SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

If you miss the days when laptops had really cool form factors like the Toshiba T1000, you're going to love this Raspberry Pi project put together by maker and developer Nilseuropa. Using our favorite SBC, he's brought an old Toshiba T1000 machine back to life by using a Raspberry Pi as the main board and has upgraded the system to include support for modern peripherals.

Don't worry—no working T1000s were harmed to create this project. According to Nilseuropa, he's spent time repairing at least 5 of them so far and this project was created using leftover pieces. Restoring old hardware doesn't come without sacrifice and it's not always possible to keep everything. Some hardware becomes donors of "parts boards". That's where the Raspberry Pi comes in, supplementing the gaps left behind by previous repairs.

One of the coolest aspects of a project like this is all of the new additions you can add to a retro piece of tech. You still get the thrill of retro computing but with the added bonus of modern support. For example, the original floppy drive space has been upgraded with a port bay that includes a USB port, SD card slots and a couple of compact flash ports. Nilseuropa also added a 3.5mm jack for connecting external audio peripherals.

The main board he chose for this project is a Raspberry Pi 4. It's connected to an 8.8-inch Waveshare widescreen that features a capacitive touchscreen interface. The Pi is connected to a few port extenders so the peripherals can attach to the outside of the case, along with the keyboard which features some snazzy, colorful keycaps. The unit is also made portable thanks to an included 10,000 mAh battery.

Software-wise, you're limited really by just your imagination. A good starting point would be to run Raspberry Pi OS so you could take advantage of standard computing functions. That said, you could also game on a rig like this pretty easily because of the Pi 4 which adds Bluetooth support—ideal for connecting wireless controllers.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

President Donald Trump said Monday night that Microsoft was in contention to buy TikTok, having previously said that he is eager to forge a deal that would "save" the popular video app from a ban:

Such a deal, if realized, would put the video app used by millions of Americans under the control of the country's second-most-valuable tech company, which has been aggressively pushing into new lines of business including artificial intelligence and gaming. Representatives for Microsoft declined to comment on Monday.

When asked aboard Air Force One whether Microsoft was involved in discussions for acquiring TikTok, Trump said: "I would say yes. A lot of interest in TikTok."

Microsoft previously discussed buying TikTok in 2020, when Trump tried to force a sale of the app during his first term. That proposal crumbled when Trump's push to force the app's sale or ban was rejected by the courts.

[...] Analysts have estimated TikTok could be worth $50 billion, or far more, depending on the underlying technology for sale.

Previously: President Trump Threatens TikTok Ban, Microsoft Considers Buying TikTok's U.S. Operations[Updated 2]

Original Submission

How Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Made a Model that Rivals OpenAI

https://www.wired.com/story/deepseek-china-model-ai/
https://web.archive.org/web/20250125102155/https://www.wired.com/story/deepseek-china-model-ai/

On January 20, DeepSeek, a relatively unknown AI research lab from China, released an open source model that's quickly become the talk of the town in Silicon Valley. According to a paper authored by the company, DeepSeek-R1 beats the industry's leading models like OpenAI o1 on several math and reasoning benchmarks. In fact, on many metrics that matter—capability, cost, openness—DeepSeek is giving Western AI giants a run for their money.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/china-is-catching-up-with-americas-best-reasoning-ai-models/

The releases immediately caught the attention of the AI community because most existing open-weights models—which can often be run and fine-tuned on local hardware—have lagged behind proprietary models like OpenAI's o1 in so-called reasoning benchmarks. Having these capabilities available in an MIT-licensed model that anyone can study, modify, or use commercially potentially marks a shift in what's possible with publicly available AI models.

https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1

We introduce our first-generation reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1. DeepSeek-R1-Zero, a model trained via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a preliminary step, demonstrated remarkable performance on reasoning. With RL, DeepSeek-R1-Zero naturally emerged with numerous powerful and interesting reasoning behaviors. However, DeepSeek-R1-Zero encounters challenges such as endless repetition, poor readability, and language mixing. To address these issues and further enhance reasoning performance, we introduce DeepSeek-R1, which incorporates cold-start data before RL. DeepSeek-R1 achieves performance comparable to OpenAI-o1 across math, code, and reasoning tasks. To support the research community, we have open-sourced DeepSeek-R1-Zero, DeepSeek-R1, and six dense models distilled from DeepSeek-R1 based on Llama and Qwen. DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B outperforms OpenAI-o1-mini across various benchmarks, achieving new state-of-the-art results for dense models.

NOTE: Before running DeepSeek-R1 series models locally, we kindly recommend reviewing the Usage Recommendation section.

Check leaderboard and compare at Chatbot Arena: https://lmarena.ai/

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Leveraging an attack vector that's been in play off and on for the last two decades, hackers are targeting Mac users with malware camouflaged as the popular Homebrew tool, and spreading it through deceptive Google ads.

Malicious actors are leveraging Google ads to distribute malware through a counterfeit Homebrew website. The campaign targets macOS and Linux users with an infostealer that compromises credentials, browser data, and cryptocurrency wallets.

Homebrew, a widely-used open-source package manager, enables users to manage software through a command line. Hackers recently exploited its popularity by creating a malicious Google ad.

The ad, spotted by developer Ryan Chenkie, appeared legitimate, displaying the correct URL for the Homebrew website, "brew.sh." However, users who clicked it were redirected to a fake website hosted at "brewe.sh."

The fake site mimicked Homebrew's installation process, tricking visitors into running a malicious command. While the legitimate Homebrew site also provides such installation commands, running the script from the fake site downloaded and executed malware, specifically AmosStealer.

AmosStealer, also known as "Atomic Stealer," is a macOS-focused infostealer sold to cybercriminals for $1,000 per month. It targets over 50 cryptocurrency wallets, browser-stored data, and desktop apps.

Previously, this malware has been used in similar campaigns, including fake Google Meet pages, making it a go-to tool for Apple-focused cyberattacks.

Homebrew's project leader, Mike McQuaid, expressed frustration with Google's inability to prevent such scams. While the malicious ad was taken down, McQuaid highlighted that similar incidents continue to occur due to insufficient oversight of sponsored ads.

Cybersecurity experts recommend avoiding sponsored links when searching for popular tools. Bookmarking official websites or accessing them directly can help users minimize risk.

[...] To stay safe from these types of attacks, make sure to double-check website URLs before clicking, stick to bookmarks for trusted sites, and steer clear of installing software from unfamiliar or sponsored links.

Google has taken down this one particular malicious ad. As history has proven, the danger from bad ads isn't gone, so Mac users — especially those using Homebrew — need to stay alert.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Phone Metadata Suddenly Not So 'Harmless' When It's The FBI's Data Being Harvested:

The government's next-best argument (after "Third Party Doctrine yo!") in support of its bulk collection of US persons' phone metadata via the (now partly-dead) Section 215 surveillance program was this: hey, it's just metadata. How harmful could it be? (And if it's of so little use to the NSA/FBI/others, how is it possible we're using it to literally kill people?)

While trying to fend off attacks on Section 215 collections (most of which are governed [in the loosest sense of the word] by the Third Party Doctrine), the NSA and its domestic-facing remora, the FBI, insisted collecting and storing massive amounts of phone metadata was no more a constitutional violation than it was a privacy violation.

Suddenly — thanks to the ongoing, massive compromising of major US telecom firms by Chinese state-sanctioned hackers — the FBI is getting hot and bothered about the bulk collection of its own phone metadata by (gasp!) a government agency. (h/t Kevin Collier on Bluesky)

[...] The agency (quite correctly!) believes the metadata could be used to identify agents, as well as their contacts and confidential sources. Of course it can. That's why the NSA liked gathering it. And that's why the FBI liked collections it didn't need a warrant to access. (But let's not pretend this data was "stolen." It was duplicated and exfiltrated, but AT&T isn't suddenly missing thousands of records generated by FBI agents and their contacts.)

The issue, of course, is that the Intelligence Community consistently downplayed this exact aspect of the bulk collection, claiming it was no more intrusive than scanning every piece of domestic mail (!) or harvesting millions of credit card records just because the Fourth Amendment (as interpreted by the Supreme Court) doesn't say the government can't.

[...] The takeaway isn't the inherent irony. It's that the FBI and NSA spent years pretending the fears expressed by activists and legislators were overblown. Officials repeatedly claimed the information was of almost zero utility, despite mounting several efforts to protect this collection from being shut down by the federal government. In the end, the phone metadata program (at least as it applies to landlines) was terminated. But there's more than a hint of egregious hypocrisy in the FBI's sudden concern about how much can be revealed by "just" metadata.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040409-00/?p=39873

A friend of mine used to work on the development of the USB specification and subsequent implementation. One of the things that happens at these meetings is that hardware companies would show off the great USB hardware they were working on. It also gave them a chance to try out their hardware with various USB host manufacturers and operating systems to make sure everything worked properly together.

One of the earlier demonstrations was a company that was making USB floppy drives. The company representative talked about how well the drives were doing and mentioned that they make two versions, one for PCs and one for Macs.

"That's strange," the committee members thought to themselves. "Why are there separate PC and Mac versions? The specification is very careful to make sure that the same floppy drive works on both systems. You shouldn't need to make two versions."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The stunning panorama features over 600 overlapping Hubble images that have been painstaking stitched together. Spread across 2.5 billion pixels, you'll find some 200 million stars – all of which are brighter than our own Sun. That is a huge number, yet only a fraction of the estimated one trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy. Many of Andromeda's less massive stars are beyond Hubble's sensitivity limit and thus, are not represented in the imaged.

Data from two surveys – the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program and the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury (PHAST) program – was used to construct the mosaic.

With it, astronomers will be able to learn more about the age of Andromeda as well as its heavy-element abundance and the stellar masses inside of it. The surveys will also help astronomers understand how Andromeda might have merged with other galaxies in its past.

"Andromeda's a train wreck. It looks like it has been through some kind of event that caused it to form a lot of stars and then just shut down," said Daniel Weisz at the University of California, Berkeley.

"This was probably due to a collision with another galaxy in the neighborhood."

NASA has multiple sizes of the panoramic available for download, including the full-size 203 MB image (42,208 x 9,870) and a more user friendly 9 MB variant (10,552 x 2,468).

Hubble has been in orbit for more than three decades, and continues to provide astronomers with meaningful science data. That said, NASA already has its successor waiting in the wings.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled to launch by May 2027, will feature a mirror roughly the same size as the one Hubble uses but will be able to capture much higher resolution images. A single Roman exposure will capture the equivalent of at least 100 high-resolution Hubble snaps, according to NASA.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Brendan Carr dumps plan to ban bulk billing deals that lock renters into one ISP:

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has dropped the previous administration's proposal to ban bulk billing deals that require tenants to pay for a specific provider's Internet service.

In March 2024, then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel proposed a ban on arrangements in which "tenants are required to pay for broadband, cable, and satellite service provided by a specific communications provider, even if they do not wish to take the service or would prefer to use another provider."

Rosenworcel's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking was opposed by Internet providers and sat on the FCC's list of items on circulation throughout 2024 without any final vote, despite the commission having a 3-2 Democratic majority at the time. Carr, who was elevated to the chairmanship by President Trump, emptied the list of items under consideration by commissioners on Friday.

With bulk billing deals in which a company agrees to provide service to every tenant of a building, residents are billed a prorated share of the total cost. Tenants may be billed by either the landlord or the telco provider. only banned

Technically, Rosenworcel's plan would have allowed bulk billing arrangements to continue as long as tenants are given the ability to opt out of them. In March, Rosenworcel's office said her plan would "increase competition for communications service in these buildings by making it more profitable for competitive providers to deploy service in buildings where it is currently too expensive to serve consumers because tenants are required to take a certain provider's service."

"Too often, tenants living in these households are forced to pay high prices with limited choices for Internet or other services," Rosenworcel's office said in March, arguing that her plan would "lower costs and address the lack of choice for broadband services" in apartments, condos, and public housing.

Samantha Wright writes:

The Pebble was 2012 smartwatch built using an e-paper display. It had great battery life, a UI that could be hacked using C or Javascript, and a very loyal fanbase. Unlike current incumbent smartwatches like the Google Pixel Watch or Apple Watch, Pebble kept its feature set under control and aimed to supplement a smartphone rather than step on its toes. The end result was a compact product with great battery life that was genuinely liked by gadgeteers.

Unfortunately, after a number of strategic missteps, the manufacturer of the Pebble was bought out in 2016, by a competitor, FitBit. The product was discontinued almost immediately, leaving the world of nifty wrist-mounted doodads noticeably poorer.

Ever since there's been a sort of grassroots campaign to support the Pebble, called Rebble, which was started more-or-less immediately after FitBit shuttered the Pebble, and is helmed by one of Pebble's founders. For the longest time they weren't making much headway on delivering software updates, as they essentially had to start over from square one, without the initial startup resources they'd had the first time around. Mostly they just served as a home for applications and widgets.

This all changed on Monday, when the Rebble lead was able to get hold of some folks at Google—who bought out FitBit in 2021—and convinced them to open-source the Pebble OS. (It's not quite complete—like many open-sourcings of closed projects, there are some patent-encumbered bits missing.) There's now the (similarly-named yet distinct) Repebble project, which aims to begin a new production run of Pebble smartwatches.

Is this the beginning of a renaissance for resurrecting beloved Google-owned products? Probably not. But it's one less corpse in the ground, that's for sure.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Chevron, one of the world's largest oil companies, has announced plans to enter the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence by building natural gas power plants directly connected to data centers:

These facilities will supply electricity to technology companies leveraging AI and other high-powered computing services, reported The New York Times. The move highlights the increasing energy demands of AI technologies and Chevron's strategic shift to diversify its operations beyond traditional oil and gas.

The company's CEO, Mike Wirth, revealed the initiative during a recent industry conference, emphasizing the role Chevron could play in bridging energy production and digital innovation. As data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity to support AI-driven computations, Chevron's natural gas plants are positioned to offer a reliable and efficient energy source. This strategy allows Chevron to capitalize on its core expertise in energy production while contributing to a sector that's reshaping industries globally.

[...] The company plans to integrate carbon capture technologies into its power plants to offset their environmental impact. Additionally, Chevron has committed to exploring renewable energy options alongside its natural gas operations, suggesting a balanced approach to meeting current energy demands while investing in a low-carbon future.

Related:

• Nuclear Woes for Proposed Data Centers - Amazon and Meta
• Google Plans to Go Nuclear With its Data Centres
• AI's Energy Appetite Too Big for Texas, Regulators Warn
• Plan Would Power New Microsoft AI Data Center From Pa.'s Three Mile Island 'Unit 1' Nuclear Reactor

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/

Last summer, Anthropic inspired backlash when its ClaudeBot AI crawler was accused of hammering websites a million or more times a day.

And it wasn't the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites. Around the same time, Reddit's CEO called out all AI companies whose crawlers he said were "a pain in the ass to block," despite the tech industry otherwise agreeing to respect "no scraping" robots.txt rules.
[...]
Shortly after he noticed Facebook's crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron began plotting a new kind of attack on crawlers "clobbering" websites that he told Ars he hoped would give "teeth" to robots.txt.

Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as [tarpitting], he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will "eat just about anything that finds its way inside."

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware.
[...]
Tarpits were originally designed to waste spammers' time and resources, but creators like Aaron have now evolved the tactic into an anti-AI weapon.
[...]
It's unclear how much damage tarpits or other AI attacks can ultimately do. Last May, Laxmi Korada, Microsoft's director of partner technology, published a report detailing how leading AI companies were coping with poisoning, one of the earliest AI defense tactics deployed.
[...]
The only AI company that responded to Ars' request to comment was OpenAI, whose spokesperson confirmed that OpenAI is already working on a way to fight tarpitting.
"We're aware of efforts to disrupt AI web crawlers," OpenAI's spokesperson said. "We design our systems to be resilient while respecting robots.txt and standard web practices."
[...]
By releasing Nepenthes, he hopes to do as much damage as possible, perhaps spiking companies' AI training costs, dragging out training efforts, or even accelerating model collapse, with tarpits helping to delay the next wave of enshittification.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://tails.net/news/version_6.11/index.en.html
https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/blob/master/debian/changelog

The vulnerabilities described below were identified during an external security audit by Radically Open Security and disclosed responsibly to our team. We are not aware of these attacks being used against Tails users until now. [Editor's Comment: I believe they mean 'up to now' or 'so far'.]

These vulnerabilities can only be exploited by a powerful attacker who has already exploited another vulnerability to take control of an application in Tails.

If you want to be extra careful and used Tails a lot since January 9 without upgrading, we recommend that you do a manual upgrade instead of an automatic upgrade.

        Prevent an attacker from installing malicious software permanently. (#20701)

        In Tails 6.10 or earlier, an attacker who has already taken control of an application in Tails could then exploit a vulnerability in Tails Upgrader to install a malicious upgrade and permanently take control of your Tails.

        Doing a manual upgrade would erase such malicious software.

        Prevent an attacker from monitoring online activity. (#20709 and #20702)

        In Tails 6.10 or earlier, an attacker who has already taken control of an application in Tails could then exploit vulnerabilities in other applications that might lead to deanonymization or the monitoring of browsing activity:
                In Onion Circuits, to get information about Tor circuits and close them.
                In Unsafe Browser, to connect to the Internet without going through Tor.
                In Tor Browser, to monitor your browsing activity.
                In Tor Connection, to reconfigure or block your connection to the Tor network.

        Prevent an attacker from changing the Persistent Storage settings. (#20710)

Also, Tails still doesn't FULLY randomize the MAC address; so much for anonymity.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Scale AI and CAIS Unveil Results of Humanity's Last Exam, a Groundbreaking New Benchmark

Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) are proud to publish the results of Humanity's Last Exam, a groundbreaking new AI benchmark that was designed to test the limits of AI knowledge at the frontiers of human expertise. The results demonstrated a significant improvement from the reasoning capabilities of earlier models, but current models still were only able to answer fewer than 10 percent of the expert questions correctly. The paper can be read here.

The new benchmark, called "Humanity's Last Exam," evaluated whether AI systems have achieved world-class expert-level reasoning and knowledge capabilities across a wide range of fields, including math, humanities, and the natural sciences. Throughout the fall, CAIS and Scale AI crowdsourced questions from experts to assemble the hardest and broadest problems to stump the AI models. The exam was developed to address the challenge of "benchmark saturation": models that regularly achieve near-perfect scores on existing tests, but may not be able to answer questions outside of those tests. Saturation reduces the utility of a benchmark as a precise measurement of future model progress.

[Source]: Scale AI

Original Submission

upstart writes:

New research "Computer-Use Agent" AI model can perform multi-step tasks through a web browser:

On Thursday, OpenAI released a research preview of "Operator," a web automation tool that uses a new AI model called Computer-Using Agent (CUA) to control computers through a visual interface. The system performs tasks by viewing and interacting with on-screen elements like buttons and text fields similar to how a human would.

Operator is available today for subscribers of the $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro plan at operator.chatgpt.com. The company plans to expand to Plus, Team, and Enterprise users later. OpenAI intends to integrate these capabilities directly into ChatGPT and later release CUA through its API for developers.

Operator watches on-screen content while you use your computer and executes tasks through simulated keyboard and mouse inputs. The Computer-Using Agent processes screenshots to understand the computer's state and then makes decisions about clicking, typing, and scrolling based on its observations.

OpenAI's release follows other tech companies as they push into what are often called "agentic" AI systems, which can take actions on a user's behalf. Google announced Project Mariner in December 2024, which performs automated tasks through the Chrome browser, and two months earlier, in October 2024, Anthropic launched a web automation tool called "Computer Use" focused on developers that can control a user's mouse cursor and take actions on a computer.

"The Operator interface looks very similar to Anthropic's Claude Computer Use demo from October," wrote AI researcher Simon Willison on his blog, "even down to the interface with a chat panel on the left and a visible interface being interacted with on the right."

To use your PC like you would, the Computer-Using Agent works in multiple steps. First, it captures screenshots to monitor your screen, then analyzes those images (using GPT-4o's vision capabilities with additional reinforcement learning) to process raw pixel data. Next, it determines what actions to take and then performs virtual inputs to control the computer. This iterative loop design reportedly lets the system recover from errors and handle complex tasks across different applications.

While it's working, Operator shows a miniature browser window of its actions.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Two NASA astronauts are set to venture outside the International Space Station (ISS) in search of signs of life.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams should have been back on Earth months ago, but, thanks to issues with Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule, are spending some additional time on the ISS before a planned return to Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon.

The plan is for the spacewalkers to collect samples from sites near life support system vents on the exterior of the ISS. Scientists will be able to determine if the ISS releases microorganisms and assess whether any can survive in the harsh environment outside the outpost.

These days, spacecraft and spacesuits are thoroughly sterilized before missions. However, humans carry plenty of microorganisms, and looking at what is collected outside the ISS will inform designs for crewed vehicles and missions to limit the spread of human contamination.

NASA said: "The data could help determine whether changes are needed to crewed spacecraft, including spacesuits, that are used to explore destinations where life may exist now or in the past."

With Mars now a priority for crewed expeditions, minimizing human contamination on the surface is crucial to avoid misidentifying it as traces of life on the red planet.

Many space agencies take the challenge of planetary protection very seriously. As an example, the European Space Agency (ESA) cites Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty, which requires care to be taken during exploration of the Moon and beyond "so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extra-terrestrial matter and, where necessary, [to] adopt appropriate measures for this purpose."

This also involves considering missions launched under less stringent standards than those in place today. Older spacecraft, for example, were not always subject to the same sterilization.

Memorably, a camera on NASA's Surveyor 3 lander, which the Apollo 12 astronauts retrieved, was found to have been contaminated [PDF] prior to launch. Despite vacuum testing, exposure to temperatures below -100° Celsius, and a stint on the lunar surface, scientists found that the microorganisms on the camera had survived.

Original Submission