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Submission + - Poll Suggestion: Your first online speed 5

Submitted by Z00L00K
Z00L00K writes: What was your first online speed in bps?
- Sneakernet
- 300
- 75/1200
- 1200 or 2400
- 9600 to 56k
- ISDN
- DSL
- Fiber or similar.

Submission + - COVID rebounds: Immune responses may be reignited by cleanup of viral scraps (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by obrien4hire
obrien4hire writes: Pfizer's antiviral pill Paxlovid is among the most treasured tools for hammering COVID-19; it can knock back the relative risk of hospitalization and death by 89 percent in unvaccinated patients at high risk of severe disease. But, as use of the convenient drug has grown in the US, so have troubling reports of rebound cases—people who took the pill early in their infection, began feeling better, and even tested negative but then slid back into symptoms and tested positive again days later.

It's still unclear just how common the phenomenon is, but it certainly happens in some proportion of Paxlovid-treated patients. In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even issued a health alert over the rebound reports.

But, amid the rising awareness, it has also become clear that patients who have not been treated with Paxlovid can also rebound. In fact, in Pfizer's clinical trials of Paxlovid, researchers noted that about 1 percent to 2 percent of both treatment and placebo groups had rebounds.

Together, this has raised a slew of questions: Are the rebounds reignited infections? Are people still infectious? Do they need to resume isolation? Are they again at risk of severe disease? Did their immune systems fail to mount an effective response? Is the virus mutating to become resistant to Paxlovid? Is omicron causing more rebounds than previous variants?

Submission + - Code bloat has become astronomical (positech.co.uk) 3

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: An indie game programmer Cliff Harris shares his concerns about the current state of compute: Code bloat sounds like something that grumpy old programmers in their fifties (like me) make a big deal out of, because we are grumpy and old and also grumpy. I get that. But us being old and grumpy means complaining when code runs 50% slower than it should, or is 50% too big. This is way, way, way beyond that. We are at the point where I honestly do believe that 99.9% of the code in files on your PC is absolutely useless and is never even executed. Its just there, in a suite of 65 DLLS, all because some coder wanted to do something trivial, like save out a bitmap and had *no idea how easy that is*, so they just imported an entire bucketful of bloatware to achieve it.

Like I say, I really should not be annoyed at young programmers doing this. Its what they learned. They have no idea what high performance or constraint-based development is. When you tell them the original game Elite had a sprawling galaxy, space combat in 3D, a career progression system, trading and thousands of planets to explore, and it was 64k, I guess they HEAR you, but they don’t REALLY understand the gap between that, and what we have now.

Computers are so fast these days that you should be able to consider them absolute magic. Everything that you could possibly imagine should happen between the 60ths of a second of the refresh rate. And yet, when I click the volume icon on my microsoft surface laptop (pretty new), there is a VISIBLE DELAY as the machine gradually builds up a new user interface element, and eventually works out what icons to draw and has them pop-in and they go live. It takes ACTUAL TIME. I suspect a half second, which in CPU time, is like a billion fucking years.

Submission + - A new vulnerability in Intel and AMD CPUs lets hackers steal encryption keys (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Hmmmmmm
Hmmmmmm writes: Microprocessors from Intel, AMD, and other companies contain a newly discovered weakness that remote attackers can exploit to obtain cryptographic keys and other secret data traveling through the hardware, researchers said on Tuesday.

Hardware manufacturers have long known that hackers can extract secret cryptographic data from a chip by measuring the power it consumes while processing those values. Fortunately, the means for exploiting power-analysis attacks against microprocessors is limited because the threat actor has few viable ways to remotely measure power consumption while processing the secret material. Now, a team of researchers has figured out how to turn power-analysis attacks into a different class of side-channel exploit that's considerably less demanding.

The team discovered that dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS)—a power and thermal management feature added to every modern CPU—allows attackers to deduce the changes in power consumption by monitoring the time it takes for a server to respond to specific carefully made queries. The discovery greatly reduces what's required. With an understanding of how the DVFS feature works, power side-channel attacks become much simpler timing attacks that can be done remotely.

The researchers have dubbed their attack Hertzbleed because it uses the insights into DVFS to expose—or bleed out—data that's expected to remain private. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-24436 for Intel chips and CVE-2022-23823 for AMD CPUs. The researchers have already shown how the exploit technique they developed can be used to extract an encryption key from a server running SIKE, a cryptographic algorithm used to establish a secret key between two parties over an otherwise insecure communications channel.

Submission + - Big Tech and the Internet Are Not Our Enemies (vortex.com)

Submitted by Lauren Weinstein
Lauren Weinstein writes: It seems like only a few years ago, the entire world was enamored of Big Tech and the Internet — and pretty much everyone was trying to emulate their most successful players. But now, to watch the news reports and listen to the politicians, the Internet and Big Tech are Our Enemies, responsible for everything from mass shootings to drug addiction, from depression to child abuse, and seemingly most other ills that any particular onlooker finds of concern in our modern world.

The truth is much more complex, and much more difficult to comfortably accept. For the fundamental problems we now face are not the fault of technology in any form, they are fully the responsibility of human beings. That is, as Pogo famously said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Submission + - Users report no comments bug hits YouTube (express.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Z00L00K
Z00L00K writes:

YouTube comments have suddenly stopped appearing on the hugely popular video sharing platform. Independent outage monitor Down Detector has today recorded a huge spike in YouTube down reports which began around 6pm BST. At the time of writing downdetector.com has registered a peak of around 2,000 reports of YouTube down.

However when I use Seamonkey instead of Firefox then the comments are visible. I don't know about other browsers.

Submission + - Biden Waives Solar Panel Tariffs, Seeks To Boost Production (apnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: President Joe Biden ordered emergency measures Monday to boost crucial supplies to U.S. solar manufacturers and declared a two-year tariff exemption on solar panels from Southeast Asia as he attempted to jumpstart progress toward his climate change-fighting goals. His invoking of the Defense Production Act and other executive actions comes amid complaints by industry groups that the solar sector is being slowed by supply chain problems due to a Commerce Department inquiry into possible trade violations involving Chinese products. The Commerce Department announced in March that it was scrutinizing imports of solar panels from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia, concerned that products from those countries are skirting U.S. anti-dumping rules that limit imports from China.

White House officials said Biden’s actions aim to increase domestic production of solar panel parts, building installation materials, high-efficiency heat pumps and other components including cells used for clean-energy generated fuels. They called the tariff suspension affecting imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia a bridge measure while other efforts increase domestic solar power production — even as the administration remains supportive of U.S. trade laws and the Commerce Department investigation. [...]

The use of executive action comes as the Biden administration’s clean energy tax cuts, and other major proposals meant to encourage domestic green energy production, have stalled in Congress. The Defense Production Act lets the federal government direct manufacturing production for national defense and has become a tool used more commonly by presidents in recent years. The Trump administration used it to produce medical equipment and supplies during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. Biden invoked its authority in April to boost production of lithium and other minerals used to power electric vehicles.

Submission + - Tesla latest company to end work at home (cnn.com)

Submitted by Billly Gates
Billly Gates writes: Elon Musk threatened to fire everyone who does not return to the office . In another story Elon went on further also is mandating a minimum 40 hour work week regardless of performance so managers. While many employers off work at home to retain and attract top talent Elon believes not one of them has made a top product. Every great product from a company came from those who worked together in an office and not over a remote connection.

Submission + - Taser Maker Proposes Use of Non-Lethal Drones to Take Down School Shooters 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm," states the First Law of Robotics. But what if that human being is killing other human beings? In response to the tragic Uvalde school shooting, Rick Smith — founder and CEO of Taser and body camera maker Axon — proposes that drones equipped with non-lethal energy weapons can help address school shootings.

Smith writes, "These two technologies may effectively combat mass shootings. In brief, non-lethal drones can be installed in schools and other venues and play the same role that sprinklers and other fire suppression tools do for firefighters: Preventing a catastrophic event, or at least mitigating its worst effects. Of course, I appreciate the risks in such a proposal, and I know it sounds faintly ludicrous to some. That’s why we must start with a caveat: We cannot introduce anything like non-lethal drones into schools without rigorous debate and laws that govern their use."

Smith's team made a similar pitch to police officials back in 2016 after concerns were voiced about how Dallas police deployed an effective but lethal bomb robot against a sniper who killed 5 officers and injured 14 others. Smith also described the use of drones to reduce shootings in his 3 Laws of Non-Lethal Robotics presentation at 2021 Axon Conference and in a 2019 graphic novel companion to his book The End of Killing.

"I know drones in schools can sound nuts," Smith acknowledged in a Reddit AMA. "Except that it can’t be any crazier than another mass shooting in a school." So, is Smith's non-lethal Taser drone concept an idea worth considering? Or is the idea "dangerous and fantastical"?

Submission + - Blistering Data Transmission Record Clocks Over 1 Petabit Per Second (newatlas.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers in Japan have clocked a new speed record for data transmission – a blistering 1.02 petabits per second (Pb/s). Better yet, the breakthrough was achieved using optical fiber cables that should be compatible with existing infrastructure. For reference, 1 petabit is equivalent to a million gigabits, meaning this new record is about 100,000 times faster than the absolute fastest home internet speeds available to consumers. Even NASA will “only” get 400 Gb/s when ESnet6 rolls out in 2023. At speeds of 1 Pb/s, you could theoretically broadcast 10 million channels per second of video at 8K resolution, according to the team.

The new record was set by researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), using several emerging technologies. First, the optical fiber contains four cores – the glass tubes that transmit the signals – instead of the usual one. The transmission bandwidth is extended to a record-breaking 20 THz, thanks to a technology known as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). That bandwidth is made up of a total of 801 wavelength channels spread across three bands – the commonly used C- and L-bands, as well as the experimental S-band. With the help of some other new optical amplification and signal modulation technologies, the team achieved the record-breaking speed of 1.02 Pb/s, sending data through 51.7 km (32.1 miles) of optical fiber cables.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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