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Submission + - Veteran PC game celebrates 40th anniversary (github.io)

Submitted by sfraggle
sfraggle writes: Biplane shoot-'em up is celebrating 40 years today since its first release back in 1984. The game is one of the oldest PC games still in active development today, originating as an MS-DOS game for the original IBM PC. The 40th anniversary site has a detailed history of how the game was written as a tech demo for the now-defunct Imaginet networking system. There is also a video interview with its original authors.

Submission + - Generative AI Arrives In the Gene Editing World of CRISPR (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Generative A.I. technologies can writepoetry and computer programsor createimages of teddy bearsandvideos of cartoon charactersthat look like something from a Hollywood movie. Now, new A.I. technology is generating blueprints for microscopic biological mechanisms that can edit your DNA, pointing to a future when scientists can battle illness and diseases with even greater precision and speed than they can today. Described in aresearch paper published on Mondayby a Berkeley, Calif., startup called Profluent, the technology is based on the same methods that drive ChatGPT, the online chatbot thatlaunched the A.I. boom after its release in 2022. The company is expected to present the paper next month at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy.

Submission + - IBM aims to buy Hashicorp (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Allegedly IBM is close to a deal to buy out Hashicorp, Reuters reports.

Submission + - What Comes After OLED? Meet QDEL (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Quantum dots are already moving in the premium display category, particularly through QD-OLED TVs and monitors. The next step could be QDEL, short for "quantum dot electroluminescent," also known as NanoLED, screens. Not to be confused with the QLED (quantum light emitting diode) tech already available in TVs, QDEL displays don't have a backlight. Instead, the quantum dots are the light source. The expected result is displays with wider color spaces than today's QD-OLEDs (quantum dot OLEDs) that are also brighter, more affordable, and resistant to burn-in. It seems like QDEL is being eyed as one of the most potentially influential developments for consumer displays over the next two years. If you’re into high-end display tech, QDEL should be on your radar.

You may know QDEL as NanoLED because that's what Nanosys, a quantum dot supplier developing the technology, calls it. QDEL has gone by other names, such as QLED—before Samsung claimed that acronym for LCD-LED TVs that use quantum dots. You may also see QDEL referred to as QD-EL, QD-LED, or EL-QD. As the alphabet soup suggests, there are still some things to finalize with this tech. This article will mostly use the term QDEL, with occasional references to NanoLED. If none of those names sound familiar, it's probably because you can't buy any QDEL products yet. Suppliers suggest that could change in the next few years; Nanosys is targeting 2026 for commercial availability. [...]

Today's OLED screens use OLED material as their light source, with QD-OLED specifically applying quantum dots to convert the light into color. In QLED, the light source is a white backlight; QDEL displays apply electricity directly to quantum dots, which then generate light. QDEL uses a layer of quantum dots sandwiched between an anode and cathode to facilitates the flow of electricity into the quantum dots. QDEL displays have pixels made of a red quantum dot subpixel, green quantum dot subpixel, and—differing from today's QLED and QD-OLED displays—blue quantum dot subpixel. QDEL displays use the same quantum dot cores that QD-OLED and QLED products use, [Jeff Yurek, Nanosys' VP of marketing] told me, adding, "The functionalization of the outer layer of the [quantum dots] needs to be changed to make it compatible with each display architecture, but the cores that do the heavy lifting are pretty much the same across all of these."

Because QDEL pixels make their own light and can therefore turn off completely, QDEL displays can deliver the same deep blacks and rich contrast that made OLED popular. But with the use of direct-view quantum dots, stakeholders are claiming the potential for wider color gamuts than we've seen in consumer displays before. With fewer layers and parts, there are also implications for QDEL product pricing, longevity, and even thinness. [...] The fact that quantum dots are already being successfully applied to LCD-LED and OLED screens is encouraging for future QDEL products. QDEL stakeholders claim that the tech could bring efficiencies like lower power consumption and higher brightness than OLED. (Research using a prototype device has recorded quantum dot light-emitting diodes reaching 614,000 nits. Of course, those aren't the type of results you should expect to see in a real-life consumer product.) There's also hope that QDEL could eventually last longer than OLED, especially since QDEL doesn't rely on organic materials that can cause burn-in.

Submission + - Driving Dystopia: Connected Vehicle Data Now Up For Grabs By Intel Agencies (thetruthaboutcars.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Connected vehicles now appear to be on the table as a new vector for government surveillance. On Saturday, President Joe Biden signed a bill that reauthorizes Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after the Senate passed it late on Friday (60-34).

The bill saw overwhelming support from Democrat legislators and sufficient Republican backing to be pushed through. Any amendments floated that were intended to shield American citizens from getting scooped up in the net without the government first procuring a warrant were struck down while it was still moving through the House earlier in the week.

Section 702 of FISA is supposed to be a way to quickly gather intel on the communications of foreign individuals. However, it’s long been criticized as being repeatedly abused as a way to push through warrantless spying and the latest incarnation seems to be written to do exactly that. While reauthorization was still under consideration in Congress, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) argued that FISA had been improperly used over 278,000 times by the federal government, often violating the rights of U.S. citizens.

"The original intent of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was to be able to gather information on bad foreign actors," she said. "However, as we have seen over the years, the program has been abused to spy on American citizens in direct violation of American liberty and the 4th Amendment. The FISA court found that the federal government violated its own rules over 278,000 times."

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) likewise opposed the bill, stating it effectively forced any business or person who has the ability to record or store electronic communications to spy on behalf of the federal intelligence agencies. In fact, the bill itself states “any other service provider who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communication” is now legally obligated to comply with clandestine communications monitoring on behalf of said agencies. Wyden claimed that would include “anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a Wi-Fi router, a phone, or a computer.”

It would also include automakers, who now possess some of the world’s largest data centers that compile the immense amount of information produced by today’s connected cars — many of which now incorporate in-cabin microphones and expansive camera arrays. All of that is now appears to be up for grabs, along with the vehicle's positional data and any calls or text made while using it. Moreover, without any need for warrants, there would be no record of who is being spied on or on what grounds. Intelligence agencies can effectively deputize any business or individual for an impromptu surveillance program and then force them to remain quiet about it.

Submission + - Linux Can Finally Run Your Car's Safety Systems and Driver-Assistance Features (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There's a new Linux distro on the scene today, and it's a bit specialized. Its development was led by the automotive electronics supplier Elektrobit, and it's the first open source OS that complies with the automotive industry's functional safety requirements. [...] With Elektrobit's EB corbos Linux for Safety Applications (that sure is a long name), there's an open source Linux distro that finally fits the bill, having just been given the thumbs up by the German organization TUV Nord. (It also complies with the IEC 61508 standard for safety applications.) "The beauty of our concept is that you don't even need to safety-qualify Linux itself," said Moritz Neukirchner, a senior director at Elektrobit overseeing SDVs. Instead, an external safety monitor runs in a hypervisor, intercepting and validating kernel actions.

"When you look at how safety is typically being done, look at communication—you don't safety-certify the communication specs or Ethernet stack, but you do a checker library on top, and you have a hardware anchor for checking down below, and you insure it end to end but take everything in between out of the certification path. And we have now created a concept that allows us to do exactly that for an operating system," Neukirchner told me. "So in the end, since we take Linux out of the certification path and make it usable in a safety-related context, we don't have any problems in keeping up to speed with the developer community," he explained. "Because if you start it off and say, 'Well, we're going to do Linux as a one-shot for safety,' you're going to have the next five patches and you're off [schedule] again, especially with the security regulation that's now getting toward effect now, starting in July with the UNECE R155 that requires continuous cybersecurity management vulnerability scanning for all software that ends up in the vehicle."

"In the end, we see roughly 4,000 kernel security patches within eight years for Linux. And this is the kind of challenge that you're being put up to if you want to participate in that speed of innovation of an open source community as rich as that of Linux and now want to combine this with safety-related applications," Neukirchner said. Elektrobit developed EB corbos Linux for Safety Applications together with Canonical, and together they will share the maintenance of keeping it compliant with safety requirements over time.

Submission + - Telegram a 'huge' problem for Ukraine; intel chief (thepressunited.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Telegram poses a “huge problem” for Ukraine and must be legally forced to do away with anonymous channels, Kiev’s top spy Kirill Budanov said in an interview with the BBC published on Monday.

Submission + - California lawmakers approve bill to make you show ID for online porn (sacbee.com) 1

Submitted by sarren1901
sarren1901 writes: Look at online porn? Soon, you might have to provide a credit card or government ID in order to do so. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers on the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee last week sided with conservative religious organizations against LGBTQ, reproductive health and civil liberty advocacy groups and voted unanimously in favor of AB 3080, a bill by Assemblyman Juan Alanis, R-Modesto, that would require pornographic websites “to take reasonable steps to ensure” that only adults are looking at them.

Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/news/po...

Submission + - Fedora Linux 40 Officially Released (9to5linux.com)

Submitted by prisoninmate
prisoninmate writes: Fedora Linux 40 distribution has been officially released and it’s now available for download powered by the latest Linux 6.8 kernel series and featuring the GNOME 46 and KDE Plasma 6 desktop environments, reports 9to5Linux:

"Powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.8 kernel series, the Fedora Linux 40 release ships with the GNOME 46 desktop environment for the flagship Fedora Workstation edition and the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment for the Fedora KDE Spin, which defaults to the Wayland session as the X11 session was completely removed."

"Fedora Linux 40 also includes some interesting package management changes, such as dropping Delta RPMs and disabling support in the default configuration of DNF / DNF5. It also changes the DNF behavior to no longer download filelists by default. However, this release doesn’t ship with the long-awaited DNF5 package manager."

"For AMD GPUs, Fedora Linux 40 ships with AMD ROCm 6.0 as the latest release of AMD’s software optimized for AI and HPC workload performance, which enables support for the newest flagship AMD Instinct MI300A and MI300X datacenter GPUs."

Submission + - Government Surveillance Keeps Us Safe (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This is an extraordinarily dangerous time for the United States and our allies. Israel’s unpreparedness on Oct. 7 shows that even powerful nations can be surprised in catastrophic ways. Fortunately, Congress, in a rare bipartisan act, voted early Saturday to reauthorize a key intelligence power that provides critical information on hostile states and threats ranging from terrorism to fentanyl trafficking.

Civil libertarians argued that the surveillance bill erodes Americans’ privacy rights and pointed to examples when American citizens got entangled in investigations. Importantly, the latest version of the bill adds dozens of legal safeguards around the surveillance in question — the most expansive privacy reform to the legislation in its history. The result preserves critical intelligence powers while protecting Americans’ privacy rights in our complex digital age.

At the center of the debate is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Originally passed in 1978, it demanded that investigators gain an order from a special court to surveil foreign agents inside the United States. Collecting the communications of foreigners abroad did not require court approval.

Submission + - Windows vulnerability reported by the NSA exploited to install Russian malware (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: Kremlin-backed hackers have been exploiting a critical Microsoft vulnerability for four years in attacks that targeted a vast array of organizations with a previously undocumented tool, the software maker disclosed Monday.

When Microsoft patched the vulnerability in October 2022—at least two years after it came under attack by the Russian hackers—the company made no mention that it was under active exploitation. As of publication, the company’s advisory still made no mention of the in-the-wild targeting. Windows users frequently prioritize the installation of patches based on whether a vulnerability is likely to be exploited in real-world attacks.

On Monday, Microsoft revealed that a hacking group tracked under the name Forest Blizzard has been exploiting CVE-2022-38028 since at least June 2020—and possibly as early as April 2019. The threat group—which is also tracked under names including APT28, Sednit, Sofacy, GRU Unit 26165, and Fancy Bear—has been linked by the US and the UK governments to Unit 26165 of the Main Intelligence Directorate, a Russian military intelligence arm better known as the GRU. Forest Blizzard focuses on intelligence gathering through the hacking of a wide array of organizations, mainly in the US, Europe, and the Middle East.

Microsoft representatives didn't respond to an email asking why the in-the-wild exploits are being reported only now.

Monday’s advisory provided additional technical details:

Read the rest at ArsTechnica.

Submission + - Voyager 1 is sending data back to Earth for the first time in 5 months (cnn.com)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: Voyager 1 is once again communicating back to Earth and appears to be functioning normally. Kudos to those NASA engineers who figured out how to diagnose that a chip was defective, and rewrite its code to avoid using that chip entirely! I can just imagine what kind of spaghetti code that is by now, but they figured out how to get it to work. I guess V'ger isn't quite here yet!

Submission + - Two lifeforms merge into one organism for first time in a billion years (msn.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: For the first time in at least a billion years, two lifeforms have merged into a single organism.

The process, called primary endosymbiosis, has only happened twice in the history of the Earth, with the first time giving rise to all complex life as we know it through mitochondria. The second time that it happened saw the emergence of plants.

Now, an international team of scientists have observed the evolutionary event happening between a species of algae commonly found in the ocean and a bacterium.

Submission + - Voyager 1 Is Communicating Well Again (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Scientific American is reporting that after [5] months of nonsensical transmissions from humanity’s most distant emissary, NASA’s iconic Voyager 1 spacecraft is finally communicating intelligibly with Earth again.

When the latest communications glitch occurred last fall, scientists could still send signals to the distant probe, and they could tell that the spacecraft was operating. But all they got from Voyager 1 was gibberish—what NASA described in December 2023 as “a repeating pattern of ones and zeros.” The team was able to trace the issue back to a part of the spacecraft’s computer system called the flight data subsystem, or FDS, and identified that a particular chip within that system had failed.

Mission personnel couldn’t repair the chip. They were, however, able to break the code held on the failed chip into pieces they could tuck into spare corners of the FDS’s memory, according to NASA. The first such fix was transmitted to Voyager 1 on April 18. With a total distance of 30 billion miles to cross from Earth to the spacecraft and back, the team had to wait nearly two full days for a response from the probe. But on April 20 NASA got confirmation that the initial fix worked. Additional commands to rewrite the rest of the FDS system’s lost code are scheduled for the coming weeks, according to the space agency, including commands that will restore the spacecraft’s ability to send home science data.

Also: Voyager 1 is sending data back to Earth for the first time in 5 months and NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact

Submission + - Voyager 1 resumes sending information (nasa.gov)

Submitted by quonset
quonset writes: Just over two weeks ago, NASA figured out why its Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped sending useful data. They suspected corrupted memory in its flight data system (FDS) was the culprit. Today, for the first time since November, Voyager 1 is sending useful data about its health and the status of its onboard systems back to NASA. How did NASA accomplish this feat of long distance repair? They broke up the code into smaller pieces and redistributed them throughout the memory. From NASA:

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.

Submission + - Rural Texas towns report cyberattacks that caused one water system to overflow (texastribune.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Local officials said the public was not put in any danger and the attempts were reported to federal authorities.

A hack that caused a small Texas town's water system to overflow in January has been linked to a shadowy Russian hacktivist group, the latest case of a U.S. public utility becoming a target of foreign cyberattacks.

Submission + - Huawei Wants To Take Homegrown HarmonyOS Phone Platform Worldwide (theregister.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies. "We will work hard to build up the HarmonyOS app ecosystem in the China market first, then, from country to country, we will start gradually pushing it out to other parts of the world," Huawei's rotating chairman Erik Xu told attendees at its 21st Analyst Summit in Shenzhen last week. Part of this process will involve porting apps to HarmonyOS and encouraging other app developers to code for the platform.

"In the China market, Huawei smartphone users spend 99 percent of their time on about 5,000 apps. So we decided to spend 2024 porting these apps over to HarmonyOS first in our drive to truly unify the OS and the app ecosystem. We are also encouraging other apps to be ported over to HarmonyOS," Xu said. According to Huawei's rotating chairman, more than 4,000 of those apps are already in the process of being transferred, and the company is "communicating with developers" on the 1,000 or so apps that remain. "This is a massive undertaking, but we have broad support in the industry and from many app developers," he claimed. "Once we have these first 5,000 Android apps – and thousands of other apps – up and running on HarmonyOS, we will have a real HarmonyOS: a third mobile operating system for the world," Xu said. That number could reach up to 1 million apps in the future, he claimed.

Submission + - Home Assistant Has a New Foundation, Goal To Become a Consumer Brand (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Home Assistant, until recently, has been a wide-ranging and hard-to-define project. The open smart home platform is an open source OS you can run anywhere that aims to connect all your devices together. But it's also bespoke Raspberry Pi hardware, in Yellow and Green. It's entirely free, but it also receives funding through a private cloud services company, Nabu Casa. It contains tiny board project ESPHome and other inter-connected bits. It has wide-ranging voice assistant ambitions, but it doesn't want to be Alexa or Google Assistant. Home Assistant is a lot.

After an announcement this weekend, however, Home Assistant's shape is a bit easier to draw out. All of the project's ambitions now fall under the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit organization that now contains Home Assistant and more than 240 related bits. Its mission statement is refreshing, and refreshingly honest about the state of modern open source projects. "We've done this to create a bulwark against surveillance capitalism, the risk of buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware," the Open Home Foundation states in a press release. "To an extent, this protection extends even against our future selves—so that smart home users can continue to benefit for years, if not decades. No matter what comes." Along with keeping Home Assistant funded and secure from buy-outs or mission creep, the foundation intends to help fund and collaborate with external projects crucial to Home Assistant, like Z-Wave JS and Zigbee2MQTT.

Home Assistant's ambitions don't stop with money and board seats, though. They aim to "be an active political advocate" in the smart home field, toward three primary principles:

— Data privacy, which means devices with local-only options, and cloud services with explicit permissions — Choice in using devices with one another through open standards and local APIs — Sustainability by repurposing old devices and appliances beyond company-defined lifetimes

Notably, individuals cannot contribute modest-size donations to the Open Home Foundation. Instead, the foundation asks supporters to purchase a Nabu Casa subscription or contribute code or other help to its open source projects.

Submission + - US Teachers Spent $3.24 Billion of Their Own Money on Classroom Expenses in 2023 (myelearningworld.com) 2

Submitted by LookMan
LookMan writes: The latest research reveals that the average teacher spent $853.90 out of pocket on school supplies in 2023, setting a new record for the highest amount ever reported. This is a significant increase from last year and underscores the growing financial burden shouldered by educators.

The discrepancy between the allowable tax deduction and actual spending means that teachers are spending nearly 2.8 times more on classroom supplies than they can deduct.

Collectively, teachers in the United States spent an estimated $3.24 billion on essential classroom items in 2023, like pencils, paper, cleaning supplies, books, software, and other materials.

Submission + - Toyota's hydrogen future is crumbling. Owners suing. (insideevs.com)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: Toyota Mirai owners are fed up and disillusioned. Hydrogen fuel pumps are hard to find and, rather than new pumps opening, they are closing down. Owners feel misled about the costs and availability of hydrogen fuel stations. Even if a Mirai owner can find a fuel station, it may not be operating.

Moreover, refuelling is frequently a long and problematic process, with pumps taking over an hour to fill a tank and cars getting stuck to the fuel pump for hours. It would be quicker to charge a battery EV.

Naturally, resale values of these cars are plummeting. Even without those problems, once the hydrogen fuel cars that Toyota gives now owners has expired or is out of funds, the hydrogen fuel is very expensive.

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