Physicists at Stockholm University and the Max Planck Institute of Physics have proposed a novel design for an "axion radio" that employs cold plasmas (gases or liquids of charged particles) to "listen" for dark matter. Their paper has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Ars Technica reports: "Finding the axion is a bit like tuning a radio: you have to tune your antenna until you pick up the right frequency," said co-author Alexander Millar, a postdoc at Stockholm University. "Rather than music, experimentalists would be rewarded with 'hearing' the dark matter that the Earth is traveling through." [...] According to quantum mechanics, particles can exhibit wavelike behavior as well as particle characteristics. So an axion would behave more like a wave (or wave packet) than a particle, and the size of the wave packets is inversely proportional to their mass. That means these very light particles don't necessarily need to be tiny. The downside is that they interact even more weakly with regular matter than [weakly interacting massive particles], or WIMPS, so they cannot be produced in large colliders -- one current method for detecting WIMPs.

Physicists don't know what the axion's mass might be, so there's a broad parameter space in which to search, and no single instrument can cover all of it, according to co-author Matthew Lawson, also a postdoc at Stockholm University. That's why physicists have been developing all kinds of smaller experiments for detecting axions, from atomic clocks and resonating bars, to shining lasers at walls on the off-chance a bit of dark matter seeps through the other side. Yet most instruments to date are capable of detecting axions only within a very limited mass range. [...] Lawson et al. have come up with an innovative design for a tunable plasma-based haloscope. Their proposed instrument exploits the fact that axions inside a strong magnetic field will generate their own small electric field. This in turn drives oscillations in the plasma, amplifying the signal. [...] At the moment, Lawson et al.'s design is theoretical, but several experimental groups are actively working on building prototypes. "The fact that the experimental community has latched onto this idea so quickly is very exciting and promising for building a full-scale experiment," said Millar.

The Paris Zoological Park on Wednesday showcased a mysterious new organism, dubbed the "blob," that has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet it can detect food and digest it. The blob also has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself in two minutes if cut in half. Reuters reports: "The blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature's mysteries," said Bruno David, director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, of which the Zoological Park is part. "It surprises us because it has no brain but is able to learn (...) and if you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other," David added.

The blob was named after a 1958 science-fiction horror B-movie, starring a young Steve McQueen, in which an alien life form - The Blob - consumes everything in its path in a small Pennsylvania town. "We know for sure it is not a plant but we don't really if it's an animal or a fungus," said David. "It behaves very surprisingly for something that looks like a mushroom (...) it has the behavior of an animal, it is able to learn."

exomondo shares a report from The Hacker News: A vulnerability has been discovered in Sudo -- one of the most important, powerful, and commonly used utilities that comes as a core command installed on almost every UNIX and Linux-based operating system. The vulnerability in question is a sudo security policy bypass issue that could allow a malicious user or a program to execute arbitrary commands as root on a targeted Linux system even when the "sudoers configuration" explicitly disallows the root access. Sudo, stands for "superuser do," is a system command that allows a user to run applications or commands with the privileges of a different user without switching environments -- most often, for running commands as the root user.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-14287 and discovered by Joe Vennix of Apple Information Security, is more concerning because the sudo utility has been designed to let users use their own login password to execute commands as a different user without requiring their password. What's more interesting is that this flaw can be exploited by an attacker to run commands as root just by specifying the user ID "-1" or "4294967295." That's because the function which converts user id into its username incorrectly treats -1, or its unsigned equivalent 4294967295, as 0, which is always the user ID of root user. The vulnerability affects all Sudo versions prior to the latest released version 1.8.28, which has been released today.

A new article this week on Motherboard argues that Flash "is responsible for the internet's most creative era," citing a new 640-page book by Rob Ford on the evolution of web design.

[O]ne could argue that the web has actually gotten less creative over time, not more. This interpretation of events is a key underpinning of Web Design: The Evolution of the Digital World 1990-Today (Taschen, $50), a new visual-heavy book from author Rob Ford and editor Julius Wiedemann that does something that hasn't been done on the broader internet in quite a long time: It praises the use of Flash as a creative tool, rather than a bloated malware vessel, and laments the ways that visual convention, technical shifts, and walled gardens have started to rein in much of this unvarnished creativity.

This is a realm where small agencies supporting big brands, creative experimenters with nothing to lose, and teenage hobbyists could stand out simply by being willing to try something risky. It was a canvas with a built-in distribution model. What wasn't to like, besides a whole host of malware?
The book's author tells Motherboard that "Without the rebels we'd still be looking at static websites with gray text and blue hyperlinks." But instead we got wild experiments like Burger King's "Subservient Chicken" site or the interactive "Wilderness Downtown" site coded by Google.

There were also entire cartoon series like Radiskull and Devil Doll or Zombie College -- not to mention games like "A Murder of Scarecrows" or the laughably unpredictible animutations of 14-year-old Neil Cicierega. But Ford tells Motherboard that today, many of the wild ideas have moved from the web to augmented reality and other "physical mediums... The rise in interactive installations, AR, and experiential in general is where the excitement of the early days is finally happening again."

Motherboard calls the book "a fitting coda for a kind of digital creativity that -- like Geocities and MySpace pages, multimedia CD-ROMs, and Prodigy graphical interfaces before it -- has faded in prominence."

Ask Google or Siri: "What is Taiwan?" "A state", they will answer, "in East Asia". But earlier in September, it would have been a "province in the People's Republic of China." From a report: For questions of fact, many search engines, digital assistants and phones all point to one place: Wikipedia. And Wikipedia had suddenly changed. The edit was reversed, but soon made again. And again. It became an editorial tug of war that - as far as the encyclopedia was concerned -- caused the state of Taiwan to constantly blink in and out of existence over the course of a single day. "This year is a very crazy year," sighed Jamie Lin, a board member of Wikimedia Taiwan. "A lot of Taiwanese Wikipedians have been attacked." Wikipedia is a movement as much as a website. Anyone can write or edit entries on Wikipedia, and in almost every country on Earth, communities of "Wikipedians" exist to protect and contribute to it. The largest collection of human knowledge ever amassed, available to everyone online for free, it is arguably the greatest achievement of the digital age. But in the eyes of Lin and her colleagues, it is now under attack.

The edit war over Taiwan was only one of a number that had broken out across Wikipedia's vast, multi-lingual expanse of entries. The Hong Kong protests page had seen 65 changes in the space of a day -- largely over questions of language. Were they protesters? Or rioters? The English entry for the Senkaku islands said they were "islands in East Asia," but earlier this year the Mandarin equivalent had been changed to add "China's inherent territory." The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were changed in Mandarin to describe them as "the June 4th incident" to "quell the counter-revolutionary riots". On the English version, the Dalai Lama is a Tibetan refugee. In Mandarin, he is a Chinese exile. Angry differences of opinion happen all the time on Wikipedia. But to Ms Lin, this was different. "It's control by the [Chinese] Government" she continued. "That's very terrible." BBC Click's investigation has found almost 1,600 tendentious edits across 22 politically sensitive articles. We cannot verify who made each of these edits, why, or whether they reflect a more widespread practice. However, there are indications that they are not all necessarily organic, nor random. Both an official and academics from within China have begun to call for both their government and citizens to systematically correct what they argue are serious anti-Chinese biases endemic across Wikipedia.

An anonymous reader writes: "DDoS-for-hire services, also known as DDoS booters, or DDoS stressors, are abusing macOS systems to launch DDoS attacks," reports ZDNet. "These attacks are leveraging macOS systems where the Apple Remote Desktop feature has been enabled, and the computer is accessible from the internet, without being located inside a local network, or protected by a firewall. More specifically, the attackers are leveraging the Apple Remote Management Service (ARMS) that is a part of the Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) feature. When users enable the Remote Desktop capability on their macOS systems, the ARMS service starts on port 3283 and listens for incoming commands meant for the remote Mac." Hackers have figured out a way to bounce traffic off these ports and carry out DDoS attacks with the help of internet connected Macs. Nearly 40,000 macOS systems are currently connected online and can be used to send out DDoS attacks.

H_Fisher writes: Movie-watchers (in the U.S. at least) already have to sit through 20+ minutes of commercials and other advertainment before showtime. Now, two major theater chains are mixing commercials in with movie trailers in a bid to generate more cash. According to the report, "regular commercials will run for five minutes after the lights go off and before the trailers at two of the country's largest circuits, Regal Cinemas and Cinemark Theatres. And one 60-second 'platinum' spot from a top-tier brand will roll before the second-to-last or last trailer." National CineMedia says that other worldwide markets have been watching ads alongside trailers for years, "with no significant consumer backlash." Right now, after the lights go down, Cinemark shows 15 minutes worth of trailers before the actual movie begins while Regal's trailer block runs 15 to 20 minutes, according to the news report.

dryriver writes: BitChute is a video-hosting website like YouTube, except that it states its mission as being "anti-censorship" and is Peer-To-Peer, WebTorrent based. "It is based on the peer-to-peer WebTorrent system, a JavaScript torrenting program that can run in a web browser," according to Wikipedia. "Users who watch a video also seed it. BitChute does not rely on advertising, and users can send payments to video creators directly. In November 2018 BitChute was banned from PayPal." So it seems that you don't need huge datacenters to build something like YouTube -- Bitchute effectively relies on its users to act as a distributed P2P datacenter. Is this the future of internet video? Will more and more people flock to P2P video-hosting sites as/when more mainstream services like YouTube fall prey to various forms of censorship?

Freshly Exhumed writes: Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and consultant on numerous movie scripts, was excited to watch "Ad Astra," the new Brad Pitt space thriller. The film was promoted with the promise of scientific realism in depicting a solar system well on its way to being settled by humanity. Unfortunately, Professor Frank finds that despite very good intentions, "Ad Astra" strikes the wrong balance between story and fact, art and artifice. While the plot ventures out to the farthest planet Neptune, the demands of the film's theme cramp its science fiction imagination. Instead of letting us explore a vision of our common future in space, "Ad Astra" delivers a solar system stripped down to fit a very particular story.

dryriver writes: For the benefit of those who are not much into 3D technologies, as far back as the year 2000 and even earlier, there was excitement about "Web3D" -- interactive 3D content embedded in HTML webpages, using technologies like VRML and ShockWave 3D. 2D vector-based Flash and Flash animation was a big deal back then. Very popular with internet users. The more powerful but less installed ShockWave browser plugin -- also made by Macromedia -- got a fairly capable DirectX 7/OpenGL-based realtime 3D engine developed by Intel Labs around 2001 that could put 3D games, 3D product configurators and VR-style building/environment walkthroughs into an HTML page, and also go full-screen on demand. There were significant problems on the hardware side -- 20 years ago, not every PC or Mac connected to the internet had a decently capable 3D GPU by a long shot. But the 3D software technology was there, it was promising even then, and somehow it died -- ShockWave3D was neglected and killed off by Adobe shortly after they bought Macromedia, and VRML died pretty much on its own.

Now we are in 2019. Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, PCs/Macs as well as Game Consoles have powerful 3D GPUs in them that could render great interactive 3D experiences in a web browser. The hardware is there, but 99% of the internet today is in flat 2D. Why is this? Why do tens of millions of gamers spend hours in 3D game worlds every day, and even the websites that cater to this "3D loving" demographic use nothing but text, 2D JPEGs and 2D YouTube videos on their webpages? Everything 3D -- 3D software, 3D hardware, 3D programming and scripting languages -- is far more evolved than it was around 2000. And yet there appears to be very little interest in putting interactive 3D anything into webpages. What causes this? Do people want to go into the 2020s with a 2D-based internet? Is the future of the internet text, 2D images, and streaming 2D videos?

This week Stack Overflow's CEO/founder Joel Spolsky spoke to Clive Thompson, the tech journalist who just published the new book Coders: the Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World . "It's a sort of ethnographic history of this particular tribe," explains a blog post at Stack Overflow, "examining how software developers fit into the world of business and culture and how their role in society has shifted in recent decades.

"The official conversation kicked off after a 15-minute tangent on Joel's collection of Omni magazine and the formative role this publication had for both men." Some excerpts: Clive: The question in my mind is, who is interested in this? What gets them bit by the bug so they are willing to crawl over all the broken glass that is the daily work.

Joel: In my time, it was the absolute control. Whatever code you wrote, that's what executed. There was no translation. It wasn't like, well the flour was kind of old, and I tried to make the souffle but it collapsed. Unlike so many things you will try to accomplish as a child or an adult, where you work on something but it doesn't turn out as you expect it to, with code it will do exactly what you told it. Even if that's not what you meant. You might suddenly realize you're obeying me to the point of making me angry.

Clive: The monkey's paw thing. I shouldn't have wished for that.

Joel: But the computer is still being completely obedient.

Clive: That thrill is a common thread I found in my research, from the 1960s through today. I will talk to people in their 80s who worked on machines the size of an entire room, and it's the same damn thing talking to a 15-year-old girl at an afterschool program working on a raspberry pi or P5. There is something unique about the micro-world that is inside the machine, qualitatively different from our real world.

Joel: It's sort of utopian. Things behave as they are supposed to. The reason I put a question mark on that, as programmers move higher and higher up the abstraction tree, that kinda goes away.

Clive: I think the rise of machine learning is an interesting challenge to the traditional craft of software development. Some of the people I spoke with for the book aren't interested in it because they don't like the idea of working with these indeterminate training systems... there is something unsettling about not really knowing what's going on with what you're building.

Joel: I just picked up Arduino a year ago and that was enormously fun because it was like going back to C, instead of all these fancy high-level languages where you don't know what they are going to do. It offered a really detailed level of control. If something doesn't work, you can figure it out, because everything is tractable.
They also discussed the future of coding -- and took a fond look back at its past. Spolsky remembers his first exposure to computers was an interactive terminal system connected to a mainframe that ran FORTRAN, BASIC, and PL/I programs. "Many, many years later I realized there was no way they had enough memory for three compilers and in fact what they had was a very simple pre-processsor that made Basic, FORTRAN, and PL/I all look like the same mush.

"It was a very crappy subset of each of those three languages."

An anonymous reader shares a report from Scientific American: Humans effortlessly know that a tree is a tree and a dog is a dog no matter the size, color or angle at which they're viewed. In fact, identifying such visual elements is one of the earliest tasks children learn. But researchers have struggled to determine how the brain does this simple evaluation. As deep-learning systems have come to master this ability, scientists have started to ask whether computers analyze data -- and particularly images -- similarly to the human brain. "The way that the human mind, the human visual system, understands shape is a mystery that has baffled people for many generations, partly because it is so intuitive and yet it's very difficult to program" says Jacob Feldman, a psychology professor at Rutgers University.

A paper published in Scientific Reports in June comparing various object recognition models came to the conclusion that people do not evaluate an object like a computer processing pixels, but based on an imagined internal skeleton. In the study, researchers from Emory University, led by associate professor of psychology Stella Lourenco, wanted to know if people judged object similarity based on the objects' skeletons -- an invisible axis below the surface that runs through the middle of the object's shape. The scientists generated 150 unique three-dimensional shapes built around 30 different skeletons and asked participants to determine whether or not two of the objects were the same. Sure enough, the more similar the skeletons were, the more likely participants were to label the objects as the same. The researchers also compared how well other models, such as neural networks (artificial intelligence-based systems) and pixel-based evaluations of the objects, predicted people's decisions. While the other models matched performance on the task relatively well, the skeletal model always won. On the Rumsfeld Epistemological Scale, AI programers trying to duplicate the functions of the human mind are still dealing with some high-level known-unknowns, and maybe even a few unknown-unknowns.

pgmrdlm shares a report from Live Science: In Douglas Adams' sci-fi series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," a pair of programmers task the galaxy's largest supercomputer with answering the ultimate question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything. After 7.5 million years of processing, the computer reaches an answer: 42. Only then do the programmers realize that nobody knew the question the program was meant to answer. Now, in this week's most satisfying example of life reflecting art, a pair of mathematicians have used a global network of 500,000 computers to solve a centuries-old math puzzle that just happens to involve that most crucial number: 42.

The question, which goes back to at least 1955 and may have been pondered by Greek thinkers as early as the third century AD, asks, "How can you express every number between 1 and 100 as the sum of three cubes?" Or, put algebraically, how do you solve x^3 + y^3 + z^3 = k, where k equals any whole number from 1 to 100? This deceptively simple stumper is known as a Diophantine equation, named for the ancient mathematician Diophantus of Alexandria, who proposed a similar set of problems about 1,800 years ago. Modern mathematicians who revisited the puzzle in the 1950s quickly found solutions when k equals many of the smaller numbers, but a few particularly stubborn integers soon emerged. The two trickiest numbers, which still had outstanding solutions by the beginning of 2019, were 33 and -- you guessed it -- 42. Using a computer algorithm to look for solutions to the Diophantine equation with x, y and z values that included every number between positive and negative 99 quadrillion, mathematician Andrew Booker, of the University of Bristol in England, found the solution to 33 after several weeks of computing time.

Since his search turned up no solutions for 42, Booker enlisted the help of Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician Andrew Sutherland, who helped him book some time with a worldwide computer network called Charity Engine. "Using this crowdsourced supercomputer and 1 million hours of processing time, Booker and Sutherland finally found an answer to the Diophantine equation where k equals 42," reports Live Science. The answer: (-80538738812075974)^3 + (80435758145817515)^3 + (12602123297335631)^3 = 42.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In late 2011, Intel introduced a performance enhancement to its line of server processors that allowed network cards and other peripherals to connect directly to a CPU's last-level cache, rather than following the standard (and significantly longer) path through the server's main memory. By avoiding system memory, Intel's DDIO -- short for Data-Direct I/O -- increased input/output bandwidth and reduced latency and power consumption.

Now, researchers are warning that, in certain scenarios, attackers can abuse DDIO to obtain keystrokes and possibly other types of sensitive data that flow through the memory of vulnerable servers. The most serious form of attack can take place in data centers and cloud environments that have both DDIO and remote direct memory access enabled to allow servers to exchange data. A server leased by a malicious hacker could abuse the vulnerability to attack other customers. To prove their point, the researchers devised an attack that allows a server to steal keystrokes typed into the protected SSH (or secure shell session) established between another server and an application server. "The researchers have named their attack NetCAT, short for Network Cache ATtack," the report adds. "Their research is prompting an advisory for Intel that effectively recommends turning off either DDIO or RDMA in untrusted networks."

"The researchers say future attacks may be able to steal other types of data, possibly even when RDMA isn't enabled. They are also advising hardware makers do a better job of securing microarchitectural enhancements before putting them into billions of real-world servers." The researchers published their paper about NetCAT on Tuesday.

Long-time Slashdot reader ClarkMills writes: Not just anybody but [lithium-ion battery pioneer] Jeff Dahn [et al.] released a paper detailing cells that "should be able to power an electric vehicle for over 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) and last at least two decades in grid energy storage."
The new lithium-ion battery cell has a next-generation "single crystal" NMC cathode and a new advanced electrolyte, according to the site Electrotek. "We are talking about battery cells that last two to three times longer than Tesla's current battery cells."

An anonymous reader quotes the website of Ireland's national public service broadcasting: Popular online reference website Wikipedia went down in several countries after the website was targeted by what it described as a "malicious attack". The server of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the site, suffered a "massive" Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the organisation's German account said in a tweet last night.

In a separate statement the Wikimedia Foundation said that the attack on the encyclopedia - one of the world's most popular websites - was "ongoing" and teams were working to restore access... Wikimedia condemned the breach of its server, saying it threatened "everyone's fundamental rights to freely access and share information."

Google and its industry allies are making a late bid to water down the first major data-privacy law in the U.S., seeking to carve out exemptions for digital advertising, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg and people familiar with the negotiations. Bloomberg reports: A lobbyist for Google recently distributed new language to members of California's state legislature that would amend the California Consumer Privacy Act. As currently drafted, the law limits how Google and other companies collect and make money from user data online, threatening a business model that generates billions of dollars in ad revenue. It's due to kick in next year and there are only a few more days to amend the law. The lobbying push seeks legislative approval to continue collecting user data for targeted advertising, and in some cases, the right to do so even if users opt out, according to the documents and the people familiar with the negotiations.

It's unclear if the language circulating in the state capitol's corridors was drafted by Google, and other lobbyists are likely asking for similar changes. Industry groups, such as the California Chamber of Commerce and the Internet Association, often help write legislation and have been the face of industry during two years of debate over the CCPA. It's also common for interested parties to suggest late changes to bills. The Google representative, who distributed the revised language in recent weeks, has yet to find a lawmaker to sponsor the amendments, according to people familiar with negotiations. The proposal must be in a bill by Sept. 10 to be eligible for lawmakers to vote on it before they adjourn for the year on Sept. 13. One of the proposals would let Google and others use data collected from websites for their own analysis, and then share it with other companies that may find it useful. Currently, the CCPA prohibits the sale or distribution of user data if the user has opted out, with limited exceptions.

Another proposal would loosen the definition of "business purpose" when it comes to selling or distributing user data. The law currently defines this narrowly and has a list of specific activities, such auditing and security, that will be allowed. Google's lobbyist shared new language that significantly broadens the rule by replacing the phrase "Business purposes are" with "Business purposes include," before the list of approved activities.

necro81 writes: The Aptera 2e was a head-turning 3-wheeled electric vehicle when it debuted a decade ago. With a body more like an aircraft than a car, it was designed for maximum efficiency. Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt and liquidated before it hit production. Now IEEE Spectrum reports the founders are having another crack at it, taking advantage of a decade of improvement in batteries, computation, and EV component supply chains. By utilizing sandwich composite body panels, lightweight 3D-printed metal components, and speedier fluid dynamics simulations, their aim is a maximum efficiency, low-volume production vehicle that, with its largest battery configuration, could achieve a range of 1000 miles (1600 km).

Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes: The IBrowse Team announced the commercial release of IBrowse 2.5 for AmigaOS 3.x (68k) and an improved PPC native AmigaOS 4.x version.

IBrowse was the most popular Amiga web browser of the 1990s when it pioneered advanced features such as tabbed web browsing.
"After many years in the making, development has been on a roller coaster since IBrowse 2.4, with challenging personal, technical and commercial issues complicating the release schedule," reads the announcement on the iBrowse site.

"However, we are extremely happy to finally make this new version available to all the valued users who have been waiting so patiently."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: For nearly 20 years," writes WIRED's Alex Davies in How Anthony Levandowski Put Himself at the Center of an Industry, "the French-American Levandowski has played a kind of purposeful Forrest Gump for the world of autonomous driving. Rather than stumbling into the center of one momentous event after another, Levandowski has put himself there. And he has left a mixed trail in his wake: Former colleagues have described him as brilliant, engaging, motivating, fast-charging, inconsiderate, a weasel, and just plain evil. None, though, deny that whether for good or ill, the benefit of society or himself, Levandowski has played a propulsive role in the development of self-driving tech."

But that's of little comfort to Levandowski, who was charged by the Feds earlier this week with stealing driverless-vehicle technology from Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo unit, prompting the New Yorker's Charles Duhigg to explain How the Anthony Levandowski Indictment Helps Big Tech Stifle Innovation in Silicon Valley. The Economic Espionage Act of 1996, Duhigg notes, "was mostly intended to be used against overseas saboteurs, but it has largely been directed at American citizens -- and, in effect, has made federal prosecutors into heavies operating on behalf of disgruntled tech firms."

The definition of a 'trade secret' in the statute, Duhigg adds, is so broad that it could very well mean anything. Daniel Olmos, an attorney who has represented individuals accused of stealing trade secrets, once told Duhigg, "I get calls all the time from scared engineers, who once put some work stuff on their home computer so they could work on it after dinner, and now they're worried if they try to jump to another firm they're gonna get sued. And you know what? They're right to be worried.