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Submission + - Record companies sue internet archive for preserving old 78 rpm recordings (reuters.com)

Submitted by bshell
bshell writes: Some of the world’s largest record labels, including Sony and Universal Music Group, filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive and others for the Great 78 Project (https://great78.archive.org), a community effort for the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records that are 70 to 120 years old. The project has been in operation since 2006 to bring free public access to a largely forgotten but culturally important medium. Through the efforts of dedicated librarians, archivists and sound engineers, we have preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium. The resulting preserved recordings retain the scratch and pop sounds that are present in the analog artifacts; noise that modern remastering techniques remove.

Comment But who's going to watch? (Score 5, Insightful) 103

Cord cutters being taxed to fund channels they can never see because they cut the cord?

As fewer and fewer people watch linear TV at all, the desire for these "community" cable channels - never very high to begin with - will dwindle, dwindle, dwindle.

Sometimes, an idea whose time has come must also face the fact that it's time has "went."

Comment Re:Be glad you're not on Windstream/Kinetic (Score 1) 131

I've been on Windstream for years here in Houston county, GA (not exactly rural anymore). First DSL, started at 50, they upgraded the DSLAM, offered 100, that worked a treat. Another DSLAM upgrade and for a couple of years, I was on the "up to 200" plan, got ~180 down, and they just let 'er eat on upstream, routinely got 60-70 up. Rare to have any outage.

In March this year, they brought fiber through our neighborhood. I'm now on 1gig/1gig fiber, $70/month. This week, Windstream began offering 8gig symmetrical here. I can't justify either that much bandwidth (I don't want to change my entire network stack out for 10gb capable gear) nor the price they're asking - $300.

Windstream's stated goal is convert everything to fiber. Here, they're doing it, but behind schedule. I can't speak for other areas of the country.

Cox also pulled fiber through the neighborhood late last year, offering up to 1gig/1gig.

Cableco offers 1gig/50 on coax.

All this in a neighborhood that until the past few years was luck to have the 25/3 options. Things have definitely improved here, even though the neighborhood hasn't grown.

Submission + - Millions of PC Motherboards Were Sold With a Firmware Backdoor (eclypsium.com) 1

Submitted by rastos1
rastos1 writes: Wired reports: Researchers at firmware-focused cybersecurity company Eclypsium revealed today that they’ve discovered a hidden mechanism in the firmware of motherboards sold by the Taiwanese manufacturer Gigabyte, whose components are commonly used in gaming PCs and other high-performance computers. Whenever a computer with the affected Gigabyte motherboard restarts, Eclypsium found, code within the motherboard’s firmware invisibly initiates an updater program that runs on the computer and in turn downloads and executes another piece of software.

Eclypsium:
- Eclypsium automated heuristics detected firmware on Gigabyte systems that drops an executable Windows binary that is executed during the Windows startup process.
- This executable binary insecurely downloads and executes additional payloads from the Internet.

List of affected motherboards is here: https://eclypsium.com/wp-conte...

Submission + - North Carolina to Kick $845.8M of Apple Employees' State Taxes Back to Apple 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "The announcement Monday that Apple Inc. would locate its new high-tech campus in Research Triangle Park," reports The News&Observer's Tyler Dukes, "was heralded as a coup for the state, which has pursued the company and the promise of its high-paying jobs for at least three years. But that victory comes at a cost. State and local incentives for the deal could be worth nearly $1 billion to the company over the next four decades. That award, by far the largest in the state’s history, will mostly come from new Apple employees’ state income tax payments — the vast majority of which will flow right back to Apple. [...] The JDIG award approved by the state’s Economic Investment Committee Monday morning would mean $845.8 million in payments to Apple through 2061 — provided the company meets its hiring, worker-retention and investment targets. These payments are recouped from the income taxes Apple’s new employees would normally pay to the state. Starting in 2023, the state will start issuing payments to Apple worth a little more than half of those employees’ annual tax payments. In 2032, if all goes as planned, that percentage increases to 90%."

Apple, whose market cap on Monday was $2.26 trillion, isn't exactly hurting for money. In February, Investopedia reported that Apple was sitting on $36 billion of cash and $160 billion of marketable securities but was selling $14 billion of bonds to continue taking advantage of historically low borrowing rates. The bonds were sold with coupons between 0.7% (for the 5-year note) and 2.8% (for the 40-year bond). Unlike the 7.595% fixed Federal PLUS Student Loan interest you may be paying for the next 30 years, Investopedia notes that the 0.7%-2.8% interest expenses Apple incurs on its bond proceeds — which may be used to fund Apple share repurchases and dividends — are fully tax deductible. Last year, Apple borrowed $8.5 billion in May and another $5.5 billion in August, joining the roster of U.S. investment-grade companies borrowing a record amount of debt in the corporate bond market during the pandemic.

Submission + - SPAM: Silence of the Tomatoes 2

Submitted by wooloohoo
wooloohoo writes: What if I told you that the smell of a fresh-cut lawn was really the chemical scream of warning to other blades of grass that it's time to release protective compounds? The idea that plants can cry for help, once scoffed at, has now been demonstrated many times. Chemical distress signals can warn peers to mount a defense.

In some cases, these distress signals can even bring help from other species. That's what happens with the tomato. When a caterpillar chows down, the leaves release volatile chemicals that ring the dinner bell for a type of wasp that lays eggs inside caterpillars. As you can imagine, especially if you've seen "Alien", this ends poorly for the caterpillar.

But evolution is often an arms race, and researchers at Penn State wondered if caterpillars could fight back. What Po-An Lin, the study's lead author, found was an enzyme in caterpillar saliva that inhibited the opening of pores in tomato plant leaves, stifling their cry for help and thus attracting fewer parasitic wasp rescuers. It may further damage the tomato plant by reducing its ability to regulate its temperature.

Practical application of this knowledge still awaits, but it's obvious that farmers are interested in anything that can keep their tomatoes healthy.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Malicious Actors are targeting Go packages on Github (michenriksen.com)

Submitted by ArghBlarg
ArghBlarg writes: Michael Henrikson describes his investigations into Go package manager 'supply chain' attacks and found at least one very suspicious package, typosquatting on one of the most popular logging libraries. The imposter package phones home to an IP he alleges belongs to the Chinese company Tencent:

It looks like the author utfave wants to know the hostname, operating system, and architecture of all the machines using their version of urfave/cli. The function extracts the system information and then calls out to the IP address 122.51.124.140 belonging to the Chinese company Shenzhen Tencent Computer Systems via HTTP with the system information added as URL parameters. While this code won’t give them any access to systems, it’s highly suspicious that they collect this information and the actor can quickly change this code to call back with a reverse shell if they identify a system to be valuable or interesting.

A good case for always going over your package imports, in any language, and ensuring you're either a) auditing them regularly, or b) keeping frozen vendored copies which you can trust.

Submission + - Has all of RSA Encryption just been Broken? 2

Submitted by heretic108
heretic108 writes: If a recent paper by German mathematician and cryptographer Claus P. Schnorr is true, then it would appear that Schnorr has just broken the entire RSA cryptosystem, by drastically reducing the computational effort to factor integers as large as 2^800 to just 10billion arithmetic operations, well within the reach of even modest desktop computers.

Submission + - Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust

Submitted by RoccamOccam
RoccamOccam writes: The developers at Discord have seen success with Rust on their video encoding pipeline for Go Live and on their Elixir NIFs' server. Recently, they've penned a post explaining how they have drastically improved the performance of a service by switching its implementation from Go to Rust.

From the post, "Remarkably, we had only put very basic thought into optimization as the Rust version was written. Even with just basic optimization, Rust was able to outperform the hyper hand-tuned Go version. This is a huge testament to how easy it is to write efficient programs with Rust compared to the deep dive we had to do with Go."

Submission + - Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine just got a lot easier to transport and distri (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by FrankOVD
FrankOVD writes: The COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech now has less stringent and extreme transportation requirements than it debuted with. Originally, the mRNA-based vaccine had to be maintained at ultra-low temperatures throughout the transportation chain in order to remain viable – between -76F and -112F. New stability data collected by Pfizer and BioNTech, which has been submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for review, allow it to be stored at temps between 5F and -13F – ranges available in standard medical freezers found in most clinics and care facilities.
The vaccine should remain stable for up to two weeks at that temperature, which vastly improves the flexibility of its options for transportation, and last-mile storage in preparation for administration to patients. To date, the vaccine has relied largely on existing “cold-chain” infrastructure to be in place in order for it to be able to reach the areas where it’s being used to inoculate patients. That limitation hasn’t been in place for Moderna’s vaccine, which is stable at even higher, standard refrigerator temperatures for up to a month.

Submission + - SPAM: Nichia LED disinfects as it illuminates

Submitted by Joe2020
Joe2020 writes: The company Nichia has developed a white LED light that includes an anti-bacterial property similar to UV lights:

It has been well-known for years that UV-C and UV-B wavelengths, ranging from ~200-380nm, has been used for disinfection,” said the company. “However, it has recently been proven that visible light, ranging from ~380-420nm, also has a bacteria disinfection effect.

So it has created the NF2W585AR-P8, a white LED with a blue die pump whose peak emission wavelength is around 405nm and “Nichia is able to achieve the balance between general white lighting and disinfection of bacteria, all out of a single LED”, it said.

Applications are foreseen for environmental hygiene maintenance in food factories, kitchens, hospitals and public facilities.

 [spam URL stripped]....
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Ten Year Old Vulnerability found in Ubiquitous 'sudo' Utility (qualys.com)

Submitted by lunchlady55
lunchlady55 writes: A ten year old vulnerability affecting all versions of sudo was discovered by the Qualys Research Team. Predictably, it is triggered by a buffer overflow, and drops any unprivileged user to a root shell when exploited even if they do not have sudo privileges. Fortunately, this does require a local account, but the broad usage of this utility and the fact that the default configuration is affected adds to the severity of this issue. Users are encouraged to patch or upgrade sudo on all systems as soon as possible.

Submission + - Google Maps will soon show COVID vaccine locations (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by wooloohoo
wooloohoo writes: Vaccine site listings will show access requirements and appointment info.

The rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine means a ton of people are soon going to be looking for vaccination sites. As usual, Google wants to be at the center of getting people where they're going, and in a new blog post Google says it will start loading Search and Maps with information on vaccination sites. "In the coming weeks," the company writes, "COVID-19 vaccination locations will be available in Google Search and Maps, starting with Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, with more states and countries to come."

Soon you'll be able to search "COVID vaccine" and get location results showing access requirements, appointment information, and if a site has a drive-through. Google says it is partnering with the Boston Children's Hospital's VaccineFinder.org, government agencies, and retail pharmacies for the data.

Submission + - Ice age Siberian hunters may have domesticated dogs 23,000 years ago (sciencemag.org) 2

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Dogs were the first animals ever domesticated, yet researchers have argued for decades over when, where, and how they arose. Now the most comprehensive comparison of ancient human and canine DNA suggests that dogs were domesticated around 23,000 years ago in Ice Age Siberia.

The people who domesticated them--known as the Ancient North Siberians--were trapped in northeastern Siberia for millennia because the harsh climate of the time prevented them from traveling too far east or west. They were stuck here with the gray wolf, the direct ancestor of today's dogs. Scientists speculate that the two forged a relationship over time, leading to the domestication of the dog. Thousands of years later, these Siberians would give some of their pups to the distant ancestors of Native Americans, who would eventually bring them to the Americas. Other ancient humans, traveling west, would bring them deeper into Asia and Europe, where they would proliferate around the world.

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