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upstart writes:

The RISC-V alternative to Raspberry Pi is almost ready to ship:

The Star64 board, which was announced last summer, will finally be available for purchase this week. Developers will also be able to experiment with the system and enjoy the freedom of choice provided by the many interface options available on-board.

Open hardware company Pine64 is adding a new option to its offer of low-cost, ARM-based devices for developers and end users. Star64 is a single-board computer based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), a Raspberry Pi alternative that provides an affordable way to create software for the RISC-based processor architecture.

The Star64 board should be available for purchase starting April 4, 2023, with a $70 initial price tag for the base version with 4GB of RAM. An 8GB model will be available as well for $90. The Star64 product page on the Pine64 store only shows the 8GB variant as of writing, and it is listed as out of stock.

As highlighted in Pine64's latest quarterly update, Star64 features a quad-core, 64-bit RISC-V 1.5GHz CPU (SiFive U74), a BX-4-32 GPU by Imagination Technology, support for up to 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM (1866MHz), and an integrated E24 RISC-V core for real-time control. The SiFive CPU should provide performance on par with the Rockchip RK3566 ARM (Cortex-A55) CPU, Pine64 says, while video support includes an HDMI port.

Star64 support for external communication is provided by a dual gigabit Ethernet port, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 wireless interface, one USB 3.0 port, three USB 2.0 ports, and a 3.5mm audio jack. Power comes from a 12V/3A DC connector. Other connection options include a PCIe x1 slot, a GPIO port, and a MIPI-CSI camera interface. The board can be equipped with an optional eMMC module up to 128GB, and there's a microSD card reader for additional storage options.

[...] Compared to ARM, however, RISC-V is still severely lacking on the software side of things. A single-board computer like the Star64 could indeed provide a low-cost option for developers interested in experimenting with the RISC-V instruction set.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Using running to escape from negative experiences rather than using it to escape to positive ones may lead to exercise dependence:

Recreational running offers a lot of physical and mental health benefits – but some people can develop exercise dependence, a form of addiction to physical activity which can cause health issues. Shockingly, signs of exercise dependence are common even in recreational runners. A study published in Frontiers in Psychology investigated whether the concept of escapism can help us understand the relationship between running, wellbeing, and exercise dependence.

[...] "Escapism is often defined as 'an activity, a form of entertainment, etc. that helps you avoid or forget unpleasant or boring things'. In other words, many of our everyday activities may be interpreted as escapism," said Stenseng. "The psychological reward from escapism is reduced self-awareness, less rumination, and a relief from one's most pressing, or stressing, thoughts and emotions."

Escapism can restore perspective, or it can act as a distraction from problems that need to be tackled. Escapism which is adaptive, seeking out positive experiences, is referred to as self-expansion. Meanwhile maladaptive escapism, avoiding negative experiences, is called self-suppression. Effectively, running as exploration or as evasion.

upstart writes:

The invasion of Ukraine supercharged the decline of the country's already struggling tech sector—and undercut its biggest success story, Yandex:

You may think, as I did, that Russia's current tech woe's are as a result of their invasion of Ukraine, or perhaps the annexation of Crimea. But it seems that the real problem started back around 2011 when it decided that the population having free access to information was not a good thing and, anyway, there must be money to be made if someone can take the tech industry under their control.

In Russia, technology was one of the few sectors where people felt they could succeed on merit instead of connections. The industry also maintained a spirit of openness: Russian entrepreneurs won international funding and made deals all over the world. For a time, the Kremlin seemed to embrace this openness too, inviting international companies to invest in Russia.

But cracks in Russia's tech industry started appearing well before the war. For more than a decade, the government has attempted to put Russia's internet and its most powerful tech companies in a tight grip, threatening an industry that once promised to bring the country into the future. Experts MIT Technology Review spoke with say Russia's war against Ukraine only accelerated the damage that was already being done, further pushing the country's biggest tech companies into isolation and chaos and corralling its citizens into its tightly controlled domestic internet, where news comes from official government sources and free speech is severely curtailed.

"The Russian leadership chose a completely different path of development for the country," says Ruben Enikolopov, assistant professor at the Barcelona School of Economics and former rector of Russia's New Economic School. Isolation became a strategic choice, he says.

The tech industry was not Russia's biggest, but it was one of the main drivers of the economy, says Enikolopov. Between 2015 and 2021, the IT sector in Russia was responsible for more than a third of the growth in the country's GDP, reaching 3.7 trillion rubles ($47.8 billion) in 2021. Even though that constituted just 3.2% of total GDP, Enikolopov saysthat as the tech industry falls behind, Russia's economy will stagnate. "I think this is probably one of the biggest blows to future economic growth in Russia," he says.

upstart writes:

German Police Raid DDoS-Friendly Host 'FlyHosting':

Authorities in Germany this week seized Internet servers that powered FlyHosting, a dark web offering that catered to cybercriminals operating DDoS-for-hire services, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. FlyHosting first advertised on cybercrime forums in November 2022, saying it was a Germany-based hosting firm that was open for business to anyone looking for a reliable place to host malware, botnet controllers, or DDoS-for-hire infrastructure.

A statement released today by the German Federal Criminal Police Office says they served eight search warrants on March 30, and identified five individuals aged 16-24 suspected of operating "an internet service" since mid-2021. The German authorities did not name the suspects or the Internet service in question.

"Previously unknown perpetrators used the Internet service provided by the suspects in particular for so-called 'DDoS attacks', i.e. the simultaneous sending of a large number of data packets via the Internet for the purpose of disrupting other data processing systems," the statement reads.

[...] The German authorities said that as a result of the DDoS attacks facilitated by the defendants, the websites of various companies as well as those of the Hesse police have been overloaded in several cases since mid-2021, "so that they could only be operated to a limited extent or no longer at times."

The statement says police seized mobile phones, laptops, tablets, storage media and handwritten notes from the unnamed defendants, and confiscated servers operated by the suspects in Germany, Finland and the Netherlands.

[...] The apparent raids on FlyHosting come amid a broader law enforcement crackdown on DDoS-for-hire services internationally. The U.K.'s National Crime Agency announced last week that it's been busy setting up phony DDoS-for-hire websites that seek to collect information on users, remind them that launching DDoS attacks is illegal, and generally increase the level of paranoia for people looking to hire such services.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Tor Project and Mullvad VPN have both announced collaboration on a privacy-oriented web browser. The joint browser, which is based on Firefox, has the features of the Tor Browser but operates over the Mullvad Virtual Private Network rather than Tor's onion routers. The collaboration has helped polish interface improvements and address several long standing issues.

Mullvad and the Tor Project have been part of the same community that is dedicated to developing technology that prioritizes protecting people's right to privacy for many years now. Mullvad contributes to the Tor Project at the highest level of membership, Shallot, and were a founding member of the Tor Project's Membership Program. They approached us to help them develop their browser because they wanted to leverage our expertise to create a product that is built on the same principles and with similar safety levels as the Tor Browser -- but that works independently of the Tor network. The result is the Mullvad Browser, a free, privacy-preserving web browser to challenge the all-too-prevalent business model of exploiting people's data for profit.

We've Teamed Up With Mullvad VPN to Launch the Mullvad Browser

and

"The mass surveillance of today is absurd. Both from commercial actors like big tech companies and from governments," says Jan Jonsson, CEO at Mullvad VPN. "We want to free the internet from mass surveillance and a VPN alone is not enough to achieve privacy. From our perspective there has been a gap in the market for those who want to run a privacy-focused browser as good as the Tor Project's but with a VPN instead of the Tor Network."

-- Mullvad VPN and the Tor Project Team up to Release the Mullvad Browser

Mullvad has been an active member of the Tor project for years.

Oh, and one more thing, speaking of VPNs, buried in the actual text of Senate Bill S.686 - RESTRICT Act 118th Congress (2023-2024), hidden behind rhetoric about ByteDance and Tiktok is a ban on VPN usage.

Previously:
(2023) The 'Insanely Broad' RESTRICT Act Could Ban VPNs in the USA
(2022) Are Virtual Private Networks Actually Private?
(2022) VPN Providers Remove Servers From India in Wake of New Data Collection Laws
(2022) Tor Project Upgrades Network Speed Performance with New System
(2014) VPN Providers Response to Heartbleed

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Uber Eats and other food-delivery drivers will receive paid sick leave under rules approved by the Seattle City Council:

The Seattle City Council today unanimously approved rules providing paid sick leave for food-delivery and other on-demand, app-based gig economy workers. The city appears to be the first in the nation to permanently ensure these protections.

[...] The measure applies to workers for companies such as DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats, as well as platforms providing on-demand work such as laundry services and car washing. Similar benefits already exist at the state level for ride-hailing companies including Lyft and Uber. Seattle's legislation provides a suite of sick and "safe" time benefits including paid time off for:

• an illness and preventative health care;
• if a company stops operations due to a public health emergency or other safety reason;
• due to a school closure for a family member; and
• in order to seek services for domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking.

Mosqueda sponsored the legislation and was also the lead on similar, temporary protections put in place in June 2020 to aid workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mayor Bruce Harrell drafted the new legislation in partnership with the council and lauded passage of the measure, according to a statement.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/ads-are-coming-for-the-bing-ai-chatbot-as-they-come-for-all-microsoft-products/

Microsoft has spent a lot of time and energy over the last few months adding generative AI features to all its products, particularly its long-standing, long-struggling Bing search engine. And now the company is working on fusing this fast-moving, sometimes unsettling new technology with some old headaches: ads.

In a blog post earlier this week, Microsoft VP Yusuf Mehdi said the company was "exploring placing ads in the chat experience," one of several things the company is doing "to share the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response." The company is also looking into ways to let Bing Chat show sources for its work, sort of like the ways Google, Bing, and other search engines display a source link below snippets of information they think might answer the question you asked.

Related:
Even the FBI Says You Should Use an Ad Blocker (20221227)
Microsoft Explores a Potentially Risky New Market (20220420)
Microsoft is Testing Ads in the Windows 11 File Explorer (20220314)
Sen. Ron Wyden Calls for an Investigation of the Ad-Blocking Industry (20200115)
Windows 10 App Starts Showing Ads, Microsoft Says You Can't Remove Them (20191215)
Microsoft Experiments with Ads in Windows Email (20181117)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Images of the previously unknown snailfish species were taken deeper than 8,000 meters, off the coast of Japan:

Researchers using baited camera traps recorded an unknown species of snailfish more than 5 miles (8 kilometers) deep just off the coast of Japan. These are the deepest fish ever caught on film.

A team with the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology and the University of Western Australia recently released the footage, which was collected in September 2022 in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench, which is just south of Japan. Cameras captured the unknown snailfish that belongs to the genus Pseudoliparis at 8,336 meters (5.1 miles) underwater, according to a press release from the University of Western Australia.

[...] The snailfish found in the Izu-Ogasaware Trench do not have any scales. They're covered in a gelatinous layer and do not have a swim bladder like other fish species do, The Guardian reports. This allows them to live under the extreme pressure found in the deepest parts of the ocean.

The expedition was part of a 10-year study into the deepest fish population on the planet. Researchers set out to study the Izu-Ogasaware, Ryukyu, and Japan trenches—all of which are over 7,000 meters (4.3 miles) deep. According to researchers, the recently released images show how different the Pacific Ocean's trenches are to others around the world. Alan Jamieson, a chief scientist in the expedition, explained in the UWA release that, in the Mariana Trench, the deeper researchers look, the less fish there are. But in the trenches around Japan, there are a lot of fish to be found even at extreme depths.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mozilla won't abandon Microsoft's tried and tested platform anytime soon:

The Extended Support Release (ESR) of Firefox will keep supporting Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 until at least until 2024. Mozilla programmer Mike Kaply confirmed the decision through the Bugzilla platform, stating that the corporation "will not be ending support for Windows 7/Windows 8 before the release of the Firefox 115 ESR," and that the Firefox 115 ESR release will support the aged operating systems "at least until 3Q 2024."

Mike Kaply also hinted at the fact that Mozilla still has to decide exactly when support for Windows 7/8 will be finally removed. Firefox ESR is stable release of the open-source browser which Mozilla supports for an extended period of time compared to regular, "rapid" releases coming out every month. During its one-year support cycle, each Firefox ESR version only gets incremental updates containing security fixes with no new features or performance enhancements.

As stated by Firefox's official release calendar, Firefox 115 ESR should come out on July 4, 2023. The Firefox Public Data Report also reveals that Windows 7 still provides a sizable portion of the overall Firefox userbase (13.44%), while Windows 10 is the leading platform with 71% of users. The much-maligned Windows 8.1 is still used by 2.3% of Firefox installations.

[...] Windows 7 was already abandoned by Google Chrome (and other Chromium-based browsers), which doesn't run on the OS anymore starting from Chrome 110. Microsoft ended support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 in January 2023, and Valve will do the same with Steam on January 1, 2024.

Are you one of the 13.44%?

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

These read like a proof of concept for replacing human writers:

Earlier this year, when BuzzFeed announced plans to start publishing AI-assisted content, its CEO Jonah Peretti promised the tech would be held to a high standard.

"I think that there are two paths for AI in digital media," Peretti told CNN. "One path is the obvious path that a lot of people will do — but it's a depressing path — using the technology for cost savings and spamming out a bunch of SEO articles that are lower quality than what a journalist could do, but a tenth of the cost."

[...] Indeed, the first AI content BuzzFeed published — a series of quizzes that turned user input into customized responses — were an interesting experiment, avoiding many of the missteps that other publishers have made with the tech.

It doesn't seem like that commitment to quality has held up, though. This month, we noticed that with none of the fanfare of Peretti's multiple interviews about the quizzes, BuzzFeed quietly started publishing fully AI-generated articles that are produced by non-editorial staff — and they sound a lot like the content mill model that Peretti had promised to avoid.

[...] A BuzzFeed spokesperson told us that the AI-generated pieces are part of an "experiment" the company is doing to see how well its AI writing assistance incorporates statements from non-writers.

The linked article includes many laughable examples of bland and similar phrases in multiple stories published on the site.

Previously: BuzzFeed Preps AI-Written Content While CNET Fumbles

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/ftc-chair-refused-musks-meeting-request-told-him-to-stop-delaying-investigation/

Twitter owner Elon Musk requested a meeting with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan late last year, but he was rebuffed and told to stop dragging his heels on providing documents and depositions needed for the FTC investigation into Twitter's privacy and data practices, a New York Times report said yesterday.

"In a Jan. 27 letter declining the meeting, Ms. Khan told a Twitter lawyer to focus on complying with investigators' demands for information before she would consider meeting with Mr. Musk," the NYT wrote.

Twitter has to comply with conditions in a May 2022 settlement in which it agreed to pay a $150 million penalty for targeting ads at users with phone numbers and email addresses collected from those users when they enabled two-factor authentication. Last year's settlement was reached after the FTC said Twitter violated the terms of a 2011 settlement that prohibited the company from misrepresenting its privacy and security practices.

Related:
FTC Fines Twitter $150M for Using 2FA Info for Targeted Advertising (20220527)
Twitter Faces FTC Probe, Likely Fine Over Use of Phone Numbers for Ads (20200804)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A620 chipset is missing features, but (mostly) not the important ones:

If you're trying to build a low-end to midrange gaming PC or workstation with inexpensive but modern parts, it has been hard to recommend AMD's Ryzen 7000-series processors. That's partly because Intel's CPUs have offered more cores for similar money, but motherboards with AMD's socket AM5 have remained stubbornly expensive, and their lack of support for DDR4 memory means you'll pay more to get DDR5 RAM.

That may change somewhat thanks to the new entry-level AMD A620 chipset, which the company quietly announced last week. AMD says it should bring the prices of AM5-based motherboards down to around $85, not far north of what low-end Intel-based H610 and B660 motherboards cost, though they'll still require DDR5 (for the DDR5-6000 that AMD recommends for optimal Ryzen performance, the price premium is still not quite double what you'll pay for the same amount of DDR4-3200).

Compared to X670 and B650-based motherboards, A620 chipsets will have more limited connectivity. There's no PCI Express 5.0 support at all for either graphics cards or SSDs—not a huge blow since no GPUs and few SSDs support PCIe 5.0 at this point anyway, but a step back for future-proofing. The processor will still provide enough PCIe 4.0 lanes for a GPU and a single SSD, but the chipset only supports PCIe 3.0 speeds for additional SSDs. The chipset also supports fewer USB ports overall and no 20Gbps USB ports.

Perhaps more significantly, A620 chipsets don't support any kind of processor overclocking, nor do they support the Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) or Curve Optimizer features for automated overclocking or undervolting. This is consistent with past AMD A-series chipsets and non-Z-series Intel chipsets, which have also limited their support for overclocking features. AMD says that memory overclocking will still be supported by "most [motherboard] models."

[...] AMD says that more A620-based boards are coming from the usual suspects—ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and Biostar are all planning to release a range of A620 motherboard options.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Strawberries tend to be blander and less nutritious when treated with particular pesticides:

Have you ever bitten into a plump, red strawberry, only to find it bland and watery? Certain pesticides might be responsible. A team reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry has found that two common strawberry fungicides can impact cellular mechanisms, creating berries with subdued flavor and sweetness, as well as a lower nutritional value.

The flavor profile of any produce, including berries, is a result of its taste and smell — sweetness often arises from the amount of dissolved glucose or fructose, and a unique aroma comes from volatile compounds, such as esters and terpenes. In addition, many fruits are also full of nutrients, including vitamin C, folic acid and antioxidants. But because fungicides are designed to disrupt the cellular processes of detrimental fungi, they could accidentally interfere with these processes in crops, inhibiting production of these important flavor and nutritional compounds. So, Jinling Diao and colleagues wanted to investigate how two common pesticides used on strawberries — boscalid (BOS) and difenoconazole (DIF) — affect specific molecular pathways in berries.

[...] Looking more closely, the team found that BOS had a direct effect on the regulation of genes involved in cellular pathways related to producing sugars, volatile compounds, nutrients and amino acids. Finally, in a blind taste test, people consistently preferred the untreated strawberries. The researchers say that this work could provide guidance to farmers about the use of pesticides.

The researchers found that, despite having the same size and color of untreated strawberries, the ones treated with the pesticides had lower levels of soluble sugar and nutrients, the sugars were converted into acids, and the amounts of volatile compounds changed, which subdued the taste and aroma.

Journal Reference:
Yuping Liu, Rui Liu, Yue Deng, et al., Insights into the Mechanism of Flavor Loss in Strawberries Induced by Two Fungicides Integrating Transcriptome and Metabolome Analysis, J. Agric. Food Chem. 2023, 71, 8, 3906–3919, 2023 https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jafc.2c08157

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/stable-diffusion-copyright-lawsuits-could-be-a-legal-earthquake-for-ai/

The AI software Stable Diffusion has a remarkable ability to turn text into images. When I asked the software to draw "Mickey Mouse in front of a McDonald's sign," for example, it generated the picture you see above.

Stable Diffusion can do this because it was trained on hundreds of millions of example images harvested from across the web. Some of these images were in the public domain or had been published under permissive licenses such as Creative Commons. Many others were not—and the world's artists and photographers aren't happy about it.

In January, three visual artists filed a class-action copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, the startup that created Stable Diffusion. In February, the image-licensing giant Getty filed a lawsuit of its own.
[...]
The plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit describe Stable Diffusion as a "complex collage tool" that contains "compressed copies" of its training images. If this were true, the case would be a slam dunk for the plaintiffs.

But experts say it's not true. Erik Wallace, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me in a phone interview that the lawsuit had "technical inaccuracies" and was "stretching the truth a lot." Wallace pointed out that Stable Diffusion is only a few gigabytes in size—far too small to contain compressed copies of all or even very many of its training images.

Related:
Ethical AI art generation? Adobe Firefly may be the answer. (20230324)
Paper: Stable Diffusion "Memorizes" Some Images, Sparking Privacy Concerns (20230206)
Getty Images Targets AI Firm For 'Copying' Photos (20230117)
Pixel Art Comes to Life: Fan Upgrades Classic MS-DOS Games With AI (20220904)
A Startup Wants to Democratize the Tech Behind DALL-E 2, Consequences be Damned (20220817)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Transparency? Redmond's heard of it:

Microsoft is close to resolving antitrust complaints lodged against it with the European Commission by local suppliers OVHcloud, Aruba S.p.A and Danish Cloud Community (DCC) over alleged commercial abuses.

The details of the said settlement remain under wraps and likely won't be published in detail, which is frustrating others' efforts to take the US software and cloud giant to task over alleged controlling market behavior.

OVHcloud, Aruba and DCC fired a joint complaint against Microsoft in May, with OVH itself confirming they were pressing the authorities for a "level playing field among cloud providers," saying Microsoft "undermines fair competition."

The complaint was focused on the higher costs of buying and running Microsoft software in clouds other than Azure, and technical adjustments needed to run some programs on competitors' clouds.

Fast-forward to this week and chatty sources close to the situation indicate Microsoft has agreed to settle the case and will propose binding commitments imminently, according to Bloomberg.

[...] Representing 24 cloud providers, the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) group itself filed a formal competition complaint against Microsoft in November, saying the vendor uses: "unjustified and discriminatory bundling, tying, self-preferencing pricing and technical and economic lock-in" to "restrict choice".

It claimed the actions of Microsoft were in violation of Article 102 TFEU, and provide grounds for the EC to launch a formal investigation.

Francisco Mingorance, Secretary General at CISPE, which counts OVH, Aruba and many others as members, told us today the decision by the trio to settle with Microsoft was "disappointing on many levels."