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upstart writes:

MacLife and Maximum PC April issues will be their last physical versions:

Magazines are so retro: If you are anything like me, you probably remember the days when you subscribed to multiple computing magazines. I still have fond memories of typing out the computer programs in the back pages of some publications; I even submitted a few of my own.

When high-speed internet came along, many computing publications began producing digital versions of their magazines online. Those with subscriptions still got their physical copies, but the online component was a nice perk for when readers could not just pick up a magazine and start reading, like at work.

Before long, most computing magazines had online versions and, at some point, started ditching paper. It was easier and cheaper to publish one copy that all subscribers could access online rather than printing hundreds of thousands of physical versions.

[...] The demise of print media in the computing industry was inevitable. By the 2000s, many prominent magazines had shut down their printing arms and switched to digital only. Byte stopped printing in 1998. Windows Magazine crashed in 2002, and the succinctly titled PC Magazine (now PCMag) published its last issue in 2009. Computer Gaming World went entirely out of business with its November 2006 issue.

[...] Print advertising also played a big part in the decline of computer publications. Once advertisers realized replicating ads on web pages was cheap and easy, they gradually pulled out of print computer magazines. Many physical magazine branches shut down for that reason alone. If the pub didn't have the clout of names like PC Magazine, Maximum PC, or PC World, it had no chance of competing against the internet for ad space. Even the almanac-like Computer Shopper plunged from nearly 360,000 readers in 1996 to about 55,000 in 2014.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

For millennia, humans have been fascinated by the mysteries of the cosmos:

Unlike ancient philosophers imagining the universe's origins, modern cosmologists use quantitative tools to gain insights into its evolution and structure. Modern cosmology dates back to the early 20th century, with the development of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Now, researchers from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration have submitted a set of papers to The Astrophysical Journal featuring a groundbreaking new map of dark matter distributed across a quarter of the sky, extending deep into the cosmos, that confirms Einstein's theory of how massive structures grow and bend light over the 14-billion-year life span of the universe.

The new map uses light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) essentially as a backlight to silhouette all the matter between us and the Big Bang.

"It's a bit like silhouetting, but instead of just having black in the silhouette, you have texture and lumps of dark matter, as if the light were streaming through a fabric curtain that had lots of knots and bumps in it," said Suzanne Staggs, director of ACT and Henry DeWolf Smyth Professor of Physics at Princeton University. "The famous blue and yellow CMB image [from 2003] is a snapshot of what the universe was like in a single epoch, about 13 billion years ago, and now this is giving us the information about all the epochs since."

[...] "We have mapped the invisible dark matter distribution across the sky, and it is just as our theories predict," said co-author Blake Sherwin, a 2013 Ph.D. alumnus of Princeton and a professor of cosmology at the University of Cambridge, where he leads a large group of ACT researchers. "This is stunning evidence that we understand the story of how structure in our universe formed over billions of years, from just after the Big Bang to today.'

upstart writes:

Governments also have no theory on how nefarious groups might behave using the tech:

The proliferation of AI in weapon systems among non-state actors such as terrorist groups or mercenaries would be virtually impossible to stop, according to a hearing before UK Parliament.

The House of Lords' AI in Weapon Systems Committee yesterday heard how the software nature of AI models that may be used in a military context made them difficult to contain and keep out of nefarious hands.

When we talk about non-state actors that conjures images of violent extremist organizations, but it should include large multinational corporations, which are very much at the forefront of developing this technology

Speaking to the committee, James Black, assistant director of defense and security research group RAND Europe, said: "A lot of stuff is very much going to be difficult to control from a non-proliferation perspective, due to its inherent software-based nature. A lot of our export controls and non-proliferation regimes that exist are very much focused on old-school traditional hardware: it's missiles, it's engines, it's nuclear materials."

An added uncertainty was that there was no established "war game" theory of how hostile non-state actors might behave using AI-based weapons.

upstart writes:

The encrypted email service has more features than ever and surpassed 100 million users worldwide:

Encrypted email company Proton has announced one of the biggest new additions to its growing suite of privacy-focused apps: Proton Pass, an end-to-end encrypted password manager.

[...] To get a better perspective on Proton's recent changes and its ambitions for the future, Gizmodo sat down with Proton's CEO, Andy Yen, to discuss what the company's been up to and where it's headed in the future. Proton Pass is the most consequential new feature that Proton has released in quite some time. Currently available only as a limited beta, Pass can only be accessed by Lifetime and Visionary Proton users, and even then on an invite-only basis. That said, the company says that a general launch of the app will happen "later this year," meaning it should soon be available to all users.

"A password manager has been one of the most common requests from the Proton community ever since we first launched Proton Mail," Yen wrote in a company blog post. "Proton Pass is not just another password manager. It's perhaps the first one built by a dedicated encryption and privacy company, leading to tangible differences in security."

[...] Speaking with Gizmodo, Proton's Yen said that the growth of consumer interest in privacy services over the past several years has generated more competition in his industry but it has also helped drive business to Proton.

"Back when we started, end-to-end encryption, abbreviated E2EE, was something that spies or crazy people were using—it was barely something most people had heard about," Yen tells me. That changed in the intervening years—as an ever-compounding slew of privacy scandals drew attention to the dangers of surveillance capitalism and government spying. Today, the average consumer is much more well versed in services like E2EE, said Yen.

canopic jug writes:

Theologian Dr Corey Stephan has documented his exploration of installing OpenBSD on an old ThinkPad X270. He has posted his rather thorough personal notes which cover the intial setup, such as power management, performance tweaks, Wi-Fi configuration, audio and video, tracking -current, and getting software from the ports tree. He also goes into a bit of his favored tools and workflow.

It is hard not to cherish the partnership of a slightly older ThinkPad and OpenBSD. The ThinkPad X270 and OpenBSD are both minimalist, robust, and customizable. Specifically, the ThinkPad is minimalist with regard to features, robust with regard to physical durability, and customizable with regard to hardware repairability and replaceability. OpenBSD is minimalist with regard to code, robust with regard to security, and customizable with regard to every aspect of the system. Further, since a healthy number of OpenBSD's developers long have used ThinkPads (to the point that I have read some jokes come out of members of their ranks like 'I may use any kind of laptop that I may like, as long as it is a ThinkPad'), the operating system works brilliantly on the laptop — both with their stock settings.

Overall, installing and configuring OpenBSD -current on the ThinkPad X270 was the simplest minimalist installation of any operating system on any hardware that I ever have done, even simpler than Debian GNU/Linux or my beloved FreeBSD (and much simpler than a proprietary, dysfunctional operating system Windows or MacOS). Was the total setup process easier than, say, that of a GNU/Linux distribution that uses the Calamares installer and comes preconfigured with a huge array of GNU/Linux drivers? Well, no, it was not, but that is not the point. OpenBSD is secure, nimble, and customizable in an elegantly simple way that interoperates smoothly with this small ThinkPad for my mobile academic research and writing. Even in this topsy-turvy era in which other popular desktop operating systems are have many design choices for form over function, OpenBSD comes as a serious, professional product that is ready to let me focus on my work.

Previously:
(2021) Recent and Not So Recent Changes in OpenBSD That Make Life Better
(2020) Using OpenBSD Routing Tables to Segment the Home Network for Privacy
(2018) OpenBSD Chief De Raadt Says No Easy Fix For New Intel CPU Bug
and many others.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Researchers have created a sturdy, lightweight material made from sugar and wood-derived powders that disintegrates on-demand:

Sturdy, degradable materials made from plants and other non-petroleum sources have come a long way in recent years. For example, cornstarch-based packing peanuts disappear simply by dousing them in water, and some utensils are based on polymers synthesized from plant sugars. But those packing peanuts can't be used to protect anything wet, and plant-derived polymers still take a long time to break down. One potential alternative is a new type of rigid material designed from isomalt, which is a sugar alcohol rather than a polymer. With isomalt, bakers can create breathtaking, but brittle, structures for desserts, and then dissolve them away quickly in water. So, Scott Phillips and colleagues wanted to boost the sturdiness of isomalt with natural additives to create a robust material that degrades on-demand.

The researchers heated isomalt to a liquid-like state and mixed in either cellulose, cellulose and sawdust, or wood flour to produce three different materials. Then, using commercial plastics manufacturing equipment, the materials were extruded into small pellets and molded into various objects, including balls, a dodecahedron, a chess piece and flower-shaped saucers. All of the tested additives doubled the strength of isomalt, creating materials that were harder than plastics, including poly(ethylene terephthalate) (known as PET) and poly(vinyl chloride) (known as PVC), but were still lightweight. In experiments, samples dissolved in water within minutes. And saucers made of the material, and coated with a food grade shellac and cellulose acetate, withstood being immersed in water for up to seven days. However, once the saucers were broken and the coating cracked, they rapidly disintegrated in water. The team also repeatedly crushed, dissolved and recycled both coated and uncoated objects into new ones that were still as strong as the original items.

The researchers say that the material could be used for food-service items and temporary décor, and then crushed and sprayed with water to fall apart. But even if such items were simply tossed into the trash or somehow got into the environment, the slightest crack in the coating would start their collapse into sugars and the plant-based additives, which the researchers say might be good for soil.

There is also a video version of this press release

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The winery's layout and finishes suggest the wine-making was merely a spectacle for ancient Roman elites:

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of an 1,800-year-old winery at the Villa of the Quintilii outside of Rome. By the team's measure, the winery was designed as much for the spectacle of wine-making as the practice itself.

Decorated rooms around the winery appear to have hosted guests who would observe the wine-making process, the researchers found, and the finishes (including marble floors) seem installed for appearances over practicality. The team's research is published in Antiquity.

"Agricultural labor was romanticized by the ruling classes of many ancient cultures, especially as it was often the source of both their wealth and status," said Emlyn Dodd, a researcher at the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London, in an Antiquity release.

Journal Reference:
Emlyn Dodd, Giuliana Galli and Riccardo Frontoni, The spectacle of production: a Roman imperial winery at the Villa of the Quintilii, Rome [open], Antiquity, 97, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2023.18

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Apple's WaveOne purchase heralds a new era in smart-streaming of AR and video:

Apple's surprise purchase at the end of last month of WaveOne, a California-based startup that develops content-aware AI algorithms for video compression, showcases an important shift in how video signals are streamed to our devices. In the near-term Cuppertino's purchase will likely lead to smart video-compression tools in Apple's video-creation products and in the development of its much-discussed augmented-reality headset.

However, Apple isn't alone. Startups in the AI video codec space are likely to prove acquisition targets for other companies trying to keep up.

[...] AI codecs, having been developed over the course of decades, use machine-learning algorithms to analyze and understand the visual content of a video, identify redundancies and nonfunctional data, and compress the video in a more efficient way. They use learning-based techniques instead of manually designed tools for encoding and can use different ways to measure encoding quality beyond traditional distortion measures. Recent advancements, like attention mechanisms, help them understand the data better and optimize visual quality.

During the first half of the 2010s, Netflix and a California-based company called Harmonic helped to spearhead a movement of what's called "content-aware" encoding. CAE, as Harmonic calls it, uses AI to analyze and identify the most important parts of a video scene, and to allocate more bits to those parts for better visual quality, while reducing the bit rate for less important parts of the scene.

Content-aware video compression adjusts an encoder for different resolutions of encoding, adjusts the bit rate according to content, and adjusts the quality score—the perceived quality of a compressed video compared to the original uncompressed video. All those things can be done by neural encoders as well.

upstart writes:

Kodiak Robotics will haul freight autonomously for Tyson Foods:

Autonomous trucking startup Kodiak Robotics is partnering with truckload carrier C.R. England to autonomously ship Tyson Foods products between Dallas and San Antonio, Texas.

A human safety operator will be present in the one dedicated truck Kodiak is allocating to this pilot. Deliveries will begin this month, according to the company.

The pilot program is the latest in Kodiak's growing string of paid partnerships with major carriers, and it further demonstrates the startup's potential path to sustainability and even profitability once it removes the human safety driver from operations.

A spokesperson for Kodiak said the company aims to remove the safety operator within the next couple of years.

[...] Kodiak says the partnership is not only emblematic of how human-driven trucks and autonomous trucks can work together, but it also provides a use case for autonomy as a solution for moving perishable products in a timely manner.

[...] As part of the partnership, C.R. England is also joining Kodiak's Partner Development Program, which is Kodiak's way of working with carriers to help establish autonomous freight operations and, hopefully, integrate Kodiak's self-driving system into their fleet.

"Our intent is to be a 'one-stop shop' for customers, whether they need their freight moved autonomously or not," said England.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Create an AI agent that works from a set of goals:

To get good output from ChatGPT or another LLM, you usually have to feed it several prompts. But what if you could just give your AI bot a set of fairly broad goals at the start of a session and then sit back while it generates its own set of tasks to fulfill those goals? That's the idea behind Auto-GPT, a new open-source tool that uses the OpenAI API (same LLM as ChatGPT) to prompt itself, based on your initial input.

We've already seen a number of Twitter users talk about how they are using Auto-GPT for everything from creating marketing plans to analyzing market data for investments to preparing topics for a podcast. Based on our hands-on experience, we can't say that it always works well (we asked it to write a Windows 11 how-to and the result was awful), but it's early days and some tasks may work better than others.

If you want to try Auto-GPT on your computer, it is easy to install, and while there are a few sticky points in the process, we've found ways to work with them, or around them to write this condensed guide on how to create your own Auto-GPT AI to help you in your goals.

[...] You may or may not need to add payment information to your OpenAI account. By default, the system will give you a certain amount of free credits. In Editor-in-Chief Avram Piltch's case, it was $18 worth of free credit that he was able to use without entering any payment methods. You may not get as much free credit or may need to add a payment method to your OpenAI account to proceed.

The article has a step-by-step guide for getting up and running on a Windows machine. If you choose to add a payment method, make sure put a limit on how much money it can charge.

Let the chaos begin!

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A punctured bone fragment predates eyed needles in Western Europe by about 15,000 years:

An animal bone fragment full of human-made pits hints at how prehistoric people in Western Europe may have crafted clothing.

The nearly 40,000-year-old artifact probably served as a punch board for leatherwork, researchers report April 12 in Science Advances. They suggest that the bone fragment rested beneath animal hide while an artisan pricked holes in the material, possibly for seams. If so, it's the earliest-known tool of its kind and predates eyed needles in the region by about 15,000 years.

Found at an archaeological site south of Barcelona, the roughly 11-centimeter-long bone fragment contains 28 punctures scattered across one flat side, with 10 of them aligned and fairly evenly spaced.

The marks don't seem to have been a notation system or decoration, given that some holes are hard to see and the bone fragment wasn't otherwise shaped, says archaeologist Luc Doyon of the University of Bordeaux in France. He thought leatherwork could have made the marks. But it wasn't until he visited a cobbler shop and saw one of the artisan's tools that the hypothesis solidified, guiding Doyon's next steps.

[...] Scientists knew that humans wore clothing long before the oldest-known eyed needles existed (SN: 4/20/10). "What [the new finding] tells us is that the first modern humans who lived in Europe had the technology in their toolkit for making fitted clothes," Doyon says.

Journal Reference:
Luc Doyon, Thomas Faure, Montserrat Sanz, et al., A 39,600-year-old leather punch board from Canyars, Gavà, Spain [open], Sci. Adv., 12, 2023. (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adg0834)

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Ancient protein evidence shows milk consumption was a powerful cultural adaptation that stimulated human expansion onto the highland Tibetan Plateau:

The Tibetan Plateau, known as the "third pole", or "roof of the world", is one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth. While positive natural selection at several genomic loci enabled early Tibetans to better adapt to high elevations, obtaining sufficient food from the resource-poor highlands would have remained a challenge.

Now, a new study in the journal Science Advances reveals that dairy was a key component of early human diets on the Tibetan Plateau. The study reports ancient proteins from the dental calculus of 40 human individuals from 15 sites across the interior plateau.

[...] Ancient protein evidence indicates that dairy products were consumed by diverse populations, including females and males, adults and children, as well as individuals from both elite and non-elite burial contexts. Additionally, prehistoric Tibetan highlanders made use of the dairy products of goats, sheep, and possibly cattle and yak. Early pastoralists in western Tibet seem to have had a preference for goat milk.

"The adoption of dairy pastoralism helped to revolutionize people's ability to occupy much of the plateau, particularly the vast areas too extreme for crop cultivation," says Prof. Nicole Boivin, senior author of the study.

[...] "We were excited to observe an incredibly clear pattern," says Li Tang. "All our milk peptides came from ancient individuals in the western and northern steppes, where growing crops is extremely difficult. However, we did not detect any milk proteins from the southern-central and south-eastern valleys, where more farmable land is available."

quietus writes:

It looks like the Paris Agreement is as dead as the fried chicken at my local deli.

At Paris, in 2015, the World agreed to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The latest report of the EU's Climate Change Service shows (summary pdf) that this target has been royally breached, at least for Europe. Temperatures there, averaged over the last 5 years, have increased by 2.2 degrees celsius.

Europe, at least, has a climate change service to measure these things. As for the rest of the world, an extrapolation of the pattern shown in Figure 1c, here, indicates that, there too, demand for swimming pools and flood insurance will grow.

To illustrate the complexity of the problem, the heatwave in mid-July of 2022 was caused by hot air from the Sahara moving into Europe, driving temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius. By mid-August, a stationary high-pressure system with clear skies and weak winds took hold, and caused a second heatwave, which was made worse due to the soil being dried out by the mid-July event, and no rains since.

Events above the Sahara might have come a second time in play, here. Increasing temperatures lead to a stronger evaporation over sea, while the land heats up more. This results in a stronger temperature gradient, which draws rains deeper inland: heavier rainfalls now are reported in the central Sahara, in summer, with formerly dry valleys being put under four meters of water. This causes less Sahara dust in the atmosphere, and hence shields the land less from solar radiation: the EU's report mentions that 2022 surface solar radiation was the highest in a 40 year record, and part of a positive trend.

To end with a positive note, the EU ain't doing so bad, compared to Greenland: three different heatwaves in 2022, and an average September temperature more than 8 degrees Celsius higher than normal.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Fermi bubbles may have started life as jets of high-energy charged particles:

Bubbles of radiation billowing from the galactic center may have started as a stream of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, new observations suggest. An excess of positrons zipping past Earth suggests that the bubbles are the result of a burp from our galaxy's supermassive black hole after a meal millions of years ago.

For over a decade, scientists have known about bubbles of gas, or Fermi bubbles, extending above and below the Milky Way's center (SN: 11/9/10). Other observations have since spotted the bubbles in microwave radiation and X-rays (SN: 12/9/20). But astronomers still aren't quite sure how they formed.

A jet of high-energy electrons and positrons, emitted by the supermassive black hole in one big burst, could explain the bubbles' multi-wavelength light, physicist Ilias Cholis reported April 18 at the American Physical Society meeting.

In the initial burst, most of the particles would have been launched along jets aimed perpendicular to the galaxy's disk. As the particles interacted with other galactic matter, they would lose energy and cause the emission of different wavelengths of light.

Those jets would have been aimed away from Earth, so those particles can never be detected. But some of the particles could have escaped along the galactic disk, perpendicular to the bubbles, and end up passing Earth. "It could be that just now, some of those positrons are hitting us," says Cholis, of Oakland University in Rochester, Mich.

upstart writes:

U.S. government imposes record fine on Seagate for violating sanctions against Seagate:

Seagate has been hit with a massive $300 million fine by the U.S. Department of Commerce [PDF] for violating export control restrictions imposed on Huawei in 2020. The report shows that the U.S. Department of Commerce states that Seagate shipped millions of hard drives to Huawei in 2020 – 2021 and become the sole supplier of HDDs to the company while its rivals Toshiba and Western Digital refrained to work with the conglomerate.

Seagate shipped 7.4 million hard drives to Huawei on 429 occasions between August 2020 and September 2021 without obtaining an export license from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security. Those drives were worth around $1.104 billion back then, a significant sum for Seagate, which revenue totaled $10.681 billion in 2021.

To settle the matter, Seagate has agreed to pay the $300 million fine in quarterly instalments of $15 million over five years starting in October 2023. The civil penalty of $300 million is more than double the estimated net profits that Seagate made from the alleged illegal exports to or involving Huawei, according to BIS. In fact, $300 million is a record fine for BIS.

"Today's action is the consequence: the largest standalone administrative resolution in our agency's history," said Matthew S. Axelrod, Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement. "This settlement is a clarion call about the need for companies to comply rigorously with BIS export rules, as our enforcement team works to ensure both our national security and a level playing field."