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Submission + - Asus Packs 12-Core Intel i7 Into a Raspberry Pi-Sized Board (theregister.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The biz’s GENE-ADP6, announced this week, can pack as much as a 12-core/16-thread Intel processor with Iris Xe graphics into a 3.5-inch form factor. The diminutive system is aimed at machine-vision applications and can be configured with your choice of Intel silicon including Celeron, or Core i3, i5, or a choice of 10 or 12-core i7 processors. As with other SBCs we’ve seen from Aaeon and others, the processors aren’t socketed so you won’t be upgrading later. This device is pretty much aimed at embedded and industrial use, mind. All five SKUs are powered by Intel’s current-gen Alder Lake mobile processor family, including a somewhat unusual 5-core Celeron processor that pairs a single performance core with four efficiency cores. However, only the i5 and i7 SKUs come equipped with Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics. The i3 and Celeron are stuck on UHD graphics. The board can be equipped with up to 64GB of DDR5 memory operating at up to 4800 megatransfers/sec by way of a pair of SODIMM modules.

For I/O the board features a nice set of connectivity including a pair of NICs operating at 2.5 Gbit/sec and 1 Gbit/sec, HDMI 2.1 and Display Port 1.4, three 10Gbit/sec-capable USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, and a single USB-C port that supports up to 15W of power delivery and display out. For those looking for additional connectivity for their embedded applications, the system also features a plethora of pin headers for USB 2.0, display out, serial interfaces, and 8-bit GPIO. Storage is provided by your choice of a SATA 3.0 interface or a m.2 mSATA/NVMe SSD. Unlike Aaeon’s Epic-TGH7 announced last month, the GENE-ADP6 is too small to accommodate a standard PCIe slot, but does feature a FPC connector, which the company says supports additional NVMe storage or external graphics by way of a 4x PCIe 4.0 interface.

Submission + - France to bar "dark store" delivery depots (bbc.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: "Dark stores", businesses which stock commonly needed items but which only offer delivery once you order over the internet, and whose "storefront" is a frosted window with no way to enter the "store", are now banned in all of France. The stores are now classified as warehouses rather than shops which will allow local mayors to take action if needed. From the BBC:

Run by half a dozen competing companies such as Gorillas, Cajoo, Getir, Flink and Gopuff, "dark stores" have proliferated in France as elsewhere over the last two years after Covid confinement popularised internet food shopping.

Advertising in Paris urges householders to get their food delivered in less than 10 minutes — or "quicker than a double by Benzema", referring to the French football star. A campaign by Cajoo shows "Alex" doing his shopping by smartphone while sitting on the lavatory.

But residents of buildings where "dark stores" have replaced pre-existing grocery shops are angry about noise from early morning lorries and the disruption caused by squads of deliverers on electric bicycles and scooters.

. . .

"This is not just a question of noise and traffic disruption. It's a question of society," said Camille Augey, a deputy mayor of Lyon.

"We need to ask ourselves what we want. Does every need have to be immediately satisfied regardless of external consequences? Do we really need that packet of pasta or bottle of shampoo at 11 o'clock at night? Can it really not wait until the morning?"

"We managed perfectly well before quick commerce, didn't we?" she added.

Submission + - Police Are Telling ShotSpotter to Alter Evidence From Gunshot-Detecting AI (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On May 31 last year, 25-year-old Safarain Herring was shot in the head and dropped off at St. Bernard Hospital in Chicago by a man named Michael Williams. He died two days later. Chicago police eventually arrested the 64-year-old Williams and charged him with murder (Williams maintains that Herring was hit in a drive-by shooting). A key piece of evidence in the case is video surveillance footage showing Williams’ car stopped on the 6300 block of South Stony Island Avenue at 11:46 p.m.—the time and location where police say they know Herring was shot. How did they know that’s where the shooting happened? Police said ShotSpotter, a surveillance system that uses hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots, generated an alert for that time and place. https://www.vice.com/en/articl... ”>Except that’s not entirely true, according to recent court filings.

That night, 19 ShotSpotter sensors detected a percussive sound at 11:46 p.m. and determined the location to be 5700 South Lake Shore Drive—a mile away from the site where prosecutors say Williams committed the murder, according to a motion filed by Williams’ public defender. The company’s algorithms initially classified the sound as a firework. That weekend had seen widespread protests in Chicago in response to George Floyd’s murder, and some of those protesting lit fireworks. But after the 11:46 p.m. alert came in, a ShotSpotter analyst manually overrode the algorithms and “reclassified” the sound as a gunshot. Then, months later and after “post-processing,” another ShotSpotter analyst changed the alert’s coordinates to a location on South Stony Island Drive near where Williams’ car was seen on camera. “Through this human-involved method, the ShotSpotter output in this case was dramatically transformed from data that did not support criminal charges of any kind to data that now forms the centerpiece of the prosecution’s murder case against Mr. Williams,” the public defender wrote in the motion.

The document is what’s known as a Frye motion—a request for a judge to examine and rule on whether a particular forensic method is scientifically valid enough to be entered as evidence. Rather than defend ShotSpotter’s technology and its employees' actions in a Frye hearing, the prosecutors withdrew all ShotSpotter evidence against Williams. The case isn’t an anomaly, and the pattern it represents could have huge ramifications for ShotSpotter in Chicago, where the technology generates an average of 21,000 alerts each year. The technology is also currently in use in more than 100 cities. Motherboard’s review of court documents from the Williams case and other trials in Chicago and New York State, including testimony from ShotSpotter’s favored expert witness, suggests that the company’s analysts frequently modify alerts at the request of police departments—some of which appear to be grasping for evidence that supports their narrative of events.

Comment Standalone backup (Score 1) 283

by caveman (#61137442) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Do You Use for Backups at Home?

And what is wrong with:
BOOT/R5:E0000000 DUA0
$ BACKUP/IMAGE DUA0: MUA0:BACKUP.BCK/SAVE/INIT/LABEL=BACKUP
?

apart from:
1. The tapes only hold 90-ish MB so you'll probably need more than one. (could be worse, could be RX50 floppy discs)
2. You try buying TK50's in quantity now
3. If you're still using VMS, you're probably only doing this because you're an old git and showing off, as it's faster to emulate the thing on SimH, and you could just copy the disk image file somewhere else in a few seconds instead of waiting several hours for old serpentine tape technology to wind it's way from end to end 22 times.
4. You could (and probably should) think of several million things that you should be doing instead

Regards,
A curmudgeonly VMS system manager

Comment Re:New phone time (Score 1) 137

by caveman (#60252114) Attached to: Ads Are Taking Over Samsung's Galaxy Smartphones

You can still replace your battery? Samsung will be sure to relieve you of the horror of that tedious chore so you can support their market model properly.

While the A10 I have is nice, and I usually manage to break phones in a total bonehead maneuvre before the battery dies the death, I still feel somewhat agrieved that if I somehow manage to care for this device well enough for long enough, it's lifetime is still going to be finite.

And back on topic, I had an alcatel phone, until they updated the calculator app or all things to contain ads. I'm not sure what bit of the sea that landed in. I had hoped Samsung were above that sort of thing.

Comment Other - Roll your own (Score 1) 226

by caveman (#56485173) Attached to: Which cell phone carrier do you use for your primary cell phone?

In the UK, there are four dominant carriers, O2, Vodaphone, EE and 3. All of the other carriers piggyback on those four to some extent, for example Tesco Mobile uses O2 as a carrier.

I have a number of SIM cards from sip2sim.uk which connect a mobile device to a VoIP service, which can be provided by their parent company, or any other VoIP provider on the planet. The SIM card itself does not provide a mobile telephone number, as the VoIP service does that. The mobile phone then becomes a registered device on that VoIP server, and consequently could be an internal extension on a corporate network, or any other kind of service provisioned via VoIP. The sip2sim servers just need, for each card, a server, username, and password. What happens to traffic after that point is down to the server you are logging in to.

These SIMs by default piggyback on UK O2, however in the event of no O2 signal, can switch automatically onto Dutch Vodaphone. Why Dutch? UK Vodaphone customers cannot roam onto EE's network, however Vodaphone customers from other countries can, so I effectively get three-network domestic roaming. Quite what will happen after Brexit, I have no idea.

My VoIP service is provided elsewhere, and I have all of my SIMs logging in to that, which means all of my devices have the same telephone number. This seems to confuse some organisations, but the practical upshot is that if you phone my number, you get me. I actually have multiple numbers, some of which I give to work contacts, others to private contacts, others to potentially spammy outfits, as numbers are cheap (as little as GBP 0.10) and can be terminated easily if a specific company starts to annoy me more than most. (British gas, I'm looking at you...)

One downside is that I have a UK telephone number which does not start 07. Numbers starting 07 in the UK are usally mobile telephone numbers, and despite many mobile networks actually offering non 07 numbers, quite a lot of companies think they are doing you a favour by refusing to accept 'mobile' numbers that do not start 07. The conversation usually goes:
Can I have your mobile number?
Sure, it's 014....
No, your mobile number
Yes. 0, 1, ..
No, it starts 07
No it doesnt
Yes it does
Stop asking me for my mobile number and then telling me that it's wrong!
(The conversation usually ends badly at this stage, although sometimes I actually get someone order a SIM card. Just don't get me started on the reaction I get from Carphone Warehouse staff when I try and buy a new mobile handset and they ask what network I'm with. (I just lie, it's easier))

So, I could allocate an 07 number to it, I do have an allocation, but why would I do that as it is still expensive to call 07 numbers from quite a lot of phone contracts when calls to landlines are practically free. (Ok, it's not a landline either, which just illustrates how easily confused the telecoms companies are)
The Internet

After Beating Cable Lobby, Colorado City Moves Ahead With Muni Broadband (arstechnica.com) 198

Posted by BeauHD from the full-steam-ahead dept.
Last night, the city council in Fort Collins, Colorado, voted to move ahead with a municipal fiber broadband network providing gigabit speeds, two months after the cable industry failed to stop the project. Ars Technica reports: Last night's city council vote came after residents of Fort Collins approved a ballot question that authorized the city to build a broadband network. The ballot question, passed in November, didn't guarantee that the network would be built because city council approval was still required, but that hurdle is now cleared. Residents approved the ballot question despite an anti-municipal broadband lobbying campaign backed by groups funded by Comcast and CenturyLink. The Fort Collins City Council voted 7-0 to approve the broadband-related measures, a city government spokesperson confirmed to Ars today.

While the Federal Communications Commission has voted to eliminate the nation's net neutrality rules, the municipal broadband network will be neutral and without data caps. "The network will deliver a 'net-neutral' competitive unfettered data offering that does not impose caps or usage limits on one use of data over another (i.e., does not limit streaming or charge rates based on type of use)," a new planning document says. "All application providers (data, voice, video, cloud services) are equally able to provide their services, and consumers' access to advanced data opens up the marketplace." The city will also be developing policies to protect consumers' privacy. The city intends to provide gigabit service for $70 a month or less and a cheaper Internet tier.

Submission + - Hal Finney, PGP and Bitcoin pioneer passes away

Submitted by brokenin2
brokenin2 writes: Hal Finney, the number two programmer for PGP and the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction has passed away. From the article on Coindesk: "Shortly after collaborating with Nakamoto on early bitcoin code in 2009, Finney announced he was suffering from ALS. Increasing paralysis, which eventually became near-total, forced him to retire from work in early 2011."
Security

Selectively Reusing Bad Passwords Is Not a Bad Idea, Researchers Say 280

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the brain-full-try-again-later dept.
An anonymous reader tipped us to news that Microsoft researchers have determined that reuse of the same password for low security services is safer than generating a unique password for each service. Quoting El Reg: Redmond researchers Dinei Florencio and Cormac Herley, together with Paul C. van Oorschot of Carleton University, Canada ... argue that password reuse on low risk websites is necessary in order for users to be able to remember unique and high entropy codes chosen for important sites. Users should therefore slap the same simple passwords across free websites that don't hold important information and save the tough and unique ones for banking websites and other repositories of high-value information. "The rapid decline of [password complexity as recall difficulty] increases suggests that, far from being unallowable, password re-use is a necessary and sensible tool in managing a portfolio," the trio wrote. "Re-use appears unavoidable if [complexity] must remain above some minimum and effort below some maximum." Not only do they recommend reusing passwords, but reusing bad passwords for low risks sites to minimize recall difficulty.

Submission + - Julian Assange's Lawyers: Follow Swedish Law, Interrogate Him in the UK (ibtimes.co.uk)

Submitted by concertina226
concertina226 writes: "Prosecutor Marianne Ny must ... start treating him as everybody else who is under suspicion," the lawyers wrote.

The lawyers' op-ed piece is in response to another piece published on 6 February in SvD entitled "Why should an exception be made for Assange?", in which the lawyer representing the younger of the two women, Elisabeth Massi Fritz, criticised the media for naming Assange, since suspects and accusers are rarely named in the Swedish press.

Submission + - Mozilla will start showing ads in Firefox (muktware.com) 3

Submitted by sfcrazy
sfcrazy writes: Mozilla has taken a u-turn from their previous stand on online advertisement where they were blocking ad cookies by default. Now the organization is opting for showing ads on a user's home page which they call Directory Tiles. There is no doubt that Mozilla is in a tricky situation as it's multi-year deal with Google will end this year and it's uncertain if Google will renew it. So, ads may be their last resort. Still it's ironic.

Submission + - House Threatens Legal Basis of NSA Surveillance (slashdot.org)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: The author of the Patriot Act has warned that the legal justification for the NSA’s wholesale domestic surveillance program will disappear next summer if the White House doesn’t restrict the way the NSA uses its power. Section 215 of the Patriot Act will expire during the summer of 2015 and will not be renewed unless the White House changes the shocking scale of the surveillance programs for which the National Security Administration (NSA) uses the authorization, according to James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), an original author of the Patriot Act and its two reauthorizations, stated Washington insider-news source The Hill. “Unless Section 215 gets fixed, you, Mr. Cole, and the intelligence community will get absolutely nothing, because I am confident there are not the votes in this Congress to reauthorize it,” Sensenbrenner warned Deputy Attorney General James Cole during the Feb. 4 hearing. Provisions of Section 215, which allows the NSA to collect metadata about phone calls made within the U.S., give the government a “very useful tool” to track connections among Americans that might be relevant to counterterrorism investigations, Cole told the House Judiciary Committee. The scale of the surveillance and lengths to which the NSA has pushed its limits was a “shock” according to Sensenbrenner, who also wrote the USA Freedom Act, a bill to restrict the scope of both Section 215 and the NSA programs, which has attracted 130 co-sponsors. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has sponsored a similar bill in the Senate.

Submission + - Judge Says You Can Warn Others About Speed Traps

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Speeding is against the law, and yes, even going 5 mph over the speed limit is breaking the law. But everyone does it, right? You do it, your friends do it, heck, your grandmother does it. But what about when you see a cop? Some cops are ticketing people for notifying fellow motorists about speed traps. In Florida, Ryan Kintner simply flashed his high-beams to warning oncoming cars that there was a cop ahead. He was given a ticket for doing so. He went to court to fight the ticket, and a judge ruled that flashing lights are the equivalent of free speech, thus he had every right to flash his lights to warn oncoming cars. So what have we learned here? Basically, if you are a good Samaritan, flash your lights and warn oncoming traffic of speed traps, because this is America ,and we are allowed freedom of speech.

Submission + - NZ Govt is relaxing privacy laws for US citizens and ex-pats (stuff.co.nz)

Submitted by Master Moose
Master Moose writes: New Zealands Government wants to override privacy laws to supply the US Government with private details about Americans living in New Zealand.

As part of a global tax-dodging crackdown, the US is forcing banks and other financial institutions to hand over the private financial details of US "persons" and companies based overseas.

From July this year, Kiwi banks and insurers will be required to provide US tax authorities with American customers' contact details, bank account numbers and transaction history.

  The move comes amid continuing criticism of New Zealand's participation in Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement talks, aimed at securing a wider-reaching free trade deal with the US and other countries.

Critics say the secretive talks could restrict New Zealand's ability to make its own laws on everything from the environment to employment.

Submission + - Fighting the Flu May Hurt Those Around You (sciencemag.org) 4

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: When you've got the flu, it can't hurt to take an aspirin or an ibuprofen to control the fever and make you feel better, right? Wrong, some scientists say. Lowering your body temperature may make the virus replicate faster and increase the risk that you transmit it to others. A new study claims that there are at least 700 extra influenza deaths in the United States every year because people suppress their fever.

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