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Comment Re: Excellent (Score 1) 123

by iabervon (#65731988) Attached to: EU Expands USB-C Mandate To Chargers

I use the magsafe on my laptop. I almost always use the laptop in the same place and only charge it there, so it's not getting mixed into my collection and picked back out, and the magsafe is somewhat easier to fumble into place than USB-C. If I was using it long enough somewhere different to need to charge it, I'd grab a USB-C (probably already nearby), rather than collecting the magsafe from where it's set up.

Comment Re: Reading TFA (Score 1) 82

by iabervon (#65729098) Attached to: US Falls Out of Top 10 on List of the World's Most Powerful Passports

They could include things like special lines at immigration, rather than just visa requirements. Arriving in Amsterdam with an EU passport is much less of a hassle than arriving with a US passport, but they both count the same on this report. Then there's the question of whether you need a permit to stay indefinitely, or just the passport.

Comment Re: Need metrcis on number of positives + hours ne (Score 2) 92

by iabervon (#65720422) Attached to: AI Slop? Not This Time. AI Tools Found 50 Real Bugs In cURL

The person who made the report is a professional penetration tester. His usual method is to look for anything that could be wrong and then test whether it actually is. What he found is that the AI tools came up with potential issues he hadn't thought of, and they weren't all wrong, so it's a valuable tool to him because he normally runs out of ideas rather than running out of time to test them. He complained about the UI making it hard to go through large lists of reported issues exhaustively, and he only used the suggested fixes to get a better idea of what the issue was supposed to be. So it's clear that the tool's output wouldn't be directly useful to a maintainer, but it does serve a purpose.

Comment Practically already true (Score 1) 107

by iabervon (#65712354) Attached to: Your Next Phone Might Come Without a USB Cable

I got a third-party cable for my phone that my phone recognizes as being able to charge it faster than the cable that came with the phone could. They should probably warn you that they don't have a cable or charger, in case you're getting a phone because you lost everything and don't have that stuff, but the first-party stuff isn't better these days.

Comment Re: Deciding when to correct a human (Score 1) 22

by iabervon (#65680590) Attached to: MLB Approves Robot Umps In 2026 For Challenges

I think it's even more interesting, in that one or two humans have to decide whether to question a call, and they have to identify calls that were wrong, not just ones they want to overturn, and they don't have a great angle to figure out what the algorithm would do. I think it's going to be fun to see batters try to do the ump's job, while standing to the side and considering swinging at the pitch.

Comment Re: Really??!! (Score 1) 173

I think the real issue is warm parts of China selling to cold parts of India without including the features that aren't needed near the factory. We know lots about battery chemistry, but rural farmers have had more immediately relevant things to know about up to now and don't have a good source of information on this new thing the government is pushing, so they skip things that sound like luxuries and end up with something inappropriate for their purpose.

Submission + - Dave Täht has passed away, aged 59 (libreqos.io)

Submitted by TheBracket
TheBracket writes: Dave Täht, the driving force behind the Bufferbloat project and a contributor to FQ-CoDel, and CAKE in the Linux kernel has passed away. Dave spent years doing battle with Internet latency and bufferbloat, contributing to countless projects. In recent years, he's been working with Robert, Frank and myself at LibreQoS to provide CAKE at the ISP level, helping Starlink with their latency and bufferbloat, and assisting the OpenWrt project.

Some of his work: https://www.bufferbloat.net/pr...
His Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Submission + - China Building Cyberweapons To Hijack Enemy Satellites, Says US Leak (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: China is building sophisticated cyber weapons to “seize control” of enemy satellites, rendering them useless for data signals or surveillance during wartime, according to a leaked US intelligence report. The US assesses that China’s push to develop capabilities to “deny, exploit or hijack” enemy satellites is a core part of its goal to control information, which Beijing considers to be a key “war-fighting domain.” The CIA-marked document, which was issued this year and has been reviewed by the Financial Times, was one of dozens allegedly shared by a 21-year-old US Air Guardsman in the most significant American intelligence disclosures in more than a decade. A cyber capability of this nature would far exceed anything Russia has deployed in Ukraine, where electronic warfare teams have taken a brute-force approach with little effect.

These attacks, first developed in the 1980s, attempt to drown out signals between low-orbit SpaceX satellites and their on-ground terminals by broadcasting on similar frequencies from truck-borne jamming systems such as the Tirada-2. China’s more ambitious cyber attacks aim to mimic the signals that enemy satellites receive from their operators, tricking them into either being taken over completely or malfunctioning during crucial moments in combat. The classified US document said this cyber capability would allow China “to seize control of a satellite, rendering it ineffective to support communications, weapons, or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.” The US has never disclosed whether it has similar capabilities.

Taiwan, which has taken note of how indispensable satellite communications have been to the Ukrainian military, is seeking to build out communications infrastructure that can survive an attack from China. It is courting investors to establish its own satellite provider, while experimenting with non-geostationary satellite receivers in 700 locations around Taiwan to guarantee bandwidth in the event of war or disasters, the Financial Times reported in January. [...]

Submission + - Scientists Finally Solved the Mystery of How the Mayan Calendar Works (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Mayan calendar’s 819-day cycle has confounded scholars for decades, but new research shows how it matches up to planetary cycles over a 45-year span. That’s a much broader view of the tricky calendar than anyone previously tried to take. In a study published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica, two Tulane University scholars highlighted how researchers never could quite explain the 819-day count calendar until they broadened their view.

“Although prior research has sought to show planetary connections for the 819-day count, its four-part, color-directional scheme is too short to fit well with the synodic periods of visible planets,” the study authors write. “By increasing the calendar length to 20 periods of 819-days a pattern emerges in which the synodic periods of all the visible planets commensurate with station points in the larger 819-day calendar.” That means the Mayans took a 45-year view of planetary alignment and coded it into a calendar that has left modern scholars scratching their heads in wonder.

Mercury was always the starting point for the tricky timeline because its synodic period—117 days—matches nicely into 819. From there, though, we need to start extrapolating out the 819 number, and if you chart 20 cycles of 819, you can fit every key planet into the mix. And Mars may be the kicker for the overall length. With a 780-day synodic period, 21 periods match exactly to 16,380, or 20 cycles of 819. Venus needs seven periods to match five 819-day counts, Saturn has 13 periods to fit with six 819-day counts, and Jupiter 39 periods to hit 19 819-counts.

Submission + - Seagate To Pay $300 Million Penalty For Shipping Huawei 7 Million Hard Drives (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Seagate has agreed to pay a $300 million penalty in a settlement with U.S. authorities for shipping over $1.1 billion worth of hard disk drives to China's Huawei in violation of U.S. export control laws, the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday. Seagate sold the drives to Huawei between August 2020 and September 2021 despite an August 2020 rule that restricted sales of certain foreign items made with U.S. technology to the company. Huawei was placed on the Entity List, a U.S. trade blacklist, in 2019 to reduce the sale of U.S. goods to the company amid national security and foreign policy concerns.

Seagate shipped 7.4 million drives to Huawei for about a year after the 2020 rule took effect and became Huawei's sole supplier of hard drives, the Commerce Department said. The other two primary suppliers of hard drives ceased shipments to Huawei after the new rule took effect in 2020, the department said. Though they were not identified, Western Digital and Toshiba were the other two, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee said in a 2021 report on Seagate.

Submission + - Scientists Identify Mind-Body Nexus In Human Brain (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers said on Wednesday they have discovered that parts of the brain region called the motor cortex that govern body movement are connected with a network involved in thinking, planning, mental arousal, pain, and control of internal organs, as well as functions such as blood pressure and heart rate. They identified a previously unknown system within the motor cortex manifested in multiple nodes that are located in between areas of the brain already known to be responsible for movement of specific body parts — hands, feet and face — and are engaged when many different body movements are performed together.

The researchers called this system the somato-cognitive action network, or SCAN, and documented its connections to brain regions known to help set goals and plan actions. This network also was found to correspond with brain regions that, as shown in studies involving monkeys, are connected to internal organs including the stomach and adrenal glands, allowing these organs to change activity levels in anticipation of performing a certain action. That may explain physical responses like sweating or increased heart rate caused by merely pondering a difficult future task, they said.

Submission + - Facebook Users Can Now File a Claim For $725 Million Privacy Settlement (cnbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Facebook users have until August to claim their share of a $725 million class-action settlement of a lawsuit alleging privacy violations by the social media company, a new website reveals. The lawsuit was prompted in 2018 after Facebook disclosed that the information of 87 million users was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

People who had an active U.S. Facebook account between May 2007 and December 2022 have until Aug. 25 to enter a claim. Individual settlement payments haven’t yet been established because payouts depend on how many users submit claims and how long each user maintained a Facebook account. Facebook users can make a claim by visiting Facebookuserprivacysettlement.com and entering their name, address, email address, and confirming they lived in the U.S. and were active on Facebook between the aforementioned dates.

Submission + - ICANN/Verisign Proposal Would Allow Any Government To Seize Domain Names (freespeech.com)

Submitted by GeorgeK
GeorgeK writes: ICANN and Verisign have quietly proposed enormous changes to global domain name policy in their proposed renewal of the .NET registry agreement, which is now open for public comments.

They’ve proposed allowing any government in the world to cancel, redirect, or transfer to their control applicable domain names! This is an outrageous and dangerous proposal that must be stopped, as it does not respect due process. While this proposal is currently only for .NET domain names, presumably they would want to also apply it to other extensions like .COM as those contracts come up for renewal.

See the full analysis at: https://freespeech.com/2023/04...

Submission + - Scientists Discover 1st 'Neutron-Rich' Isotope of Uranium Since 1979 (livescience.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have discovered and synthesized an entirely new isotope of the highly radioactive element uranium. But it might last only 40 minutes before decaying into other elements. The new isotope, uranium-241, has 92 protons (as all uranium isotopes do) and 149 neutrons, making it the first new neutron-rich isotope of uranium discovered since 1979. While atoms of a given element always have the same number of protons, different isotopes, or versions, of those elements may hold different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei. To be considered neutron-rich, an isotope must contain more neutrons than is common to that element.

"We measured the masses of 19 different actinide isotopes with a high precision of one part per million level, including the discovery and identification of the new uranium isotope," Toshitaka Niwase(opens in new tab), a researcher at the High-energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Wako Nuclear Science Center (WNSC) in Japan, told Live Science in an email. "This is the first new discovery of a uranium isotope on the neutron-rich side in over 40 years." Niwase is the lead author of a study on the new uranium isotope, which was published March 31 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Niwase and colleagues created the uranium-241 by firing a sample of uranium-238 at platinum-198 nuclei at Japan's RIKEN accelerator. The two isotopes then swapped neutrons and protons — a phenomenon called "multinucleon transfer." The team then measured the mass of the created isotopes by observing the time it took the resulting nuclei to travel a certain distance through a medium. The experiment also generated 18 new isotopes, all of which contained between 143 and 150 neutrons.

Submission + - Pacific Garbage Patch Providing a Deep Ocean Home For Coastal Species (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A survey of plastic waste picked up in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre—aka the Giant Pacific Garbage Patch—has revealed that the garbage is providing a home to species that would otherwise not be found in the deep ocean. Over two-thirds of the trash examined plays host to coastal marine species, many of which are clearly reproducing in what would otherwise be a foreign habitat. The findings suggest that, as far as coastal species are concerned, there was nothing inhospitable about the open ocean other than the lack of something solid to latch on to. [...]

Plastics, especially things like buoys, floats, and netting, are often designed to hold up in the difficult marine environment and could provide a stable home at the top of the water column. To find out whether that was taking place, the researchers collected over 100 plastic debris items from the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre in late 2018/early 2019. While a handful of items could be assigned to either Asian or North American origins, most were pretty generic, such as rope and fishing netting. There was a wide variety of other items present, including bottles, crates, buckets, and household items. Some had clearly eroded significantly since their manufacture, suggesting they had been in the ocean for years. Critically, nearly all of them had creatures living on them.

Ninety-eight percent of the items found had some form of invertebrate living on them. In almost all cases, that included species found in the open ocean (just shy of 95 percent of the plastic). But a handful had nothing but coastal species present. And over two-thirds of the items had a mixed population of coastal and open-ocean species. While the open-ocean species were found on more items, the researchers tended to find the same species repeatedly. All told, coastal species accounted for 80 percent of the 46 taxonomic richness represented by the organisms identified. Significantly, the coastal species were breeding. In a number of cases, the researchers were able to identify females carrying eggs; in others, it was clear that the individuals present had a wide range of sizes, suggesting they were at different stages of maturity.

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