Month: November 2024

Paleontologists have long puzzled over how the dinosaurs—originally relatively small and of minor importance to the broader ecosystem—evolved to become the dominant species some 30 million years later. Fossilized feces and vomit from dinosaurs might hold important clues to how and why this evolutionary milestone came about, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.

Co-author Martin Qvarnström, an evolutionary biologist with Uppsala University in Sweden, and his collaborators studied trace fossils known as bromalites, a designation that includes coprolites as well as vomit or other fossilized matter from an organism's digestive tract. As previously reported, coprolites aren't quite the same as paleofeces, which retain a lot of organic components that can be reconstituted and analyzed for chemical properties. Coprolites are fossils, so most organic components have been replaced by mineral deposits like silicate and calcium carbonates.

For archaeologists keen on learning more about the health and diet of past populations—as well as how certain parasites evolved in the evolutionary history of the microbiome—coprolites and paleofeces can be a veritable goldmine of information. For instance, in 2021 we reported on an analysis of preserved paleo-poop revealing that ancient Iron Age miners in what is now Austria were fond of beer and blue cheese.

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The GPD G1 is a small, portable and self-contained external GPU. Comprised of an AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT mobile graphic card together with an inbuilt 240 watt power supply, the GPD G1 offers both OCuLink or USB4 ports for connection to a host computer, allowing you to bring discrete graphics to a handheld, laptop, […]

The post GPD G1 Review: Compact AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT GPU gives your PC a graphics boost appeared first on Liliputing.

Over the past decade, a new class of infections has threatened Windows users. By infecting the firmware that runs immediately before the operating system loads, these UEFI bootkits continue to run even when the hard drive is replaced or reformatted. Now the same type of chip-dwelling malware has been found in the wild for backdooring Linux machines.

Researchers at security firm ESET said Wednesday that Bootkitty—the name unknown threat actors gave to their Linux bootkit—was uploaded to VirusTotal earlier this month. Compared to its Windows cousins, Bootkitty is still relatively rudimentary, containing imperfections in key under-the-hood functionality and lacking the means to infect all Linux distributions other than Ubuntu. That has led the company researchers to suspect the new bootkit is likely a proof-of-concept release. To date, ESET has found no evidence of actual infections in the wild.

The ASCII logo that Bootkitty is capable of rendering. Credit: ESET

Be prepared

Still, Bootkitty suggests threat actors may be actively developing a Linux version of the same sort of unkillable bootkit that previously was found only targeting Windows machines.

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Black Friday is still a few days away, but retailers stopped paying attention to the calendar years ago, so a whole bunch of Black Friday sales are already live. Whether you’re looking to score savings on streaming video, handheld gaming PCs, Chromebooks, Windows or Mac laptops, or tablets, there are already a bunch of deals […]

The post Daily Deals (11-27-2024) appeared first on Liliputing.

Most airplanes in the world have vertical tails or rudders to prevent Dutch roll instabilities, a combination of yawing and sideways motions with rolling that looks a bit like the movements of a skater. Unfortunately, a vertical tail adds weight and generates drag, which reduces fuel efficiency in passenger airliners. It also increases the radar signature, which is something you want to keep as low as possible in a military aircraft.

In the B-2 stealth bomber, one of the very few rudderless airplanes, Dutch roll instabilities are dealt with using drag flaps positioned at the tips of its wings, which can split and open to make one wing generate more drag than the other and thus laterally stabilize the machine. “But it is not really an efficient way to solve this problem,” says David Lentink, an aerospace engineer and a biologist at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. “The efficient way is solving it by generating lift instead of drag. This is something birds do.”

Lentink led the study aimed at better understanding birds’ rudderless flight mechanics.

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Law enforcement operations targeting pirate sites and services are often enthusiastically described as ‘large-scale’ or ‘major’.

If reports emerging from authorities in Italy hold true, describing the international operation that culminated early this morning as massive, wouldn’t be an exaggeration.

Operation Takendown is said to have targeted what may be the largest pirate IPTV network serving Europe, authorities say, and the numbers involved are some of the largest ever seen.

The District Attorney’s Office of Catania, a Sicilian city with strong links to organized crime, claims that the network served 22 million subscribers and generated an estimated €3 billion per year, causing €10 billion in damages to subscription TV broadcasters.

Operation Takendown: International Cooperation

The operation was carried out through a collaboration between law enforcement agencies, including Europol and Eurojust, and the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA).

A total of 14 searches were executed in the UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Romania, and Croatia. Servers and IPTV panels were traced to the UK and the Netherlands during searches that reportedly took place on Tuesday. In Croatia, police executed precautionary custody orders against 11 suspects.

Across all of these countries, 102 people are suspects in the investigation, including administrators of the IT infrastructure. The authorities say that the main servers in the network were located in the Netherlands, Romania, and China (Hong Kong), although no enforcement was reported there.

The action, which received funding from the European Commission, reportedly took down 2,500 illegally streamed TV channels, plus a number of servers used to manage the IPTV operation. Police also seized cryptocurrency valued at €1,650,000 and an estimated €40,000 in cash.

Prosecutor’s Office Provides Additional Detail

“On the basis of the evidence collected and to be verified in court, it appeared that the subjects from Catania and the Netherlands, with the participation of numerous other Italian and other European countries under investigation, through IT structures spread throughout the world, had carried out the conduct deemed illicit by this Office for a long period of time,” the Prosecutor’s Office explained in a statement this morning.

“These illicit activities were interrupted thanks to the seizure of these structures.”

The authorities describe a transnational organization, operating as a pyramid of suppliers, distributors, sellers, and resellers. The two-year investigation, which also involved intense monitoring of various social media platforms, identified two offices in Romania and Hong Kong, and nine servers said to be responsible for the supply of the illegal streams into Europe.

Three administrators of the service’s IT infrastructure and 80 IPTV panels used to manage subscribers, were traced to the UK and the Netherlands.

Fake identities and false documents were used to register phones, obtain credit cards, subscribe to TV channels, and rent servers. Police monitoring of IPTV forums and various profiles used to advertise the availability of streams, played a part in identifying the suspects.

Andrea Duilio, CEO of Sky Italia, the company that triggered the investigation with an initial complaint, thanked those involved.

“I would like to thank the Catania Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Postal Police, Europol, and the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance for this extraordinary operation in which we are proud to have collaborated,” Duilio said.

“These results are the fruit of great synergetic work that has allowed us to dismantle a criminal organization that operated on an international scale. Actions like this, together with the systematic contribution of Piracy Shield, that allows us to block pirate sites in real time, make the fight against a phenomenon that damages the audiovisual industry by destroying thousands of jobs, much more effective.”

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Der Telekom gelingt es, eine SMS per Satellit an ein normales Smartphone zu senden. Mit dabei sind Qualcomm und Skylo. (Telekom, Mobilfunk)

Wago Klemmen mit Hebel und ohne im großen Set gibt es gerade bei Amazon billiger als anderswo dank Black-Friday-Rabatt. (Technik/Hardware)

Starlink yesterday obtained federal approval to provide service to cell phones, with some limits. The Federal Communications Commission issued an order that partially grants SpaceX's application while imposing conditions and deferring a decision on some aspects of the application.

Starlink received approval to provide Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) within the United States. This means that in areas not covered by terrestrial cellular networks, Starlink satellites can provide service to cell phones. SpaceX already had approval to launch 7,500 second-generation satellites for its existing broadband service, and the new approval allows mobile service from those satellites.

The approval lets Starlink and T-Mobile move ahead with their plan to provide satellite service to phones in cellular dead spots. SpaceX is authorized to use the 1910–1915 MHz (Earth-to-space) and 1990–1995 MHz (space-to-Earth) bands for SCS pursuant to its lease agreement with T-Mobile. The lease covers the continental US, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.

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Makers of smart devices that fail to disclose how long they will support their products with software updates may be breaking the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned this week.

The FTC released its statement after examining 184 smart products across 64 product categories, including soundbars, video doorbells, breast pumps, smartphones, home appliances, and garage door opener controllers. Among devices researched, the majority—or 163 to be precise—"did not disclose the connected device support duration or end date" on their product webpage, per the FTC's report [PDF]. Contrastingly, 11.4 percent of devices examined shared a software support duration or end date on their product page.

Elusive information

In addition to manufacturers often neglecting to commit to software support for a specified amount of time, it seems that even when they share this information, it's elusive.

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