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Submission + - Crypto should 'die in a fire" 1

sdinfoserv writes: One of the leading experts in computer security is UC Berkeley Professor Nicholas Weaver. https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu... . Professor Weaver's lecture on Cryptocurrencies for CS 161 class https://www.youtube.com/watch?... breaks down crypto, block chain, and several other technologies and definitively explains why it doesn't work, and it should "die in fire"

Submission + - European scientists claim nuclear fusion breakthrough (bbc.com)

tomhath writes: The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen...The experiments produced 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds (11 megawatts of power)...This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997.

It's not a massive energy output — only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. But the significance is that it validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being constructed in France.

"The JET experiments put us a step closer to fusion power," said Dr Joe Milnes, the head of operations at the reactor lab. "We've demonstrated that we can create a mini star inside of our machine and hold it there for five seconds and get high performance, which really takes us into a new realm."

Submission + - Twitter's CSS Trickery (twitter.com) 1

davide marney writes: If you choose to read your tweets online, you're in for a nasty bit of CSS trickery in their web interface: vertical scrolling is enabled for a few seconds, then disabled. This prevents you from reading replies. To recreate:
  1. Open a link to a status page on twitter.com such as this one: WhiteHouse twitter feed
  2. Vertical scrolling is initially enabled
  3. Wait for a few seconds
  4. Vertical scrolling is now disabled, hiding further replies.
  5. Inspect the <HTML> element's style; "overflow" is set to "hidden". Change it to "auto".
  6. Scrolling is now restored.

Since scrolling is initially enabled, it's safe to conclude that this CSS setting is not in any of the style sheets or the initial content as parsed by the browser — such parsing is done before the content is rendered. Therefore, it is being set by Javascript. It appears to be an intentional "evil CSS" choice.

The web is full of CSS trickery, of course, but usually businesses aren't so obvious about it.

Comment Re:I don't understand. (Score 2) 115

its working, back in the old days it was called Palladium and was widely rejected as the experts knew what their endgame was, 20 years later with a rebrand into TPM with enforcement baked in and its a resounding success, any hacker knows if it has Trust in the product name its anything but trustworthy.

Submission + - YouTube Strips Ad Revenue From Channel on Disappeared Chinese Tennis Star (freebeacon.com)

An anonymous reader writes: YouTube stripped ad revenue from a news show for posting a video on the disappearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, the latest example of big tech's kowtowing to the Chinese Communist Party.

The site blocked ads from running before the video, which outlined Peng's allegations that a senior CCP official raped her. YouTube said the video "isn't suitable for all advertisers," a likely nod to Chinese advertisers. YouTube frequently "demonetizes" videos that break the site's rules, a move that prevents creators from making money off their videos.

Google, which owns YouTube, is not the only big tech company to carefully monitor content that could be critical of China. LinkedIn has censored British and American critics of the CCP and recently overhauled its LinkedIn China product to remove user posts. Until earlier this year, Facebook removed posts that alleged that COVID-19 came from a Chinese laboratory. Microsoft this year has deepened its collaboration with the Chinese government. Apple spent $90,000 to lobby against a bill that would punish companies that use Chinese slave labor.

Submission + - SPAM: NASA Seeks Ideas For a Nuclear Reactor On the Moon

An anonymous reader writes: NASA and the nation's top federal nuclear research lab on Friday put out a request for proposals for a fission surface power system. NASA is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory to establish a sun-independent power source for missions to the moon by the end of the decade. If successful in supporting a sustained human presence on the moon, the next objective would be Mars. NASA says fission surface power could provide sustained, abundant power no matter the environmental conditions on the moon or Mars. The reactor would be built on Earth and then sent to the moon.

Submitted plans for the fission surface power system should include a uranium-fueled reactor core, a system to convert the nuclear power into usable energy, a thermal management system to keep the reactor cool, and a distribution system providing no less than 40 kilowatts of continuous electric power for 10 years in the lunar environment. Some other requirements include that it be capable of turning itself off and on without human help, that it be able to operate from the deck of a lunar lander, and that it can be removed from the lander and run on a mobile system and be transported to a different lunar site for operation. Additionally, when launched from Earth to the moon, it should fit inside a 12-foot (4-meter) diameter cylinder that's 18 feet (6 meters) long. It should not weigh more than 13,200 pounds (6,000 kilograms). The proposal requests are for an initial system design and must be submitted by Feb. 19.

Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Tesla ranks almost dead-last on Consumer Reports reliability list

schwit1 writes: “Among the concerns Consumer Reports had for the Tesla Model S, X and Y lines, according to CNBC, were issues with ‘heat pumps, air conditioning’ and notoriously, misaligned panels. It’s also worth noting that Tesla’s Model X ranked dead-last among all cars for reliability, scoring a 5 out of 100.”
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: CDC Panel Unanimously Endorses Pfizer and Moderna Covid Boosters For All Adults

An anonymous reader writes: The CDC’s independent panel of vaccine scientists unanimously endorsed Pfizer and Moderna’s boosters for all adults, one of the final regulatory steps before the U.S. can officially start distributing the doses. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted to recommend the shots. The Food and Drug Administration authorized both company’s vaccine boosters for everyone 18 and over earlier on Friday, and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is expected to clear the doses soon after. The panel’s recommendation would open up eligibility to everyone 18 and over in the U.S., but the group more strongly endorsed shots for older Americans by saying everyone 50 and over should get a booster. It previously said people over 65 and some other high-risk people should get a third shot. Once Walensky signs off, tens of millions of Americans who’ve received their two initial shots at least six months ago will be eligible to get a third shot as soon as early as this weekend.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: LAPD Used software that studies your FB friends to predict who may commit crimes

schwit1 writes: For police, the appeal of such tools is clear: use technology to automatically and quickly see connections that might take officers much longer to uncover, or to detect unnoticed behaviors or leads that a human might not pick up on because of lack of sophistication or capacity. With immense pressure on departments to keep crime rates low and prevent attacks, using technology to be able to make fast and efficient law enforcement decisions is an attractive value proposition. New and existing documents show the LAPD alone has worked or considered working with companies such as PredPol, MediaSonar, Geofeedia, Dataminr, and now Voyager.

But for the public, social media-informed policing can be a privacy nightmare that effectively criminalizes casual and at times protected behavior, experts who have reviewed the documents for the Guardian say.

As the Guardian previously reported, police departments are often unwilling to relinquish the use of those tools even in the face of public outcry and in spite of little proof it helps to reduce crime.

Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: SpaceX Will 'Hopefully' Launch First Orbital Starship Flight In January

An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk on Wednesday said SpaceX is “hoping” to launch the first orbital flight test of its mammoth Starship rocket in January, a schedule that depends on testing and regulatory approval. “We’ll do a bunch of tests in December and hopefully launch in January,” Musk said, speaking at a meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Space Studies Board.

The company’s next major step in developing Starship is launching to orbit. First, the company needs a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration for the mission, with the regulator expecting to complete a key environmental assessment by the end of this year. Musk noted that he wasn’t sure if Starship would successfully reach orbit on the first try, but emphasized that he is “confident” that the rocket will get to space in 2022. “We intend to have a high flight rate next year,” Musk said.

SpaceX aims to launch as many as a dozen Starship test flights next year, he said, to complete the “test flight program” and move to launching “real payloads in 2023.” He stressed that creating a mass production line for Starship is crucial to the program’s long-term goals, noting that the current “biggest constraint” on rocket manufacturing is how fast the company can build the Raptor engines needed for Starship. “I think, in order for life to become multiplanetary, we’ll need maybe 1,000 ships or something like that,” Musk said. “The overarching goal of SpaceX has been to advance space technology such that humanity can become a multi-planet species and, ultimately, a spacefaring civilization.”

Link to Original Source

Submission + - UN Food Programme's $6.6 Billion Executive Summary of Plan to End World Hunger (cnn.com)

thomst writes: UN Food Programme Director (and former Republican governor of South Carolina) David Beasley tweeted a link to what his agency is calling an Executive Summary of its plan to use $6.6 Billion of Elon Musk's money to eradicate hunger in areas of the world where it presents the greatest threat to human life. CNN Business's Jackie Wattles reports on the tweet in a story that lays out the background of Beasley's original challenge to Musk and other multi-billionaires to contribute 2% of their wealth to eradicate world hunger.

The CNN business report recounts the history of the public dialogue between Musk and Beasley, who have engaged in a Twitter exchange on the subject for more than two weeks now. The back-and-forth began with Musk's tweet (in response to an interview CNN conducted with the WFP Director on November 1, 2021, in which Beasley made a direct, personal plea to Musk to donate 2% of his wealth to help "end world hunger") challenging the WFP to detail how his $6-Billion-plus donation would be used, that would have to include an "open source" accounting scheme that would enable any interested party to track exactly where the money went.

Submission + - Iodine instead of Xenon for Ion Drives (newscientist.com)

Tesseractic writes: Chen Ly over at New Scientist reports on a Nature article on ion drives:

https://www.nature.com/article...

Dmytro Rafalskyi at ThrustMe, a space technology company based in France, and his colleagues have developed an electric propulsion system that uses iodine. They operated a small satellite and performed successful manoeuvres using the drive.

Submission + - SPAM: BlockFi Faces SEC Scrutiny Over High-Yield Crypto Accounts

An anonymous reader writes: BlockFi is being scrutinized by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its popular product that pays customers high interest rates for lending out their digital tokens, a development that significantly ratchets up the fast-growing crypto firm’s legal woes. The SEC review focuses on whether the BlockFi accounts are akin to securities that should be registered with the regulator, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The Jersey City, New Jersey-based firm touts annual yields as high as 9.5% on its website — a figure that dwarfs the 0.06% average interest rate for bank savings accounts.

States including New Jersey and Texas have already taken action against BlockFi, questioning whether it’s marketing illicit financial products that lack bedrock consumer protections. BlockFi and other firms are able to pay high interest rates because they can charge institutional investors that want access to coins even more. The market is one of the hottest corners of crypto, with companies saying they’ve collected more than $40 billion in deposits. [...] A key concern is that unlike bank deposits, the crypto accounts aren’t insured by the federal government. If a firm goes bust, customers could lose their funds.

Link to Original Source

Submission + - Bill Gates' TerraPower Will Set Up a $4 Billion Nuclear Plant in Wyoming (interestingengineering.com) 1

Hmmmmmm writes: Founded by Bill Gates, TerraPower, a company that plans to use nuclear energy to deliver power in a sustainable manner, has selected Kremmer, Wyoming as a suitable site to demonstrate its advanced nuclear reactor, Natrium. The decision was made after extensive evaluation of the site and consultations with the local community, the company said in a press release.

Last year, the Department of Energy (DOE) had awarded TerraPower a grant of $80 million to demonstrate its technology. The advanced nuclear reactor that is being developed by the company in association with General Electric-Hitachi, uses a sodium-cooled fast reactor that works with a molten salt-based energy storage system. Earlier in June, the company had decided to set up its demonstration plant in Wyoming and has recently sealed the decision by selecting the site of a coal-fired power plant that is scheduled for a shut down by 2025, the press release said.

The demonstration plant where the company plans to set up a 345 MW reactor will be used to validate the design, construction, and operation of TerraPower's technology. Natrium technology uses uranium enriched to up to 20 percent, far higher than what is used by other nuclear reactors. However, nuclear energy supporters say that the technology creates lesser nuclear waste, Reuters reported.

The energy storage system to be used in the plant is also designed to work with renewable sources of energy. TerraPower plans to utilize this capability and boost its output to up to 500 MW, enough to power 400,000 homes, the company said.

Comment Re: The gift that keeps on giving (Score 1) 193

not that easy pal, you have to follow the rabbit, Win10 has multiple watchdogs that periodically check to see if WindowsUpdates services or any parts of the update system are disabled/broken/corrupt, if it finds issues the watchdog processes will re-enable/repair updates, the reason being is many malware apps used to disable updates so now a watchdog checks.
It is possible to disable it but long gone are the days that simply disabling WindowsUpdate in services.msc would stop it.

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