La France aujourd'hui

14/06/2022

NASA’s new powerful space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, got pelted by a larger than expected micrometeoroid at the end of May, causing some detectable damage to one of the spacecraft’s 18 primary mirror segments. The impact means that the mission team will have to correct for the distortion created by the strike, but NASA says that the telescope is “still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements.”

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, is the agency’s incredibly powerful next-generation space telescope, designed to look into the farthest reaches of the Universe and see back in time to the stars and galaxies that formed just after the Big Bang. It cost NASA nearly $10 billion to build and more than two decades to complete. But, on Christmas Day 2021, the telescope finally launched to space, where it underwent an extremely complex unfolding process before reaching its final destination roughly 1 million miles from Earth.

One of JWST’s 18 mirrors was struck.

13/06/2022

Twitter’s redesigned process for reporting policy violations on its platform is now widely available, the company has announced. It’s designed to handle everything from reports about misinformation and spam, to harassment and hate speech. The redesign has been in testing since December last year, and uses a so-called “symptoms-first reporting flow” that’s designed to make it easier to report bad behavior. It’s now available in “most countries” across web, iOS, and Android.

The company outlined how the new process works in a blog post last year. Previously, Twitter’s process would ask which policy has been broken, and then ask for more details. Instead, the new flow asks for details on what’s happened, before getting more granular about which rules may have been broken. Twitter’s blog post likened the new process to a doctor asking “Where does it hurt?” rather than immediately jumping to specifics.

Using a new ‘symptoms-first’ flow.

10/06/2022

Even though more companies than ever are proclaiming that they’re powered by renewable energy, those claims are usually exaggerated, new research shows. That disconnect between a company’s claims and reality could jeopardize global efforts to stop climate change.

The problem stems from companies’ reliance on Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) to back up their green claims. A company receives a REC by paying to support renewable energy projects around the world. When brands say that they’re powering their business with 100 percent renewable energy, they’re typically still using electricity generated by fossil fuels; they’re just buying up renewable energy certificates to try to cancel out the environmental impact of their energy use.

The climate gains companies report can be misleading.

08/06/2022

GiveSendGo, a crowdfunding website that was being used to source donations for the “Freedom Convoy” protest mounted by Canadian truckers, has been taken offline in an apparent hack and information about alleged donors leaked online.

On Sunday night, the GiveSendGo domain began to redirect to a new domain — GiveSendGone[.]wtf — and show a video loop from Disney’s Frozen, as first noted by Daily Dot journalist Mikael Thalen. The video was accompanied by text criticizing the fundraising site and linking it to the January 6th insurrection in the US.

More than half of the donors appear to come from the US

07/06/2022

On Tuesday, OpenSea and NFT communications platform Metalink announced a new partnership aimed at preventing social engineering attacks carried out through Discord DMs. As The Verge previously reported, some confidence tricksters have made millions of dollars by posing as customer service agents in OpenSea’s official Discord server and tricking NFT holders into sharing details that will let the scammers take control of their cryptocurrency wallets.

OpenSea hopes to mitigate these scams by using Metalink, which operates a “token gated” communications platform so that only users holding certain NFTs in their cryptocurrency wallets will be able to get access. When they do so, they’ll be connected with authenticated OpenSea support representatives, theoretically cutting out potential scammers from the loop.

“OpenSea will be partnering with Metalink as we seek to engage more deeply with the NFT ecosystem,” said OpenSea’s head of community Stevey Tromberg in a statement. “Our goal is to create a direct channel for you to interact with OpenSea to get support, offer feedback, receive updates, and to share any other information that will help us better serve you.”

Metalink will provide "token gated" access to communication channels.

06/06/2022

Russian state-sponsored hackers have been targeting security-cleared US defense contractors for at least two years, according to an alert released Wednesday by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and National Security Agency (NSA).

According to the alert, Russian-backed actors had targeted cleared defense contractors (CDCs) and subcontractors that supported the Department of Defense (DoD) in a range of areas, including weapons and missile development, vehicle and aircraft design, surveillance and reconnaissance, and combat communications systems. Compromised entities include contractors supporting the US Army, Air Force, Navy, Space Force, DoD, and Intelligence programs.

Through intrusions against defense contractors, Russian-backed actors had acquired sensitive unclassified information as well as export-controlled technology, CISA said. Under normal circumstances, technology subject to export-control laws requires a license to be released to foreign entities, necessitating approval from the US government.

The FBI, NSA, and CISA warned that Russian state-sponsored intrusions will continue.

02/06/2022

The Definitive Guide to Building a Data Mesh With Event Streams

While data mesh sounds pretty cool, you may find yourself wondering “why do I want one?” The short answer is that traditional analytic architectures are often brittle, messy, and slow to change. The data mesh concept was introduced by Zhamak Dehghani to address these flaws by moving from a centralized to a decentralized approach. Traditionally, data is sourced from various systems, transformed, and loaded into a centralized data warehouse where it is analyzed by data analysts. This end-to-end process is often error-prone, brittle, and reactionary, in large part due to consistent, stable, and well-defined data not being available. This architecture places the responsibility for ensuring clean, available, and reliable data on the central data team, instead of on the team that owns, generates, uses, and stores it.

If you’ve worked in the analytics space, you’ll likely be familiar with what happens next: frequent breakages, misinterpreted data, multiple (and often discordant) sources of truth pop up, and there becomes a pervasive lack of trust in the data analytics being generated. The goal of implementing a data mesh architecture is to fix these problems.

01/06/2022

Rebuild System Databases in SQL Server

System databases are databases used internally by SQL Server and are necessary for its operation.

There are five system databases:

Master database: It stores system-level information of the instance of SQL Server.
msdb database: It is used by SQL Server Agent for scheduling jobs.
Model database: It is used as a template for the creation of a new database.
Resource database: It stores internal system objects that are associated with the sys schema of every database.
Tempdb database: It is used as a space to store temporary objects or intermediate result sets.

Learn about system database corruption and what it means. If corruption in system databases occurs, is a problem because it will cause the SQL Server to stop.