SoylentNews

hubie writes:

Brain activity imaging coupled with computer vision reveals how neuron populations in different individuals synchronize during social interactions:

Humans are social creatures. But what leads to them being this way? To fully understand how the brain gives rise to social behaviors, we need to investigate it during social encounters. Moreover, we need to analyze not only the internal operations of one brain during social activities but also the dynamic interplay between multiple brains engaged in the same activity. This emerging research field is referred to as "second-person neuroscience" and employs hyperscanning (the simultaneous recording of the activity of multiple brains) as the signature technique.

[...] Now, a research team led by Yasuyo Minagawa of Keio University, Japan, has worked out an elegant solution to this problem. [...]

Each pair of participants (39 pairs in total) engaged in a natural, cooperative, and creative task: the design and furnishing of a digital room in a computer game. They were allowed to communicate freely to create a room that satisfied both. The participants also completed the same task alone as the researchers sought to compare between-brain synchronizations (BBSs) and within-brain synchronizations (WBSs) during the individual and cooperative tasks. The social behavior that the team focused on during the tasks was eye gaze, that is, whether the participants directed their gaze at the other's face. They automatically extracted this behavior from the video footage using an open-source software, which made the data analysis easier.

One of the most intriguing findings of the study was that, during cooperative play, there was a strong BBS among the superior and middle temporal regions and specific parts of the prefrontal cortex in the right hemisphere, but little WBS in comparison. Moreover, the BBS synchronization was strongest when one of the participants raised their gaze to look at the other. Interestingly, the situation reversed during individual play, showing increased WBS within the same regions.

According to Minagawa, these results agree with the idea that our brains work as a "two-in-one system" during certain social interactions. "Neuron populations within one brain were activated simultaneously with similar neuron populations in the other brain when the participants cooperated to complete the task, as if the two brains functioned together as a single system for creative problem-solving," she explains. "These phenomena are consistent with the notion of a 'we-mode,' in which interacting agents share their minds in a collective fashion and facilitate interaction by accelerating access to the other's cognition."

Overall, this study provides evidence hinting at the remarkable capability of the human brain to understand and synchronize with others' when the situation calls for it. [...]

Journal Reference:
Mingdi Xu, Satoshi Morimoto, Eiichi Hoshino, et al., Neurophotonics, Vol. 10, Issue 1, 013511 (February 2023). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.NPh.10.1.013511

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microplastics are messing with the microbiomes of seabirds:

To find out if the microbes being introduced might be "good" or "bad," Fackelmann and her colleagues analyzed the microbiomes and looked up individual types of microbes in databases to learn what they do. They found that with more plastic, there were more microbes that are known to break down plastic. There were also more microbes that are known to be resistant to antibiotics and more with the potential to cause disease.

Fackelmann and her colleagues didn't assess the health of the birds, so they don't know if these microbes might have been making them unwell. "But if you accumulate pathogens and antibiotic-resistant microbes in your digestive system, that's clearly not great," says Wagner.

The study, which was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, shows that the levels of plastic already present in the environment are enough to affect animals' microbiomes, says Fackelmann. The next step is to work out what this might mean for their health and the health of other animals, including humans, she says.

"When I read [the study], I thought about the whales we find beached with kilograms of plastic debris found in their bellies," says Wagner. "It's probably quite comparable to what birds have in their digestive systems, so it would be interesting to know if this happens in whales, dolphins, [and other marine animals] as well."

upstart writes:

GitHub publishes RSA SSH host keys by mistake, issues update:

GitHub has updated its SSH keys after accidentally publishing the private part to the world. Whoops.

A post on Github's security blog reveals that the company has changed its RSA SSH host keys. This is going to cause connection errors, and some frightening warning messages, for a lot of developers, but it's all right: it's not scary cracker activity, just plain old human error.

Microsoft subsidiary GitHub is the largest source code shack in the world, with an estimated 100 million active users. So this is going to inconvenience a lot of people. It's not the end of the world: if you normally push and pull to GitHub via SSH – which most people do – then you will have to delete your local GitHub SSH key, and fetch new ones.

As the blog post describes, the first symptom is an alarming warning message[.]

For almost everyone, this warning is spurious. It's not that you're being attacked – although that is always a remote (ha ha, only serious) possibility – it's that GitHub revoked its old keys and published new ones. Hanlon's Razor applies, as it most often does:

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. (The word stupidity is often replaced with incompetence, but then, one does tend to lead to the other.)

This time, the reason was – as usual – plain old human error. Someone published GitHub's private RSA keys in a repository on GitHub itself. If you're unclear how SSH encryption works, about public versus private keys, or the different cryptographic algorithms SSH uses, there are many good explanations out there.

Original Submission

guest reader writes:

Experts acknowledge the apparent technical achievement of the research but highlight the ethical issues raised by being able to choose the sex of an offspring:

Researchers used a technique to separate sperm on whether they had an X chromosome (making female offspring) or a Y one (male offspring). Sperm with an X chromosome are slightly heavier than those with a Y, the research indicates.

However, the study has again raised long-held concerns over the ethics of such a process. Selecting embryos without reasons such as a sex-linked disease is illegal in many countries.

Experts behind the research, from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, said their technique was inexpensive and "extremely safe".

Fifty-nine couples wanted a girl and it resulted in 79.1% (231 out of 292) female embryos, with 16 girls being born without any abnormalities. Fifty-six couples wanted a boy and the technique produced 79.6% male embryos (223 out of 280), resulting in 13 healthy male babies.

[...] "I am convinced that the science is sound and that, instead of the usual 50:50 'coin toss' then a couple can get a baby with the desired sex a little under 80% of the time."

From the article:

The desire to have offspring of a specific sex has a long history but has been particularly present since the 1970s with the early appearance of assisted reproduction. The reasons for choosing a child's sex may be social, such as a desire for family balancing [1]. Couples undergoing IVF, who already have a child or children of one sex, may wish to have the experience of raising children of both sexes. Some couples, who already have children, could have financial reasons for not attempting a further pregnancy without assurance that the additional child will be of a specific sex.

Cheung S, Elias R, Xie P, Rosenwaks Z, Palermo GD (2023) A non-randomized clinical trial to determine the safety and efficacy of a novel sperm sex selection technique. PLoS ONE 18(3): e0282216. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282216

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft to fix Windows 11 'aCropalypse' privacy failure:

Updated Microsoft is said to be preparing to fix the high-profile "aCropalypse" privacy bug in its Snipping Tool for Windows 11.

Users can remove sensitive information or some other parts of photos, screenshots, and other images by cropping them using the Snipping Tool app. The problem is that for the Windows 11 app – as well as Microsoft's Snip & Sketch cropping tool in Windows 10 – the file of the cropped image still includes the cropped out portions, which can be recovered and viewed.

A similar flaw was found in Google's Markup image-editing app for its Pixel smartphones. According to reverse engineers Simon Aarons and David Buchanan – who named the bug aCropalyse – the problem affects Pixel smartphones since 2018, when the 3 series came out. Google patched its code to avoid leaking cropped areas of images.

Then this week, Buchanan confirmed that the Windows Snipping Tool and Snip & Sketch software had the same issue. If a user cropped a photo or other image using the software and then saved the edited image over the original file, that file still contains the cropped-out portion. The area isn't visible when viewing the image using normal tools, but the data is still there in the file, and can be restored and viewed using appropriate recovery software.

Steven Murdoch, a professor of security engineering at the UK's University College London, shared some thoughts here on the underlying issue within Windows, specifically its latest Save File API, which he described as "defective by design."

[...] Meanwhile, if you've used Microsoft's code to crop your snaps and then shared them on, be aware someone with a copy of them might be able to recover the lopped-off portions. ®

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

[R]esearchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created soft robots that can seamlessly shift from walking to swimming, for example, or crawling to rolling:

"We were inspired by nature to develop a robot that can perform different tasks and adapt to its environment without adding actuators or complexity," said Dinesh K. Patel, a post-doctoral fellow in the Morphing Matter Lab in the School of Computer Science'sHuman-Computer Interaction Institute. "Our bistable actuator is simple, stable and durable, and lays the foundation for future work on dynamic, reconfigurable soft robotics."

The bistable actuator is made of 3D-printed soft rubber containing shape-memory alloy springs that react to electrical currents by contracting, which causes the actuator to bend. The team used this bistable motion to change the actuator or robot's shape. Once the robot changes shape, it is stable until another electrical charge morphs it back to its previous configuration.

[...] The actuators require only a hundred millisecond of electrical charge to change their shape, and they are durable. The team had a person ride a bicycle over one of the actuators a few times and changed their robots' shapes hundreds of times to demonstrate durability.

In the future, the robots could be used in rescue situations or to interact with sea animals or coral. Using heat-activated springs in the actuators could open up applications in environmental monitoring, haptics, and reconfigurable electronics and communication.

Video of the robot in action.

Related:

• Scientists Unveil Bionic Robo-Fish to Remove Microplastics From Seas
• New Stretchable, Self-Healing and Illuminating Electronic Material for Wearables and Soft Robots
• A Soft Robotic Insect That Survives Being Flattened by a Fly Swatter
• Rubbery Figures: Scientists Create an Entirely Soft Robot
• "Soft Muscled" Robots Could Perform Delicate Tasks

Original Submission

guest reader writes:

Microsoft Research has issued a 154-page report entitled Sparks of Artificial Intelligence: Early Experiments With GPT-4:

Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.

Zvi Mowshowitz wrote a post about this article:

[...] Their method seems to largely be 'look at all these tasks GPT-4 did well on.'

I am not sure why they are so impressed by the particular tasks they start with. The first was 'prove there are an infinite number of primes in the form of a rhyming poem.' That seems like a clear case where the proof is very much in the training data many times, so you're asking it to translate text into a rhyming poem, which is easy for it - for a challenge, try to get it to write a poem that doesn't rhyme.

[...] As I understand it, failure to properly deal with negations is a common issue, so reversals being a problem also makes sense. I love the example on page 50, where GPT-4 actively calls out as an error that a reverse function is reversed.

[...] in 6.1, GPT-4 is then shown to have theory of mind, be able to process non-trivial human interactions, and strategize about how to convince people to get the Covid-19 vaccine far better than our government and public health authorities handled things. The rank order is clearly GPT-4's answer is very good, ChatGPT's answer is not bad, and the actual answers we used were terrible.

[...] Does this all add up to a proto-AGI? Is it actually intelligent? Does it show 'sparks' of general intelligence, as the paper words it?

Preliminary Court Setback for Libraries and Digital Lending

canopic jug writes:

The Internet Archive has published a post about their ongoing fight in the lower courts over Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), specifically from the case Hachette v Internet Archive. This potentially affects all libraries with digital resources and the Internet Archive will appeal the court's decision.

Today's lower court decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve. This decision impacts libraries across the US who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.

But it’s not over—we will keep fighting for the traditional right of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books. We will be appealing the judgment and encourage everyone to come together as a community to support libraries against this attack by corporate publishers. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundaion (EFF) pointed out that libraries have already paid publishers billions of dollars for their print collections which are being digitized at great expense as means of preserving these slowly decaying artifacts. CDL helps make full use of the books that the public have already bought and paid for in their libraries. Gizmodo had a piece a few days ago, giving a heads up about this setback: Internet Archive Faces Uphill Battle in Lawsuit Over Its Free Digital Library.

Hachette and several other publishers are fighting the Internet Archive in court to stop the practice of CDL. Basically, CDL is a model where artificial restrictions are imposed to create artificial scarcity of digital resources in emulation of the old model based on physical artifacts. This attack on basic library service is just the latest in decades of such attacks. Glyn Moody provides some context about other, long-term general attempts to remove libraries from the picture.

Freeman writes:

https://www.techspot.com/news/98047-youtube-channel-linustechtips-terminated-after-hacked-show-crypto.html

What just happened? Linus Tech Tips, one of the largest and most popular technology YouTube channels on the platform, has been hacked. It was used by the hackers to show pre-recorded 'live-streaming' crypto-scam videos, featuring former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The channel is now showing a message stating it has been shut down for violating YouTube's community guidelines, but it appears Linus' other channels are also being abused.

Linus Sebastian's Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel has been running since 2008 and has amassed 15.8 million subscribers. The Canadian has several channels under the Linus Media Group banner, including TechLinked, but the main one remains the most popular. Sadly for all involved, it's become the latest high-profile channel to be hacked.
[...]
YouTube has shuttered the channel for violating its guidelines, but it seems the hackers have now gone after other Linus Media Group accounts. TechLinked has been renamed Tesla and is showing the same Musk livestream.
[...]
While all the content from the channels has been deleted, Linus previously created several videos showing off the high-end hardware used to store the terabytes of backups the company created over the years.

[UPDATE: After taking back control of the channels, he released a video explaining how it all went down by way of a little bit of social engineering resulting in the attacker gaining their browser session token --hubie]

Also:
Linus Tech Tips YouTube Channel Hacked to Promote Crypto Scams
Linus Tech Tips YouTube Channel Is Down After Crypto Scammer Hack
VERGE STUPIDLY MAKES THEIR TITLES IMAGES NOW (Though, it could just be the one article. This is also an article on the Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel hack.)

Related:
Live Show on Improving Your Security -- Wednesday June 3rd, 2020 (NCommander - 2020)
Security Warning For 23 Million YouTube Creators Following 'Massive' Hack Attack (2019)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Automakers are pushing subscriptions, but consumer interest just isn't there:

The last decade or so has seen the creeping techification of the auto industry. Executives will tell you the trend is being driven by consumers, starry-eyed at their smartphones and tablets, although the 2018 backup camera law is the main reason there's a display in every new car.

But automakers have been trying to adopt more than just shiny gadgets and iterating software releases. They also want some of that lucrative "recurring revenue" that so pleases tech investors but makes the rest of us feel nickeled and dimed. Now we have some concrete data on just how much car buyers are asking for this stuff, courtesy of a new survey from AutoPacific. The answer is "very little."

AutoPacific asked people looking to buy a new vehicle about their interest in 11 different in-car connected features, starting with a data plan for the car for a hypothetical price of $15/month.

The results may chasten some of the investors demanding that the car companies keep traveling down this path. The most in-demand or desirable feature was Internet connection with a Wi-Fi hotspot—not an unreasonable demand for $15 per month. But only 30 percent of people looking to buy a new car said they were interested in paying for their car's Internet access.

[...] AutoPacific also broke down some of its data by age brackets. The 30- to 39-year-old group was consistently the most interested in connected subscription features for their cars—28 percent want to stream video directly to the infotainment screen, 20 percent want to play video games on the infotainment screen, and 18 percent want in-car video conferencing. As you might expect, the 60- to 69-year-old bracket was the least interested in any of this stuff; just 10 percent would want in-car video streaming, with video conferencing at 5 percent and in-car gaming at just 4 percent.

In other news, water is wet...

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Arm is tired of seeing device makers bring in billions while it makes millions:

What's in store for the future of chip maker Arm? The company's owner, Softbank, has been in financial trouble lately, and that has caused Arm to bounce from one dramatic possibility to another. Initially, Arm was put up for sale, and Nvidia was the front-runner to buy the company. That plan was shut down by regulators, and now "Plan B" is an IPO, which is supposed to happen on the New York Stock Exchange sometime this year. If you want to succeed on the stock market, you've got to show revenue, and while Arm enables the sale of billions of dollars of devices around the world, the company's chip licensing scheme only brings in a comparatively small amount of money—around $500 million a quarter.

The Financial Times has a report on Arm's "radical shake-up" of its business model. The new plan is to raise prices across the board and charge "several times more" than it currently does for chip licenses. According to the report, Arm wants to stop charging chip vendors to make Arm chips, and instead wants to charge device makers—especially smartphone manufacturers—a fee based on the overall price of the final product.

Let's say Motorola makes a phone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon Arm chip. Previously, Qualcomm would have signed a deal with Arm for an Arm license, and that license would extend to anyone that buys a Qualcomm Arm chip, like Motorola. Qualcomm contributes a lot to its own chip designs, but when it comes to the Arm license it is basically an Arm reseller. Arm would now want a licensing fee from Motorola (and not Qualcomm?), and it would ask Qualcomm to not sell chips to anyone that doesn't have a licensing agreement with Arm.

upstart writes:

In its bid to catch up with Starlink, the company plans to build as many as four satellites a day:

Amazon has applied to the FCC to increase its constellation to 7,774 satellites, which would allow it to cover regions further north and south, including Alaska, as Starlink does.

There are riches to be had: SpaceX currently charges $110 a month to access Starlink, with an up-front cost of $599 for an antenna to connect to the satellites. According to a letter to shareholders last year, Amazon is spending "over $10 billion" to develop Kuiper, with more than 1,000 employees working on the project. Andy Jassy, Amazon's current CEO, has said that Kuiper has a chance of becoming a "fourth pillar" for the company, alongside its retail marketplace, Amazon Prime, and its widely used cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services

"Amazon's business model relies on people having internet connectivity," says Shagun Sachdeva, an industry expert at the space investment firm Kosmic Apple in France. "It makes a lot of sense for them to have this constellation to provide connectivity."

Amazon is not yet disclosing the pricing of its service but has previously said a goal is to "bridge the digital divide" by bringing fast and affordable broadband to "underserved communities," an ambition Starlink has also professed. But whether costs will ever get low enough for that to be achievable remains to be seen. "Costs will come down, but to what extent is really the question,"  says Sachdeva. On March 14, the company revealed it was producing its own antennas at a cost of $400 each, although a retail cost has not yet been revealed.

guest reader writes:

Julia and Kokkos perform comparably with C/OpenMP on CPUs, while Julia implementations are competitive with CUDA and HIP on GPUs:

High-level dynamic languages such as Python, Julia, and R have been at the forefront of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), data analysis, and interactive computing workflows in the last decade. Traditional high-performance computing (HPC) frameworks that power the underlying low-level computations for performance and scalability are written in compiled languages: C, C++, and Fortran.

[...] We analyze single node scalability on two systems hosted at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)1—Wombat, which uses Arm Ampere Neoverse CPUs and 2 NVIDIA A100 GPUs, and Crusher, which is equipped with AMD EPYC 7A53 CPUs and 8 MI250X GPUs and serves as a test bed for Frontier, the first exascale system on the TOP500 list.

[...] We run hand-rolled general matrix multiplication (GEMM) code for dense matrices using Julia, Python/Numba and Kokkos implementations and compare the performance with C for multithreaded CPU (OpenMP) and single GPU (CUDA/HIP) systems. GEMM is an important kernel in the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) used across several deep learning AI frameworks, for which modern GPU architectures have been heavily optimized via tensor cores.

[...] For CPUs, Julia performance was comparable to C/OpenMP combined with LLVM-based ArmClang and AMDClang vendor compilers. For the AMD GPUs, Julia AMDGPU.jl performance was comparable to HIP. Nevertheless, there is still a performance gap on NVIDIA A100 GPUs for single-precision floating point cases.

[...] We observe that Python/Numba implementations still lack the support needed to reach comparable CPU and GPU performance on these systems, and AMD GPU support is deprecated.

Pre-print article:
William F. Godoy and Pedro Valero-Lara and T. Elise Dettling and Christian Trefftz and Ian Jorquera and Thomas Sheehy and Ross G. Miller and Marc Gonzalez-Tallada and Jeffrey S. Vetter and Valentin Churavy, Evaluating performance and portability of high-level programming models: Julia, Python/Numba, and Kokkos on exascale nodes, Accepted at the 28th HIPS workshop, held in conjunction with IPDPS 2023, 2023, 2303.06195, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.06195

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Beijing's Made in China drive fueled by Washington's export crackdowns:

Huawei has reportedly completed work on electronic design automation (EDA) tools for laying out and making chips down to 14nm process nodes.

Chinese media said the platform is one of 78 being developed by the telecoms equipment giant to replace American and European chip design toolkits that have become subject to export controls by the US and others.

EDA is an umbrella term for software, hardware, and services essential to the planning, design, and production of chips. While integrated circuits were largely designed by hand decades ago, chips became so complex that computer-aided design and automation was unavoidable, generally speaking.

Huawei's EDA platform was reportedly revealed by rotating Chairman Xu Zhijun during a meeting in February, and later confirmed by media in China. The Register reached out to Huawei's PR team for comment; we'll let you know if we hear anything back.

Today, the EDA market is largely controlled by three companies: California-based Synopsys and Cadence, as well as Germany's Siemens. According to the industry watchers at TrendForce, these three companies account for roughly 75 percent of the EDA market. And this poses a problem for Chinese chipmakers and foundries, which have steadily found themselves cut off from these tools.

Synopsys and Cadence's EDA tech is already subject to several of these export controls, which were stiffened by the US Commerce Department last summer to include state-of-the-art gate-all-around (GAA) transistors.

upstart writes:

The uncrewed capsule will fly again:

Blue Origin now has an explanation for the booster failure that cut a New Shepard flight short last September. Jeff Bezos' company has determined that a "thermo-structural failure" in the NS-23 rocket's engine nozzle was to blame. Operational temperatures for the nozzle climbed higher than expected following cooling system design changes, creating fatigue that misaligned the thrust and activated the crew capsule's escape system.

Engineers are already taking "corrective actions" that include redesigning the combustion chamber and operating conditions. Blue Origin has also tweaked the nozzle design to improve its structural integrity. The capsule wasn't damaged and will fly again, Blue Origin says.

The company says it hopes to resume flights "soon," but hasn't provided an exact date. It intends to restart operations by re-flying the research payload from the aborted mission. The Federal Aviation Administration has to accept the incident findings before Blue Origin can move forward.

There's plenty of pressure on Blue Origin to address the issues. The company recently obtained a NASA contract to fly a science mission to Mars using its yet-to-launch New Glenn rocket, and has been pushing for a lunar lander agreement. The sooner Blue Origin can prove that its rocketry is trustworthy, the sooner it can secure customers that include governments and space tourists.

Original Submission