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Submission + - Former Intel Engineer: Skylake QA drove Apple away (pcgamer.com) 1

Submitted by UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: A former Intel engineer has put forth information that the QA process around Skylake was so terrible that it may have finally driven Apple to use their own processors in upcoming Macs. Not to say that Apple would not have eventually made this move, but François Piednoël says Skylake was abnormally bad with Apple finding the largest amount of bugs inside the architecture rivaling Intel itself. That led Apple to reconsider staying on the architecture and hastening their plans to migrate to their own chips.

Submission + - Gravitational waves reveal lightest black hole ever observed (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Gravitational wave detectors have spotted a cosmic collision in which a giant black hole swallowed up a mystery object seemingly too heavy to be a neutron star, but too light to be a black hole. Weighing in at 2.6 times the mass of the Sun, the object falls into a hypothetical “mass gap,” a desert between the heaviest neutron star and the lightest black hole that some theories predict—suggesting the gap doesn’t exist and that those theories need to be amended.

“People who thought there was a mass gap will have to rethink it, for sure,” says Cole Miller, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who was not involved in the observation. He adds, however, “People aren’t going to be joining cults because they cannot survive this change in their worldview.”

Submission + - Wizards of the Coast is addressing racist stereotypes in Dungeons & Dragons (polygon.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast has acknowledged the existence of racist stereotypes in its sourcebooks, and pledged to make changes to ameliorate the issue. In a blog post published on June 17 titled "Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons," Wizards of the Coast said that depicting a diverse array of human beings — beyond “fantasy versions of northern Europeans” — is "one of the explicit design goals of 5th edition D&D."

We present orcs and drow in a new light in two of our most recent books, Eberron: Rising from the Last War and Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount. In those books, orcs and drow are just as morally and culturally complex as other peoples. We will continue that approach in future books, portraying all the peoples of D&D in relatable ways and making it clear that they are as free as humans to decide who they are and what they do.

Submission + - Nvidia Engineer releases Vulkan GPU driver after 2 years of development (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by frootcakeuk
frootcakeuk writes: Martin Thomas has just released his version of a Vulkan compatible (somewhat) GPU driver for Raspberry Pi 0,1,2 & 3. From Tom's Hardware: "Earlier this year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation hooked up with Igalia to start development on an open-sourced Vulkan graphics driver for the Raspberry Pi. However, Martin Thomas, an engineer at Nvidia, beat them to the punch.

Thomas announced yesterday via his personal Twitter that his RPi-VK-Driver is ready for primetime. The talented engineer had been working on the Vulkan driver in his spare time for more than two years.

Technically, Thomas' iteration isn't a Vulkan driver per se because it doesn't comply with the official standards established by The Khronos Group. Nonetheless, the resourceful developer produced a driver that adheres to the Vulkan parameters as much as possible, and as close as the hardware would permit it. There's just one limitation with the RPi-VK-Driver though. Unlike the official Vulkan driver that's still in the works, Thomas' version is only compatible with the Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU that's found inside the Raspberry Pi 1, 2, 3 and Zero devices."

Submission + - SpaceX Is Now Taking Requests for Starlink Beta Testers (futurism.com)

Submitted by Pikoro
Pikoro writes: With over 500 Starlink broadband-beaming satellites already in orbit, SpaceX is looking to move ahead with rolling out its internet service. The Elon Musk-led company is now seeking beta users to test it out

The service’s website now invites users to apply to become early adopters of the service. “Get updates on Starlink news and service availability in your area,” it reads.
Once signed up, users get an email: “Starlink is designed to deliver high-speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable. Private beta testing is expected to begin later this summer, followed by public beta testing, starting with higher latitudes.”

Starlink's website beta signup page is available here: https://www.starlink.com/

Submission + - Some States Have Embraced Online Voting. It's a Huge Risk. (politico.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Sunday, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan revealed numerous security flaws in the product that West Virginia and Delaware are using, saying it “represents a severe risk to election security and could allow attackers to alter election results without detection.” In fact, it may be a decade or more before the U.S. can safely entrust the internet with the selection of its lawmakers and presidents, according to some experts. Still, a handful of states are pushing ahead, with the encouragement of one politically connected tech entrepreneur — and the tempting logic of the question, “If we can bank online, why can’t we vote the same way?”

These are the problems with that logic:
1) Elections are different. Lots of people bank, shop and socialize online — putting their money and personal details at potential risk of theft or other exploitation. But elections are unique for two reasons: They are anonymous and irreversible. Aside from party caucuses and conventions, virtually all U.S. elections use secret ballots and polling places designed for privacy. That protects people from being blackmailed or bribed to vote a certain way — but it also means that, barring an advance in the technology, voters have no way to verify that their ballots were correctly counted or challenge the results. That’s far different from a consumer’s ability to contest a fraudulent credit card purchase, which depends on their financial institution linking their activity to their identity.

2) The internet is a dangerous place. Even if it were possible to require electronic ballots to travel through servers only in the U.S., no method exists to ensure security at every server along the way. It would be like trusting FedEx to deliver a package that had to pass through warehouses with unlocked doors, open windows and no security cameras. The most effective way to protect data along these digital paths is “end-to-end” encryption [...] Researchers have not figured out how to use end-to-end encryption in internet voting.

3) People’s devices may already be compromised. It’s hard enough to protect a ballot as it transits the internet, but what really keeps experts up at night is the thought of average Americans using their computers or phones to cast that ballot in the first place. Internet-connected devices are riddled with malware, nefarious code that can silently manipulate its host machine for myriad purposes. [...] Importantly, election officials cannot peer into their voters’ devices and definitively sweep them for malware. And without a secure device, end-to-end encryption is useless, because malware could just subvert the encryption process.

4) Hackers have lots of potential targets. What could an attacker do? "There are literally hundreds of different threats," said Joe Kiniry, chief scientist of the election tech firm Free & Fair. Among the options: Attacking the ballot; Attacking the election website; Tampering with ballots in transit; Bogging down the election with bad data; and/or The insider threat involving a "bad" employee tampering with an election from the inside.

5) Audits have faulted the major internet voting vendors’ security. Virtually every audit of an internet voting system has revealed serious, widespread security vulnerabilities, although the ease with which a hacker could exploit them varies.

6) Internet voting advocates disagree. Election officials who embrace internet voting deny the risks are as serious as the experts say.

7) What it would take to make internet voting secure. Secure internet voting depends on two major advances: technology that allows voters’ computers and phones to demonstrate that they are malware-free, and end-to-end encryption to protect ballots in transit. [...] Solving these problems would require expensive, long-term collaboration between virtually every big-name hardware- and software-maker, Kiniry said.

Submission + - The SDR.hu project has been finished (sdr.hu)

Submitted by Z00L00K
Z00L00K writes: The site known in amateur radio for access to a plethora of SDR (Software Defined Radio) sites sdr.hu has now closed down.

The SDR sites that exists all over the world are for listening in to primarily shortwave radio.

From the site:

I'd like to say a big thanks to everyone who joined my journey with this project!

I hope you had a good time listening on the site, and learnt some things about SDR. The purpose of this site was to provide a technological demonstration for amateur radio operators about Software Defined Radio, and I hope this goal has been reached. As this website was a one-person hobby project, with my tasks and responsibilities growing, and my focus moving to other projects at which I hope to make a greater positive impact, I'm unable to further develop SDR.hu and protect it from abuse.

Furthermore, I think this site has some good alternatives now. Nevertheless, in my opinion amateur radio receivers should be shared with strict access control in the future.

If you have more questions, feel free to consult the FAQ.


73!

Andras, HA7ILM

Submission + - Scientists Engineer One Protein To Fight Cancer and Regenerate Neurons (phys.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Our lungs, bones, blood vessels and other major organs are made up of cells, and one way our bodies keep us healthy is by using protein messengers known as ligands that bind to receptors on the surfaces of cells to regulate our biological processes. When those messages get garbled, it can make us ill with a host of different diseases. Now a team led by Stanford bioengineer and department chair Jennifer Cochran has tweaked one ligand in slightly different ways to produce two startlingly different results. One set of alterations caused neuronal cells to regenerate, while different tweaks to the same protein inhibited lung tumor growth. The experiments her team described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences were performed on rat and human cells or in mice that model actual diseases and are still far from being tested in humans. But the results show how scientists are becoming increasingly adept at tinkering with the body's protein-based control mechanisms to help vital organs heal themselves.

Submission + - SPAM: What It's Like to Get Doxed for Taking a Bike Ride 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: By the standards of the pandemic, Thursday had been a normal day for Peter Weinberg. A 49-year-old finance marketing executive, he worked from his home in Bethesda, Maryland, right outside of the District of Columbia, staying busy with Zoom meetings and the new rituals of our socially isolated world.

Then, around 10 p.m., he received an irate message on LinkedIn from someone he didn’t know. He brushed it off, thinking it was probably just spam. Then he got another. And another. The third message was particular strange, as it mentioned something about the cops coming to find him. Perplexed, he watched as the messages continued to pile up. They were all so similar: angry, threatening, accusatory. His profile views suddenly soared into the thousands.

He began to panic. He decided to check Twitter. Although he’d had an account for more than a decade, Weinberg didn’t use the social platform very much. He mostly followed mainstream news outlets, politicians from across the ideological spectrum, entrepreneurs, and financial analysts. He had what you might call “low engagement.” But not anymore.

The other guy had been captured on video hitting children and ramming his bike into an adult after becoming enraged that they were posting fliers around the Capital Crescent Trail in support of George Floyd.

“You assaulted a little girl and other innocents because of your political beliefs,” one Twitter user messaged him. “Hey so are you the piece of shit who assaulted a child in Maryland today on the bicycle trail?” asked another.

But the Park Police had made an error. “Correction, the incident occurred yesterday morning, 6/1/2020,” they wrote in a follow up tweet. As with most such clarifications, it had only a fraction of the reach: a mere 2,000 shares.

It was based on that initial, false information that Weinberg had become a suspect for the internet mob. To his surprise, the app that he used to record his regular rides from Bethesda into Georgetown via the Capital Crescent Trail shared that information publicly, not just with his network of friends and followers. Someone had located a record of his ride on the path on June 2, matched it to the location of the assault from the video, matched his profile picture — white guy, aviator-style sunglasses, helmet obscuring much of his head — to the man in the video, and shared the hunch publicly.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - A $350 'Anti-5G' Device Is Just a 128MB USB Stick, Teardown Finds (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Believers of 5G conspiracy theories have apparently been buying a $350 anti-5G USB key that—not surprisingly—appears to just be a regular USB stick with only 128MB of storage. As noted by the BBC today, the "5GBioShield" USB stick "was recommended by a member of Glastonbury Town Council's 5G Advisory Committee, which has called for an inquiry into 5G." The company that sells 5GBioShield claims it "is the result of the most advanced technology currently available for balancing and prevention of the devastating effects caused by non-natural electric waves, particularly (but not limited to) 5G, for all biological life forms." The product's website charges 283 British pounds for a single 5GBioShield, which converts to nearly $350. That's what it costs to get "protection for your home and family, thanks to the wearable holographic nano-layer catalyser, which can be worn or placed near to a smartphone or any other electrical, radiation or EMF emitting device." The USB stick apparently doesn't need to be plugged in to anything to work its magic. "It is always ON and working—that's why we used quantum nano-layer technology," the company says in an FAQ.

But what does the 5GBioShield actually consist of? The BBC pointed to a recent teardown by security company Pen Test Partners, which found that the device is just a USB stick with 128MB of storage. The company wrote: "When plugged in to our test machine we may have missed the bubble of 'quantum holographic catalyzer technology' appearing. The stick comes loaded with a 25 page PDF version of the material from 5GBioShield's website. It included a Q&A of distances for the "bubble" and how to know if it is working. It's an "always on" system apparently, is always working, powered or not, so no visual checks needed. A review of the stick's properties revealed nothing more than what you'd expect from a regular 128MB USB key. We weren't even sure that 128s are still in production!"

Submission + - As Russia stalks US satellites, a space arms race may be heating up

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: 12 years (and billions of rubles) after skirmishes between pro-Russian separatists and government forces in Georgia and the subsequent invasion of the former Soviet republic by Russian forces, Russia has heeded the lessons learned from that conflict: The Russian military had gone to war in using World War II-era compasses for navigation and outmoded equipment for weapons targeting, a far cry from the capabilities of the US military. But Russia is now challenging the United States’ long-standing supremacy in space, working to exploit the US military’s dependence on space systems for communications, navigation, intelligence, and targeting.

Aaron Bateman of Johns Hopkins, a former US Air Force intelligence officer who has published on technology and military strategy, Cold War history, and European security affairs, writes about a coming space arms race, with Moscow’s aggressive behavior in space potentially inducing the United States to pursue more assertive policies, like the reinvigoration of Cold War-era anti-satellite weapons programs.

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