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takyon writes:

AI Teaches Itself Diplomacy

Now that DeepMind has taught AI to master the game of Go—and furthered its advantage in chess—they've turned their attention to another board game: Diplomacy. Unlike Go, it is seven-player, it requires a combination of competition and cooperation, and on each turn players make moves simultaneously, so they must reason about what others are reasoning about them, and so on.

"It's a qualitatively different problem from something like Go or chess," says Andrea Tacchetti, a computer scientist at DeepMind. In December, Tacchetti and collaborators presented a paper at the NeurIPS conference on their system, which advances the state of the art, and may point the way toward AI systems with real-world diplomatic skills—in negotiating with strategic or commercial partners or simply scheduling your next team meeting.

Diplomacy is a strategy game played on a map of Europe divided into 75 provinces. Players build and mobilize military units to occupy provinces until someone controls a majority of supply centers. Each turn, players write down their moves, which are then executed simultaneously. They can attack or defend against opposing players' units, or support opposing players' attacks and defenses, building alliances. In the full version, players can negotiate. DeepMind tackled the simpler No-Press Diplomacy, devoid of explicit communication.

The only winning move is to kill all humans.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow639:

Heavily used Node.js package has a code injection vulnerability:

A heavily downloaded Node.js library has a high severity command injection vulnerability revealed this month.

Tracked as CVE-2021-21315, the bug impacts the "systeminformation" npm component which gets about 800,000 weekly downloads and has scored close to 34 million downloads to date since its inception.

Put simply, "systeminformation" is a lightweight Node.js library that developers can include in their project to retrieve system information related to CPU, hardware, battery, network, services, and system processes.

[...] "This library is still work in progress. It is supposed to be used as a backend/server-side library (will definitely not work within a browser)," states the developer behind the component.

However, the presence of the code injection flaw within "systeminformation" meant an attacker could execute system commands by carefully injecting payload within the unsanitized parameters used by the component.

[...] Users of "systeminformation" should upgrade to versions 5.3.1 and above to resolve the CVE-2021-21315 vulnerability in their application.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Researchers Say They've Solved the Puzzling Mystery of the Moons of Mars:

Mars's two moons, Phobos and Deimos, have puzzled researchers since their discovery in 1877. They are very small: Phobos's diameter of 22 kilometers is 160 times smaller than that of our Moon, and Deimos is even smaller, with a diameter of only 12 kilometers. "Our moon is essentially spherical, while the moons of Mars are very irregularly shaped – like potatoes," says Amirhossein Bagheri, a doctoral student at the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich, adding: "Phobos and Deimos look more like asteroids than natural moons."

This led people to suspect that they might in fact be asteroids that were captured in Mars's gravity field. "But that's where the problems started," Bagheri says. Captured objects would be expected to follow an eccentric orbit around the planet, and that orbit would be at a random inclination. In contradiction to this hypothesis, the orbits of the Martian moons are almost circular and move in the equatorial plane of Mars. So, what is the explanation for the current orbits of Phobos and Deimos? To solve this dynamic problem, the researchers relied on computer simulations.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

The Famous Basic Computer Games Book Gets A 2021 Update:

If you are a certain age, your first programming language was almost certainly BASIC. You probably at least saw the famous book by Ahl, titled BASIC Computer Games or 1010[sic] BASIC Computer Games. The book, published in 1973 by [David Ahl] was a staple in its day and the first computer book to sell over one million copies. Of course, if you want to run Super Star Trek or Hamurabi, you better fire up an old retrocomputer or a simulator because BASIC in 1973 doesn't look like what we have today. Or, you can head to GitHub where [coding-horror] is inviting people to help update the programs using modern languages.

[...] By today's standards, these games are pretty crude, but they are still engaging and, if you remember them, always nostalgic.  There is one thing missing, though. In 1973, you had no choice but to type the programs in yourself. You couldn't help but learn something about programming in the process. Besides, you then had to debug the program to find your typing mistakes and that was definitely educational. It might seem like these games are ultra-simple, but hexapawn does machine learning and the lunar lander game is a simple physics simulation.

[...] Seeing some of these old gems is like unexpectedly running into an old friend. If you want to help out, there's a discussion board available.

NOTE: Prior to uploading to GitHub, all programs were updated to run on Vintage Basic.

Wikipedia entry for BASIC Computer Games.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

The Framework laptop is coming this spring (hopefully) a laptop that can be upgraded and repaired easier then most machines today on the market.

The Framework Laptop is an upgradable, customizable 13-inch notebook coming this spring:

A San Francisco-based startup called Framework has just launched an ambitious project: a thin, lightweight productivity laptop that it claims can be "upgraded, customized, and repaired in ways that no other notebook can."

Framework founder Nirav Patel told The Verge that the company aims to address his long-standing frustrations with consumer technology companies. Patel was one of the original Oculus employees and has worked for Apple as well. During that time, he says he "saw an industry that felt incredibly broken across the board."

"As a consumer electronics company, your business model effectively depends on churning out constant tons of hardware and pushing it into channels, and into market, and into consumers' hands, and then sort of dropping it and letting it exist out there," Patel explains. "It encourages waste and inefficiency, and ultimately environmental damage."

To that end, Patel sees the Framework Laptop as more than a product — he sees it as an ecosystem.

The Framework comes with a 13.5-inch 2256 x 1504 screen, a 1080p 60fps webcam, a 55Wh battery, and a 2.87-pound aluminum chassis. Inside, you’ll get 11th Gen Intel processors, up to 64GB of DDR4 memory, and “4TB or more” of Gen4 NVMe storage.

[...] Framework will be taking preorders this spring, and the device is expected to ship this summer. Pricing hasn’t yet been announced, though Patel says it will be “comparable to other well-reviewed notebooks.”

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

LastPass Android App Contains 7 Trackers:

As The Register reports, the trackers were discovered when penetration tester Mike Kuketz decided to check the LastPass Android app with the help of Android privacy audit platform Exodus.

The seven trackers found are as follows:

• AppsFlyer
• Google Analytics
• Google CrashLytics
• Google Firebase Analytics
• Google Tag Manager
• MixPanel
• Segment

All of the Google trackers are for analytics and crash reporting, but MixPanel and Segment also cover user profiling and advertisements. So as you use the LastPass app, data is being gathered for marketing purposes and a profile of the user is constructed. This isn't uncommon for apps to do, but LastPass is a password manager and therefore demands a high level of trust from its user base.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Folding Drone Can Drop Into Inaccessible Mines

Inspecting old mines is a dangerous business. For humans, mines can be lethal: prone to rockfalls and filled with noxious gases. Robots can go where humans might suffocate, but even robots can only do so much when mines are inaccessible from the surface.

Now, researchers in the UK, led by Headlight AI, have developed a drone that could cast a light in the darkness. Named Prometheus, this drone can enter a mine through a borehole not much larger than a football, before unfurling its arms and flying around the void. Once down there, it can use its payload of scanning equipment to map mines where neither humans nor robots can presently go. This, the researchers hope, could make mine inspection quicker and easier. The team behind Prometheus published its design in November in the journal Robotics.

Journal Reference:
Liam Brown, Robert Clarke, Ali Akbari, et al. The Design of Prometheus: A Reconfigurable UAV for Subterranean Mine Inspection, Robotics (DOI: 10.3390/robotics9040095)

Soft Legged Robot Uses Pneumatic Circuitry to Walk Like a Turtle

Soft robots are inherently safe, highly resilient, and potentially very cheap, making them promising for a wide array of applications. But development on them has been a bit slow relative to other areas of robotics, at least partially because soft robots can't directly benefit from the massive increase in computing power and sensor and actuator availability that we've seen over the last few decades. Instead, roboticists have had to get creative to find ways of achieving the functionality of conventional robotics components using soft materials and compatible power sources.

In the current issue of Science Robotics, researchers from UC San Diego demonstrate a soft walking robot with four legs that moves with a turtle-like gait controlled by a pneumatic circuit system made from tubes and valves. This air-powered nervous system can actuate multiple degrees of freedom in sequence from a single source of pressurized air, offering a huge reduction in complexity and bringing a very basic form of decision making onto the robot itself.

Journal Reference:
Dylan Drotman, Saurabh Jadhav, David Sharp, et al. Electronics-free pneumatic circuits for controlling soft-legged robots [$], Science Robotics (DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aay2627)

Original Submission

EE|Times has a great article/interview about mode confusion, with semi-autonomous driving (safety?) features. These are showing up in more and more new cars, for one example, automatic lane keeping. Sometimes the system is working, other times not and, according to the article the distinction is frequently not at all obvious to the driver.

'Mode Confusion' Vexes Drivers, Carmakers:

NHTSA vs. NTSB
Curiously, regulators are more worried about the safety issues of fully autonomous vehicles than the more immediate concerns of safety for vehicles operating in partial autonomy.

The advanced notice of proposed rule making (ANPRM) recently issued by NHTSA seeks input from the public, as the agency plans to develop a framework for safety in Automated Driving Systems (ADS) — fully autonomous vehicles.

Last week, NTSB, responding to ANPRM, made it abundantly clear that NTHSA should be first "incorporating into the safety framework the lessons learned from NTSB crash investigations." By "lessons learned," NTSB means their investigations of crashes that involved vehicles operating in partial automated mode.

Describing driver/operator attention as "an integral component of lower level automation systems," NTSB stressed that "a driver monitoring system must be able to assess whether and to what degree the driver is performing the role of automation supervisor."

Further down, there is an interview with an ex-F-18 pilot who tells of a fellow pilot who experienced mode confusion first hand:

DeathMonkey writes:

There were a lot of folks chiming in with alternatives due to the sad demise of Fry's electronics.

So what are we all doing with all those fun components?

What's your project, Soylent?

Doesn't need to be related to electronics, if you're painting a portrait or drafting a treatise on the heliocentric nature of the Solar System let's hear about it!

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Why France's new 'repairability index' is a big deal:

Our electronic devices take a serious environmental toll, and one of the best ways to mitigate that is to use them for as long as possible before replacing them. But it's hard to know how long a new gadget will last if you're unsure how easy it will be to fix. Now, companies are going to have to start coming clean about that — in France, at least.

In a world first move last month, France began requiring makers of certain electronic devices, including smartphones and laptops, to tell consumers how repairable their products are. Manufacturers selling these devices in France must give their products a score, or "repairability index," based on a range of criteria including how easy it is to take the product apart and the availability of spare parts and technical documents. While France won't be enforcing use of the index with fines until next year, some companies have already begun releasing scores for their products.

The repairability index represents part of France's effort to combat planned obsolescence, the intentional creation of products with a finite lifespan that need to be replaced frequently, and transition to a more circular economy where waste is minimized. But it also has global implications. Repair advocates say that the index will serve as a litmus test for other nations weighing similar regulations, help consumers make better choices, and hopefully incentivize companies to manufacture more repairable devices.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Why is the DOS path character "\"?

Many of the DOS utilities (except for command.com) were written by IBM, and they used the "/" character as the "switch" character for their utilities (the "switch" character is the character that's used to distinguish command line switches - on *nix, it's the "-" character, on most DEC operating systems (including VMS, the DECSystem-20 and DECSystem-10), it's the "/" character" (note: I'm grey on whether the "/" character came from IBM or from Microsoft - several of the original MS-DOS developers were old-hand DEC-20 developers, so it's possible that they carried it forward from their DEC background).

[...] Then along came DOS 2.0. DOS 2.0 was tied to the PC/XT, whose major feature was a 10M hard disk. IBM asked the Microsoft to add support for hard disks, and the MS-DOS developers took this as an opportunity to add support for modern file APIs - they added a whole series of handle based APIs to the system (DOS 1.0 relied on an application controlled structure called an FCB). They also had to add support for hierarchical paths.

Original Submission

Eratosthenes writes:

So the TianWen-1 is orbiting Mars, and getting ready to send a rover down to the planet's surface. Some reporting from Space.com

China's Tianwen-1 spacecraft has trimmed its orbit around Mars to allow the spacecraft to analyze the chosen landing region on the Red Planet.

After the burn, which occurred on Tuesday (Feb. 23), Tianwen-1 is now in position to begin imaging and collecting data on primary and backup landing sites for the mission's rover, which will attempt to touch down in May or June.

Tianwen-1, China's first independent interplanetary mission, consists of an orbiter and rover, which have been in Mars orbit as a single spacecraft since Feb. 10. The latest engine burn, at 5:29 p.m. EST Tuesday (2229 GMT, 06:29 Beijing time Wednesday), executed during the spacecraft's closest approach to Mars, greatly reduced its apoapsis, or farthest point from the planet.

All in preparation for:

The Tianwen-1 rover is contained within an aeroshell attached to the orbiter. This conical structure will both protect and slow the rover during its fiery, hypersonic entry into the Martian atmosphere at the start of the landing attempt. A supersonic parachute will further slow the rover before retropropulsion engines provide the final deceleration for the soft landing.

The rover carries science payloads to investigate surface soil characteristics and mineral composition and to search for potential water ice with a ground penetrating radar. The rover is designed to operate for 90 Mars sols (92 Earth days) with the Tianwen-1 orbiter serving to relay communications and data between the rover and the Earth. The orbiter is designed to operate for a total of one Mars year, or about 687 Earth days.

Getting crowded in the Martian sky!

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

The genetics of relatively healthy obesity:

In general, obesity is linked with a large range of health problems—for most people, at least. But for a substantial minority of those who are overweight, obesity is accompanied by indications of decent health, with no signs of impending diabetes or cardiovascular disease. These cases have probably received unwarranted attention[¹]; who doesn't want to convince themselves that they're an exception to an unfortunate rule, after all?

[...] a large international team of researchers has looked into whether some of these cases might be the product of genetic influences[²]. And simply by using existing data, the team found 61 instances where a location in our genomes is associated with both elevated obesity and signs of good health, cardiovascular or otherwise.

[...] Combining all the past studies in these areas, the researchers were able to leverage a sample of hundreds of thousands of individuals.

To find the sorts of genes the team was interested in, the researchers had a simple criterion: the same area of the genome has to be associated with both one of the measures of obesity and one of the measures of metabolic or cardiovascular health. After doing the pairwise comparisons, the researchers checked whether any of the areas that came out of the analysis was associated with more than one measure (so, for example, health levels of both cholesterol and glucose).

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Mississippi uses first stimulus bill funds to create a 'broadband miracle':

When Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and lawmakers in the Mississippi legislature got $1.2 billion in federal money from the first stimulus bill in March, they decided to do something different. They used a portion of the funds to supercharge the rollout of high-speed broadband to the most underserved areas of the state in an effort to close the digital divide.

They went to rural electric co-ops -- private, independent electric utilities owned by the members they serve -- many of which were left gobsmacked by the offer, according to David O'Bryan, general manager of Delta Electric Power Association, which now serves Carroll and Grenada counties with broadband. Many of these co-ops had been preparing to deploy networks but lacked the cash to begin a major project, especially in the most remote and sparsely populated parts of their territories.

The result has been an acceleration in broadband deployment that could make Mississippi one of the most connected states in the nation within the next five to six years. That's a huge leap for the state, which last year ranked 42 out of 50 in BroadbandNow's 2020 connectivity rankings. The Federal Communications Commission says that at least 35% of rural Mississippians lack access to broadband.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

What about deep, non-superficial thinkers?

Answer Quickly to Be Believed – Pausing Before Replying Decreases Perceived Sincerity:

When people pause before replying to a question, even for just a few seconds, their answers are perceived to be less sincere and credible than if they had replied immediately, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

And the longer the hesitation, the less sincere the response appears.

"Evaluating other people's sincerity is a ubiquitous and important part of social interactions," said lead author Ignazio Ziano, PhD, of Grenoble Ecole de Management. "Our research shows that response speed is an important cue on which people base their sincerity inferences."

The research was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.