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Submission + - ReBoot master tapes located (globalnews.ca)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: Predating even Toy Story, ReBoot was the first 3D animated television show. The master tapes have been located in storage but the hardware needed to play the 1990s-era media has yet to be located.

Submission + - Technical Analysis of Pegasus Spyware

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: An Investigation Into Highly Sophisticated Espionage Software

Executive Summary: “This report is an in-depth technical look at a targeted espionage attack being actively leveraged against an undetermined number of mobile users around the world. Lookout researchers have done deep analysis on a live iOS sample of the malware, detailed in this report. Citizen Lab’s investigation links the software and infrastructure to that of NSO Group which offers a product called Pegasus solution.”

Submission + - US Engine Maker Will Pay $1.6 Billion To Settle Claims of Emissions Cheating (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The United States and the state of California have reached an agreement in principle with the truck engine manufacturer Cummins on a $1.6 billion penalty to settle claims that the company violated the Clean Air Act by installing devices to defeat emissions controls on hundreds of thousands of engines, the Justice Department announced on Friday. The penalty would be the largest ever under the Clean Air Act and the second largest ever environmental penalty in the United States. Defeat devices are parts or software that bypass, defeat or render inoperative emissions controls like pollution sensors and onboard computers. They allow vehicles to pass emissions inspections while still emitting high levels of smog-causing pollutants such as nitrogen oxide, which is linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses.

The Justice Department has accused the company of installing defeat devices on 630,000 model year 2013 to 2019 RAM 2500 and 3500 pickup truck engines. The company is also alleged to have secretly installed auxiliary emission control devices on 330,000 model year 2019 to 2023 RAM 2500 and 3500 pickup truck engines. “Violations of our environmental laws have a tangible impact. They inflict real harm on people in communities across the country,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “This historic agreement should make clear that the Justice Department will be aggressive in its efforts to hold accountable those who seek to profit at the expense of people’s health and safety.”

In a statement, Cummins said that it had “seen no evidence that anyone acted in bad faith and does not admit wrongdoing.” The company said it has “cooperated fully with the relevant regulators, already addressed many of the issues involved, and looks forward to obtaining certainty as it concludes this lengthy matter. Cummins conducted an extensive internal review and worked collaboratively with the regulators for more than four years.” Stellantis, the company that makes the trucks, has already recalled the model year 2019 trucks and has initiated a recall of the model year 2013 to 2018 trucks. The software in those trucks will be recalibrated to ensure that they are fully compliant with federal emissions law, said Jon Mills, a spokesman for Cummins. Mr. Mills said that “next steps are unclear” on the model year 2020 through 2023, but that the company “continues to work collaboratively with regulators” to resolve the issue. The Justice Department partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency in its investigation of the case.

Submission + - 12VO Power Standard Appears To Be Gaining Steam, Will Reduce PC Cables and Costs (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The 12VO power standard (PDF), developed by Intel, is designed to reduce the number of power cables needed to power a modern PC, ultimately reducing cost. While industry uptake of the standard has been slow, a new slew of products from MSI indicates that 12VO is gaining traction.

MSI is gearing up with two 12VO-compliant motherboards, covering both Intel and AMD platforms, and a 12VO Power Supply that it's releasing simultaneously: The Pro B650 12VO WiFi, Pro H610M 12VO, and MSI 12VO PSU power supply are all 'coming soon,' which presumably means they'll officially launch at CES 2024. HardwareLux got a pretty good look at MSI's offerings during its EHA (European Hardware Awards) tech tour, including the 'Project Zero' we covered earlier. One of the noticeable changes is the absence of a 24-pin ATX connector, as the ATX12VO connectors use only ten-pin connectors. The publications also saw a 12VO-compliant FSP power supply in a compact system with a thick graphics card.

A couple of years ago, we reported on FSP 650-watt and 750-watt SFX 12VO power supply. Apart from that, there is a 1x 6-pin ATX12VO termed 'extra board connector' according to its manual and a 1x 8-pin 12V power connector for the CPU. There are two smaller 4-pin connectors that will provide the 5V power needed for SATA drives. It is likely each of these connectors provides power to two SATA-based drives. Intel proposed the ATX12VO standard several years ago, but adoption has been slow until now. This standard is designed to provide 12v exclusively, completely removing a direct 3.3v and 5v supply. The success of the new standard will depend on the wide availability of the motherboard and power supplies.

Submission + - The Air Force Is Having To Reverse Engineer Parts Of Its Own Stealth Bomber (thedrive.com) 2

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: In a surprising turn of events, the United States government is calling upon its country’s industry to reverse engineer components for the Air Force’s B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. An official call for this highly unusual kind of assistance was put out today on the U.S. government’s contracting website beta.SAM.gov. Mark Thompson, a national-security analyst at the Project On Government Oversight, brought our attention to the notice, which seeks an engineering effort that will reverse engineer key parts for the B2’s Load Heat Exchangers. While it is not exactly clear what part of the aircraft’s many complex and exotic subsystems these heat exchangers relate to, the bomber has no shortage of avionics systems, for example, which could require cooling.

While it’s hard to say exactly why this approach is being taken now, it indicates that the original plans for these components are unavailable or the manufacturing processes and tooling used to produce them no longer exists. This could be the result of them having been so secretive that, at some point, they were inadvertently destroyed altogether. They could also have been simply misplaced, or the parts may have been produced by a smaller contractor that has long since disappeared, taking the bespoke tooling with it.

Submission + - Scientists Are Pretty Sure They Found a Portal to the Fifth Dimension (yahoo.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: While the “warped extra dimension” (WED) is a trademark of a popular physics model first introduced in 1999, this research, published in The European Physical Journal C, is the first to cohesively use the theory to explain the long-lasting dark matter problem within particle physics.

Our knowledge of the physical universe relies on the idea of dark matter, which takes up the vast majority of matter in the universe. Dark matter is a kind of pinch hitter that helps scientists explain how gravity works, because a lot of features would dissolve or fall apart without an “x factor” of dark matter. Even so, dark matter doesn’t disrupt the particles we do see and “feel,” meaning it must have other special properties as well.

“[T]here are still some questions which do not have an answer within the [standard model of physics],” the scientists, from Spain and Germany, explain in their study. “One of the most significant examples is the so-called hierarchy problem, the question why the Higgs boson is much lighter than the characteristic scale of gravity. [The standard model of physics] cannot accommodate some other observed phenomena. One of the most striking examples is the existence of dark matter.”

The new study seeks to explain the presence of dark matter using a WED model. The scientists studied fermion masses, which they believe could be communicated into the fifth dimension through portals, creating dark matter relics and “fermionic dark matter” within the fifth dimension.

Basically, a key piece of mathematics creates bulk masses of fermions that are manifested in the so-called fifth dimensional warped space. This pocket “dark sector” is one possible way to explain the huge amount of dark matter that, so far, has eluded detection using any traditional measurements designed for the standard model of physics. Fermions jammed through a portal to a warped fifth dimension could be “acting as” dark matter.

How would we observe this kind of dark matter in order to verify it? To date, this is the holdup on many different theories of dark matter. But all it would take to identify fermionic dark matter in a warped fifth dimension would be the right kind of gravitational wave detector, something growing in prevalence around the world. Indeed, the answer to the dark matter conundrum could be just around the corner.

Submission + - Android 12 Leak Appears To Show Major Redesign With Color-Changing UI (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The final version of Android 12 should be released sometime in September, but the first developer preview is expected any day now. Our first hint of what Google's new release might have in store comes to us from XDA Developers' Mishaal Rahman, who has some pictures of what looks like a major UI overhaul for Android 12. According to the report, these images represent mockups, not screenshots, of Android 12. The mockups appear in a document describing the new features of Android 12, and the document is being passed around to partners as a heads-up before the public rollout.

The first thing that jumps out to me is the weird sepia-tone color scheme, like someone left night mode on permanently. This color scheme looks like a huge change compared to the all-white color scheme of Android 11, but it's probably completely up to the user. [...] Even if we ignore the colors, the notification panel is still pretty different, which is totally on brand for Android, as the notification panel gets revamped in every release. Starting at the top, the weird black status bar is gone, replaced with a single sheet that serves as a notification background. It's not transparent here, but that could just be a mockup inaccuracy. The time and date have swapped places, with the date on top now. The quick settings are no longer in a box, and they've been cut down to four instead of six (booo!). The Quick Settings shapes have been configurable in the past, but it now looks like there's a mix of shapes, with disabled settings having a square background and enabled settings getting a circle.

There's also a new "Privacy" settings screen, which gives you what looks like systemwide kill switches for the camera, microphone, and location. None of these switches is new, but you get easy, more obvious access to them now. This privacy screen also seems to show a new design for the settings. In addition to the new color scheme, it looks like Google is taking after Samsung and some other Android OEMs in designing settings screens with reachability in mind. There's a huge "Privacy" banner at the top, with lots of white space above it, pushing the start of the list down from the very top of the phone. Most good implementations of this feature shrink the top banner once you start scrolling. The final new item in the mockups is a "conversations" widget. This seems to show a person or group chat and recent messages or calls from that person. It appears to combine messages from multiple apps into a single widget, which would be possible through the existing notification APIs.

Submission + - Lenovo System Update Service Bug Wastes Power (lenovo.com)

Submitted by allquixotic
allquixotic writes: Since late January, most everyone running a pre-installed Lenovo image of Windows 10 has been bitten by a bug in Lenovo's System Update Service (SUService.exe) causing it to constantly occupy a CPU thread. This was noticed by many ThinkPad and IdeaPad users as an unexpected increase in fan noise, but many desktop users might not notice the problem. I'm submitting this story to Slashdot because Lenovo does not provide an official support venue for their software, and the problem has persisted for several weeks with no indication of a patch forthcoming. While this bug continues to persist, anyone with a preinstalled Lenovo image of Windows 10 will have greatly reduced battery life on a laptop, and greatly increased power consumption in any case. As a thought experiment, if this causes 1 million systems to increase their idle power consumption by 40 watts, this software bug is currently wasting 40 megawatts, or about 1/20th the output of a typical commercial power station. On my ThinkPad P15, this bug actually wastes 80 watts of power, so the indication is that 40 watts per system is a very conservative number.

Lenovo's official forums and unofficial reddit pages have seen several threads pop up since late January with confused users noticing the issue, but so far Lenovo is yet to issue an official statement. Users have recommended uninstalling the Lenovo System Update Service as a workaround, but that won't stop this power virus from eating up megawatts of power around the world for those who don't notice this power virus's impact on system performance.

Submission + - Terraria Port to Google Stadia Cancelled After Creator's Google Account Locked (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Pibroch(CiH)
Pibroch(CiH) writes: Andrew Spinks, the creator of Terraria and lead developer for Re-Logic, has been trying to find out why his Google account (which encompasses YouTube, GMail, and many other important services) was suddenly banned and locked with no warning. According to Ars Technica:

Spinks says his entire Google account has been down for three weeks now, and Google has "done nothing but given me the runaround." You can view the quality of Google's support on Twitter for yourself. After the tweet from the official Terrarria account, YouTube support declined Re-logic's request to try to solve the problem privately, choosing instead to publicly offer irrelevant suggestions to the game developer with over 30 million customers. First, YouTube asked if Re-Logic could access its banned email account, which the developer already explained was banned. Then, YouTube suggested trying Google's account recovery system, which is only for users who have forgotten their Google password. Finally, YouTube shared instructions for how to recover a voluntarily deleted Google account, which is in no way relevant to an account ban.

Spinks has moved to cancel the release of the popular game Terraria on Google's Stadia game streaming platform.

Submission + - A Vast Web of Vengeance (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by GatorSnake
GatorSnake writes: "Outrageous lies destroyed Guy Babcock’s online reputation. When he went hunting for their source, what he discovered was worse than he could have imagined." Another take of the implications of Section 230...one person poisoned the online persona of multiple people who had "wronged" her, with it being nearly impossible to have the false accusations removed from the sites or from Google's search results.

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