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upstart writes:

When an earthquake rocked Taiwan, hundreds of Gogoro's battery-swap stations automatically stopped drawing electricity to stabilize the grid:

On the morning of April 3, Taiwan was hit by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Seconds later, hundreds of battery-swap stations in Taiwan sensed something else: the power frequency of the electric grid took a sudden drop, a signal that some power plants had been disconnected in the disaster. The grid was now struggling to meet energy demand.

These stations, built by the Taiwanese company Gogoro for electric-powered two-wheeled vehicles like scooters, mopeds, and bikes, reacted immediately. According to numbers provided by the company, 590 Gogoro battery-swap locations (some of which have more than one swap station) stopped drawing electricity from the grid, lowering local demand by a total six megawatts—enough to power thousands of homes. It took 12 minutes for the grid to recover, and the battery-swap stations then resumed normal operation.

Gogoro is not the only company working on battery-swapping for electric scooters (New York City recently launched a pilot program to give delivery drivers the option to charge this way), but it's certainly one of the most successful. Founded in 2011, the firm has a network of over 12,500 stations across Taiwan and boasts over 600,000 monthly subscribers who pay to swap batteries in and out when required. Each station is roughly the size of two vending machines and can hold around 30 scooter batteries.

Now the company is putting the battery network to another use: Gogoro has been working with Enel X, an Italian company, to incorporate the stations into a virtual power plant (VPP) system that helps the Taiwanese grid stay more resilient in emergencies like April's earthquake.

Battery-swap stations work well for VPP programs because they offer so much more flexibility than charging at home, where an electric-bike owner usually has just one or two batteries and thus must charge immediately after one runs out. With dozens of batteries in a single station as a demand buffer, Gogoro can choose when it charges them—for instance, doing so at night when there's less power demand and it's cheaper. In the meantime, the batteries can give power back to the grid when it is stressed—hence the comparison to power plants.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

California Senator Scott Wiener is used to pushback when he proposes laws aimed at reining in reckless drivers and improving road safety in his car-dependent state. But even he was caught off guard when, earlier this year, he introduced a new bill requiring a speed “governor” on all new cars sold in the state. The opposition from drivers was so fierce that he had to rewrite the proposal to only require weaker versions of the technology.

“There were people who loved it, people who hated it, people who were mad at me, spouses who were arguing with each other about it,” Wiener said in an interview. “It was an interesting situation. There’s a certain cultural embrace of being able to drive your car however you want to drive your car.”

Speeding is part of our cultural identity. Automakers frequently advertise new cars tearing through empty cities or weaving through traffic well above safe speeds. Movies and television shows frequently push these boundaries further. And social media further glorifies lawbreaking by providing a platform for speedsters. It all perpetuates the idea that speeding is not only safe but an American right.

“There’s a certain cultural embrace of being able to drive your car however you want to drive your car.”

Yet speeding is one of the most deadly things you can do in a vehicle. In 2023, more than 40,000 people died in traffic accidents, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data released in April of this year. That’s down about 36 percent from 2022, when crashes accounted for nearly 43,000 deaths. The previous year was even worse, with speeding fatalities reaching a 14-year high. 

[...] “Driver’s behavior is the overwhelming cause of traffic crashes,” Jonathan Adkins, CEO of the Governors Highway Safety Association. “We’re driving too fast or drinking, we’re not wearing our seatbelt. We’re distracted by our cell phones. It’s all those behaviors that lead to the vast majority of crashes.”

Salvation could come from technology like intelligent speed assistance (ISA) systems, but there’s a lot of nuance. These systems use cameras, radar, and lidar in conjunction with GPS data to detect both the speed of your vehicle and “read” the speed limit signs on the road. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Imagine misplacing your house keys and then pulling out a 3D printer from your pocket to make new ones.

3D printing has made manufacturing more affordable, especially for low-volume production. However, 3D printers are often huge and heavy devices that need a stable platform to work properly — until now. MIT News reports that its researchers have worked closely with a team from the University of Texas at Austin to create a prototype 3D printer that is smaller than a coin.

This photonic chip focuses its beam into a resin well that rapidly cures when it’s hit by a particular wavelength of light emitted from the chip. The palm-sized 3D printer also saves space by eschewing moving parts — instead of using arms and motors to change the beam’s focal point, the prototype uses tiny optical antennas to move it around and create the desired shape.

If the team is successful in turning this concept into a viable product, it could change the face of instant manufacturing. The portability and speed of this palm-sized printer could allow anyone — engineers, doctors, or even first responders — to create solutions on the fly without needing to lug around a big and heavy device.

[...] These are just some of the exciting possibilities that this 3D printing concept brings to the table. According to MIT Professor Jelena Notaros, “This system is completely rethinking what a 3D printer is. It is no longer a big box sitting on a bench in a lab creating objects, but something that is handheld and portable. It is exciting to think about the new applications that could come out of this and how the field of 3D printing could change.” 

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Water frost detected on Mars' volcanoes in 'significant' first discovery: Study

Researchers say the frost patches equate to '60 Olympic-size swimming pools.'

[....] The thin yet widespread layers of water frost were discovered atop three of Mars' Tharsis volcanoes, located on a plateau at the planet's equator, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The Tharsis volcanoes, a string of 12 large peaks, are the tallest volcanoes in our solar system, according to the study, which notes that the water frost was discovered on the volcanoes Olympus, Arsia Ascraeus Mons, and Ceraunius Tholus.

"The researchers calculate the frost constitutes at least 150,000 tons of water that swaps between the surface and atmosphere each day during the cold seasons," researchers from Brown University reported in a press release Monday [...]

[...] "We thought it was improbable for frost to form around Mars' equator, as the mix of sunshine and thin atmosphere keeps temperatures during the day relatively high at both the surface and mountaintop — unlike what we see on Earth, where you might expect to see frosty peaks,"

[...] Researchers hypothesize the air circulating above the calderas creates a "unique microclimate that allows the thin patches of frost to form."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Following the strongest solar storm in twenty years, NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite was put into a safe hold on May 10 due to atmospheric drag from the expanded atmosphere. Recovery actions have since raised its orbit, with operations anticipated to restart on June 17.

The lidar instrument on NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite is scheduled to resume collecting data around June 17, after going into a safe hold on May 10 due to impacts from the strongest solar storm to hit Earth in two decades. The storm did not cause any detectable damage to the satellite or its instrument.

Between May 7 and May 11, strong solar flares and coronal mass ejections were released from the Sun and sparked a geomagnetic storm at Earth that caused our planet’s atmosphere to expand in places. This created unexpected drag on ICESat-2, rotating the satellite, and triggering the satellite to enter safe hold, which turned off ICESat-2’s science instrument.

The ICESat-2 team has conducted two thruster burns to raise the spacecraft’s altitude, allowing it to now drift back to its normal orbit around 310 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth. Once there, the team will return the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System instrument to science mode, to continue measuring the height of Earth’s ice, water, forests, and land cover.

ICESat-2, short for Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2, is a NASA satellite mission designed to measure ice sheet elevation and sea ice thickness, as well as land topography and vegetation characteristics. Launched in September 2018, the satellite employs a sophisticated laser altimeter system called ATLAS (Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System) to provide precise and detailed measurements of Earth’s surface.

ICESat-2’s high-resolution data helps scientists understand changes in ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice that result from climate change, enhancing our ability to accurately predict future sea level rise and assess changes in Earth’s ecosystems. This satellite is a critical tool in NASA’s Earth Observing System, contributing valuable data for environmental research and climate science.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Back in April the Biden FCC finally got around to restoring both net neutrality rules, and the agency’s Title II authority over telecom providers. The modest rules, as we’ve covered extensively, prevent big telecom giants from abusing their monopoly and gatekeeper power to harm competitors or consumers. They also require that ISPs be transparent about what kind of network management they use.

Contrary to a lot of industry and right wing bullshit, the rules don’t hurt broadband investment and they’re not some “radical government overreach.” They’re some very basic guidelines proposed by an agency that under both parties is generally too feckless to stand up to industry.

But big telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast have unsurprisingly challenged the rules once again in the Fifth Circuit, the Sixth Circuit, Eleventh Circuit, and the D.C. Circuit as they seek a lucky lottery draw. At the same time, they’ve filed a petition asking the FCC to pause the rules (set to take effect July 22), claiming (falsely, as it turns out) that the agency’s decision was illegal (all consumer protection efforts are illegal if you’re ignorant enough to ask an AT&T or Comcast lawyer’s opinion about it).

Big ISPs, as usual, insist that if net neutrality is to be addressed, it should be done by Congress:

Telecom lobbyists, which spend an estimated $320,000 every day lobbying Congress, enjoy making this claim hoping you’re too daft to realize that Congress has long been too corrupted by corporate influence to do this (or much of anything else on consumer protection or consumer privacy). They know they have Congress in their pockets, and they’re obviously working hard on the courts.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

After weeks of being excoriated by cybersecurity experts, Microsoft is making moves to address concerns over its new AI-powered computer history-saving feature: Copilot+ Recall.

Most notably, Microsoft is switching Recall from a default feature to one that requires a user to opt-in first. The company is making the change before Recall officially rolls out on June 18.

"We are updating the set-up experience of Copilot+ PCs to give people a clearer choice to opt-in to saving snapshots using Recall," wrote Microsoft Windows VP Pavan Davuluri in an official company update on the feature. "If you don’t proactively choose to turn it on, it will be off by default."

Last month, Microsoft announced a series of new AI-powered features coming to Windows. One central feature that the company announced was Recall.

Recall takes constant screenshots in the background while a user uses a device. Microsoft's AI then scans the screenshots and makes a searchable archive of all the activity history that a user performed. Which websites were visited, what a user typed into forms – nearly everything is saved.

Cybersecurity experts were immediately concerned. A prominent former Microsoft threat analyst who had hands-on experience using Recall called the feature a "disaster." 

It turns out, Recall really does save pretty much everything including text passwords, sensitive financial information, private Google Chrome browser history, and more. And Recall saves it inside a database that can be easily accessed by a bad actor who gains remote control of a user's device.

Making things even worse, Recall was going to be a feature turned on by default, meaning users might not have even been aware of what was going on in the background of their device.

Thankfully, users will now have to opt-in to the feature, fully aware of what they are turning on and what Recall does.

owl writes:

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/learn-something-old-every-day-part-xii-strange-file-resizing-on-dos/

Someone recently asked an interesting question: Why do Microsoft C and compatible DOS compilers have no truncate() and/or ftruncate() library functions? And how does one resize files on DOS?

OK, that's actually two questions. The first one is easy enough to answer: Because XENIX had no truncate() or ftruncate() either. Instead, XENIX had a chsize() function which, sure enough, can be found in the Microsoft C libraries at least as far back as MS C 3.0 (early 1985).

The second question is rather more interesting. The way files are resized on DOS is moving the file pointer to the desired size by calling the LSEEK function (INT 21h/42h), and then calling the WRITE function (INT 21h/40h) with zero length (CX=0).

Now, this mechanism is rather curious, because the handle-based file API in DOS 2.0 was modeled on XENIX, yet on UNIX systems, the write() function asked to transfer zero bytes simply does nothing. If the mechanism didn't come from XENIX, where did it come from?....

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Multiple sites are reporting on an article in Nature Ecology & Evolution about communication between African elephants (paywall). Using machine learning to analyze the low rumblings that elephants make, they researchs conclude that elephants have names for each other and use them.

Wild African elephants call each other by their names, according to a study published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution — making them the only nonhuman animals known to use language like this.

— Vox, Elephants have names — and they use them with each other

and

For the new study, a team of international researchers used an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyse the calls of two wild herds of African savannah elephants in Kenya.

The research "not only shows that elephants use specific vocalisations for each individual, but that they recognise and react to a call addressed to them while ignoring those addressed to others," lead study author Michael Pardo said.

— Science Alert, Wild Elephants Invent Names For One Another in Surprise Sign of Abstract Thinking

and

The researchers analyzed vocalizations - mostly rumbles generated by elephants using their vocal cords, similar to how people speak - made by more than 100 elephants in Amboseli National Park and Samburu National Reserve.

Using a machine-learning model, the researchers identified what appeared to be a name-like component in these calls identifying a specific elephant as the intended addressee. The researchers then played audio for 17 elephants to test how they would respond to a call apparently addressed to them as well as to a call apparently addressed to some other elephant.

— The Hindustan Times, Elephants use 'names' to communicate with each other: Study

and

So Pardo and some colleagues analyzed recordings of 469 rumbling calls that wild African elephants had made to each other in the Amboseli National Park and Samburu and Buffalo Springs National Reserves in Kenya between 1986 and 2022.

For every recorded call, the researchers knew the identity of the elephant making the rumble as well as, based on the context, the elephant that was being addressed.

— NPR, Wild elephants may have names that other elephants use to call them

Previously,
(2021) Wise Old Elephants Keep the Young Calm
(2014) Elephants: Best Sense of Smell by a Wide Margin
(2014) Elephants Can Tell Human Ethnicity by our Voices

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2eeg9gygyno

An appeal has been launched for O blood-type donors to book appointments across the country following the ransomware attack affecting major London hospitals.

NHS Blood and Transplant is appealing for O blood-type donors to book appointments to donate as this is safe to use for all patients.

The IT attack means the affected hospitals cannot currently match patients' blood at the same frequency as usual.

Several London hospitals declared a critical incident, cancelled operations and tests, and were unable to carry out blood transfusions last week after the attack on the pathology firm Synnovis, which Qilin, a Russian group of cyber criminals, is understood to have been behind.

Memos to NHS staff at King's College Hospital, Guy's and St Thomas' (including the Royal Brompton and the Evelina London Children's Hospital) and primary care services in London said a critical incident had been declared.

Now NHS Blood and Transplant is calling for O positive and O negative blood donors to book appointments in one of the 25 NHS Blood Donor Centres in England to boost stocks.

For surgeries and procedures requiring blood to take place, hospitals need to use O- type blood as this is safe to use for all patients and blood has a shelf life of 35 days, so stocks need to be continually replenished, the NHS said.

That means more units of these types of blood than usual will be required over the coming weeks.

AnonTechie writes:

Source: General Robots

A very interesting article about programming Robots, written by BENJIE HOLSON:

I worked on this idea for months before I decided it was a mistake. The second time I heard someone mention it, I thought, "That's strange, these two groups had the same idea. Maybe I should tell them it didn't work for us." The third and fourth time I rolled my eyes and ignored it. The fifth time I heard about a group struggling with this mistake I decided it was worth a blog post all on its own. I call this idea "The Mythical Non-Roboticist".

The idea goes something like this: Programming robots is hard. And there are some people with really arcane skills and PhDs who are really expensive and seem to be required for some reason. Wouldn't it be nice if we could do robotics without them?1 What if everyone could do robotics? That would be great, right? We should make a software framework so that non-roboticists can program robots.

This idea is so close to a correct idea that it's hard to tell why it doesn't work out. On the surface, it's not wrong: all else being equal, it would be good if programming robots was more accessible. The problem is that we don't have a good recipe for making working robots. So we don't know how to make that recipe easier to follow. In order to make things simple, people end up removing things that folks might need, because no one knows for sure what's absolutely required. It's like saying you want to invent an invisibility cloak and want to be able to make it from materials you can buy from Home Depot. Sure, that would be nice, but if you invented an invisibility cloak that required some mercury and neodymium to manufacture would you toss the recipe?

In robotics, this mistake is based on a very true and very real observation: programming robots is super hard. Famously hard. It would be super-great if programming robots was easier. The issue is this: programming robots has two different kinds of hard parts.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Roughly a year ago, astronomers announced that they had observed an object that shouldn't exist. Like a pulsar, it emitted regularly timed bursts of radio emissions. But unlike a pulsar, those bursts were separated by over 20 minutes. If the 22-minute gap between bursts represents the rotation period of the object, then it is rotating too slowly to produce radio emissions by any known mechanism.

Now, some of the same team (along with new collaborators) are back with the discovery of something that, if anything, is acting even more oddly. The new source of radio bursts, ASKAP J193505.1+214841.0, takes nearly an hour between bursts. And it appears to have three different settings, sometimes producing weaker bursts and sometimes skipping them entirely. While the researchers suspect that, like pulsars, this is also powered by a neutron star, it's not even clear that it's the same class of object as their earlier discovery.

[...] We don't have a clear idea of how long the time between pulses can get before a pulsar will shut down. But we do know that it's going to be far less than 22 minutes.

Which is why the 2023 discovery was so strange. The object, GPM J1839–10, not only took a long time between pulses, but archival images showed that it had been pulsing on and off since at least 35 years ago.

To figure out what is going on, we really have two options. One is more and better observations of the source we know about. The second is to find other examples of similar behavior. There's a chance we now have a second object like this, although there are enough differences that it's not entirely clear.

The object, ASKAPJ193505.1+214841.0, was discovered by accident when the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope was used to observe the area due to detections of a gamma-ray burst. It picked up a bright radio burst in the same field of view, but it was unrelated to the gamma-ray burst. Further radio bursts showed up in later observations, as did a few far weaker bursts. A search of the telescope's archives also spotted a weaker burst from the same location.

Checking the timing of the radio bursts, the team found that they could be explained by an object that emitted bursts every 54 minutes, with bursts lasting from 10 seconds to just under a minute. Checking additional observations, however, showed that there were often instances where a 54-minute period would not end with a radio burst, suggesting the source sometimes skipped radio emissions entirely.

upstart writes:

OpenSSH introduces options to penalize undesirable behavior:

In a recent commit, Damien Miller (djm@) introduced the new sshd(8) configurations options, PerSourcePenalties and PerSourcePenaltyExemptList, to provide a built in facility in sshd(8) itself to penalize undesirable behavior, and to shield specific clients from penalty, respectively.

The commit message reads,

List: openbsd-cvs Subject: CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src From: Damien Miller <djm () cvs ! openbsd ! org Date: 2024-06-06 17:15:26 CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: djm@cvs.openbsd.org 2024/06/06 11:15:26 Modified files: usr.bin/ssh : misc.c misc.h monitor.c monitor_wrap.c servconf.c servconf.h srclimit.c srclimit.h sshd-session.c sshd.c sshd_config.5 Log message: Add a facility to sshd(8) to penalise particular problematic client behaviours, controlled by two new sshd_config(5) options: PerSourcePenalties and PerSourcePenaltyExemptList.

When PerSourcePenalties are enabled, sshd(8) will monitor the exit status of its child pre-auth session processes. Through the exit status, it can observe situations where the session did not authenticate as expected. These conditions include when the client repeatedly attempted authentication unsucessfully (possibly indicating an attack against one or more accounts, e.g. password guessing), or when client behaviour caused sshd to crash (possibly indicating attempts to exploit sshd). When such a condition is observed, sshd will record a penalty of some duration (e.g. 30 seconds) against the client's address. If this time is above a minimum threshold specified by the PerSourcePenalties, then connections from the client address will be refused (along with any others in the same PerSourceNetBlockSizeCIDR range). Repeated offenses by the same client address will accrue greater penalties, up to a configurable maximum. A PerSourcePenaltyExemptList option allows certain address ranges to be exempt from all penalties. We hope these options will make it significantly more difficult for attackers to find accounts with weak/guessable passwords or exploit bugs in sshd(8) itself. PerSourcePenalties is off by default, but we expect to enable it automatically in the near future.

This new facility comes in addition to the already well known and loved pf.confstate tracking options, and is for now available only in OpenBSD-current, but is almost certainly to be available in the upcoming OpenBSD 7.6 release.

Windows Recall Demands an Extraordinary Level of Trust That Microsoft Hasn't Earned

upstart writes:

Op-ed: The risks to Recall are way too high for security to be secondary:

Microsoft's Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs come with quite a few new AI and machine learning-driven features, but the tentpole is Recall. Described by Microsoft as a comprehensive record of everything you do on your PC, the feature is pitched as a way to help users remember where they've been and to provide Windows extra contextual information that can help it better understand requests from and meet the needs of individual users.

This, as many users in infosec communities on social media immediately pointed out, sounds like a potential security nightmare. That's doubly true because Microsoft says that by default, Recall's screenshots take no pains to redact sensitive information, from usernames and passwords to health care information to NSFW site visits. By default, on a PC with 256GB of storage, Recall can store a couple dozen gigabytes of data across three months of PC usage, a huge amount of personal data.

The line between "potential security nightmare" and "actual security nightmare" is at least partly about the implementation, and Microsoft has been saying things that are at least superficially reassuring. Copilot+ PCs are required to have a fast neural processing unit (NPU) so that processing can be performed locally rather than sending data to the cloud; local snapshots are protected at rest by Windows' disk encryption technologies, which are generally on by default if you've signed into a Microsoft account; neither Microsoft nor other users on the PC are supposed to be able to access any particular user's Recall snapshots; and users can choose to exclude apps or (in most browsers) individual websites to exclude from Recall's snapshots.

This all sounds good in theory, but some users are beginning to use Recall now that the Windows 11 24H2 update is available in preview form, and the actual implementation has serious problems.

[...] The short version is this: In its current form, Recall takes screenshots and uses OCR to grab the information on your screen; it then writes the contents of windows plus records of different user interactions in a locally stored SQLite database to track your activity. Data is stored on a per-app basis, presumably to make it easier for Microsoft's app-exclusion feature to work. Beaumont says "several days" of data amounted to a database around 90KB in size. In our usage, screenshots taken by Recall on a PC with a 2560×1440 screen come in at 500KB or 600KB apiece (Recall saves screenshots at your PC's native resolution, minus the taskbar area).

See also:

• A PR disaster: Microsoft has lost trust with its users, and Windows Recall is the straw that broke the camel's back

Motor Trend is running a story that summarizes a number of different sources that look at vehicle privacy, https://www.motortrend.com/news/connected-cars-data-privacy-issues-sex-speeding/ It isn't favorable to the car companies, which (historically) is a change of direction for Motor Trend--long ago accused of making back room deals over their long-running "Car of the Year" award and other industry-favorable coverage.

As well as stories covered here earlier from Mozilla and NY Times, they also link to this possibly interesting page,

Amico created Privacy4cars.com as a potential solution. "We built a tool called the Vehicle Privacy Report," https://vehicleprivacyreport.com/ he said. "It's free for consumers. You can punch in a VIN, and we'll tell you what data your car collects and where it's going." Privacy4Cars also created a smartphone app that allows consumers to delete data in a car, and its Assert Your Data Rights services allows Privacy4Cars to act as authorized agent to submit requests for access to personal information collected by a car, to delete the information, and request that personal information not be sold as defined by respective state laws.

I tried it on a 10 year old car and it pretty much matched what I expected -- no Wi-Fi, no linking to phones, but possible data collected if satellite radio was used (it's not).

Then there is this, provided for curiosity only, since sex and SN users are not typically intersecting sets (grin):

Of all the data that car companies can potentially capture, one of the most eye-opening from the Mozilla report was people having sex in vehicles. "One of the things that everybody latched onto was Nissan and Kia saying they could collect information on your sex life or your sexual activity," Caltrider said. "That really freaked people out." While the researchers couldn't determine exactly how the automakers would gather data on sexual activity in cars, the educated guess is it wouldn't be that hard for cameras and sensors to gather the information necessary.

After the Mozilla Foundation report was released, Kia Connect Services (a suite of services Kia extends to its vehicle owners) and Nissan USA removed wording about collecting information on sexual activity from their online privacy policies, Caltrider said. She sent us a PDF of the original wording on the Nissan site, and under Types of Personal Data collected, it read: "Sensitive personal information, including ... sexual orientation, sexual activity, precise geolocation, health diagnosis data, and genetic information." On Kia's broader corporate privacy page under Sensitive Personal Information as of press time, it still read, "This category may include ... sex life or sexual orientation information."

Original Submission