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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

While the majority of the bill was allowed to proceed, two elements were blocked over concerns that they may infringe tech companies’ First Amendment rights.

A US district judge has blocked the state of California from enforcing parts of a bill aimed at safeguarding children and teenagers from social media, following a lawsuit filed by tech lobbying group NetChoice.

Senate Bill 976, also known as the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, was initially passed in September of last year and prevents social media companies from purposely providing an addictive content feed to minors without the consent of their parents.

While judge Edward J Davila denied NetChoice’s motion for an injunction to stop the law in its entirety – thus allowing most elements of the bill to come into effect – he did block some elements of the bill from proceeding after finding they may infringe tech companies’ First Amendment rights.

Specifically, he blocked two elements of the bill: one that proposed restrictions on night-time notifications for minors and another that compelled social media companies to disclose the number of minors using their platforms.

upstart writes:

Once you get over the ick factor, new technologies are efficiently transforming human waste into agricultural solutions:

This system, called Varcor, was designed by the Seattle engineering firm Sedron Technologies and is owned by the San Francisco–based company Generate Upcycle. Wastewater treatment plants across the country are using high heat, composting, and devices akin to pressure cookers to transform leftover biomass into rich fertilizers, mulches, and other soil additives with names like Bloom and TAGRO (short for "Tacoma Grow"). Some process the wastewater in a separate step to extract phosphorus—an essential plant nutrient and a common element in the human diet—and layer it to form round pellets, in a technique a bit like building pearls. This technology, developed by a St. Louis–based company called Ostara, creates a slow-release fertilizer that can be sold back to farmers.

"We love tackling the yuck factor head-on," says the CEO of Epic Cleantec, which transforms wastewater into clean water and a natural soil additive.

Even portable toilets can be vehicles for nutrient recovery, through nitrogen-capturing methods developed by "peecycling" groups like the Rich Earth Institute and Wasted in Vermont and by Sanitation360 AB in Sweden. Because our protein-rich diets contain abundant nitrogen, the element can be readily recycled from both urine and feces.

Making fertilizer from the nutrients that we and other animals excrete has a long and colorful history; for generations it helped Indigenous cultures around the world create exceptionally fertile soil. These systems fell out of favor in Western culture, but researchers and engineers have joined advocates in reframing feces, urine, and their ingredients as invaluable natural resources to reuse instead of waste products to burn or bury. Several companies are now showing how to safely scale up the transformation with energy-efficient technologies. "We love tackling the yuck factor head-on," says Aaron Tartakovsky, cofounder and CEO of Epic Cleantec, which uses a chemical reaction and heat to transform wastewater into clean water and a natural soil additive.

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/good-thinking/indent-data-storage/

Cuneiform, the world's oldest form of writing, involved making indentations in clay tablets. Scientists have now developed a data storage system that's like cuneiform on steroids – and it's capable of storing more data than a typical hard disc drive.

The experimental new technology was created by Abigail Mann and colleagues at Australia's Flinders University.

Instead of a clay tablet, the system utilizes an inexpensive polymer film composed of sulfur and a chemical compound known as dicyclopentadiene. Data is stored on that film in the form of a series of nanoscale indentations. These tiny indents are made (and read) using a fine-tip probe mounted on an atomic force microscope ... not by a reed stylus.

In previous attempts at such "indent-based" data storage systems, the indents served as binary code. The presence of an indent represented a 1, while the absence of an indent represented a 0.

Not only were the polymer substrates that were used in these earlier systems difficult to produce, they also weren't very stable or finely workable. That's where the Flinders polymer comes in.

It's sensitive enough that the depth of each indent can be precisely tweaked. As a result, instead of data being stored via two-state binary code, it can be stored via a three-state ternary code in which the absence of an indent is a 0, a 0.3- to 1.0-nanometer-deep indent is a 1, and a 1.5- to 2.5-nanometer-deep indent is a 2.

This capability boosts the system's data density four-fold over binary coding.

What's more, the indents remain intact and readable until the polymer is heated to 140 ºC (284 ºF) for just 10 seconds, thus erasing it. The film can then be rewritten with new data. In tests performed so far, the material remained functional through four write-read-erase-rewrite cycles.

As an added bonus, the indent-writing process can be performed at room temperature, keeping the system's energy requirements relatively low.

"This research unlocks the potential for using simple, renewable polysulfides in probe-based mechanical data storage, offering a potential lower-energy, higher density and more sustainable alternative to current technologies," says Mann, who is a PhD student in Flinders' College of Science and Engineering.

Journal Reference: Probe-Based Mechanical Data Storage on Polymers Made by Inverse Vulcanization, Abigail K. Mann, Samuel J. Tonkin, Pankaj Sharma, et al., First published: 16 December 2024 https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202409438

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Dark energy does not exist, some scientists have claimed – which could help get rid of one of the universe's biggest mysteries.

For a century, scientists have thought that the universe was expanding in all directions. To make that assumption work, astronomers have used the concept of dark energy.

Dark energy cannot be seen directly and has never been proven. But scientists have suggested that it must exist because of the effect is seemingly exerts on the universe and as it is needed to help resolve some fundamental problems in our understanding of the cosmos.

Now, however, researchers from the University of Canterbury say that the universe is not actually expanding equally in all directions. Instead, it is growing in a "lumpier" way, in more varied directions.

[...] "Dark energy is a misidentification of variations in the kinetic energy of expansion, which is not uniform in a Universe as lumpy as the one we actually live in.

[Source]: The Independent

[Abstract]: Supernovae evidence for foundational change to cosmological models

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

This basement seismometer is relatively compact yet still sensitive enough to detect the low-frequency vibrations from distant earthquakes.

In September of 2023, I wrote in these pages about using a Raspberry Pi–based seismometer—a Raspberry Shake—to record earthquakes. But as time went by, I found the results disappointing. In retrospect, I realize that my creation was struggling to overcome a fundamental hurdle.

I live on the tectonically stable U.S. East Coast, so the only earthquakes I could hope to detect would be ones taking place far away. Unfortunately, the signals from distant quakes have relatively low vibrational frequencies, and the compact geophone sensor in a Raspberry Shake is meant for higher frequencies.

I had initially considered other sorts of DIY seismometers, and I was put off by how large and ungainly they were. But my disappointment with the Raspberry Shake drove me to construct a seismometer that represents a good compromise: It’s not so large (about 60 centimeters across), and its resonant frequency (about 0.2 Hertz) is low enough to make it better at sensing distant earthquakes.

My new design is for a horizontal-pendulum seismometer, which contains a pendulum that swings horizontally—or almost so, being inclined just a smidge. Think of a fence gate with its two hinges not quite aligned vertically. It has a stable position in the middle, but when it’s nudged, the restoring force is very weak, so the gate makes slow oscillations back and forth.

[...] Most DIY seismometers use a magnet and coil to sense motion as the moving magnet induces a current in the fixed coil. That’s a tricky proposition in a long-period seismometer, because the relative motion of the magnet is so slow that only very faint electrical signals are induced in the coil. One of the more sophisticated designs I saw online called for an LVDT (linear variable differential transformer), but such devices seem hard to come by. Instead, I adopted a strategy I hadn’t seen used in any other homebrewed seismometer: employing a Hall-effect magnetometer to sense position. All I needed was a small neodymium magnet attached to the boom and an inexpensive Hall-effect sensor board positioned beneath it. It worked just great.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Because of the increasing number of undersea cable disruptions happening in the past couple of years, NATO is building on a system that will locate damage to undersea cables with an accuracy of one meter and find more routes that data can take if a disruption does occur in a particular line. This project will be called HEIST, says the IEEE in a report, which stands for Hybrid Space-Submarine Architecture Ensuring Infosec of Telecommunications.

The value of transactions transmitted through undersea cables exceeds $10 trillion in total, with Henric Johnson, the vice-chancellor of Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) and HEIST testbed coordinator, saying, “What we’re talking about now is critical infrastructure in the society.” BTH, located in Karlskrona, near the southern coast of Sweden, is one of the partners in the HEIST program. Engineers will work there to develop smart systems that allow cable breaks to be quickly located and develop protocols to quickly and automatically reroute the affected data to satellites.

“We have had incidents of cables that have been sabotaged between Sweden, Estonia, and Finland,” added Johnson. “So those incidents are, for us, a reality.”

Although it may seem that undersea cables are tough infrastructure because of the environment they’re in, these intercontinental connections are very fragile. That’s because these cables, about the thickness of a garden hose, lie on the seafloor instead of being buried underneath. Anything dragging on the ocean floor—a sea creature, a loose anchor, or a submarine—could easily damage or even sever these communications cables.

This shows how fragile our internet-driven world is, especially given that over 95% of global data traffic is carried through these undersea fiber optics. About a hundred cable cuts happen each year, with about 600 undersea cables globally, meaning that about 16% of global connections are down yearly. Although there are specially designed ships stationed worldwide to repair faults as soon as they happen, these often take days or weeks and could cost millions of dollars.

ElizabethGreene writes:

Eric Raymond has a lovely essay here: http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/ that describes some non-intuitive behavior in how compilers assemble structures in memory. The default is to pad structures out with empty bytes to align data types around arbitrary byte boundaries for similarly non-intuitive reasons.

If you don't immediately understand why this struct is 12 or 16 bytes long, it's worth reading.

struct Foo {
  char *p; /* 4 or 8 bytes */
  char c; /* 1 byte */
  int x; /* 4 bytes */
}

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) discovered anchor drag marks on the seabed after mapping it from start to finish. However, Finnish news outlet Helsingin Sanomat reports that the authorities are still looking for the anchor that caused the damage. NBI Detective Chief Inspector Sami Paila says, “So far, a possible anchor detachment point has not been confirmed.”

The investigation focuses on the Eagle S, suspected of dragging its anchor on Christmas Day to cut the Estlink 2 power cable and several other internet and communications cables connecting Finland and Estonia. Authorities have already boarded the ship, but its anchor is reportedly missing. The authorities then sailed the Eagle S into Finland's territorial waters. They moved it to an even more secure anchorage in Svartbäck to facilitate the investigation, with other ships restricted from approaching the ship to maintain security. Its crew has also remained aboard for further questioning, with Finnish Customs authorities also looking into its cargo.

“The vessel’s captain and crew have remained on board and active during the move [from its original stopping point]. Once anchored, we will resume investigative procedures, focusing on whether this ship caused the damage,” said Helsinki Police Superintendent Heikki Porola to Finland’s national broadcasting company Yle.

The investigators discovered anchor drag marks on the seabed just a day after moving the ship. “East of that point, there are several tens of kilometers [of dragging], if we are not talking about almost a hundred kilometers,” says Paila. He added, “The track ends where the ship lifted the anchor chain.”

Because of this, Finland is adding aggravated telecommunications interference to the charges against the Eagle S and its crew. This is in addition to the initial aggravated arson charge and the aggravated regulation offense that Finland customs is investigating regarding the oil cargo it carries.

Sources say the Eagle S is part of Russia’s “shadow fleet,” a collection of poorly maintained ships with murky ownership and registration that the country uses to circumvent sanctions and smuggle its oil exports despite the embargoes.

This is the second such incident in the last two months. In mid-November, a Chinese vessel, Yi Peng 3, is suspected of cutting undersea cables connecting Lithuania to Sweden and Germany to Finland. Underwater cameras also revealed drag marks that coincided with the vessel's maneuvers, further proving that it dragged its anchor to cause the damage.

Related:
    • Undersea Power Cable Connecting Finland And Estonia Experiences Outage Capacity Reduced To 35%
    • Chinese Ship's Crew Suspected of Deliberately Dragging Anchor for 100 Miles to Cut Baltic Cables

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

According to a letter from the U.S. Treasury Department to lawmakers revealed on Monday, Dec. 30, Chinese-backed hackers successfully infiltrated the department’s systems and stole government documents this month.

The breach, first reported by Reuters, highlights yet another instance of state-sponsored cyber espionage targeting U.S. government employees — just moments after AT&T and Verizon finally dealt with Salt Typhoon. In a statement to Senator Sherrod Brown, chair of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, the Treasury confirmed that the attack occurred in December.

In the letter, the department states that the breach was flagged by a third-party cybersecurity vendor, BeyondTrust, which discovered that the attackers had compromised a key used to secure a cloud-based service. That service was integral to providing remote technical support to end users within the department's offices.

"With access to the stolen key, the threat actor was able [to] override the service’s security, remotely access certain Treasury DO user workstations, and access certain unclassified documents maintained by those users," the letter reads.

The Treasury revealed it was alerted to the breach on Dec. 8 and is collaborating with the FBI and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to evaluate the scope of the incident. Reuters reports that the FBI has yet to respond to requests for comment, while CISA redirected inquiries back to the Treasury.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/indiana-bakery-still-using-commodore-64s-originally-released-in-1982-as-point-of-sale-terminals

These things pop up every now and then. The last one I recall now was some car-autorepair-shop in Poland that still used one for some function.

Indiana bakery still using Commodore 64s originally released in 1982 as cash registers — Hilligoss Bakery in Brownsburg sticks to the BASICs

While this may seem questionable— particularly in an era where it seems that nearly all business customers are being pushed to regularly upgrade their PCs— it's actually quite sensible when you consider the processing power required to do Point of Sale transactions, which isn't very much. Even for its age,

It's a very sturdy machine in that regard. You get a large keyboard. There are very few things that can actually break. A lot of them can also break and the machine will still work, just not those things. You could just remove a bunch of chips and still have a working machine -- if you don't [need] sound and a few peripherals. They are not essential in that regard.

Overall, we can't help but appreciate the prudence of Hilligoss Bakery here by not opting for unneeded hardware upgrades when what they have already works. Why create e-waste and spend money you don't have to when your existing retro hardware not only works fine but gives customers something to talk about? Seems like a win-win.

I somehow doubt they do it cause they don't want to create e-waste. That said if they have their own built system running on them they could just start to get "TheC64Mini" as replacement hardware.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The research, led by Geoffrey Ellis, a petroleum geochemist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has been published in the journal Science Advances. It suggests that tapping into just a fraction of this hydrogen could have far-reaching implications for the world's energy future.

"Just 2% of the hydrogen stocks found in the study, equivalent to 124 billion tons of gas, would supply all the hydrogen we need to get to net-zero [carbon] for a couple hundred years," Ellis told LiveScience. This amount of hydrogen contains roughly twice the energy stored in all known natural gas reserves on Earth.

Hydrogen, a clean energy carrier, has diverse applications, ranging from fueling vehicles to powering industrial processes and generating electricity. As global efforts to combat climate change intensify, hydrogen is projected to play an increasingly significant role, potentially accounting for up to 30% of future energy supply in some sectors.

The study's findings challenge long-held beliefs about hydrogen's behavior underground. "The paradigm throughout my entire career was that hydrogen's out there, it occurs, but it's a very small molecule, so it easily escapes through small pores and cracks and rocks," Ellis said. However, recent discoveries of substantial hydrogen caches in West Africa and an Albanian chromium mine have shifted this perspective.

To estimate the global hydrogen reserves, Ellis and his colleague Sarah Gelman developed a model accounting for various factors, including hydrogen production rates underground, the amount likely trapped in reservoirs, and losses through processes such as atmospheric leakage. The model revealed a wide range of possible hydrogen quantities, from 1 billion to 10 trillion tons, with 6.2 trillion tons being the most probable estimate.

While these figures are promising, Ellis cautions that much of this hydrogen may be inaccessible due to depth or offshore locations. Additionally, some reserves might be too small for economically viable extraction. Nevertheless, the sheer scale of the estimated reserves suggests that even with these limitations, there could be ample hydrogen available for exploitation.

upstart [soylentnews.org] writes:

Autism Prevalence Reaches 61.8 Million Globally, Study Shows:

[Editor's Note - See disclosure that several authors have ties the to pharmaceutical industry--JR]

The global prevalence and rank of nonfatal burden of autism spectrum disorder are high, according to a review published online Dec. 19 in The Lancet Psychiatry.

Damian Santomauro, Ph.D., from the University of Queensland in Archerfield, Australia, and colleagues conducted a systematic literature review to estimate the global prevalence and health burden of autism spectrum disorder.

The researchers found that in 2021, an estimated 61.8 million individuals were on the autism spectrum globally. The global age-standardized prevalence was 788.3 per 100,000 people, which was equivalent to 1,064.7 and 508.1 males and females with autism per 100,000 males and females, respectively.

Globally, autism spectrum disorder accounted for 11.5 million disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), which was equivalent to 147.6 DALYs per 100,000 people. Age-standardized DALY rates varied from 126.5 to 204.1 per 100,000 people in Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Oceania and in the high-income super region, respectively. Across the lifespan, DALYs were evident, emerging for children younger than 5 years (169.2 DALYs per 100,000 people) and decreasing with age (163.4 and 137.7 DALYs per 100,00 people aged younger than 20 and aged 20 years or older, respectively). For people younger than 20 years, autism spectrum disorder was ranked within the top 10 causes of nonfatal health burden.

"We hope that this study provides a foundation for future research and policy interventions, so that key stakeholders work to ensure that the unique needs of all autistic people are met, contributing to a better, more inclusive, and more understanding future," the authors write.

Several authors disclosed ties to the pharmaceutical industry.

More information: Damian F Santomauro et al, The global epidemiology and health burden of the autism spectrum: findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021, The Lancet Psychiatry (2024). DOI: 10.1016/S2215-0366(24)00363-8

owl writes:

https://github.com/kokx/duco-analysis

My newly built house came with a promising feature: a DucoBox Energy Comfort D325 ventilation system with heat recovery. While the system efficiently preheats incoming air using outgoing air's heat, its control options were limited to four basic modes through a simple button interface. I wanted more - specifically, integration with Home Assistant. The official solution? A Duco Connectivity Board. But when I noticed it was just an ESP32 in disguise, I knew there had to be a better way.

The system operates in four general modes: one AUTO mode, which selects the mode automatically, and three manual modes that set airflow levels. By default, these modes are active for 15 minutes, but holding the button longer keeps the mode active until stopped.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rqlejlxg4o
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy553j377do
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cornwall-68911765

Hundreds of pieces of Lego lost at sea off a cargo ship 27 years ago have been found this year, including the first ever shark.

A freak wave swept 62 shipping containers of Lego off the Tokio Express cargo ship 20 miles (32km) off Land's End on 13 February 1997, one of which held 4,756,940 pieces, much of it sea-themed.

Since then, Lego parts have been found in south-west England, the Channel Islands, Wales, Ireland and as far away as the Netherlands and Norway.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Chinese crime rings already dominate the illegal marijuana trade in the U.S. and launder cocaine and heroin profits. Now a federal task force is investigating their role in a burgeoning form of gift card fraud:

Federal authorities are investigating the involvement of Chinese organized crime rings in gift card fraud schemes that have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars or more from American consumers.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has launched a task force, whose existence has not previously been reported, to combat a scheme known as "card draining," in which thieves use stolen or altered card numbers to siphon off money before the owner can spend it. The initiative has been dubbed "Project Red Hook," for the perpetrators' ties to China and their exploitation of cards hung in store kiosks on "J-hooks."

This marks the first time that federal authorities have focused on the role of Chinese organized crime in gift card fraud and devoted resources to fighting it. Homeland Security Investigations, a DHS agency, began prioritizing gift card fraud late last year in response to a flurry of consumer complaints and arrests connected to card draining.

[...] Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return to a store and place the cards back on a rack. When a customer unwittingly selects and loads money onto a tampered card, the criminal is able to access the card online and steal the balance.

[...] More broadly, almost 60% of retailers said they experienced an increase in gift card scams between 2022 and 2023. Between 2019 and 2023, Americans lost close to $1 billion to card draining and other gift card scams, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Original Submission