained a plasma of about 50 million degrees Celsius for six minutes. It achieved this record after scientists encased the tokamak's interior in tungsten, a metal with an extraordinarily high melting point. Researchers from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory used an X-ray detector inside the tokamak to measure aspects of the plasma and the conditions that made it possible."

[...] Earlier this year, the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy installed a tungsten diverter in its KSTAR tokamak, replacing the device's carbon diverter. Tungsten has a higher melting point than carbon, and according to Korea's National Research Council of Science and Technology, the new diverter improves the reactor's heat flux limit two-fold. KSTAR's new diverter enabled the institute's team to sustain high-ion temperatures exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius for longer.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The threat is potentially grave because it could be used in supply-chain attacks:

A maximum severity vulnerability that allows hackers to hijack GitLab accounts with no user interaction required is now under active exploitation, federal government officials warned as data showed that thousands of users had yet to install a patch released in January.

A change GitLab implemented in May 2023 made it possible for users to initiate password changes through links sent to secondary email addresses. The move was designed to permit resets when users didn't have access to the email address used to establish the account. In January, GitLab disclosed that the feature allowed attackers to send reset emails to accounts they controlled and from there click on the embedded link and take over the account.

While exploits require no user interaction, hijackings work only against accounts that aren't configured to use multifactor authentication. Even with MFA, accounts remained vulnerable to password resets, but the attackers ultimately are unable to access the account, allowing the rightful owner to change the reset password. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-7028, carries a severity rating of 10 out of 10.

On Wednesday, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it is aware of "evidence of active exploitation" and added the vulnerability to its list of known exploited vulnerabilities. CISA provided no details about the in-the-wild attacks. A GitLab representative declined to provide specifics about the active exploitation of the vulnerability.

The vulnerability, classified as an improper access control flaw, could pose a grave threat. GitLab software typically has access to multiple development environments belonging to users. With the ability to access them and surreptitiously introduce changes, attackers could sabotage projects or plant backdoors that could infect anyone using software built in the compromised environment. An example of a similar supply chain attack is the one that hit SolarWinds in 2020 and pushed malware to more than 18,000 of its customers, 100 of whom received follow-on hacks. Other recent examples of supply chain attacks are here, here, and here.

[...] GitLab users should also remember that patching does nothing to secure systems that have already been breached through exploits. GitLab has published incident response guidance here.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches 2 satellites on record-tying 20th flight (video):

SpaceX just tied its rocket-reuse record for the second time in less than a week.

A Falcon 9 rocket launched two Earth-observation satellites for the company Maxar today (May 2) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 2:36 p.m. EDT (1836 GMT; 11:36 a.m. local California time).

It was the 20th mission for this rocket's first stage, tying a record that one Falcon 9 set last month and another one equaled on Saturday night (April 27).

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth safely yet again today, making a vertical touchdown back at Vandenberg about 8.5 minutes after liftoff.

The rocket's upper stage, meanwhile, continued carrying two of Maxar's WorldView Legion satellites to orbit. The first spacecraft will be deployed 13 minutes after launch, and the second will follow suit 3.5 minutes after that.

The WorldView Legion satellites are built by Maxar Space Systems and will be operated by Maxar Intelligence, both of which are divisions of Maxar Technologies. The spacecraft that went up today are the first two of a planned six-satellite network.

"When all six WorldView Legion satellites are launched, it will triple Maxar Intelligence's capacity to collect 30-centimeter-class [12 inches] and multispectral imagery," Maxar representatives wrote in a description of the network.

"The full Maxar constellation of 10 electro-optical satellites will image the most rapidly changing areas on Earth as frequently as every 20 to 30 minutes, from sunup to sundown," they added.

Original Submission

owl writes:

http://www.righto.com/2024/04/intel-8088-bus-state-machine.html

The 8088 processor communicates over the bus with memory and I/O devices through a highly-structured sequence of steps called "T-states." A typical 8088 bus cycle consists of four T-states, with one T-state per clock cycle. Although a four-step bus cycle may sound straightforward, its implementation uses a complicated state machine making it one of the most difficult parts of the 8088 to explain. First, the 8088 has many special cases that complicate the bus cycle. Moreover, the bus cycle is really six steps, with two undocumented "extra" steps to make bus operations more efficient. Finally, the complexity of the bus cycle is largely arbitrary, a consequence of Intel's attempts to make the 8088's bus backward-compatible with the earlier 8080 and 8085 processors. However, investigating the bus cycle circuitry in detail provides insight into the timing of the processor's instructions. In addition, this circuitry illustrates the tradeoffs and implementation decisions that are necessary in a production processor. In this blog post, I look in detail at the circuitry that implements this state machine.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Axon Wants Its Body Cameras To Start Writing Officers' Reports For Them:

Taser long ago locked down the market for "less than lethal" (but still frequently lethal) weapons. It has also written itself into the annals of pseudoscience with its invocation of not-an-actual-medical condition "excited delirium" as it tried to explain away the many deaths caused by its "less than lethal" Taser.

These days Taser does business as Axon. In addition to separating itself from its troubled (and somewhat mythical) past, Axon's focus has shifted to body cameras and data storage. The cameras are the printer and the data storage is the ink. The real money is in data management, and that appears to be where Axon is headed next. And, of course, like pretty much everyone at this point, the company believes AI can take a lot of the work out of police work. Here's Thomas Brewster and Richard Nieva with the details for Forbes.

On Tuesday, Axon, the $22 billion police contractor best known for manufacturing the Taser electric weapon, launched a new tool called Draft One that it says can transcribe audio from body cameras and automatically turn it into a police report. Cops can then review the document to ensure accuracy, Axon CEO Rick Smith told Forbes. Axon claims one early tester of the tool, Fort Collins Colorado Police Department, has seen an 82% decrease in time spent writing reports. "If an officer spends half their day reporting, and we can cut that in half, we have an opportunity to potentially free up 25% of an officer's time to be back out policing," Smith said.

If you don't spend too much time thinking about it, it sounds like a good idea. Doing paperwork consumes a large amounts of officers' time and a tool that automates at least part of the process would, theoretically, allow officers to spend more time doing stuff that actually matters, like trying to make a dent in violent crime — the sort of thing cops on TV are always doing but is a comparative rarity in real life.

[...] Then there's the AI itself. Everything at use at this point is still very much in the experimental stage. Auto-generated reports might turn into completely unusable evidence, thanks to the wholly expected failings of the underlying software.

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-05-lego-bumblebees-reveal-insect-collaboration.html

A new study reveals that cooperation by bumblebees isn't simply a result of accumulated individual efforts. Rather, these miniature-brained creatures are not just hard-working pollinators, but also show signs of being master collaborators.

The study, conducted at the University of Oulu in Finland and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, demonstrates the role of teamwork for bumblebees in novel cooperative challenges.

It has previously been thought that understanding the role of a partner in a cooperative task is a complex phenomenon that is mainly characteristic of big-brained mammals such as humans and chimpanzees. But new research shows that even insects can learn and adapt to cooperative tasks. Understanding how collaboration has become so important for humans requires comparisons with other species.

"The study's findings challenge conventional notions of insects, and the ability to work together towards a common goal is present even in the miniature brain of bumblebees," says lead researcher, Associate Professor, Dr. Olli Loukola.

In the study, pairs of bumblebees were trained in two different cooperative tasks. Bees learned to simultaneously push a Lego block in the middle of an arena, or to simultaneously push a door at the end of a transparent double tunnel to gain access to rewarding nectar.

Bumblebees' behaviors suggest their efforts towards solving the cooperative tasks were influenced by the presence, absence, and movement direction of their partner. When their partner was delayed, bees tended to take longer than controls to initiate pushing and were more likely to push only when their partner pushed with them.

In short, bees trained on cooperative tasks seemed to wait for their partner. The bumblebees in the control group, which had been trained alone, did not show similar behavior.

In the study, pairs of bumblebees were trained in two different cooperative tasks. Bees learned to simultaneously push a Lego block in the middle of an arena, or to simultaneously push a door at the end of a transparent double tunnel to gain access to rewarding nectar.

Bumblebees' behaviors suggest their efforts towards solving the cooperative tasks were influenced by the presence, absence, and movement direction of their partner. When their partner was delayed, bees tended to take longer than controls to initiate pushing and were more likely to push only when their partner pushed with them.

In short, bees trained on cooperative tasks seemed to wait for their partner. The bumblebees in the control group, which had been trained alone, did not show similar behavior.

More information: Olli J. Loukola et al, Evidence for socially influenced and potentially actively coordinated cooperation by bumblebees, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2024.0055

Original Submission

upstart writes:

China Launches Mission To Far Side Of The Moon As US Claims A New Space Race Has Begun:

On May 3, China launched Chang’e 6, its latest mission to the Moon. Similar to its predecessor, it is a sample retrieval mission, expected to collect up to 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of lunar material from the far side of the Moon, the portion that is always facing away from Earth. The whole mission is expected to last 53 days.

China has already broken records on the far side by becoming the first and only nation to soft-land there with Chang’e 4 in 2019. That mission landed in the Von Kármán crater, which is 180 kilometers (110 miles) across and sits within the South Pole-Aitken Basin. Chang’e 6 is targeting another area of the basin: the Apollo crater, which is three times as wide as the Von Kármán.

The interest in this area lies in the distant past of the Moon. Underneath this region, there is a massive structure, potentially part of the colossal object that slammed into the Moon and created the basin 4 billion years ago. The jackpot would be to find portions of the lunar mantle and bring them back to Earth.

In an attempt to achieve this, Chang’e 6 is equipped with a scoop to collect soil and rocks from the surface, as well as a drill to collect subsurface samples. An ascent vehicle will launch the samples into orbit, where it will rendezvous with an orbiter and come back to Earth.

That is not the only focus of the mission, however. The lander and orbiter include scientific payloads from other countries too, which aim to understand dust and outgassing on the Moon, studying lunar magnetism, among other goals.

[...] In the US, China’s plans are being seen with increased anxiety. On April 17, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies held a hearing about the NASA Budget for 2025. Both the chair, representative Harold Rogers (R-KY), and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson made reference to a new space race.

“The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was founded in 1958 in response to the so-called Space Race with the Soviet Union to land the first man on the Moon. Today we find ourselves in yet another space race, this time with China,” Rogers stated during the hearing.

“We are in a race,” Nelson replied to a question from Rogers on Chinese plans. “The latest date they've said they're going to land [on the moon] is 2030 but that keeps moving up.”

[...] Nelson also said that he believes that the Chinese civilian space program is actually a military program. The comments have been seen as venting a frustration about the comparatively limited budget NASA operates. Others have considered Nelson’s comments as coming across as hypocritical given NASA’s many links to the military-industrial complex and the Department of Defense.

Original Submission

Audioguy was one of the original team who created the existing SoylentNews site. He has stayed with us since that time and has served the community as a sys-admin for over 10 years. It is no exaggeration to say that over the last year or two he has played an almost single-handed role in keeping this site working.

Audioguy has suffered a series of significant personal and medical events over the last 6 months or so. He is now about to commence ophthalmic surgery tomorrow (Wednesday) and is facing other potentially life changing medical issues in the near future. He has, quite understandably and reluctantly, been forced to stand down from his role which was effective from late last week. Unfortunately that has meant that we have lost the ability to correct the current certificates problem. Access to the Linode servers is still controlled by the existing Board and we have experienced additional problems accessing one of our servers by the usual methods. This appears to be common to many staff and has further exacerbated the current problem.

I have written an email to NCommander requesting his assistance in updating the certificates so that the site becomes fully operational again. Your patience is appreciated. What might appear to many in the community to be a relatively minor issue is, behind the scenes, a major blow to the existing team. We have other sys-admins who are ready to pick up the challenge but they do not yet have the necessary access, nor are they yet experienced in managing the beast that that is Slashd.

Returning to audioguy, I am sure that the entire community would wish to join me in thanking him for a decade of support to the site, and to wish him well for the upcoming surgery. He remains one of this community and evidence of his past contributions can be found in numerous bits of code and associated documentation. He has also, for example, been the manager of the technical wiki which has been vital to the support team for all of that period. We are indebted to him.

Good luck for the future, audioguy. Take it easy. Best wishes to you and your family.

upstart writes:

Tech CEO Gets 6 Years for Selling Fake Cisco Gear on Amazon, eBay:

A Miami-based CEO will serve over six years in prison for selling counterfeit Cisco equipment to numerous buyers on Amazon and eBay, with some of the shoddy hardware ending up in sensitive US government systems.

On Wednesday, 40-year-old Onur Aksoy was sentenced to six years and six months in prison for raking in at least $100 million from the counterfeit sales.

Aksoy committed the fraud from at least 2013 to 2022 — the year he was arrested— by buying the fake Cisco equipment from suppliers in China. The counterfeits were then resold as legitimate Cisco products for an estimated retail value of over $1 billion.

"Aksoy sold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of counterfeit computer networking equipment that ended up in US hospitals, schools, and highly sensitive military and other governmental systems, including platforms supporting sophisticated US fighter jets and military aircraft," Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole Argentieri said in a statement.

The scheme persisted for nearly a decade, with Aksoy selling the counterfeit gear through 19 companies, along with 15 Amazon storefronts and at least 10 eBay storefronts, according to the Justice Department. But the fake hardware performed poorly once installed.