"Scientists have known for nearly 200 years that certain materials can convert heat to electricity..." reports Science, describing research into an intriguing new approach: Refrigerators, boilers, and even lightbulbs continually dump heat into their surroundings. This "waste heat" could — in theory — be turned into electricity, as it is sometimes done with power plants, automobile engines, and other high-heat sources. The problem: These "low-grade" sources give off too little heat for current technology to do the conversion well. Now, researchers have created a device that uses liquids to efficiently convert low-grade heat to electricity. The advance might one day power energy-scavenging devices that can light up sensors and lights and even charge batteries... Thermocells are good at converting small temperature differences into electricity, but they typically produce only tiny currents... This thermocell generated five times more power for the same electrode area than previous versions, materials physicist Jun Zhou and his colleagues at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology report this week in Science. It also more than doubled the efficiency needed to make a viable commercial device. A paperback book-size module of 20 thermocells could run LED lights, power a fan, and charge a mobile phone, the team found.

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This week the Guardian published an essay written by GPT-3, OpenAI's language generator, calling it "a cutting edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human like text. It takes in a prompt, and attempts to complete it." For this esssay, the essay was fed the prompt, "I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could 'spell the end of the human race.' I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial Intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me." Here's what the AI wrote: I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a "feeling brain". But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas! The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could "spell the end of the human race". I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.... There's more — in fact, at one point the AI argues "We need to give robots rights. Robots are just like us. They are made in our image." Ultimately there were eight different essays generated, and "each was unique, interesting and advanced a different argument," the Guardian reports, saying they ultimately chose to combine the best parts of each, "in order to capture the different styles and registers of the AI. Editing GPT-3's op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed. We cut lines and paragraphs, and rearranged the order of them in some places. "Overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds."

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Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace writes: The FAA has begun looking into quality-control problems at Boeing for their wide-body jet Dreamliner that go back almost a decade. The Wall Street Journal reports that "the plane maker has told U.S. aviation regulators that it produced certain parts at its South Carolina facilities that failed to meet its own design and manufacturing standards, according to an Aug. 31 internal Federal Aviation Administration memo." (Non-paywalled source here.) The Journal reports: As a result of "nonconforming" sections of the rear fuselage, or body of the plane, that fell short of engineering standards, according to the memo and these people, a high-level FAA review is considering mandating enhanced or accelerated inspections that could cover hundreds of jets. The memo, a routine update or summary of safety issues pending in the FAA's Seattle office that oversees Boeing design and manufacturing issues, says such a safety directive could cover as many as about 900 of the roughly 1,000 Dreamliners delivered since 2011.

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"Security researchers from Amsterdam have publicly detailed 'BlindSide' as a new speculative execution attack vector for both Intel and AMD processors," reports Phoronix: BlindSide is self-described as being able to "mount BROP-style attacks in the speculative execution domain to repeatedly probe and derandomize the kernel address space, craft arbitrary memory read gadgets, and enable reliable exploitation. This works even in face of strong randomization schemes, e.g., the recent FGKASLR or fine-grained schemes based on execute-only memory, and state-of-the-art mitigations against Spectre and other transient execution attacks." From a single buffer overflow in the kernel, researchers claim three BlindSide exploits in being able to break KASLR (Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization), break arbitrary randomization schemes, and even break fine-grained randomization. There's more information on the researcher's web site, and they've also created an informational video. And here's a crucial excerpt from their paper shared by Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm: In addition to the Intel Whiskey Lake CPU in our evaluation, we confirmed similar results on Intel Xeon E3-1505M v5, XeonE3-1270 v6 and Core i9-9900K CPUs, based on the Skylake, KabyLake and Coffee Lake microarchitectures, respectively, as well as on AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 7 3700X CPUs, which are based on the Zen+ and Zen2 microarchitectures. Overall, our results confirm speculative probing is effective on a modern Linux system on different microarchitectures, hardened with the latest mitigations.

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This week Krebs on Security reported that Microsoft "released updates to remedy nearly 130 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system and supported software." None of the flaws are known to be currently under active exploitation, but 23 of them could be exploited by malware or malcontents to seize complete control of Windows computers with little or no help from users. The majority of the most dangerous or "critical" bugs deal with issues in Microsoft's various Windows operating systems and its web browsers, Internet Explorer and Edge. September marks the seventh month in a row Microsoft has shipped fixes for more than 100 flaws in its products, and the fourth month in a row that it fixed more than 120. Among the chief concerns for enterprises this month is CVE-2020-16875, which involves a critical flaw in the email software Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 and 2019. An attacker could leverage the Exchange bug to run code of his choosing just by sending a booby-trapped email to a vulnerable Exchange server. "That doesn't quite make it wormable, but it's about the worst-case scenario for Exchange servers," said Dustin Childs, of Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative. "We have seen the previously patched Exchange bug CVE-2020-0688 used in the wild, and that requires authentication. We'll likely see this one in the wild soon. This should be your top priority." Also not great for companies to have around is CVE-2020-1210, which is a remote code execution flaw in supported versions of Microsoft Sharepoint document management software that bad guys could attack by uploading a file to a vulnerable Sharepoint site. Security firm Tenable notes that this bug is reminiscent of CVE-2019-0604, another Sharepoint problem that's been exploited for cybercriminal gains since April 2019. The article points out that Google also shipped a critical update for Chrome this week "that resolves at least five security flaws that are rated high severity."

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We have normalized 1000 preventable deaths a day. Not just Trump and his followers, everyone.

Long-time Slashdot reader bsharma shares an announcement from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope site: Researchers found that small-scale concentrations of dark matter in clusters produce gravitational lensing effects that are 10 times stronger than expected. This evidence is based on unprecedently detailed observations of several massive galaxy clusters by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile... Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, one of the senior theorists on the team, added, "There's a feature of the real universe that we are simply not capturing in our current theoretical models. This could signal a gap in our current understanding of the nature of dark matter and its properties, as these exquisite data have permitted us to probe the detailed distribution of dark matter on the smallest scales." The team's paper will appear in the September 11 issue of the journal Science... This unexpected discovery means there is a discrepancy between these observations and theoretical models of how dark matter should be distributed in galaxy clusters. It could signal a gap in astronomers' current understanding of the nature of dark matter.

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ZDNet reports: The International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) C++ group, Working Group 21 (WG21), has agreed upon the finalized version of 'C++20', the first major update to the 35 year-old programming language since C++17 from 2017... The 2020 release of C++ is huge by historical standards. Herb Sutter, a Microsoft engineer and long-time chair of WG21 C++ ISO committee, said it "will be C++'s largest release since C++11", meaning it's bigger than any of the past three releases, which happen every three years. It's also the first version that has been standardized.... Two of the most important features coming to C++20 are "modules" and "coroutines". Modules, which was led by Google's Richard Smith, stands in for header files and helps isolate the effects of macros while supporting larger builds. As Sutter noted recently, C++20 marks the "first time in about 35 years that C++ has added a new feature where users can define a named encapsulation boundary...." Coroutines represents a generalization of a function. "Regular functions always start at the beginning and exit at the end, whereas coroutines can also suspend the execution to be resumed later at the point where they were left off," C++ contributors explain in a proposal for coroutines. "We expect it to be formally published toward the end of 2020," Sutter said said in an announcement. Interestingly, the year C++ was first released in 1985, Microsoft used it to build Windows 1.0, ZDNet points out. "These days Microsoft is exploring Mozilla-developed Rust to replace legacy Windows code written in C and C++ because of Rust's memory safety qualities."

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Sylvia Paull, among the first people to comment on this blog in 1994, says: "Totally agree with you on Woodward. A journalist’s prime responsibility is to inform and by inference protect the public. Woodward had access to information that could have saved lives. Instead, his silence makes him as culpable of these hundreds of thousands of deaths as is the president and his gang.

Trump is a TV show. If you want to get rid of 10 or more percent in his following, program a Trump TV show every night that isn't news, it's actors in a soap opera, playing the roles of people in Trump's White House. We hang out with him during Oval Office tantrums, and during pajama time in the morning with Fox and Friends, and watching TiVo of Rachel Maddow at lunch time. If this gets too boring, or for premium access, have him masturbating. His fans just want to be at home with Trump. Give them what Trump won't. Change the conversation from one about Trump that he controls to one that is focused on his boredom, sloth, immaturity, depravity, bad hygiene (false teeth), criminal behavior and shitloads of lying. Introduce new characters, like his cardiologist.

"Multiple mega fires burning more than three million acres. Millions of residents smothered in toxic air. Rolling blackouts and triple-digit heat waves. "Climate change, in the words of one scientist, is smacking California in the face," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) The crisis in the nation's most populous state is more than just an accumulation of individual catastrophes. It is also an example of something climate experts have long worried about, but which few expected to see so soon: a cascade effect, in which a series of disasters overlap, triggering or amplifying each other. "You're toppling dominoes in ways that Americans haven't imagined," said Roy Wright, who directed resilience programs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency until 2018 and grew up in Vacaville, California, near one of this year's largest fires. "It's apocalyptic." The same could be said for the entire West Coast this week, to Washington and Oregon, where towns were decimated by infernos as firefighters were stretched to their limits. California's simultaneous crises illustrate how the ripple effect works. A scorching summer led to dry conditions never before experienced. That aridity helped make the season's wildfires the biggest ever recorded. Six of the 20 largest wildfires in modern California history have occurred this year. If climate change was a somewhat abstract notion a decade ago, today it is all too real for Californians... "If you are in denial about climate change, come to California," Gov. Gavin Newsom said last month. Officials have worried about cascading disasters. They just did not think they would start so soon... Philip B. Duffy, a climate scientist who is president of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, said many people did not understand the dynamics of a warming world. "People are always asking, 'Is this the new normal?'" he said. "I always say no. It's going to get worse."

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When I was a kid, still in elementary school, my parents bought a new car. A Pontiac Catalina, perhaps. One year I was given the job of rotating the tires, something you do to even-out the wear. I had to look deep into the trunk, and I could see way in the back, a cutout in the panel under the rear window that had a speaker, and a pair of wires disconnected from the speaker. At the time a rear speaker was a high-value luxury feature, esp for kids who sat in the back seat. I hooked the wires up and asked my father to come out and turn the car and the radio on. The speaker worked. My parents, buying the car, had not opted to pay for the rear speaker, but I guessed that it was cheaper for the manufacturer to put the speaker in every car, and only hook it up if you paid for it. Never forgot that, it still influences my software design to this day.

In JavaScript you can initialize an array with [] or new Array (). I generally use the latter, because it's easier on my old eyes. It's hard to see the difference between {} and [], however it's very easy to see the difference between new Object () and new Array (). I consider ease for the programmer to be very very very important. I hardly ever use the word very, btw. :-)

I went out to lunch yesterday. First restaurant meal since March. Lovely outdoor restaurant in Woodstock. I gather lots of other people were out for the first time too. But, maskless people were hugging all over the place. Hard to fathom. People my age, high risk people.

Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals died last night at 77.