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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 08 - 13 MAY 2023
Hello and Welcome,
The Coronation
Remember to watch the Coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla on Saturday, May 6th (TODAY).
The procession from Buckingham Palace begins at 10:20 am GMT, which is about 7:20 pm AEST.
— Ed.
Will there be a public holiday in Australia?
No, sorry.
People in the UK will get a public holiday, known as a 'bank holiday' on Monday, May 8.
Are Harry and Megan going?
After months of speculation, Prince Harry confirmed he would attend his father's coronation, but his wife, Megan Markle, will stay home with their two children as the coronation collides with their son's birthday.
— ABC News
Meeting TODAY
2023/05/06 — 13:00-14:00 — May, Sat — Penrith Group (MEETING)
Meeting This Week
2023/05/09 — 18:00-20:00 — May, Tue — Programming
Meetings Next Week
2023/05/16 — 10:00-12:00 — May, Tue — Tuesday Group
2023/05/20 — 14:00-16:00 — May, Sat — Web Design
Schedule of Current & Upcoming Meetings
First Tuesday 18:00-20:00 — Main Meeting
First Saturday 13:00-14:00 — Penrith Group
Second Tuesday 18:00-20:00 — Programming
Third Tuesday 10:00-12:00 — Tuesday Group
Third Saturday 14:00-16:00 — Web Design
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Go to the official Sydney PC Calendar for this month's meeting details.
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Penrith meetings are held every 2nd month on the 1st Saturday from 1-2 pm. The next meetings are in May, July and September 2023.
ASCCA News:Tech News:
Microsoft is Rewriting Parts of the Windows Kernel in Rust
See the Thurrott article by Paul Thurrott on Apr 29, 2023.
Microsoft vice president David Weston revealed this week that Microsoft would follow Linux and rewrite parts of the Windows kernel in Rust.
"We're in the crawling stage of crawl, walk, run of Rust in Windows," Mr Weston said during an appearance at Microsoft's BlueHat IL 2023 conference. "We're talking about one of the most complex engineering products on the planet. But our goal is to do this to improve security … So you will see Windows booting with Rust in the kernel in probably the next several weeks or months, which is really cool. The basic goal here is to convert some of these internal C++ data types into their Rust equivalents."
The sample code he displayed demonstrated part of the reason for this conversion: the Rust code is much easier to write and understand than the current C++ code. It's also safer and more secure: for those unfamiliar, Rust is a modern C-like programming language that's beloved by developers because it forces the creation of safe, native code without the overhead of managed languages.
According to Weston, Microsoft has already rewritten 36,000 lines of code in the Windows kernel in Rust, in addition to another 152,000 lines of code it wrote for a proof of concept DirectWrite Core library, and the performance is excellent with no regressions compared to the old C++ code. He also said "There is now a syscall in the Windows kernel, written in Rust." A syscall, or system call, is how user mode applications interact with internal kernel functions (to oversimplify it).
I'd like to see how Microsoft calls out this work in the future, but the DirectWrite Core library is available now in the Windows App SDK, and some GDI work is coming soon to Insiders. What Microsoft won't be doing is replacing the entire "40 years of work" in C/C++ in the kernel with Rust. Still, I'm sure it makes sense to replace some of that work to remove legacy attack surfaces while moving new kernel work to Rust, as is the case with Linux: the recently released Linux 6.1 kernel is the first to include Rust code.
Amazon Seller Fined $600k for Review Manipulation.
See the InfoPackets article by John Lister on May 2, 2023, at 01:05 pm EDT.
A company that manipulated Amazon listings to deceive customers has been fined $600,000. It's the first time the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has punished a business for "review hijacking."
The Bountiful Company sells a range of nutritional supplements. According to the FTC, it listed more than 1,000 products on Amazon. (Source: ftc.gov)
One of the tactics it used took advantage of how Amazon groups "variation" products. This is meant to cover situations such as an identical t-shirt that's available in multiple colours or a medicine that's available in different size bottles.
The idea of the grouping is that crucial information for the different variations can be combined. For example, each page for a different colour of the t-shirt could show the combined number of customer ratings and average ratings for all versions.
Bogus Connections
According to the FTC, The Bountiful Company abused this feature by falsely linking unconnected products as variations. It took poorly reviewed products and linked them to more successful and higher-rated products. Done in the right combination, both products would now appear to be popular and well-rated.
Although the FTC used the phrase "review hijacking," the seller was piggybacking off its products rather than taking credit for rival products. It wasn't just the number of reviews and star ratings that were effectively manipulated by these tactics. In some cases, the less popular products were made to look as if they had been available for longer when they were new on the market.
"Best Seller" Baloney
The manipulation also meant some products were incorrectly labelled as "number one best sellers" or carried an "Amazon's Choice" badge. (Source: theinformation.com)
The Bountiful Company has now agreed to an FTC order under which it will no longer mislead customers in this way or falsely link products as "variations". It will also pay a financial penalty of $600,000.
Fun Facts:
Cosmic controversy: James Webb Telescope findings challenge best-established theories
The James Webb Space Telescope is finding multiple galaxies that grew too massive too soon after the Big Bang, possibly leading to changes in prevailing cosmology theories.
First, the Big Bang is questioned. Then Dark Matter. What is going on in Space Science?
— Ed.
If dark matter is ubiquitous, why do some galaxies contain none?
See the Sky-at-Night-Magazine article by Anita Chandran | Published: May 1, 2023, at 8:30 am.
What does a galaxy without dark matter or very little of it mean?
Next time you're looking at a beautiful image of multiple stars and galaxies like those captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, or staring in awe at the latest James Webb Space Telescope images, consider this:
All the 'normal' visible matter we can see in the Universe — planets, stars, galaxies etc. — accounts for just 5% of its total content.
The rest is composed of dark energy — the name given to the force that appears to be accelerating the rate of the expansion of the Universe — and dark matter — which is known to exist but cannot be observed directly.
So the question is this: if dark matter accounts for a vast amount of the known matter in our Universe, why do some galaxies appear to contain almost none of it?
What does a galaxy without dark matter or very little of it mean?
This is the question asked by Pavel Mancera Piña, a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, who specialises in dark matter.
We spoke to Piña to find out more.
What is dark matter, and why is it called 'dark'?
Evidence suggests there should be a certain amount of mass in the Universe, but this mass cannot be observed directly.
Even in early works from the 1920s, astronomers knew that to explain how fast some galaxies move, there needed to be more mass than we could account for.
An astronomer called Fritz Zwicky came up with the name 'dark matter', but essentially the name only reflects that we don't know what it is.
What might dark matter be made of?
Most of the community — not all — believes that dark matter is made of particles that don't interact with electromagnetic radiation, instead only interacting with ordinary matter through gravity.
Essentially, it doesn't absorb or emit light (and heat). We can only infer that it's there due to gravitational effects.
The problem is that although we have built experiments like the Large Hadron Collider, we haven't been able to detect dark matter particles, so we don't know their exact properties.
How do you look for dark matter?
By looking at how fast galaxies rotate. We know the rotation of a galaxy is a consequence of its total mass, so if we can observe how fast a galaxy rotates, then we know its total mass.
We can compare the total mass measured from how fast the galaxy rotates with the mass of stars and gas [in the galaxy], which we can observe directly from telescopes.
We can then look at the mismatch between the two to infer how much dark matter there is in the galaxy.
There is typically an extreme mismatch, suggesting a lot of mass that we don't see.
What do your investigations show?
Our team was looking at a galaxy that was very peculiar because it's classified as an 'ultra-diffuse' galaxy.
These galaxies are weird because the distribution of light within them is similar to giant spiral galaxies like the Andromeda Galaxy or the Milky Way.
But they have about 1,000 times less stellar mass than giant galaxies. Some people say they have the mass of dwarf galaxies but the size of giants.
We observed the motion of gas in one of these galaxies using the Very Large Array, a set of antennae in New Mexico, to obtain very sharp images.
We measured how fast the gas is rotating in this galaxy. And then we tried to see how much dark matter there was.
Usually, when you look at small galaxies, you find that most of the mass is dark matter. 90%, maybe 80%.
We found instead that there was a very small contribution from dark matter in this galaxy.
If you take the numbers, you could argue that you don't need dark matter to explain how fast the galaxy is rotating.
Why do ultra-diffuse galaxies have little dark matter?
According to our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution, all galaxies should have dark matter.
So if you see a galaxy with little dark matter, it's very puzzling, though some mechanisms could explain it.
A potential explanation is that the galaxies have dark matter, but their density is very low.
This tells us that the distribution of dark matter in these galaxies — if there is dark matter — should be very atypical and utterly different from what we expect from our galaxy formation and evolution models.
What do galaxies with little to no dark matter tell us?
They challenge the norm in different aspects.
They may be telling us that the distribution of dark matter in galaxies is much broader than what we would have expected.
Or they are telling us that other mechanisms can produce low dark matter densities.
What is very exciting is that we can use these observations to infer the dark matter content, and perhaps these galaxies can tell us something about the nature of dark matter itself.
This interview originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of BBC Sky at Night Magazine.
Anita Chandran is a physicist, a science writer and Communications Officer at the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser Facility.
Meeting Location & Disclaimer
Bob Backstrom
~ Newsletter Editor ~
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