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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Twenty-five years ago, Space Shuttle Columbia launched the Chandra X-ray observatory and nearly ended in catastrophe. As the then-ascent flight director John Shannon observed: "Yikes. We don't need another one of those."

Space Shuttle Columbia was launched from Kennedy Space Center's LC-39B on the morning of July 23, 1999. Two previous launch attempts, on July 20 and 22, were scrubbed because of a faulty sensor and bad weather.

The launch was third time lucky in more ways than one.

Unknown to the Shuttle's crew and flight controllers, Columbia contained several flaws – as do all vehicles – some of which were about to make their presence felt during the launch phase of the mission. A bit of wiring within the payload bay had chafed against a burred screw head, a single gold-plated pin was slightly loose in a deactivated Liquid Oxygen (LOX) post in the main injector of the right engine, and the main center engine had a slight bias in pressure measurements on its B channel that would only show when the engine reached full throttle.

Oh, and there was a slightly loose connection on a hydraulic pressure sensor on the right solid rocket booster (SRB).

The team was blissfully unaware of any of this.

owl writes:

https://blog.mattstuchlik.com/2024/07/21/fastest-memory-read.html

Summing ASCII Encoded Integers on Haswell at the Speed of memcpy turned out more popular than I expected, which inspired me to take on another challenge on HighLoad: Counting uint8s. I'm currently only #13 on the leaderboard, ~7% behind #1, but I already learned some interesting things. In this post I'll describe my complete solution (skip to that) including a surprising memory read pattern that achieves up to ~30% higher transfer rates on fully memory bound, single core workloads compared to naive sequential access, while apparently not being widely known (skip to that).

As before, the program is tuned to the input spec and for the HighLoad system: Intel Xeon E3-1271 v3 @ 3.60GHz, 512MB RAM, Ubuntu 20.04. It only uses AVX2, no AVX512.

The Challenge

"Print the number of bytes whose value equals 127 in a 250MB stream of bytes uniformly sampled from [0, 255] sent to standard input."

Nothing much to it!

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The automaker announced the pivot in an earnings call this week, with CEO Mary Barra citing the Origin's "unique design" as creating too much "regulatory uncertainty." That design was indeed unusual, with no immediately obvious front or rear, and not a single spot for a human driver.

Instead of the Origin, GM's Cruise autonomous driving division will refocus on modifying existing Chevy Bolt EVs for self-driving capabilities. A new generation of autonomous Bolts is slated for production in 2025, and Barra says going this route will reduce costs per vehicle.

GM's chief financial officer Paul Jacobson says the company "might" revisit Origin down the road, but currently the efforts are "really going to be focused" on the Bolt.

Cruise has been under fire since an incident last October when one of its self-driving test vehicles struck and dragged a pedestrian in San Francisco. California regulators swiftly grounded the robotaxis.

[...] The entire industry has sunk billions into cracking this nut, with the promise of one day raking in massive profits from fleets of driverless robotaxis. However, as Cruise's setbacks show, actually delivering on that reality has been one pothole-ridden road. Many analysts think we're still years away from having a truly driverless car roll up, if it ever happens at all.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/24/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-apology-gift-card-to-say-sorry-for-outage/

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that crashed millions of computers with a botched update all over the world last week, is offering its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology, according to several people who say they received the gift card, as well as a source who also received one.

On Tuesday, a source told TechCrunch that they received an email from CrowdStrike offering them the gift card because the company recognizes "the additional work that the July 19 incident has caused."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A team of marine biologists and ecotoxicologists affiliated with several institutions in Brazil has found cocaine in muscle and liver samples collected from Brazilian Sharpnose sharks harvested off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. Their study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, highlights the potential impact of the presence of illicit drugs in marine environments.

Prior research has suggested that much cocaine winds up in the ocean via wastewater from sewage systems, drainage from labs and packages abandoned by traffickers attempting to prevent discovery. What is not known is how long the drug persists in the sea and what impact it has on ocean life. For this new study, the research team tested Brazilian Sharpnose sharks, a small variety that makes its home in the shallow waters along many of Brazil's coastal areas.

The researchers purchased 13 of the sharks from local fishermen. Each was dissected in the lab, where the team also collected muscle and liver samples and assessed them with tandem mass spectrometry. They found cocaine in all the samples at concentrations approximately 100 times higher than observed in any other marine animal.

The researchers suggest their findings are just a starting point regarding research into the presence of cocaine in the sea. They note that it is not known what sort of impact the cocaine might have on the sharks. They do not know, for example, if it impacts their behavior, as it does humans, or if it impacts other functions such as their reproductive abilities.

More information:Gapriel de Farias Araujo et al, "Cocaine Shark": First report on cocaine and benzoylecgonine detection in sharks, Science of The Total Environment (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.174798
                                                                               

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

A "battle of the giants" is unfolding in the market for chips for real-time artificial intelligence systems:

A separate "front line" in this confrontation is the development and implementation of SoM [System on Module] with Programmable Logic. This post is dedicated to one small "battle," on the example of which we want to show why, in our opinion, China could win this "war."

Since the announcement in 2019 by Xilinx (which then bore this name without a proud three-letter prefix), Versal ACAP (Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform) chips were inaccessible to developers—the first development boards cost tens of thousands of U.S. dollars, and the difficulty of developing your own board for this chip would scare off anyone other than Tony Stark.

A lot of water flowed, and a lot of developers' tears were shed, but a silicon Versal is just as unavailable as The Palace of Versailles: the cheapest kit from AMD–VEK280 is sold by the official suppliers for $7K, excluding delivery and customs clearance. The classic argument in the style of "if you don't have money for an iron door, you don't need it" does not always work in the field of R&D—a rare developer will refuse to study a top-end chip at the expense of his employer, but even with this approach, the cost is too high.

[...] The problem is that the announcement of AMD Xilinx has so far remained an announcement, but the developers from Alinx, the Chinese company, did not waste any time. This company already is known for its inexpensive development boards with Zynq‑7000 and Ultrascale+ on board, not much different from SoM. Now they not only promised, but also mass-produced the SoM V100 with the XCVE2302-SFVA784-1LP-E-S chip (Versal AI Edge family) for $750 [1].

[...] There is, of course, a fly in the V100 ointment. The developers from Alinx were so inspired by Kria that they also used "legendary" Samtec connectors "well-liked" by all designers and engineers. Who among us hasn't drilled them from the side with the thinnest drill, forgetting to route that very necessary pin right in the middle in the inner row? However, to achieve the required transmission speeds with a compact size, there is hardly an alternative to Samtec connectors.

V100 SoM specs: 4 GBytes DDR4 (64-bit data-bus), 64 MBytes QSPI FlashROM, 8 GBytes eMMC, Gen4 ×8 PCI-Express, 8 x GTY up to 12.5 Gbps, 53 (for ARM cores) + 106 (for FPGA part) input/output lines, two Samtec ADF6-40-03.5-L-4-2-A-TR connectors with 160 pins each, single supply voltage 12V, and the dimensions are 65 x 60 mm.

Related:

• $119+ BeagleV "Powerful", Open-Hardware RISC-V Linux SBC Targets AI Applications
• AMD Confirms Ryzen AI 300 PCs Won't Feature Copilot+ Features At Launch
• AMD is Convinced its Latest CPUs will Crush Qualcomm AI Chips

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A Chinese lunar probe found traces of water in samples of the moon's soil, scientists have said, as the country pushes its ambitious space program into high gear.

The Chang'e-5 rover completed its mission in 2020, returning to Earth with rock and soil samples from the moon.

The lunar samples "revealed the presence of trace water", the group of scientists from Chinese universities wrote in the Nature Astronomy journal published Monday.

A NASA infrared detector already confirmed in 2020 the existence of water on the moon, while scientists found traces of water in recent analyses of samples dating from the 1960s and 1970s.

But the Chang'e-5 samples are from a "much higher latitude", providing new clues as to what form water takes on the moon's surface, the Chinese scientists wrote.

The samples suggest that "water molecules can persist in sunlit areas of the moon in the form of hydrated salts", they said.

Reference: Shifeng Jin et al, Evidence of a hydrated mineral enriched in water and ammonium molecules in the Chang'e-5 lunar sample, Nature Astronomy (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-024-02306-8

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://nrk.neocities.org/articles/cpu-vs-common-sense

Recently one of my older post about strlcpy has sparked some discussion on various forums. Presumably the recently released POSIX edition had something to do with it. One particular counter-argument was raised by multiple posters - and it's an argument that I've heard before as well:

In the common case where the source string fits in to the destination buffer, strlcpy would only traverse the string once whereas strlen + memcpy would traverse it twice always.

Hidden in this argument is the assumption that traversing the string once is faster. Which - to be clear - is not at all an unreasonable assumption. But is it actually true? That's the focus of today's article.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

When it comes to discoveries about our upper atmosphere, it pays to know your surroundings.

Using data from the Twin Rockets to Investigate Cusp Electrodynamics (TRICE-2) rocket launch, NASA scientists Francesca Di Mare and Gregory Howes from the University of Iowa studied waves traveling down Earth's magnetic field lines into the polar atmosphere.

These waves were known to accelerate electrons, which pick up speed as they "surf" along the electric field of the wave. But their effect on ions—a more heterogenous group of positively charged particles, which exist alongside electrons—was unknown.

By estimating the ion mixture they were flying through—predominantly protons and singly charged oxygen ions—the scientists discovered that these waves were accelerating protons as they circle about the Earth's magnetic field lines as well as electrons as they surf the waves. The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, reveal a new way our upper atmosphere is energized.

Journal information: Physical Review Letters ZZZ

More information: Francesca Di Mare, [et al]. New Regime of Inertial Alfvén Wave Turbulence in the Auroral Ionosphere, Physical Review Letters (2024). [DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.045201]

Original Submission

Chimpanzees gesture back and forth quickly like in human conversations:

"While human languages are incredibly diverse, a hallmark we all share is that our conversations are structured with fast-paced turns of just 200 milliseconds on average," said Catherine Hobaiter at the University of St Andrews, UK. "But it was an open question whether this was uniquely human, or if other animals share this structure."

"We found that the timing of chimpanzee gesture and human conversational turn-taking is similar and very fast, which suggests that similar evolutionary mechanisms are driving these social, communicative interactions," says Gal Badihi, the study's first author.

The researchers knew that human conversations follow a similar pattern across people living in places and cultures all over the world. They wanted to know if the same communicative structure also exists in chimpanzees even though they communicate through gestures rather than through speech. To find out, they collected data on chimpanzee "conversations" across five wild communities in East Africa.

Altogether, they collected data on more than 8,500 gestures for 252 individuals. They measured the timing of turn-taking and conversational patterns. They found that 14% of communicative interactions included an exchange of gestures between two interacting individuals. Most of the exchanges included a two-part exchange, but some included up to seven parts.

Overall, the data reveal a similar timing to human conversation, with short pauses between a gesture and a gestural response at about 120 milliseconds. Behavioral responses to gestures were slower. "The similarities to human conversations reinforce the description of these interactions as true gestural exchanges, in which the gestures produced in response are contingent on those in the previous turn," the researchers write.

"We did see a little variation among different chimp communities, which again matches what we see in people where there are slight cultural variations in conversation pace: some cultures have slower or faster talkers," Badihi says.

"Fascinatingly, they seem to share both our universal timing, and subtle cultural differences," says Hobaiter. "In humans, it is the Danish who are 'slower' responders, and in Eastern chimpanzees that's the Sonso community in Uganda."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

For developers familiar with MySQL, you've probably heard that MariaDB is the next generation of the database engine. MySQL has long been the traditional database in Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) environments. However, MariaDB has gained popularity as an alternative. MariaDB is a fork of the original MySQL codebase, created to ensure continuity and avoid the potential pitfalls after MySQL was acquired by Oracle. Developers will find that the syntax is similar, but MariaDB introduces several notable differences.

Although MySQL remains embedded in several large technology businesses, MariaDB is often seen as a popular new-generation database for enterprises. MariaDB supports higher data transfer volumes and is supported by most cloud providers. Its similarity to MySQL, which was the dominant database in the early 2000s, has facilitated its adoption.

The key differences between MariaDB and MySQL form the foundation of MariaDB's performance. MariaDB offers several more storage engines and supports over 200,000 connections. MySQL's Enterprise edition includes proprietary code, while MariaDB is completely open-source. These differences contribute to MariaDB's superior speed. In recent benchmark testing, MariaDB performs somewhere between 13% to 36% faster than MySQL.

Since MariaDB is a fork from MySQL, the syntax is similar, but MariaDB has several additional features. Basic SQL syntax remains the same, but MariaDB handles data storage and functions differently. Each new version of MariaDB includes added features and extensions.

One example of a feature in MariaDB not available in MySQL is the SEQUENCE feature. In MySQL, you use the AUTO_INCREMENT feature to add a unique incremented integer to each row created in a table. With SEQUENCE, you can create a custom sequence that starts at a specific value and increments by a custom value.

The following is an example of the SEQUENCE function:

CREATE SEQUENCE s START WITH 10 INCREMENT BY 10;

MySQL was introduced in 1995 and became the dominant database engine in the early 2000s. It's used by some of the world's largest companies such as Facebook, GitHub, Airbnb, and YouTube. It handles billions of records and integrates easily into Linux environments, including affordable web hosting providers.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Smart home defenses crumble when the NEO dog arrives.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that it has developed a four-legged robot designed to jam the wireless transmissions of smart home devices. The robot was revealed at the 2024 Border Security Expo and is called NEO. It is built using the Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle (Q-UGV) and looks a lot like the Boston Dynamics Spot robot. 

According to the transcript of the speech by DHS Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) director Benjamine Huffman, acquired by 404 Media, NEO is equipped with an antenna array that is designed to overload home networks, thus disrupting devices that rely on Wi-Fi and other wireless communication protocols. It will thus likely be effective against a wide range of popular smart home devices that use wireless technologies for communications.

Aside from taking out smart devices, law enforcement can also use the robot to communicate with subjects in the target area, and to provide remote eyes and ears to officers on the ground. “NEO can enter a potentially dangerous environment to provide video and audio feedback to the officers before entry and allow them to communicate with those in that environment,” says Huffman. “NEO carries an onboard computer and antenna array that will allow officers the ability to create a ‘denial-of-service’ (DoS) event to disable ‘Internet of Things’ devices that could potentially cause harm while entry is made.”

This roaming robotic jammer was first contemplated after a child sexual abuse suspect used his doorbell camera to see FBI agents at his door serving a search warrant. The gunman opened fire on them from behind the closed door with an assault-style rifle, killing two veteran agents and injuring three more.

Aside from the NEO, the DHS also built the ‘FLETC Smart House’, which is designed to train law enforcement about smart home devices and how they could be used against them. Huffman explained, “A suspect who has been searched and is under the control of officers can cause these actions to happen with a simple voice command which can start a chain of events to occur within a house, such as turning off lights, locking doors, activating the HVAC system to introduce chemicals into the environment and cause a fire or explosion to take place.”

This development shows how law enforcement is catching up with technological advancements. Smart home devices started becoming common in the mid-to-late-2010s, with many users installing them to automate several aspects of their houses and bolster security. So, anyone with a little bit of technical know-how and ingenuity could potentially create a hostile environment using readily available wireless electronics. While NEO might not be able to affect hard-wired smart devices, it would still be able to disable the radio frequencies most wireless IoT devices use, thus reducing the risks for law enforcement officers.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Today I'd like to revisit an often ignored/known method for tracking/hacking for SN discussion!

[Editor's Comment: Much of the discussion in the links originates from 2013-2016. That could mean several things. 1. It wasn't shown to be very effective, or 2. It is effective but very difficult to detect and counter. ]

Ultrasound Tracking Could Be Used to Deanonymize Tor Users
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ultrasound-tracking-could-be-used-to-deanonymize-tor-users/

Their research focuses on the science of ultrasound cross-device tracking (uXDT), a new technology that started being deployed in modern-day advertising platforms around 2014.

uXDT relies on advertisers hiding ultrasounds in their ads. When the ad plays on a TV or radio, or some ad code runs on a mobile or computer, it emits ultrasounds that get picked up by the microphone of nearby laptops, desktops, tablets or smartphones.

These second-stage devices, who silently listen in the background, will interpret these ultrasounds, which contain hidden instructions, telling them to ping back to the advertiser's server with details about that device.

Advertisers use uXDT in order to link different devices to the same person and create better advertising profiles so to deliver better-targeted ads in the future.

Ultrasound Cross Device Tracking techniques could be used to launch deanonymization attacks against some users: https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/issues/20214

Your home's online gadgets could be hacked by ultrasound: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2110762-your-homes-online-gadgets-could-be-hacked-by-ultrasound/

Beware of ads that use inaudible sound to link your phone, TV, tablet, and PC: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-that-use-inaudible-sound-to-link-your-phone-tv-tablet-and-pc/

Meet "badBIOS," the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mysterious-mac-and-pc-malware-that-jumps-airgaps/

Scientist-developed malware prototype covertly jumps air gaps using inaudible sound: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/scientist-developed-malware-covertly-jumps-air-gaps-using-inaudible-sound/

Using Ultrasonic Beacons to Track Users: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/05/using_ultrasoni.html

Ads Surreptitiously Using Sound to Communicate Across Devices: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/11/ads_surreptitio.html

235 apps attempt to secretly track users with ultrasonic audio: https://boingboing.net/2017/05/04/235-apps-attempt-to-secretly-t.html

Leaking Data By Ultrasound: https://hackaday.com/2020/12/06/leaking-data-by-ultrasound/

Original Submission

PiMuNu writes:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13924

Fermilab is a major US national lab with a budget of several 100M$ per year, focusing on particle physics. All is not well at the lab, however, following project delays and huge cost overruns for the flagship DUNE project. The organisation that operates Fermilab, led by University of Chicago, has had its contract withdrawn and the lab director Lia Merminga has been laid off. Now a pair of senior and well-respected scientists have put their oar in as well, blasting the management of the lab over the past decade that has led to the current situation in a paper posted to the arxiv preprint server. The pair point at many problems, based on a toxic working environment, giving anecdotal examples supported by indicators such as a fourfold increase in sick leave over the past decade.

The PDF is available here.

It's a fun read!

[Ed. note: It appears Lia Merminga has not been laid off]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

You're not going crazy — you may actually be paying higher prices than other people | CNN Business:

It's hard not to get fired up by how much more everything costs compared to just a few years ago. But people making the same exact purchases as you aren't necessarily paying the same exact prices as you.

This became apparent to me a few weeks ago when a friend texted me that Starbucks was running a buy one, get one free drink promotion. But when I logged in to the app, the offer was nowhere to be found.

Why was my friend getting special treatment?

It's likely that Starbucks used artificial intelligence to determine that my friend, if offered a promotion, would make a purchase they wouldn't otherwise have, whereas I would make a purchase regardless, said Shikha Jain, a lead partner in the North American consumer and retail division at the consultancy firm Simon-Kucher.

The system nailed it for me — just opening the app to check if I had the promo got me to order, and I paid full price.

[...] The Seattle-based coffee chain declined to share what feeds into its AI model, dubbed Deep Brew. A spokesperson did, however, confirm that AI is powering the individualized offers it sends customers.

This personalized promotion strategy is not unique to Starbucks. Companies are increasingly leveraging customer data, often derived from loyalty programs, in coordination with machine-learning models to customize prices of goods and services based on an individual's willingness to pay.

[...] On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission sent orders to eight companies — Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture and McKinsey & Co — seeking information on how they allegedly offer surveillance pricing and services "that incorporate data about consumers' characteristics and behavior."

The orders seek to understand how technologies like AI along with consumers' personal information could be used "to categorize individuals and set a targeted price for a product or service," according to an announcement the FTC published Tuesday morning.

"Firms that harvest Americans' personal data can put people's privacy at risk. Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices," FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement.