Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Project Honolulu user interface, one of the new features in Windows Server 2019. (credit: Microsoft)

The next version of Windows Server will be branded Windows Server 2019, and it'll be out in the second half of the year.

This isn't tremendously surprising, as it fits with the schedule Microsoft has already committed to that splits Windows between a Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), with 10 years of support and a release every three years, and a Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) with 18 months of support and a release every six months. Windows Server 2019 will be an LTSC release, and it'll also have a corresponding Windows 10 release.

Highlights of the next version will be the new Project Honolulu Web-based interface, the integration the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and greater support for containers.

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen die. Threadripper has two of these in a multi-chip module. Epyc has four of them. (credit: AMD)

AMD has responded to the reports last week of a range of security flaws affecting its Platform Security Processor (PSP) and chipset. The company acknowledges the bugs and says that, in coming weeks, it will have new firmware available to resolve the PSP bugs. These firmware fixes will also mitigate the chipset bugs.

Israeli firm CTS identified four separate flaw families, naming them Masterkey (affecting Ryzen and Epyc processors), Ryzenfall (affecting Ryzen, Ryzen Pro, and Ryzen Mobile), Fallout (hitting only Epyc), and Chimera (applying to Ryzen and Ryzen Pro systems using the Promonotory chipset).

Masterkey, Ryzenfall, and Fallout are all problems affecting the Platform Security Processor (PSP), a small ARM core that's integrated into the chips to provide certain additional features such as a firmware-based TPM security module. The PSP has its own firmware and operating system that runs independently of the main x86 CPU. Software running on the x86 CPU can access PSP functionality using a device driver, though this access is restricted to administrator/root-level accounts.

Enlarge / The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald (DDG 62) returns to Fleet Activities (FLEACT) Yokosuka following a collision with a merchant vessel while operating southwest of Yokosuka, Japan in June, 2017. (credit: US Navy)

While the US Navy has already taken administrative action regarding the collision of the USS Fitzgerald, one of the members of the ship's crew now faces possible criminal charges in Japan as the result of a Japanese Coast Guard investigation of the incident. Stars & Stripes reported today that Japanese Coast Guard officials have recommended negligent homicide charges against both the Fitzgerald's Officer of the Deck (OOD) and the 2nd officer of the container ship the Fitzgerald struck—the ACX Crystal.

Japan Coast Guard spokesman Yoshihito Nakamura said that the official charges recommended were "Causing Death and Injury through Negligence in the Pursuit of Social Activities and Endangering Traffic through Negligence in the Pursuit of Social Activities." He also said that they had been recommended because both officers were responsible for the navigation of their ships at the time of the collision. While the ACX Crystal was operating in accordance with Preventing Collisions at Sea regulations—known to sailors as the "Rules of the Road"—the ACX Crystal's 2nd officer failed to take any actions to avoid the collision.

In the Navy's report on the June 2017 collision, issued along with findings from the August 2017 collision of the USS McCain last November, the Navy found:

Scientists analyzed the remains of two Paleolithic human campsites in South Africa (PP5-6 and VBB) to see whether there were dramatic changes after the Toba eruption 74,000 years ago in Sumatra. They found clear evidence that ash and glass from the eruption fell at these sites, and yet human habitation remained uninterrupted. (credit: Nature)

It's one of the biggest mysteries of recent human evolution. Roughly 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens went through a genetic bottleneck, a period when our genetic diversity shrank dramatically. But why? In the late 1990s, some scientists argued that the culprit was a massive volcanic eruption from what is now Lake Toba, in Sumatra, about 74,000 years ago, whose deadly effects reduced our species to a few thousand hardy individuals. Now, new evidence suggests we were right about the volcano—but wrong about pretty much everything else.

The so-called Toba Catastrophe Theory was first proposed by University of Illinois anthropologist Stanley Ambrose and popularized by University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending, who was trying to understand what caused the genetic bottleneck. At the time, mounting evidence suggested that the volcano had had a global effect, because debris from it can be found throughout the world. Many scientists thought it was likely that airborne particles from Toba caused a "volcanic winter" that lowered Earth's temperatures. Harpending and his colleague Gregory Cochran suggested that it ushered in a millennium of frigid temperatures, driving humanity to near-extinction and pushing it out of Africa in search of better habitats.

Once the globe warmed up again, the theory goes, humanity started to recover its ranks. But the population crash meant that we had lost a lot of genetic diversity. This hypothesis sounded reasonable at first, but then scientists began to uncover intriguing new evidence that humans hadn't died out at all.