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Submission + - Capacitor but no "nuclear reactor" found in man's garage (cincinnati.com)

Submitted by k6mfw
k6mfw writes: About 40 residences in the town of Columbus were evacuated due to fear of a small nuclear reactor fire. Instead of a reactor, the device was a capacitor. A man claimed he sustained “radio frequency burns” while working on a “quantum physics generator” in his garage.

Submission + - RISC-V Foundation Moving to Switzerland over Trade Curb Fears (reuters.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: The RISC-V Foundation, which sets standards for the open-sourced CPU architecture and controls who can use the RISC-V trademark on products, will soon move to Switzerland to ensure that universities, governments and companies outside the United States can help develop its open-source technology. “From around the world, we’ve heard that ‘If the incorporation was not in the U.S., we would be a lot more comfortable’,” its Chief Executive Calista Redmond said. Redmond said the foundation’s board of directors approved the move unanimously but declined to disclose which members prompted it. More than 325 companies or other entities pay to be members, including U.S. and European chip suppliers such as Qualcomm and NXP Semiconductors, as well as China’s Alibaba Group and Huawei Technologies. The foundation’s move from Delaware to Switzerland may foreshadow further technology flight because of U.S. restrictions on dealing with some Chinese technology companies, said William Reinsch, who was undersecretary of commerce for export administration in the Clinton administration. “There is a message for the government. The message is, if you clamp down on things too tightly this is what is going to happen. In a global supply chain world, companies have choices, and one choice is to go overseas,” he said. The US has increased tenancy to sanction foreign, especially Chinese, companies using national security as an excuse, thus conveniently evading legal due process in the US justice system without providing any actual evidence.

Submission + - Solid state battery breakthrough could double the density of lithium-ion cells (newatlas.com)

Submitted by Tangential
Tangential writes: Safer, denser Li-ion batteries are desperately needed these days. Researchers at Australia's Deakin University say they've managed to use common industrial polymers to create solid electrolytes, opening the door to double-density solid state lithium batteries that won't explode or catch fire if they overheat.

The new technology uses a solid polymer material, weakly bonded to the lithium-ion, to replace the volatile liquid solvents typically used as electrolytes in current battery cells. The liquid electrolyte is the part of the system that becomes flammable during the kinds of infamous battery fires Samsung would rather forget.

In addition to making batteries safer, the team believes this solid polymer electrolyte will finally allow batteries to work with a lithium metal anode. That would be big news in the battery world, where the lithium anode has been recently described in Trends in Chemistry as "critical to break the energy-density bottleneck of current Li-ion chemistry" – the bottleneck that's stopping electric vehicles, aircraft and portable electronics from developing at the pace they should be.

Submission + - An update on what happened after the explosion at Russia's VECTOR Institute

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: You may remember the explosion at VECTOR, once a center of Soviet biological warfare research. Filippa Lentzos, senior research fellow jointly appointed in the Departments of War Studies and of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London, just posted an update on what happened after the explosion. Her research focuses on biological threats and on the security and governance of emerging technologies in the life sciences, and she's been covering the accident since it first happened in September.

Submission + - Democrats Propose Sweeping Online Privacy Laws (theguardian.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: "Top Democrats on Tuesday proposed tough new privacy laws to rein in the US’s tech companies after a series of scandals that have shaken confidence in the companies and exposed the personal data of millions of consumers."

"The act resembles Europe’s sweeping General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation, passed in 2016. It would force tech companies to disclose the personal information they have collected, delete or correct inaccurate or incomplete information and allow consumers to block the sale of their information."
The bill’s sponsors are all Democrats and include presidential candidate Senator Amy Klobuchar. “Companies continue to profit off of the personal data they collect from Americans, but they leave consumers completely in the dark about how their personal information is being used,” she said. “It’s time for Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation.”

Submission + - Transport Canada official says 737 MAX MCAS system "must go" (aerotime.aero)

Submitted by Freshly Exhumed
Freshly Exhumed writes: In a growing line of whistleblowers and skeptics voicing their concerns before the expected re-certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, another rogue agent has emerged. In an email sent to regulators in the U.S., Europe and Brazil, a Transport Canada safety official called for the entire removal of the MCAS system from the 737 MAX. The official believes that the U.S. plane maker should remove the software, largely blamed for the two deadly 737 MAX 8 crashes, before the aircraft is cleared to fly again. “The only way I see moving forward at this point is that the MCAS has to go,” Jim Marko, manager of Aircraft Integration and Safety Assessment at Canada’s aviation regulator – Transport Canada – wrote in the email, according to The New York Times, which first reported the news. In the email, sent to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and Brazil’s National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC) on November 19, 2019, Marko expressed his “uneasiness” about Boeing’s attempts to fix the MCAS software. “Judging from the number and degree of open issues that we have, I am feeling that final decisions on acceptance will not be technically based,” he was quoted as saying by Canada’s National Post. “This leaves me with a level of uneasiness that I cannot sit idly by and watch it pass by”

Comment Not sure how much MORE I can boycott Sony. (Score 1) 507

by faulteh (#39057033) Attached to: Sony Raises Price of Whitney Houston's Music 30 Minutes After Death

OK Sony have added +1 to their boycott level, bringing their Douchebag Boycott level to +5. I'm already boycotting them for:
+1 piss-poor customer service in their stores
+1 piss-poor service for their laptop repair
+1 CD rootkit issue
+1 removing the "Other OS" option on the PS3 (ok I never even bought a PS3 but it was a douche move)

Essentially, Sony's douchery have demanded I revise the scale for boycott actions. The +4 level they held previously caused me to
- live Phony free
- defriend on facebook or unfollow anyone with anything good to say about Phony in a status update.
- actively discourage friends/family from purchasing Sony products
- persuade a neighbour to purchase a new TV of brand other than Sony so I did not have to stare at the Phony logo when watching TV when visiting

Ideas for additional sanctions for this new +5 boycott? Currently under consideration: building Rube Goldberg like devices to cause "accidental damage" to any Phony device owned by friends, colleages and acquaintences.

Comment Re:iRobots? (Score 2, Interesting) 244

by faulteh (#35852544) Attached to: Robots Enter Fukushima Reactor Building

iRobot has been building robots for years with no problems with the name.

It is substantially different from crApple products by the fact iRobot products are actually useful rather than shiny technology, and substantially different from Asimov's titicular story, 'I, Robot' in the fact that (a) iRobot's are not 3 laws safe, and (b) it doesn't use 'I, ' but rather 'i' and (c) the company in Asimov's stories is US Robotics which shares the name with another company that you may have used back in the dialup days www.usr.com

I have one of the iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaners and hope that there will be future technological advances that allow me to continue on my goal to the state of being a lazy fat c*nt.

PS WTF Japan, you're only NOW starting to use robots help fix the reactor???

Comment Ingenious plan... (Score 2) 81

by faulteh (#35826482) Attached to: 1Gbps Fiber Optic Network For Rural Britain

Like the rollout to rural areas of the NBN in Australia, smart and powerful people are rolling out fast FTTH broadband so IT people can live the dream, move to the farm and give up on the city rat race. You don't need to live in the inner city to write code.

At least until the apocalypse.

Comment PLEASE UPDATE FRONTPAGE WITH NEW REAL FACTS (Score 2) 515

by faulteh (#35676812) Attached to: Samsung Plants Keyloggers On Laptops

I don't work for Samsung but I am a fan of their products.

It seems this so called 'IT consultant' used a crap, rarely used AV product called VIPRE which caused a false-positive, mistaking a SLovenian language pack from Microsoft Live! with a keylogger called StarLogger (both use C:\windows\SL apparently.. jeez I'd hate to use such a poorly written AV package!)

Please refer to posts by Sophos NakedSecurity blog http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/03/30/samsung-intentionally-shipping-laptops-with-keyloggerspy-software/

and Samsung Tomorrow http://www.samsungtomorrow.com/1071

NOW, can we please restore the integrity of /. frontpage news with actual facts instead of fear and obsolete debunked information.

PS - where did this "IT Consultant" get his training from? back of a cereal carton???

Comment This is not really news just marketing. (Score 1) 182

by faulteh (#35073598) Attached to: DreamPlug ARM Box Brings Power To Plug Computing

This Dreamplug doesn't deserve it's top billing on slashdot - it's just a Guruplug in a new case.

5W you say?? I call BS.. The Guruplug said it was only 5W but when I plugged a wattmeter into it was pulling 7W when idle (old firewall P4 computer was pulling 70W constantly so that's a decent power save anyway). Running both ethernets at gigabit and having the wifi turned on was the major cause of heat problems in the guruplug (so they crippled it so only 1 could run gigabit. Now I see the Dreamplug has 2 gigabit ethernet ports again.

Then I had to install additional airflow elements (drilling holes in the case, replacing heatsinks, replace internal power supply with external one), to turn it into a decent box that could run as my firewall. Not that I mind doing it myself - I'm from the "if you can't open it you don't own it" crowd, but it means you can't recommend this device to other less technical people without voiding their warranty too.

There are no thermal sensors on the board so trying to use lm-sensors package on Linux to get things like CPU temp will fail. The Marvell ARM in the Guruplug is ARMv5 so no XN or No-Execute page protection - that comes with ARMv6. If they haven't been addressed in this new Dreamplug it could very easily turn into a Nightmareplug *groan* especially for it's price.

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