SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Thirteen thousand members of the United States Army were reportedly caught up in a Reply-All email storm in early February:

Khaki-hued news and recruitment site Military.com last week published an account of the email swarm penned by a serving member of the Army who was granted anonymity to avoid backlash from brass.

The report states that the Reply-All storm started when an Army captain replied to a message from a distribution list called "FA57 Voluntary Transfer Incentive Program". Tragically, the unnamed soldier hit Reply-All instead of just Reply.

Their response soon reached 13,000 inboxes belonging to Army captains, "some newly promoted majors, a single chief warrant officer, a Space Force captain, and a specialist".

As is often the case, the storm grew in power as some recipients of the unwanted email also used Reply-All to relay their requests for the flood of emails to stop, while others used Reply-All with ironic intent – to both celebrate and complicate the mess. There are always a few, aren't there.

[...] "There are far too many technically illiterate captains who would benefit from learning how to use Microsoft Outlook (particularly how to set up sorting rules) instead of replying like boomers using new technology," the anonymous author opined.

[...] The author concluded with the observation that "This event proves the point that if you put a bunch of soldiers or officers of the same rank in one room (including generals), they will revert to acting like privates within 15 minutes."

Original Submission

Motor Trend and probably many other sources report on the recall of all Teslas with FSD, https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-admits-full-self-driving-crashes-recalls-360000-cars/

On February 15, 2023, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) posted a notice that Tesla will recall 362,758 of its Model S, Model X, Model 3, and Model Y vehicles—the entirety of its current lineup—from model years ranging between 2016 and 2023, and equipped with the Full Self-Driving Beta software suite. This driver assistance software, which is technically in beta, has been under investigation for years. NHTSA and Tesla have determined that the system "allows a vehicle to exceed speed limits or travel through intersections in an unlawful or unpredictable manner [that] increases the risk of a crash."

At the bottom there is a link to a Tweet by Elon:

Definitely. The word "recall" for an over-the-air software update is anachronistic and just flat wrong!

I remember at least one Soylentil commenting about turning off over-the-air updates from Tesla because they remove features. For the same reason the same owner never took their car to Tesla for service because of the likelihood of updates being applied against their wishes. Not sure if this applies in that case?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Debian 12 "Bookworm" Enters Its Soft Freeze:

Debian 12 "Bookworm" Enters Its Soft Freeze After last month's initial Debian 12 freeze, this week the "Bookworm" Linux distribution release entered its soft freeze.

From this point on all uploads for Debian 12 need to be small, targeted fixes and no new source packages are to be allowed into Bookworm. Source packages in the Bookworm archive are also no longer allowed to add or drop binary packages.

The soft freeze was announced on Friday to the mailing list. In that release team update it was also noted:

The state of bookworm is pretty good. We ask everybody to keep working on fixing the remaining RC bugs (and please find and file those that are currently unreported). Link has the list we should drive down to zero together. Please try out upgrading your bullseye systems to bookworm now and report issue you encounter.

In the Bookworm archive is GNOME 43 packages, KDE Plasma 5.26.90 at the moment, the Linux 6.1 LTS kernel, Mesa 22.3, LLVM 15, and many other newer packages compared to what has been shipping in Debian 11.

The Debian 12.0 release should be out later this year [...] .

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-prove-that-there-is-no-second-law-of-entanglement/

The second law of thermodynamics is widely considered one of the most universally true physical laws. It dictates that the entropy, a measure of physical disorder, of any isolated system can never decrease over time. It adds an 'arrow of time' to everyday occurrences, determining which processes are reversible and which are not. It explains why an ice cube on a hot stove will always melt and why compressed gas will always escape its container and never return when a valve is opened to the atmosphere.

Only states of equal entropy and energy can be reversibly converted from one to the other. This reversibility condition led to the discovery of thermodynamic processes such as the (idealized) Carnot cycle, which poses an upper limit to how efficiently one can convert heat into work, or the other way around, by cycling a closed system through different temperatures and pressures. Our understanding of this process underpinned the rapid economic development during the Western Industrial Revolution.

[...] Resolving this long-standing open question, research carried out by Lami (previously at the University of Ulm and currently at QuSoft and the University of Amsterdam) and Bartosz Regula (University of Tokyo) demonstrates that manipulation of entanglement is fundamentally irreversible, putting to rest any hopes of establishing a second law of entanglement. This new result relies on the construction of a particular quantum state which is very 'expensive' to create using pure entanglement. Creating this state will always result in a loss of some of this entanglement, as the invested entanglement cannot be fully recovered. As a result, it is inherently impossible to transform this state into another and back again. The existence of such states was previously unknown.

Because the approach used here does not presuppose what exact transformation protocols are used, it rules out the reversibility of entanglement in all possible settings. It applies to all protocols, assuming they don't generate new entanglement themselves. Lami explains: "Using entangling operations would be like running a distillery in which alcohol from elsewhere is secretly added to the beverage."

Journal Reference:
Lami, L., Regula, B. No second law of entanglement manipulation after all. Nat. Phys. 19, 184–189 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01873-9

Original Submission

quietus writes:

It is now legal to hack into any company or government institution in Belgium, but only under certain circumstances.

That's the result of a new law on whistleblower protection that came into effect on February 15. Under the law, any citizen with the Belgian nationality is allowed to breach networks of Belgian legal entities without any previous notification or consent, provided he/she describes and reports the breach to the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium within 72 hours, and does not request a reward for it.

This new framework allows any natural or legal person, acting without fraudulent or malicious intent, to investigate and report existing vulnerabilities in networks and information systems located in Belgium, provided that certain conditions are strictly respected (see detailed explanations).

Do you think those hacking misfits should have any protection at all? Which legal framework exists for hackers in your country?

[Editor's Comment: The new law is specifically targeted at pen testers or 'ethical hackers' - it applies only to those acting "without fraudulent or malicious intent". There are specific "obligations in the context of the search for and reporting of a vulnerability" which are fully explained in the linked article. Whether or not such obligations will be abused or ignored is yet to be seen. --JR]

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Responsible use of AI in the military? US publishes declaration outlining principles

On Thursday, the US State Department issued a "Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy," calling for ethical and responsible deployment of AI in military operations among nations that develop them. The document sets out 12 best practices for the development of military AI capabilities and emphasizes human accountability.

The declaration coincides with the US taking part in an international summit on responsible use of military AI in The Hague, Netherlands. Reuters called the conference "the first of its kind." At the summit, US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control Bonnie Jenkins said, "We invite all states to join us in implementing international norms, as it pertains to military development and use of AI" and autonomous weapons.

In a preamble, the US declaration outlines that an increasing number of countries are developing military AI capabilities that may include the use of autonomous systems. This trend has raised concerns about the potential risks of using such technologies, especially when it comes to complying with international humanitarian law.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/app-founder-quits-google-says-company-doesnt-serve-users-anymore/

Here's some insight into what Google's problems are like lately, direct from an ex-employee. Praveen Seshadri, a founder whose company was acquired by Google, recently quit and dropped a scathing Medium post on his way out the door, detailing the problems he saw in his time at the company. Seshadri says Google is "trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews," and other bureaucratic processes, and while the employees are capable, they "get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year."

Seshadri is the founder of AppSheet, a "no-code development platform" that he started in 2014. After several years of development, Seshadri's company was acquired by Google Cloud in 2020, and Seshadri spent the next three years turning the app into Google AppSheet. Seshadri left Google the second his "three year mandatory retention period" was up, saying, "I have left Google understanding how a once-great company has slowly ceased to function."

Seshadri outlines his big problems with the company:

The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called "Ads" that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.

(1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement.

[...] The post says that "risk mitigation trumps everything else" at Google, echoing a 2021 New York Times article saying CEO Sundar Pichai built "a paralyzing bureaucracy" while running the company.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Hubble is investigating mysterious spokes in Saturn's rings:

Saturn is famous for its beautiful rings, but these rings have a strange feature: "spokes" which appear intermittently. These spots in the rings can be light or dark and can look like blobs or like lines stretching radially outward from the planet, and they appear in a regular cycle related to the planet's equinox. Now, the Hubble Space Telescope has the opportunity to study these oddities of the rings in more detail and researchers hope they can learn more about what causes these features.

The spokes were first noticed by the Cassini mission to Saturn in the 1980s, and since then they have been seen just before and after the equinox: the time at which day and night are of equal length across the planet because the sun is directly over the equator. On Earth, we experience two equinoxes each year, and the same is true for Saturn — but because Saturn is further out in its orbit and its year is much longer, its equinoxes occur just once every 15 Earth years.

[...] "Despite years of excellent observations by the Cassini mission, the precise beginning and duration of the spoke season is still unpredictable, rather like predicting the first storm during hurricane season," Simon explained.

[...] The current theory of the spokes' origin is that they are related to Saturn's magnetic field, as charged particles from the sun interact with it in a way that could charge particles within the rings, shifting these particles out of place with the rest of the ring structure. But astronomers need to do more research to be sure of this theory — and to find out whether similar spokes could occur on other planets with rings, such as Neptune or Jupiter.

"It's a fascinating magic trick of nature we only see on Saturn —for now at least," Simon said.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

AI automation throughout the drug development pipeline is opening up the possibility of faster, cheaper pharmaceuticals:

At 82 years old, with an aggressive form of blood cancer that six courses of chemotherapy had failed to eliminate, "Paul" appeared to be out of options. With each long and unpleasant round of treatment, his doctors had been working their way down a list of common cancer drugs, hoping to hit on something that would prove effective—and crossing them off one by one. The usual cancer killers were not doing their job.

With nothing to lose, Paul's doctors enrolled him in a trial set up by the Medical University of Vienna in Austria, where he lives. The university was testing a new matchmaking technology developed by a UK-based company called Exscientia that pairs individual patients with the precise drugs they need, taking into account the subtle biological differences between people.

[...] In effect, the researchers were doing what the doctors had done: trying different drugs to see what worked. But instead of putting a patient through multiple months-long courses of chemotherapy, they were testing dozens of treatments all at the same time.

The approach allowed the team to carry out an exhaustive search for the right drug. Some of the medicines didn't kill Paul's cancer cells. Others harmed his healthy cells. Paul was too frail to take the drug that came out on top. So he was given the runner-up in the matchmaking process: a cancer drug marketed by the pharma giant Johnson & Johnson that Paul's doctors had not tried because previous trials had suggested it was not effective at treating his type of cancer.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Big Tech lobbyist language made it verbatim into NY's hedged repair bill

When New York became the first state to pass a heavily modified right-to-repair bill late last year, it was apparent that lobbyists had succeeded in last-minute changes to the law's specifics. A new report from the online magazine Grist details the ways in which Gov. Kathy Hochul made changes identical to those proposed by a tech trade association.

In a report co-published with nonprofit newsroom The Markup, Maddie Stone writes that documents surrounding the drafting and debate over the bill show that many of the changes signed by Hochul were the same as those proposed by TechNet, which represents Apple, Google, Samsung, and other technology companies.
[...]
The bill passed with broad bipartisan support, but it was pared down to focus only on small electronics.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Documents show internal predictions were as good as contemporary science but executives publicly downplayed their significance:

The first systematic analysis of data from over a hundred ExxonMobil documents has shown that the company's scientists have accurately modelled global warming caused by fossil fuels since the late 1970s. However, company executives chose to publicly denigrate climate models, insist there was no scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, and claim the science was highly uncertain when their own scientists were telling them the opposite, the study's authors say. Their findings are likely to figure in court proceedings around the world as fossil fuel companies face increasing legal and political attacks for their role in climate change.

[...] 'Exxon leadership had specific, accurate, state-of the art scientific information, presented to them by their own scientists,' says Oreskes. 'And that science was consistent with what academic and government scientists were saying at the same time. Our findings highlight the stark hypocrisy of ExxonMobil [chief executives] Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson, who for decades insisted on the high degree of 'uncertainty' in climate models, when, in fact, their own scientists had produced models that were not highly uncertain, and which, in hindsight, we can say were highly accurate.'

[...] Another new finding involves ExxonMobil's claim that the science was too uncertain to know when – or if – human-caused global warming might be measurable. In fact, ExxonMobil scientists in the early 1980s offered the date of 2000±5 years, which turned out to be correct, says Oreskes. 'The [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)] first declared man-made climate change to be 'discernible' in 1995 so they got that right, too.'

upstart writes:

Ransomware Attack Pushes City of Oakland Into State of Emergency:

The city of Oakland, California issued a local state of emergency late Tuesday as a result of the ongoing impact following a ransomware attack that first hit city IT systems on Wednesday, February 8.

According to an update, the city "continues to experience a network outage that has left several non-emergency systems including phone lines within the City of Oakland impacted or offline."

City officials say the declaration of a local state of emergency (PDF) allows Oakland to expedite the procurement of equipment and materials, activate emergency workers if needed, and issue orders on an expedited basis to help restore systems and bring services back online.

While voicemail and other non-emergency services were disrupted or taken offline, no critical or emergency services such as 911 and fire departments have been impacted.

[...] While some cities paid the ransom – including Florence City, Lake City, and Riviera Beach City – others chose not to pay, in some cases with disastrous results. The City of Atlanta, which refused to pay a $51,000 ransom, spent millions to recover the impacted systems.

[...] Cybercriminals earned significantly less from ransomware attacks in 2022 compared to 2021 as victims are increasingly refusing to pay ransom demands.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Senators Are Hopping Mad and Demanding Answers for the Crypto Collapse:

Lawmakers from opposing parties disagreed over who and what was truly to blame for a devastating crypto crash that left customers collectively burnout out of billions in losses during a Wednesday Senate Banking Committee hearing. While Democratic lawmakers and crypto skeptics warned of the dangers presented by a lack of meaningful oversight measures, Republicans pushed back, with some blaming part of the recent tumultuous chaos on the Securities and Exchange Commission's alleged failure to use regulatory powers already at its disposal.

[...] The lawmakers questioned three expert witnesses who held widely divergent views on cryptocurrency. Linda Jeng, the chief global regulatory officer and general counsel for major crypto advocacy group Crypto Council for Innovation, largely went to bat for the industry, while Duke Financial Economics Center Policy Director Lee Reiners and Vanderbilt University Law School Professor Yesha Yadav have spoken more critically about crypto companies.

In her testimony, Jeng, who testified under her personal capacity as an academic and researcher, tried to separate the broader crypto space from specific bad actors like FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried, and called for a light-handed, nuanced regulatory approach. Jeng said it was important for crypto firms to have clear rules of the road dictating what they can and can't do, but cautioned against overly aggressive restrictions. In addition to rules, Jeng said it was important for the U.S. to adopt a more coherent national strategy around crypto to avoid falling too far behind the E.U., U.K, and others.

"This is a key moment for our transition to a digital economy," Jeng said in her written testimony. "We are at a decision point where how we build our legal and regulatory foundation will determine our digital future for decades to come.

hubie writes:

Trees' tolerance, watered down:

Despite recent, torrential rains, most of Southern California remains in a drought. Accordingly, many residents plant trees prized for drought tolerance, but a new UC Riverside-led study shows these trees lose this tolerance once they're watered.

One goal of the study was to understand how artificial irrigation affects the trees' carbon and water use. To find out, the researchers examined 30 species of trees spread across Southern California's urban areas from the coast to the desert. They then compared those trees with the same species growing wild.

"We found that, particularly as you move toward the desert regions, the same species of urban trees use much more water than their natural counterparts, even trees considered drought tolerant," said study lead and former UC Riverside botany graduate student Peter Ibsen, currently with the U.S. Geological Survey.

[...] Drought tolerant trees often restrict their water use to protect themselves from drying out when temperatures rise. However, with the exception of ficus, the irrigated trees all increased their water intake.

"Generally, they're not conserving it," Ibsen said. "Given the extra water, they will use it all."

[...] In these and other ways, urban trees are so unique in their behaviors that they can be classified as having their own distinct ecology. "Urban forests are different than anything else on the planet, even though all the species are found elsewhere on the planet," Ibsen said.

upstart writes:

A Huge Lithium Discovery Just Changed The Stakes In EV Production - SlashGear:

Lithium is one of the most sought-after commodities on Earth right now thanks to its fundamental role in making batteries that power everything from smartphones and laptops to electric vehicles. Such is the race for lithium that it has become a topic of geopolitical tussle between countries that have natural reserves and their diplomatic allies. As of 2023, the majority of the world's lithium mining is concentrated in China, Australia, and Chile. However, a fresh geological discovery could very well change the game.

The Geological Survey of India has announced the discovery of "5.9 million tonnes inferred resources of lithium" in the Salal-Haimana region of India's northern union territory Jammu & Kashmir. Chile currently holds the largest lithium reserves in the world at around 9.2 million tonnes, followed by Australia, Argentina, and China. The recent discovery propels India straight to the second spot in terms of lithium reserves across the globe. India currently imports most of its lithium from China, which happens to be one of the biggest lithium-processing hotspots in the world courtesy of a massive electronics manufacturing industry and a cut-throat EV market.

[...] India is poised to shake up the lithium processing and battery production dynamics with its abundant natural reserves, but a geopolitical splash will take some time to happen. Two additional rounds of rigorous geological surveys are needed to narrow down potential mining hotspots. Once that is done, the development of proper mining infrastructure could take years, and the same goes for lithium battery manufacturing lines.

Original Submission