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An anonymous reader shares a report: The RIAA is ramping up the pressure on a wide range of platforms allegedly involved in music piracy. Two DMCA subpoenas obtained against Cloudflare and Namecheap require the companies to hand over all information they hold on more than 40 torrent sites, streaming portals and YouTube-ripping services. Also included in the mix are several file-hosting platforms.

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Seagate revealed several interesting points about its upcoming releases of next-generation hard drives during its quarterly earnings call this week. From a report: The company has disclosed a shift to a new generation of HDDs based on so-called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. This technology is set to bring many improvements compared to the one currently used by Seagate's rivals like Western Digital. The rivaling company uses energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) and microwave-assisted (MAMR) technologies and it already has a 20 TB drive in the offering. Seagate announced that they will unveil a 20 TB HDD in December this year, with the use of HAMR technology, which will bring many improvements like better speed and more efficient disk read/write. It added, "Seagate will be the first to ship this crucial technology with a path to deliver 50-TB HAMR drives forecast in 2026."

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Security researchers from Google have disclosed today a zero-day vulnerability in the Windows operating system that is currently under active exploitation. From a report: The zero-day is expected to be patched on November 10, which is the date of Microsoft's next Patch Tuesday, according to Ben Hawkes, team lead for Project Zero, Google's elite vulnerability research team. On Twitter, Hawkes said the Windows zero-day (tracked as CVE-2020-17087) was used as part of a two-punch attack, together with another a Chrome zero-day (tracked as CVE-2020-15999) that his team disclosed last week. The Chrome zero-day was used to allow attackers to run malicious code inside Chrome, while the Windows zero-day was the second part of this attack, allowing threat actors to escape Chrome's secure container and run code on the underlying operating system -- in what security experts call a sandbox escape.

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iFixit: After exhaustive testing, comparing notes with multiple repair technicians, and reviewing leaked Apple training documents, we've found that the iPhone 12 camera is entirely unreliable when swapped between iPhones. This latest fault, along with indications from Apple's repair guides, makes it more clear than ever: Apple, by design or neglect or both, is making it extremely hard to repair an iPhone without their blessing. This may be a bug that Apple eventually fixes. There is even precedent for iPhone parts misbehaving when swapped between phones. But it is also possible that Apple is planning on locking out all unauthorized iPhone camera and screen repairs. Apple's internal training guides tell authorized technicians that, starting with the 12 and its variants, they will need to run Apple's proprietary, cloud-linked System Configuration app to fully repair cameras and screens. We are very concerned about this possibility.

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Facebook revealed Thursday how internal technical glitches had disrupted the delivery of some ads from the Joe Biden and Donald Trump campaigns, but said it made changes to resolve those hiccups in the run-up to the November U.S. presidential election. From a report: The social media giant's admission followed complaints from the Biden camp about how thousands of its ads had been blocked. Facebook said in a blog post it spotted "unanticipated issues" affecting both campaigns, including technical flaws that caused a number of ads to be "paused improperly." "No ad was paused or rejected by a person, or because of any partisan consideration," Facebook said in its post. "The technical problems were automated and impacted ads from across the political spectrum and both Presidential campaigns."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Unless you're a physicist or an engineer, there really isn't much reason for you to know about partial differential equations. I know. After years of poring over them in undergrad while studying mechanical engineering, I've never used them since in the real world. But partial differential equations, or PDEs, are also kind of magical. They're a category of math equations that are really good at describing change over space and time, and thus very handy for describing the physical phenomena in our universe. They can be used to model everything from planetary orbits to plate tectonics to the air turbulence that disturbs a flight, which in turn allows us to do practical things like predict seismic activity and design safe planes. The catch is PDEs are notoriously hard to solve. And here, the meaning of "solve" is perhaps best illustrated by an example. Say you are trying to simulate air turbulence to test a new plane design. There is a known PDE called Navier-Stokes that is used to describe the motion of any fluid. "Solving" Navier-Stokes allows you to take a snapshot of the air's motion (a.k.a. wind conditions) at any point in time and model how it will continue to move, or how it was moving before. These calculations are highly complex and computationally intensive, which is why disciplines that use a lot of PDEs often rely on supercomputers to do the math. It's also why the AI field has taken a special interest in these equations. If we could use deep learning to speed up the process of solving them, it could do a whole lot of good for scientific inquiry and engineering. Now researchers at Caltech have introduced a new deep-learning technique for solving PDEs that is dramatically more accurate than deep-learning methods developed previously. It's also much more generalizable, capable of solving entire families of PDEs -- such as the Navier-Stokes equation for any type of fluid -- without needing retraining. Finally, it is 1,000 times faster than traditional mathematical formulas, which would ease our reliance on supercomputers and increase our computational capacity to model even bigger problems. That's right. Bring it on.

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A Chinese spacecraft is expected to land on Mars in May, state-run media reported on Thursday, citing a space agency official. From a report: The spacecraft, which left Earth in July, is set to land in Utopia Planitia, a plain in the northern hemisphere of Mars, the China News Service reported, citing Liu Tongjie, spokesman for the Mars mission. Separate spacecraft launched by the United States and the United Arab Emirates this year are also en route to Mars, though only the U.S. one will attempt a landing.

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New submitter B1948J writes: It's interesting that Honeywell is once again emerging as a computing hardware vendor. Over 50 years ago, Honeywell established itself as one of the big 3 computer mainframe manufacturers (Honeywell, Burroughs and IBM). Some say the Honeywell-200 introduced "channel architecture" before IBM "announced" it for their 360 series computers. Now, Honeywell is announcing its H1 Quantum Computer capable of a Quantum Value of 128 through 10 fully connected qubits.

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WhatsApp, the popular instant messaging app owned by Facebook, is now delivering roughly 100 billion messages a day, the company's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at the quarterly earnings call Thursday. From a report: For some perspective, users exchanged 100 billion messages on WhatsApp last New Year's Eve. That is the day when WhatsApp tops its engagement figures, and as many of you may remember, also the time when the service customarily suffered glitches in the past years. (No outage on last New Year's Eve!) At this point, WhatsApp is just competing with itself. Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp together were used to exchange 60 billion messages a day as of early 2016.

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While the rest of the U.S. economy languished earlier this year, the tech industry's biggest companies seemed immune to the downturn, surging as the country worked, learned and shopped from home. From a report: On Thursday, as the economy is showing signs of improvement, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Facebook reported profits that highlighted how a recovery may provide another catalyst to help them generate a level of wealth that hasn't been seen in a single industry in generations. With an entrenched audience of users and the financial resources to press their leads in areas like cloud computing, e-commerce and digital advertising, the companies demonstrated again that economic malaise, upstart competitors and feisty antitrust regulators have had little impact on their bottom line. Combined, the four companies reported a quarterly net profit of $38 billion. Amazon reported record sales, and an almost 200 percent rise in profits, as the pandemic accelerated the transition to online shopping. Despite a boycott of its advertising over the summer, Facebook had another blockbuster quarter. Alphabet's record quarterly net profit was up 59 percent, as marketers plowed money into advertisements for Google search and YouTube. And Apple's sales rose even though the pandemic forced it to push back the iPhone 12's release to October, in the current quarter. On Tuesday, Microsoft, Amazon's closest competitor in cloud computing, also reported its most profitable quarter, growing 30 percent from a year earlier. "The scene that's playing out fundamentally is that these tech stalwarts are gaining more market share by the day," said Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities. "It's 'A Tale of Two Cities' for this group of tech companies and everyone else."

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Samsung is back on top as the world's biggest smartphone vendor one quarter after losing its spot to Huawei, according to reports from IDC, Counterpoint, and Canalys. The news comes just as Samsung posted its highest quarterly revenue figures ever, which the company said was helped by a boost in demand for smartphones. From a report: Huawei became the number one vendor for the first time three months ago, benefiting from strong sales in China while much of the rest of the world was operating under constrained retail conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But Huawei's shipments fell 7 percent quarter-on-quarter and 24 percent year-on-year, according to Counterpoint, while Samsung's shipments increased by 47 percent over the last quarter. Xiaomi was able to regain the number three spot for the first time in several years, overtaking Apple for the first time with year-on-year growth of 46 percent. Apple's shipments fell 7 percent year-on-year in the July-September quarter, no doubt affected by the fact that its new iPhones this year slipped until October and November release dates.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CTV News: Without customers' knowledge, more than five million images of Canadian shoppers' were collected through facial recognition software used by Cadillac Fairview, a parent company of malls across the country, according to an investigation by privacy officials. The federal privacy commissioner reported Thursday that Cadillac Fairview contravened federal and provincial privacy laws by embedding cameras inside digital information kiosks at 12 shopping malls across Canada, and captured users' images without their consent. The facial recognition software installed in Cadillac Fairview's "wayfinding" directories was called "Anonymous Video Analytics (AVA) and through cameras installed behind protective glass, was used in Canadian malls for a brief testing period in 2017 and then was in-use between May and July of 2018. The software took temporary digital images of the faces of any individual within the field of view of the camera inside the directory and converted the images into biometric numerical representations of each face and used that information to compile demographic information about mall visitors. According to a statement from Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien, the company said the goal of its cameras was to "analyze the age and gender of shoppers and not to identify individuals." The corporation said that it did not collect personal information because the images were briefly looked at and then deleted, however the information generated from the images was being stored by a third-party contractor called Mappedin, which Cadillac Fairview said it was unaware of. "Cadillac Fairview -- one of the largest owners and operators of retail and other properties in North America -- 'expressly disagreed' with the investigation's findings, telling the commissioners that there were decals placed on shopping mall entry doors noting their privacy policy," the report adds. "These stickers directed visitors to visit guest services to obtain a copy of the company's privacy policy, but when the investigators asked a guest services employee at the Eaton location in Toronto, the employee was 'confused by the request' and so Therrien found the stickers to be an 'insufficient' measure."

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Sony PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan says virtual reality won't be a meaningful part of interactive entertainment in the near future. The Verge reports: Ryan indicated to The Washington Post that VR still has a long way to go, although he emphasized that Sony isn't giving up on the medium. The statement suggests that an update to Sony's PlayStation VR headset is years away. "I think we're more than a few minutes from the future of VR," Ryan told the Post. "PlayStation believes in VR. Sony believes in VR, and we definitely believe at some point in the future, VR will represent a meaningful component of interactive entertainment. Will it be this year? No. Will it be next year? No. But will it come at some stage? We believe that." He notes that the upcoming PlayStation 5, which will be released November 12th, supports the old PlayStation VR headset with a special adapter.

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Since 2000, there have always been humans living and working on the International Space Station -- and the streak could just be getting started. National Geographic reports: On Halloween in the year 2000, a Russian Soyuz rocket launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and flew into the history books, carrying one U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts to the nascent International Space Station (ISS). The crew arrived two days later, and the space station has been continuously occupied by humans ever since, a 20-year streak of living and working in low-Earth orbit. "There's kids now who are in college who, for their entire lives, we've been living off the planet," says Kenny Todd, NASA's deputy program manager for the ISS. "When I was a kid, that was all stuff that was just dreams." The orbiting laboratory is among the most expensive and technologically complex objects ever built: a $150-billion pressurized habitat as long as a football field, whizzing 254 miles above Earth's surface at 17,000 miles an hour. Over the decades, 241 women and men from around the world have temporarily called the space station home, some for nearly a full year at a time. "It's pretty crazy -- I'm surprised we haven't, like, really seriously hurt anybody," says retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent nearly a year on one ISS stay. "It's really a testament to the seriousness [with which] people on the ground take this job, the attention to detail." Upward of a hundred thousand people have worked together to design, build, launch, and operate the sprawling station, says David Nixon, who worked with NASA on ISS designs in the mid-1980s. "When you compare the station to the procession of great structures and buildings built by humanity since the dawn of civilization, it's up there with the Pyramids, the Acropolis -- all the great structures and edifices," he says. The future of the ISS remains uncertain. "The station is currently slated to run until at least 2024, and much of its hardware is certified to operate safely until at least 2028, if not longer for its younger components," the report notes. "Will the ISS be disassembled and scavenged in orbit to construct a future space station? Will it be turned over to private companies as nations venture farther into space? Will the whole structure go out in a final blaze of glory, steered into a Pacific crash landing like the Russian space station Mir?"

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have found evidence that frozen methane deposits in the Arctic Ocean -- known as the "sleeping giants of the carbon cycle" -- have started to be released over a large area of the continental slope off the East Siberian coast, the Guardian can reveal. High levels of the potent greenhouse gas have been detected down to a depth of 350 meters in the Laptev Sea near Russia, prompting concern among researchers that a new climate feedback loop may have been triggered that could accelerate the pace of global heating. The slope sediments in the Arctic contain a huge quantity of frozen methane and other gases -- known as hydrates. Methane has a warming effect 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over 20 years. The United States Geological Survey has previously listed Arctic hydrate destabilization as one of four most serious scenarios for abrupt climate change. The international team onboard the Russian research ship R/V Akademik Keldysh said most of the bubbles were currently dissolving in the water but methane levels at the surface were four to eight times what would normally be expected and this was venting into the atmosphere. The scientists -- who are part of a multi-year International Shelf Study Expedition -- stressed their findings were preliminary. The scale of methane releases will not be confirmed until they return, analyze the data and have their studies published in a peer-reviewed journal. But the discovery of potentially destabilized slope frozen methane raises concerns that a new tipping point has been reached that could increase the speed of global heating.

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In preparation for next year's Xe HPG graphics cards, Intel's open-source developers have begun publishing their patches enabling their "ANC" Vulkan Linux driver to support Vulkan ray-tracing. Phoronix reports: Jason Ekstrand as the lead developer originally on the Intel ANV driver has posted today the initial ray-tracing code for ANV in order to support VK_KHR_ray_tracing for their forthcoming hardware. Today is the first time Intel has approved of this open-source code being published and more is on the way. The code today isn't enough for Vulkan ray-tracing but more is on the way and based against the latest internal Khronos ray-tracing specification. At the moment they are not focusing on the former NVIDIA-specific ray-tracing extension but may handle it in the future if game vendors continue targeting it rather than the forthcoming finalized KHR version. Among other big ticket items still to come in the near-term includes extending the ANV driver to support compiling and dispatching OpenCL kernels, new SPIR-V capabilities, and generic pointer support. Also needed is the actual support for compiling ray-tracing pipelines, managing acceleration structures, dispatching rays, and the platform support. The actual exposing of the support won't come until after The Khronos Group has firmed up their VK_KHR_ray_tracing extension. Some of this Intel-specific Vulkan ray-tracing code may prove useful to Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver as well. Intel engineers have been testing their latest ray-tracing support with ANV internally on Xe HPG.

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User growth in the United States in Canada -- the company's most lucrative ad market -- has declined, Facebook reported as part of its third-quarter earnings. Engadget reports: The company now has 196 million users in North America, down slightly from 198 million last quarter. In a statement, the company said the decrease was expected, and could continue through the end of the year. "As expected, in the third quarter of 2020, we saw Facebook DAUs and MAUs in the US & Canada decline slightly from the second quarter 2020 levels which were elevated due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic," Facebook wrote in a press release. "In the fourth quarter of 2020, we expect this trend to continue and that the number of DAUs and MAUs in the US & Canada will be flat or slightly down compared to the third quarter of 2020." The company had previously reported a large surge in growth at the start of the year due to widespread coronavirus lockdowns. Facebook isn't seeing the same slowdown everywhere, though, and the social network is continuing to add new users in Asia and its "rest of world" markets. The company also continued to tout its "family of apps" metrics, which combines Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. That number rose to 2.54 billion "daily active people" in September, according to the company. The slowdown also doesn't seem to have affected Facebook's revenue, which was up to $21.4 billion for the quarter, an increase of 22 percent from last year and better than analyst expectations for the company.

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Researchers at Google say they've developing an AI system that can automatically convert webpages into short videos. From a report: It extracts assets like text and images and their design styles including fonts, colors, and graphical layouts from HTML sources and organizes the assets into a sequence of shots, maintaining a look and feel similar to the source page as it does so. Google envisions the system could be useful to businesses that host websites containing rich visual representations about their services or products. These assets, the company says, could be repurposed for videos, potentially enabling those without extensive resources to reach a broader audience. A typical video costs between $880 and $1,200 and can take days to weeks to produce. URL2Video, which was presented at the 2020 User Interface Software and Technology Symposium, automatically selects key content from a page and decides the temporal and visual presentation of each asset.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The Brave web browser will soon block CNAME cloaking, a technique used by online marketers to defy privacy controls designed to prevent the use of third-party cookies. The browser security model makes a distinction between first-party domains -- those being visited -- and third-party domains -- from the suppliers of things like image assets or tracking code, to the visited site. Many of the online privacy abuses over the years have come from third-party resources like scripts and cookies, which is why third-party cookies are now blocked by default in Brave, Firefox, Safari, and Tor Browser. In a blog post on Tuesday, Anton Lazarev, research engineer at Brave Software, and senior privacy researcher Peter Snyder, explain that online tracking scripts may use canonical name DNS records, known as CNAMEs, to make associated third-party tracking domains look like they're part of the first-party websites actually being visited. They point to the site https://mathon.fr/ as an example, noting that without CNAME uncloaking, Brave blocks six requests for tracking scripts served by ad companies like Google, Facebook, Criteo, Sirdan, and Trustpilot. But the page also makes four requests via a script hosted at a randomized path under the first-party subdomain 16ao.mathon.fr. When Brave 1.17 ships next month (currently available as a developer build), it will be able to uncloak the CNAME deception and block the Eulerian script. Other browser vendors are planning related defenses. "Mozilla has been working on a fix in Firefox since last November," notes The Register. "And in August, Apple's Safari WebKit team proposed a way to prevent CNAME cloaking from being used to bypass the seven-day cookie lifetime imposed by WebKit's Intelligent Tracking Protection system."

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fahrbot-bot shares a press release from NASA: NASA's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission has successfully stowed the spacecraft's Sample Return Capsule (SRC) and its abundant sample of asteroid Bennu. On Wednesday, Oct. 28, the mission team sent commands to the spacecraft, instructing it to close the capsule -- marking the end of one of the most challenging phases of the mission. The mission team spent two days working around the clock to carry out the stowage procedure, with preparations for the stowage event beginning Oct. 24. The process to stow the sample is unique compared to other spacecraft operations and required the team's continuous oversight and input over the two-day period. For the spacecraft to proceed with each step in the stowage sequence, the team had to assess images and telemetry from the previous step to confirm the operation was successful and the spacecraft was ready to continue. Given that OSIRIS-REx is currently more than 205 million miles (330 million km) from Earth, this required the team to also work with a greater than 18.5-minute time delay for signals traveling in each direction. Throughout the process, the OSIRIS-REx team continually assessed the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism's (TAGSAM) wrist alignment to ensure the collector head was being placed properly into the SRC. Additionally, the team inspected images to observe any material escaping from the collector head to confirm that no particles would hinder the stowage process. StowCam images of the stowage sequence show that a few particles escaped during the stowage procedure, but the team is confident that a plentiful amount of material remains inside of the head. By the evening of Oct. 27, the spacecraft's TAGSAM arm had placed the collector head into the SRC. The following morning, the OSIRIS-REx team verified that the collector head was thoroughly fastened into the capsule by performing a "backout check." This sequence commanded the TAGSAM arm to attempt to back out of the capsule -- which tugged on the collector head and ensured the latches are well secured.

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