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Submission + - Ophelia Became a Major Hurricane Where No Storm Had Before (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The system formerly known as Hurricane Ophelia is moving into Ireland on Monday, bringing "status red" weather throughout the day to the island. The Irish National Meteorological Service, Met Eireann, has warned that, "Violent and destructive gusts of 120 to 150km/h are forecast countrywide, and in excess of these values in some very exposed and hilly areas. There is a danger to life and property." Ophelia transitioned from a hurricane to an extra-tropical system on Sunday, but that only marginally diminished its threat to Ireland and the United Kingdom on Monday, before it likely dissipates near Norway on Tuesday. The primary threat from the system was high winds, with heavy rains. Forecasters marveled at the intensification of Ophelia on Saturday, as it reached Category 3 status on the Saffir-Simpson scale and became a major hurricane. For a storm in the Atlantic basin, this is the farthest east that a major hurricane has been recorded during the satellite era of observations. Additionally, it was the farthest north, at 35.9 degrees north, that an Atlantic major hurricane has existed this late in the year since 1939.

Submission + - Tesla Badly Misses Model 3 Production Goals (wsj.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Tesla badly missed its goal of building 1,500 Model 3 cars in the third quarter, the first sign that the production ramp-up for the new sedan isn’t going as smoothly as planned. The Silicon Valley electric-car maker built 260 of the Model 3s between July and September, the company said Monday in a statement. In August, the auto maker predicted it would build more than 1,500 Model 3s before cranking up production to 5,000 a week by the end of the fourth quarter. Tesla blamed “production bottlenecks” for the weaker production. “It is important to emphasize that there are no fundamental issues with the Model 3 production or supply chain,” Tesla said in a statement. “We understand what needs to be fixed and we are confident of addressing the manufacturing bottleneck issues in the near-term.”

Submission + - Mystery of Sonic Weapon Attacks At US Embassy In Cuba Deepens (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again. It was as if he’d walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room. Soon came the hearing loss, and the speech problems, symptoms both similar and altogether different from others among at least 21 U.S. victims in an astonishing international mystery still unfolding in Cuba. The top U.S. diplomat has called them “health attacks." New details learned by the Associated Press indicate at least some of the incidents were confined to specific rooms or even parts of rooms with laser-like specificity, baffling U.S. officials who say the facts and the physics don’t add up.

Suspicion initially focused on a sonic weapon, and on the Cubans. Yet the diagnosis of mild brain injury, considered unlikely to result from sound, has confounded the FBI, the state department and U.S. intelligence agencies involved in the investigation. Some victims now have problems concentrating or recalling specific words, several officials said, the latest signs of more serious damage than the U.S. government initially realized. The United States first acknowledged the attacks in August — nine months after symptoms were first reported.

Submission + - ShadowBrokers Releases NSA UNITEDRAKE Manual (schneier.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: The ShadowBrokers released the manual for UNITEDRAKE, a sophisticated NSA Trojan that targets Windows machines:

Able to compromise Windows PCs running on XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, Vista, Windows 7 SP 1 and below, as well as Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, the attack tool acts as a service to capture information.

UNITEDRAKE, described as a "fully extensible remote collection system designed for Windows targets," also gives operators the opportunity to take complete control of a device.

The malware's modules — including FOGGYBOTTOM and GROK — can perform tasks including listening in and monitoring communication, capturing keystrokes and both webcam and microphone usage, the impersonation users, stealing diagnostics information and self-destructing once tasks are completed.

Comment Re:No, this does not solve the problem. (Score 1) 135

by Arkh89 (#54859401) Attached to: A New Sampling Algorithm Could Eliminate Sensor Saturation

No, in astronomy you are interested in reducing the noise for the equivalent of a sub-length. This means that if you combine say 100 images of 5 minutes, the result should be better in terms of noise (and thus DR) than a single 5 minutes exposure. Here we are interested in a totally different normalization which consists in deciding the total number of sub-frames dividing the total exposure (500 minutes with the previous analogy). For a simple stochastic sensor model, the smallest number of sub-frames (1) will *always* be the best.

To prove this, let's say that you will count an average of F electrons in a single pixel over the total exposure time and that each read-out operation follows a 0-mean normal/Gaussian distribution of variance s^2 (normalized in electrons). Then, the stochastic output of the pixel for a single read-out is given by : O ~ Poisson(F) + Normal(0,s^2). If we now decide to divide the observation interval in k sub-frame, we should observe for each : O_k ~ Poisson(F/k) + Normal(0,s^2) as the read-out noise is a constant cost. The standard deviation of the sum of the k sub-frames can be written as follow : sqrt(k*(F/k+s^2)) = sqrt(F+k*s^2). As the local dynamic range D is defined as the ratio between the full flux detected F and the previous standard deviation, we obtain F/sqrt(F+k*s^2). Thus to increase D, you want to reduce the number k of sub-frames recorded down to 1, or reduce the sensor read-noise s (RMS). And ultimately, you will hit the shot-noise limit D = F/sqrt(F).

Comment Re:No, this does not solve the problem. (Score 3, Informative) 135

by Arkh89 (#54859021) Attached to: A New Sampling Algorithm Could Eliminate Sensor Saturation

And every time you read out a sub-frame you are penalized by the read noise... after accumulation of the variances, you end-up with an extremely noisy image. If you want to do that you don't just need a very good quantum efficiency (the probability of a incident photon to be absorbed and to release an electron) you need an almost perfect read-out circuitry (if you want to operate without cooling). Eric Fossum has proposed a "Quanta" binary sensor which would do this with a ~0.15e- RMS read-out noise which has to be compared with the 1.5+e- of the best sensors used in consumer applications today.

Submission + - Iceberg twice size of Luxembourg breaks off Antarctic ice shelf (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Layzej
Layzej writes: Reported to be “hanging by a thread” last month, the trillion-tonne iceberg was found to have split off from the Larsen C segment of the Larsen ice shelf on Wednesday morning after scientists examined the latest satellite data from the area.

Luckman said that while the Larsen C ice shelf might continue to shed icebergs, it might regrow. Nevertheless previous research by the team has suggested that the remaining ice shelf is likely less stable now that the iceberg has calved, although it is unlikely the event would have any short-term effects. “We will have to wait years or decades to know what will happen to the remainder of Larsen C,” he said, pointing out that it took seven years after the release of a large iceberg from Larsen B before the ice shelf became unstable and disintegrated.

And while climate change is accepted to have played a role in the wholesale disintegration of the Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves, Luckman emphasised that there is no evidence that the calving of the giant iceberg is linked to such processes.

Submission + - NVIDIA Unveils Tesla V100 AI Accelerator Powered By 5120 CUDA Core Volta GPU (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang just offered the first public unveiling of a product based on the company's next generation GPU architecture, code named Volta. NVIDIA just announced its new Tesla V100 accelerator that's designed for AI and machine learning applications and at the heart of the Tesla V100 is NVIDIA's Volta GV100 GPU. The chip features a 21.1 billion transistors on a die that measures 815mm2 (compared to 12 billion transistors and 610mm2 respectively for the previous gen Pascal GP100). The GV100 is built on a 12nm FinFET manufacturing process by TSMC. It is comprised of 5,120 CUDA cores with a boost clock of 1455MHz, compared to 3585 CUDA cores for the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and previous gen Tesla P100 AI accelerator, for example. The new Volta GPU delivers 15 TFLOPS FP32 compute performance and 7.5 TFLOPS of FP64 compute performance. Also on board is 16MB of cache and 16GB of second generation High Bandwidth (HBM2) memory with 900GB/sec of bandwidth via a 4096-bit interface. The GV100 also has dedicated Tensor cores (640 in total) accelerating AI workloads. NVIDIA notes the dedicated Tensor cores also allow for a 12x uplift in deep learning performance compared to Pascal, which relies solely on its CUDA cores. NVIDIA is targeting a Q3 2017 release Tesla V100 with Volta, but the timetable is for a GeForce derivative of consumer graphics cards is has not been disclosed.

Comment Re:Reminder: "Hacking" was mere illumination (Score 1) 312

by Arkh89 (#54208883) Attached to: Russian Arrested in Spain 'Over US Election Hacking'

I think the term "hacking" for the election fits perfectly... in the context of the tech audience here. Because hacking does not have, for us, the same meaning that it acquired through the media : that of breaching electronic systems, most often for criminal gain (note the extra negative connotation).
Instead, here its meaning is about finding and implementing a subversive approach to work around the limitations or rules of a system : all the news manipulation, polls, fact-checking wars are the expressions of that hack to attract the voters one way or another.

Submission + - From Earth to orbit using a single-stage rocket and aerospike engine (newatlas.com)

Submitted by Eloking
Eloking writes: New Mexico-based ARCA Space Corporation has announced that it is developing the world's first Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) launch vehicle that can deliver both a small payload and itself into low Earth orbit, at a cost of about US$1 million per launch. Dubbed the Haas 2CA after the 16th century rocket pioneer Conrad Haas, the new booster uses a linear aerospike engine instead of conventional bell-shaped rocket engines to do away with multiple stages.

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