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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Most brain activity is "background noise" — and that's upending our understanding of consciousness:

What are you thinking about right now?

Have you ever wondered why it's so hard to answer this simple question when someone asks? There is a reason. 95 percent of your brain's activity is entirely unconscious. Of the remaining 5 percent of brain activity, only around half is intentionally directed. The vast majority of what goes on in our heads is unknown and unintentional. Neuroscientists call these activities "spontaneous fluctuations," because they are unpredictable and seemingly unconnected to any specific behavior. No wonder it's so hard to say what we are thinking or feeling and why. We like to think of ourselves as CEOs of our own minds, but we are much more like ships tossed at sea.

What does this reveal about the nature of consciousness? Why is our brain, a mere 2 percent of our body mass, using 20 percent of our energy to produce what many scientists still call "background noise?" Neuroscientists have known about these "random" fluctuations in electrical brain activity since the 1930s, but have not known what to make of them until relatively recently. Many brain studies of consciousness still look only at brain activity that responds to external stimuli and triggers a mental state. The rest of the "noise" is "averaged out" of the data.

This is still the prevailing approach in most contemporary neuroscience, and yields a "computational" input-output model of consciousness. In this neuroscientific model, so-called "information" transfers from our senses to our brains.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956 and for Teckla:

Cuttlefish show self-control, pass 'marshmallow test':

"Self-control is thought to be the cornerstone of intelligence, as it is an important prerequisite for complex decision-making and planning for the future," said lead author Alex Schnell, a research associate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. Not all animals share this trait, and it was previously thought that the ones that do, such as great apes, corvids and parrots, have long and social lives.

To see if a cephalopod should join the ranks, Schnell and her team adapted the famous "marshmallow test" so that it appealed to cuttlefish.

[...] They then set up a two-chamber apparatus with transparent sliding drawers. Behind one drawer, they placed a preferred meal (such as live grass shrimp) and behind the other, they placed a less preferred meal (such as Asian shore crab). The doors had symbols on them that indicated whether it would open with a delay (a triangle) or open immediately (a circle), which the cuttlefish learned to recognize.

The drawer with the less preferred meal always opened to the cuttlefish immediately, but the other drawer opened after a delay. In the control condition, the door with the preferred snack didn't open at all (a square). When the cuttlefish approached one chamber, the researchers immediately removed the snack in the other.

Booga1 writes:

Cybernews is reporting a trove of data for millions of VPN users being offered for sale.

A user on a popular hacker forum is selling three databases that purportedly contain user credentials and device data stolen from three different Android VPN services – SuperVPN, GeckoVPN, and ChatVPN – with 21 million user records being sold in total.
data of a VPn service being sold on a forum

The VPN services whose data has been allegedly exfiltrated by the hacker are SuperVPN, which is considered as one of the most popular (and dangerous) VPNs on Google Play with 100,000,000+ installs on the Play store, as well as GeckoVPN (1,000,000+ installs) and ChatVPN (50,000+ installs).

The forum user is selling deeply sensitive device data and login credentials – email addresses and randomly generated strings used as passwords – of more than 21 million VPN users for an undisclosed sum.

We reached out to SuperVPN, GeckoVPN, and ChatVPN and asked the providers if they could confirm that the leak was genuine but we have received no responses at the time of writing this report

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

'Deep Nostalgia' Can Turn Old Photos of Your Relatives Into Moving Videos:

It's hard to feel connected to someone who's gone through a static photo. So a company called MyHeritage who provides automatic AI-powered photo enhancements is now offering a new service that can animate people in old photos creating a short video that looks like it was recorded while they posed and prepped for the portrait.

Called Deep Nostalgia, the resulting videos are reminiscent of the Live Photos feature in iOS and iPadOS where several seconds of video are recorded and saved before and after the camera app's shutter is pressed. But where Live Photos is intended to be used to find the perfect shot and framing that may have been missed the exact second the shutter was pressed, Deep Nostalgia is instead meant to bring still shots, even those not captured on a modern smartphone, to life.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

How battery swapping could reduce EV charge time to just 10 minutes:

The fastest electric vehicle charging stations currently get an empty battery to 80 percent full in about 30 minutes. But a new company is working on swapping out empty battery packs for fully charged ones. That would get an electric vehicle to 100 percent full in about 10 minutes.

Ample, which officially launched this week at two sites in San Francisco and another Oakland, builds and operates battery-swapping stations that use a robot to pluck out dead battery packs from under the car and replace them with packs fully charged and ready to go.

The Ample stations can be set up anywhere close to a power source so that the robot machine can get under the belly of the car and also charge a waiting supply of replacement batteries. The stations are completely autonomous and you don't even have to get out of the car while the batteries are switched. You communicate with the station through a smartphone app.

[...] Ample's station can be more energy efficient than a plug-in station, especially fast ones. The Ample station can charge those battery packs during low peak times, when energy is in low demand. It can also be programmed to charge the empty batteries when the grid is using more renewable energy, like wind and solar.

During the holidays and other peak times, fast charging stations have become known for long lines along major travel roads. With battery swapping, Ample is hoping to get those lines moving and cars loaded with efficiently charged energy.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Google claims it will stop tracking individual users for ads:

As Google's plan to kill third-party tracking cookies ramps up, the company is answering questions about what will replace it. Many people have wondered: if Google kills cookies, won't the company just cook up some other method for individually tracking users?

Today, Google answered that concern in a post on its "Ads & Commerce" blog, pledging it won't come up with "any technology used for tracking individual people." The company wrote:

We continue to get questions about whether Google will join others in the ad tech industry who plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers. Today, we're making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.

You might look at that statement and think that Google is sacrificing something or turning over a new leaf when it comes to privacy, but really, the fact is Google doesn't need to track individuals for advertisements. Google's cookie-tracking replacement technology, the Chrome "Privacy Sandbox," uses group tracking, which is more in line with how advertisers think anyway.

As Google puts it in its blog post, "advertisers don't need to track individual consumers across the web to get the performance benefits of digital advertising. Advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing and other privacy-preserving technologies offer a clear path to replacing individual identifiers." If you're an advertiser with a phone ad, you would only ever want to show your ad to "people who care about phones." As an advertiser, you wouldn't really care about individuals or exact browsing history, as long as you knew they were open to being manipulated by your ad.

Original Submission

Eratosthenes writes:

From How This Ancient, Defleshed Human Skull Ended Up in Such a Strange Spot?

Archaeologists may have finally figured out how a 5,300-year-old skull ended up on the ledge of a deep vertical cave shaft in northern Italy.

The skull, with no jaw, was discovered in 2015 during exploratory work at a natural gypsum cave in northern Italy. It was found near the top of a vertical shaft, approximately 40 feet (12 meters) below a complex of meandering caves and 85 feet (26 meters) below ground level.

That a skull should be found in such a strange and isolated spot came as a complete surprise, to say the least. No other human remains were found in the immediate vicinity, nor any archaeological evidence. The location of the upturned skull—a natural cavity within the shaft—can only be accessed with special climbing equipment, and not a spot that ancient peoples could have easily reached.

Was there, a rabbit?

For the study, the researchers were "focused on investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of this individual, since the cranium shows signs of some lesions that appear to be the results of [post-death] manipulation probably carried out to remove soft tissues."

Indeed, the skull, known as the Marcel Loubens cranium, or MLC for short, has some scratches and cut marks on it that are consistent with the removal of flesh, which was likely done as part of a death ritual, according to the authors. Sounds bizarre, but the defleshing of deceased individuals was a relatively common prehistoric practice (even among Neanderthals), both in this part of the world and elsewhere.

So, how did the skull get there?

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Japanese billionaire seeks 8 crewmembers for moon-bound mission on SpaceX's Starship:

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is looking for eight crewmembers for a mission to the moon.

Maezawa, a controversial entrepreneur who previously held a "girlfriend contest" for a now-defunct space-bound mission, announced Tuesday (March 2) that his dearMoon project, which aims to fly the "first civilian mission to the moon," according to the project website, is now looking for eight crewmembers to fly to and around the moon and back on SpaceX's Starship spacecraft.

The project was announced in 2018 with the original intent to bring a crew of artists to the moon. In this latest release, Maezawa calls for applicants to make up a crew of eight individuals from around the world for the week-long lunar trip.

For more information about the project and applicant requirements, check out the dearMoon website here.

Related: How SpaceX's lunar flight with Yusaku Maezawa will work

Watch this video to learn more about the selection process. It also contains a special message from @elonmusk #dearMoon ↓ Check the full version March 2, 2021

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

In Colorado:
Concerning the regulation of digital communications, and, in connection therewith, creating the digital communications division and the digital communications commission
Session: 2021 Regular Session
Subjects: Professions & Occupations
Telecommunications & Information Technology
Bill Summary

The bill creates the digital communications division (division) . . . On an annual basis and for a reasonable fee determined by the commission, the division shall register digital communications platforms . . . such as social media platforms or media-sharing platforms, that conduct business in Colorado . . . A digital communications platform that fails to register with the division commits a class 2 misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 for each day that the violation continues.

The division shall investigate and the commission may hold hearings . . .

• Include practices that promote hate speech; undermine election integrity; disseminate intentional disinformation, conspiracy theories, or fake news; . . . .
• May include business, political, or social practices that are conducted in a manner that a person aggrieved by the practices can demonstrate are unfair or discriminatory to the aggrieved person. . . . .
• Practices that target users for purposes of collecting and disseminating users' personal data, including users' sensitive data
• Profiling users based on their personal data collected
• Selling or authorizing others to use users' personal data to provide location-based advertising or targeted advertising; or
• Using facial recognition software and other tracking technology.

The full text of the bill is here.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD Announces Radeon RX 6700 XT: RDNA2 For 1440p, Coming March 18th For $479

As part of AMD's latest Where Gaming Begins product presentation, the prolific processor designer announced the next member in its Radeon family of video cards, the Radeon RX 6700 XT. Following the tried and true scale-down release strategy that has come to define the GPU industry, the company is preparing its second RDNA2 GPU to further flesh out its lineup of video cards. Set to be released on March 18th, the Radeon RX 6700 XT will be AMD's anchor card for 1440p gaming, succeeding the last-generation RX 5700 XT and giving AMD's product lineup a more wallet-friendly option than their 4K-focused 6800/6900 series cards. The launch for the latest Radeon card will be an all-out affair, with both reference and partner custom cards launching the same day, with prices starting at $479.

[...] Finally, AMD has stated that they're also going to be priming more OEMs than usual with the RX 6700 XT as a third pillar of sorts to better ensure some kind of ongoing retail availability of the card. Despite AMD's best efforts, retail RX 6700 XT cards are virtually guaranteed to sell out within hours (if not sooner) due to how starved the video card market is. So the company wants to at least give customers another avenue towards getting a modern video card by supplying it as part of a complete system, especially as crypto miners seldom buy whole OEM systems.

The RX 6700 XT comes with 12 GB of GDDR6 VRAM and 96 MB of "Infinity Cache". Despite a smaller die, clock speeds are up significantly, which could allow it to perform at around 89% of an RX 6800.

Nvidia's RTX 3060 GPU is "available" at a $329 MSRP. Notably, that GPU also includes 12 GB of VRAM, more than the RTX 3080, 3070, and 3060 Ti.

AMD's Threadripper Pro workstation CPUs with 8 memory channels and 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes are now available, having previously been sold exclusively in Lenovo systems. The 64-core TR 3995WX has a suggested price of $5,490, compared to $3,990 for the 64-core TR 3990X.

Also at Tom's Hardware, The Verge, and Phoronix.

See also: AMD is bringing Smart Access Memory's frame rate boosts to Ryzen 3000 processors
AMD releasing new gaming card amid chip shortage

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Texas court orders Intel to pay $2.18 billion for two patent infringements

The two patents are owned by VLSI and relate to ways to manage CPU clock speeds and minimum voltages for memory. VLSI has an additional six patent violation claims against Intel, which could amount to $11 billion in damages. Intel denies all allegations and is confident it can avoid these fees through future appeals.

[...] Waco Tribune-Herald and Tom's Hardware note that one of the patents (759) relates to clock speed management and is supposed to represent $1.5 billion in damages, while the other one (373) describes a method to reduce the minimum voltage for memory and totals just $675 million in damages. The other six patent violations are supposed to amount to $7.1 billion, and Intel must also consider future royalties, attorney's fees, interests, procedure costs etc., which could amount to $1.7 billion if VLSI manages to win the entire case.

Another Texas jury weighing in on patents.

Also at Wccftech.

Original Submission

Halibut writes:

Last November, class action lawsuits were filed against multiple websites employing activity loggers: Nike (and FullStory), Lululemon (and Quantum Metric), and WebMD (and Mouseflow). The WebMD story mentions some others at the end.

According to these lawsuits, the companies running the websites, and the companies providing the logging software, are intercepting and/or recording personally identifiable information without the knowledge or consent of the viewers of the site. The lawsuits, which are filed in the state of California, allege this constitutes an illegal wiretap in violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA). The CIPA is an anti-wiretapping law that imposes civil and criminal penalties for recording confidential conversations, with fairly broad definitions for confidential conversations and consent.

Despite being a few months old, I had not heard about these lawsuits. Website replay logging software scripts have been around for years (here is a story from 2017). These replay loggers can record everything from where your cursor goes to what links you click on to what keys you press on the website. According to the stories, both the company hosting the website and the company who operates the logger can get enough information to fully replay a user's interaction with the website. This would be particularly violating where the user is entering a password or, as in the WebMD case above, personal information including medical information. Even if the user intended to send that information to the website in question, most users are probably not aware that it is also being sent to a third party.

Original Submission

Watch out, PayPal. Square just launched its own bank:

New York (CNN Business) Square, the financial payments firm run by Jack Dorsey, launched an in-house bank that it says will allow it to "operate more nimbly" in an increasingly crowded fintech market.

The firm announced Monday that the bank has begun operations after completing the charter approval process with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Utah Department of Financial Institutions. It will operate as an independently governed subsidiary of Square Inc (SQ) Dorsey is also the CEO and co-founder of Twitter (TWTR).

The Salt Lake City, Utah-based Square Financial Services will provide business loans and deposit products to sellers who use its card reader and other point-of-sale services.

[...] Unlike a traditional bank that must rely on a business' report of its performance, payment service providers "have a constant, near-real-time view into the business performance and perhaps the entirety of their revenue stream," Ford said. "As far as managing risk, they have a constant pulse check on how the business is doing."

This kind of data helps Square lend to businesses that might be turned away by a typical bank — the company says it has a better record of lending to women- and minority-owned businesses than traditional lenders.

Square Capital facilitated approximately 57,000 loans during the fourth quarter of 2020 totaling $254 million (a 62% year-over-year decline that it attributed in part to the pandemic). As of December 31, 2020, Square Capital had also facilitated approximately $857 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans to more than 80,000 small businesses.

The company said Monday it does not expect the bank to have a material impact on its balance sheet, revenue or income in 2021, and that it will "continue to sell loans to third-party investors and limit balance sheet exposure."

Original Submission

[2021-03-03 22:13:57 UTC; UPDATE #2]:

Ars Technica posted an update to their earlier story:

Update 3:45 pm EST: The SN10 Starship prototype very nearly launched on Wednesday afternoon from South Texas, but a last-second out-of-bounds reading aborted the attempt. The abort was caused by a "slightly conservative high thrust limit," SpaceX founder Elon Musk said afterward. Basically, the onboard flight computer received data from one of the engines that it was producing more thrust than anticipated.

The good news? This thrust limit can be adjusted upward in the flight software, and the vehicle is now recycling through propellant loading for another attempt. SN10 may still fly later today, time to be determined.

SpaceX's original (i.e. aborted) launch YouTube link.

Original story moved below the fold.

There is a slight possibility of a retry later today, Wednesday 2021-03-03.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Cord cutting was so bad last year that pay-TV penetration is down to 1994 levels

Cord cutting accelerated at such a rapid pace last year that the penetration of U.S. households paying for traditional TV services is down to levels not seen since the mid-1990s, according to a new report from analyst firm MoffettNathanson.

Over the course of 2020, cable and satellite TV companies shed 6 million subscribing households, the firm estimates, a decline of 7.3%.

And the rise of cable-like streaming services—such as Sling, YouTube TV, and Hulu's live TV service—has not been dramatic enough to make up the difference, since only about one-third of cord cutters subscribed to an over-the-top equivalent.

Original Submission