Linux fréttir

Automakers concerned as to whether there is enough infrastructure and battery capacity to go around

Analysis The European Parliament this week voted to support what is effectively a ban on the sale of cars with combustion engines by 2035, and automakers are not happy.…

The first global survey of marine RNA viruses has discovered thousands of new viruses, some of which play a central role in locking away carbon at the bottom of the sea. From a report: Between 2009 and 2012, researchers aboard a ship called Tara collected seawater samples from all the world's oceans. Guillermo Dominguez-Huerta at the Ohio State University and his colleagues had previously looked at hundreds of thousands of DNA viruses in these samples and found they were concentrated in five major ecological zones, with some of the greatest diversity in the Arctic Ocean. But this only told half of the story. The ocean is also filled with viruses that have genomes made of a different genetic material called RNA, which cells use to direct protein synthesis. Analysing DNA viruses was relatively easy using existing methods, but the researchers had to come up with improved techniques to distinguish viral RNA from the surfeit of RNA produced by the other organisms swimming in each sample. Now, Dominguez-Huerta and his colleagues have published the biggest-ever survey of RNA viruses in the ocean using the samples from Tara. The researchers identified more than 5000 types of RNA viruses in the sea, almost all of which were new to science. "It has expanded our view of how much diversity there is," says Curtis Suttle at the University of British Columbia, who wasn't involved in the study. The team focused particularly on the role viruses play in carbon sequestration. Every day, massive numbers of dead plankton sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking the carbon in their bodies with them, which is then entombed for potentially millions of years. This process, known as the biological carbon pump, puts away as much as 12 gigatonnes of carbon each year. That is about a third of the total annual human-caused CO2 emissions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'Performing live forensics on an infected machine may not turn anything up' warn researchers

Intezer security researcher Joakim Kennedy and the BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence Team have analyzed an unusual piece of Linux malware they say is unlike most seen before - it isn't a standalone executable file.…

New Insider build adds a few toys, but leaves Pro X users reaching for the power button

Microsoft has treated some of the courageous Dev Channel crew of Windows Insiders to the long-awaited tabbed File Explorer.…

Microsoft employees will be free to seek jobs at the likes of Google and Amazon after the internet giant announced it would no longer enforce non-compete clauses (NCCs) against the majority of its staff. From a report: The change is one of four updates announced in a blog post on Wednesday, including plans to ditch non-disclosure agreements, conduct a civil rights audit of its existing work policies, and commit to providing salary ranges on all internal and external job descriptions. NCCs are used by firms to stop employees moving to companies considered to be direct competitors. While there's more understanding when they're included in the contracts of c-suite and senior managers, their use against lower-level workers has been criticized as being too restrictive and holding people to unfair conditions. Microsoft has enforced them in some employee contracts, but effective today, the company is removing clauses from employee agreements, and will not enforce existing clauses in the US, the company said. "We have heard concerns that the non-competition clauses in some U.S. employee agreements, even when rarely and reasonably enforced, feel at odds with our talent principles," said the blog post, attributed to Amy Pannoni, Microsoft's deputy general counsel and Amy Coleman, Microsoft's corporate vice president for HR.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The truth is out there, and the space agency intends to find it – scientifically

Over recent years, Uncle Sam has loosened its tight-lipped if not dismissive stance on UFOs, or "unidentified aerial phenomena", lest anyone think we're talking about aliens. Now, NASA is the latest body to get in on the act.…

Strategy says 50 of the most frequently used digital services will be upgraded at the same time

The UK government has committed to ending its reliance on legacy applications, or at least those it deems the highest priority, by 2025.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Robots can now be covered in living skin grown from real human cells to make them look more like us. As robots increasingly take on roles as nurses, care workers, teachers and other jobs that involve close personal contact, it is important to make them look more human so we feel comfortable interacting with them, says Shoji Takeuchi at the University of Tokyo in Japan. At the moment, robots are sometimes coated in silicone rubber to give them a fleshy appearance, but the rubber lacks the texture of human skin, he says. To make more realistic-looking skin, Takeuchi and his colleagues bathed a plastic robot finger in a soup of collagen and human skin cells called fibroblasts for three days. The collagen and fibroblasts adhered to the finger and formed a layer similar to the dermis, which is the second-from-top layer of human skin. Next, they gently poured other human skin cells called keratinocytes onto the finger to recreate the upper layer of human skin, called the epidermis. The resulting 1.5-millimeter-thick skin was able to stretch and contract as the finger bent backwards and forwards. As it did this, it wrinkled like normal skin, says Takeuchi. "It is much more realistic than silicone." The robot skin could also be healed when it was cut by grafting a collagen sheet onto the wound. However, the skin began to dry out after a while since it didn't have blood vessels to replenish it with moisture. In the future, it may be possible to incorporate artificial blood vessels into the skin to keep it hydrated, as well as sweat glands and hair follicles to make it more realistic, says Takeuchi. It should also be possible to make different skin colors by adding melanocytes, he says. The researchers now plan to try coating a whole robot in the living skin. The research has been published in the journal Matter.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fresh out of jail on corruption charges, the company's leader goes shopping

Samsung vice chairman Lee Jae-yong is said to be courting Dutch chipmaker NXP on a visit to Europe to bolster the company's position in the automotive semiconductor market.…

MIT CSAIL boffins devise PACMAN attack to let existing exploits avoid pointer authentication

Apple's M1 chip has been found to contain a hardware vulnerability that can be abused to disable one of its defense mechanisms against memory corruption exploits, giving such attacks a greater chance of success.…

Don’t cross the streams! Why? It would be bad. What do you mean 'bad'?

Something for the Weekend Which do you prefer: sweat or green slime? Both are being touted as clean sources of energy to drive electronic devices.…

A 29% rate hike for hydroelectric power in Chelan County, created specifically for cryptocurrency miners, went into effect on June 1. Decrypt reports: The miners used to pay a lower, high-density load rate for their electricity. Now they'll pay a newly-created cryptocurrency rate, known as Rate 36. Washington state accounted for about two-thirds of all hydroelectric power generated in the U.S. in 2020, according to the Energy Information Administration. The state's Grand Coulee Dam, located on the Columbia River in Grant and Okanogan counties, powers a 6,809-megawatt. The cheap and renewable hydropower has made Washington state a popular destination for Bitcoin miners too. Washington state accounted for 4% of the total U.S. hashrate in December, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. [...] KPQ also reported that nearby Douglas County has stopped allowing new Bitcoin miners to set up operations there because they already consume 25% of the county's available energy. Still, the Chelan County rate hike won't ban crypto miners. For companies that have made substantial investments in their mining facilities, officials have approved transition plans to gradually increase energy rates over the next two years. "We need to have some sort of transition. That's important for business," PUD Commissioner Ann Congdon told the Wenatchee World on Tuesday. "I understand how businesses need that in order to plan." Malachi Salcido, CEO of Salcido Enterprises, told the local news outlet that the new rate will force him to reconfigure his three Chelan County crypto mining facilities into data farms. He has four other crypto mining facilities, two in Douglas County and two in Grant County. Under the new pricing plan, Salcido can keep his Chelan facility on the lower, high-density energy rate if he processes data instead of mining crypto. The data processing uses the same amount of power as crypto mining, he told the Wenatchee World. "Do you really want to be in the business of regulating what kind of processing happens on servers in your territory," Salcido said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pre-configured units can be delivered to customers in 12 weeks

Schneider Electric has revamped its modular datacenters, and announced an update for the EcoStruxure IT management software to cover the hybrid infrastructure scenarios that now characterise the modern world of IT.…