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

Submitted by sdinfoserv
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)

Submitted by tomhath
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."

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

by sh0rtie (#62090575) Attached to: Microsoft Moves More Settings Away from the Control Panel on Windows 11

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

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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: CDC Panel Unanimously Endorses Pfizer and Moderna Covid Boosters For All Adults

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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: SpaceX Will 'Hopefully' Launch First Orbital Starship Flight In January

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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 + - Iodine instead of Xenon for Ion Drives (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Tesseractic
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

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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

Submitted by Hmmmmmm
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

by sh0rtie (#60544242) Attached to: Windows XP Source Code Leaked

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.

Submission + - NYT: Uber Engineers Geofenced Apple HQ to Cover Up iPhone Fingerprinting

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Uber CEO Travis Kalanick's drive to win in life, writes the New York Times' Mike Isaac, has led to a pattern of risk-taking that has put his ride-hailing company on the brink of implosion, including a previously unreported encounter with Apple CEO Tim Cook in early 2015 that threatened the ride-sharing company with an iPhone ban death sentence: "For months, Mr. Kalanick had pulled a fast one on Apple by directing his employees to help camouflage the ride-hailing app from Apple’s engineers. The reason? So Apple would not find out that Uber had secretly been tracking iPhones even after its app had been deleted from the devices, violating Apple’s privacy guidelines. But Apple was on to the deception, and when Mr. Kalanick arrived at the midafternoon meeting sporting his favorite pair of bright red sneakers and hot-pink socks, Mr. Cook was prepared. 'So, I’ve heard you’ve been breaking some of our rules,' Mr. Cook said in his calm, Southern tone. Stop the trickery, Mr. Cook then demanded, or Uber’s app would be kicked out of Apple’s App Store. For Mr. Kalanick, the moment was fraught with tension. If Uber’s app was yanked from the App Store, it would lose access to millions of iPhone customers — essentially destroying the ride-hailing company’s business. So Mr. Kalanick acceded."
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IRS Is Suing Facebook Over Asset Transfers In Ireland (fortune.com) 97

Posted by BeauHD from the tax-evasion dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has sued Facebook on Wednesday to force it to comply with summonses related to a 2010 asset transfer. Fortune reports: "According to documents the IRS filed in San Francisco federal court, the agency suspects Facebook and its accounting firm, Ernst and Young, understated the value of intangible assets transferred to Ireland by billions of dollars. The IRS says it is seeking an order to enforce six summonses that asked Facebook to appear at the agency's offices in San Jose, Calif., and to produce papers and others records. According to IRS agent Nina Stone, Facebook failed to show up at the appointed date of June 17, and nor did it provide the documents. The dispute arose as a result of an ongoing audit of Facebook by IRS that stretches back to 2010. In that year, the company chose to designate Facebook Ireland as the rights-holder for its worldwide business outside of the U.S. and Canada, and also to transfer intellectual property assets such as its platform and 'marketing intangibles.' The crux of the disagreement between Facebook and the IRS turns on the arcane question of whether the assets in question could be transferred in their entirety or if, as the agency argues, they are 'interdependent.' [The agent's declaration can be found here.] Such arrangements are common among U.S. tech companies, and seek to reduce tax payments by scoring revenue in low tax jurisdictions like Ireland, while having higher tax countries (especially the U.S.) reduce profits by paying to license intellectual property from overseas subsidiaries."

Submission + - Arrested Nigerian Email Scammer facing 30-years in Prison (dallasnews.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Amechi Colvis Amuegbunam, 28, a Nigerian man living in the U.S. on a student visa, faces federal wire fraud charges in connection with a sophisticated email phishing scam targeting businesses. He was arrested in Baltimore and charged with scamming 17 North Texas companies out of more than $600,000 using the technique. If convicted, Amuegbunam faces up to 30 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million.

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