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fliptop writes:

Losing ground in the race to produce electric vehicles, German and French carmakers are heading toward a disruptive wave of factory closures:

Volkswagen AG is considering factory closures in Germany for the first time in its 87-year history, parting with tradition and risking a feud with unions in a step that reflects the deep woes roiling Europe's auto industry.

After years of ignoring overcapacity and slumping competitiveness, the German auto giant's moves are likely to kick off a broader reckoning in the industry. The reasons are clear: Europe's efforts to compete with Chinese rivals and Tesla Inc. in electric cars are faltering. (full article is paywalled)

"If even VW mulls closing factories in Germany, given how hard that process will be, it means the seas have gotten very rough," Pierre-Olivier Essig, a London-based equities analyst at AIR Capital, told Bloomberg. "The situation is very alarming."

[...] Car sales in Europe are down nearly one-fifth from prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and EV demand has slackened as Germany and Sweden have removed and reduced incentives to purchase the vehicles, Bloomberg reported. As a result, Chinese EV manufacturer BYD has jumped into the European market, pricing its Seagull model at just $9,700 before tax, a far cry from the European's average EV cost of $48,000 in 2022.

VW began downsizing in July, with its Audi subsidiary cutting 90% of its 3,000 person workforce at its manufacturing plant in Brussels, Belgium, according to Bloomberg.

The company's share price is now approaching the lows of its 2015 "diesel crisis," when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency accused the company of installing illegal software in its cars in order to artificially improve its results on diesel emission tests, BBC News reported. The company also posted a €100 million net cash flow loss on its automotive business in the first half of 2024.

Related:

• South Korean EV Battery Makers Reporting Big Losses as EV Demand Slows
• General Motors Lays Off Hundreds Of US Workers
• Auto Woes
• Why are All the EVs so Expensive?

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/sailors-hid-an-unauthorized-starlink-on-the-deck-of-a-us-warship-and-lied-about-it/

It's no secret that government IT can be a huge bummer. The records retention! The security! So government workers occasionally take IT into their own hands with creative but, err, unauthorized solutions.

For instance, a former US Ambassador to Kenya in 2015 got in trouble after working out of an embassy compound bathroom—the only place where he could use his personal computer (!) to access an unsecured network (!!) that let him log in to Gmail (!!!), where he did much of his official business—rules and security policies be damned.

Still, the ambassador had nothing on senior enlisted crew members of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester, who didn't like the Navy's restriction of onboard Internet access. In 2023, they decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to secretly bolt a Starlink terminal to the "O-5 level weatherdeck" of a US warship.
[...]
The Navy Times has all the new and gory details, and you should read their account, because they went to the trouble of using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to uncover the background of this strange story.
[...]
the chiefs don't appear to have taken amazing security precautions once everything was installed. For one thing, they called the network "STINKY." For another, they were soon adding more gear around the ship, which was bound to raise further questions. The chiefs found that the Wi-Fi signal coming off the Starlink satellite transceiver couldn't cover the entire ship, so during a stop in Pearl Harbor, they bought "signal repeaters and cable" to extend coverage.

Sailors on the ship then began finding the STINKY network and asking questions about it.
[...]
Ship officers heard the scuttlebutt about STINKY, of course, and they began asking questions and doing inspections, but they never found the concealed device. On August 18, though, a civilian worker from the Naval Information Warfare Center was installing an authorized SpaceX "Starshield" device and came across the unauthorized SpaceX device hidden on the weatherdeck.
[...]
All of the chiefs who used, paid for, or even knew about the system without disclosing it were given "administrative nonjudicial punishment at commodore's mast," said Navy Times.

[Command Senior Chief Grisel] Marrero herself was relieved of her post last year, and she pled guilty during a court-martial this spring.

So there you go, kids: two object lessons in poor decision-making. Whether working from an embassy bathroom or the deck of a littoral combat ship, if you're a government employee, think twice before giving in to the sweet temptation of unsecured, unauthorized wireless Internet access.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Cops Are Starting To Tow Away Teslas To 'Secure' Recordings Captured By The Cars' Cameras

Well, here's a not-so-fun new twist in the search-and-seizure narrative. Car owners are being deprived of their vehicles just because cops think footage of a crime may have been captured by the car's on-board cameras.

[....] But being in the wrong place at the wrong time might mean drivers going without cars because cops have decided the best way to secure this potential evidence is to take cars away from their drivers. Here's Rachel Swan, reporting for the San Francisco Chronicle. (h/t Bluesky user Hypervisible)

A Canadian tourist was visiting Oakland recently when he had to talk someone out of taking his Tesla from a hotel parking lot.

This was no thief. It was the Oakland Police Department. Turns out, the Tesla may have witnessed a homicide.

In Oakland and beyond, police called to crime scenes are increasingly looking for more than shell casings and fingerprints. They're scanning for Teslas parked nearby, hoping their unique outward-facing cameras captured key evidence. And, the Chronicle has found, they're even resorting to obtaining warrants to tow the cars to ensure they don't lose the video.

[....] At least warrants appear to be involved at this point, which means there's a paper trail documenting law enforcement's seizure of the inanimate "witness." Unfortunately, that's not going to mean much to car owners who may walk out of their houses, businesses, or places of worship to discover their vehicle missing.

Even though this is handled about as well as it can be at this point in time, this kind of thing is only going to become more common. And, inevitably, some cops are going to decide they don't have time to get a warrant, much less make a good faith effort to secure the recordings from the vehicle's owner before initiating a seizure.

Coming soon! Owners of cars without cameras considered to be obstructing justice.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

In the hunt for alien life, is man truly 'the measure of all things?':

Enrico Fermi's lunchtime question at wartime Los Alamos, "Where is everybody?" has been both a gift and a problem to scientists ever since. Known as "Fermi's Paradox," it simply asks, why, since life on Earth is ubiquitous and developed very early in Earth's history, and the galaxy is very old and not overly large, aren't there intelligent, advanced extraterrestrials everywhere? In particular, why can't we detect any, and why haven't any (obvious) aliens visited us?

There have been a few dozen proposed explanations of Fermi's Paradox, in which, as is the human way, mankind is placed at the center of the picture. It's about what we see, how we evolved to this technological state, what we have or haven't heard from space.

Vojin Rakić, a Serbian philosopher, calls these anthropocentric solutions, because they put humans at the center of the picture. In a paper that studies the existing proposals for solving the paradox, he puts forth a new, possible explanation: Alien life might be unobservable to the senses humans have developed, or even live in part of the wider universe we don't know of or can' t yet detect and observe.

His epistemological approach discards the role of man in the nature of the universe and the search for life. A scholar from the Center for the Study of Bioethics at the University of Belgrade, Rakić's work has been published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

[...] Rakić begins by classifying the many proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox as exceptionality solutions, annihilation solutions and communication barrier solutions. The first posits that life is extremely unlikely to develop and we might be the only life in the Milky Way galaxy, if not the universe, and there may be nobody out there. The development of intelligent life might be even rarer, much rarer, requiring a series of crucial but exceedingly rare jumps in its path.

Annihilation solutions hold that planet-wide catastrophes happen from time to time, like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, or that intelligent species cause their own extinctions with war, weapons or environmental damage, or destroy intelligent life elsewhere either as a means of protection or to grab resources.

Communication barrier solutions question whether alien civilizations are too far away, are incomprehensible to humans, or if they (or we) only exist for a relatively short period of time, or whether intelligent extraterrestrials chose to hide themselves, a scenario discussed in Liu Cixin's sci-fi trilogy "Remembrance of Earth's Past."

The zoo hypothesis proposes that extraterrestrials leave Earth alone to let it develop naturally, a kind of Prime Directive, as was self-imposed by human space explorers in the "Star Trek" universe.

canopic jug writes:

Coreboot 24.08 has been released, as announced on the project's blog. coreboot is a fast, flexible, and secure extended firmware platform to help boot modern computers and embedded systems. Some hardware comes with coreboot these days as vendors increasingly offer it as an option. In other cases, if you have a supported chip set, it can be used to replace the slower, less secure, proprietary UEFI ("BIOS") firmware which came with the hardware.

We are pleased to announce the release of coreboot 24.08, another significant milestone in our ongoing commitment to delivering open-source firmware solutions. This release includes over 900 commits, contributed by more than 130 dedicated individuals from our global community. The updates in 24.08 bring various enhancements, optimizations, and new features that further improve the reliability and performance of coreboot across supported platforms.

The next release is planned for mid-November. It has been a while since SN has addressed firmware. Libreboot is a variant of Coreboot but with more of the proprietary blobs removed.

Previously:
(2021) Libreboot Sees First New Release In Nearly 5 Years, Supports More Old Motherboards
(2020) "Project X" - Pure Open-Source Coreboot Support On AMD Zen
(2019) NSA Contributing Low-Level Code to Coreboot UEFI BIOS Alternative
(2014) Replace your Proprietary BIOS with Libreboot

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Seven months after its first lunar lander fell short of reaching the Moon, Astrobotic announced Tuesday that the spacecraft was stricken by a valve failure that caused a propellant tank to burst in orbit. The company's next landing attempt, using a much larger spacecraft, will include fixes to prevent a similar failure.

Astrobotic's first Peregrine lander, which the company called Peregrine Mission One, launched on January 8 aboard United Launch Alliance's first Vulcan rocket. But soon after separating from the rocket in space, the lander ran into trouble as it stepped through an activation sequence to begin priming its propulsion system.

A review board determined "the most likely cause of the malfunction was a failure of a single helium pressure control valve called a PCV—pressure control valve 2, within the propulsion system," said John Horack, a space industry veteran and professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at Ohio State University.

Helium was supposed to pressurize Peregrine's propulsion system and force fuel and oxidizer from the lander's onboard storage tanks into the spacecraft's small rocket engines to combust and generate thrust.

"PCV2 suffered a loss of seal capability that was most likely due to a mechanical failure in the valve caused by vibration-induced relaxation between some threaded components that are inside the valve, so a failure deep inside the valve itself," said Horack, who chaired Astrobotic's investigation into the failure of the Peregrine lander.

It didn't take long for the valve malfunction to have catastrophic consequences for Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander, which was attempting to become the first US spacecraft since 1972 to achieve a soft landing on the Moon.

upstart writes:

The LZ experiment reports no signs of dark matter in their latest search:

Scientists have just slashed the potential hiding spaces for dark matter particles.

The LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ, experiment has searched for and ruled out the existence of dark matter particles with a wide swath of properties, researchers report August 26 at two conferences. Dark matter is a substance whose influence can be seen on the scale of galaxies and galaxy clusters, but which has never been directly detected.

LZ searches for a hypothetical type of dark matter particle called a weakly interacting massive particle, specifically WIMPs with masses above 9 billion electron volts. (For comparison, a proton has a mass of around 1 billion electron volts). The LZ detector, filled with 10 metric tons of liquid xenon, monitors for atomic nuclei recoiling when WIMPs plow into the liquid (SN: 7/7/22).

The researchers characterize WIMPs by their cross section — the probability that a particle will interact. The result shrinks the maximum possible cross section to about a fifth that allowed by previous results, LZ researchers report at the TeV Particle Astrophysics meeting in Chicago and at the Light Detection in Noble Elements meeting in São Paulo.

"We are making massive strides into new territory," says physicist Chamkaur Ghag of University College London, spokesperson of LZ.

The study was performed with 280 days' worth of data. LZ's final results will be based on 1,000 days of data, and it's expected to further carve away at the dark matter's possibilities — or find evidence of it.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

The Register

After an initial euphoric rush to the cloud, administrators are questioning the value and promise of the tech giant's services.

According to a report published by UK cloud outfit Civo, more than a third of organizations surveyed reckoned that their move to the cloud had failed to live up to promises of cost-effectiveness. Over half reported a rise in their cloud bill.

Although the survey, unsurprisingly, paints Civo in a flattering light, some of its figures may make uncomfortable reading for customers sold on the promises from hyperscalers.

[...] In the IT world, there is an expectation that bang for buck increases as time goes by, but in this example, prices are rising faster than the rate of inflation, and what customers receive for their money remains unchanged.

[...] The giddy enthusiasm might have waned in favor of some hard-nosed ROI calculations, and some workloads might jump away from cloud vendors, "but this will not constitute a change in direction – just a ripple in the stream of dollars flowing to the cloud."

So, are prices increasing? The answer has to be yes. How much of those rises are down to the major vendors opportunistically adding of a few percentage points versus an increase in fixed costs, such as electricity, is pretty much irrelevant. The advice remains the same: the cloud is here to stay although its luster has dulled over time.

Time, then, to wheel out the ROI calculator and ensure there's been no stealthy vendor lock-in. All clouds and all workloads are, after all, not created equal.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

"We know what you're thinking. Is this even legal?":

In a pitch deck to prospective customers, one of Facebook's alleged marketing partners explained how it listens to users' smartphone microphones and advertises to them accordingly.

As 404 Media reports based on documents leaked to its reporters, the TV and radio news giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims that its so-called "Active Listening" software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to "capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations."

"Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers," the deck continues.

In the same slideshow, CMG counted Facebook, Google, and Amazon as clients of its "Active Listening" service. After 404 reached out to Google about its partnership, the tech giant removed the media group from the site for its "Partners Program," which prompted Meta, the owner of Facebook, to admit that it is reviewing CMG to see if it violates any of its terms of service.

An Amazon spokesperson, meanwhile, told 404 that its Ads arm "has never worked with CMG on this program and has no plans to do so. The spox added, confusingly, that if one of its marketing partners violates its rules, the company will take action.

This latest leak marks the third time in a year that 404 has reported on CMG's shady voice targeting service. Last December, the independent news site not only put a marketing company on blast for boasting about such creepy tech on its podcast, but also revealed the existence of CMG's Active Listening feature.

Together with this latest update to the CMG saga, these stories bolster longstanding suspicions about advertisers using our phones to listen to us.

"We know what you're thinking. Is this even legal?" a since-deleted Cox blog post from November 2023 noted. "It is legal for phones and devices to listen to you. When a new app download or update prompts consumers with a multi-page term of use agreement somewhere in the fine print, Active Listening is often included."

Also see: Pitch Deck Gives New Details on Company's Plan to Listen to Your Devices for Ad Targeting

Original Submission

owl writes:

http://cityinfrastructure.com/single.php?d=RuralOutsidePlant&t=Rural%20Outside%20Plant

Another section of this web site talked about outside plant, which is the telephone company's term for the cabling and other equipment which connects your home telephone to their Central Office.

This diagram shows an overview, and below are some pictures and descriptions of how outside plant is different for rural areas.

The main differences are that the Central Offices are typically smaller, and the cable distances are much greater.

[Editor's Note: A few weeks ago we ran a story about a cold war hardened shelter which generated a reasonable discussion. This is another one of those submissions which show how regular everyday systems are actually put together and maintained; in this case part of the standard telephone system. It is informative and I discovered several things about a standard US telephone cabling that I did not know before e.g. some cable is pressurized with air to help prevent water ingress, but it provides additional benefits to the engineers who have to maintain the system.]

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Innovative research from Japan challenges negative perceptions, revealing the psychological benefits of video gaming:

A pioneering study titled "Causal effect of video gaming on mental well-being in Japan 2020-2022," published in Nature Human Behaviour, has conducted the most comprehensive investigation to date on the causal relationship between video gaming and mental well-being. This research, the first to demonstrate this relationship using real-life data, challenges commonly held views about the effects of gaming.

The study found substantial improvements in mental well-being: owning a Nintendo Switch improved mental health by 0.60 standard deviations, while owning a PlayStation 5 improved it by 0.12 standard deviations. Additionally, PlayStation 5 ownership increased life satisfaction by 0.23 standard deviations.

"Our findings challenge common stereotypes about gaming being harmful or merely providing temporary euphoria," said lead author Hiroyuki Egami, PhD., Assistant Professor at Nihon University. "We've shown that gaming can improve mental health and life satisfaction across a broad spectrum of individuals."

Egami further explained, "Many earlier studies drew conclusions from correlational analysis with observational data, which can't distinguish between cause and effect. Our natural experimental design allows us to confidently say that gaming actually leads to improved well-being, rather than just being associated with it."

[...] Notably, the study found that while the PlayStation 5 offered relatively smaller psychological benefits for children, the Nintendo Switch provided larger psychological benefits. These findings question the stereotype that games are universally harmful to children and emphasize the importance of considering the multifaceted nature of gaming, including platforms, genres, and playing styles, in research and policymaking.

Journal Reference: Egami, H., Rahman, M.S., Yamamoto, T. et al. Causal effect of video gaming on mental well-being in Japan 2020–2022. Nat Hum Behav (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01948-y

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/rust-in-linux-lead-retires-rather-than-deal-with-more-nontechnical-nonsense/

The Linux kernel is not a place to work if you're not ready for some, shall we say, spirited argument. Still, one key developer in the project to expand Rust's place inside the largely C-based kernel feels the "nontechnical nonsense" is too much, so he's retiring.

Wedson Almeida Filho, a leader in the Rust for Linux project, wrote to the Linux kernel mailing list last week to remove himself as the project's maintainer. "After almost 4 years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it's best to leave it up to those who still have it in them," Filho wrote.
[...]
Filho also left a "sample for context," a link to a moment during a Linux conference talk in which an off-camera voice, identified by Filho in a Register interview as kernel maintainer Ted Ts'o, emphatically interjects: "Here's the thing: you're not going to force all of us to learn Rust." In the context of Filho's request that Linux's file system implement Rust bindings, Ts'o says that while he knows he must fix all the C code for any change he makes, he cannot or will not fix the Rust bindings that may be affected.
[...]
Drew DeVault, founder of SourceHut, blogged for a second time about Rust's attempts to find a place inside the Kernel. In theory the kernel should welcome enthusiastic input from motivated newcomers. "In practice, the Linux community is the wild wild west, and sweeping changes are infamously difficult to achieve consensus on, and this is by far the broadest sweeping change ever proposed for the project," DeVault writes.
[...]
Rather than test their patience with the kernel's politics, DeVault suggests Rust developers build a Linux-compatible kernel from scratch. "Freeing yourselves of the [Linux Kernel Mailing List] political battles would probably be a big win for the ambitions of bringing Rust into kernel space," DeVault writes.
[...]
Linus Torvalds [...] took a "wait and see" approach in 2021, hoping Rust would first make itself known in relatively isolated device drivers. At an appearance late last month, Torvalds... essentially agreed with the Rust-minded developer complaints, albeit from a much greater remove.

"I was expecting [Rust] updates to be faster, but part of the problem is that old-time kernel developers are used to C and don't know Rust," Torvalds said. "They're not exactly excited about having to learn a new language that is, in some respects, very different. So there's been some pushback on Rust." Torvalds added, however, that "another reason has been the Rust infrastructure itself has not been super stable."

Original Submission

Frosty Piss writes:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91174361/kim-dotcom-loses-12-year-battle-halt-deportation-u-s

Kim Dotcom, founder of the once wildly popular file-sharing website Megaupload, lost a 12-year fight this week to halt his deportation from New Zealand to the U.S. on charges of copyright infringement, money laundering and racketeering.

According to New Zealand's Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith, the date for the extradition was not set, and Goldsmith said Dotcom would be allowed "a short period of time to consider and take advice" on the decision. "Don't worry I have a plan," Dotcom posted on X this week.

The saga stretches to the 2012 arrest of Dotcom in a dramatic raid on his Auckland mansion, along with other company officers. Prosecutors said Megaupload raked in at least $175 million — mainly from people who used the site to illegally download songs, television shows and movies — before the FBI shut it down earlier that year.

Dotcom has fought the order for years — lambasting the investigation and arrests — but in 2021 New Zealand's Supreme Court ruled that Dotcom and two other men could be extradited. It remained up to the country's Justice Minister to decide if the extradition should proceed.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Study finds people are consistently and confidently wrong about those with opposing views:

Despite being highly confident that they can understand the minds of people with opposing viewpoints, the assumptions humans make about others are often wrong, according to new research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London, in partnership with the University of Oxford.

"Poorer representation of minds underpins less accurate mental state inference for out-groups" was published in Scientific Reports. The research explores the psychology behind why people come to the wrong conclusions about others, and suggests how society could start to change that.

In all, 256 participants were recruited from the U.S. and split evenly between those with left- and right-leaning political views. They were presented with various political statements (e.g. Immigrants are beneficial to society) and asked to rate on a 5-point scale how much they agreed with it (i.e. strongly agree to strongly disagree).

For each statement, the participant would then be presented with someone else's response to the same statement. If the two shared a similar opinion, they were deemed "in-group" to one another. If the two held different opinions, they were deemed "out-group" to each other.

The participant was then asked to predict the other person's response on a second statement (e.g. all women should have access to legal abortion), and to state their confidence in their answer, from "Not at all' to "Extremely."

Participants could then choose to receive up to five more of the other person's responses to different statements to help the participant build up a better idea—or "representation"—of the other person's mind. After receiving any further information, participants could update their initial prediction and reclarify their confidence on their final answer.

Analysis of the data found that, even though participants were prepared to seek out as much—and often more—information about someone they disagreed with, their predictions were consistently incorrect, even after receiving further information about them.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

CrowdStrike's major meltdown a month ago doesn't look like affecting the cyber security vendor's market dominance anytime soon, based on its earnings reported Wednesday.

CrowdStrike's faulty Falcon sensor update in July bricked 8.5 million Windows machines, grounding thousands of flights worldwide, delaying medical services and downing some US states' 911 emergency services. Nonetheless, it reported better-than-expected revenue for the second quarter of fiscal year 2025.

[...] Moving forward, these new customers signing CrowdStrike contracts will be key to watch – and a good indicator if the July 19 fiasco will have any lasting impact on the security vendor, said IDC Group VP of security and trust Frank Dickson.

"When you look at the impact, the only think you're really going to be able to impact is new consideration, new customers evaluating security vendors," Dickson told The Register. "Net-new companies may look at this and say 'I don't know.' But that isn't going to start showing its head in the earnings for another quarter or two."

Existing customers – especially those who have gone all in with CrowdStrike's security products – aren't likely to go anywhere, despite any lingering frustrations about the flawed update.

CrowdStrike, along with some of its competitors, calls its separate products "modules," and all 28 of CrowdStrike's modules connect to its central Falcon platform.

[...] This is where CrowdStrike finds the bulk of its business. "If you only have one service from CrowdStrike, it's a lot easier to cancel," Dickson explained. "If you are a company with four, five, and six modules, it's going to be a lot harder to change. If you were so angry at CrowdStrike that you wanted to rip and replace everything, that's a herculean effort."