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Comment Re:Translation please (Score 1) 74

this [summary] actually made sense and, believe it or not, used standard conventions to convey info.

The phrases "mask with RGB", and "RGB-clad" might make some sense in the original article, where there's a big photo showing colored lights. From just a text summary, I was wondering if there was some new thing I'd never heard of: novel filter material? forever chemical?

I actually looked at the article before posting. Most of the mask isn't very colorful, and the few spots of light hardly seemed to count. So but I refused to believe that's what they meant unless they were going to say it. Call it a "color-changing Mask" or "Mask with pulsating colors" or whatever it was supposed to do.

I suppose it might look less lame in the dark? Ha! Who am I kidding?

It would be a lot less lame if it was actually an efficacious filter.
Google

'Stalkerware' Phone Spying Apps Have Escaped Google's Ad Ban (techcrunch.com) 25

Posted by BeauHD from the policy-violations dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Several companies offering phone-spying apps -- known as "stalkerware" -- are still advertising in Google search results, despite the search giant's ban that took effect today, TechCrunch has found. These controversial apps are often pitched to help parents snoop on their child's calls, messages, apps and other private data under the guise of helping to protect against online predators. But some repurpose these apps to spy on their spouses -- often without their permission. It's a problem that the wider tech industry has worked to tackle. Security firms and antivirus makers are working to combat the rise of stalkerware, and federal authorities have taken action when app makers have violated the law.

One of the biggest actions to date came last month when Google announced an updated ads policy, effectively banning companies from advertising phone-snooping apps "with the express purpose of tracking or monitoring another person or their activities without their authorization." Google gave these companies until August 11 to remove these ads. But TechCrunch found seven companies known to provide stalkerware -- including FlexiSpy, mSpy, WebWatcher and KidsGuard -- were still advertising in Google search results after the ban took effect. Google did not say explicitly say if the stalkerware apps violated its policy, but told TechCrunch that it removed ads for WebWatcher. Despite the deadline, Google said that enforcement is not always immediate. "We recently updated our policies to prohibit ads promoting spyware for partner surveillance while still allowing ads for technology that helps parents monitor their underage children," said a Google spokesperson. "To prevent deceitful actors who try to disguise the product's intent and evade our enforcement, we look at several signals like the ad text, creative and landing page, among others, for policy compliance. When we find that an ad or advertiser is violating our policies, we take immediate action."
Medicine

Russia Claims To Have Registered World's First COVID-19 Vaccine (cnbc.com) 165

Posted by BeauHD from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.
New submitter Hmmmmmm shares a report from CNBC: Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the registration of what Russia claims to be the first vaccine for the coronavirus in the world and said one of his daughters had already taken it. "Although I know that it works quite effectively, it forms a stable immunity and, I repeat, has passed all the necessary checks," Putin said. Clinical trials of this Russian vaccine have been completed in less than two months and phase three trials are set to begin on Wednesday, despite the vaccine having already been registered. Countries including the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia are taking part in those trials.

"The vaccine developed by Russia is a so-called viral vector vaccine, meaning it employs another virus to carry the DNA encoding of the needed immune response into cells," reports Al Jazeera. "[The Gamaleya research institute's vaccine] is based on the adenovirus, a similar technology to the coronavirus vaccine prototype developed by China's CanSino. The state-run Gamaleya institute came under fire after researchers and its director injected themselves with the prototype several months ago, with specialists criticizing the move as an unorthodox and rushed way of starting human trials.
Movies

The Last Blockbuster Has Been Turned Into An Airbnb (independent.co.uk) 23

Posted by BeauHD from the movie-magic dept.
The world's last Blockbuster is offering movie fans the opportunity to spend the night in the store by booking through Airbnb. The Independent reports: The opportunity to book a one-night stay in the last of the nearly defunct video rental stores, which only remains in Bend, Oregon, will be possible thanks to the property's owner, Sandi Harding. "As the last standing location in the world, our BLOCKBUSTER store is an ode to movie magic, simpler times and the sense of community that could once be found in BLOCKBUSTER locations around the world," Harding explains in the Airbnb listing.

Starting on 17 August, residents of Deschutes County will be able to book the store, which has been transformed into a living room complete with TV and pull-out couch, for either 18, 19, or 20 September. According to the press release, guests who successfully book the store, which will be available for just $4, will be treated to "all the movies your heart could desire." "Whether you want to stay up until sunrise or pass out on the couch, we've created the perfect space complete with a pull-out couch, bean bags and pillows for you to cosy up with 'new releases' from the 90s," the Airbnb listing reads. "Crack open a two-liter of Pepsi before locking into a video game, charting your future in a game of MASH, or watching movie after movie." Those who aren't eligible for the opportunity can visit the store's living room set-up as customers starting on 21 September -- or call the store for a personalized movie recommendation.
Democrats

What Kamala Harris, Joe Biden's VP Pick, Means For Tech (cnet.com) 521

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: After months of speculation, Joe Biden has picked California Sen. Kamala Harris to be his vice-presidential running mate in the race for the White House. The choice fulfills a pledge from Biden, the Democrats' presumptive nominee for president, to name a woman to his ticket as he seeks to unseat Donald Trump in the November election. [...] Here's what we know about Harris' stance on tech issues:

A California senator and former candidate in the 2020 presidential race, Harris made her name in Washington by grilling Trump nominees and officials from her seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Harris, 55, is known for being a tough-on-crime prosecutor earlier in her career. That toughness, however, didn't carry over to Big Tech companies when she was California attorney general, critics charge. During her time as the state's top law enforcement officer, Facebook and other companies gobbled up smaller competitors. Harris, like regulators under Obama, did little from an antitrust perspective to slow consolidation, which many members of Congress now question.

During her 2020 presidential bid, Harris' stance on consumer protections and antitrust issues weren't as tough as those of some of her rivals, especially Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who called for the breakup of large tech companies, like Facebook and Google. Still, Harris was vocal last year in urging Twitter to ban Trump from the platform for "tweets [that] incite violence, threaten witnesses, and obstruct justice." This was a demand Twitter rejected. She has also been critical of Facebook for not doing more to rid its platform of misinformation.
Mars

What Mars Would Look Like If Its Surface Was Covered With Water (inverse.com) 91

Posted by BeauHD from the Elon-Musk's-wet-dream dept.
schwit1 writes: A new map shows what the red planet would look like if 71 percent of its surface area was covered with water -- around the same proportion as Earth. The results are spectacular: it shows two distinct landmasses forming, each of which would seem to form continents. While the left side shows a dramatic, mountainous terrain that includes Olympus Mons, the right side seems to offer more flatlands that include planes like Terra Sabaea.

The map was created by Aaditya Raj Bhattarai, a Nepal-based civil engineering student currently studying for his bachelor's degree at Tribhuwan University. "I am [a] big fan of Elon [Musk] and SpaceX and their plan to put man on Mars, and I hope I could help in his cause," Bhattarai says. "This is a part of my side project where I calculate the volume of water required to make life on Mars sustainable and the sources required for those water volumes from comets that will come nearby Mars in [the] next 100 years." [...] Bhattarai noted that in this map, Mars' sea level lies as low as 1,211 meters (0.75 miles) below the geoid level, a level that averages out the ocean surface by removing factors like tides and currents. The sea level also lies a staggering 20,076 meters (12.5 miles) below Olympus Mons, depicted in the image as the top-left-most black dot. Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system and measures more than double the height of Mount Everest.
Space

Planet Ceres Is An 'Ocean World' With Sea Water Beneath Surface, Mission Finds (theguardian.com) 90

Posted by BeauHD from the beneath-the-surface dept.
The dwarf planet Ceres -- long believed to be a barren space rock -- is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed on Monday. The Guardian reports: Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and has its own gravity, enabling the Nasa Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface. Now a team of scientists from the United States and Europe have analyzed images relayed from the orbiter, captured about 35km (22 miles) from the asteroid. They focused on the 20-million-year-old Occator crater and determined that there is an "extensive reservoir" of brine beneath its surface.

Using infrared imaging, one team discovered the presence of the compound hydrohalite -- a material common in sea ice but which until now had never been observed off of Earth. Maria Cristina De Sanctis, from Rome's Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica said hydrohalite was a clear sign Ceres used to have sea water. "We can now say that Ceres is a sort of ocean world, as are some of Saturn's and Jupiter's moons," she told AFP. The team said the salt deposits looked like they had built up within the last 2 million years -- the blink of an eye in space time. This suggests that the brine may still be ascending from the planet's interior, something De Sanctis said could have profound implications in future studies.

Writing in an accompanying comment article, Julie Castillo-Rogez, from the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the discovery of hydrohalite was a "smoking gun" for ongoing water activity. "That material is unstable on Ceres' surface, and hence must have been emplaced very recently," she said. In a separate paper, US-based researchers analyzed images of the Occator crater and found that its mounds and hills may have formed when water ejected by the impact of a meteor froze on the surface.
Earth

'Zombie Cicadas' Are Under the Influence of a Psychedelic, Mind-controlling Fungus (cnn.com) 34

Posted by EditorDavid from the bad-trip dept.
Slashdot reader quonset shares CNN's report on "zombie cicadas" under the influence of "a psychedelic fungus" called Massospora containing the chemicals found in hallucinogenic mushrooms (citing a new study published in PLOS Pathogens). After infecting its host, the fungus results in "a disturbing display of B-horror movie proportions," West Virginia University said in a press release. First Massospora spores eat away at the cicada's genitals, butt, and abdomen. They are then replaced with fungal spores used to transmit the fungus to other cicadas. From there, this new, fungal abdomen will slowly "wear away like an eraser on a pencil," said study co-author Brian Lovett in the release... While almost a third, if not more, of their bodies are replaced with fungal tissue, infected cicadas continue to move around oblivious of their sickness. This is because the fungus manipulates the insects' behavior to keep the host alive rather than killing them to maximize spore dispersal...

Even though infected cicadas lose their ability to mate when their backsides become fungal plugs, they will still attempt to mate to sexually transmit the fungus to healthy cicadas. The parasitic fungus even manipulates male cicadas into flicking their wings to imitate the females' mating invitation so they can also infect unsuspecting male cicadas to rapidly transmit the disease.

While researchers believe sexual transmission of the fungus is the easiest way for Massospora to spread, cicadas can also come into contact with the pathogen in other ways. "When they fly around or walk on branches, they spread spores that way too," Kasson said. "We call them flying saltshakers of death, because they basically spread the fungus the way salt would come out of a shaker that's tipped upside down."

While a zombie army of cicadas sounds terrifying, Kasson reassures that infected cicadas are not a danger to humans. At this time, researchers believe the fungus does not pose a serious risk to the overall cicada population.
"When these pathogens infect cicadas, it's very clear that the pathogen is pulling the behavioral levers of the cicada," says one of the study's co-authors, "to cause it to do things which are not in the interest of the cicada but is very much in the interest of the pathogen."

A doctoral student involved in the research even suggests these discoveries might one day be used for pest control.
Android

Millions of Android Phones At Risk Due to 'Achilles' Flaw in Qualcomm Chips (gizmodo.com) 36

Posted by EditorDavid from the bringing-it-to-heel dept.
"Researchers have found that Qualcomm's Snapdragon chip, one of the most widely used in Android phones, has hundreds of bits of vulnerable code that leaves millions of Android users at risk," reports Gizmodo: To back up a bit, Qualcomm is a major chip supplier to several well-known tech companies. In 2019, its Snapdragon series of processors could be found on nearly 40% of all Android smartphones, including high-profile flagship phones from Google, Samsung, Xiaomi, LG, and OnePlus. Researchers from Check Point, a cybersecurity firm, found the digital signal processor (DSP) in Qualcomm Snapdragon chips had over 400 pieces of vulnerable code. The vulnerabilities, altogether dubbed "Achilles," can impact phones in three major ways.

Attackers would only have to convince someone to install a seemingly benign app that bypasses usual security measures. Once that's done, an attacker could turn the affected phone into a spying tool. They'd be able to access a phone's photos, videos, GPS, and location data. Hackers could potentially also record calls and turn on the phone's microphones without the owner ever knowing. Alternatively, an attacker could choose to render the smartphone completely unusable by locking all the data stored on it in what researchers described as a "targeted denial-of-service attack." Lastly, bad actors could also exploit the vulnerabilities to hide malware in a way that would be unknown to the victim, and unremovable.

Part of why so many vulnerabilities were found is that the DSP is a sort of "black box." It's difficult for anyone other than the manufacturer of the DSP to review what makes them work...
The article notes that Qualcomm has no evidence of the vulnerability being exploited in the wild, adding that the company has "reportedly since fixed the issue."

But they also note that it's still up to individual phone makers to push out the relavant security paches, "which could take some time."
Sun Microsystems

CNO Neutrinos From the Sun Are Finally Detected (syfy.com) 32

Posted by BeauHD from the one-century-later dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from SyFy: For the first time, scientists have detected neutrinos coming from the Sun's core that got their start via the CNO process, an until-now theorized type of stellar nuclear fusion. [...] The Borexino neutrino observatory is 1400 meters under the rock below the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy. It has an 8.5 meter wide nylon balloon filled with 280 tons of pseudocumene, surrounded by a tank of water, surrounded by over 2200 very sensitive photon detectors. They turned everything on, then waited. Over the course of July 2016 - February 2020 (1072 days), they painstakingly recorded all the events, and had to go through heroic efforts to prevent all manners of other reactions that also create little light flashes from interfering with their experiment. They also had to distinguish proton-proton chain neutrinos from ones made in the CNO cycle, but the neutrinos have different energies, which makes it possible to separate them out. They just announced their results: They detected the CNO neutrinos! About 20 per day interacted with the pseudocumene -- 20 per day, when sextillions of them had passed through! -- about what you'd expect from theory.

This is an important discovery for a lot of reasons. For one thing, while the proton-proton chain dominates in the Sun, in stars with more than about 1.3 times the Sun's mass the CNO cycle dominates (it kicks in strongly at higher temperatures), so knowing how it works in the Sun tells us about other stars. Also, the presence of heavier elements (what astronomers misleadingly call metals, meaning any element heavier than hydrogen and helium) can affect the fusion rate in the Sun's CNO cycle, and the amount of these metals isn't perfectly well known; different methods to measure them yield slightly different amounts, but enough to mess up what we know about the fusion in the core. This experiment agrees with ones that find a lower metal content. That has a ripple effect on a lot of other ideas, including details on how we think the Sun and planets formed, how the Sun ages, and how it will die. All that, from less than two dozen neutrinos a day, while countless more go undetected.
Facebook

Why We Have a 'TikTok Problem' (substack.com) 85

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares an analysis: As national security expert Lucas Kunce notes, Facebook is in fact the reason we have a TikTok problem to begin with. When Twitter launched a TikTok-like product Vine years before, Facebook actively killed the product by refusing to let Vine access its APIs on the same terms other corporations got. Mark Zuckerberg personally made the call to shut off access to Vine, and Twitter eventually shut the product down. Then, Facebook allowed TikTok to advertise massively on its platform, at a time Zuckerberg was currying favor with the Chinese Communist Party to try to get into the Chinese market. In other words, Zuckerberg killed an American competitor using anti-competitive means, and promoted a Chinese competitor for his own business interests. Now we have a TikTok problem, but that's because policymakers refused to enforce anti-monopoly rules against tech giants.

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