Month: February 2020

Enlarge / Image of anti-vaccine protestors in Connecticut's Legislative Office Building. They formed a prayer circle and said the Pledge of Allegiance and the Our Father before chanting “Healthy kids belong in school.” (credit: Twitter | Christopher Keating)

The battle over vaccinations ramped up in Connecticut this week as state lawmakers narrowly advanced a bill—with last-minute amendments—aimed at banning religious vaccine exemptions for children.

If passed, the measure will no longer allow parents to cite their religious beliefs as a valid reason not to provide their children with life-saving immunizations, which are otherwise required for entry into public and private schools and daycares.

The legislature’s public health committee passed the bill Monday in a 14-11 vote bu t not before making a last-minute amendment that would grandfather in children who already have such an exemption. As passed, the amended legislation would only apply to children newly enrolling.

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  The LG V60 ThinQ. [credit: LG ]

Mobile World Congress had to stay home sick this year with the coronavirus, but that's not stopping the mobile industry from making a bunch of announcements this week. LG has announced its obligatory Snapdragon 865 smartphone: the "LG V60 ThinQ."

The phone has Qualcomm's latest SoC, the Snapdragon 865, along with the X55 5G modem. LG's spec sheet does not say what kind of 5G (really, LG?) but Android Police reports that there is "mmWave exclusive to Verizon, and sub-6 for everyone, including AT&T." The phone has a 6.8-inch 2460×1080 OLED display, 8GB of RAM, 128GB or 256GB of storage, and MicroSD slot as well as a 5000mAh battery. There are four holes in the rear-camera array but only three cameras: a 64MP main camera, 13MP wide-angle, and two holes for a time-of-flight camera for 3D effects. Like every other Snapdragon 865, 5G-packing smartphone we've seen so far, this is a lot bigger than last year's device. The LG V50 measured 159.2 x 76.1 x 8.3 mm, while the V60 is bigger in every direction: 169.3 x 77.6 x 8.9mm.

Also like the LG V50, the V60 again has an optional second screen attachment, This makes the phone look a bit like a Microsoft Surface Duo without any of the striking good looks. The second screen is the same as the first: a 6.8-inch 2460×1080 OLED display, and there's even a  2.1-inch monochrome screen on the front, which shows the time, date, battery level, and notification icons. The case is powered by the phone by plugging into the USB-C port, and for charging with the case on, you get a Mag-Safe-style magnetic charging connector. It's kind of neat that's it's reversible, but it's also a proprietary charger to worry about.

Enlarge (credit: YouTube / Getty / Aurich Lawson)

YouTube is a private forum and therefore not subject to free-speech requirements under the First Amendment, a US appeals court ruled today. "Despite YouTube's ubiquity and its role as a public-facing platform, it remains a private forum, not a public forum subject to judicial scrutiny under the First Amendment," the court said.

PragerU, a conservative media company, sued YouTube in October 2017, claiming the Google-owned video site "unlawfully censor[ed] its educational videos and discriminat[ed] against its right to freedom of speech."

PragerU said YouTube reduced its viewership and revenue with "arbitrary and capricious use of 'restricted mode' and 'demonetization' viewer restriction filters." PragerU claimed it was targeted by YouTube because of its "political identity and viewpoint as a non-profit that espouses conservative views on current and historical events."

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  MEV-1 moves toward IS-901 to prepare for proximity operations. [credit: Northrop Grumman ]

On Tuesday, a spacecraft that was launched four months earlier docked with a communications satellite about 36,000km above the Earth. Northrop Grumman reported the historic docking on Wednesday, and the company heralded the mission as an "historic accomplishment" in the field of satellite servicing. Prior to this mission, no two commercial spacecraft had ever docked in orbit before.

Launched on a Proton rocket in October, the Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1) has a fairly long history of development under various companies. Ultimately, it was brought to space by SpaceLogistics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman. After the company's rideshare launch in October, its MEV-1 spacecraft used electric-propulsion thrusters to raise its orbit 290km above geosynchronous orbit.

Meanwhile, a communications satellite launched in 2001 (Intelsat-901) was pulled from active service in December 2019 as it ran low on fuel. Operators commanded the satellite to move into a "graveyard orbit" above geostationary space. It is here that MEV-1 linked up with the communications satellite on Tuesday.

Landsat image of Lake Toba (credit: NASA)

A supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago wasn’t enough to stop humanity in its tracks, artifacts at a Paleolithic site in central India suggest. The study is the latest strike against a hotly debated proposal that suggests that the eruption of Indonesia’s Toba supervolcano had a huge influence on human evolution. The idea is that the eruption caused global cooling that killed most of the humans who had spread from Africa into Europe and Asia. But at the Dhaba site in Madhya Pradesh, India, archaeologists found stone tools in sediment layers spanning thousands of years before and after the eruption—evidence that human life went on.

An ancient apocalypse?

Today, the Toba supervolcano lies beneath the strikingly scenic Lake Toba on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Seventy-four thousand years ago, it erupted in the middle of an important chapter in humanity’s takeover of the world. One of archaeology’s biggest questions in recent years has been when and how people first spread beyond Africa into different areas of the world; the answers lie in fossilized skeletons, objects left behind, and the DNA of modern people.

Fossil evidence suggests that people had reached the Levant by around 200,000 years ago, the Arabian Peninsula by around 85,000 years ago, and northern Australia by around 65,000 years ago. But the genomes of modern people suggest that the ancestors of modern African and non-African peoples branched off from a common ancestor around 70,000 years ago. At first glance, those lines of evidence don’t seem to agree, and some paleoanthropologists say that’s because a sudden, lengthy period of global cooling changed environments around the world in very drastic ways. The resulting crisis allegedly killed off most of the people alive at the time, leaving only a few thousand survivors.

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  This looks like an advertisement for AMD Epyc processors until you get to that bright yellow "solutions available today" box and realize we're talking about Intel. [credit: Intel Corporation ]

At Intel's Security Day event on Tuesday, the company laid down its present and future vision for security-focused features in its hardware.

Intel's Anil Rao and Scott Woodgate opened their presentation with a present-and-future discussion of Intel's SGX (Security Guard Extensions), but their coverage of the company's plans to bring Full Memory Encryption to future Intel CPUs was more interesting.

Security Guard Extensions

Intel SGX—announced in 2014, and launched with the Skylake microarchitecture in 2015—is one of the first hardware encryption technologies designed to protect areas of memory from unauthorized users, up to and including the system administrators themselves. SGX is a set of x86_64 CPU instructions which allows a process to create an "enclave" within memory which is hardware encrypted. Data stored in the encrypted enclave is only decrypted within the CPU—and even then, it is only decrypted at the request of instructions executed from within the enclave itself.