Linux fréttir

ExtremeTech's Joel Hruska tells the story of a recent high-speed boat chase involving up to 300 Nvidia CMP 30HX GPUs. From the report: Our movie-like story kicked off with Chinese authorities detaining a fishing boat anchored near Hong Kong International Airport. Men on the fishing boat were swapping cargo over to a speedboat. When authorities approached, the smugglers hopped into the speedboat and fled. While the customs officials were unable to apprehend the smugglers in the subsequent high-speed chase, the hapless fishing boat owner was unable to get away. Confiscated goods, according to THG, included sea cucumbers, shark fins, and other various tech products and gadgets. The graphics cards were considered a surprise. There's a certain dark hilarity in imagining drug dealers across the world offering their clientele multiple ounces of weed or an RTX 3060, but in this case, the haul consisted of low-end 30HX CMP cards. Nvidia offers a range of CMP cards, with performance ranging from 26MH/s to 86MH/s. The 30HX and 40HX are believed to be based on Turing silicon -- the GTX 1660 Super and RTX 2070, respectively. The 50X and 90HX are harder to pin down. The 50HX is a touch faster than the known mining performance of the RTX 2080 Ti, while the 90HX is about 10 percent slower than the known mining performance of an RTX 3080. If the 50HX is based on the RTX 2080 Ti, it's fielding a smaller amount of VRAM; the RTX 2080 Ti offered 11GB, while the 50HX has just 10GB.

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Apps' developers believe they can manage potential abuse

Earlier this month, a startup called Socket, Inc., launched Wormhole, a web app for encrypting files and making them available to those who receive the URL-embedded encryption key, without exposing the files to the cloud-based intermediary handling the transfer.…

In Myanmar, the junta's intensifying crackdowns on protesters in the street are mirrored by its rising restrictions online. Reuters: In the early hours of Feb. 1, Myanmar's military seized power in a coup that has ignited months of mass protests. The military junta's security forces have since killed more than 550 civilians in crackdowns on the pro-democracy protesters, including children. To try to suppress protests, the junta has imposed increasing restrictions on internet access, culminating in a near total shutdown as of April 2. That has made it extremely difficult for people to access information, upload videos of protests, or organize. These tactics have also crippled businesses and limited access to medical information during the coronavirus pandemic. A Myanmar junta spokesperson did not respond to calls seeking comment. At a March 23 press conference, spokesperson Zaw Min Tun said the junta had no immediate plans to ease internet restrictions because violence was being provoked online. Protesters in Myanmar, who asked to stay anonymous, told Reuters they were terrified about being shut off from the world, with no way to broadcast news of the protests or of the army's killings to those outside of Myanmar. "We Myanmar people are in the dark now," said one young protester. "News from Myanmar is going to disappear," another added. Governments around the world are increasingly using internet restrictions during political crises as a tool to limit free expression and hide human rights abuses, according to data from the digital rights organization Access Now. The U.N. Human Rights Council has condemned such intentional disruptions as a human rights violation. "Whenever the internet is shut down during such critical moments we would hear or document or see reports of human rights abuses, and that is what is happening in Myanmar," said Felicia Anthonio, a campaigner with Access Now. "The government is cracking down on protesters to ensure they do not let the rest of the world know what is happening." Since the coup, the junta has ordered telecom companies to carry out dozens of shutdowns. These shutdowns targeted mobile and wireless internet, which is the only available internet for most in the country.

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Rei writes: Having moved from pigs to rhesus macaques in pursuit of the goal of hopefully beginning human trials by the end of the year, Neuralink has continued their recruitment drive with a pair of videos showing their latest progress. In the first video, they show how they train the macaque to control a joystick with its mind, and how after associating the neural signals with intent, they can disconnect the joystick and the macaque continues to be able to operate the training interface solely through Neuralink. They then switch it over to controlling a cursor in Pong (picture-in-picture showing synapses here). Even with the game set to high speed and with the distraction of his banana-milkshake reward, the macaque puts out an impressive gaming performance. Musk expects the first commercial product to enable a paralyzed person to interact with a smartphone faster than a healthy person using their thumbs. ["Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again," adds Musk. "The device is implanted flush with skull & charges wirelessly, so you look & feel totally normal."]

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Someone hasn't heard of redundancy

The US Justice Department on Friday announced the arrest of Seth Aaron Pendley, 28, for allegedly planning to blow up a single Amazon data center in Ashburn, Virginia, which he thought would knock out around 70 per cent of the internet.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A zero-day vulnerability in Zoom which can be used to launch remote code execution (RCE) attacks has been disclosed by researchers. The researchers from Computest demonstrated a three-bug attack chain that caused an RCE on a target machine, and all without any form of user interaction. As Zoom has not yet had time to patch the critical security issue, the specific technical details of the vulnerability are being kept under wraps. However, an animation of the attack in action demonstrates how an attacker was able to open the calculator program of a machine running Zoom following its exploit. As noted by Malwarebytes, the attack works on both Windows and Mac versions of Zoom, but it has not -- yet -- been tested on iOS or Android. The browser version of the videoconferencing software is not impacted. Computest researchers Daan Keuper and Thijs Alkemade earned themselves $200,000 for this Zoom discovery, as it was part of the Pwn2Own contest. In a statement to Tom's Guide, Zoom thanked the Computest researchers and said the company was "working to mitigate this issue with respect to Zoom Chat." In-session Zoom Meetings and Zoom Video Webinars are not affected. "The attack must also originate from an accepted external contact or be a part of the target's same organizational account," Zoom added. "As a best practice, Zoom recommends that all users only accept contact requests from individuals they know and trust."

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Mammoth as a mobe, but serious as a game device

Lenovo's latest tech features top-shelf components and new cooling technologies.…

Scientific papers containing lots of specialized terminology are less likely to be cited by other researchers. The New York Times reports: Polje, nappe, vuggy, psammite. Some scientists who study caves might not bat an eye, but for the rest of us, these terms might as well be ancient Greek. Specialized terminology isn't unique to the ivory tower -- just ask a baker about torting or an arborist about bracts, for example. But it's pervasive in academia, and now a team of researchers has analyzed jargon in a set of over 21,000 scientific manuscripts. They found that papers containing higher proportions of jargon in their titles and abstracts were cited less frequently by other researchers. Science communication -- with the public but also among scientists -- suffers when a research paper is packed with too much specialized terminology, the team concluded. These results were published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Jargon can be a problem, but it also serves a purpose, said Hillary Shulman, a communications scientist at Ohio State University. "As our ideas become more refined, it makes sense that our concepts do too." This language-within-a-language can be a timesaver, a way to precisely convey meaning, she said. However, it also runs the risk of starkly reminding people -- even some well-educated researchers -- that they aren't "in the know." "It's alienating," said Dr. Shulman.

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Retail union accuses the tech giant of illegally swaying votes, files complaint

Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, voted against unionization, according to results announced on Friday.…

There is something that the average person can do to slow down climate change, and it can be accomplished without leaving the house. Don't waste food. From a report: Some 931 million tons of it went to waste in 2019, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Individual households were responsible for more than half of that, with the rest coming from retailers and the food service industry. New estimates show that about 17% of food available to consumers worldwide that year ended up being wasted. The matter is even more urgent when considered alongside another UN analysis that tracks the problem further up the supply chain, and shows 14% of food production is lost before it reaches stores. Waste is happening at every point, from the field to the dinner table. Food waste and loss are responsible for as much as 10% of global emissions, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If it were a country, this discard would rank third in the ranking of the world's sources of greenhouse gases, after China and the U.S. Among the most effective climate solutions, non-profit Project Drawdown ranks cutting food waste ahead of moving to electric cars and switching to plant-based diets. Thursday's UNEP report suggests the amount of food wasted by consumers could be about double the previous estimate. The analysis conducted by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization in 2011 relied on data from fewer countries.

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Questions raised about procurement process but, gosh, they badly need a replacement HR system

The US State of Iowa has approved $17m in its 2022 budget to replace an HR system dating back to the 1980s with Workday software.…

smooth wombat writes: Chuang Cheng-deng's modest rice farm is a stone's throw from the nerve center of Taiwan's computer chip industry, whose products power a huge share of the world's iPhones and other gadgets. This year, Mr. Chuang is paying the price for his high-tech neighbors' economic importance. Gripped by drought and scrambling to save water for homes and factories, Taiwan has shut off irrigation across tens of thousands of acres of farmland. The authorities are compensating growers for the lost income. But Mr. Chuang, 55, worries that the thwarted harvest will drive customers to seek out other suppliers, which could mean years of depressed earnings. "The government is using money to seal farmers' mouths shut," he said, surveying his parched brown fields. Officials are calling the drought Taiwan's worst in more than half a century. And it is exposing the enormous challenges involved in hosting the island's semiconductor industry, which is an increasingly indispensable node in the global supply chains for smartphones, cars and other keystones of modern life. Chip makers use lots of water to clean their factories and wafers, the thin slices of silicon that form the basis of the chips. And with worldwide semiconductor supplies already strained by surging demand for electronics, the added uncertainty about Taiwan's water supply is not likely to ease concerns about the tech world's reliance on the island and on one chip maker in particular: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. More than 90 percent of the worldâ(TM)s manufacturing capacity for the most advanced chips is in Taiwan and run by TSMC, which makes chips for Apple, Intel and other big names. The company said last week that it would invest $100 billion over the next three years to increase capacity, which will likely further strengthen its commanding presence in the market. TSMC says the drought has not affected its production so far. But with Taiwan's rainfall becoming no more predictable even as its tech industry grows, the island is having to go to greater and greater lengths to keep the water flowing. In recent months, the government has flown planes and burned chemicals to seed the clouds above reservoirs. It has built a seawater desalination plant in Hsinchu, home to TSMC's headquarters, and a pipeline connecting the city with the rainier north. It has ordered industries to cut use. In some places it has reduced water pressure and begun shutting off supplies for two days each week. Some companies, including TSMC, have hauled in truckloads of water from other areas.

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Security researchers say APKPure, a widely popular app for installing older or discontinued Android apps from outside of Google's app store, contained malicious adware that flooded the victim's device with unwanted ads. From a report: Kaspersky Lab said that it alerted APKPure on Thursday that its most recent app version, 3.17.18, contained malicious code that siphoned off data from a victim's device without their knowledge, and pushed ads to the device's lock screen and in the background to generate fraudulent revenue for the adware operators. But the researchers said that the malicious code had the capacity to download other malware, potentially putting affected victims at further risk.

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As the constellation stands anyway

SpaceX's Starlink has been described as the solution to dismal rural broadband. Like any project linked to Elon Musk, the satellite internet constellation is surrounded by a thick cloud of hype. But is it justified?…

Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO, listed fintech as one of the "enormous competitive threats" to banks in his annual shareholder letter released this week. From a report: "Banks ... are facing extensive competition from Silicon Valley, both in the form of fintechs and Big Tech companies," like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Walmart, Dimon wrote, and "that is here to stay." Fintech companies, in particular, "are making great strides in building both digital and physical banking products and services," Dimon said. "From loans to payment systems to investing, they have done a great job in developing easy-to-use, intuitive, fast and smart products." This, in part, is why "banks are playing an increasingly smaller role in the financial system," he said. Fintechs, like Stripe, Robinhood and PayPal, have seen a lot of growth and success in recent years, which may present challenges to traditional banks. While traditional banks have "significant strengths," like "brand, economies of scale, profitability and deep roots with their customers," Dimon also acknowledged their weaknesses. Things like "inflexible 'legacy systems'" along with "extensive regulations," can hinder innovation within banks, though they can arguably also make banks a "safer" option for consumers, too.

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Things to look forward to on Monday morn: Our Who, Me? column and 1st flight of Ingenuity

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is set to take its first flight after engineers spun its blades up to 50rpm in preparation.…

More than a third of the Antarctic ice shelf risks collapsing into the sea if global temperatures reach 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels as climate change warms the world, a new study from the UK's University of Reading has warned. From a report: In a forecasting study, scientists found that 34% of the area of all Antarctic ice shelves, measuring some half a million square kilometers, could destabilize if world temperatures were to rise by 4 degrees. Some 67% of the ice shelf area on the Antarctic Peninsula would be at risk of destabilization under this scenario, researchers said. Ice shelves are permanent floating platforms of ice attached to areas of the coastline, formed where glaciers flowing off the land meet the sea. They can help limit the rise in global sea levels by acting like a dam, slowing the flow of melting ice and water into the oceans. Each summer, ice at the surface of ice shelves melts and runs into smaller gaps in the snow below, where it usually refreezes. But when there is a lot of melting and little snowfall, this water instead pools onto the ice's surface or flows into crevasses. This deepens and widens the crevasses, causing the shelf to fracture and collapse into the sea.

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A Google proposal which enables a web browser to treat a group of domains as one for privacy and security reasons has been opposed by the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). From a report: Google's First Party Sets (FPS) relates to the way web browsers determine whether a cookie or other resource comes from the same site to which the user has navigated or from another site. The browser is likely to treat these differently, an obvious example being the plan to block third-party cookies. The proposal suggests that where multiple domains owned by the same entity -- such as google.com, google.co.uk, and youtube.com -- they could be grouped into sets which "allow related domain names to declare themselves as the same first-party." The idea allows for sites to declare their own sets by means of a manifest in a known location. It also states that "the browser vendor could maintain a list of domains which meet its UA [User Agent] policy, and ship it in the browser." In February 2019, Google software engineer Mike West requested a TAG review and feedback on the proposal was published yesterday. "It has been reviewed by the TAG and represents a consensus view," the document says. According to the TAG, "the architectural plank of the origin has remained relatively steady" over the last 10 years, despite major changes in web technology. It added: "We are concerned that this proposal weakens the concept of origin without considering the full implications of this action." The group identified some vagueness in the proposal, such as whether FPS applies to permissions such as access to microphone and camera. A Google Chrome engineering manager has stated: "No, we are not proposing to change the scope for permissions. The current scope for FPS is only to be treated as a privacy boundary where browsers impose cross-site tracking limitations." But the TAG reckons that the precise scope of FPS should be laid out in the proposal. A second concern is over the suggestion that browser vendors would ship their own lists. "This could lead to more application developers targeting specific browsers and writing web apps that only work (or are limited to) those browsers, which is not a desirable outcome," said the TAG.

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Google is signaling to the White House that a lack of coordination on tech and trade policy across the Atlantic is hurting business. From a report: Google's head of global policy and government affairs, Karan Bhatia, is urging the Biden administration to accept an invitation from the European Commission to form an EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council, according to a post shared exclusively with Axios. Around the world, different countries are proposing and enacting trade, tax, privacy and moderation rules impacting U.S. tech companies. On Thursday, the Biden administration proposed a tax agreement for very large multinational companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, the Wall Street Journal reports. Today's global regulatory patchquilt is a legacy of trade wars launched intermittently during the Trump administration plus aggressive moves aimed at U.S. tech companies from overseas. "Trans-Atlantic coordination has largely become an afterthought, if itâ(TM)s thought of at all," Bhatia wrote in a blog post. "These policy trends hurt both the U.S. and European economies, risking the 16 million jobs on both sides of the Atlantic linked to transatlantic trade and investment," he wrote. "They also make it harder for the U.S. and the EU to address new global technology challenges and partner with emerging economies in Asia." Bhatia says the Biden administration should opt to participate in the proposed Trade and Technology Council to avoid "unilateral approaches" on data flows between the U.S. and Europe and regulation of digital platforms.

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Who says everything below the line is a cesspit of useless filth?

Nearly a third of Britons use the name of their pet or a family member as a password, the National Cyber Security Centre has said as it advised folk to adopt what looks very much like a Register forum user's suggestion for secure password generation.…