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Submission + - Huawei CFO Asks for Extradition Case to Be Stayed, Says U.S. Misled Canada (globalnews.ca)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: Lawyers for Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, have applied to a Canadian court seeking stays in the proceedings for her extradition to the United States, documents released on Thursday showed. The applications are based in part on what Meng’s lawyers allege was a destruction of the integrity of the judicial process by United States President Donald Trump and other senior members of the administration by their intention to use Meng “as a bargaining chip in a trade dispute.” As trading with Iran was legal in Canada, the extradition case hinges on whether Meng misled HSBC about Huawei’s relationship with a company operating in Iran, putting HSBC at risk of fines and penalties for breaking U.S. sanctions on Tehran. However, Meng’s lawyers allege that the United States misled Canada about the evidence in the case against her, by “selectively summariz(ing) information and omit(ting) highly relevant information” about the knowledge that Huawei accurately shared with HSBC about its operations in Iran. The omissions are “far below the expected standard of diligence, candor and accuracy,” the lawyers wrote. Meng's lawyers also cite comments by US President Donald Trump and Canadian PM Trudeau on the case as proof of political interventions. “Trudeau described how he asked the US to include the applicant in any trade deal it signed with China: ‘We’ve said that the United States should not sign a final and complete agreement with China that does not settle the question of Meng Wanzhou and the two Canadians’.” “Where the requesting state engages in conduct that offends our Canadian sense of fair play and decency, the court must intervene to safeguard the integrity of the judicial process. This is such a case,” Meng’s lawyers say in their new submissions.

Submission + - Russian Elite Given Experimental Covid-19 Vaccine Since April (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scores of Russia’s business and political elite have been given early access to an experimental vaccine against Covid-19, according to people familiar with the effort, as the country races to be among the first to develop an inoculation.

Top executives at companies including aluminum giant United Co. Rusal, as well as billionaire tycoons and government officials began getting shots developed by the state-run Gamaleya Institute in Moscow as early as April, the people said. They declined to be identified as the information isn’t public.

Peskov’s comments followed a Health Ministry statement that said only participants in Gamaleya’s trials are currently eligible for the jabs.

While the new shots are “safe” because they’re based on proven vaccines for other diseases, their effectiveness has yet to be determined, according to Sergei Netesov, a former executive at Vector, a state-run virology center in Novosibirsk, Siberia, that’s also working on an inoculation.

“Those who take it do so at their own risk,” Netesov said.

Russia has reported more than 750,000 cases of Covid-19, the fourth-largest total in the world, and Gamaleya’s program is on a faster track than many developers in the West. RDIF chief Kirill Dmitriev said last week phase 3 trials will start Aug. 3 and include thousands of people in Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with the vaccine distributed nationally as early as September. Western researchers typically run phase 3 trials for months to better understand safety and effectiveness.

Submission + - Quadsort: A stable sorting algorithm faster than quicksort and Timsort (github.com)

Submitted by scandum
scandum writes: Long has the conviction been held that quicksort is faster than merge sort. Timsort (derived from merge sort and insertion sort) was introduced in 2002 and while slower than quicksort for random data, Timsort performs better on ordered data.

Quadsort (derived from merge sort) was introduced in 2020 and is faster than quicksort for random data, and slightly faster than Timsort on ordered data.

Also of notice is the significant performance difference on small arrays, quadsort is on average two times faster than Timsort on data sets between 10 and 1000 elements. Quadsort achieves this performance through several optimizations spread out over 1500 lines of code that get the maximum performance out of merge sort.

Submission + - CPR is less effective than most people think, study suggests (upi.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: "But the real rate of survival is about 12% for cardiac arrests that occur outside hospitals and between 24% and 40% for those that happen in the hospital, according to the report published online July 13 in the Emergency Medicine Journal."

That’s a lot better than nothing.

Submission + - New Study Detects Ringing of the Global Atmosphere (phys.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A ringing bell vibrates simultaneously at a low-pitched fundamental tone and at many higher-pitched overtones, producing a pleasant musical sound. A recent study, just published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences by scientists at Kyoto University and the University of Hawai'i at Mnoa, shows that the Earth's entire atmosphere vibrates in an analogous manner, in a striking confirmation of theories developed by physicists over the last two centuries. In the case of the atmosphere, the "music" comes not as a sound we could hear, but in the form of large-scale waves of atmospheric pressure spanning the globe and traveling around the equator, some moving east-to-west and others west-to-east. Each of these waves is a resonant vibration of the global atmosphere, analogous to one of the resonant pitches of a bell.

Now in a new study by Takatoshi Sakazaki, an assistant professor at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Science, and Kevin Hamilton, an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawaii at Mnoa, the authors present a detailed analysis of observed atmospheric pressure over the globe every hour for 38 years. The results clearly revealed the presence of dozens of the predicted wave modes. The study focused particularly on waves with periods between 2 hours and 33 hours which travel horizontally through the atmosphere, moving around the globe at great speeds (exceeding 700 miles per hour). This sets up a characteristic "chequerboard" pattern of high and low pressure associated with these waves as they propagate.

Submission + - Could we not use DNS for a certificate revocation mechanism? 2

Submitted by dhammabum
dhammabum writes: As reported in the recent slashdot story, starting in September we system admins will be forced into annually updating TLS certificates because of a decision by Apple, abetted by Google and Mozilla. Supposedly this measure somewhat rectifies the current ineffective CRL system by limiting the use of compromised certificates to one year. Please read the linked story to see how cack-handed and useless this is.

Anyway, in an attempt to prevent this pathetic measure, could we instead use DNS to replace the current CRL system? Why not create a new type of TXT record, call it CRR (Certificate Revocation Record), this would consist of the Serial Number (or Subject Key ID or thumbprint) of the certificate. On TLS connection to a website, the browser does a DNS query for a CRR for the Common Name of the certificate. If the number/key/thumbprint matches, reject the connection. This way the onus is on the domain owner to directly control their fate. The only problem I can see with this is if there are numerous certificate Alternate Names — there would need to be a CRR for each name. A pain, but one only borne by the hapless domain owner.

Alternatively, if Apple is so determined to save us from ourselves, why don't they fund and host a functional CRL system? They have enough money. End users could create a CRL request via their CA who would then create the signed record and forward it to this grand scheme.

Otherwise, are there any other ideas?

Submission + - 'We've bought the wrong satellites': UK investment in OneWeb baffles experts (theguardian.com) 2

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: The UK government’s plan to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in a satellite broadband company has been described as “nonsensical” by experts, who say the company doesn’t even make the right type of satellite the country needs. The investment in OneWeb is intended to mitigate against the UK losing access to the EU’s Galileo satellite navigation system.

OneWeb is building a global satellite internet delivery platform similar to Starlink, and plans to piggyback a British navigation system on the satellites. But the satellites will be in low Earth orbit at 12,000km altitude, compared to other navigation systems at 20,000km. "The fundamental starting point is, yes, we’ve bought the wrong satellites" said Dr Bleddyn Bowen, a space policy expert at the University of Leicester.

OneWeb filed for bankruptcy in March.

Submission + - Supreme Court of Canada declares Uber Drivers are Employees

Submitted by Strider-
Strider- writes: In a decision released today, the Supreme Court of Canada has released a decision declaring that Uber drivers are Employees, rather than independent contractors. The case centered on an Uber Eats driver who was forced to accept new terms before completing a delivery, and the available arbitration was impractical. This decision paves the way for a large class-action lawsuit against Uber over working conditions and benefits.

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 + - SPAM: Spare the Programming, Spoil High School CS? 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In A New Pedagogy to Address the Unacknowledged Failure of American Secondary CS Education (June ACM Inroads), Scott Portnoff argues that a big part of the problem is the survey nature of today's most popular high school CS course offerings — Exploring Computer Science (ECS) and AP Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) — both of whose foundational premise is that programming is just one of many CS topics. "Up until a decade ago," Portnoff explains, "introductory high school computer science classes were synonymous with programming instruction, period. No longer." This new status quo in secondary CS education, Portnoff argues, resulted from baseless speculation that programming was what made Java-based AP CS A inaccessible, opposed to, say, an uninspiring or pedagogically ineffective version of that particular curriculum, or a poorly prepared instructor. It's quite a departure from the 2011 CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards, which made the case for the centrality of programming in CS education ("Pedagogically, computer programming has the same relation to studying computer science as playing an instrument does to studying music or painting does to studying art. In each case, even a small amount of hands-on experience adds immensely to life-long appreciation and understanding"). So, spare the programming, spoil high school CS?

Submission + - Charter Asks FCC to Help Them More Efficiently Screw Over Cord Cutters (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Proudrooster
Proudrooster writes: Charter is petitioning the FCC to release them from the 7-year "no data cap agreement" agreed to in the Time Warner merger. One released Charter would implement data caps and start charging interconnect fees for networks serving up streaming video kicking off another net neutrality war. This move is clearly aimed at cord cutters who are streaming video and also to exploit the COVID-19 crisis for profit as Americans are dependent on the broadband monopoly for work and school.

The FCC is seeking public comment:
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/at...

You can read some of the early current comment filings here:
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/searc...

Side note: Ajit at the FCC already let Charter weasel out of the first merger condition which was to provide competition in areas served by other ISPs. However, Ajit being a industry insider determined that competition was bad for the corporations and that monopolies are much more profitable.

Please comment.

Submission + - Construction begins on world's biggest liquid air battery (theguardian.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Construction is beginning on the world’s largest liquid air battery, which will store renewable electricity and reduce carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants. The project near Manchester, UK, will use spare green energy to compress air into a liquid and store it. When demand is higher, the liquid air is released back into a gas, powering a turbine that puts the green energy back into the grid.

The new liquid air battery, being developed by Highview Power, is due to be operational in 2022 and will have a capacity of 250MWh, almost double that of the largest chemical battery storage system built by Tesla. The plant’s lifetime is expected to be 30-40 years.

Submission + - SPAM: Scientists trigger hibernation in mice, astronauts could be next

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Scientists in Japan successfully triggered a hibernation-like state in mice by activating a specific group of brain cells.

The research, published this week in the journal Nature, suggests even animals that don't naturally sleep through the winter are capable of hibernation.

Entering a hibernation-like state could help astronauts conserve food and water, as well as avoid the ill-effects of microgravity, on long journeys through space.

Hibernation isn't simply prolonged sleep. When food gets scarce and winter approaches, hibernating animals begin to slow down their metabolism and drop their body temperature. During their prolonged slumber, hibernating animals quiet their brains and slow their heart rate and breathing.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Twitch streamers receive a flood of music copyright claims for old clips (engadget.com)

Submitted by stikves
stikves writes: It looks like Twitch streamers are the latest targets for coordinated DMCA attacks. What is more concerning is that these could potentially cripple their accounts.

From the story:
"The company has acknowledged (via Evening Standard) a “sudden influx” of DMCA takedown requests against streamers for allegedly violating music copyright in clips captured by viewers between 2017 and 2019.

As each request potentially represents a strike against an account, this raises the threat of permanent bans for streamers who might get three strikes with relatively little warning — and for clips they didn’t even choose to create."

Submission + - It's 2020 and USB-C is still a mess... (androidauthority.com)

Submitted by mprindle
mprindle writes: It's the middle of 2020 and the USB-C standards are confusing even for the most technical person.

USB-C is billed as the solution for all our future cable needs, unifying power, and data delivery with display and audio connectivity. Ushering in an age of the one-size-fits-all cable. Despite the USB-C connector supplied as default in modern smartphones, the standard has, unfortunately, failed to live up to its early promises. Even the seemingly most basic function of USB-C — powering devices — continues to be a mess of compatibility issues, conflicting proprietary standards, and a general lack of consumer information to guide purchasing decisions. The data speeds available over USB-C have also become increasingly convoluted. The problem is that the features supported by different USB-C devices aren’t clear, yet the defining principle of the USB-C standard makes consumers think everything should just work.

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