SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Insteon finally comes clean about its sudden smart home shutdown:

Smart home company Insteon and its parent company, Smartlabs Inc., suddenly disappeared last week. In what will probably be remembered as one of the most notorious smart home shutdowns ever, Insteon decided to turn off its cloud servers without giving customers any warning at all, surprise-bricking many smart home devices that relied on the Insteon cloud.

[...] Insteon has finally updated its website (archive here) and pinned a goodbye message to the top of every page a full week after its surprise liquidation. The statement—which is not attributed to anyone—says that the company is going out of business because of the pandemic and supply chain problems. The company looked for a buyer but couldn't find one.

The statement reads, in part:

In 2019, the onset of the global pandemic brought unforeseen disruption to the market, but the company continued to move forward. However, the subsequent (and enduring) disruption to the supply chain caused by the pandemic proved incredibly difficult and the company engaged in a sales process in November, 2021. The goal was to find a parent for the company and continue to invest in new products and the technology. The process resulted in several interested parties, and a sale was expected to be realized in the March timeframe. Unfortunately, that sale did not materialize. Consequently, the company was assigned to a financial services firm in March to optimize the assets of the company.

[...] Insteon ends its statement by saying, "We hope that the Insteon community understands the tireless efforts by all the employees to serve our customers, and [we] deeply apologize to the community."

Previous Story: Insteon Looks Dead—Just Like its Users' Smart Homes

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Since we mentioned that the C64 got middle age (or however you see 40 as) one might also note that the European rival the ZX Spectrum also just turned to (on the 23rd of April). While it might not have been big in America it was fairly popular over in Europe, and certainly then in the UK. More of a rival over here then all this talk about the Apple II etc.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/22/spectrum_at_40/

The ZX Spectrum, released on April 23, 1982, was a follow-up to Sinclair's ZX81. Referred to as the ZX82 or ZX81 Colour during development, the final product arrived with either 16KB or 48KB of RAM (depending on pocket depth) and a case designed by Rick Dickinson, who had previously worked on the ZX81 wedge. Dickinson was also responsible for the ZX Spectrum's infamous rubber keyboard.

The BASIC interpreter was stored in ROM and was written by Steve Vickers on contract from Nine Tiles. A prototype ZX Spectrum, formerly in the possession of Nine Tiles, was donated to the Centre for Computing History in 2019. The prototype lacks the Dickinson case and features full-travel keys, but the guts would go on to form the ZX Spectrum found occupying many a family television of the 1980s.

Text took the form of a 32 x 24 column display and graphics had 256 x 192 pixels to play with. Color was problematic; to conserve memory a separate 32 x 24 overlay of 8 x 8 pixels were used, with each block having a foreground and background color. While static color images could work relatively well, the approach resulted in the infamous attribute clash. Rival machines, such as the Commodore 64, did not suffer from the same problem although used a lower multicolor resolution made for blockier graphics.

The ZX Spectrum, replete with rubber keyboard, debuted at £125 for the 16KB version and £175 for the 48KB incarnation. A 32KB RAM pack could be plugged into the rear expansion slot of the former, and this writer well remembers the joy of an unexpected reset caused by a wobbly bit of hardware.

Over five million of the Z80A-based devices were sold, and its impact cannot be overstated. While over 1.5 million BBC Micros (made by Acorn) may have also been sold during its lifetime, it was the ZX Spectrum that found its way into far more homes across Europe, and its impact continues to resonate in the IT world of today.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel Publishes Open-Source PSE Firmware

Last year open-source developers called on Intel to open-source their "PSE" firmware. The Programmable Services Engine (PSE) introduced with Elkhart Lake is an Arm Cortex-M7 companion core responsible for various tasks and is programmed by a binary-only firmware module. While it started out as a proprietary, binary blob, the PSE firmware has now been open-sourced!

[...] The PSE firmware had been closed-source as a frustration to Coreboot developers and other folks concerned about having an open platform as much as possible at the lower-levels for the sake of not only open-source system firmware but also security concerns.

The Intel PSE firmware is being made open-source via GitHub. The Elkhart Lake PSE is open-source under an Apache 2.0 license and is accompanied as well by sample applications and pre-built binaries.

Elkhart Lake is based on the Tremont Atom core.

Also at CNX Software.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Hackers are exploiting 0-days more than ever:

Previously unknown "zero-day" software vulnerabilities are mysterious and intriguing as a concept. But they're even more noteworthy when hackers are spotted actively exploiting the novel software flaws in the wild before anyone else knows about them. As researchers have expanded their focus to detect and study more of this exploitation, they're seeing it more often. Two reports this week from the threat intelligence firm Mandiant and Google's bug hunting team, Project Zero, aim to give insight into the question of exactly how much zero-day exploitation has grown in recent years.

[...] "We started seeing a spike early in 2021, and a lot of the questions I was getting all through the year were, 'What the heck is going on?!'" says Maddie Stone, a security researcher at Project Zero. "My first reaction was, 'Oh my goodness, there's so much.' But when I took a step back and looked at it in the context of previous years, to see such a big jump, that growth actually more likely is due to increased detection, transparency, and public knowledge about zero-days."

[...] While awareness and detection efforts have increased, James Sadowski, a researcher at Mandiant, emphasizes that he does see evidence of a shift in the landscape.

"There are definitely more zero-days being used than ever before," he says. "The overall count last year for 2021 shot up, and there are probably a couple of factors that contributed, including the industry's ability to detect this. But there's also been a proliferation of these capabilities since 2012," the year that Mandiant's report looks back to. "There's been a significant expansion in volume as well as the variety of groups exploiting zero-days," he says.

upstart writes:

Countries that allow economic inequality to increase as they grow richer make their citizens less happy, new research shows:

In most of 78 countries studied people were less satisfied with their lives as their country became less economically equal.

The fall in life satisfaction occurred even where the economy had grown as a whole and people from all classes were generally richer, Dr. David Bartram will tell the British Sociological Association's online annual conference on Thursday 21 April,

[...] He found that life satisfaction in the U.K. in 2018 was similar to that in 1981, during a major recession, in part because inequality in the U.K. had increased so much. The U.K. was typical of countries that had lower life satisfaction over time as inequality had risen, falling from 7.7 in 1981 to 7.4 in 1999 as inequality rose, later recovering to 7.8 as inequality fell.

[...] "When inequality increases, people with high incomes don't benefit much from their gains—many rich people are focused on those who have even more than they do, and they never feel they have enough. But people who earn little really suffer from falling further behind—they feel excluded and frustrated by not being able to keep up even with people who receive average incomes."

[...] Countries where inequality had fallen were generally happier over time, including Poland, Peru, Mexico and pre-war Ukraine.

Dr. Bartram said his research contradicted some previous work that found that higher inequality could increase life satisfaction. "My paper finds the opposite—higher inequality depresses life satisfaction. Previous researchers have compared across different countries at one point in time, but comparing one country to another isn't a good way of learning what will happen as inequality increases."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Brave introduces feature to bypass 'harmful' Google AMP pages:

Chromium-based browser maker Brave has introduced a new feature called De-AMP which allows users to bypass Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages framework (AMP) to allow them to instead visit websites directly.

Brave was scathing in its assessment of Google's AMP framework, claiming in a blog post released on Tuesday that the framework is "harmful to privacy" and "helps Google further monopolize and control the direction of the web".

"An ethical web must be a user-first web, where users are in control of their browsing, and are aware of who they are communicating with. AMP (along with Google's upcoming, actual name still to come, 'AMP 2.0') is incompatible with a user-first Web. De-AMP adds to the long list of Brave features that put users first on the Web," Brave said in the post.

"Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether. And in cases where that is not possible, Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP/Google code from being loaded and executed."

Brave announced that the De-AMP feature is now available in its Nightly and Beta versions and will soon be enabled in the upcoming 1.38 Desktop and Android versions before being released on iOS.

Google claims on its website that the purpose of AMP is to enhance website performance in order to create "user-first experiences".

Also reported at Brave is bypassing Google AMP pages because they're 'harmful to users':

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

upstart writes:

MIT's newest computer vision algorithm identifies images down to the pixel:

For humans, identifying items in a scene [...] is as simple as looking at them. But for artificial intelligence and computer vision systems, developing a high-fidelity understanding of their surroundings takes a bit more effort. Well, a lot more effort. Around 800 hours of hand-labeling training images effort, if we're being specific. To help machines better see the way people do, a team of researchers at MIT CSAIL in collaboration with Cornell University and Microsoft have developed STEGO, an algorithm able to identify images down to the individual pixel.

Normally, creating CV training data involves a human drawing boxes around specific objects within an image — say, a box around the dog sitting in a field of grass — and labeling those boxes with what's inside ("dog"), so that the AI trained on it will be able to tell the dog from the grass. STEGO (Self-supervised Transformer with Energy-based Graph Optimization), conversely, uses a technique known as semantic segmentation, which applies a class label to each pixel in the image to give the AI a more accurate view of the world around it.

Whereas a labeled box would have the object plus other items in the surrounding pixels within the boxed-in boundary, semantic segmentation labels every pixel in the object, but only the pixels that comprise the object — you get just dog pixels, not dog pixels plus some grass too. It's the machine learning equivalent of using the Smart Lasso in Photoshop versus the Rectangular Marquee tool.

The problem with this technique is one of scope. Conventional multi-shot supervised systems often demand thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of labeled images with which to train the algorithm. Multiply that by the 65,536 individual pixels that make up even a single 256x256 image, all of which now need to be individually labeled as well, and the workload required quickly spirals into impossibility.

Instead, "STEGO looks for similar objects that appear throughout a dataset," the CSAIL team wrote in a press release Thursday. "It then associates these similar objects together to construct a consistent view of the world across all of the images it learns from."

upstart writes:

ISPs can't find any judges who will block California net neutrality law:

The broadband industry has lost another attempt to block California's net neutrality law.

After ISP lobby groups' motion for a preliminary injunction was denied last year in US District Court for the Eastern District of California, they appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. A three-judge panel unanimously upheld the ruling against the broadband industry in January, after which the industry groups petitioned for a rehearing with all of the appellate court's judges (called an "en banc" hearing).

The answer came back Wednesday: No judges on the appeals court thought the broadband industry's petition for a rehearing was even worth voting on.

"The full court has been advised of the petition for rehearing en banc and no judge has requested a vote on whether to rehear the matter en banc. The petition for rehearing en banc is denied," the order said.

California can thus continue enforcing its net neutrality law while the case continues.

upstart writes:

Planting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models:

These days the computational resources to train machine learning models can be quite large and more places are outsourcing model training and development to machine-learning-as-a-service (MLaaS) platforms such as Amazon Sagemaker and Microsoft Azure. With shades of a Ken Thompson speech from almost 40 years ago, you can test whether your new model works as you expect by throwing test data at it, but how do you know you can trust it, that it won't act in a malicious manner using some built-in backdoor? Researchers demonstrate that it is possible to plant undetectable backdoors into machine learning models. From the paper abstract:

[...] On the surface, such a backdoored classifier behaves normally, but in reality, the learner maintains a mechanism for changing the classification of any input, with only a slight perturbation. Importantly, without the appropriate "backdoor key", the mechanism is hidden and cannot be detected by any computationally-bounded observer.

They show multiple ways to plant undetectable backdoors such that if you were given black-box access to the original and backdoored versions, it is computationally infeasible to find even a single input where they differ.

upstart writes:

In rare interview, Monkey Island designers tell Ars about long-awaited Return:

Nine years ago, The Secret of Monkey Island creator and designer Ron Gilbert wrote a blog post laying out what he would do if he made another Monkey Island game. But now that Gilbert is actually working on Return to Monkey Island—his first work on the franchise in over three decades—he told Ars that the 2013 blog post seems like it was written by a completely different person.

[...] Today, Gilbert describes the process that finally led him back to Monkey Island as "a star alignment thing." While Gilbert said he had considered a return to the series many times over the years, it wasn't until a pitch from publisher Devolver Digital a few years ago that "the ball started moving forward on stuff."

Before diving back into Monkey Island, though, Gilbert said he wanted to make sure any new game could live up to expectations that have risen sky-high after three decades of the first two Monkey Island games being hailed as the pinnacle of classic adventure game design. "That was my No. 1 concern when Devolver first approached me about this—just the weight of [expectations]," he said. "Was that something I really wanted to take on?"

To get past those fears, Gilbert consulted with fellow Monkey Island programmer and writer Dave Grossman to discuss whether revisiting the setting would actually be valuable. The pair asked themselves a series of questions before committing: "Do we have a good idea? Can we move this forward? Do we have... a story that fits the legacy?"

"For me, [the prospect of] working with Ron definitely was a big draw," Grossman told Ars. "[But] just to sort of check ourselves, we got together before we definitely said yes to make sure that we had something to say with [a new game], that we were going to be able to take it in some interesting directions. So we met for a weekend and decided that, yeah, that was the case, and we should make a game."

So fellow Soylentils, are you fans of Monkey Island?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Google marked Earth Day 2022 with a Doodle consisting of animated GIFs showing time-lapse images of four scenes: glacial retreat at the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania between December 1986 and 2020 and in Sermersooq, Greenland between December 2000 and 2020, a coral bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef between March 2016 and October 2017, and deforestation of the Harz forests in Elend, Germany, between December 1995 and 2020.

Climate counsellor Lesley Hughes, a professor of biology at Macquarie University in Sydney, said the images of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef are "a very high-impact visual image" that would resonate.

[...] "Our physical and biological world is transforming before our eyes and that's what these images are emphasising and so there's absolutely no time to waste."

Hughes said the confronting images published in 2022 may be a response to the IPCC26 report and were important for raising awareness.

"I think when you're sitting in a middle-class environment and it's a nice day and the sun's come up or has gone down, it's easy to become complacent about the larger forces at work in our climate system and the impacts those forces have," Hughes said.

"So reminding people that just because it's a nice day, climate change hasn't gone away is really important."

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Anomaly 6 claims to be able to track billions of mobile phones, including those belonging to some of America's top spy agencies.

There exists an underworld data broker market devoted to auctioning off your information to the highest bidder. It's an industry populated by professional creeps who buy and sell mobile data collected via invasive if legal means, often from nosy apps. A new report shows that one such company demonstrated just how creepy it could be by spying on some of America's three letter agencies to show off its product.

The Intercept and Tech Inquiry report that a little-known Virginia data firm called Anomaly Six, or A6, displayed its surveillance capabilities by tracking mobile phones used by employees of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. The company reportedly uses highly accurate GPS data purchased from mobile apps to triangulate when and where a specific phone user is at any given time. This, along with other collected data points, allows the company to track 3 billion devices in "real time," marketing materials viewed by the outlets suggests.

The alleged snooping on America's spies was revealed during a demo unveiled at a meeting between A6 and another surveillance startup, Zignal Labs, which is known for sucking up reams of social media data from Twitter. The two companies were in the midst of talks regarding a potential partnership and, to impress Zignal, A6's rep, Brendon Clark, allegedly used the firm's tech to track a mobile phone from the parking lot of the NSA to a military training base in the Middle East.

[Source]: Gizmodo

So, who else is left to be tracked ??

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/index.html

Ever wonder what's lurking within the dark corners, nooks and crannies of your computer? Is some gremlin responsible for all those crashes---you know, the ones that happen when you are trying to save that critical document you've been working on so diligently for the past three hours? We wondered too, so we took a look to see what we could find. And guess what? When we put the computer chips under the microscope we found some very interesting creatures hiding there.

Our search has led to a new collection of photomicrographs (photographs taken through a microscope) featuring many of the interesting silicon creatures and other doodling scribbled onto integrated circuits by engineers when they were designing computer chip masks. The tiny creatures are far too small to be seen with the naked eye, so we have provided high-magnification photomicrographs to share these mysterious wonders with our visitors. Engineers designing modern computer chips have a very rich sense of humor as you will discover when you visit our Silicon Creatures Gallery that we keep corralled in the Silicon Zoo. We hope you enjoy your adventure!

Original Submission

upstart writes:

How Bitcoin mining devastated this New York town:

When specialized ASICs optimized for crypto mining went on the market, a processor arms race began. Plattsburgh, in upstate New York, had some of the cheapest electricity rates in the country and crypto miners beat a path to their town to set up shop. In 2018 the town was receiving a major crypto mining application every week.

In January 2018, there was a cold snap. People turned up their heat and plugged in space heaters. The city quickly exceeded its quota of hydropower, forcing it to buy power elsewhere at much higher rates. McMahon says his Plattsburgh home's energy bill jumped by $30 to $40 a month. "People felt there was a problem but didn't know what to attribute it to," he says.

Once the town realized the energy burden of this new industry and the fact that it brought in very little in the way of jobs or tax revenue, they started regulating the industry by requiring funds up front, and they updated their building codes and noise ordinances. Mining farms now have little interest in their town and new applications have moved on to other locations.

upstart found an interesting article written by former Commodore engineer Bil Herd over at Hackaday:

Commodore C64: The Most Popular Home Computer Ever Turns 40:

This year marks the anniversary of the most popular selling home computer ever, the Commodore 64, which made its debut in 1982. Note that I am saying "home computer" and not personal computer (PC) because back then the term PC was not yet in use for home computer users.

Some of you have probably not heard of Commodore, which is kind of sad, though there is a simple reason why — Commodore is no longer around to maintain its legacy. If one were to watch a documentary about the 1980s they may see a picture of an Apple computer or its founders but most likely would not see a picture of a Commodore computer in spite of selling tens of millions of units.

It is a nice history lesson on the most popular home computer ever sold. For those less inclined to reading and scrolling, his presentation is also a YouTube video.

How many of you started with the 6502 CPU or even the Commodore 64 itself?

Original Submission