Technology

At the Haba, go, go Habana. The hottest research north of Havana

The University of San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) says it's ready to run test workloads on its experimental Voyager AI system, which looks to be the first-ever Intel Habana-based supercomputer.…

Singapore issues injunction against the sale of image procured through questionable foreclosure

For the first time, a court has issued an injunction to stop the sale and transfer of a non-fungible token (NFT) at the request of a previous owner.…

The engineering team with NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is trying to solve a mystery: The interstellar explorer is operating normally, receiving and executing commands from Earth, along with gathering and returning science data. But readouts from the probe's attitude articulation and control system (AACS) don't reflect what's actually happening onboard. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports: The AACS controls the 45-year-old spacecraft's orientation. Among other tasks, it keeps Voyager 1's high-gain antenna pointed precisely at Earth, enabling it to send data home. All signs suggest the AACS is still working, but the telemetry data it's returning is invalid. For instance, the data may appear to be randomly generated, or does not reflect any possible state the AACS could be in. The issue hasn't triggered any onboard fault protection systems, which are designed to put the spacecraft into "safe mode" -- a state where only essential operations are carried out, giving engineers time to diagnose an issue. Voyager 1's signal hasn't weakened, either, which suggests the high-gain antenna remains in its prescribed orientation with Earth. The team will continue to monitor the signal closely as they continue to determine whether the invalid data is coming directly from the AACS or another system involved in producing and sending telemetry data. Until the nature of the issue is better understood, the team cannot anticipate whether this might affect how long the spacecraft can collect and transmit science data. Voyager 1 is currently 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it takes light 20 hours and 33 minutes to travel that difference. That means it takes roughly two days to send a message to Voyager 1 and get a response -- a delay the mission team is well accustomed to.

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Crew's raids continue worldwide, Talos team warns

The US government's alert three months ago warning businesses and government agencies about the threat of BlackByte has apparently done little to slow down the ransomware group's activities.…

Tech exploits electromagnetically induced transparency to form highly sensitive electric field detector

Brit telecoms giant BT is undertaking a trial of new antenna technology that may boost the range of 5G networks and reduce mobile network energy consumption.…

For tiny Venn diagram wedge who want the feel of a mechanical keyboard plus, er, emoji keys

So many mechanical keyboards put function ahead of form. Put less charitably, they're ugly as sin. The Logitech Pop, a $100 wireless mechanical keyboard, tries to play both sides of the field.…

No 'reportable concerns' yet plenty of concerned feedback

As Google's self-imposed "late 2023" deadline to kill all third party cookies in its Chrome browser looms, the giant has handed in its first quarterly Privacy Sandbox report to the UK's competition regulator.…

Miners behind the Great Firewall may never have downed tools, say Cambridge crypto-boffins

China has become the world’s second most prolific miner of bitcoin – or maybe it always was – according to new data from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF).…

The American Institute of Physics reports via Phys.Org: In Physics of Fluids, researchers from the University of Nicosia in Cyprus assessed the potential impact of a rocket launch on atmospheric pollution by investigating the heat and mass transfer and rapid mixing of the combustion byproducts for altitudes up to 67 kilometers into the atmosphere. The team modeled the exhaust gases and developing plume at several altitudes along a typical trajectory of a standard present-day rocket. They did this as a prototypical example of a two-stage rocket to transport people and payloads into Earth's orbit and beyond. The researchers found the production of thermal nitrogen oxides (NOx), components of the combustion exhaust, can remain high up to altitudes with an ambient atmospheric pressure above or even slightly below the nozzles' exit pressure, i.e., below an altitude of approximately 10 km. At the same time, the emitted mass of carbon dioxide as the rocket climbs 1 kilometer in altitude in the mesosphere is equivalent to that contained in 26 cubic kilometers of atmospheric air at the same altitude. They found the impact on the atmosphere locally and momentarily in the mesosphere can be significant. While air currents will gradually transport and mix the exhaust CO2 throughout the atmosphere, eventually bringing the CO2 back down to its naturally occurring levels, the time scale over which this happens is not clear. The scientists believe a certain number of rocket launches might still exist above which mesospheric carbon dioxide could accumulate over time, thus increasing the naturally occurring levels and affecting our climate. Their results suggest that in the worst-case scenario, sufficient NOx could be produced over the time it takes the rocket to reach an altitude of 10 kilometers to pollute over 2 cubic kilometers of atmospheric air with a NOx concentration that, according to the World Health Organization, would be at a level hazardous to human health.

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British startup Wayve gets supercomputing leg up

Microsoft is pumping supercomputing oomph as well as funds into a British-born autonomous vehicle startup.…

Engineers debugging at 160 bits per second, with 41 hours latency

NASA engineers are investigating anomalous telemetry data produced by venerable space probe Voyager 1.…

"Don't concatenate long strings," is generally solid advice in most languages. Due to internal representations, strings are frequently immutable and of a fixed length, so a block like this:

string s = getSomeString(); s = s + "some suffix";

creates three strings- the original, the suffix, and the third, concatenated string. Keep spamming instances, especially long ones, if you want to stress test your garbage collector.

While languages will do their best to optimize those kinds of operations, the general advice is to use string builders which can minimize those allocations and boost performance.

Or, you can do what Richard B's predecessor did, and abuse the heck out of string interpolation in C#.

.comment { border: none; } StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(filename); #region Export file header string header = ""; header = "Title"; header = $"{header},\"First Name\""; header = $"{header},\"Middle Name\""; header = $"{header},\"Last Name\""; header = $"{header},Suffix"; header = $"{header},Company"; header = $"{header},Department"; header = $"{header},\"Job Title\""; header = $"{header},\"Business Street\""; header = $"{header},\"Business Street 2\""; header = $"{header},\"Business Street 3\""; header = $"{header},\"Business City\""; header = $"{header},\"Business State\""; header = $"{header},\"Business Postal Code\""; header = $"{header},\"Business Country/ Region\""; header = $"{header},\"Home Street\""; header = $"{header},\"Home Street 2\""; header = $"{header},\"Home Street 3\""; header = $"{header},\"Home City\""; header = $"{header},\"Home State\""; header = $"{header},\"Home Postal Code\""; header = $"{header},\"Home Country/ Region\""; header = $"{header},\"Other Street\""; header = $"{header},\"Other Street 2\""; header = $"{header},\"Other Street 3\""; header = $"{header},\"Other City\""; header = $"{header},\"Other State\""; header = $"{header},\"Other Postal Code\""; header = $"{header},\"Other Country/ Region\""; header = $"{header},\"Assistant's Phone\""; header = $"{header},\"Business Fax\""; header = $"{header},\"Business Phone\""; header = $"{header},\"Business Phone 2\""; header = $"{header},Callback"; header = $"{header},\"Car Phone\""; header = $"{header},\"Company Main Phone\""; header = $"{header},\"Home Fax\""; header = $"{header},\"Home Phone\""; header = $"{header},\"Home Phone 2\""; header = $"{header},ISDN"; header = $"{header},\"Mobile Phone\""; header = $"{header},\"Other Fax\""; header = $"{header},\"Other Phone\""; header = $"{header},Pager"; header = $"{header},\"Primary Phone\""; header = $"{header},\"Radio Phone\""; header = $"{header},\"TTY/TDD Phone\""; header = $"{header},Telex"; header = $"{header},Account"; header = $"{header},Anniversary"; header = $"{header},\"Assistant's Name\""; header = $"{header},\"Billing Information\""; header = $"{header},Birthday"; header = $"{header},\"Business Address PO Box\""; header = $"{header},Categories"; header = $"{header},Children"; header = $"{header},\"Directory Server\""; header = $"{header},\"E - mail Address\""; header = $"{header},\"E - mail Type\""; header = $"{header},\"E - mail Display Name\""; header = $"{header},\"E-mail 2 Address\""; header = $"{header},\"E - mail 2 Type\""; header = $"{header},\"E - mail 2 Display Name\""; header = $"{header},\"E-mail 3 Address\""; header = $"{header},\"E - mail 3 Type\""; header = $"{header},\"E - mail 3 Display Name\""; header = $"{header},Gender"; header = $"{header},\"Government ID Number\""; header = $"{header},Hobby"; header = $"{header},\"Home Address PO Box\""; header = $"{header},Initials"; header = $"{header},\"Internet Free Busy\""; header = $"{header},Keywords"; header = $"{header},Language"; header = $"{header},Location"; header = $"{header},\"Manager's Name\""; header = $"{header},Mileage"; header = $"{header},Notes"; header = $"{header},\"Office Location\""; header = $"{header},\"Organizational ID Number\""; header = $"{header},\"Other Address PO Box\""; header = $"{header},Priority"; header = $"{header},Private"; header = $"{header},Profession"; header = $"{header},\"Referred By\""; header = $"{header},Sensitivity"; header = $"{header},Spouse"; header = $"{header},\"User 1\""; header = $"{header},\"User 2\""; header = $"{header},\"User 3\""; header = $"{header},\"User 4\""; header = $"{header},\"Web Page\""; #endregion Export file header sw.WriteLine(header);

The real killer to this is that there's no need for string concatenation at all. There's no reason one needs to WriteLine the entire header at once. sw.Write("Title,"); Also, string interpolation is almost always more expensive than straight concatenation, and harder for compilers to optimize. I'm not about to benchmark this disaster to prove it, but I suspect this is going to be pretty much the most expensive option.

And don't worry, the same basic process follows for each individual row they're outputting:

string contactRow = ""; HtmlToText htmlToText = new HtmlToText(); bool extendedPropRetrieved = false; #region Extract properties for export file if (contact.CompleteName != null) contactRow = $"\"{contact.CompleteName.Title}\""; // Title else contactRow = $""; contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.GivenName}\""; // First name contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.MiddleName}\""; // Middle name contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.Surname}\""; // Last name if (contact.CompleteName != null) contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.CompleteName.Suffix}\""; //Suffix else contactRow = $"{contactRow},"; contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.CompanyName}\""; // Company contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.Department}\""; // Department contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.JobTitle}\""; // Job title if (contact.PhysicalAddresses.Contains(PhysicalAddressKey.Business)) { contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.PhysicalAddresses[PhysicalAddressKey.Business].Street}\""; // Business street contactRow = $"{contactRow},"; // Business street 2 contactRow = $"{contactRow},"; // Business street 3 contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.PhysicalAddresses[PhysicalAddressKey.Business].City}\""; // Business city contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.PhysicalAddresses[PhysicalAddressKey.Business].State}\""; // Business state contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.PhysicalAddresses[PhysicalAddressKey.Business].PostalCode}\""; // Business postalcode contactRow = $"{contactRow},\"{contact.PhysicalAddresses[PhysicalAddressKey.Business].CountryOrRegion}\""; // Business country/region } else { contactRow = $"{contactRow},"; contactRow = $"{contactRow},"; contactRow = $"{contactRow},"; contactRow = $"{contactRow},"; contactRow = $"{contactRow},"; contactRow = $"{contactRow},"; contactRow = $"{contactRow},"; } // ... this goes on for about 600 lines

The physical address else block is something really special, here.

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No, you're not really gonna be hacked. But you may be surprised

Some research into the potentially exploitable low-power state of iPhones has sparked headlines this week.…

Well short of planned 70 percent domestic capacity

China’s integrated circuit (IC) production has failed to keep pace with its appetite for silicon, with market research firm IC Insights predcicting the nation will produce only one in five ICs it uses in 2026.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When you use your phone to unlock a Tesla, the device and the car use Bluetooth signals to measure their proximity to each other. Move close to the car with the phone in hand, and the door automatically unlocks. Move away, and it locks. This proximity authentication works on the assumption that the key stored on the phone can only be transmitted when the locked device is within Bluetooth range. Now, a researcher has devised a hack that allows him to unlock millions of Teslas -- and countless other devices -- even when the authenticating phone or key fob is hundreds of yards or miles away. The hack, which exploits weaknesses in the Bluetooth Low Energy standard adhered to by thousands of device makers, can be used to unlock doors, open and operate vehicles, and gain unauthorized access to a host of laptops and other security-sensitive devices. [...] [The] attack uses custom software and about $100 worth of equipment. [Sultan Qasim Khan, a principal security consultant and researcher at security firm NCC Group] has confirmed it works against the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y and Kevo smart locks marketed under the Kwikset and Weiser brand names. But he says virtually any BLE device that authenticates solely on proximity -- as opposed to also requiring user interaction, geolocation querying, or something else -- is vulnerable. "The problem is that BLE-based proximity authentication is used in places where it was never safe to do so," he explained. "BLE is a standard for devices to share data; it was never meant to be a standard for proximity authentication. However, various companies have adopted it to implement proximity authentication." Because the threat isn't caused by a traditional bug or error in either the Bluetooth specification or an implementation of the standard, there's no CVE designation used to track vulnerabilities. Khan added: "In general, any product relying on BLE proximity authentication is vulnerable if it does not require user interaction on the phone or key fob to approve the unlock and does not implement secure ranging with time-of-flight measurement or comparison of the phone/key fob's GPS or cellular location relative to the location of the device being unlocked. GPS or cellular location comparison may also be insufficient to prevent short distance relay attacks (such as breaking into a home's front door or stealing a car from the driveway, when the owner's phone or key fob is inside the house)." There's a few countermeasures one can take to mitigate this attack. "One mechanism is to check the location of the authenticating device to ensure that it is, in fact, physically close to the locked car or other device," reports Ars. "Another countermeasure is to require the user to provide some form of input to the authenticating device before it's trusted." The phone's accelerometer could also be used to measure its movements. The advisories published by NCC Group can be found here, here, and here.

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Cutting costs across sprawling business as COVID makes life hard in China

Chinese tech giant Tencent has recorded its first ever quarter-to-quarter revenue fall, warned that COVID-19 lockdowns will hurt messing with its business, and cautioned against assumptions that Beijing is ready to enthusiastically support tech companies.…

The winner of this year's MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is commercializing a new water desalination technology. MIT News reports: Nona Desalination says it has developed a device capable of producing enough drinking water for 10 people at half the cost and with 1/10th the power of other water desalination devices. The device is roughly the size and weight of a case of bottled water and is powered by a small solar panel. The traditional approach for water desalination relies on a power-intensive process called reverse osmosis. In contrast, Nona uses a technology developed in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics that removes salt and bacteria from seawater using an electrical current. "Because we can do all this at super low pressure, we don't need the high-pressure pump [used in reverse osmosis], so we don't need a lot of electricity," says Crawford, who co-founded the company with MIT Research Scientist Junghyo Yoon. "Our device runs on less power than a cell phone charger." The company has already developed a small prototype that produces clean drinking water. With its winnings, Nona will build more prototypes to give to early customers. The company plans to sell its first units to sailors before moving into the emergency preparedness space in the U.S., which it estimates to be a $5 billion industry. From there, it hopes to scale globally to help with disaster relief. The technology could also possibly be used for hydrogen production, oil and gas separation, and more.

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We're shutting down as we can no longer pay staff, bills, web giant says

Google Russia is shutting down and filing for bankruptcy after Vladimir Putin's government confiscated the Chocolate Factory's bank account in the nation.…

Older TikTok users are using the online platform, regarded as the virtual playground of teenagers, to defy ageist stereotypes of elderly people as technophobic and frail. The Guardian reports: Research has found increasing numbers of accounts belonging to users aged 60 and older with millions of followers. Using the platform to showcase their energy and vibrancy, these TikTok elders are rewriting expectations around how older people should behave both on and off social media. "These TikTok elders have become successful content creators in a powerful counter-cultural phenomenon in which older persons actually contest the stereotypes of old age by embracing or even celebrating their aged status," said Dr Reuben Ng, the author of the paper Not Too Old for TikTok: How Older Adults are Reframing Ageing, and an assistant professor at Yale University. Interestingly, said Ng, most TikTok elders are women who "fiercely resist common stereotypes of older women as passive, mild-mannered and weak, instead opting to present themselves as fierce or even foul-mouthed," he said. [...] The paper looked at 1,382 videos posted by TikTok users who were aged 60 or older and had between 100,000 and 5.3 million followers. In total, their videos, all of which explicitly discussed their age, had been viewed more than 3.5 billion times. Ng found that 71% of these videos -- including those from accounts such as grandadjoe1933, who has 5.3 million followers, and dolly_broadway, who has 2.4 million followers -- were used to defy age stereotypes. A recurring motif was the "glamma", a portmanteau combining "glamorous" and "grandma", with videos including those of a 70-year-old woman joyfully parading around the streets in a midriff-bearing top. Almost one in five of the videos analyzed made light of age-related vulnerabilities, and one in 10 called out ageism among both younger people and their own contemporaries. Other videos positioned older users as superior to younger people. "I may be 86 but I can still drink more than you lightweights" says one clip. "I may be 86 but I can still twerk better than you," says another, showing an octogenarian leaping up from a fall down the stairs with a twerk.

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Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers last quarter and potentially two million this current period, according to a note to shareholders from last month. Now, new research highlights that the number of long-standing subscribers canceling Netflix rose precipitously in the past few years. 9to5Mac reports: The data provided by the research firm Antenna to The Information shows that people who had been subscribers for more than three years accounted for just 5% of total cancelations at the start of 2022, while it hit 13% in the first quarter of 2022: "Newbie subscribers, meantime, accounted for only 60% of cancellations in the quarter, down from 64% in the fourth quarter. Also in the first quarter, overall cancellations rose to 3.6 million people, compared with around 2.5 million in each of the preceding five quarters. Antenna says it draws its data from a panel of 5 million Americans who anonymously contribute their streaming subscriptions." While Netflix is losing ground, the streaming market as a whole is gaining more subscribers, and Antenna's data suggest a connection between the price increase and Netflix's subscriber losses: "'Consumers vote with their wallets on a monthly basis, and now there are just more viable candidates on the ballot,' said Brendan Brady, media and entertainment lead at Antenna. Also, since many entertainment companies, like NBCUniversal and Disney, have pulled their shows off Netflix and put them on their own services, Netflix has had to rely more on its originals, which have been hit or miss, he said."

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