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upstart writes:

New method detects deepfake videos with up to 99% accuracy:

Computer scientists at UC Riverside can detect manipulated facial expressions in deepfake videos with higher accuracy than current state-of-the-art methods. The method also works as well as current methods in cases where the facial identity, but not the expression, has been swapped, leading to a generalized approach to detect any kind of facial manipulation. The achievement brings researchers a step closer to developing automated tools for detecting manipulated videos that contain propaganda or misinformation.

Developments in video editing software have made it easy to exchange the face of one person for another and alter the expressions on original faces. As unscrupulous leaders and individuals deploy manipulated videos to sway political or social opinions, the ability to identify these videos is considered by many essential to protecting free democracies. Methods exist that can detect with reasonable accuracy when faces have been swapped. But identifying faces where only the expressions have been changed is more difficult and to date, no reliable technique exists.

[...] The UC Riverside method divides the task into two components within a deep neural network. The first branch discerns facial expressions and feeds information about the regions that contain the expression, such as the mouth, eyes, or forehead, into a second branch, known as an encoder-decoder. The encoder-decoder architecture is responsible for manipulation detection and localization.

More information: Ghazal Mazaheri, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury, Detection and Localization of Facial Expression Manipulations. arXiv:2103.08134v1 [cs.CV], arxiv.org/abs/2103.08134

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upstart writes:

This time, can Boeing's Starliner finally shine?:

Boeing and NASA say the Starliner spacecraft is ready for a do-over flight, with a second uncrewed test mission of the spacecraft now scheduled for May 19.

Nine months have passed since a standard pre-flight check of the spacecraft, then sitting atop a rocket on a launch pad in Florida, found that 13 of 24 oxidizer valves within Starliner's propulsion system were stuck. The discovery was made within hours of liftoff.

Since then, engineers and technicians at Boeing and NASA have worked to fully understand why the valves were stuck and to fix the problem. They found that the dinitrogen tetroxide oxidizer that had been loaded onto the spacecraft 46 days prior to launch had combined with ambient humidity to create nitric acid, which had started the process of corrosion inside the valve's aluminum housing.

On Tuesday, during a teleconference with reporters, officials from Boeing and NASA discussed the steps they have taken to ameliorate the problem for Starliner's upcoming test flight. Michelle Parker, vice president and deputy general manager of Boeing Space and Launch, said the valves remain the same on the vehicle but that technicians have sealed up pathways by which moisture might get inside the propulsion system. They are also purging moisture from the valves using nitrogen gas and loading propellants onto Starliner closer to launch.

With those mitigations undertaken, Starliner will soon be stacked on top of an Atlas V rocket built by United Launch Alliance. Starliner was in fact due to roll out to the Atlas V launch complex in Florida on Wednesday, but Boeing said the rollout was "paused" due to a hydraulic leak on United Launch Alliance's transport vehicle.

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Dog Coronavirus Jumps to Humans, With a Protein Shift

upstart writes:

Dog coronavirus jumps to humans, with a protein shift:

A new canine coronavirus was first identified in two Malaysian human patients who developed pneumonia in 2017-18. A group of other scientists isolated the canine coronavirus, sequenced it and published their findings in 2021.

Now, a team led by Cornell and Temple University researchers has identified a pattern that occurs in a terminus of the canine coronavirus spike protein -- the area of the virus that facilitates entry into a host cell: The virus shifts from infecting both the intestines and respiratory system of the animal host to infecting only the respiratory system in a human host.

The researchers identified a change in the terminus -- known as the N terminus -- a region of the molecule with alterations also detected in another coronavirus, which jumped from bats to humans, where it causes a common cold.

The paper, "Recent Zoonotic Spillover and Tropism Shift of a Canine Coronavirus is Associated with Relaxed Selection and Putative Loss of Function in NTD Subdomain of Spike Protein," was published April 21 in the journal Viruses.

"This study identifies some of the molecular mechanisms underlying a host shift from dog coronavirus to a new human host, that may also be important in the circulation of a new human coronavirus that we previously didn't know about," said Michael Stanhope, professor of public and ecosystem health in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Journal Reference:
Jordan D. Zehr, Sergei L. Kosakovsky Pond, Darren P. Martin, et al. Recent Zoonotic Spillover and Tropism Shift of a Canine Coronavirus Is Associated with Relaxed Selection and Putative Loss of Function in NTD Subdomain of Spike Protein, Viruses (DOI: 10.3390/v14050853)

Bird Flu Found in Colorado Man but Risk to Humans is Low, CDC Says

upstart writes:

Bird Flu Found in Colorado Man but Risk to Humans Is Low, CDC Says:

A man in Colorado has tested positive for the H5N1 avian flu, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health officials said Thursday. The man, who's younger than 40 and an inmate at a state correctional facility, had direct exposure to infected poultry at a commercial farm in western Colorado.

The CDC and the Colorado Department of Public Health said the risk to the public remains low. The man is largely asymptomatic but is receiving treatment per CDC guidelines and is being kept away from others.

According to the CDC, this is the second human case "associated with this specific group of H5 viruses," and the first case in the US. H5N1 is the predominant bird flu virus in the world, but it remains rare in humans.

"We want to reassure Coloradans that the risk to them is low," said Dr. Rachel Herlihy, epidemiologist with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, in a release.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Code locker has figured out it's a giant honeypot for miscreants planning supply chain attacks

GitHub has announced that it will require two factor authentication for users who contribute code on its service.

"The software supply chain starts with the developer," wrote GitHub chief security officer Mike Hanley on the company blog. "Developer accounts are frequent targets for social engineering and account takeover, and protecting developers from these types of attacks is the first and most critical step toward securing the supply chain."

Readers will doubtless recall that attacks on development supply chains have recently proven extremely nasty. Exhibit A: the Russian operatives that slipped malware into SolarWinds' Orion monitoring tool and used it to gain access to over 18,000 companies. GitHub has also had its own problems, such as when access to npm was compromised.

Hence its decision to require 2FA "by the end of 2023" for users who commit code, open or merge pull requests, use Actions, or publish packages. GitHub already offers 2FA, requires contributors of popular packages (including npm) to employ it, and states that 16.5 per cent of active users already employ the technique.

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upstart writes:

Facebook employees knew that a computer-curated feed increased the time users spent on the social network—and that it led to unhealthy behaviors:

This piece is part of Gizmodo's ongoing effort to make the Facebook Papers available to the public. See the full directory of documents here.

In a presentation dated May 6, 2018, a Facebook employee asked, "Is Ranking Good?"

"Probably. Even asking the question feels slightly blasphemous at Facebook," the same employee answered in smaller text below. "So many experiments and product launches demonstrate the value of ranking that it's [sic] value is often taken as an article of faith."

[...] . The presentation is part of the Facebook Papers, a trove of documents that offer an unprecedented look inside the most powerful social media company in the world. [...]

Today, as part of a rolling effort to make the Facebook Papers available publicly, Gizmodo is releasing a second batch of documents—37 files in all. In our first drop, we shared 28 files related to the 2020 election and the Jan 6. attack on the U.S. Capitol. [...]

Today's batch offers insight into how Meta chooses to rank the content submitted by its users. It's a system that very few people seem to understand, a problem that the company appears short on clues how to solve. [...]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Is there a First Amendment right to assemble in the metaverse?:

In front of Samsung's headquarters this February, dozens of protesters marched in red shirts with "MoneyFestation" written on the front, holding signs that say, "I Have A Scream."

The shirt was designed by Azerbaijani poet and artist Babi Badalov. Combining the words money, infestation, and manifestation, Badalov and supporters were rallying to criticize rampant capitalism and consumerism.

But the protest didn't take place in the Samsung headquarters in South Korea; instead, it was at their digital headquarters in the virtual town of Decentraland within the depths of the metaverse.

The protesters were digital avatars, and their shirts were minted non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that were distributed among the protesters for free as a commentary on the commodification of art.

[...] Schweiger said the group was protesting big tech companies that are encroaching on what is supposed to be decentralized, digital land.

Corporations such as Samsung act in contradiction to the decentralization of the internet, which Superflus sees as a major actor in "colonizing [the metaverse], bringing along consumerism, (digital) inequality, exclusion, and extraction."

[...] The new and exciting ways to protest in the metaverse also bring a new set of challenges and concerns. As extended reality technology continues to develop and become more ubiquitous, there are questions about human rights within virtual reality.

upstart writes:

This California Greenhouse is Run by Robots - ExtremeTech:

Northern California-based Iron Ox was born from the realization that conventional American agriculture negatively impacts the environment in a multitude of ways. The type of farming most of us are familiar with uses as much as 70 percent of the world's fresh water supply and produces up to 1.19 gigatons of greenhouse gasses every year. [...]

Iron Ox uses two house-designed, AI-supported robots to perform most repetitive farming tasks and ensure resources are used efficiently. The first of these, called Grover, makes up the brawn of Iron Ox's robotic crew. Able to lift more than 1,000 pounds, Grover helps move plant "modules" (i.e. planter boxes) around the greenhouse. Grover also helps water and harvest crops in tandem with Phil, the company's brainier robot farmer. Phil monitors and delivers each module's water, nutrient mix, and pH levels to maximize crop yield and quality while making sure resources aren't overused.

[...] As with any other setting, the integration of robots into agriculture raises concerns regarding job displacement. Conventional farming has long presented employment opportunities for lower-income communities and immigrants; [...] The company says farming is facing a labor crisis as young workers turn away from grueling, environmentally detrimental work, and that its technology may very well present a more positive alternative.

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upstart writes:

Attackers Use Event Logs to Hide Fileless Malware:

Researchers have discovered a malicious campaign utilizing a never-before-seen technique for quietly planting fileless malware on target machines.

The technique involves injecting shellcode directly into Windows event logs. This allows adversaries to use the Windows event logs as a cover for malicious late stage trojans, according to a Kaspersky research report released Wednesday.

Researchers uncovered the campaign in February and believe the unidentified adversaries have been active for the past month.

"We consider the event logs technique, which we haven't seen before, the most innovative part of this campaign," wrote Denis Legezo, senior security researcher with Kaspersky's Global Research and Analysis Team.

[...] The first stage of the attack involves the adversary driving targets to a legitimate website and enticing the target to download a compressed .RAR file boobytrapped with the network penetration testing tools called Cobalt Strike and SilentBreak. Both tools are popular among hackers who use them as a vehicle for delivering shellcode to target machines.

[...] Next, attackers are then able to leverage Cobalt Strike and SilentBreak to "inject code into any process" and can inject additional modules into Windows system processes or trusted applications such as DLP.

[...] What is new is new, however, is how the encrypted shellcode containing the malicious payload is embedded into Windows event logs. To avoid detection, the code "is divided into 8 KB blocks and saved in the binary part of event logs."

Look what I can do! writes:

"We are especially proud to present you Tails 5.0, the first version of Tails based on Debian 11 (Bullseye). It brings new versions of a lot of the software included in Tails and new OpenPGP tools."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Every ISP in the US has been ordered to block three pirate streaming services:

A federal judge has ordered all Internet service providers in the United States to block three pirate streaming services operated by Doe defendants who never showed up to court and hid behind false identities.

The blocking orders affect Israel.tv, Israeli-tv.com, and Sdarot.tv, as well as related domains listed in the rulings and any other domains where the copyright-infringing websites may resurface in the future. The orders came in three essentially identical rulings (see here, here, and here) issued on April 26 in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Each ruling provides a list of 96 ISPs that are expected to block the websites, including Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. But the rulings say that all ISPs must comply even if they aren't on the list [...].

[...] The plaintiffs are United King Film Distribution, D.B.S. Satellite Services (1998), HOT Communication Systems, Reshet Media, and Keshet Broadcasting. While the plaintiffs "transmit their programming in an encrypted form," the defendants' "various services and hardware permit end-user consumers to bypass the Plaintiffs' encryption to view Plaintiffs' content," the rulings said.

The judge ordered domain registrars and registries to transfer the domain names to the plaintiffs. The rulings include injunctions against "third parties providing services used in connection with Defendants' operations," including web hosts, content delivery networks, DNS providers, VPN providers, web designers, search-based online advertising services, and others.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Largest known cave art images in US by Indigenous Americans discovered in Alabama:

Archaeologists in Alabama have discovered the longest known painting created by early Indigenous Americans, a new study finds. Indigenous Americans crafted this 1,000-year-old record-breaking image — of a 10-foot-long (3 meters) rattlesnake — as well as other paintings, out of mud on the walls and ceiling of a cave, likely to depict spirits of the underworld, the researchers said.

The cave has hundreds of cave paintings and is considered the richest place for Native American cave art in the American Southeast, the researchers said. To investigate its historic art, the team turned to photogrammetry, a technique that involves taking hundreds of digital images in order to build a virtual 3D model. Using this method, the researchers spotted five previously unknown giant cave paintings, known as glyphs.

"This methodology allows us to create a virtual model of the space that we can manipulate," study first author Jan Simek, a distinguished professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, told Live Science. "In this particular case, the ceiling of the cave is very close to the floor. So your field of vision is limited by your proximity to the ceiling. We never saw these very large images because we couldn't get back far enough to see them."

After creating the virtual model, "we could look at it from a greater perspective," he said. "It allows us to see things in a way that we can't in person."

[...] This cave was first discovered in 1998 and remains unnamed, going by the moniker "19th unnamed cave" in order to protect the discoveries. The cave contains over 3 miles (5 kilometers) of underground passages with the majority of paintings discovered in one large chamber, according to a 1999 study published in the journal Southeastern Archaeology. In continuing to use photogrammetry techniques on the 19th unnamed cave and others, the team hopes to further improve understanding of Indigenous American art.

The study will be published online Wednesday (May 4) in the journal Antiquity.

Source: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/discovering-ancient-cave-art-using-3d-photogrammetry-precontact-native-american-mud-glyphs-from-19th-unnamed-cave-alabama/

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2022.24

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The Italian research center SISSA has announced a paper proposing a new property, called "non-minimal coupling" [PDF - 232Kb] to address the mystery of the nature of dark matter:

In the Universe, dark matter and standard matter "talk" to each other using a secret language. This "discussion" happens thanks to gravity, scientists say, but not in a way they can fully comprehend. A new SISSA study published in "The Astrophysical Journal" sheds light on this long-standing issue.

The authors of the research, Ph.D Student Giovanni Gandolfi and supervisors Andrea Lapi and Stefano Liberati, propose a special property for dark matter called a "non-minimal coupling with gravity". This new type of interaction can modify dark matter gravitational influence on standard 'baryonic' matter.

[...] To prove the hypothesis, the assumption has been tested and then confirmed with experimental data from thousands of spiral galaxies.

[...] The new study suggests the existence of a new feature of dark matter, named 'non-minimal coupling', which "can be described as a new type of interaction between dark matter and gravity" the authors affirm. "It tells us a lot about the way the two components "communicate". If the non-minimal coupling is present, standard matter "perceives" spacetime in a way which is different from the one "experienced" by the dark matter.

[...] The new study proposes a solution to one of the most discussed problems in astrophysics, researchers say: "Among other things, the positions of those who argue that dark matter does not exist, and therefore gravity must be modified, are based on the difficulty of finding an explanation to this problem, which is one of the last missing pieces for a global comprehension of dark matter".

But there is more. "This feature of dark matter is not a piece of new exotic fundamental physics" the author say. "One can explain the existence of this non- minimal coupling with known physics alone".

Journal Reference:
Giovanni Gandolfi et al Empirical Evidence of Nonminimally Coupled Dark Matter in the Dynamics of Local Spiral Galaxies? [open] 2022 ApJ 929 48
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac5970

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AnonTechie writes:

Yahoo

The Fermi paradox questions why aliens have never visited Earth despite the Universe being so old and so vast that races should have evolved interstellar travel and come calling by now. Now two scientists believe they may have the answer.

Astrobiologists Dr Michael Wong, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, and Dr Stuart Bartlett, of California Institute of Technology, have hypothesised that civilisations burn out when they grow too large and technical.

Faced with an ever-growing population and eye-watering energy consumption, worlds hit a crisis point known as a "singularity" where innovation can no longer keep up with demand. The only alternative to collapse is to abandon "unyielding growth" and adopt a balance that allows survival but prevents the society moving any further forward, or venturing far from its own spot in the universe.

Writing in the Royal Society Open Science, Dr Wong and Dr Bartlett said: "We propose a new resolution to the Fermi paradox: civilisations either collapse from burnout or redirect themselves to prioritising homeostasis, a state where cosmic expansion is no longer a goal, making them difficult to detect remotely. "Either outcome — homeostatic awakening or civilisation collapse — would be consistent with the observed absence of (galactic-wide) civilisations."

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Science fiction novelist, journalist, and technology activist, Cory Doctorow, has written an article at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) covering the self-censorship that social control media participants exercise when playing to the algorithms, a behavior sometimes called algospeak. In pursuing algospeak, participants avoid certain words, phrases, and topics while boosting others to play to the automated moderation algorithms. If played correctly the algorithm will actually raise the visibility of the content in question. If played incorrectly the content disappears off the radar. However, since the algorithm itself is unknown to the participants, the result usually falls somewhere in between even after a lot of trial and error.

"Algospeak" is a new English dialect that emerged from the desperate attempts of social media users to "please the algorithm": that is, to avoid words and phrases that cause social media platforms' algorithms to suppress or block their communication.

Algospeak is practiced by all types of social media users, from individuals addressing their friends to science communicators and activists hoping to reach a broader public. But the most ardent practitioners of algospeak are social media creators, who rely—directly or indirectly—on social media to earn a living.

For these creators, accidentally blundering into an invisible linguistic fence erected by social media companies can mean the difference between paying their rent or not. When you work on a video for days or weeks—or even years—and then "the algorithm" decides not to show it to anyone (not even the people who explicitly follow you or subscribe to your feed), that has real consequences.

Cory Doctorow goes into a bit more depth about how these circumstances are abnormal and closes by recommending the Santa Clara Principles on transparency and accountability in content moderation.

While there are a lot of articles here on SN about censorship as it is imposed from the outside, self-censorship gets relatively little coverage at least by name. Social control media has been using the computer as a Skinner box. Skinner himself would have been impressed, though whether positively or negatively is another matter.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

New experiments have shown the source of the aurora borealis

Researchers have demonstrated Alfvén waves accelerating electrons under conditions that correspond to Earth's magnetosphere. The magnetosphere around the Earth contains ionized charged particles or plasma, one of the four types of matter along with solid, liquid, and gas. Plasmas are similar to both fluids and gases but also contain magnetic and electric fields. In 1942, Hannes Alfvén predicted that plasmas could support waves. These waves are today called Alfvén waves. The new experiments show that electrons "surf" on the electric field of the Alfvén wave in a phenomenon known as Landau damping. This means the energy of the wave is transferred to the accelerated electrons, like a surfer catching a wave and being continually accelerated as the surfer moves along with the wave. These electrons are the ultimate source of the light we call the aurora borealis.

The electrons stream along the magnetic field lines and run into atoms of oxygen and molecules of oxygen and nitrogen, knocking them into excited states resulting in their emissions of a wide range of colors.

Journal Reference:
Schroeder, J. W. R., et al., Laboratory measurements of the physics of auroral electron acceleration by Alfvén waves, Nature Communications 12, 3103 (2021).
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23377-5

Original Submission