175560977
submission
SpzToid writes:
Chinese Ship’s Crew Suspected of Deliberately Dragging Anchor for 100 Miles to Cut Baltic Cables
A Chinese commercial vessel that has been surrounded by European warships in international waters for a week is central to an investigation of suspected sabotage that threatens to test the limits of maritime law—and heighten tensions between Beijing and European capitals.
Investigators suspect that the crew of the Yi Peng 3 bulk carrier—225 meters long, 32 meters wide and loaded with Russian fertilizer—deliberately severed two critical data cables last week as its anchor was dragged along the Baltic seabed for over 100 miles.
Alternate links:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.today%2F%3Frun%3D1%26amp;u...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fwo...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reuters.com%2Fworld%2F...
175373839
submission
SpzToid writes:
A new exemption to a 1998 law will allow third-party technicians to repair McDonald’s ice cream and McFlurry machines.
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Meredith Rose’s children wanted ice cream on the long drive to her parents’ house for Thanksgiving last year, so she stopped at a McDonald’s and ordered an Oreo McFlurry.
A few minutes later, the attorney from Rockville, Maryland, learned that the restaurant’s ice cream machine was broken.
That disappointing moment for her children — something Americans nationwide have experienced — motivated Rose to fight for a legal exemption that could lead to more functioning ice cream machines at the world’s largest fast-food chain, she said.
At that time, it was illegal for anyone other than the machines’ manufacturer, the Taylor Company, to repair the copyrighted devices, which include access codes that only the manufacturer typically knows. But Rose and her colleagues had recently begun petitioning the U.S. Copyright Office for an exemption to federal law, arguing that copyright shouldn’t apply to repairs.
The Library of Congress — which houses the Copyright Office — agreed, ruling last week that any technician can repair some commercial food preparation equipment, including the McDonald’s ice cream machines. The decision could decrease the amount of time McDonald’s restaurants have to wait for an expert to fix the devices, Rose said.
Alternate link:
http://archive.today/epGsw
175219661
submission
SpzToid writes:
The City of London Police had put the teenage boy in the suburban Travelodge to protect him. They even set up a code with him and his mom to signal it was safe to open the door: “Lucky lucky.”
Then they grew suspicious.
The teen had a history with the police. It was September 2022, and 17-year-old Arion Kurtaj had been arrested twice earlier that year for his alleged role in a hacking group that stole data and demanded ransoms from some of the world’s biggest tech companies. Kurtaj, who is autistic, was released both times. The second time, that March, he had been let go under the condition that he stay offline.
Kurtaj was arrested a third time and charged with hacking, fraud and blackmail. Authorities said that while at the Travelodge, he broke into Uber and taunted the company by posting a link to a photo of an erect penis on the company’s internal Slack messaging system, then stole software and videos from Rockstar Games. Stolen clips had popped up in a “Grand Theft Auto” discussion forum from a user named teapotuberhacker and stirred a frenzy.
Alternate link: http://archive.today/2024.10.0...
175183261
submission
SpzToid writes:
Visual effects studio Digital Domain — the company whose credits have ranged from “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” to “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — has teamed up with Amazon Web Services to accelerate the development and global reach of its Autonomous Virtual Human (AVH) technology by migrating it to the cloud and involving AWS' generative AI and machine learning tools.
The company aims to expand the use of its AVH tech in areas including storytelling, customer engagement, and interactive entertainment with real-time virtual human interaction, in industries ranging from entertainment to hospitality and healthcare. Reflecting this work, it introduced prototype virtual human Zoey for such purposes in 2022. The studio’s digital human work for film dates back further, notably with David Fincher’s 2008 fantasy “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” for which the company’s work in aging Brad Pitt in reverse earned a VFX Oscar.
175143627
submission
SpzToid writes:
Bug let researchers track millions of cars, unlock doors, and start engines at will.
======
Today, a group of independent security researchers revealed that they'd found a flaw in a web portal operated by the carmaker Kia that let the researchers reassign control of the Internet-connected features of most modern Kia vehicles—dozens of models representing millions of cars on the road—from the smartphone of a car’s owner to the hackers’ own phone or computer. By exploiting that vulnerability and building their own custom app to send commands to target cars, they were able to scan virtually any Internet-connected Kia vehicle’s license plate and within seconds gain the ability to track that car’s location, unlock the car, honk its horn, or start its ignition at will.
175120959
submission
SpzToid writes:
The bike-sharing program rewards users who help redistribute bikes around New York City. A few riders have figured out how to turn that into profit.
Alternative link.
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It was the perfect New York hustle, a scam of subtle perfection. And for three years, it helped Mark Epperson pay his rent.
The hustle, in its simplest form: Borrow a Citi Bike. Ride it one block. Wait 15 minutes, then ride it back.
Earn $6,000 a month (under ideal conditions, and with lots of work).
174718964
submission
SpzToid writes:
The campaign suggested Iran was to blame. POLITICO has not independently verified the identity of the hacker or their motivation.
= = = =
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign said Saturday that some of its internal communications had been hacked.
The acknowledgment came after POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account with documents from inside Trump’s operation.
The campaign blamed “foreign sources hostile to the United States,” citing a Microsoft report on Friday that Iranian hackers “sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign.” Microsoft did not identify the campaign targeted by the email and declined to comment Saturday.
172729567
submission
SpzToid writes:
No one doubts that wind turbines do indeed kill at least some birds. But a new analysis of American data, published in Environmental Science & Technology, suggests the numbers are negligible, and have little impact on bird populations.
Wind power has expanded dramatically in America over the past 20 years, from 2.6 gigawatts of installed capacity on land in 2000 to 122 gigawatts in 2020. Many studies have analysed the effects in specific locations or on specific bird species. But few have looked at the effects on wildlife at the population level. Enter Erik Katovich, an economist at the University of Geneva. Dr Katovich made use of the Christmas Bird Count, a citizen-science project run by the National Audubon Society, an American non-profit outfit. Volunteers count birds they spot over Christmas, and the society compiles the numbers. Its records stretch back over a century.
Comparing bird populations to the locations of new gas wells revealed an average 15% drop in bird numbers when new wells were drilled, probably due to a combination of noise, air pollution and the disturbance of rivers and ponds that many birds rely upon. When drilling happened in places designated by the National Audubon Society as “important bird areas”, bird numbers instead dropped by 25%. Such places are typically migration hubs, feeding grounds or breeding locations.
172593285
submission
SpzToid writes:
Since the 1960s engineers around the world have been fiddling with a novel type of jet called a rotating detonation engine (RDE), but it has never got beyond the experimental stage. That could be about to change. GE Aerospace, one of the world’s biggest producers of jet engines, recently announced it was developing a working version. Earlier this year America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded a $29m contract to Raytheon, part of RTX, another big aerospace group, to develop an RDE called Gambit.
Both engines would be used to propel missiles, overcoming the range and speed limitations of current propulsion systems, including rockets and existing types of jet engines. However, if the companies are successful in getting them to work, RDEs might have a much broader role in aviation—including the possibility of helping revive supersonic air travel.
In a nutshell, an RDE “replaces fire with a controlled explosion”, explains Kareem Ahmed, an expert in advanced aerospace engines at the University of Central Florida. In technical terms, this is because a jet engine relies on the combustion of oxygen and fuel, which is a subsonic reaction that scientists call deflagration. Detonation, by comparison, is a high-energy explosion that takes place at supersonic speeds. As a result it is a more powerful and potentially a more efficient way of producing thrust, the force that drives an aircraft forward.
image: The Economist
A conventional jet engine uses lots of moving parts (see diagram). Rotating blades draw in air and compress it before igniting it with fuel in a combustion chamber, creating rapidly expanding hot gases that blast out of the rear. As the gases exit they drive a turbine, which keeps the whole process going. An RDE is simpler. Air entering the front is forced into a hollow space between two concentric cylinders. When fuel is pumped into this area, it mixes with the oxygen in the air and detonates, creating a rotating supersonic shock wave that spirals around the gap and out of the rear. Once it has started, the detonation is self-sustaining.
Read more
172008607
submission
SpzToid writes:
Ubuntu 23.10, codenamed Mantic Minotaur, is the 39th Ubuntu release, and it's one of the three smaller interim releases Canonical puts out between long-term support (LTS) versions. This last interim before the next LTS doesn't stand out with bold features you can identify at a glance. But it does set up some useful options and upgrades that should persist in Ubuntu for some time.
Two of the biggest changes in Ubuntu 23.10 are in the installer. Ubuntu now defaults to a "Default installation," which is quite different from what the "default" was even just one release prior. "Default" is described as "Just the essentials, web browser, and basic utilities," while "Full" is "An offline-friendly selection of office tools, utilities, web browser, and games." "Default" is somewhat similar to what "Minimal" used to be in prior versions, while "Full" is intended for those who are offline or have slow connections or just want as many options as possible right away.
Elsewhere in the installer, you can now choose ZFS as your primary file system. There's also an experimental option to set up Trusted Platform Module (TPM) full-disk encryption rather than rely entirely on passphrases to encrypt your disk. This brings Ubuntu up to speed with Windows in offering a way to both secure your system and find out the hard way that you lack a backup key to get in after messing with your boot options. (Kidding! Somewhat.)
171637026
submission
SpzToid writes:
The industry consumes as much electricity as Britain—and rising
What you notice first is how silent it is,” says Kimmo Koski, the boss of the Finnish IT Centre for Science. Dr Koski is describing LUMI—Finnish for “snow”—the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, which sits 250km south of the Arctic Circle in the town of Kajaani in Finland.
LUMI, which was inaugurated last year, is used for everything from climate modelling to searching for new drugs. It has tens of thousands of individual processors and is capable of performing up to 429 quadrillion calculations every second. That makes it the third-most-powerful supercomputer in the world. Powered by hydroelectricity, and with its waste heat used to help warm homes in Kajaani, it even boasts negative emissions of carbon dioxide.
LUMI offers a glimpse of the future of high-performance computing (HPC), both on dedicated supercomputers and in the cloud infrastructure that runs much of the internet. Over the past decade the demand for HPC has boomed, driven by technologies like machine learning, genome sequencing and simulations of everything from stockmarkets and nuclear weapons to the weather. It is likely to carry on rising, for such applications will happily consume as much computing power as you can throw at them. Over the same period the amount of computing power required to train a cutting-edge AI model has been doubling every five months.
All this has implications for the environment. HPC—and computing more generally—is becoming a big user of energy. The International Energy Agency reckons data centres account for between 1.5% and 2% of global electricity consumption, roughly the same as the entire British economy. That is expected to rise to 4% by 2030. With its eye on government pledges to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the computing industry is trying to find ways to do more with less and boost the efficiency of its products. The work is happening at three levels: that of individual microchips; of the computers that are built from those chips; and the data centres that, in turn, house the computers.
Start with the microchips themselves. Digital computers have become vastly more efficient over the past 80 years. A modern machine can do around 10trn calculations for the same amount of energy as a single calculation would have consumed in the aftermath of the second world war. Much of that enormous progress was a result of the industry’s attempts to stick to Moore’s Law—the observation that the number of components that can be crammed onto an integrated circuit doubles every couple of years.
171191810
submission
SpzToid writes:
Running a turbine backwards can produce green heat
Fossil fueled power stations can be replaced by solar panels or nuclear reactors. Petrol-powered cars can be replaced with ones that use zero-carbon electricity to charge batteries. But not every part of an economy is so easy to decarbonise, even in principle. Three heavy industries—cement, chemicals and steelmaking—are particularly tricky to clean up. One reason is that all rely on chemical processes that need very high temperatures.
Extracting iron from its ore, for instance, is the first step in steelmaking. Temperatures inside the furnaces used to do that can exceed 1,600C. Cement kilns, which convert limestone into clinker, one of cement’s raw ingredients, can reach 1,400C. Because it is tricky or impossible to produce such temperatures for some industrial processes using electricity alone, firms rely on fossil fuels.
Green-minded businesses have been exploring alternatives. Hydrogen, for instance, can be produced by splitting water into its component elements. If that is done with clean energy, the gas can be burned as a zero-carbon fuel. Another option might be to stick with fossil fuels, but to capture and bury the carbon dioxide they generate, an idea known as carbon capture and storage. But both technologies are nascent, and would require the building of a great deal of new infrastructure that does not yet exist.
At the Brightlands Campus, a state- and industry-backed innovation centre near Maastricht, in the Netherlands, a Finnish engineering firm called Coolbrook is hoping to change that. Its “RotoDynamic” system is designed to supply just the sorts of super-high temperatures needed by heavy industry—and to do so while being powered solely by electricity.
Spinning up
The easiest way to think about Coolbrook’s system is as a gas turbine in reverse. A conventional gas turbine—as used in power stations or jet engines—burns fossil fuel to create a hot, high-pressure gas that spins rotor blades. That rotational energy can be used to run a thrust-generating fan (as in jet aircraft) or converted to electricity in a generator (as in a power station).
The new system begins instead with an electric motor. The motor spins the turbine’s rotors. Gas or liquid is then fed to the turbine. Once inside, the rotors accelerate the stuff to supersonic speeds, and then rapidly slow it again. The sudden deceleration transforms the kinetic energy contained in the accelerated gas or fluid into heat. If the motor is powered by green electricity, then no carbon dioxide is produced.
170984903
submission
SpzToid writes:
Millions of people get phone calls from scammers and wonder who is at the other end.
Now we know: rather than someone in a call centre far away, a “bright young man” living in a lush flat in London has been unmasked as the mastermind behind so many of these calls.
Tejay Fletcher’s trial exposed how criminals with a simple website bypassed police, phone operators and banks to facilitate “fraud on an industrial scale”, scamming victims out of £100m of their hard earned cash.
Fletcher, 35, who ran the website iSpoof.cc, was jailed for 13 years and four months earlier this week following his arrest in 2019 in what is the biggest anti-fraud operation mounted in the UK.
The website allowed criminals to disguise their phone numbers in a process known as “spoofing” and trick unsuspecting people to believe they were being called by their bank or other institutions.
Fletcher’s luxury lifestyle
When police arrested Fletcher and raided his home, a rented east London apartment with views of the Royal Victoria Dock and the City skyline, they found riches including a £230,000 Lamborghini, two Range Rovers worth £120,000 and an £11,000 Rolex.
A Lamborghini Urus worth 230,000 were among the riches owned by Tejay Fletcher — Metropolitan Police/PA
A Lamborghini Urus worth £230,000 were among the riches owned by Tejay Fletcher — Metropolitan Police/PA
There was also a money counter, jewellery, and an Audemars Piguet watch which appeared to be fake.
It was a far cry from the early years of his life, which he spent in a succession of foster homes, according to his lawyer.
The son of a single mother who “simply was unable to cope”, his pathway to criminality was lined with stolen cars and the consumption of cannabis, Southwark Crown Court heard.
In 2020, he co-founded iSpoof.cc, which he built into what he called “the most sophisticated client spoofing platform available”, allowing scammers to change the number or identity displayed when they made calls so they appeared to be calling from a trusted organisation, often a bank or a bank’s fraud department.
After he earned nearly £2m in profits, police finally caught him and brought down the site.
His website was used for a large proportion of fraudulent activity in the UK – but copycats have since taken its place, and others are still falling victim to these types of scams, experts have warned.
170720502
submission
SpzToid writes:
Camouflage ranks highly among the arts of war. Thanks to innovations such as fractal colouration patterns, which mimic nature by repeating shapes at different scales, the distance from which naked eyes can quickly spot soldiers wearing the best camouflage has shrunk, by one reckoning, by a fifth over the past two decades. That is impressive.
On today’s battlefields, however, it is no longer enough to merely hide from human eyes. People and kit are given away as well by signals beyond the visual spectrum, and devices that detect these wavelengths are getting better, lighter and cheaper. Thermal sensors are a case in point. Today, one that costs about $1,000 and weighs as little as five sachets of sugar can, in good weather, detect a warm vehicle as far off as 10km.
As Hans Kariis, deputy head of signatures research at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, notes, that is well beyond the range at which a small drone would be spotted. Two decades ago, he adds, a less sensitive thermal sensor weighing a kilogram cost ten times as much.
For forces in Ukraine keen to go unnoticed, the challenge is not just that precision sensors are multiplying, on land, in the skies and in orbit. It is also that better automatic target-detection software is helping operators find needles in the haystacks of data being collected.
Look out!
For example, software called Kestrel, developed by Sentient Vision Systems of Melbourne, Australia, scans feeds of visual, infrared and radar data, and places red boxes around people and other potential targets, even as their positions in the frame move. Sentient says Kestrel has been deployed on more than 3,500 crewed and uncrewed aircraft since its introduction in 2009. The pertinent data processing, which also classifies objects and calculates ranges, can be done aloft—a bonus, for an aircraft may collect more data than can be streamed to computers on the ground.
As Maksym Zrazhevsky, an analyst with Molfar, an intelligence firm in Dnipro, Ukraine, observes, the fighting in his country shows how these advances have made it far harder to camouflage military assets. This no doubt helps explain why, as Mr Zrazhevsky notes, Russian forces in Ukraine have resorted to using sections of timber to disguise military refuelling vehicles as civilian logging lorries. However clever that may seem, there’s a rub. The 1949 Geneva Convention on warfare bans “the feigning of civilian, non-combatant status”, as Article 37’s “Prohibition of perfidy” puts it.
But there is a different, convention-compliant approach to reducing the chance of appearing in an enemy’s cross-hairs. Rather than make targets seem civilian, design special camouflage that tricks electronic sensors as well as human eyes.
One developer of such “multispectral” camouflaging is Saab, a Swedish industrial giant. Its Barracuda unit sells camouflage netting for vehicles and soldiers that reduces both radar reflections and heat signals. To handle radar, it contains a layer of specially crafted (but secret) semi-conducting polymers that absorb a portion of the incoming beam. That stops reflections revealing tanks and other military gear underneath. Formulating the polymer is tricky, says Johan Jersblad, a senior camouflage engineer at Saab. If it is too conductive, the netting itself will appear on a radar screen and become a target.
Saab’s nets’ heat-signature reduction comes from an insulating material, also of undisclosed composition, which reflects infrared radiation from what it is covering back towards its source, be it an engine, a gun or a body. To better fool soldiers or software scanning thermal imagery, the material also reflects cooler wavelengths emitted by surroundings like the ground and vegetation—in effect, stealing their temperature from them. The material in question is distributed unevenly, to mimic heat variation in the natural world. Dr Kariis reckons today’s multispectral camouflage cuts in half the range at which an asset can be spotted by many sensors.
170570187
submission
SpzToid writes:
Imagine a habitable colony on Mars or the Moon and the kinds of structures that come to mind are probably gleaming domes or shiny metallic tubes snaking over the surface. But with no Earth-like atmosphere or magnetic field to repel solar radiation and micrometeorites, space colonists would probably need to pile metres-thick rocks and geological rubble onto the roofs of such off-world settlements. More like a hobbit hole than Moonbase Alpha.
There could be another solution, however, that would offer future colonists safer and far more expansive living space than any cramped base built on the surface. Writing in Acta Astronautica, Raymond Martin, an engineer at Blue Origin, a rocket company, and Haym Benaroya, an aerospace engineer at Rutgers University, explore the benefits of setting up a Moon base inside giant geological tunnels that lie just below the lunar surface.
First discovered during the Apollo programme, these lunar lava tubes are a legacy of when Earth’s nearest celestial neighbour was geologically hyperactive, with streams of boiling basaltic magma bursting from the interior to flow across the Moon’s surface as lava. Found on Earth (see picture), and identified on Mars, lava tubes form when the sluggish top layer of a lava stream slows and cools, forming a thick and rocky lid that is left behind when the rest of the lava underneath eventually drains away.
Lava tubes on Earth are usually up to 15 metres wide and can run for several kilometres. But the reduced gravity on the Moon makes them hundreds of times bigger, creating colossal cave systems that are up to a kilometre across and hundreds of kilometres long.
