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upstart writes:

After being acquired by Red Ventures, staff say editorial firewalls have been repeatedly breached:

Last October, CNET's parent company, Red Ventures, held a cross-department meeting to discuss the AI writing software it had been building for months. The tool had been in testing internally ahead of public use on CNET, and Red Ventures' early results revealed several potential issues.

[...] Red Ventures executives laid out all of these issues at the meeting and then made a fateful decision: CNET began publishing AI-generated stories anyway.

"They were well aware of the fact that the AI plagiarized and hallucinated," a person who attended the meeting recalls. (Artificial intelligence tools have a tendency to insert false information into responses, which are sometimes called "hallucinations.") "One of the things they were focused on when they developed the program was reducing plagiarism. I suppose that didn't work out so well."

[...] Multiple former employees told The Verge of instances where CNET staff felt pressured to change stories and reviews due to Red Ventures' business dealings with advertisers. The forceful pivot toward Red Ventures' affiliate marketing-driven business model — which generates revenue when readers click links to sign up for credit cards or buy products — began clearly influencing editorial strategy, with former employees saying that revenue objectives have begun creeping into editorial conversations.

Reporters, including on-camera video hosts, have been asked to create sponsored content, making staff uncomfortable with the increasingly blurry lines between editorial and sales. One person told The Verge that they were made aware of Red Ventures' business relationship with a company whose product they were covering and that they felt pressured to change a review to be more favorable.

Original Submission

China balloon: US shoots down airship over Atlantic

The US has shot down a giant Chinese balloon that it says has been spying on key military sites across America.

The Department of Defense confirmed its fighter jets brought down the balloon over US territorial waters.

Three airports were shut and airspace was closed off the coast of North and South Carolina as the military carried out the operation on Saturday.

Footage on US TV networks showed the balloon falling to the sea after a small explosion.

An F-22 jet fighter engaged the high-altitude balloon with one missile - an AIM-9X Sidewinder - and it went down about six nautical miles off the US coast at 14:39 EST (19:39 GMT), a defence official told reporters.

US President Joe Biden had been under pressure to shoot the balloon down since defence officials first announced they were tracking it on Thursday.

Second balloon spotted over Latin America:

On Friday, the Pentagon said a second Chinese spy balloon had been spotted - this time over Latin America with reported sightings over Costa Rica and Venezuela.

upstart writes:

The marks might be one of the earliest examples of a coherent notational system:

As far back as roughly 25,000 years ago, Ice Age hunter-gatherers may have jotted down markings to communicate information about the behavior of their prey, a new study finds.

These markings include dots, lines and the symbol "Y," and often accompany images of animals. Over the last 150 years, the mysterious depictions, some dating back nearly 40,000 years, have been found in hundreds of caves across Europe.

Some archaeologists have speculated that the markings might relate to keeping track of time, but the specific purpose has remained elusive (SN: 7/9/19). Now, a statistical analysis, published January 5 in CambridgeArcheological Journal, presents evidence that past people may have been recording the mating and birthing schedule of local fauna.

By comparing the marks to the animals' life cycles, researchers showed that the number of dots or lines in a given image strongly correlates to the month of mating across all the analyzed examples, which included aurochs (an extinct species of wild cattle), bison, horses, mammoth and fish. What's more, the position of the symbol "Y" in a sequence was predictive of birth month, suggesting that "Y" signifies "to give birth."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Cord Cutting Is Hitting Comcast Harder Than Ever:

For a while there, everybody's least favorite cable company, Comcast, was weathering the cord cutting revolution fairly well. The company's losses on the cable TV side could simply be recouped over on its broadband side, where a monopoly protected it from having to actually, you know, try.

Things have shifted. Last year, Comcast saw a record 11 percent of its customer base cancel their Comcast cable service in favor of streaming video, over the air broadcasts, or free services like TikTok. And the company lost lost 440,000 traditional video customers in the fourth quarter of 2022 alone, a big bump over the 227,000 customers it lost in the last three months of 2021.

[...] At this rate Comcast may, someday in the not so distant future, be required to actually try.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The newly developed method links quantum and classical worlds and may enhance measurements for quantum computers and other applications:

[...] Our vision is made possible by the specialized cells in our retina that absorb light. But, can one see without any absorption of light or even a single photon? Surprisingly, the answer is yes.

Suppose you have a camera cartridge that could hold a roll of photographic film. The film is so delicate that even a single photon could damage it. Using conventional methods, it's impossible to determine if there's film in the cartridge. However, in the quantum world, it can be achieved. Anton Zeilinger, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics 2022, was the first to experimentally implement the idea of an interaction-free experiment using optics.

Now, in a study exploring the connection between the quantum and classical worlds, Shruti Dogra, John J. McCord, and Gheorghe Sorin Paraoanu of Aalto University have discovered a new and much more effective way to carry out interaction-free experiments. The team used transmon devices –superconducting circuits that are relatively large but still show quantum behavior– to detect the presence of microwave pulses generated by classical instruments. Their research was recently published in Nature Communications.

Journal Reference:
Dogra, Shruti, McCord, John J., Paraoanu, Gheorghe Sorin. Coherent interaction-free detection of microwave pulses with a superconducting circuit [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-35049-z)

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Did users change their Wi-Fi password, or did they see the nature of IoT privacy?

Appliance makers like Whirlpool and LG just can't understand. They added Wi-Fi antennae to their latest dishwashers, ovens, and refrigerators and built apps for them—and yet only 50 percent or fewer of their owners have connected them. What gives?

The issue, according to manufacturers quoted in a Wall Street Journal report (subscription usually required), is that customers just don't know all the things a manufacturer can do if users connect the device that spins their clothes or keeps their food cold—things like "providing manufacturers with data and insights about how customers are using their products" and allowing companies to "send over-the-air updates" and "sell relevant replacement parts or subscription services."

"The challenge is that a consumer doesn't see the true value that manufacturers see in terms of how that data can help them in the long run. So they don't really care for spending time to just connect it," Henry Kim, US director of LG's smart device division ThinQ, told the Journal.

[...] While the manufacturers blame technical constraints, some customers may simply not want to provide companies with vague privacy policies or bad histories with security access to their networks.

[...] Appliance makers are eager for buyers to connect their smart devices, but at least some may think they've done the smart thing by letting them work offline.

Original Submission

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