Month: February 2018

Emojipedia

The Unicode Emoji 11.0 set is final, adding 157 new emoji to the 2666 we previously had. While we have not yet seen how these will be drawn by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other vendors, Emojipedia has whipped up a set of sample emoji to present an idea of what they might look like.

There are 77 unique emojis, padded by skin-color varietals. For smileys there's "Smiling Face With 3 Hearts," "Hot Face," "Cold Face," "Partying Face," "Woozy Face," and "Pleading Face." Humans get hair color options for "red," "curly," "bald," and "white," along with two new professions: "superheroes" and "supervillains." There's also disembodied legs and feet in the various skin tones, and we can't wait to see how the kids turn them into weird euphemisms.

Enlarge / Intel Skylake Core i7-6700K. (credit: Orestis Bastounis)

After recommending customers not use its microcode fix for Broadwell and Haswell chips, Intel has issued a new microcode update for Skylake processors that gives operating systems the ability to protect against the Spectre flaw revealed earlier this year.

The Spectre attacks work by persuading the processor's branch predictor into making a specific bad prediction. This bad prediction can then be used to infer the value of data stored in memory, in turn giving an attacker information that they shouldn't otherwise have. The microcode update is designed to give operating systems greater control over the branch predictor, enabling them to prevent one process from influencing the predictions made in another process.

Intel's first microcode update, developed late last year, was included in system firmware updates for machines with Broadwell, Haswell, Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake processors. It was subsequently discovered that the update was causing systems to crash and reboot; initially, only Broadwell and Haswell systems were confirmed to be affected, but subsequently it was determined that Skylake, Kaby Lake, and Coffee Lake systems were rebooting too. In response, people were advised not to use the new microcode, and operating system features that leveraged the new capabilities were disabled.

Enlarge (credit: John Perry Barlow)

John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, rancher, and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, died Wednesday at the age of 70.

The San Francisco-based digital rights advocacy organization said that it was mourning the loss of its co-founder.

"It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow’s vision and leadership," Cindy Cohn, the group’s executive director, wrote in a blog post. "He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance."

Enlarge (credit: Arch Mission Foundation)

With any luck, alien civilizations will one day be able to read the works of Isaac Asimov and tap into his imagined Encyclopedia Galactica. That’s the hope, anyway.

Tesla wasn't shy about advertising its launch of a Tesla Roadster on board a Falcon Heavy rocket, on Tuesday. But it was less vocal about that Roadster's secret cargo: a tiny optical disc, known as an Arch (pronounced "ark"). Theoretically, this format of disc can hold 360TB per disc, and the one on board the launched car contains Asimov's Foundation book trilogy.

Unlike traditional optical discs, according to the Arch Mission’s press release, this Arch disc is "written by a femtosecond laser on quartz silica glass," and its data is "encoded digitally as 20nm gratings, formed by plasma disruptions from the laser pulses."

Enlarge / Ljubljana, Slovenia - October 13, 2016: Tesla car supercharger machine at Supercharger Station glowing at night (credit: Getty Images)

As expected, Tesla saw some pretty big losses this quarter, mostly related to Model 3 delays. The company reported $675 million in losses attributable to shareholders in Q4, wrapping up 2017 with almost $2 billion in losses for the whole year.

But unlike with other doomed companies posting dire losses quarter after quarter, Tesla revenues have been sizable. Just this quarter, Tesla earned $3.3 billion in revenues from automotive sales, leasing, energy products, and services. For the year, the company reported almost $12 billion in revenue. People want Tesla products, but Tesla can't stop spending more money than it has.

The company (naturally) contends that all losses are temporary. "At some point in 2018, we expect to begin generating positive quarterly operating income on a sustained basis," the company stated in its investor letter. Musk specified in the accompanying earnings call that he expected the company to be profitable by the more stringent Generally Accepted Accounting Principles this year. That line may sound familiar: Tesla claimed similar projections in early 2016, and while Tesla did indeed have its second-ever profitable quarter that year, the company resumed its loss-making habit shortly after.

Enlarge / The Baden-Wurttemberg, listing slightly to starboard as usual, has been sent back to shipbuilders—refused by the German Navy. (credit: Ein Dahmer)

The German Navy has a lot of problems right now. It has no working submarines, in part because of a chronic repair parts shortage. The Deutsche Marine is still flying helicopters older than their pilots—the Sea Lynx entered service in 1981, and the Sea King in 1969—and has long-delayed their replacement. And now the service is facing problems with its newest ships so severe that the first of the class failed its sea trials and was returned to the shipbuilders in December.

As Christian Mölling, a defense-industry expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, told the Wall Street Journal’s William Wilkes in January, German military procurement is “one hell of a complete disaster. It will take years to sort this problem out.”

The Baden-Wurttemberg class frigates were ordered to replace the 1980s-era Bremen class ships, all but of two which have been already retired. At 149 meters (488 feet) long with a displacement of 7,200 metric tons (about 7900 US tons), the Baden-Wurttembergs are about the size of destroyers and intended to reduce the size of the crew required to operate them (in this way, they are similar to the US Navy's Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) classes and the Zumwalt-class destroyers).

Enlarge / Lungs of a coal worker, with black pigmentation and fibrosis from inhalation of coal dust. (credit: Yale Rosen)

An epidemic of severe and rapidly progressive black lung disease is emerging among coal miners in Appalachia. Case counts from just three clinics in the region reveal the highest disease levels that doctors have ever reported, according to a study published in JAMA this week.

Between January 2013 and February 2017, researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health documented 416 coal miners with the condition. Prior to the discovery, researchers largely thought that black lung cases were a thing of the past. Diagnoses have been rare since the late 1990s

The clinics, run by Stone Mountain Health Services, would typically see five to seven cases each year, Ron Carson, who directs Stone Mountain's black lung program told NPR. Now, the clinics see that many in two weeks, he said. And in the past year, they’ve diagnosed 154 cases.

Enlarge (credit: Mighty Travels)

Federal prosecutors have criminally charged 36 people for their alleged roles in a massive online fraud enterprise. The fraud, feds claim, has caused more than $530 million in losses since 2010.

Known as the Infraud Organization, the enterprise aimed to be the Internet's premier destination for buying and selling stolen payment card data. It served as an online bazaar that directed potential buyers to a pool of people selling stolen credit card data, social security numbers, and other personal information, as well as malware, hardware, and other wares used to facilitate card fraud. Infraud is the biggest online fraud group ever prosecuted by the US Justice Department. As of last March, it had almost 11,000 registered members. Its tagline: In Fraud We Trust.

Infraud was a well-organized enterprise that operated globally. At the organization's top were administrators who collectively controlled its destiny and seeded it with sellers who had a reputation for delivering illicit goods of high quality. Administrators also meted out punishments to members who broke rules and to members of rival criminal groups.

Enlarge / Eating our way to world domination. (credit: Vince Smith / Flickr)

Last year, archaeologists in California made a startling announcement: they had discovered a 130,000 year-old prehistoric human campsite in the Golden State. According to currently accepted evidence, the first modern humans were just venturing out of Africa at that time, and no one would set foot in the Americas for about 115,000 years. Not surprisingly, the claim met with skepticism from other archaeologists, who said that the evidence at the site wasn’t enough to support rewriting the entire story of human migration.

That evidence is a collection of broken mastodon bones, rounded cobbles, and flat stones. These bits and pieces were unearthed during a 1992 highway construction project in San Diego and are now known as the Cerutti Mastodon Site. Archaeologist Steven R. Holen of the San Diego Natural History Museum and his colleagues say that early humans used the cobbles as hammers and the flat stones as anvils to crack open mastodon bones to get the marrow inside. They say the Cerutti site represents a very early wave of human migration into the Americas, perhaps one that didn’t last long enough to get a foothold. That explains why no other human campsites this old have turned up in the Americas.

There’s no question about the age of the site. Radiometric testing relying on uranium decay and several other methods put the bones at over 100,000 years old, and even critics agree that the dating is reliable. The debate centers on whether the items at Cerutti are really proof of human activity, and competing arguments have been published in today's issue of Nature.