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upstart writes:

More supposition than superposition as local media goes on Sci-Fi journey:

Quantum computers have started rolling off the production line in China, according to local media reports.

Global Times offers one of many such accounts and China Television has also covered the news.

None of the reports offer concrete detail. Indeed, many open with a reference to the presence of a quantum computer in the recently released Chinese action blockbuster "Wandering Earth 2" then enthuse about that science fiction vision having become reality.

All report that the computer was produced in the city of Hefei, which is in Anhui province where the local government is known to have funded a quantum computer lab. Some quote an outfit called Origin Quantum as having been informed of the debut by Anhui quantum lab.

Others suggest the computers were quietly slipped into production at Chinese organizations in 2021 and are now available for other buyers.

[...] In the real world, meanwhile, analysts suggest one of China's main interests in quantum computers is breaking classical encryption.

China has lots of big challenges that quantum computing could help to address. It also has enormous military ambitions, and a lengthy track record of using technology to surveil and oppress its citizens.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

With 12 Newfound Satellites, Jupiter Quietly Takes Crown for Most Moons:

Some planets just seem to have it all. Jupiter is the largest in the solar system, spotting a distinctive and fashionable red spot, subtle but elegant rings and dozens of moons.

As if that wasn't enough, it looks as though Jupiter has 12 more small moons in its orbit, bringing the total number of natural satellites within its grasp to a whopping 92.

Astronomer Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, reported observations of the system over the last two years that reveal a dozen new moons. The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center has quietly been publishing the orbits of the new, unnamed moons in recent weeks, giving their existence the stamp of confirmation from humanity's officialdom on the matter.

Jupiter takes the crown from Saturn in terms of moon count. The rival ringed gas giant has 83 known moons.

All of the moons are probably too small to be named and take more than 340 days to orbit, according to Sky and Telescope.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Geofence warrants that allow law enforcement to collect location data on mobile device users for criminal probes are under attack by civil rights groups and public defenders:

The ACLU and eight federal public defenders are asking the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to exclude mobile device location data obtained from Google via a so-called geofence warrant that helped law enforcement catch a bank robbery suspect.

The first geofence civil rights case to reach a federal court of appeals raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns against unreasonable search and seizure related to the location and personal information of mobile device users.

Geofence warrants have primarily been issued for Google to hand over data about every cell phone or other mobile device within a specific geographical region and timeframe. The problem: location data on every person carrying a mobile device in that area is scooped up in a wide net and their data is then handed over en masse to law enforcement.

"These warrants are patently unconstitutional," said Tom McBrien, a law fellow with the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington DC. "They look through everyone's location history within that geographical area to see where they were at the time."

Geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution on several fronts, McBrien argued. First, the amendment requires that evidentiary warrants meet the "particularity requirement," meaning police must be specific about what and who they're seeking to find with the data. The warrants can't turn into "fishing expeditions," McBrien said.

Secondly, probable cause requires law enforcement to link a specific person or persons to a crime. Only in that case does the law allow the invasion of privacy that comes with geofence data access.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

He codesigned the Internet protocol and transmission control protocol:

IEEE Life Fellow Vinton "Vint" Cerf, widely known as the "Father of the Internet," is the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Medal of Honor. He is being recognized "for co-creating the Internet architecture and providing sustained leadership in its phenomenal growth in becoming society's critical infrastructure."

[...] While working as a program manager at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office in 1974, Cerf and IEEE Life Fellow Robert Kahn designed the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. TCP manages data packets sent over the Internet, making sure they don't get lost, are received in the proper order, and are reassembled at their destination correctly. IP manages the addressing and forwarding of data to and from its proper destinations. Together they make up the Internet's core architecture and enable computers to connect and exchange traffic.

[...] Together with Kahn, Cerf founded the nonprofit Internet Society in 1992. The organization helps set technical standards, develops Internet infrastructure, and helps lawmakers set policy.

Cerf served as its president from 1992 to 1995 and was chairman of the board of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers from 2000 to 2007. ICANN works to ensure a stable, secure, and interoperable Internet by managing the assignment of unique IP addresses and domain names. It also maintains tables of registered parameters needed for the protocol standards developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Cerf has received several recognitions for his work, including the 2004 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. The honor is known as the Nobel Prize of computing. Together with Kahn, he was awarded a 2013 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, a 2005 U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a 1997 U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Fake listing for Le Nouveau Duluth raises questions about online tourism platforms:

Yoo Jeung has been running Le Spot St-Denis, at the corner of Duluth Avenue and St-Denis Street for 22 years. Her flower shop is supposedly right next to the top-rated restaurant in Montreal on Tripadvisor, Le Nouveau Duluth, but she says she's never heard of it.

She says she knows the area very well and tourists often ask her for directions to restaurants.

"But Nouveau Duluth? No," she said — and something about the online listing seemed off to her.

"There's a very high ceiling [in the photos]," she said. "On Duluth there are no high ceilings ... it looks fake."

[...] Le Nouveau Duluth does not exist but the ease with which it rose to the top of a travel advice site is a clear example of how easy it is to create buzz with no substance behind it — and what challenges real restaurants face getting noticed in the algorithm.

The page was taken down after CBC sent a request for a response from Tripadvisor. The popular travel site responded saying stunts that create a fake restaurant listing are "uncommon occurrences and do not share the characteristics of genuine instances of fraud."

[...] Though he's never encountered a fake restaurant on Tripadvisor, cybersecurity expert Terry Cutler says fake reviews are relatively easy to spot.

"If you look at the reviews, a lot of the time they're so vague, like 'Great job,' 'Keep it up,' it has nothing to do with what the review is about," he said.

"If you start seeing nothing but five-star reviews — there's never any negative comments — that should be a sign that there's something wrong."

AMD CEO Says It's Limiting Supply of CPUs and GPUs to Maintain High Prices

upstart writes:

AMD CEO Says It's Limiting Supply of CPUs and GPUs to Maintain High Prices:

[...] The somewhat startling admission came during the company's quarterly earnings call. AMD is doing quite well despite the industry downturn. It reported 42% year-over-year growth in its data center products. Intel reported a drop of 33% YoY for its data center chips, so the contrast is remarkable. For client PC and gaming, however, AMD is also feeling some pain. It reported a 51% decline YoY in processor shipments. This led to a loss of $152 million compared with a profit of $530 million a year ago, according to Yahoo.

But even though AMD's consumer and gaming revenues are tanking, it's still found a way to keep the numbers up through that old chestnut: supply and demand. According to remarks noted by PCGamer, Dr. Su says it's been limiting supply and will continue to do so. "We have been undershipping the sell-through or consumption for the last two quarters," said AMD's CEO. "We undershipped in Q3, we undershipped in Q4. We will undership, to a lesser extent, in Q1."

It's an interesting admission that explains why CPU and GPU prices haven't crashed along with the PC market. It makes us wonder if Nvidia is doing something similar. Although some decent deals on GPUs appeared a few months ago before AMD and Nvidia launched new architectures, those deals have now vanished.

upstart writes:

The space agency's next-generation observatory grabbed a detailed view of ringed asteroid Chariklo:

Scientists using NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope say they've been able to get a closer look at an asteroid that also hosts just the fifth ring system to be discovered in our solar system (the others circle Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune).

Astronomers initially discovered the rings in 2013 while watching Chariklo occult, or pass in front of, a distant star. To their surprise, two other smaller objects also appeared to pass in front of the background star for an instant. These turned out to be two thin rings around Chariklo.

In October 2022, Pablo Santos-Sanz, from Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain, used Webb to watch Chariklo occult a star once again.

[...] So far, data suggests the rings could be made up of ice and other dark debris, probably the remnants of some ancient cosmic collision with the asteroid.

[...] "We hope to gain insight into why this small body even has rings at all," he said, "and perhaps detect new fainter rings."

Associated video showing the occultation [either that, or Conway's Game of Life --hubie]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Judge rejects motion to protect Prenda lawyer Hansmeier from further prosecution:

Paul Hansmeier, who is serving a 14-year prison sentence for filing sham copyright infringement lawsuits and extorting money from victims, has lost an attempt to enforce copyrights from prison. In a ruling Monday, a federal judge rejected Hansmeier's request to prevent the government from enforcing mail-wire fraud and money laundering laws against him. Hansmeier wanted an injunction so that he could file copyright lawsuits without facing new charges.

Hansmeier, who is also appealing his conviction despite having pleaded guilty, will be familiar to Ars readers as one of the principals behind the notorious "copyright troll" firm Prenda Law. He was sentenced in June 2019 "for an elaborate fraud scheme that involved uploading pornographic videos to file-sharing networks and then threatening to sue people who downloaded them," as our reporting at the time said. Prenda Law's strategy involved seeking settlements of a few thousand dollars from each victim.

[...] Last week, Hansmeier filed a motion in US District Court for the District of Minnesota saying he wants to "hire an undercover investigator to protect his copyrights against Internet piracy and bring claims under the Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act against people who trespass on his computers to infringe his works."

fliptop writes:

But Springer Nature, which publishes thousands of scientific journals, says it has no problem with AI being used to help write research — as long as its use is properly disclosed:

Springer Nature, the world's largest academic publisher, has clarified its policies on the use of AI writing tools in scientific papers. The company announced this week that software like ChatGPT can't be credited as an author in papers published in its thousands of journals. However, Springer says it has no problem with scientists using AI to help write or generate ideas for research, as long as this contribution is properly disclosed by the authors.

"We felt compelled to clarify our position: for our authors, for our editors, and for ourselves," Magdalena Skipper, editor-in-chief of Springer Nature's flagship publication, Nature, tells The Verge. "This new generation of LLM tools — including ChatGPT — has really exploded into the community, which is rightly excited and playing with them, but [also] using them in ways that go beyond how they can genuinely be used at present."

[...] Skipper says that banning AI tools in scientific work would be ineffective. "I think we can safely say that outright bans of anything don't work," she says. Instead, she says, the scientific community — including researchers, publishers, and conference organizers — needs to come together to work out new norms for disclosure and guardrails for safety.

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Musk is working on enabling money transfers in Twitter

Just like Weibo. Similar to Applepay. The ultimate goal of this expansion is to transform Twitter into a comprehensive payment gateway solution, incorporating traditional bank accounts, cryptocurrencies, and other financial services.Musk's goal is to generate $1.3 billion in payments revenue for Twitter by 2028. The news came after Musk revealed he will to allow users to tweet a whopping 4,000 characters making Twitter posts more like Facebook. If this works it could be the western version of Weibo opening up a dominant income stream for the beleaguered platform.

Over the past few months, Twitter has been working towards obtaining the necessary licenses to allow money transfers between its users. This would allow users to send and receive payments through their Twitter profiles.

[...] It remains uncertain whether Twitter will be granted the necessary licenses and if it will successfully navigate through this new venture. Perhaps Musk is merely testing the waters and gauging the market before making a full-fledged commitment, as he has done with other changes he has proposed in the past.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The feds' actions saved victims over $130 million:

What just happened? In what could be described as beautifully ironic, a notorious ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gang has been brought down after the FBI infiltrated its systems, disrupted operations, and seized its sites. Or, as the Deputy US Attorney General put it, they "hacked the hackers."

Speaking at a news conference, US Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Deputy U.S. Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced that the government secretly infiltrated the Hive ransomware gang's networks in July 2022 before launching a six-month monitoring operation.

During this infiltration, the government was able to steal more than 300 decryption keys from Hive and distribute them to victims who were under attack, preventing around $130 million in ransom payments, including $5 million from a Texas school district. The feds also distributed over 1,000 additional decryption keys to previous Hive victims.

The FBI used its access to Hive's infrastructure to warn targets about impending attacks, giving them time to bolster their systems and prepare. Hive's Tor payment and data leak sites were also seized.

As per Bleeping Computer, the FBI gained access to two dedicated servers and one virtual private server at a hosting provider in California that were leased using email addresses belonging to Hive members. In a coordinated move, Dutch police also gained access to two dedicated backup servers hosted in the Netherlands. Law enforcement confirmed that these servers acted as the main data leak site, negotiation site, and web panels for Hive and its affiliates.

[...] The gang had collected more than $100 million in ransomware payments, and while no arrests have been announced, a department official suggested that would soon change. Unlike other ransomware operators, Hive never stated any intent to avoid targeting hospitals or emergency services.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

TikTok's CEO agrees to testify before Congress for the first time in March:

As Congress prepares to vote on a nationwide TikTok ban next month, it looks like that ban may already be doomed to fail. The biggest hurdle likely won't be mustering enough votes, but drafting a ban that doesn't conflict with measures passed in the 1980s to protect the flow of ideas from hostile foreign nations during the Cold War.

These decades-old measures, known as the Berman amendments, were previously invoked by TikTok creators suing to block Donald Trump's attempted TikTok ban in 2020. Now, a spokesperson for Representative Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the incoming chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Ars that these measures are believed to be the biggest obstacle for lawmakers keen on blocking the app from operating in the United States.

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that lawmakers' dilemma in enacting a ban would be finding a way to block TikTok without "shutting down global exchanges of content—or inviting retaliation against US platforms and media." Some lawmakers think that's achievable by creating a narrow carve-out for TikTok in new legislation, but others, like McCaul, think a more permanent solution to protect national security interests long-term would require crafting more durable and thoughtful legislation that would allow for bans of TikTok and all apps beholden to hostile foreign countries.

upstart writes:

Fermi Space Telescope Detects First-Ever Gamma-Ray Eclipses in 'Spider' Systems:

Pulsars are some of the most extreme and fascinating objects in the universe, and NASA's Fermi Space Telescope has just unlocked a new way to study them. Using the orbiting observatory, astronomers have identified the first gamma-ray eclipses in "spider systems," consisting of a pulsar and a smaller main sequence star. These are so-named as a reference to the arachnid tendency to consume one's companion, which is what happens in these solar systems, too.

Before Fermi came online in 2008, science knew of just a few pulsars that emitted gamma rays. Today, Fermi has identified more than 300 of them. An international team of experts combed through a decade of Fermi data in search of something specific: a gamma-ray eclipse. The end goal is to accurately calculate the mass and velocity of these extreme stellar remnants, and the eclipses help get us there.

In some alien solar systems, there are two stars that age at very different rates. That can lead to a situation in which the larger of the pair may go supernova while the smaller one is still fusing hydrogen like the sun. This can lead to a spider system — the pulsar feeds off its smaller companion while superheating one side of it. According to NASA, scientists even have sub-categories based on the relationship between the two. A "Black widow" system has a star with less than 5% of the sun's mass. A "Redback" spider system has a stellar companion weighing between 10% and 50% of a solar mass.

[...] The team believes that once the models are fine-tuned, Fermi will be able to answer some nagging questions about spider systems. For example, does the mass stolen from the companions make them the most massive population of pulsars? B1957 ended up smaller than we thought, but it could go the other way just as easily.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The countries have agreed to further restrict what chip-manufacturing equipment can be supplied to China:

The US has convinced two other countries to join it in expanding a ban on exports of chip-making technology to China, according to a report by Bloomberg. The move could cramp China's home-grown chip industry as there are few, if any, other sources for the sophisticated technologies required for modern semiconductor manufacturing.

As part of a broader trade war with China, the US sought for its chip technology embargo from Japan and the Netherlands, where some of the world's largest manufacturers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment are headquartered. It first imposed restrictions on exports of chips to China in 2015, extending them in 2021 and twice in 2022. The most recent restrictions were introduced in December.

It has already banned exports of artificial intelligence hardware, such as graphical processing units (GPUs), tensor processing units (TPUs) and other advanced application-specific integrated circuits (ASICS), and the latest extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) equipment used to make them, and the Dutch government has followed suit. The Netherlands is home to ASML, the only manufacturer of EUV tools.

The US has now persuaded the Netherlands and Japan join it in banning transfers of some slightly older deep ultraviolet lithography (DUV) equipment. ASML makes this too, while Japan is home to DUV equipment makers such as Canon, Nikon and Tokyo Electron Ltd., making the two countries key to the US plan to gnaw away at China's dominance in the broader microchip market.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/massive-yandex-code-leak-reveals-russian-search-engines-ranking-factors/

Nearly 45GB of source code files, allegedly stolen by a former employee, have revealed the underpinnings of Russian tech giant Yandex's many apps and services. It also revealed key ranking factors for Yandex's search engine, the kind almost never revealed in public.
[...]
As detailed by Buraks (in two threads), Yandex's engine favors pages that:

• Aren't too old
• Have a lot of organic traffic (unique visitors) and less search-driven traffic
• Have fewer numbers and slashes in their URL
• Have optimized code rather than "hard pessimization," with a "PR=0"
• Are hosted on reliable servers
• Happen to be Wikipedia pages or are linked from Wikipedia
• Are hosted or linked from higher-level pages on a domain
• Have keywords in their URL (up to three)

I'm not sure how different these differ from our own search engines. Does anyone have any insights?

Original Submission