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owl writes:

https://kevinlynagh.com/calipertron/

Have you ever wished for a 500 Hz, millimeter-precise linear position sensing system? Well you're in luck — all you need is some circuit board, a basic microcontroller, and a wee bit of maths!

Why make calipers?

Electronic calipers are awesome. This $30 pair has served me well for years, reading far more precision than my skills justify:

Such calipers work via capacitive coupling between a PCB on the powered slidey display and a passive PCB "scale" in the stationary spine.

Back in March, I idly wondered if the same working principle could be used for a cheap and cheerful "maker-friendly" positioning system. E.g., slide some passive PCB scales into an aluminum extrusion rail, add a capacitive pickup to the bottom of whatever carriage you've got riding along, and tada — you've got sub-mm closed-loop positioning. All for the cost of some PCB, a few GPIO pins, and some firmware (so free, basically).

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Intel was sued in a federal court in San Jose, California, on Tuesday, based on claims that the chipmaker's 13th and 14th generation desktop processors from 2022 and 2023 are defective.

The plaintiff, Mark Vanvalkenburgh of Orchard Park, New York, purchased an Intel Core i7-13700K from Best Buy in January 2023, according to the complaint [PDF].

"After purchasing the product, Plaintiff learned that the processor was defective, unstable, and crashing at high rates," the complaint claims. "The processor caused issues in his computer, including random screen blackouts and random computer restarts. These issues were not resolved even after he attempted to install a patch issued by Intel for its 13th Generation processors."

The potential class-action lawsuit cites various media reports and social media posts dating back to December 2022 that describe problems with Intel's 13th and 14th generation processors, known as Raptor Lake. These reports document unexplained failures and system instability, as well as a higher-than-expected rate of product returns.

"By late 2022 or early 2023, Intel knew of the defect," the complaint says. "Intel’s Products undergo pre-release and post-release testing. Through these tests, Intel became aware of the defect in the processors."

And because Intel continued making marketing claims touting the speed and performance of its products, with no mention of any defect, the complaint alleges that Intel committed fraud by omission, breached implied warranty, and violated New York General Business Law.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The climate impact of flights taken by the super-rich rose sharply from 2019 to 2023, fuelling calls for a carbon tax on private aviation

Flights taken on private jets should be subject to a carbon tax to curb the runaway growth in carbon emissions from the sector, researchers have said.

Emissions from private aviation jumped 46 per cent between 2019 and 2023, according to analysis of 18.7 million flights by almost 26,000 aircraft.

Flights were mainly for leisure reasons, with 1846 private flights to the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar alone. Other popular destinations were the Cannes Film Festival, the Super Bowl, the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, and the World Economic Forum in Davos. Trips to the south of France, Ibiza and other destinations in Spain peaked during the summer months as travellers jetted in for long weekends of sun.

“A rather small group of very wealthy individuals, because of their lifestyles and investments, is pushing emissions quite quickly up,” says Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University, Sweden.

Alongside colleagues, Gössling used flight tracker data for millions of flights to build a picture of private aviation use around the world.

Flying by private jet is the most polluting way to travel, with a single flight emitting 3.6 tonnes of CO2 on average, equivalent to the annual carbon impact of someone living in Sweden.

Most flights on private jets are short, the analysis found, with almost half of all flights covering a distance less than 500 kilometres. Most were within the US and Europe.

Total emissions from private jets in 2023 were 15.6 megatonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the annual emissions of Tanzania. That is up from 10.7 megatonnes in 2019.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A relatively tiny code change by penguin premier Linus Torvalds is making a measurable improvement to Linux's multithreaded performance.

The code commit has the catchy name of x86/uaccess: Avoid barrier_nospec() in 64-bit copy_from_user() and it's a security tweak intended to counter the types of security holes known as Meltdown flaws and Spectre attacks when they became public in 2018. Unfortunately, these problems haven't gone away. As The Register covered just last month, this type of attack remains current.

The patch is a rewrite of one originally submitted by Red Hat developer Josh Poimboeuf, which Torvalds revised to make faster. "The kernel test robot reports a 2.6 percent improvement in the per_thread_ops benchmark," he wrote in the commit.

Torvalds's version avoids using the barrier_nospec() API, which prevents speculative execution of some machine code. Speculative execution is a feature of modern CPUs that use branch prediction to try to predict what program code will be run before it's needed, so it can be run and the results cached in advance. If the prediction is correct, it saves time; if it isn't, the results are discarded. The snag is that this opens up a particular form of security issue, which boffins have been working on ever since.

Instead, where the copy_from_user() call wouldn't be allowed because of an invalid address, it uses pointer masking to return an address of all 1s.

Defending against these sorts of attacks is a necessary evil. Running web servers and the like is a primary usage of Linux, and such boxes must be locked down against every conceivable attack – even at the cost of disabling performance-enhancing features. It makes servers safer but slower. Torvalds is known for disapproving of such performance-killing measures (to put it mildly).

upstart writes:

AOL's 'You've Got Mail' voice, Elwood Edwards, dies at age 74:

Elwood Edwards, the voice of AOL's "You've Got Mail" greeting, has died at age 74 after a long illness, according to local Ohio news station WKYC, where he was employed for many years.

During a 2016 interview, Edwards recounted how he became the voice of AOL. His wife, who worked at Quantum Computer Services (which later became AOL), heard that the company was looking to add a voice to its software. "I'd been an announcer throughout my entire broadcasting career, and she volunteered me," Edwards said.

In 1989, Edwards recorded the once-ubiquitous phrase, along with "Welcome," "Files done," and "Goodbye" on a cassette tape for just $200. "It started off as a test just to see if it would catch on, and lo and behold, in the mid-90s, it had really caught on."

Since then, Edwards has made appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and an episode of The Simpsons. He was even spotted as an Uber driver.

As a longtime AOL user (yes, I still use AOL to this day), I'm ashamed to admit that I never knew there was a person behind that iconic voice — I thought it was computer-generated. Even now, Edwards' voice will continue to live on in my inbox, which still declares, "You've Got Mail."

Any other long-term AOL users here? What is the oldest bit of software that you use on a regular basis?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Administrators are reporting unexpected appearances of Windows Server 2025 after what was published as a security update turned out to be a complete operating system upgrade.

The problem was flagged by a customer of web app security biz Heimdal. Arriving at the office on the morning of November 5, they found, to their horror, that every Windows Server 2022 system had either upgraded itself to Windows Server 2025 or was about to.

Sysadmins are cautious by nature, so an unplanned operating system upgrade could easily result in morning coffee being sprayed over a keyboard.

Heimdal's services include patch management, and it relies on Microsoft to label patches accurately to ensure the correct update is applied to the correct software at the correct time. In this instance, what should have been a security update turned out to be Windows Server 2025.

It took Heimdal a while to trace the problem. According to a post on Reddit: "Due to the limited initial footprint, identifying the root cause took some time. By 18:05 UTC, we traced the issue to the Windows Update API, where Microsoft had mistakenly labeled the Windows Server 2025 upgrade as KB5044284."

It added: "Our team discovered this discrepancy in our patching repository, as the GUID for the Windows Server 2025 upgrade does not match the usual entries for KB5044284 associated with Windows 11. This appears to be an error on Microsoft's side, affecting both the speed of release and the classification of the update. After cross-checking with Microsoft's KB repository, we confirmed that the KB number indeed references Windows 11, not Windows Server 2025."

As of last night, Heimdal estimated that the unexpected upgrade had affected 7 percent of customers – it said it had blocked KB5044284 across all server group policies. However, this is of little comfort to administrators finding themselves receiving an unexpected upgrade.

Since rolling back to the previous configuration will present a challenge, affected users will be faced with finding out just how effective their backup strategy is or paying for the required license and dealing with all the changes that come with Windows Server 2025.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Don't get 'river-crabbed!'

An online blogger in China recently asked: how do you clean a flask? But the Mandarin word for flask is xi-jing-ping, which sounds like the name of China's leader, Xi Jin Ping. Government censors suspected the writer was really asking, "How do you get rid the president of China?" They took down the query.

If someone online in China refers to President Xi as a "paratrooper," they may not be hailing him as rugged and resourceful. Paratrooper in Mandarin is san bing, which sounds much like the word for "idiot."

China's Cyberspace Administration and Ministry of Education has begun what they call the Clear and Bright Campaign to prune the web in China of what they consider "irregular and uncivilized language."

The language bureaucrats aren't just watching for criticism of President Xi, mentions of the Tiananmen Square massacre, or demonstrations in Hong Kong. They want to extinguish the seemingly innocuous phrases many Chinese have ingenuously appropriated to express dissent.

[...] When a Chinese censor finds an "irregular" phrase, they eliminate it, but call it "harmonizing". He-xie, the Mandarin word for harmony, sounds like the word for river crab, and so people who have been censored report they have been "river-crabbed."

Then there's Cao Ni Ma, the Mandarin name for the mythical grass mud horse. It sounds similar to a phrase that is so profane, I can't even hint at it. The Mandarin phrase for "cover your middle parts", dang zhong yang, sounds close to the name of the Chinese Party Central Committee. And so the artist Ai Weiwei created a music video in which voices sing out, "Grass mud horse and cover your middle part!" in "Gangnam Style," and, "Grass mud horse and river crab!"

Wen'guang Huang says the video can't be seen in China, of course. But people there have heard about it, and might hum it in hushed tones. The tune is catchy and appealing — like free speech.

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

Ars Technica has a piece about briefs filed by big telecoms AT&T and Verizon claimng that the FCC doesn't have the authority to fine them for selling customer data without consent.

From the article:

Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are continuing their fight against fines for selling user location data, with two of the big three carriers submitting new court briefs arguing that the Federal Communications Commission can't punish them.

A Verizon brief[PDF] filed on November 4 and an AT&T brief[PDF] on November 1 contest the legal basis for the FCC fines issued in April 2024. T-Mobile also sued the FCC, but briefs haven't been filed yet in that case.

"Verizon's petition for review stems from the multiple and significant errors that the FCC, in purporting to enforce statutory consumer data privacy provisions, made in overstepping its authority," Verizon wrote. "The FCC's Forfeiture Order violated both the Communications Act and the Constitution, while failing to benefit the consumers it purported to protect."

Verizon and AT&T both said the fines violate their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial, and that the location data doesn't fall under the law cited by the FCC. Verizon appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, while AT&T appealed in the 5th Circuit and T-Mobile appealed in the DC Circuit.

The fines are $80.1 million for T-Mobile, $57.3 million for AT&T, $46.9 million for Verizon, and $12.2 million for T-Mobile subsidiary Sprint. The penalties relate to the 2018 revelation of real-time location data being shared. The FCC proposed the fines in 2020, when the commission had a Republican majority, and the fines were finalized under the current Democratic majority.

So what say you, Soylentils? Are AT&T and Verizon correct in saying that the FCC has no authority to levy fines? Is selling your location data without your consent ethical/legal? If you answer 'no' to both, who does have such authority? If you answer 'yes' to both, why? If you mix 'yes' and 'no', why?

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/533118/german-receives-1700-identical-letters-from-taxman

Most people dread a letter from the tax office. So spare a thought for the German man who got 1700 of them.

In an administrative meltdown worthy of a Franz Kafka novel, the mountain of tax correspondence arrived at his front door in 10 boxes, a local newspaper reported.

Germany's finance ministry apologised on Wednesday for the "technical error" that threw the man from Quickborn in northern Germany.

"The finance ministry has contacted the taxpayer and apologised," said a ministry spokeswoman.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The two cases, involving three individuals each, were the first time the DoJ issued charges connected to an ongoing investigation involving IT manufacturers, distributors and resellers and their deals with the federal government. The Department of Defense is among the agencies allegedly ripped off by the two groups of fraudsters, the DoJ noted, as were unspecified parts of the intelligence community. 

[...] The first group, led by Maryland resident Victor Marquez, allegedly conspired to rig bids by using insider information "to craft bids at artificially determined, non-competitive and non-independent prices, ensuring Marquez's company would win the procurement," the DoJ said. 

Marquez was charged [PDF] in a four-count indictment with wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud and major fraud, for which he's facing up to 70 years in prison, with his co-conspirators charged with similar offenses. 

In the other group, Breal L. Madison Jr. was hit with a 13-count indictment [PDF], and his co-conspirators with lesser charges, "for orchestrating a years-long scheme to defraud his employer and the United States out of over $7 million in connection with the sale of IT products to various government agencies." 

Madison reportedly used the stolen funds to purchase luxury items, including a yacht and Lamborghini Huracan, which the government plans to seize if he's convicted. Facing charges of conspiracy, bribery, mail fraud and money laundering, Madison faces up to 185 years in prison if convicted. 

[...] Human Security's Satori threat research team has disrupted an ecommerce fraud ring they say has been in operation for five years, infecting more than a thousand websites and raking in tens of millions of dollars from hundreds of thousands of victims in the process.

Victims who buy products are presented with a legitimate payment processor page, so the transaction is technically real - but there's no product, and nothing ever shows up. 

Satori said it managed to get the fake listings it discovered pulled from Google SERPs, and victimized payment processors have banned Phish 'n' Ships operators from their platforms, but it's probably not safe yet. 

"It's unlikely the threat actors will pull the plug on their work without trying to find a new way to perpetuate their fraud," Satori said. 

Rule of thumb: If a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/since-the-60s-ford-has-stored-cars-underground-in-a-kansas-city-cave/

You may have seen a photo floating around the Internet that depicts a gaggle of Mavericks—not the pickup, but the econo-coupe that preceded it—lurking in what appears to be some type of natural cave. Dig a little deeper, and you might even stumble across a sentence or two explaining that these unlikely spelunkers represent overstock stuffed by Ford into a subterranean system carved deep beneath the bedrock of Missouri.

The image might seem an oddball anachronism, some kind of temporary solution to overflowing dealer lots that somehow made sense in the 1970s. Would it surprise you to find out that Ford is actually entering its seventh decade of keeping cars in said caves, which are part of a vast business complex called SubTropolis?

...

Although Hunt Midwest works with other automotive partners at SubTropolis, Ford is truly the anchor tenant. With its Kansas City plant still building the F-150 pickup (as it has since 1957), and another nearby Missouri facility churning out the Transit van, the company's underground presence has grown alongside both of those product lines.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The densely populated island state is moving from what it calls Electric Road Pricing (ERP) 1.0 to ERP 2.0. The first version used gantries – or automatic tolls – to charge drivers a fee through an in-car device when they used specific roadways during certain hours.

ERP 2.0 sees the vehicle instead tracked through GPS, which can tell where a vehicle is at all operating times.

"ERP 2.0 will provide more comprehensive aggregated traffic information and will be able to operate without physical gantries. We will be able to introduce new 'virtual gantries,' which allow for more flexible and responsive congestion management," explained the LTA.

But the island's government doesn't just control inflow into urban areas through toll-like charging – it also aggressively controls the total number of cars operating within its borders.

Singapore requires vehicle owners to bid for a set number of Certificates of Entitlement – costly operating permits valid for only ten years. The result is an increase of around SG$100,000 ($75,500) every ten years, depending on that year's COE price, on top of a car's usual price. The high total price disincentivizes mass car ownership, which helps the government manage traffic and emissions.

Between ERP 2.0, a plan to one day charge based on distance instead of per gantry entry, improvements in mass transit links, and “evolving” traffic patterns sparked by an increase in flexible work arrangements, Singapore reckons it can handle the extra traffic from 20,000 cars.

Original Submission

quietus writes:

"The Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact as we accelerate our work to ensure a more open and equitable technical future for us all. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward."

Mozilla Foundation is laying off 30% of its remaining (estimated) 120 employees, due to "a relentless onslaught of change". The firings mean the end for 2 divisions within Mozilla Foundation: global programs (outreach to LGBTQ+ and so on) and advocacy. The 5 person advocacy division handled issues around privacy, security, algorithms and ad policies on the web, shin kicking android, youtube, tiktok, facebook, slack, hulu and assorted others.

According to the February appointed CEO of the Mozilla Foundation,

"Navigating this topsy-turvy, distracting time requires laser focus — and sometimes saying goodbye to the excellent work that has gotten us this far because it won't get us to the next peak. Lofty goals demand hard choices."

See also: submitted by RamiK Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division - TechCrunch

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Some 6,500 light-years from Earth lurks a zombie star cloaked in long tendrils of hot sulfur.

Nobody knows how those tendrils formed. But astronomers now know where they’re going. New observations, reported in the Nov. 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters, capture the 3-D structure and motion of debris left in the wake of a supernova that was seen to detonate almost 900 years ago.

“It’s a piece of the puzzle towards understanding this very bizarre [supernova] remnant,” says astronomer Tim Cunningham of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

The supernova was first recorded in 1181 as a “guest star” by astronomers in ancient China and Japan (SN: 4/17/02). Astronomers didn’t find the remains of that explosion, now called the Pa 30 nebula, until 2013.

And when they did find the remnant, it looked weird. The supernova appeared to be a kind called type 1a, wherein a white dwarf star detonates, destroying itself in the process (SN: 3/23/16). But in this case, part of the star survived.

Stranger still, the star was surrounded by spiky filaments stretching about three light-years in all directions. “This is really unique,” Cunningham says. “There’s no other supernova nebula that shows filaments like this.”

[...] Researchers still aren’t sure how the filaments formed, or how they’ve maintained their straight-line shapes for centuries. One possibility is that a shock wave from the explosion ricocheted off the diffuse material between stars and bounced back toward the white dwarf. That wave could have sculpted the material into the spikes astronomers see. Future theoretical studies using the new observations might help solve the puzzle.

The study did show that this remnant is almost definitely from the guest star of 1181. Taking the speeds and positions of the filaments and tracing them backward show they all emanated from the same point around the year 1152, give or take 75 years.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Southampton team developed a "nervous system" for drones using optical fibers to continuously monitor strains and stresses, similar to how nerves relay information in the human body. Unlike traditional electrical monitoring, this system uses light signals, which helps avoid the interference issues common in electronic setups.

The monitoring system works through a technique called "optical speckle," where specific images are projected based on detected strains and stresses. AI algorithms then analyze these patterns to assess potential damage, alerting crews when issues arise.

Initial test flights integrating the nervous system on an undergraduate drone project were promising. According to an aerospace student leading the project, the live data showed that fiber optic technology could significantly extend flight duration by reducing the need for manual inspections.

"The drone was first developed to deliver life-saving equipment like defibrillators in emergencies, but it's served as an excellent test platform for the optical fiber nervous system. What really excited us was seeing the live data from the fiber system. It showed that the technology could keep drones operational longer without extensive ground crews," said aerospace engineering graduate Toby King-Cline, who led the student team.

The researchers believe their self-monitoring system holds immense potential across industries. They aim to commercialize the technology as early as 2025.

Drones capable of continuously assessing their own structural integrity could prove invaluable for applications such as cargo transport, emergency response deliveries, and other sectors that would benefit from extended flight times without frequent landing requirements.

Although initial testing was conducted on a small student drone, these smaller drones don't typically need full inspections between flights. The technology would likely be most beneficial for larger cargo drones that endure greater operational stress.

Original Submission