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PastTense writes:

Apple CEO sounds warning of algorithms pushing society towards catastrophe:

"At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement -- the longer the better -- and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible," he said.

"What are the consequences of seeing thousands of users join extremist groups, and then perpetuating an algorithm that recommends even more?"

Cook touched on the recent US Capitol riots in Washington, saying the time was over to pretend there are no costs to boosting conspiracy theories and incitements to violence simply because users get engaged.

Facebook and Twitter are major examples of what Cook is talking about.

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

We do not cover "The Markets" so much on SoylentNews, unless of course it has to do with COVID-19 cures, but just had to submit this, because of the term, "Reddit Horde". Yes, truly, the barbarians are at the gates, and not just Bill Gates (even though I still need to run Windows to play my Wall Street simulation games).

Reportage ex Bloomberg, by way of Yahoo.

(Bloomberg) -- Retail sites were overwhelmed with demand for silver bars and coins on Sunday, suggesting the Reddit-inspired frenzy that roiled commodities markets last week is spilling over into physical assets.

Sites from Money Metals and SD Bullion to JM Bullion and Apmex, the Walmart of precious metals products in North America, said they were unable to process orders until Asian markets open because of unprecedented demand for silver.

Robert Higgins, chief executive officer at Argent Asset Group LLC in Wilmington, Delaware, said he's been on the phone trading all day, with people desperate to buy gold or silver.

"It's a very, very tight physical market right now," he said. "And I don't know there's any answer to it except when things calm down or the market explodes on Sunday at 6 p.m."

Retail traders, inspired by Reddit posters, stormed into the silver market last week and successfully drove up prices of the physical metal, silver miners and exchange-traded funds. Spot prices, silver futures on the Comex and the largest silver exchange-traded fund, iShares Silver Trust, all climbed more than 5% in the week.

takyon writes:

TSMC's 'Chip-for-Vaccine' Swap To Delay Integrated Circuit Chip Production

Chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has agreed to manufacture automobile processors at an expedited rate. TSMC's decision comes after governments in several continents requested the Taiwanese authorities to ask the chipmaker to increase this production - as a global shortage of the products start to emerge as a thorn in the side of the economic recovery of many countries that house automobile manufacturers affected by this shortage.

Following the request, Taiwan's Minister of Economic Affairs Ms. Mei-Hua Wang convened a meeting that involved representatives from Germany, TSMC and other semiconductor companies and the dean of Taiwan's Economic Research Institute to discuss the shortage and how Germany and other countries could help Taiwan in return for providing the aforementioned chips.

The meeting took place earlier this week on Wednesday, and a key item on the agenda was how countries including Germany could help the island in return for TSMC agreeing to step up its vehicle chip output. Specifically, the participants stressed on the need for Taiwan to procure vaccinations for the ongoing pandemic and whether nation-states could help the island in this regard.

Following this, the dean of the Taiwan Economic Research Institute stated that he was already in discussions with TSMC and that the chipmaker had agreed to cooperate to provide chips in return for the vaccines. Subsequently, TSMC confirmed on the following day that it would speed up the process for manufacturing automotive chips, with the confirmation coming soon after a second rumored price increase had been reported by The Nikkei Asian Review on Tuesday.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for TheMightyBuzzard:

Facebook restores disputed posts after its Oversight Board issues first decisions:

In its first set of decisions, Facebook's Oversight Board has overturned most of the company's actions on user posts previously removed from the platform for violating the social network's standards. In 4 of the 5 cases announced Thursday — which dealt with ethnic hate speech, nudity and COVID-19 misinformation — the board decided to restore the posts.

The board's decisions are binding and Facebook will have seven days to restore content according to the board's verdicts. The company has 30 days to respond to any of the board's policy recommendations.

[...] The first set of verdicts provided insight into the decision process of the 20-member board, which is made up of legal experts, journalists and human rights advocates. The published decisions included frequent references to international human rights standards on free speech and suggested that board members favor free expression except in cases that could cause harm.

The five cases — which Facebook will use as precedents to decide on similar cases — included a decision to remove a post that pejoratively implied Muslims were inferior, a breast cancer awareness post that depicted female nipples, a post that allegedly quoted a German Nazi leader and a post that falsely claimed a cure for COVID-19 exists.

Facebook's Vice President of Content Policy Monika Bickert said the company will "take to heart" the board's suggestions. "Their recommendations will have a lasting impact on how we structure our policies," she said.

The board upheld just one of Facebook's decisions, which removed a Russian-language post that used an ethnic slur against Azerbaijanis.

Well, that's interesting.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

AMD feels supply shortages will affect PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC gaming until at least 2H 2021:

AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su said, "overall demand exceeded planning" and CPU/GPU shortages will primarily impact gaming hardware and the low-end of the PC market. Gaming products impacted include both consoles and gaming CPUs and GPUs. This will continue until production resumes at full capacity, which may take up to 2H 2021. [...]

Ultimately, consoles such as the Sony PlayStation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X and Series S are likely to be the most affected of all until 2H 2021. [...]

[...] Adding to the supply woes is the fact that global GDDR6 shortage is expected to continue well into February and may be even beyond thus affecting all NVIDIA and AMD GPUs that use this memory standard.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Surprisingly Fast Transport in Carbon Nanotube Membranes Could Advance Human Health:

[...] In a surprising discovery published in the journal Advanced Science, LLNL researchers found that carbon nanotube pores (graphite cylinders with diameters thousands of times smaller than a human hair) might provide a solution to the permeability vs. selectivity tradeoff. When using a concentration gradient as a driving force, small ions, such as potassium, chloride, and sodium, were found to diffuse through these tiny pores more than an order of magnitude faster than when moving in bulk solution.

"This result was unexpected because the general consensus in the literature is that diffusion rates in pores of this diameter should be equal to, or below what we see in bulk," said Steven Buchsbaum, lead author of the paper.

"Our finding enriches the number of exciting and often poorly understood nanofluidic phenomena recently discovered in a-few-nanometer confinement," added Francesco Fornasiero, the principal investigator on the project.

The team believes this work has significant implications in several technology areas. Membranes employing carbon nanotubes as transport channels could enable ultra-rapid hemodialysis processes that would greatly reduce treatment time. Similarly, cost and time for purifying proteins and other biomolecules as well as recovering valuable products from electrolyte solutions could be drastically reduced. Enhanced ion transport in small graphitic pores could enable supercapacitors with high power density even at pore sizes closely approaching those of the ions.

LLNL - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Journal Reference:
Steven F. Buchsbaum, Melinda L. Jue, April M. Sawvel, et al. Fast Permeation of Small Ions in Carbon Nanotubes [open], Advanced Science (DOI: 10.1002/advs.202001802)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The first new skull discovered in nearly a century from a rare species of the iconic, tube-crested dinosaur Parasaurolophus was announced today in the journal PeerJ. The exquisite preservation of the skull, especially the bizarre tube-shaped nasal passage, finally revealed the structure of the crest after decades of disagreement.

Despite its extreme morphology, details of the specimen show that the crest is formed much like the crests of other, related duckbilled dinosaurs. Joe Sertich, curator of dinosaurs at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and the leader of the team who discovered the specimen said, "This specimen is a wonderful example of amazing creatures evolving from a single ancestor."

"Imagine your nose growing up your face, three feet behind your head, then turning around to attach above your eyes. Parasaurolophus breathed through eight feet of pipe before oxygen ever reached its head," said Terry Gates, a paleontologist from North Carolina State University.

[...] "The preservation of this new skull is spectacular, finally revealing in detail the bones that make up the crest of this amazing dinosaur known by nearly every dinosaur-obsessed kid," said Sertich. "This just reinforces the importance of protecting our public lands for scientific discoveries."

"My jaw dropped when I first saw the fossil," said Gates. He continued, "I've been waiting for nearly 20 years to see a specimen of this quality."

"This specimen is truly remarkable in its preservation," said Evans, who has also worked on this iconic dinosaur for almost two decades. "It has answered long-standing questions about how the crest is constructed and about the validity of this particular species. For me, this fossil is very exciting."

Journal Reference:
Terry A. Gates, David C. Evans, Joseph J.W. Sertich. Description and rediagnosis of the crested hadrosaurid (Ornithopoda) dinosaur Parasaurolophus cyrtocristatus on the basis of new cranial remains, PeerJ (DOI: 10.7717/peerj.10669)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

DMCA Takedowns Remove Perfectly Legal Plex Pages From Google * TorrentFreak:

Plex is a multifunctional media software and service that allows users to easily access all their entertainment in one place.

[...] The Mediaverse part of the Plex site appears to cause some confusion. While it offers content that can be legally streamed for free, it also lists many other titles, such as The Mandalorian, Game of Thrones, Wonder Woman 1984, and Tenet.

These other titles are not freely available for streaming, of course. Plex merely added an informational page to its library so people can put these titles on their watchlist. However, not all copyright holders appear to get this distinction.

Over the past month alone more than a handful of DMCA takedown requests were sent to Google, asking the search engine to remove these "copyright-infringing" pages. The takedowns suggest that Plex offers access to the full videos and list its URLs together with those of notorious pirate sites.

[...] We reached out to Plex to inform the company about the takedowns and requested a comment. The company informed us that they are aware of these notices and will try to work things out with the copyright holders individually.

That's probably wise because too many notices put sites at risk of being demoted, which can seriously hurt search traffic.

Original Submission

MrPlow wrote in with a submission, via IRC, for chromas,

Source: GnuPG crypto library can be pwned during decryption – patch now!

Bug hunter Tavis Ormandy of Google's Project Zero just discovered a dangerous bug in the GNU Privacy Guard team's libgcrypt encryption software.

[...] In theory, this vulnerability could lead to what's known as RCE, short for Remote [C]ode Execution, because the bug can be triggered simply by sending libgcrypt a block of booby-trapped data to decrypt.

In other words, a program that used libgcrypt to decrypt and check the integrity of data submitted from outside the network – ironically, something you might do to see if you should trust the data in the first place – could be tricked into running an arbitrary fragment of malware code hidden away inside that data.

[...] The vulnerability was introduced in version 1.9.0 of the library, which only came out on 2021-01-19, less than two weeks before Ormandy filed his bug report.

But the good news for those of us who did get 1.9.0 within the last few days is that the GNU Privacy Guard team fixed this bug almost immediately, releasing version 1.9.1.

To check the version on your system, issue:

gpg2 --version | grep libgcrypt

You need to update if you see:

libgcrypt 1.9.0

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Mozilla retires Firefox Voice and Voice Fill extensions - gHacks Tech News:

Mozilla announced the retirement of the two Firefox extensions Firefox Voice and Firefox Voice Fill yesterday. Firefox Voice was labeled beta all the time. Mozilla released the source code of both extensions to the public.

The main reason for retiring both extensions is the decommissioning of the Mozilla Speech Proxy Server on February 28, 2021. The extensions require the server, and since it is decommissioned, will not work anymore after February 28, 2021.

Both extensions will be retired on February 19, 2021 as a consequence.

Mozilla will notify users about the retirement by updating the extensions. The update will inform users about the upcoming retirement of the extension, and the extensions will uninstall themselves automatically on the day of the deadline.

[...] Mozilla did not reveal why the Mozilla Speech Proxy Server is decommissioned. The extensions had 5800 (Voice Fill) and 11600 (Voice Beta) users and a 3.8 stars (out of 5) rating each.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Green Run Update: NASA Proceeds With Plans for Second Hot Fire Test – Artemis:

NASA plans to conduct a second Green Run hot fire test as early as the fourth week in February with the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket's core stage that will launch the Artemis I mission to the Moon. The Green Run is a comprehensive assessment of the rocket's core stage prior to launching Artemis missions.

While the first hot fire test marked a major milestone for the program with the firing of all four RS-25 engines together for the first time for about a minute, it ended earlier than planned. After evaluating data from the first hot fire and the prior seven Green Run tests, NASA and core stage lead contractor Boeing determined that a second, longer hot fire test should be conducted and would pose minimal risk to the Artemis I core stage while providing valuable data to help certify the core stage for flight.

Inspections showed the core stage hardware, including its engines, and the B-2 test stand are in excellent condition after the first hot fire test, and no major repairs are needed to prepare for a second hot fire test at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

[...] After the second hot fire test, it will take about a month to refurbish the core stage and its engines. Then, the Pegasus barge will transport the core stage to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida where it will be assembled with the other parts of the SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft being prepared for the Artemis I launch later this year.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Extreme Events in Quantum Cascade Lasers Enable an Optical Neuron System 10,000× Faster Than Biological Neurons:

Recently, extreme events have been observed in quantum cascade lasers, as reported by researchers from Télécom Paris (France) in collaboration with UC Los Angeles (USA) and TU Darmstad (Germany). The giant pulses that characterize these extreme events can contribute the sudden, sharp bursts necessary for communication in neuromorphic systems inspired by the brain's powerful computational abilities. Based on a quantum cascade laser (QCL) emitting mid-infrared light, the researchers developed a basic optical neuron system operating 10,000× faster than biological neurons. Their report is published in Advanced Photonics.

Olivier Spitz, Télécom Paris research fellow and first author on the paper, notes that the giant pulses in QCLs can be triggered successfully by adding a "pulse-up excitation," a short-time small-amplitude increase of bias current. Senior author Frédéric Grillot, Professor at Télécom Paris and the University of New Mexico, explains that this triggering ability is of paramount importance for applications such as optical neuron-like systems, which require optical bursts to be triggered in response to a perturbation.

The team's optical neuron system demonstrates behaviors like those observed in biological neurons, such as thresholding, phasic spiking, and tonic spiking. Fine tuning of modulation and frequency allows control of time intervals between spikes. Grillot explains, "The neuromorphic system requires a strong, super-threshold stimulus for the system to fire a spiking response, whereas phasic and tonic spiking correspond to single or continuous spike firing following the arrival of a stimulus." To replicate the various biological neuronal responses, interruption of regular successions of bursts corresponding to neuronal activity is also required.

Journal Reference:
Olivier Spitz, Jiagui Wu, Andreas Herdt, et al. Extreme events in quantum cascade lasers [open], Advanced Photonics (DOI: 10.1117/1.AP.2.6.066001)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

First Evidence That Earth's Magnetosphere Can Create Water on the Moon's Surface:

Water is far more prevalent in space than astronomers first thought, from the surface of Mars to Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings, comets, asteroids and Pluto; it has even been detected in clouds far beyond our solar system. It was previously assumed that water was incorporated into these objects during the formation of the solar system, but there is growing evidence that water in space is far more dynamic. Though the solar wind is a likely source for lunar surface water, computer models predict that up to half of it should evaporate and disappear at high-latitude regions during the approximately three days of the full moon when it passes within Earth's magnetosphere.

Surprisingly, the latest analysis of surface hydroxyl/water surface maps by the Chandrayaan-1 satellite's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) showed that lunar surface water does not disappear during this magnetosphere shielding period. Earth's magnetic field was thought to block the solar wind from reaching the moon so that water could not be regenerated faster than it was lost, but the researchers found this was not the case.

[...] Previous Kaguya satellite observations during the full moon detected high concentrations of oxygen isotopes that leaked out of Earth's ozone layer and embedded in lunar soil, along with an abundance of hydrogen ions in our planet's vast extended atmosphere, known as the exosphere. These combined flows of magnetosphere particles are fundamentally different from those in the solar wind. Thus, the latest detection of surface water in this study refutes the shielding hypothesis and instead suggest that the magnetosphere itself creates a "water bridge" that can replenish the moon.

Journal Reference:
H. Z. Wang, J. Zhang, et al. Earth Wind as a Possible Exogenous Source of Lunar Surface Hydration - IOPscience, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/abd559)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

General Motors Says It Will Stop Making Gas-Powered Vehicles by 2035:

General Motors announced Thursday that it will stop making gas-powered cars and trucks and exclusively produce zero-emissions vehicles by 2035, upending the American automaker's decadeslong reputation for producing gas-guzzling SUVs. GM's articulation of an electric future is a seismic shift for the auto industry, particularly the American auto industry, which had lagged behind competitors in the transition to more environmentally-friendly makes and models.

GM said the goal of phasing out petroleum-powered cars and trucks over the next decade and a half in favor of electric and possibly hydrogen-powered vehicles is part of its larger ambition of going carbon neutral in its global production by 2040. "General Motors is joining governments and companies around the globe working to establish a safer, greener and better world," CEO Mary Barra said in a statement. "We encourage others to follow suit and make a significant impact on our industry and on the economy as a whole."

Previously: California Bans New Internal Combustion Engines, Starting in 2035

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

There's a Curious Effect Urban Trees Might Have on Depression, Study Finds:

There's already a long list of reasons to like trees, we know. Warding off depression could be the latest entry on that list, based on a study of 9,751 residents in Leipzig, Germany.

For a more consistent measure, researchers used antidepressant prescriptions rather than self-reporting to gauge the mental health of communities, and then cross-referenced these statistics with the numbers of street trees in each area.

They reported that more local foliage within 100 metres (328 feet) of the home was associated with a reduced likelihood of being prescribed antidepressants – findings that could be very useful indeed for city planners, health professionals, and governments.

The reduction in antidepressant use linked to street trees was particularly prominent in socioeconomically disadvantaged groups. While it's important not to take such findings too far, the results do hint that urban trees could act as a simple and affordable way of boosting mental health and assist in closing health inequality gaps across society.

"Our finding suggests that street trees – a small scale, publicly accessible form of urban greenspace – can help close the gap in health inequalities between economically different social groups," says environmental psychologist Melissa Marselle from De Montfort University in the UK.

[...] While the study has its limitations – not all depressed people are on antidepressants, for example, and there might be other factors at play affecting mental health – the stats show enough of a relationship to suggest that simply having street trees around is enough to improve the mood of an area as people go about their daily lives.

Journal Reference:
Melissa R. Marselle, Diana E. Bowler, Jan Watzema, et al. Urban street tree biodiversity and antidepressant prescriptions [open], Scientific Reports (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-79924-5)

Original Submission