SoylentNews

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/01/the-8086-processors-microcode-pipeline.html

Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978, and its influence still remains through the popular x86 architecture. The 8086 was a fairly complex microprocessor for its time, implementing instructions in microcode with pipelining to improve performance. This blog post explains the microcode operations for a particular instruction, "ADD immediate". As the 8086 documentation will tell you, this instruction takes four clock cycles to execute. But looking internally shows seven clock cycles of activity. How does the 8086 fit seven cycles of computation into four cycles? As I will show, the trick is pipelining.

[...] The alternative is microcode: instead of building the control circuitry from complex logic gates, the control logic is largely replaced with code. To execute a machine instruction, the computer internally executes several simpler micro-instructions, specified by the microcode. In other words, microcode forms another layer between the machine instructions and the hardware. The main advantage of microcode is that it turns the processor's control logic into a programming task instead of a difficult logic design task.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Torswats uses synthesized voices to pressure law enforcement to specific locations:

"Hello, I just committed a crime and I want to confess," a panicked sounding man said in a call to a police department in February. "I've placed explosives inside a local school,' the man continued.

"You did what?!" the operator responded.

"I've placed explosives inside a local school," the man said again, before specifying Hempstead High School in Dubuque, Iowa, and providing its address. In response to the threat, the school went on lockdown, and police searched the school but found nothing, according to a local media report.

The bombs weren't real. But, crucially, neither was the man's voice. The panicked man's lines sound artificially generated, according to recordings of the swatting calls reviewed by Motherboard. It is unclear how exactly the caller generated the voice, be that some form of artificial intelligence tool or another speech synthesis program. The result, though, is a voice that sounds very consistent across multiple calls.

[...] Known as "Torswats" on the messaging app Telegram, the swatter has been calling in bomb and mass shooting threats against highschools and other locations across the country. Torswat's connection to these wide ranging swatting incidents has not been previously reported. The further automation of swatting techniques threatens to make an already dangerous harassment technique more prevalent.

[...] Torswats carries out these threatening calls as part of a paid service they offer. For $75, Torswats says they will close down a school. For $50, Torswats says customers can buy "extreme swattings," in which authorities will handcuff the victim and search the house. Torswats says they offer discounts to returning customers, and can negotiate prices for "famous people and targets such as Twitch streamers." Torswats says on their Telegram channel that they take payment in cryptocurrency.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Machine learning has boosted the resolution of an image produced by Event Horizon Telescope data captured six years ago:

Using machine learning, a team of researchers has enhanced the first image ever taken of a distant black hole. Importantly, the newly updated image shows the full resolution of the telescope array for the very first time.

[...] The machine learning model has sharpened the otherwise blurry image of black hole M87, showcasing the utility of machine learning models in improving radio telescope images. The team's research was published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"Approximately four years after the first horizon-scale image of a black hole was unveiled by EHT in 2019, we have marked another milestone, producing an image that utilizes the full resolution of the array for the first time," said Dimitrios Psaltis, a researcher at Georgia Tech and a member of the EHT collaboration, in an Institute for Advanced Study release. "The new machine learning techniques that we have developed provide a golden opportunity for our collective work to understand black hole physics."

[...] But even using radio telescopes around the world doesn't give astronomers a complete view of the black hole; by incorporating a machine learning technique called PRIMO, the collaboration was able to improve the array's resolution. What appeared a bulbous, orange doughnut in a 2019 image has now taken on the delicate, thin circle of The One Ring.

upstart writes:

Writers and publishers face an existential threat from AI: time to embrace the true fans model:

Walled Culture has written several times about the major impact that generative AI will have on the copyright landscape. More specifically, these systems, which can create quickly and cheaply written material on any topic and in any style, are likely to threaten the publishing industry in profound ways. Exactly how is spelled out in this great post by Suw Charman-Anderson on her Word Count blog. The key point is that large language models (LLMs) are able to generate huge quantities of material. The fact that much of it is poorly written makes things worse, because it becomes harder to find the good stuff[.]

[...] One obvious approach is to try to use AI against AI. That is, to employ automated vetting systems to weed out the obvious rubbish. That will lead to an expensive arms race between competing AI software, with unsatisfactory results for publishers and creators. If anything, it will only cause LLMs to become better and to produce material even faster in an attempt to fool or simply overwhelm the vetting AIs.

The real solution is to move to an entirely different business model, which is based on the unique connection between human creators and their fans. The true fans approach has been discussed here many times in other contexts, and once more reveals itself as resilient in the face of change brought about by rapidly-advancing digital technologies.

upstart writes:

You don't need alien asteroids, you just need a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and liquid hot magma:

A new research model shows that Earth's oceans could have formed from interactions between a hydrogen-rich early atmosphere and oxygen within the planet's magma.

The study from the multi-institution AETHER project also demonstrates why Earth's core is lighter than it should be, owing to the presence of gaseous hydrogen.

Edward Young, professor at the University of California Los Angeles, and colleagues propose that one of the protoplanets involved in the formation of Earth was heavier than thought. By maximizing its size to more than a fifth or third of Earth, the researchers show there would have been enough gravity to make the hydrogen-rich atmosphere hang around long enough to interact with the magma ocean, according to a paper published in Nature this week.

Prevailing theories explaining the abundance of water on Earth – oceans make up around 70 percent of the planet's surface – depend on the impacts of water-carrying asteroids.

[...] In a statement coinciding with the publication, co-author Anat Shahar, staff scientist and deputy for Research Advancement Earth and Planets Laboratory at Carnegie Science, said the inspiration for the new model came from studies of planets forming outside the solar system.

upstart writes:

Kernel 6.2 ditched a useful defense against ghostly chip design flaw:

The Spectre vulnerability that has haunted hardware and software makers since 2018 continues to defy efforts to bury it.

On Thursday, Eduardo (sirdarckcat) Vela Nava, from Google's product security response team, disclosed a Spectre-related flaw in version 6.2 of the Linux kernel.

The bug, designated medium severity, was initially reported to cloud service providers – those most likely to be affected – on December 31, 2022, and was patched in Linux on February 27, 2023.

"The kernel failed to protect applications that attempted to protect against Spectre v2, leaving them open to attack from other processes running on the same physical core in another hyperthread," the vulnerability disclosure explains. The consequence of that attack is potential information exposure (e.g., leaked private keys) through this pernicous problem.

The moniker Spectre [PDF] describes a set of vulnerabilities that abuse speculative execution, a processor performance optimization in which potential instructions are executed in advance to save time.

canopic jug writes:

MEP Patrick Breyer (Germany, Pirate Party), one of the few representatives fighting for preserving rights online rather than against them, has posted a summary about the EU Parliament's assessment of the proposed "Chat Control" legislation. In short, the "Chat Control" proposal violates basic human rights:

The experts made clear that an "increase in the number of reported contents does not necessarily lead to a corresponding increase in investigations and prosecutions leading to better protection of children. As long as the capacity of law enforcement agencies is limited to its current size, an increase in reports will make effective prosecution of depictions of abuse more difficult."

In addition, the study finds: "It is undisputed that children need to be protected from becoming victims of child abuse and depictions of abuse online... but they also need to be able to enjoy the protection of fundamental rights as a basis for their development and transition into adulthood." It warns: „With regards to adult users with no malicious intentions, chilling effects are likely to occur."

There is an obfuscated link at the bottom of his post to the study, Proposal for a regulation laying down the rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse: Complementary Impact Assessment. He also has older overview of the problems with the proposed legislation at his blog, too.

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

[Editor's Note: This is not connected to the Kodi Linux Operating System. JR]

Bleeping Computer reports that Kodi has revealed (on 8 April 2023) that their forum [N.B. the forum itself is now gone and replaced with a blog post about the breach] database was breached and is for sale online.

From the Bleeping Computer article:

The Kodi Foundation has disclosed a data breach after hackers stole the organization's MyBB forum database containing user data and private messages and attempted to sell it online.

Kodi is a cross-platform open-source media player, organizer, and streaming suite, that supports a vast array of third-party add-ons enabling the users to access content from various sources or customize their experience.

The now-shut down Kodi forum has roughly 401,000 members who used it to discuss media streaming, exchange tips, offer support, share new add-ons, and more in 3 million posts.

According to an announcement published by the platform on Saturday, hackers stole the forum database by logging into the Admin console using an inactive staff member's credentials.

Once they gained access to the admin panel, they created and downloaded database backups multiple times in 2023.

"MyBB admin logs show the account of a trusted but currently inactive member of the forum admin team was used to access the web-based MyBB admin console twice: on 16 February and again on 21 February," explains Kodi in a message to its users.

"The account was used to create database backups which were then downloaded and deleted. It also downloaded existing nightly full-backups of the database."

The Kodi team confirmed that the actual account owner did not perform these actions on the admin console, indicating that the staff member's credentials were likely stolen.

"If you have used the same username and password on any other site, you should follow the password reset/change procedure for that site."

So Soylentils, do (or, in the case of the forum, did) you use Kodi or, more importantly, their forum?

If so, will this breach affect how/whether or not you (continue) to use Kodi?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

There's confusion over which companies will be affected:

The law requires social media companies that earn more than $100 million in annual revenue to work with third-party services to verify new account holders' personal information. This is done using "any commercially reasonable age verification method" or government-issued IDs such as photo IDs or driver's licenses. Current account holders won't be affected.

The law states that social media companies are defined as any online forum that lets users create public profiles and interact with each other through digital content.

CNN reports that in the final days of negotiations over the bill, Arkansas lawmakers approved an amendment that appears to exempt some of the world's biggest social media companies. Given all the concern over TikTok's influence and its links with China, it's surprising to see that social media platforms that permit users to "generate short video clips of dancing, voice overs, or other acts of entertainment in which the primary purpose is not educational or informative" are exempt. That would also seem to cover Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, as well as TikTok - but apparently not.

[...] Other exemptions include social media companies that "exclusively" offer subscription content, and those focused on "professional networking" and "career development" (i.e., LinkedIn). Companies that "exclusively offer" video gaming-focused social networking features aren't covered, either, which could include Twitch despite it not really being a social media platform.

At least it will protect the kids from all the remaining $100M/yr companies that weren't covered by the exemptions.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The "pancosmorio theory" says that for humans to survive in space, missions must duplicate ecological conditions found back home, including Earth's gravity:

One of the main questions surrounding humanity's next giant leap into deep space is whether humans can thrive on missions far from Earth. A new theory says yes, but only in environments modeled deeply after our own planet.

Father-daughter research duo Morgan Irons of Cornell University and Lee G. Irons from the Norfolk Institute dub the idea "pancosmorio," a word that means "all word limit," in a paper published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences last month. Irons and Irons argue that, to allow humans to survive on lengthy treks into deep space, these missions must recreate Earth-like ecosystems, including Earth-like gravity and oxygen, reliable sources of water, as well as societal systems like steady agricultural output and the recycling of waste.

"For humans to sustain themselves and all of their technology, infrastructure and society in space, they need a self-restoring, Earth-like, natural ecosystem to back them up," said Morgan Irons in a press release from the institution. "Without these kinds of systems, the mission fails."

[...] "There are conditions from which human life has evolved. Such conditions are required to sustain human life at its current level of growth," the scientists write in their study. "The availability of such conditions to humans defines the limit of their world."

upstart writes:

Employers participating in the proposed two-year pilot program would transition some or all of their workers to a shortened workweek without any loss of pay or benefits:

Following a similar program in Europe, two Massachusetts lawmakers have filed a bill this week to create a two-year pilot program for a four-day workweek.

[...] The pilot program would run for two years and would be overseen by the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development. To participate, employers must agree to transition at least 15 workers to a shortened workweek.

While the bill was just filed this week, a number of businesses have already reached out to ask how they can participate, according to Cutler.

"I think this is really the perfect time for this kind of pilot program, given the changes we've seen in hybrid work as a result of the pandemic and the need to look for creative solutions to our current labor market challenges," Cutler said in an email response to Computerworld.

If the legislation passes, employers who participate in the pilot would agree to reduce the hours of all or some of their employees without reducing overall pay, status, or benefits. Businesses will also be eligible for a tax credit for their participation in the study and necessary data collection, Cutler said.

While the pilot program is designed to run for two years, individual businesses are not required to participate the entire time. The proposal is aimed at discovering the feasibility and benefits of a four-day work week.

"We chose this amount of time because we wanted to ensure a robust response and data availability. I have seen a variety of different lengths. In Maryland, there is a bill proposing a five-year pilot, for example. In this case, we felt two years struck a good balance," Cutler said. (The Maryland proposal was withdrawn earlier this year.)

The Massachusetts legislation doesn't call for participating organizations to adopt a strict 32-hour work week; instead, it states employees must receive "a meaningful reduction in actual work hours."

hubie writes:

Researchers compare multiple categories of shoppers and find the linchpin:

It's commonly assumed that the supply-and-demand economics of the consumer marketplace dictates price. If you are one of few retailers that sells a product consumers want, you can charge more. Or, if supplies of that product are more scarce, again, prices will likely be higher. On the flip side, if supplies are plentiful for a product that is in less demand, prices for that product are likely to be lower.

But researchers have found it's not always that simple. Thanks to the internet and e-commerce, more consumers have taken advantage of going to a physical store to inspect items before purchase, leaving that store, and then purchasing the product at a lower price elsewhere. This is called "showrooming."

This has led to several assumptions in the retail industry, from the thought that showrooming will put brick-and-mortar retailers out of business, to the notion that the showrooming trend has driven prices down across the board. A new study has found these may both be false.

[...] "Showroomers do their research in advance," says Bar-Isaac. "They know what they want, they already know what that retailer may charge, and they go to stores with more limited or shallow selections in search of a better price."

upstart writes:

Elon Musk admits he only bought Twitter because he thought he'd be forced to:

Elon Musk gave a rare interview to an actual reporter late on Tuesday, speaking to BBC reporter James Clayton on Twitter Spaces. During the interview, Clayton pressed Musk on whether his purchase of Twitter was, in the end, something he went through with willingly, or whether it was something he did because the active court case at the time in which Twitter was trying to force him to go through with the sale was going badly.

The answer (which we all suspected anyway) was that Musk did indeed only do the deal because he believed legally, he was going to be forced to do so anyway. Here's the relevant transcript from the Twitter Spaces audio:

Clayton: So then you change your mind again, and decided to buy it – did you do that? Did you do that?

Musk: Well, I kind of had to.

Clayton: Right. Did you do that, because you thought that a court would make you do that?

Musk: Yes.

Clayton: Right.

Musk: Yes, that is the reason.

Clayton: So you were still trying to get out of it. And then you just were advised by lawyers, "Look, you're going to buy this?"

Musk: Yes.

In case you don't recall (it was all the way back in September/October last year which is basically an eternity ago in current Twitter time), Twitter took Musk to trial to force him to honor his signed obligation to acquire the company for the agreed-upon price of $44 billion, or $54.20 per share. Musk was contending that his obligation was void because Twitter had, he claimed, inflated its real user numbers and understated the number of bots on the platform.

Musk then notified the SEC that he intended to buy the company after all at the price he originally set with the company, a move most agreed at the time was made because his legal case was weak and the trial was clearly not going his way.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

French Court Smacks Remote Learning Software Company For Pervasive Surveillance Of Students In Their Own Homes:

A worldwide pandemic trapped students in their own homes to stop the spread of the coronavirus. They didn't ask for this. Neither did educators. But educators made the worst of it in far too many cases.

Aptitude tests and other essentials for continued funding (and bragging rights) were now out of their control. Any student sitting at home had access to a wealth of knowledge to buttress what they may have actually retained from remote instruction.

Leveling the playing field was the goal. In practice, that meant turning the most sacrosanct of private places — students' homes and bedrooms — into heavily surveilled spaces... all in the interest of preventing cheating.

Laptop cameras monitored rooms and students' movements during testing. Internet connections often contributed more to passing grades than students' knowledge as educators (and their preferred tech partners) viewed inconsistent or dropped connections as indicators of attempted cheating. Malware deliberately installed by schools monitored internet usage before, during, and after tests.

A bedroom is not a classroom, even if that's where the educating is taking place temporarily due to pandemic restrictions. But that's how it was perceived and a bunch of opportunistic spyware purveyors rushed to fill the perceived "fairness" void with surveillance software that even the most inveterate stalker might consider too invasive.

Proctorio was on the forefront of this education-adjacent bedroom surveillance. It was particularly enthusiastic about stripping students of their privacy. When it was criticized for going too far, it went further, issuing legal threats and bogus DMCA takedown notices to its detractors.

NotSanguine writes:

As the title suggests, they weren't all that impressed.

From the article:

As with so many things involving AI, the claims are served with a generous portion of smoke and mirrors. PassGAN, as the tool is dubbed, performs no better than more conventional cracking methods. In short, anything PassGAN can do, these more tried and true tools do as well or better. And like so many of the non-AI password checkers Ars has criticized in the past—e.g., here, here, and here—the researchers behind PassGAN draw password advice from their experiment that undermines real security.

PassGAN is a shortened combination of the words "Password" and "generative adversarial networks." PassGAN is an approach that debuted in 2017. It uses machine learning algorithms running on a neural network in place of conventional methods devised by humans. These GANs generate password guesses after autonomously learning the distribution of passwords by processing the spoils of previous real-world breaches. These guesses are used in offline attacks made possible when a database of password hashes leaks as a result of a security breach.

Conventional password guessing uses lists of words numbering in the billions taken from previous breaches. Popular password-cracking applications like Hashcat and John the Ripper then apply "mangling rules" to these lists to enable variations on the fly.

[...] PassGAN uses none of these methods. Instead, it creates a neural network, a type of data structure loosely inspired by networks of biological neurons. This neural network attempts to train machines to interpret and analyze data in a way that's similar to how a human mind would. These networks are organized in layers, with inputs from one layer connected to outputs from the next layer.

PassGAN was an exciting experiment that helped usher in the use of AI-based password candidate generators, but its time in the sun has come and gone, password-cracking expert and Senior Principal Engineer at Yahoo Jeremi Gosney said. Gosney added that a different neural networking method for guessing passwords, introduced in 2016, performs slightly better than PassGAN.

Original Submission