Technology

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: With select bucket seats from the 911 and 718 as well as various classic car parts -- including clutch release levers for the 959 -- already being produced using 3D printing, Porsche is more familiar with the technology than most. Now, the automaker is taking things even further, 3D printing entire pistons for its most powerful 991-gen 911, the GT2 RS. Although it doesn't sound like these 3D-printed pistons will actually be found in many production Porsches anytime soon, they represent a bit more than just an engineering flex. There are some very real mechanical benefits here. For starters, they weigh 10 percent less than their forged equivalents and feature an integrated and closed cooling duct in the piston crown that's apparently unable to be reproduced using traditional manufacturing methods. The decrease in weight and temperature results in an extra 30 horsepower on top of the GT2 RS's already mighty 700. Produced in partnership with German auto part maker Mahle and industrial machine manufacturer Trumpf, the pistons are made out of a high-purity metal powder developed in-house by the former using the laser metal fusion process, essentially a laser beam that heats and melts the metal powder into the desired shape. The end result is then validated using measurement technology from Zeiss, the German optics company best known for camera lenses.

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Chartered Institute of Information Security finds many overworked, under-resourced, stressed

Almost one in five infosec pros have quit a job due to overwork or burnout caused by the constant pressure of keeping things safe and doing so without the resources to counter ever-evolving threats.…

A little something to keep determined snoopers out, in theory

Google Cloud will today announce the availability, as a beta, so-called Confidential Virtual Machines that feature on-the-fly RAM encryption using per-VM keys.…

What’s that smell? It could be Oh So Orange, Clearly White or Almost Black

Google has revealed it employs people to invent colours and give them silly names, too.…

Also: Hope Probe hopes for lift-off, Virgin teases SpaceShipTwo interior, Ariane 6 slips

In brief  SpaceX's 10th Starlink mission remained resolutely welded to the launchpad over the weekend as the company decided to stand down from a 11 July launch attempt in order to "allow more time for checkouts".…

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A pair of earthquakes that struck the remote California desert 1 year ago have raised the risk of 'the big one' hitting Southern California, according to a new study. The research finds that the 2019 Ridgecrest, California, quakes shifted underground stresses, making the San Andreas fault -- the state's longest and most dangerous fault -- three times more likely to rupture. U.S. Geological Survey estimates for the annual probability of an earthquake on this part of the San Andreas are about one-third of a percent -- equivalent to expecting a magnitude 7.8 every 300 years, on average. The new modeling triples that hazard to 1% per year -- or a big one every century. And if the Garlock actually does rupture, then the hazard really rises on the San Andreas, by a factor of 150: The probability of a big one rises to 50% in the following year. In principle, a Garlock earthquake could lead to rupture on the San Andreas in a matter of hours or days, much as the two Ridgecrest events came within a day or two. USGS regional scenarios anticipate 1,800 deaths and 50,000 injuries in the event of a major San Andreas earthquake. More than 3 million homes could be damaged, at a reconstruction cost of $289 billion. The study has been published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

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Counterfeit and repurposed semiconductors still a problem

If you're looking for cheap electronic sensors, the internet has lots of possibilities, but buyer beware: they aren't always exactly legit.…

From happy hour to happy power

As if a few volts were enough to get between a steaming Cornishman and his pint, a pub near the UK pirate haven of Penzance has run an electric fence along the bar to enforce social distancing. And yes, it can be turned on.…

'Project Ubin' might be faster and cheaper than current tools, even for central banks

Singapore’s experimental digital-ledger-powered payments service has proven itself ready to handle actual transactions in multiple currencies, according to the organisations involved in its final tests.…

You wanted an android butler? Well, first it's gotta learn to hold a wire, then we can talk about folding sheets

Video  An MIT team has built a robot that can plug cables into jacks.…

Interested in Helm, service meshes and what’s next for DevOps? Grab your ticket now – there's still time

Event  Mid-July is almost here, and with it the first online edition of our excellent Continuous Lifecycle London conference.…

Cambridge Engineering alumnus Hal Evans has built a fully-functioning replica of a 1930s Polish cyclometer -- an electromechanical cryptologic device that was designed to assist in the decryption of German Enigma ciphertext. The replica currently resides in King's College, Cambridge. TechXplore reports: Work on the hardware-based replica began in 2018, as part of Hal's fourth year Master's project under the supervision of King's College Fellow and Senior Tutor Dr. Tim Flack. The aim was to investigate further into cryptologist Marian Rejewski's cyclometer -- an early forerunner to Cambridge University mathematician Alan Turing's machine, known as the Bombe, which was used to crack the German Enigma code during the Second World War. Hal said he chose to work on the cyclometer as it was the very first machine used to assist the decryption effort. To his knowledge, the replica is the first fully-functioning hardware-based electromechanical cyclometer to exist since the years preceding the Second World War. The original machines would have been destroyed in 1939 to prevent them from falling into the hands of German invaders. Rejewski's cyclometer exploited the German's procedure at the time of double encipherment of the Enigma message key, and semi-automated the process for calculating what were known as 'characteristics' for every possible Enigma rotor starting position. There were more than 100,000 of these rotor starting positions, and they each needed their characteristic to be calculated and catalogued in a card index system. The cyclometer therefore eliminated the arduous task of calculating these characteristics by hand. The machine consisted of, in effect, two interlinked Enigma systems side-by-side -- one offset by three positions relative to the other -- and 26 lamps and switches to cover the alphabet. On operation, a certain number of bulbs illuminated, indicating the lengths of the characteristics. These were recorded for every single possible rotor starting position to create an immense look-up catalogue. Once this was completed, obtaining the daily Enigma rotor starting settings to decode messages was a simple matter of intercepting enough messages and referencing the catalogue, taking only a matter of minutes.

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13 percent growth ain’t bad, but the Chinese giant has previously done better

Huawei has posted its results for the first half of 2020 and the news is mixed.…

Bags, soap, cosmetics covered, Trump admin backs away from President’s threatened wine levy

America is moving ahead with massive 25 per cent tariffs on French products in retaliation for the Euro nation approving a new digital tax aimed squarely at tech giants like Google and Facebook.…

Grant Imahara, an electrical engineer and roboticist who hosted the popular science show MythBusters and Netflix's White Rabbit Project, has died suddenly following a brain aneurysm. He was 49. From The Hollywood Reporter: An electrical engineer and roboticist by training, he joined Discovery's MythBusters in its third season, replacing Scottie Chapman and was with the show until 2014 when he left with with co-hosts Kari Byron and Tory Belleci. The trio would reunite in 2016 for Netflix's White Rabbit Project which lasted for one season. On MythBusters, Imahara used his technical expertise to design and build robots for the show and also operated the computers and electronics needed to test myths. Born in Los Angeles, Imahara studied electrical engineering at the University of Southern California (though he briefly had doubts and wanted to become a screenwriter) before combining the two passions and landing a post-graduation gig at Lucasfilm-associated THX labs. In his nine years at Lucasfilm, he worked for the company's THX and Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) divisions. In his years at ILM he became chief model maker specializing in animatronics and worked on George Lucas' Star Wars prequels, as well as The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, Galaxy Quest, XXX: State of the Union, Van Helsing, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. [...] Imahara also starred in several episodes of the fan-made web series Star Trek Continues. He played Hikaru Sulu, a lieutenant, helmsman and third officer on the USS Enterprise, in the show that was an unofficial continuation of Star Trek: The Original Series. "We are heartbroken to hear this sad news about Grant. He was an important part of our Discovery family and a really wonderful man. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family," a representative for Discovery said in a statement on Monday.

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Your order [Ref #RYUGU_REGOLITH | Picked up by probe #HAYABYUSA2] has shipped!

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has announced that its attempt to bring a chunk of asteroid back to Earth will touch down in December.…

Minister declares special economic zones are open to even China and Russian money so long as they do something digital or medical

Pakistan has become the latest Asian nation to declare it will roll out the welcome mat for foreign investors who want to do something to do with technology on its soil.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Researchers in Singapore have developed an apparatus that can be placed in a window to reduce incoming sound by 10 decibels. The system was created by a team of scientists, including Masaharu Nishimura, who came up with the basic concept, and Bhan Lam, a researcher at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Their results were published on Thursday in Scientific Reports. The prototype is not yet the most practical device in real world conditions, but it points the way toward the development of technologies that may help ease the strain of noisy city living. Borrowing from the same technological principles used in noise-canceling headphones, the team expanded the concept to fit an entire room by placing 24 small speakers in a window. The speakers emit sound waves that correspond to the incoming racket and neutralize it -- or, at least some of it. The system is based on the frequency of the sound waves and, for now, the optimal range is between 300 and 1,000 hertz. [...] The system uses a microphone outside the window to detect the repeating sound waves of the offending noise source, which is registered by a computer controller. That in turn deciphers the proper wave frequency needed to neutralize the sound, which is transmitted to the array of speakers on the inside of the window frame. The speakers then emit the proper "anti" waves, which cancel out the incoming waves, and there you have it: near blissful silence. Unfortunately, there are some limitations. The system works best from the types of steady noise sources found within the optimal frequency range and isn't great at neutralizing sporadic noises. Also, since human voices don't fit within most of that range, they won't be canceled out.

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Localisation and transformation plan wins prime ministerial approval, but as usual has as much upside for Google as for its generous hosts

Google has unveiled a plan to invest $10bn in India over the next five to seven years.…

Crooks made off with everything needed for ID theft

Hackers infiltrated Collabera, siphoned off at least some employees' personal information, and infected the US-based IT consultancy giant's systems with ransomware.…