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upstart writes:

Explained: Why a new lawsuit targeting Google & YouTube can potentially change the internet forever- Technology News, Firstpost;:

Legislators have often debated whether social media platforms and search result aggregators should be held responsible for objectionable content that users post, which then gets recommended to different users by an algorithm, based on the user's interest.

The Supreme Court of the United States of America is now going to consider a case against Google, which may settle the debate and potentially change the internet forever.

The Supreme Court of the US is going to listen to the case of Gonzalez v. Google. The case was filed by the parents of Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in the 2015 ISIS attack in Paris.

Gonzalez's family is suing Google, claiming that YouTube, which is owned by Google, violated the Anti-Terrorism Act when its algorithm recommended ISIS videos to other users. The complaint states that YouTube not only hosts videos that are used by ISIS to recruit terrorists but also recommends these videos to users, instead of taking them down as per their content moderation policies.

upstart writes:

Microsoft's HoloLens headsets are giving US Army testers nausea:

Microsoft's HoloLens headsets for the US Army have some teething troubles. Bloomberg and Insider say a recent unclassified report reveals the current Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) iteration is creating problems for soldiers in tests. Some testers suffered nausea, headaches and eyestrain while using the augmented reality goggles. Others were concerned about bulk, a limited field of view and a display glow that could reveal a soldier's position even at long distances.

A Microsoft worker talking to Insider claimed IVAS failed four out of six elements in one test. The Defense Department's Operational Test and Evaluation Director, Nickolas Guertin, also said there were still too many failures for essential features. Soldier acceptance is still low, according to the report.

[...] The military appears to be aware of and addressing issues. In a statement to Insider, Brigadier General Christopher Schneider said IVAS was successful in "most" criteria, but that there were areas where it "fell short" and would receive improvements. Army assistant acquisition secretary Doug Bush cleared the acceptance of an initial batch of 5,000 HoloLens units in August, but that the armed forces branch was modifying its plans to "correct deficiencies." Microsoft told Bloomberg it still saw IVAS as a "transformational platform" and was moving ahead with delivery for the initial headsets.

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

In a blog post today (12 October 2022), the Signal team announced that they will be removing SMS/MMS send/receive functionality from the Signal Android app.

For many years, the Signal app on Android has supported sending and receiving plaintext SMS and MMS messages in addition to Signal messages. SMS and MMS are standardized communication protocols that allow mobile devices to send and transmit messages, and most people picking up their phone to text or share memes don't really think about them. [...] we continued supporting the sending and receiving of plaintext SMS messages via the Signal interface on Android. We did this because we knew that Signal would be easier for people to use if it could serve as a homebase for most of the messages they were sending or receiving, without having to convince the people they wanted to talk to to switch to Signal first. But this came with a tradeoff: it meant that some messages sent and received via the Signal interface on Android were not protected by Signal's strong privacy guarantees.We have now reached the point where SMS support no longer makes sense. For those of you interested, we walk through our reasoning in more detail below.

In order to enable a more streamlined Signal experience, we are starting to phase out SMS support from the Android app. You will have several months to transition away from SMS in Signal, to export your SMS messages to another app, and to let the people you talk to know that they might want to switch to Signal, or find another channel if not. [...] This change will only affect you if you use Signal as your default SMS app on Android. Meaning that you use Signal on Android to receive and send both Signal and SMS messages from within the Signal interface.

[...] The most important reason for us to remove SMS support from Android is that plaintext SMS messages are inherently insecure. They leak sensitive metadata and place your data in the hands of telecommunications companies. With privacy and security at the heart of what we do, letting a deeply insecure messaging protocol have a place in the Signal interface is inconsistent with our values and with what people expect when they open Signal. [...] We are focused on building secure, intuitive, reliable, and pleasant ways to connect with each other without surveillance, tracking, or targeting. Dropping support for SMS messaging also frees up our capacity to build new features (yes, like usernames) that will ensure Signal is fresh and relevant into the future. After much discussion, we determined that we can no longer continue to invest in accommodating SMS in the Android app while also dedicating the resources we need to make Signal the best messenger out there.

Do many (any?) Soylentils use Signal? What's your use case?

This change will break my primary use case (as the app for SMS and secure messaging on my phone) and will confuse the hell out of the dozens of non-technical folks I've converted to Signal over the years.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Taiwan says destroying TSMC in the event of a Chinese invasion is unnecessary:

Once again, rising tensions between China and the US have put the spotlight on Taiwan and what would happen to TSMC, which manufactures more than half the world's semiconductors, in the event of an invasion. One proposal is to destroy the company's facilities, but the island's security chief said such a move is unnecessary.

Chen Ming-tong, director-general of Taiwan's National Security Bureau, told lawmakers (via Bloomberg) that TSMC's reliance on overseas companies and supplies for its operations means the facilities would be useless if China took over Taiwan.

"If you understand the ecosystem of TSMC, the comments out there are unrealistic," Chen said. "TSMC needs to integrate global elements before producing high-end chips. Without components or equipment like ASML's lithography equipment, without any key components, there is no way TSMC can continue its production."

[...] The US is said to be considering the evacuation of TSMC chip engineers in the event of a Chinese invasion, something the US National Security Council estimates would impact the world economy by more than $1 trillion. Former US officials have suggested making it clear to China that the semiconductor giant's facilities would be destroyed by the US if the attack occurred, thereby prevented TSMC from falling into Chinese hands.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Delta invests in air taxi startup Joby to enable home-to-airport flights:

Flying taxi startup Joby Aviation just landed a deal that could make your ride to the airport much more enjoyable. Delta is investing a total of up to $200 million in Joby in exchange for a home-to-airport flight service. Instead of hailing a car or paying for parking, you can have an eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft take you to the terminal without the usual traffic hassles.

The service will initially be available to Delta passengers travelling through New York City and Los Angeles, and will operate for at least five years after launch. It will exist alongside Joby's regular airport service in "priority" areas.

This represents a significant boost for Joby. It was the first eVTOL company to get key FAA certifications for airworthiness and carrier service, and now it's signing a "first-of-its-kind" (according to the companies) agreement with a US airline. The move could give Joby an edge over rivals like Archer and Wisk Aero that are waiting for FAA certifications or major commercial partnerships.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A compound that both inhibits the MRSA superbug in lab experiments and renders it more vulnerable to antibiotics has been discovered by scientists at Bath:

The novel compound – a polyamine – seems to destroy Staphylococcus aureus, the bacterium that causes (among other things) deadly Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections, by disrupting the pathogen's cell membrane.

[...] The study shows that as well as destroying S. aureus directly, the compound is able to restore the sensitivity of multidrug resistant strains of the bacteria to three important antibiotics (daptomycin, oxacillin and vancomycin). This could mean that antibiotics that have become ineffective through decades of overuse may, in time, reclaim their ability to bring serious infections under control.

"We're not entirely sure why these synergies occur between the compound and antibiotics, but we're keen to explore this further," said Dr Laabei, researcher from the Department of Live Sciences at Bath.

Polyamines are naturally occurring compounds found in most living organisms. Until a decade ago, they were thought to be essential to all life, but scientists now know they are both absent in, and toxic to, S. aureus. Since making this discovery, researchers have been attempting to exploit the pathogen's unusual vulnerability to polyamines to inhibit bacterial growth.

[...] Antibiotic resistance (or antimicrobial resistance – AMR) poses a major threat to human health around the world, and S. aureus has become one of the most notorious multidrug-resistant pathogens.

[...] "New treatments are urgently needed to treat infections," said Dr Laabei.

Journal Reference:
Edward J. A. Douglas, Abdulaziz H. Alkhzem, Toska Wonfor, et al. Antibacterial activity of novel linear polyamines against Staphylococcus aureus, Front Microbiol, 2022. DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2022.948343

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Data from DappRadar suggests metaverse platforms Decentraland and The Sandbox each have fewer than 1,000 "daily active" users, despite $1 billion valuations:

What's going on in the metaverse these days, you might ask. Looking at two of the biggest companies with over $1 billion valuations, one data point suggests that users may not be returning every day. According to data aggregator DappRadar, the Ethereum-based virtual world Decentraland had 38 "active users" in the past 24 hours, while competitor The Sandbox had 522 "active users" in that same time.

It's important to note that an active user, according to DappRadar, is defined as a unique wallet address' interaction with the platform's smart contract. For example, logging onto The Sandbox or Decentraland to make a purchase with SAND or MANA, each platform's respective native utility token, is counted as an "active use."

This means that DappRadar's compilation of daily "active users" doesn't count people who simply log in and interact with other users on a metaverse platform or drop in briefly for an event, such as a virtual fashion week. It also may mean that fewer transactions, like buying or selling a non-fungible token (NFT), take place on these platforms than the number of people that visit.

[...] Sam Hamilton, Creative Director at Decentraland, disputed the way DappRadar tracks daily "active users" on the platform. "DappRadar doesn't track our users, only people interacting with our contracts," he told CoinDesk, adding that the platform had 8,000 users on average per day, though he did not specify what makes an "active use" versus a more passive interaction. [...]

[...] "Imagine you only track the number of people paying for something at a cashier at a shopping mall," he said. "That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of passerbys."

upstart writes:

Peer-to-peer file sharing would make the Internet far more efficient:

When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in early 2020, the world made an unprecedented shift to remote work. As a precaution, some Internet providers scaled back service levels temporarily, although that probably wasn't necessary for countries in Asia, Europe, and North America, which were generally able to cope with the surge in demand caused by people teleworking (and binge-watching Netflix). [...]

But is overprovisioning the only way to ensure resilience? We don't think so. [...]

The reality today is that the Internet is more often used to send exactly the same thing to many people, and it's doing a huge amount of that now, much of which is in the form of video. [...]

The real problem is not so much the volume of content being passed around—it's how it is being delivered, from a central source to many different far-away users, even when those users are located right next to one another.

A more efficient distribution scheme in that case would be for the data to be served to your device from your neighbor's device in a direct peer-to-peer manner. But how would your device even know whom to ask? Welcome to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).

upstart writes:

ASUS, Acer and Lenovo built Chromebooks optimized to run services like GeForce Now:

One part of Google may have given up on cloud gaming, with Stadia set to be discontinued in a few months. But on the ChromeOS team, there's a whole new initiative to try and push back on the whole "you can't game on a Chromebook" thing. Today, Google — along with a handful of hardware and software partners — are announcing what it calls "the world's first laptops built for cloud gaming."

Stripping back the hyperbole, what does this mean in practice? After all, the whole point of cloud gaming is that you don't need superpowered hardware to enjoy high-quality games — many existing Chromebooks can run cloud gaming services just fine. That said, the new laptops announced today are quite a bit different than your average Chromebook.

At a high level, Google says that it focused on a handful of hardware features to differentiate these laptops, including large displays with high refresh rates, keyboards with anti-ghosting tech (and RBG keyboards in some cases), WiFi 6/6E cards and generally high specs.

upstart writes:

"We can't force the timeline. It will happen when it happens":

More than two decades have come and gone since entrepreneur Dennis Tito became the first person to pay for his own ride into space, spending a week on the International Space Station.

After that pioneering mission aboard a Soyuz vehicle, Tito said he always had a desire to return to space, with a preference for flying to the Moon. But this thought remained mostly dormant, because Tito did not have confidence in any of the available spaceflight vehicles for such a mission.

That changed about a year and a half ago when he and his wife, Akiko Tito, visited SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California. After a tour, they discussed possible space tourism trips, and it did not take long for the lunar idea to come up. Would Tito be interested in riding aboard SpaceX's Starship vehicle for a flight around the Moon?

[...] "I said yes, I want to go," Akiko Tito added. "We both wanted to go."

The Titos announced Wednesday that they purchased two of a dozen seats on the second of SpaceX's planned circumlunar flights later this decade. With the public announcement, Akiko Tito becomes the first woman confirmed to fly on Starship. The flight will last about a week, outbound to the Moon, passing within about 40 km of the surface and flying back. Ten other seats on Starship remain unsold and are available. Tito said he was not at liberty to disclose the price he paid.

hubie writes:

UC Riverside physicist and colleague invoke the cosmological collider to explain why matter, and not antimatter, dominates the universe:

Early in its history, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with equal amounts of matter and "antimatter" — particles that are matter counterparts but with opposite charge. But then, as space expanded, the universe cooled. Today's universe is full of galaxies and stars which are made of matter. Where did the antimatter go, and how did matter come to dominate the universe? This cosmic origin of matter continues to puzzle scientists.

Physicists at the University of California, Riverside, and Tsinghua University in China have now opened a new pathway for probing the cosmic origin of matter by invoking the "cosmological collider."

[...] "Cosmic inflation provided a highly energetic environment, enabling the production of heavy new particles as well as their interactions," Cui said. "The inflationary universe behaved just like a cosmological collider, except that the energy was up to 10 billion times larger than any human-made collider."

[...] "The fact that our current-day universe is dominated by matter remains among the most perplexing, longstanding mysteries in modern physics," Cui said. "A subtle imbalance or asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the early universe is required to achieve today's matter dominance but cannot be realized within the known framework of fundamental physics."

Cui and Xianyu propose testing leptogenesis, a well-known mechanism that explains the origin of the baryon — visible gas and stars — asymmetry in our universe. Had the universe begun with equal amounts of matter and antimatter, they would have annihilated each other into photon radiation, leaving nothing. Since matter far exceeds antimatter today, asymmetry is required to explain the imbalance.

upstart writes:

Analysts estimate SSD prices will drop 50 percent by mid-2023:

As SSD and NAND prices gradually decline, analysts now believe the price drops have no end in sight. The latest projections show that next year, consumers may be able to add 2TB worth of SSD storage to their PC for less than $100.

It's safe to say that one of the best inventions for PC components was the creation of NAND flash and the subsequent M.2 SSDs. The ability to store upwards of multiple terabytes of data on a storage device nearly the same size as a stick of gum is fantastic.Unfortunately, M.2 drives with those high amounts of data have been unfathomable for most consumers for a while.

Recently, SSDs have seen significant price cuts and capacity increases. Just six years ago, a 1 TB NVMe drive from Samsung cost nearly $500. Now, the same SSDs go for $90. That's an 80-percent price cut. Analysts believe this steady price decline will continue. Estimations indicate current SSD costs could be cut in half by the middle of 2023. If projections prove correct, 1 TB M.2 SSDs could retail for around $50, 2 TB SSDs might reach sub-$100 prices, and the 4 TB drives approaching the $200 mark might put them within reach of budget-minded customers.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Metalenz ships millions of its tiny cameras and powers up with $30M B round:

The cameras in our phones, laptops, and increasingly home robots and the like are about as small as they can get unless we starting doing something different, and that's just what Metalenz is getting up to — with great success and now a $30 million funding round to expand its ultra-small 3D imaging tech.

The startup appeared in 2021 with a fresh take on cameras that abandons the approach we've used for decades, basically "a normal camera and lens but small." Instead, it uses a complex but nearly 2D surface to capture light passing through a single lens, allowing the whole unit to be a fraction of the size. It's not meant for taking clear ordinary images but providing the kind of extra info needed by those cameras — depth, object and material recognition, and so on.

We've seen this type of thing before, but usually in university research labs showing one-off prototypes. But Metalenz's camera tech isn't just capable of being manufactured — they're already shipping orders in the millions.

If you're wondering "wait, why haven't I heard of it then?" think about it — did you know who made your phone's camera, let alone its front-facing depth sensor? Not just Apple, not Samsung, not Google — they all use someone else's lens and sensor stack, companies like Sony Imaging and Omnivision that integrate their camera component with a board maker, who sells it on to the big guys.

As it happens, one of these integrators called STMicroelectronics was looking for a better camera to equip a class of imaging board it has shipping more than a billion units of over the years. They looked at what Metalenz had to offer and basically said "great, how many can you make? We'll buy that number."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

It has a planned capacity of 40 GWh/year of lithium ion cells by end of 2025:

A key component of the revised electric vehicle tax credit is a requirement for an ever-increasing amount of domestic content in those EVs' battery packs. Automakers and battery manufacturers were already in the process of setting up US manufacturing to be closer to locally built EVs, and that trend has accelerated ever since.

At the end of August, Honda and LG Energy Solutions announced that they were forming a joint venture to build a US battery factory. And on Tuesday, the pair announced that the factory would be in Fayette County, Ohio, about 40 miles (64.4 km) southwest of Columbus.

Honda and LG will spend $3.5 billion on the new plant after regulatory approval. Assuming that happens relatively rapidly, the plan is to begin construction in 2023 and finish the building work by the end of 2024. Honda said that by the end of the following year, the factory should have an annual capacity of 40 GWh. Honda and LG also said the factory should create 2,200 jobs in the area.

[...] The cells that the plant produces will be used in Honda's new "e:Architecture" platform. The first EVs to use e:Architecture should go on sale in the US in 2026 and will be built in North America.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

EU-US data sharing agreement: Is it a done deal?:

The thousands of companies waiting for a new US-EU data-transfer agreement to go into effect soon and ease the burdensome legal work necessary for cross-border data transfer shouldn't get their hopes up. US President Joe Biden's executive order to implement rules for the Trans-Atlantic Data Policy Framework agreed on earlier this year is a move in the right direction, but the new pact won't go into effect until next spring at the earliest, and even then it is bound to face legal challenges, say public policy and legal experts.

The executive order, signed by Biden on October 7, puts new restrictions on electronic surveillance by American intelligence agencies and gives Europeans new avenues to launch a complaint when they believe their personal information has been used unlawfully by US intelligence agencies.

The move comes two years after the European Court of Justice shut down the previous EU-US data sharing agreement known as Privacy Shield in 2020 on grounds that the US doesn't provide adequate protection for personal data, particularly in relation to state surveillance.

The new Trans-Atlantic Data Policy Framework is meant to improve US privacy safeguards, replace Privacy Shield, and eventually pass Court of Justice scrutiny when expected legal challenges are lodged. However, despite both the Biden Administration and the European Commission releasing statements endorsing the newly proposed data pact,  it's far from a done deal, according to Jonathan Armstrong, a compliance and technology lawyer at UK-based compliance specialists Cordery.

"Both the White House and the European Commission might be saying that they are confident, but we've been down this road before, with both sides saying that Privacy Shield would stand up to judicial scrutiny. It didn't," Armstrong said.