As early as next Monday night, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch a cluster of 24 satellites for the US Air Force. From a report: Known as the Space Test Program-2 mission, the rocket will deposit its payloads into three different orbits. Perhaps the most intriguing satellite will be dropped off at the second stop -- a circular orbit 720km above the Earth's surface. This is the Planetary Society's LightSail 2 spacecraft. After a week in space, allowing the satellites deposited in this orbit to drift apart, LightSail 2 will eject from its carrying case into open space. About the size of a loaf of bread, the 5kg satellite will eventually unfurl into a solar sail 4 meters long by 5.6 meters tall. The Mylar material composing the sail is just 4.5 microns thick, or about one-tenth as thick as a human hair. This experiment, which will attempt to harness the momentum of photons and "sail" through space, is the culmination of decades of work by The Planetary Society. "This goes back to the very beginning, to Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Lou Friedman," the organization's chief executive, Bill Nye, told Ars in an interview. "We are carrying on a legacy that has been with us since the founders. It's just an intriguing technology because it lowers the cost of going all over the place in the Solar System."

A reader quotes a report from CBS News: A swarm of meteors heading towards Earth could have the potential to cause a catastrophic impact, a new study from Western Ontario University says. The so-called Taurid swarm is a recurring event that some scientists believe could have played a role in the biggest Earth impact of modern times, in 1908, when a space rock slammed into Siberia with enough force to destroy an entire forest. What has become known as the Tunguska explosion of 1908 was so powerful that the blast leveled 80 million trees over an 800-square-mile area. It's considered to be a one-in-1,000-year event, according to Western Ontario University. But while the Tunguska explosion occurred just over a century ago, another such phenomenon could occur much sooner than its 1,000-year expectancy, the researchers say. That's why they're focusing new attention on the Taurid swarm.

The Taurid swarm is a dense cluster of meteors within the Taurid meteor stream. Earth periodically passes through the Taurid swarm, and it is one of the three space phenomenons that could result in a catastrophic collision. Near Earth Objects (NEOs) such as asteroids and meteoroids, as well as comets are the other two potential causes. The Taurid swarm is created when Earth passes through the debris left behind by Comet Encke, according to NASA. The comet's dust barrels through Earth's atmosphere at 65,000 mph, burns up and creates a meteor shower. This Taurid meteor shower is usually weak, but there are some years where it is more visible, NASA says. The Taurid swarm heightens the possibility of a large collision, Western Ontario University researchers hypothesized. This summer, Earth will approach within 30,000,000 km of the center of the Taurid swarm, the study says. That would be Earth's closest encounter with the swarm since 1975 and the best viewing opportunity we'll have until the early 2030s.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It looked like yet another weird symptom of San Francisco tech culture: a cluster of people sitting on the side of a road, working at desks placed within the boundaries of a parking space. But WePark -- a project led by San Francisco-based web developer Victor Pontis -- was actually a manifestation of an idea that has become more popular in the last few years: Cities use space inefficiently and prioritize cars over people. The people at the desks were attempting to reclaim a sliver of space for human use. "Car parking squanders space that can be used for the public good -- bike lanes, larger sidewalks, retail, cafes, more housing," Pontis said. "Let's use city streets for people, not cars."

(There are also WePark franchises in France as well as Santa Monica.) Pontis said he got the idea from a Twitter exchange in which Github's Devon Zuegel pointed out that eight bicycles could fit in one park spot instead of a car. Urbanist Annie Fryman, responded, suggesting that the metered parking spot be used as a coworking space instead. Pontis turned that hypothetical into a reality, choosing popular real estate like Santa Monica's Ocean Avenue. The set-up was simple: he paid for a day's worth of parking meter, then charged users people per hour. He said 30 people showed up on the first day in the three cities, paying the $2.25 per hour fee that WePark charged for a spot at a parking lot desk. (Paying for a desk at a regular coworking space, like WeWork is approximately $50 per day plus a monthly membership fee.)

GoDaddy removed a cluster of more than 15,000 fraudulent websites discovered by a researcher at Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 analysis team. From a report: The scam, which sold products like weight loss pills, used breached websites to add legitimacy to its sales and involved using fake celebrity endorsements. Jeff White, the researcher at Unit 42, started researching the network of sites more than 2 years ago when he noticed spam messages that looked visually similar and used similar language. The products were sold on commission as part of an affiliate marketing program and used low initial pricing and tiny print to get people signed up for costly subscriptions. The sales took place on hacked GoDaddy websites, where hackers had set up subdomains on legitimate websites.

Why would someone build their own Beowulf cluster -- a high-performance parallel computing prototype -- using 12 Raspberry Pi boards? It's using the standard Beowulf cluster architecture found in about 88% of the world's largest parallel computing systems, with an MPI (Message Passing Interface) system that distributes the load over all the nodes.

Matt Trask, a long-time computer engineer now completing his undergraduate degree at Florida Atlantic University, explains how it grew out of his work on "virtual mainframes": In the world of parallel supercomputers (branded 'high-performance computing', or HPC), system manufacturers are motivated to sell their HPC products to industry, but industry has pushed back due to what they call the "Ninja Gap". MPI programming is hard. It is usually not learned until the programmer is in grad school at the earliest, and given that it takes a couple of years to achieve mastery of any particular discipline, most of the proficient MPI programmers are PhDs. And this, is the Ninja Gap -- industry understands that the academic system cannot and will not be able to generate enough 'ninjas' to meet the needs of industry if industry were to adopt HPC technology.

As part of my research into parallel computing systems, I have studied the process of learning to program with MPI and have found that almost all current practitioners are self-taught, coming from disciplines other than computer science. Actual undergraduate CS programs rarely offer MPI programming. Thus my motivation for building a low-cost cluster system with Raspberry Pis, in order to drive down the entry-level costs. This parallel computing system, with a cost of under $1000, could be deployed at any college or community college rather than just at elite research institutions, as is done [for parallel computing systems] today.

The system is entirely open source, using only standard Raspberry Pi 3B+ boards and Raspbian Linux. The version of MPI that is used is called MPICH, another open-source technology that is readily available.
But there's an added visual flourish, explains long-time Slashdot reader iamacat. "To visualize computing, each node is equipped with a servo motor to position itself according to its current load -- lying flat when fully idle, standing up 90 degrees when fully utilized."

Its data comes from the /proc filesystem, and the necessary hinges for this prototype were all generated with a 3D printer. "The first lesson is to use CNC'd aluminum for the motor housings instead of 3D-printed plastic," writes Trask. "We've seen some minor distortion of the printed plastic from the heat generated in the servos."

A Russian company called StartRocket says it's going to launch a cluster of cubesats into space that will act as an "orbital billboard," projecting enormous advertisements into the night sky like artificial constellations. And its first client, it says, will be PepsiCo -- which will use the system to promote a "campaign against stereotypes and unjustified prejudices against gamers" on behalf of an energy drink called Adrenaline Rush, reports Futurism. From the report: Yeah, the project sounds like an elaborate prank. But Russian PepsiCo spokesperson Olga Mangova confirmed to Futurism that the collaboration is real. "We believe in StartRocket potential," she wrote in an email. "Orbital billboards are the revolution on the market of communications. That's why on behalf of Adrenaline Rush -- PepsiCo Russia energy non-alcoholic drink, which is brand innovator, and supports everything new, and non-standard -- we agreed on this partnership."

In the state of Washington, the House has voted 89 to 7 to "ditch the switch, bring the light, and defeat the dark night," says one representative. KOMO reports: Changing the clocks twice a year impacts the body's natural rhythms and is associated with a spike in heart attacks, strokes, and traffic collisions each year, according to the Washington State Department of Health's impact review. Extended daylight in the evening is also better for kids who play sports or who are active outside, Riccelli said. The bill now heads to the Senate for consideration.... The federal government would have the final say.
And meanwhile, one Pennsylvania newspaper has published a state representative's op-ed calling for Pennsylvania to help lead the resistance in America's Eastern Standard Time zone, complaining that "This weekend, we again will be forced to comply with an archaic tradition, one that offers no benefits." There is no national crisis that changing clocks helps to alleviate. In fact, there are more negative side effects from changing clocks than benefits. Studies have shown that automobile accidents, workplace injuries, heart attacks, strokes, cluster headaches, miscarriages, depression, and suicides all increase in the weeks following clock changes.

This government-mandated interruption of natural biological rhythms and sleep cycles can wreak havoc on job performance, academic results, and overall physical/mental health. Clock changes require farmers to make needless adjustments, as crops and animals live by the sunlight... During this legislative session, I will be working to advance this commonsense legislation that will not only end the antiquated ritual of changing clocks, but will also help preserve the health, safety, well-being, productivity, and lives of Pennsylvanians.

The Washington Post reports on why some U.S. cities are restricting the spread of discount "dollar stores": Residents fear the stores deter other business, especially in neighborhoods without grocers or options for healthy food. Dollar stores rarely sell fresh produce or meats, but they undercut grocery stores on prices of everyday items, often pushing them out of business...Grocery stores run on thin profit margins -- usually between 1 and 3 percent. And they employ more workers than dollar stores to keep perishable food stocked.

"It's no longer the big-box grocery store" that threatens local businesses, said David Procter, a Kansas State University professor who studies rural grocery stores. "But it's the discount retailer that's coming to town and setting up shop right across the street."
"As the stores cluster in low-income neighborhoods," the Post writes, "their critics worry they are not just a response to poverty -- but a cause."

For several decades, the areal density of hard disks increased by an average of nearly 40 percent each year. But in recent years, that rate has slowed to around 10 percent. Seagate and Western Digital, the leading manufacturers of hard drives, differ with each other on how to get around this. From a report: In back-to-back announcements in October 2017, Western Digital pledged to begin shipping drives based on what is known as microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) in 2019, and Seagate said it would have drives that incorporate heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) on the market by 2020. If one company's solution proves superior, it will reshape a US $24 billion industry and set the course for a decade of advances in magnetic storage. Companies that wish to store huge amounts of data do have other options, but hard drives are still the go-to choice for enterprise storage needs that fall somewhere between faster, more expensive solid-state drives built on flash memory, and slower, cheaper magnetic tape.

Seagate now aims to debut a 20+ terabyte drive based on HAMR in 2020, and Western Digital promises MAMR drives that will hold roughly 16 TB later this year. Western Digital expects to quickly scale up to MAMR drives with 40 TB of capacity by 2025, while Seagate believes it can achieve similar capacities through HAMR, though it has not publicly stated a target date. Both companies are essentially starting from the same place, with hard drives that share a few key components. The disk, for example, is a thin platter that has been coated with some form of magnetic material made up of countless individual grains, each of which is magnetized in one particular direction. Ten or so grains in a cluster, all with magnetization pointing in the same direction, represent a bit.

ZDNet reports that by 2020, "many, if not most, new cars will be running with Linux." While some companies, like Tesla, run their own homebrew Linux distros, most rely on Automotive Grade Linux (AGL). AGL is a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open platform for connected cars with over 140 members... Its membership includes Audi, Ford, Honda, Mazda, Nissan, Mercedes, Suzuki, and the world's biggest automobile company: Toyota. Why? "Automakers are becoming software companies, and just like in the tech industry, they are realizing that open source is the way forward," said Dan Cauchy, AGL's executive director, in a statement.

Car companies know that while horsepower sells, customers also want smart infotainment systems, automated safe drive features, and, eventually, self-driving cars. Linux and open-source company can give them all of that. The AGL's goal is to develop an open-source, common platform for infotainment systems: The Unified Code Base (UCB). This is a Linux distribution and open-source software platform for car infotainment, telematics, and instrument cluster applications... The AGL's hope is that this will serve as a de facto industry standard. It's well on its way.
Yesterday Hyundai announced that they were also joining both the AGL effort and the Linux Foundation.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Still using your ex-roommates cable credentials to watch "Game of Thrones?" That may soon be getting a lot harder, thanks to new efforts to crack down on password sharing for pay TV and online video services. One of these efforts, launched by London-based Synamedia ahead of next week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), even uses artificial intelligence to uncover notorious password sharers. Credentials Sharing Insight, as the new service is being called, targets both casual password sharing as well as criminal enterprises looking to resell pay TV login information. However, the focus clearly is on friends and family taking their generosity a bit too far, explained Symanedia chief product officer Jean-Marc Racine in an interview with Variety this week.

[...] Most services have tried to curtail password sharing by limiting the number of simultaneous streams, with little else to go by to identify abuse. "Today, you are in the dark," he said. Synamedia's solution on the other hand digs through lots of data to cluster users based on their streaming behavior. This can include user's physical location (someone streaming from both coasts at the same time) as well as general usage patterns (someone streaming 24/7). The company can even take a look at the specific content streamed by a user to identify unusual patterns. Based on these clues, Synamedia trains models to score users on a scale of 1 to 10, indicating whether they are likely sharing their passwords or not.

Twitter is introducing a new toggle in the app to allow users to switch from the ranked timeline to the original, reverse-chronological feed. "The company says the move comes in recognition of the fact that Twitter is often most useful in real time, particularly during live events such as sports games or the Oscars," reports The Verge. From the report: The latest incarnation of the original Twitter feed can be accessed by tapping the cluster of small stars -- the company calls it the "sparkle" and now so shall we all, forever -- and switching to see the latest tweets. Over time, the company will learn your behavior. If you routinely switch to the latest tweets, Twitter will default you to them. This marks a change from the past, when the app would switch you back to the ranked timeline at unpredictable intervals.

Kubernetes has become the most popular cloud container orchestration system by far, so it was only a matter of time until its first major security hole was discovered. And the bug, CVE-2018-1002105, aka the Kubernetes privilege escalation flaw, is a doozy. It's a CVSS 9.8 critical security hole. From a report: With a specially crafted network request, any user can establish a connection through the Kubernetes application programming interface (API) server to a backend server. Once established, an attacker can send arbitrary requests over the network connection directly to that backend. Adding insult to injury, these requests are authenticated with the Kubernetes API server's Transport Layer Security (TLS) credentials. Can you say root? I knew you could. Worse still, "In default configurations, all users (authenticated and unauthenticated) are allowed to perform discovery API calls that allow this escalation." So, yes, anyone who knows about this hole can take command of your Kubernetes cluster.

Independent security researcher Fabio Castro found data belonging to 32 million customers of SKY Brasil exposed online. "Using the advanced features of the Shodan search engine, he was able to discover multiple servers in Brazil running Elasticsearch that made information available without authentication," reports BleepingComputer. "A cluster of servers called 'digital-logs-prd' attracted the researcher's attention and with a simple command, he listed the indices available, one of them 429.1GB in size." From the report: The file included personally identifiable information of SKY Brasil customers, which featured full name, email address, service login password, client IP address, payment methods, phone number, and street address. SKY Brasil is a telecommunications company that also offers television services, being the second largest provider of pay-TV services in the country, according to statistics from March. In a conversation with BleepingComputer, Castro said that he reported his findings to the company who fixed the problem by restricting access with a password, an operation that takes just a few minutes. Because the server has been exposed for a long time, the protective measure may have come too late. Castro told us that it is very possible that criminals have already grabbed the data.

An estimated 4 billion people in the world lack a physical address. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab and Facebook are now proposing a new way to address the unaddressed: with machine learning. From a report: The team first trained a deep-learning algorithm to extract the road pixels from satellite images. Another algorithm connected the pixels together into a road network. The system analyzed the density and shape of the roads to segment the network into different communities, and the densest cluster was labeled as the city center. The regions around the city center were divided into north, south, east, and west quadrants, and streets were numbered and lettered according to their orientation and distance from the center.

When they compared their final results with a random sample of unmapped regions whose streets had been labeled manually, their approach successfully addressed more than 80% of the populated areas, improving coverage compared with Google Maps or OpenStreetMaps. This isn't the only way to automate the creation of addresses. The organization what3words generates a unique three-word combination for every 3-by-3-meter square on a global grid. The scheme has already been adopted in regions of South Africa, Turkey, and Mongolia by national package delivery services, local hospitals, and regional security teams. But Ilke Demir, a researcher at Facebook and one of the creators of the new system, says its main advantage is that it follows existing road topology and helps residents understand how two addresses relate to one another.

This week a Paris-born designer/developer (now living in Osaka) announced the results of the third annual "State of JavaScript" survey of over 20,000 JavaScript developers in 153 countries "to figure out what they're using, what they're happy with, and what they want to learn."

An anonymous reader writes: Among its findings? The number of people who have used Microsoft's TypeScript and said they would use it again has increased from 20.08% in 2016 to 46.7% in 2018, "and in some countries that ratio even went over 50%." More than 7,000 respondents indicated they liked its "robust, less error-prone code" and another 5,500 cited "elegant programming style and patterns." A blog post announcing the results declares TypeScript "the clear leader" among other syntaxes and languages that can compile to JavaScript.

Meanwhile, when it comes to frameworks, "only React has both a high satisfaction ratio and a large user base, although Vue is definitely getting there." Elsewhere the report notes Vue has already overtaken React for certain metrics such as total GitHub stars. "Angular on the other hand does boast a large user base, but its users don't seem too happy," the announcement adds, although later the report argues that Angular's poor satisfaction ratio "is probably in part due to the confusion between Angular and the older, deprecated AngularJS (previous surveys avoided this issue by featuring both as separate items)."
94% of the survey's respondents were male, and "Years of experience" for the respondents seemed to cluster in three cohorts in the demographics breakdown: 27.8% of respondents reported they had 2-5 years of experience, while 28% reported 5-10 years, and 24% reported 10-20 years.

There's a beautiful interactive graphic visualizing "connections between technologies," where a circle's outer red band is segmented based on the popularity of JavaScript libraries, while hovering over each band reveals the popularity of other libraries with its users. But while this year's results were presented on a "dark mode" web page, the survey's announcement concedes that this year's trends didn't include many surprises.

"TL;DR: things didn't change that much this year."

How did Choc, a quirky calligraphic typeface drawn by a French graphic designer in the 1950s, end up on storefronts everywhere? From a report: Stand just about anywhere on Broadway, or on Canal Street with its sprightly neon and overstuffed souvenir shops, or the long stretch of restaurants, hardware stores, pharmacies, bars, realtors, barber shops, groceries and auto shops that extends through Fifth Avenue in South Brooklyn, and you'll find a surplus of vibrant and overstated signage -- a cacophony of typography. Steven Heller, a co-chairman at the School of Visual Arts' M.F.A. program, sees it somewhat differently. "You say 'cacophony,'" he said. "I call it chaos." But amid all of this chaos there is the occasional beacon. Choc, for instance.

It's a typeface that draws the eye with its inherent contradictions. It seems to have been drawn improvisationally with a brush, and yet it's so hefty it looks like it could slip off a wall. It's both delicate and emphatic, a casual paradox, like a Nerf weapon. Choc is far from the most popular typeface on the storefronts of New York, but it can still be found everywhere and in every borough. It's strewn on fabric awnings and etched in frosted glass. It gleams in bright magenta or platinum lighting. It's used for beauty salons, Mexican restaurants, laundromats, bagel shops, numerous sushi bars. It may be distorted, stacked vertically, or shoehorned into a cluster of other typefaces. But even here Choc remains clear and articulate, its voice deep and friendly, its accent foreign, perhaps, yet endearing. You've already seen it, probably repeatedly, like a stranger you recognize from your morning commute.

"Dire as it is, the latest IPCC report is actually too optimistic," writes Slashdot reader Dan Drollette. "It ignores the risk of self-reinforcing climate feedbacks pushing the planet into chaos beyond human control. So says a team of climate experts, including the winner of the 1995 Nobel for his work on depletion of the ozone layer." From their article: These cascading feedbacks include the loss of the Arctic's sea ice, which could disappear entirely in summer in the next 15 years. The ice serves as a shield, reflecting heat back into the atmosphere, but is increasingly being melted into water that absorbs heat instead. Losing the ice would tremendously increase the Arctic's warming, which is already at least twice the global average rate. This, in turn, would accelerate the collapse of permafrost, releasing its ancient stores of methane, a super climate pollutant 30 times more potent in causing warming than carbon dioxide.

By largely ignoring such feedbacks, the IPCC report fails to adequately warn leaders about the cluster of six similar climate tipping points that could be crossed between today's temperature and an increase to 1.5 degrees -- let alone nearly another dozen tipping points between 1.5 and 2 degrees. These wildcards could very likely push the climate system beyond human ability to control. As the UN Secretary General reminded world leaders last month, "We face an existential threat. Climate change is moving faster than we are.⦠If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences."
In related news, a court in The Hague "has upheld a historic legal order on the Dutch government to accelerate carbon emissions cuts, a day after the world's climate scientists warned that time was running out to avoid dangerous warming. Appeal court judges ruled that the severity and scope of the climate crisis demanded greenhouse gas reductions of at least 25% by 2020 -- measured against 1990 levels -- higher than the 17% drop planned by Mark Rutte's liberal administration. The ruling -- which was greeted with whoops and cheers in the courtroom -- will put wind in the sails of a raft of similar cases being planned around the world, from Norway to New Zealand and from the UK to Uganda."

Meanwhile, a new article in GQ cites estimates that more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies, complaining that "there is no 'free market' incentive to prevent disaster."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A new study has sifted through some of the largest online data sets of personality quizzes and identified four distinct "types" therein. The new methodology used for this study -- described in detail in a new paper in Nature Human Behavior -- is rigorous and replicable, which could help move personality typing analysis out of the dubious self-help section in your local bookstore and into serious scientific journals. What's new here is the identification of four dominant clusters in the overall distribution of traits. [Paper co-author William Revelle (Northwestern University)] prefers to think of them as "lumps in the batter" and suggests that a good analogy would be how people tend to concentrate in cities in the United States. The Northwestern researchers used publicly available data from online quizzes taken by 1.5 million people around the world. That data was then plotted in accordance with the so-called Big Five basic personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The Big Five is currently the professional standard for social psychologists who study personality. (Here's a good summary of what each of those traits means to psychologists.) They then applied their algorithms to the resulting dataset. Here are the four distinct personality clusters that the researchers ended up with:

Average: These people score high in neuroticism and extraversion, but score low in openness. It is the most typical category, with women being more likely than men to fit into it.
Reserved: This type of person is stable emotionally without being especially open or neurotic. They tend to score lower on extraversion but tend to be somewhat agreeable and conscientious.
Role Models: These people score high in every trait except neuroticism, and the likelihood that someone fits into this category increases dramatically as they age. "These are people who are dependable and open to new ideas," says Amaral. "These are good people to be in charge of things." Women are more likely than men to be role models.
Self-Centered: These people score very high in extraversion, but score low in openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Most teenage boys would fall into this category, according to Revelle, before (hopefully) maturing out of it. The number of people who fall into this category decreases dramatically with age.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When a group of security researchers reported a popular but allegedly dangerous Mac App Store utility to Apple, noting that it secretly sends "highly sensitive user information" to an "unscrupulous" developer, Apple's response for a full month was surprising: "crickets." But after a cluster of bad press today, Apple finally pulled Yongming Zhang's app Adware Doctor: Anti Malware &Ad from the store.

Three researchers, including former NSA staffer Patrick Wardle, Thomas Reed of Malwarebytes, and "privacy fighter" @privacyis1st, said in a blog post today that they reported Adware Doctor last month for sending a user's Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and App Store browsing histories alongside lists of the Mac's apps and running processes to a server in China. Despite receiving confirmation that Apple received the report, the $5 app remained in the App Store -- where it was ranked the number one paid app across all Mac utilities.