An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Italy’s brand new anti-piracy law has just received full approval from telecoms regulator AGCOM. In a statement issued Thursday, AGCOM noted its position “at the forefront of the European scene in combating online piracy.” The new law comes into force on August 8 and authorizes nationwide ISP blocking of live events and enables the state to issue fines of up to 5,000 euros to users of pirate streams .

In a statement published Thursday, AGCOM welcomed the amendments to Online Copyright Enforcement regulation 680/13/CONS, which concern measures to counter the illegal distribution of live sports streams, as laid out in Resolution 189/23/CONS. The new provisions grant AGCOM the power to issue “dynamic injunctions” against online service providers of all kinds, a privilege usually reserved for judges in Europe’s highest courts. The aim is to streamline blocking measures against unlicensed IPTV services, with the goal of rendering them inaccessible across all of Italy.

“With such measures, it will be possible to disable access to pirated content in the first 30 minutes of the event broadcast by blocking DNS resolution of domain names and blocking the routing of network traffic to IP addresses uniquely intended for illicit activities,” AGCOM says. “With this amendment, in perfect synchrony with the changes introduced by Parliament, AGCOM is once again at the forefront of the European scene in combating online piracy activity,” says AGCOM Commissioner Massimiliano Capitanio.

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Source: Slashdot – Italian Pirate IPTV Customers Risk a 5,000 Euro Fine Starting August 8, 2023

A routine sequence of commands has triggered a 2-degree change in Voyager 2’s antenna orientation, preventing the iconic spacecraft from receiving commands or transmitting data back to Earth, NASA announced earlier today. Mission controllers transmitted the commands to Voyager 2 on July 21. Gizmodo reports: Voyager 2, one of two twin probes launched in the 1970s to explore planets in the outer solar system, is located some 12.4 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from Earth and is continually moving deeper into interstellar space. The glitch has disrupted the probe’s ability to communicate with ground antennas operated by the Deep Space Network (DSN), and it’s unable to receive commands from the mission team on Earth, NASA explained.

The communications pause is expected to be just that — a pause. Voyager 2 is “programmed to reset its orientation multiple times each year to keep its antenna pointing at Earth,” the space agency says. This procedure should — fingers crossed — re-establish the lost connection and allow routine communications to resume. The next reset is scheduled for October 15, which is 79 days from now. Undoubtedly, this will be 79 agonizing days for NASA and the Voyager team. Despite the current communication hiatus, the mission team remains confident that Voyager 2 will stay on its planned trajectory. Voyager 1, situated nearly 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth, “continues to operate normally,” NASA added.

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Source: Slashdot – NASA’s Voyager 2 Is Experiencing an Unplanned ‘Communications Pause’

sciencehabit shares a report from Science: Water is a near-universal solvent, able to dissolve substances ranging from limestone to the sugar in your coffee. That chemical superpower originates, oddly enough, in water’s electrical properties. It can oppose and almost entirely cancel electric fields — including attractions among dissolved ions that might otherwise pull them together. Curiously, dissolving salt in water weakens that electrical response. Now, a team of physicists has figured out exactly why this happens, using state-of-the-art computer simulations bolstered by artificial intelligence (AI).

‘This is a fundamental property of water and one can finally do a calculation in which this can be entirely predicted from first principles,’ says Roberto Car, a physicist at Princeton University who was not involved in the work. The AI-aided approach should allow physicists to probe in other settings, he says, such as batteries and fuel cells. […] The results show that most of the salinity effect comes from the disruption of the clustering and correlations produced by hydrogen bonding, the team reports in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters. The researchers can pull out even more detail, explaining exactly how disruptions propagating through the network of water molecules make the dielectric constant vary with the salt concentration in a complex, nonlinear way.

“They can distinguish all the different contributions and identify which effect is dominant over the other,” Car says. Yuki Nagata, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, says, “This is more or less conclusive.” More important than this specific result may be the AI-based method, Nagata adds. It could be used for more practical problems, such as analyzing the interactions of water with membranes or surfaces. Zhang says she’s doing just that, analyzing the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen along the surface of a titanium dioxide catalyst, one potential way to generate hydrogen for fuel.

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Source: Slashdot – AI Helps Crack Salt Water’s Curious Electrical Properties

Katie Malone writes via Engadget: “Tor” evokes an image of the dark web; a place to hire hitmen or buy drugs that, at this point, is overrun by feds trying to catch you in the act. The reality, however, is a lot more boring than that — but it’s also more secure. The Onion Router, now called Tor, is a privacy-focused web browser run by a nonprofit group. You can download it for free and use it to shop online or browse social media, just like you would on Chrome or Firefox or Safari, but with additional access to unlisted websites ending in .onion. This is what people think of as the “dark web,” because the sites aren’t indexed by search engines. But those sites aren’t an inherently criminal endeavor.

“This is not a hacker tool,” said Pavel Zoneff, director of strategic communications at The Tor Project. “It is a browser just as easy to use as any other browser that people are used to.” That’s right, despite common misconceptions, Tor can be used for any internet browsing you usually do. The key difference with Tor is that the network hides your IP address and other system information for full anonymity. This may sound familiar, because it’s how a lot of people approach VPNs, but the difference is in the details. VPNs are just encrypted tunnels hiding your traffic from one hop to another. The company behind a VPN can still access your information, sell it or pass it along to law enforcement. With Tor, there’s no link between you and your traffic, according to Jed Crandall, an associate professor at Arizona State University. Tor is built in the “higher layers” of the network and routes your traffic through separate tunnels, instead of a single encrypted tunnel. While the first tunnel may know some personal information and the last one may know the sites you visited, there is virtually nothing connecting those data points because your IP address and other identifying information are bounced from server to server into obscurity.

Accessing unindexed websites adds extra perks, like secure communication. While a platform like WhatsApp offers encrypted conversations, there could be traces that the conversation happened left on the device if it’s ever investigated, according to Crandall. Tor’s communication tunnels are secure and much harder to trace that the conversation ever happened. Other use cases may include keeping the identities of sensitive populations like undocumented immigrants anonymous, trying to unionize a workplace without the company shutting it down, victims of domestic violence looking for resources without their abuser finding out or, as Crandall said, wanting to make embarrassing Google searches without related targeted ads following you around forever.

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Source: Slashdot – ‘Tor’s Shadowy Reputation Will Only End If We All Use It’

The world’s largest community of 3D-printed homes, located in Texas, has unveiled its first completed house. CNN reports: With walls “printed” using a concrete-based material, the single-story structure is the first of 100 such homes set to welcome residents starting September. The community is part of a wider development in Georgetown, Texas called Wolf Ranch. It’s located about 30 miles north of Austin, the state capital, and is a collaboration between Texas construction firm ICON, homebuilding company Lennar and Danish architecture practice Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). On Saturday prospective buyers toured around the finished model home at the project’s grand opening, and some of the units have already sold, ICON spokesperson Cara Caulkins told CNN via email.

Images of the newly completed building shared by the company show brightly lit interiors and curved gray walls. The walls are made from a concrete mix called Lavacrete, which is piped into place using 46-foot-wide robotic printers. After the walls are printed, the doors, windows and roofs — all of which are equipped with solar panels — are installed. ICON says more than a third of the homes’ walls have now been printed, and the properties currently on offer are being sold at $475,000 to $599,000. The 3D-printed homes range in size from 1,500 to 2,100 square feet and have three to four bedrooms.

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Source: Slashdot – Inside the World’s Largest 3D-Printed Neighborhood In Texas

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: U.S. government services contracting giant Maximus has confirmed that hackers exploiting a vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer accessed the protected health information of as many as 11 million individuals. Virginia-based Maximus contracts with federal, state and local governments to manage and administer government-sponsored programs, such as Medicaid, Medicare, healthcare reform and welfare-to-work. In an 8-K filing on Wednesday, Maximus confirmed that the personal information of a “significant number” of individuals was accessed by hackers exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer, which the organization uses to “share data with government customers pertaining to individuals who participate in various government programs.”

While Maximus hasn’t yet been able to confirm the exact number of individuals impacted — something the company expects to take “several more weeks” — the organization said it believes hackers accessed the personal data, including Social Security numbers and protected health information, of “at least” 8 to 11 million individuals. If the latter, this would make the breach the largest breach of healthcare data this year — and the most significant data breach reported as a result of the MOVEit mass-hacks. Maximus has not confirmed which specific types of health data were accessed and has not responded to TechCrunch’s questions. In its 8-K filing, the company said it began notifying impacted customers and federal and state regulators, adding that it expects the security incident to cost approximately $15 million to investigate and remediate. Clop, the Russia-linked data extortion group responsible for the MOVEit mass-hacks, claims to have stolen 169 gigabytes of data from Maximus, which it has not yet published. The report notes that “more than 500 organizations have so far been impacted by the MOVEit mass-hacks, exposing the personal information of more than 34.5 million people.”

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Source: Slashdot – MOVEit Hackers Accessed Health Data of ‘At Least’ 8 Million Individuals