“Very difficult times are ahead for our space program.”
Rockets for the Moon: developmental new vehicles (payload capacity to LEO in metric tons), including various Angara rockets, the Soyuz 5 booster, and Super Thrust Block 1 and Super Thrust Block 2. [credit:
Roscosmos
]
Last Thursday, the leader of Russia's state space corporation, Dmitry Rogozin, gave a wide-ranging talk at Moscow University. The speech sought to describe activities happening now at Roscosmos and what may happen in the future, including a potential lunar landing.
Rogozin addressed his comments largely to students at the university, and he sought to paint a picture of a vibrant national space enterprise. This is presumably to boost the desirability of a career in space, as young people have been pursuing aerospace careers in smaller numbers. Reports of low salaries, low morale, and a lack of funding to even remove trash from Roscosmos facilities has not helped this trend.
The Russian plan
Via Robinson Mitchell, Ars obtained a copy of the slide deck Rogozin used for his speech and a translation of its contents (key slides are shown above). Of particular interest is the speech's focus on an independent lunar landing featuring cosmonauts by 2030. Taken at face value—which probably is not wise, given the big question of how Russia would fund such an enterprise—a Russian attempt to land humans on the Moon a decade from now would set up an extraordinary race among that country, NASA's Artemis Program, and China's lunar ambitions.
It can do AND or OR logic in a single transistor, switch states using light.
With the development of carbon nanotubes and graphene, scientists were given an entirely new collection of materials to work with: sheets and tubes that could be consistently made with thicknesses roughly those of individual atoms. These materials hold the promise of building electronic devices with dimensions smaller than is currently possible through any other process and with properties that can be tuned by using different starting materials.
So far, most of the attention has gone to re-creating new versions of familiar devices. But a new paper by a group of researchers in Shanghai looks into what can be done if you're not constrained by the sorts of devices we currently make in silicon. The result is a device that can perform basic logic in half the transistors silicon needs, can be switched between different logical operations using light, and can store the output of the operation in the device itself.
OR or AND?
Computer instructions can be distilled down to a series of simple logical operations. Of theses, the simplest are AND and OR. AND produces a value of 1 only if both of its two inputs are also 1; OR does so if either of the two inputs are 1.
YouTube Gaming is more or less shutting down this week. Google launched the standalone YouTube gaming vertical almost four years ago as a response to Amazon's purchase of Twitch, and on May 30, Google will shut down the standalone YouTube Gaming app and the standalone gaming.youtube.com website.
The plan to shut down the gaming portal was announced in September, with a report from The Verge saying the site was dying because it simply wasn't popular. YouTube serves more than 50 billion hours of gaming content a year, but people just aren't viewing those hours through the gaming-specific site and apps.
Live game streaming is one of the few incursions into Google's dominance of video on the Web. Google tried to buy game streaming leader Twitch.tv back in 2014, but the company was snatched up by Amazon. YouTube Gaming launched one year later as, more or less, a clone of Twitch. YouTube Gaming offered a very different interface from YouTube, in the same way Twitch is different from YouTube. Individual games got their own pages on YouTube Gaming that showed all the YouTube content related to that game, and viewers could follow a game to receive all the latest content and discover new creators. Livestreams were heavily promoted as part of the gaming push, along with a low-latency streaming mode for better chat interaction. The site also set about copying some of Twitch's monetization features, with things like paid "Super chats" and paid channel subscriptions.
For now, battles against friends will require split-screen or local Switch wireless.
A first for any Super Mario game: online play. This expands upon the local-multiplayer insanity of the New Super Mario Bros. series. [credit:
Nintendo
]
Update, June 11: Shortly after Nintendo's E3 2019 "Direct" video presentation on Tuesday, the game maker hosted a "Treehouse" panel on YouTube with updates about previously announced Nintendo Switch games. One of those updates confirmed some good news for hopeful Super Mario Maker 2 owners: its online matchmaking service will indeed receive "friends-only" modes after all.
When discussing upcoming support for the June 28 game, producer Takashi Tezuka said through a translator, "A new update will let people play with your friends online." The game will not ship with this feature in June, and no date was attached to this eventual update. But we're glad to see the company publicly reverse course and reach feature parity with other first-party Nintendo Switch Online games.
Apple has updated the iPod touch for the first time since July 2015. Today, the company refreshed the device with its A10 system-on-a-chip (which includes a CPU, GPU, and more), a big step up in performance from the A8 in the prior model.
The A10 has come to be Apple's entry-level CPU. Originally introduced in the iPhone 7 (which is no longer available except in the refurbished store), it currently ships in the entry-level iPad and, now, the iPod touch. The CPU is just over half the speed of the A12 in the latest iPhones for multi-threaded tasks, though the gap is much smaller in single-core performance. The A10's built-in GPU delivers about 56 percent the performance of the A12. It was the last Apple system-on-a-chip to use Imagination Technologies' PowerVR chip. (Apple now designs its own graphics silicon for iOS devices).
The iPod launched a new era for Apple after Steve Jobs' return in 1998, but these days, you'd be forgiven for forgetting the company even still sells the product. Gone is the traditional-hard-drive-equipped traditional iPod with the iconic click wheel. For the past few years, Apple has only offered the iPod touch, which is like a smaller, lighter iPhone without the cellular guts. It's a niche product, but it's still there.
File-hosting service DBR.ee, which was frequently used to share leaked music, has been shut down by several music industry groups. The domain now redirects to a public advisory instead. The shutdown follows an RIAA request to Cloudflare requiring it to unmask the operator and coincides with downtime issues at other targeted sites.
While movies and TV-shows tend to be the most sought-after content among pirates, music remains popular as well.
Thousands of album releases can be found on classic torrent sites and stream-ripping services are also widely used.
In addition, there’s a dedicated group of music fans who share their work in private forums, dedicated release sites, or through messaging tools such as Telegram and Discord.
These sites and services usually rely on third-party hosting platforms and have become renowned for hosting pre-release leaks. This includes DRB.ee.
The music industry isn’t happy with this activity and following a series of leaks last month, the RIAA took action. Among other things, the music group requested a subpoena from a Columbia federal court against Cloudflare, requiring it to hand over identifying information related to several domain names.
“We have determined that users of your system or network have infringed our member record companies’ copyrighted sound recordings. Enclosed is a subpoena compliant with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” the RIAA’s McDevitt wrote to Cloudflare.
Among the targets was the hosting site DBR.ee which, according to the RIAA, made a copy of Big Sean’s track ‘Emotional’ available, as highlighted in the subpoena request.
While it’s not known if and what information Cloudflare handed over, DBR.ee went offline soon after. The downtime was initially shrouded in mystery, with some claiming that the site would soon return. However, it has now become clear that the site was targeted by the RIAA, IFPI, and Music Canada.
After a domain name update, now DBR.ee links to a message from the three music groups, noting that the site is no longer available.
“This site has been shut down following legal action for copyright infringement,” the page states, featuring the logos of the three music organizations.
“Making available copyright protected music on the internet without authorisation from the copyright holder is illegal. Wilful, commercial scale copyright infringement could lead to criminal conviction. Illegal music services exploit the work of artists and pay nothing to those creating and investing in music.”
The shutdown notice
In a follow-up comment, IFPI explains to us that they identified and contacted the site operator, who agreed to stop the infringing activities. Whether the Cloudflare subpoena was instrumental wasn’t specifically confirmed, but that would make sense.
“DBR.ee was responsible for large scale copyright infringement of music content,” an IFPI spokesperson informed TorrentFreak.
“On behalf of our member record companies, IFPI, RIAA and Music Canada identified and contacted the site operator who has now agreed to shut down the site completely and not to infringe sound recording rights in the future.”
A source familiar with the site informed TorrentFreak that DBR.ee was hosted in Canada, which may further explain in the involvement of Music Canada. The organization informed us that it sides with IFPI’s statement.
It’s worth noting that Ayefiles, which was targeted with the same subpoena, has been offline for a few days as well. Similarly, the hosting platform Nofile, the subject of another RIAA subpoena, is also offline.
Others that were targeted, such as the unrelated Dbree.org and the music release site ‘Plus Premieres’, remain online. The latter does mention the downtime issues at DBR.ee
“With dbr.ee and omerta.is offline a lot of links need to be reuploaded. Considering how much music we have and our limited amount of editors that will take some time,” Plus Premieres said on Twitter recently.
Now that the music industry has these platforms clearly in their sights, more reuploading may be needed in the near future.
Mayor and council president ask for federal disaster dollars to clean up IT toxic waste.
Enlarge/ Baltimore: An IT disaster area? (credit: Cyndi Monaghan via Getty Images)
The mayor and city council president of Baltimore are pushing for the ransomware attack that brought Baltimore's city government to a standstill to be designated a disaster, and officials are seeking federal aid to help pay for the cleanup from the RobbinHood malware's damage. This call came after a New York Times report that the ransomware used the EternalBlue exploit developed by the National Security Agency to spread across the city's network.
EternalBlue was part of a set of tools developed for the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group that were leaked by Shadow Brokers in 2017. The tool was then used two months later as part of WannaCry, the destructive cryptographic worm that affected thousands of computers worldwide. Shadow Brokers has been linked by some security experts to a Russian intelligence agency; WannaCry has been attributed to North Korea's military.
For better and for worse (mostly better), there’s never been a VR system like this.
The Valve Index and its incredibly reflective front plastic plate in my Seattle apartment. [credit:
Sam Machkovech ]
My introduction to the Index, Valve's first-ever top-to-bottom PC virtual reality system, was a whirlwind of numbers and demos. Valve's three-hour hands-on event in April came with a considerable blast of specs, claims, and pre-release software, but while those ranged from puzzling to impressive, none of them stayed with me like one off-hand comment from the day.
"I don't use VR for 30 minutes a day," one Valve engineer said in response. "I use VR hours a day. What's good enough for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, is dramatically different than one hour, two hours."
Das Bundeskartellamt sieht sich das Zusammengehen von T-Systems und IBM bei Großrechnern genau an. T-Systems erklärte offiziell, es handele sich nicht um einen Verkauf. (T-Systems, IBM)
Das Bundeskartellamt sieht sich das Zusammengehen von T-Systems und IBM bei Großrechnern genau an. T-Systems erklärte offiziell, es handele sich nicht um einen Verkauf. (T-Systems, IBM)
M-net will sich künftig auf FTTH konzentrieren. FTTB ist derzeit unter Druck, weil die Telekom inhouse den Frequenzbereich für Super Vectoring erhalten dürfte. (Buglas, Glasfaser)
M-net will sich künftig auf FTTH konzentrieren. FTTB ist derzeit unter Druck, weil die Telekom inhouse den Frequenzbereich für Super Vectoring erhalten dürfte. (Buglas, Glasfaser)
While movies and TV-shows tend to be the most sought-after content among pirates, music remains popular as well. 
Das Bundeskartellamt sieht sich das Zusammengehen von T-Systems und IBM bei Großrechnern genau an. T-Systems erklärte offiziell, es handele sich nicht um einen Verkauf. (
M-net will sich künftig auf FTTH konzentrieren. FTTB ist derzeit unter Druck, weil die Telekom inhouse den Frequenzbereich für Super Vectoring erhalten dürfte. (
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