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Submission + - Can you picture things in your mind? (theguardian.com)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: The Guardian has an interesting article on aphantasia, which is the inability to picture objects in your mind. People with this condition tend to go into STEM fields and remember different aspects of objects and people. Personally, I never realized before reading this article that people could create mental images.

Try the red apple test.

Submission + - LiON fires on aircraft (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by khb
khb writes: CBS contends that these are happening nearly weekly. There's a nice video, and they correctly observe the difficulties in putting out such fires. Unclear why aircraft aren't being upgraded with a "disposal chute". It seems that dumping small battery items (assuming not over a forest, chaparral, or an urban area) would be a better bet than trying to manage it onboard. Or perhaps a small amount of liquid nitrogen could manage such small item fires.
Linux

Asahi Linux Is Reverse-Engineering Support For Apple Silicon, Including M1 Ultra (arstechnica.com) 46

Posted by BeauHD from the work-in-progress dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For months, a small group of volunteers has worked to get this Arch Linux-based distribution up and running on Apple Silicon Macs, adapting existing drivers and (in the case of the GPU) painstakingly writing their own. And that work is paying off -- last week, the team released its first alpha installer to the general public, and as of yesterday, the software supports the new M1 Ultra in the Mac Studio. In the current alpha, an impressive list of hardware already works, including Wi-Fi, USB 2.0 over the Thunderbolt ports (USB 3.0 only works on Macs with USB-A ports, but USB 3.0 over Thunderbolt is "coming soon"), and the built-in display. But there are still big features missing, including DisplayPort and Thunderbolt, the webcam, Bluetooth, sleep mode, and GPU acceleration. That said, regarding GPU acceleration, the developers say that the M1 is fast enough that a software-rendered Linux desktop feels faster on the M1 than a GPU-accelerated desktop feels on many other ARM chips.

Asahi's developers don't think the software will be "done," with all basic M1-series hardware and functionality supported and working out of the box, "for another year, maybe two." By then, Apple will probably have introduced another generation or two of M-series chips. But the developers are optimistic that much of the work they're doing now will continue to work on future generations of Apple hardware with relatively minimal effort. [...] If you want to try Asahi Linux on an M1 Mac, the current installer is run from the command line and requires "at least 53GB of free space" for an install with a KDE Plasma desktop. Asahi only needs about 15GB, but the installer requires you to leave at least 38GB of free space to the macOS install so that macOS system updates don't break. From there, dual-booting should work similarly to the process on Intel Macs, with the alternate OS visible from within Startup Disk or the boot picker you can launch when your start your Mac. Future updates should be installable from within your new Asahi Linux installation and shouldn't require you to reinstall from scratch.
Hardware

Retro Computing Museum In Ukraine Destroyed By Russian Bomb (pcgamer.com) 131

Posted by BeauHD from the now-only-existing-in-memories dept.
A privately owned collection of more than 500 pieces of retro computer and technology history has been destroyed by a Russian bomb in the city of Mariupol. PC Gamer reports: The destruction was highlighted by Mark Howlett on Twitter, and confirmed by the Ukrainian Software and Computer Museum account, which operates museums in Kharkiv and Kyiv. The owner of the Mariupul collection, Dmitry Cherepanov, is reportedly safe, though his collection of computers, consoles, and assorted tech from fifty years of computing has been wiped out. "There is neither my museum nor my house," writes Cherepanov on his Facebook page, it8bit.club.

The museum itself may be gone, but Cherepanov has been chronicling his collection of exhibits online for some time now, and though this is all that's left, it is still a resource worth checking out. There are a host of fascinating old machines, including the Commodore C64 [...]. As well as images and information about all the 120 computers and consoles in his collection, Cherepanov also hosts RetroBit Radio on the site, too. Cherepanov has set up a Paypal account for donations, the details of which you can find on his Facebook page.

Submission + - NASA's new sleeping bags could prevent eyeball 'squashing' on the ISS (engadget.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: It sucks fluid out of astronaut's heads and toward their feet.

Becoming an astronaut requires perfect 20/20 vision, but unfortunately, the effects of space can cause astronauts to return to Earth with degraded eyesight. Now, researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center have developed a sleeping bag that that could prevent or reduce those problems by effectively sucking fluid out of astronauts' heads.

More than half of NASA astronauts that went to the International Space Station (ISS) for more than six months have developed vision problems to varying degrees. In one case, astronaut John Philips returned from a six month stint about the ISS in 2005 with his vision reduced from 20/20 to 20/100, as the BBC reported.

To combat SANS, researchers collaborated with outdoor gear manufacturer REI to develop a sleeping bag that fits around the waist, enclosing the lower body. A vacuum cleaner-like suction device is then activated that draws fluid toward the feet, preventing it from accumulating in the head.

Submission + - UKG / Kronos Impacted by Ransomware Attack (kronos.com) 1

Submitted by DJAdapt
DJAdapt writes: Kronos Private Cloud (KPC) customers discovered that their Time & Labor Management and Payroll solutions were completely down on Monday, 12/13/21. According to a post on the Kronos Community Page, a cyber security incident due to a ransomware attack is affecting UKG Workforce Central, UKGTeleStaff, Healthcare Extensions, and Banking Scheduling. Although they are currently working with cyber security experts on the issue, they say that it may take several weeks to restore full system availability. This will cause many folks using their TLM and payroll services to seek manual alternatives in the meantime.

Submission + - Wikimedia bans admin of Wikipedia Croatia for pushing radical right agendas (therecord.media) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Wikimedia Foundation has banned the administrator of the Croatian version of Wikipedia after an investigation revealed that together with other admins, they edited and distorted content on the site with radical right views. This group had de-facto control of the website between 2011 and 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation said in a report published earlier this month.

“It appears that this group consisted of real-life friends, ideological sympathisers, and political allies,” the organization said. any articles created and edited by the members of this group present the views that match political and socio-cultural positions advocated by a loosely connected group of Croatian radical right political parties and ultra-conservative populist movements."

Submission + - SPAM: Verizon Will Shut Down Its 3G Network In 2022

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Verizon will shut down its 3G services on December 31st, 2022, VP of network engineering Mike Haberman announced today. According to Haberman, less than 1 percent of Verizon customers still access the 3G network, with 99 percent on 4G LTE or 5G. Verizon has roughly 94 million customers, so by the company's own math, as many as 940,000 people are still using Verizon's 3G network.

"Customers who still have a 3G device will continue to be strongly encouraged to make a change now," Haberman wrote. "As we move closer to the shut-off date customers still accessing the 3G network may experience a degradation or complete loss of service, and our service centers will only be able to offer extremely limited troubleshooting help on these older devices." Verizon has been teasing a shut-off of its 3G CDMA services for years. [...] The delay to 2022 is final — there will be no more extensions, Haberman said. He noted that this will be "months after our competitors have shut off their networks completely."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Teens Fully Protected By Pfizer's COVID-19 Vaccine, Company Says

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Adolescents ages 12 to 15 were completely protected from symptomatic COVID-19 after being vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine in a small Phase III clinical trial, Pfizer reported in a press release Wednesday. The company also said that the vaccine was well-tolerated in the age group, spurring only the standard side effects seen in people ages 16 to 25. The vaccine is already authorized for use in people age 16 and over.

The vaccine appeared more effective at spurring defensive immune responses in adolescents ages 12 to 15 than in the 16- to 25-year-old group, producing even higher levels of antibodies that were able to neutralize SARS-CoV-2. In a measure of neutralizing antibodies, vaccinated youths in the new trial had geometric mean titers (GMTs) of 1,239.5, compared with the GMTs of 705.1 previously seen in those ages 16 to 25, Pfizer noted. The trial involved 2,260 adolescents ages 12 to 15, of which 1,131 were vaccinated and 1,129 received a placebo. There were 18 cases of symptomatic COVID-19 in the trial, all of which were in the placebo group. In today’s press release, the company trumpeted that the vaccine demonstrated “100 percent efficacy.” The trial was not primarily designed to assess efficacy, however. It was primarily assessing relative immune responses, so it will require more data to fully evaluate efficacy. Additionally, Pfizer and BioNTech have only released top-line trial results, not the full data from the trial, which has not been peer-reviewed.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Almalinux 8.3 Is Released As A Stable RHEL Clone For Those Who Liked CentOS (linuxreviews.org)

Submitted by xiando
xiando writes: CentOS used to be the go-to alternative for those who wanted to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) without having to pay RedHat to use it. It was a almost 1:1 clone until RedHat took control of it and turned it into what is now a RHEL beta-version, not a stable RHEL release without the branding. Almalinux is one of several projects that have made their own RHEL forks in response. The first Almalinux version is now released.

Submission + - IPv4 Parsing Flaw in NPM Netmask Could Affect 270,000 Apps 1

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: Independent security researchers analyzing the widely used open source component netmask have discovered security vulnerabilities that could leave more than a quarter million open source applications vulnerable to attack, according to a report released Monday, The Security Ledger reports. (https://securityledger.com/2021/03/critical-flaws-found-in-widely-used-netmask-open-source-library/)

According to a report by the site Sick Codes (https://sick.codes/universal-netmask-npm-package-used-by-270000-projects-vulnerable-to-octal-input-data-server-side-request-forgery-remote-file-inclusion-local-file-inclusion-and-more-cve-2021-28918/) the flaws open applications that rely on netmask to a wide range of malicious attacks including Server Side Request Forgeries (SSRF) and Remote- and Local File Includes (RFI, LFI) that could enable attackers to ferry malicious code into a protected network, or siphon sensitive data out of one. Even worse, the flaws appear the stretch far beyond a single open source module, affecting a wide range of open source development languages, researchers say.

Netmask (https://www.npmjs.com/package/netmask) is a widely used package that allows developers to evaluate whether a IP address attempting to access an application was inside or outside of a given IPv4 range. Based on an IP address submitted to netmask, the module will return true or false about whether or not the submitted IP address is in the defined “block.” According to the researcher using the handle “Sick Codes,” (https://www.twitter.com/sickcodes), the researchers discovered that netmask had a big blind spot. Specifically: it evaluates certain IP addresses incorrectly: improperly validating so-called “octal strings” rendering IPv4 addresses that contain certain octal strings as integers. For example, the IP4 address 0177.0.0.1 should be evaluated by netmask as the private IP address 127.0.0.1, as the octal string “0177” translates to the integer “127.” However, netmask evaluates it as a public IPv4 address: 177.0.0.1, simply stripping off the leading zero and reading the remaining parts of the octal string as an integer.

The implications for modules that are using the vulnerable version of netmask are serious. According to Sick Codes, remote attackers can use SSRF attacks to upload malicious files from the public Internet without setting off alarms, because applications relying on netmask would treat a properly configured external IP address as an internal address. Similarly, attackers could also disguise remote IP addresses local addresses, enabling remote file inclusion (RFI) attacks that could permit web shells or malicious programs to be placed on target networks. But researchers say much more is to come. The problems identified in netmask are not unique to that module. Researchers have noted previously that textual representation of IPv4 addresses were never standardized (https://blog.dave.tf/post/ip-addr-parsing/), leading to disparities in how different but equivalent versions of IPv4 addresses (for example: octal strings) are rendered and interpreted by different applications and platforms.

Submission + - SpacX Mars rocket explodes. Again. (cnn.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: SpaceX's fourth attempt to successfully launch and land its Mars rocket prototype has once again gone up in flames.

SpaceX engineer John Insprucker, who hosted a webcast of the test launch, said the rocket, known as SN11, had a normal ascent and that all appeared to be well before on-board cameras lost signal and the vehicle was subsumed by fog moments before landing. Insprucker said the company will share updates on social media once SpaceX engineers are able to check out the landing site. The area surrounding the vehicle must be cleared before liftoff for safety reasons.

Insprucker said the company is not expecting to recover video footage. "Don't wait for landing," he advised webcast viewers.

Independent video streamers that recorded the flight did not capture the last stretch of the flight either due to fog, but NASASpaceflight — a media site — reported that one of the outlet's cameras may have been struck by debris from the rocket. Footage of the launch pad showed SN11 was nowhere in sight after the rocket's descent.

For his part, Musk tweeted:

At least the crater is in the right place!— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 30, 2021

Submission + - Astronomers detect extended dark matter halo around ancient dwarf galaxy (phys.org)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: The Milky Way is surrounded by dozens of dwarf galaxies that are thought to be relics of the very first galaxies in the universe. Among the most primitive of these galactic fossils is Tucana II—an ultrafaint dwarf galaxy that is about 163,000 light years, from Earth.

MIT astrophysicists have detected stars at the edge of Tucana II, in a configuration that is surprisingly far from its center but nevertheless caught up in the tiny galaxy's gravitational pull. This is the first evidence that Tucana II hosts an extended dark matter halo—a region of gravitationally bound matter that the researchers calculated to be three to five times more massive than scientists had estimated. This discovery of far-flung stars in an ancient dwarf galaxy implies that the very first galaxies in the universe were also likely extended and more massive than previously thought.

The team used an imaging filter on the telescope to spot primitive, metal-poor stars beyond the galaxy's core. Analysis shows a kinematic connection, that these far-out stars move in lockstep with the inner stars, like bathwater going down the drain.

The results suggest that Tucana II must have an extended dark matter halo that is three to five times more massive than previously thought, in order for it to keep a gravitational hold on these far-off stars. "Without dark matter, galaxies would just fly apart," Chiti. says. "[Dark matter] is a crucial ingredient in making a galaxy and holding it together."

The team's results are the first evidence that an ultrafaint dwarf galaxy can harbor an extended dark matter halo. "This probably also means that the earliest galaxies formed in much larger dark matter halos than previously thought,"

Submission + - Fauci Says CDC May Recommend Wearing Two Masks To Fight Virus (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Centers for Disease Control may recommend wearing two masks — one over the other — to keep at bay the more contagious variants of the coronavirus, according to Anthony Fauci. The CDC and Fauci discussed the matter Monday but the agency doesn’t yet have the data to make any formal recommendation, he said Tuesday during a Washington Post event. Still, "it makes common sense” to increase protection, Fauci said. The infectious disease expert has previously endorsed double-masking given the new strains of the virus.

Submission + - Comcast Lifts Uploads To 5Mbps Amid Complaints Its Low-Income Plan Is Too Slow (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Comcast is doubling download speeds and increasing upload speeds for the $10-per-month Internet Essentials plan that it sells to low-income subscribers. Comcast had faced criticism for keeping the plan's speeds at 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up during the pandemic, though even those speeds were an increase from the 15Mbps/2Mbps offered until March 2020. In today's announcement, Comcast said it is "doubling the program's Internet download speed to 50Mbps and increasing the upstream speed to 5Mbps for all new and existing customers at no additional cost." The speed upgrade "will be rolled out nationally beginning March 1," Comcast said.

Low-income users still face Comcast's 1.2TB data cap, which adds $10 to a monthly bill for each additional block of 50GB. But data-cap overage charges are capped at $30 per month for Internet Essentials subscribers, while the extra charges can go up to $100 for other customers. Information on how to qualify for Internet Essentials is available here.

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