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upstart writes:

The company divulged its supply chain emissions for the first time, and it’s the most polluting part of its business:

Tesla released its 2022 Impact Report this week, and it gives the clearest picture yet of the electric car company's carbon footprint. Tesla disclosed numbers on its supply chain emissions for the first time, which makes its overall carbon footprint much bigger than it has reported in the past.

Last year, the company only disclosed how much greenhouse gas pollution it generated from its direct operations and from customers charging their EVs. Altogether that was roughly equivalent to 2.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. But that missed the big picture since supply chain pollution — considered indirect emissions — often make up a major chunk of a company's carbon footprint.

This year, Tesla finally released data on its supply chain emissions for 2022, which is equivalent to roughly 30.7 million tons of carbon dioxide. That's a huge change from what the company reported last year.

The disclosure really highlights how important it is to count up all of a company's direct and indirect emissions. It's especially pertinent with a fight brewing in the US between companies and the Securities and Exchange Commission over how much of those emissions ought to be reported under law.

A company's carbon footprint is usually divvied up into three main groups or "scopes." Scope 1 includes direct emissions from its own factories, offices, and vehicles. Scope 2 encompasses emissions from its electricity use, heating, and cooling. Scope 3 comprises all the other indirect emissions from supply chains and the lifecycle of the products a company makes. And there are 15 different categories of emissions within Scope 3 alone to give a sense of how wide-ranging it can be.

upstart writes:

Brace Yourself for the 2024 Deepfake Election:

Artificial intelligence was once something the average person described in the abstract. They had no tactile relationship with it that they were aware of, even if their devices were often utilizing it. That's all changed over the past year as people have started to engage with AI programs like OpenAI's DALL-E and ChatGPT, and the technology is rapidly advancing.

As AI is democratized, democracy itself is falling under new pressures. There will likely be many exciting ways it will be deployed, but it may also start to distort reality and could become a major threat to the 2024 presidential election if AI-generated audio, images, and videos of candidates proliferate. The line between what's real and what's fake could start to blur significantly more than it already has in an age of rampant disinformation.

"We've seen pretty dramatic shifts in the landscape when it comes to generative tools—particularly in the last year," says Henry Ajder, an independent AI expert. "I think the scale of content we're now seeing being produced is directly related to that dramatic opening up of accessibility."

It's not a question of whether AI-generated content is going to start playing a role in politics, because it's already happening. AI-generated images and videos featuring president Joe Biden and Donald Trump have started spreading around the internet. Republicans recently used AI to generate an attack ad against Biden. The question is, what will happen when anyone can open their laptop and, with minimal effort, quickly create a convincing deepfake of a politician?

There are plenty of ways to generate AI images from text, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. It's easy to generate a clone of someone's voice with an AI program like the one offered by ElevenLabs. Convincing deepfake videos are still difficult to produce, but Ajder says that might not be the case within a year or so.

"To create a really high-quality deepfake still requires a fair degree of expertise, as well as post-production expertise to touch up the output the AI generates," Ajder says. "Video is really the next frontier in generative AI."

Some deepfakes of political figures have emerged in recent years, such as one of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his troops to surrender that was released last year. Once the technology has advanced more, which may not take long considering how quickly other forms of generative AI are advancing, more of these types of videos may appear as they become more convincing and easier to produce.

hubie writes:

Scientists Think They've Finally Figured Out How a Maya Calendar Works:

A cycle featured in Maya calendars has been a mystery pretty much since it was rediscovered and its deciphering began in the 1940s.

Covering a period of 819 days, the cycle is referred to simply as the 819-day count. The problem is that researchers couldn't match that 819 days up to anything.

But anthropologists John Linden and Victoria Bricker from Tulane University now think they've finally cracked the code. All they had to do was broaden their thinking, studying how the calendar worked over a period of not 819 days, but 45 years, and relate it to the time taken for a celestial object to appear to return to approximately the same point in the sky – what's referred to as the synodic period.

[...] "By increasing the calendar length to 20 periods of 819-days a pattern emerges in which the synodic periods of all the visible planets commensurate with station points in the larger 819-day calendar."

The Maya calendar is actually a complicated system made up of smaller calendars, developed centuries ago in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Of the component calendars, the 819-day count is the most baffling to modern anthropologists.

[...] There were other clues to suggest that the 819-day count was associated with the synodic periods of visible planets in the Solar System. The Maya had extremely accurate measurements of the synodic periods of the visible planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

owl writes:

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans

Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She'd laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn't find their files.

Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they'd saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. "What are you talking about?" multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn't understand the question.

Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations' understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

Professors have varied recollections of when they first saw the disconnect. But their estimates (even the most tentative ones) are surprisingly similar. It's been an issue for four years or so, starting — for many educators — around the fall of 2017.

That's approximately when Lincoln Colling, a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Sussex, told a class full of research students to pull a file out of a specific directory and was met with blank stares. It was the same semester that Nicolás Guarín-Zapata, an applied physicist and lecturer at Colombia's Universidad EAFIT, noticed that students in his classes were having trouble finding their documents. It's the same year that posts began to pop up on STEM-educator forums asking for help explaining the concept of a file.

While some of us may find this phenomenon strange to understand it is becoming increasingly real for many. Are there any other examples of things that we take for granted becoming incomprehensible to those younger that ourselves? I'm not thinking of 'hanging up' the telephone, or why the icon for saving a file appears to some young people to be a vending machine, but things that cause difficulty for others.

Original Submission

UK government blocks Microsoft's proposed Activision purchase

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/uk-government-blocks-microsofts-proposed-activision-purchase/

In its long-awaited final report, the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority said that Microsoft's proposed $69 billion acquisition of Activision would "result in a substantial lessening of competition" (SLC) in the supply of cloud-gaming services in the UK. As such, the regulator said that "the only effective remedy to this SLC and its adverse consequences is to prohibit the Merger."

The final report cites Microsoft's "strong position" in the cloud-gaming sector, where the company has an estimated 60 to 70 percent market share that makes it "already much stronger than its rivals." After purchasing Activision, the CMA says Microsoft "would find it commercially beneficial to make Activision's titles exclusive to its own cloud gaming service."

Microsoft has in recent months signed deals with Nvidia and smaller cloud-gaming providers in an attempt to "mak[e] even more clear to regulators that our acquisition of Activision Blizzard will make Call of Duty available on far more devices than before," as Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said in a statement last month. But the CMA said these kinds of cloud-gaming deals—which Microsoft submitted to the CMA as a proposed remedy for any anticompetitive effects of the merger—were "limited to cloud gaming providers with specific business models" and thus not sufficient to address the regulator's concerns.

Previously:
Microsoft and Activision Will Miss Their Contractual Merger Deadline 20230115
FTC Moves to Block Microsoft's Activision Acquisition 20221209
The Biggest Deal in Gaming is Under Fire From U.S. Senators 20220403
Microsoft Set to Purchase Activision Blizzard in $68.7 Billion Deal 20220118

Related:
Microsoft's Latest Tactics Show that Gabe Newell of Valve was Right to Worry 20160306

upstart writes:

New observations of the rock show its comet-like tail is not made of dust, possibly altering the origin story of the Geminid meteor shower:

A comet-like asteroid has been flaunting a tail of material as it approaches the Sun. But unlike its cometary counterparts, a fresh look at asteroid Phaethon reveals, this tail is made of sodium rather than dust, as was previously thought.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency, recorded new observations of Phaethon as it passed near the Sun in May 2022. SOHO's Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph imaged the asteroid using different filters: one that detects dust and another that detects sodium.

[...] Phaethon's sodium tail adds even more mystery to this strange object. The asteroid was discovered in 1983 and named after the son of the Greek Sun god Helios for its close proximity to the star. Although classified as an asteroid, Phaethon has been showing some comet-like behavior. The rock is the likely origin of the Geminid meteor shower, which streaks across the sky in December. Most meteor showers, however, are produced by comets as a trail of debris left behind during their solar flyby.

[...] The discovery of sodium in Phaethon's tail could also hold clues to the origin of its meteor shower. Scientists had previously thought that the asteroid's tail is what crated the Geminid meteor shower, but the latest observations show that the asteroid doesn't shed enough dust for the shower to form. Instead, the researchers behind the new study suggest that a piece of Phaethon broke off around a few thousand years ago, causing the asteroid to eject a stream of billions of bits that make up the Geminids.

Scientists are set to gather more data on Phaethon through an upcoming mission to the asteroid. The Japanese space agency is sending the DESTINY+ mission to the celestial body in 2028 in an attempt to image its surface.

Journal Reference: Qicheng Zhang et al 2023 Planet. Sci. J. 4 70 DOI 10.3847/PSJ/acc866

Original Submission

upstart writes:

An examination by security researchers finds an alarming flaw in the search giant's new feature, which syncs your Authenticator app across devices:

A new two-factor authentication tool from Google isn't end-to-end encrypted, which could expose users to significant security risks, a test by security researchers found.

Google's Authenticator app provides unique codes that website logins may ask for as a second layer of security on top of passwords. On Monday, Google announced a long-awaited feature, which lets you sync Authenticator to a Google account and use it across multiple devices. That's great news, because in the past, you could end up locked out of your account if you lost the phone with the authentication app installed.

But when app developers and security researchers at the software company Mysk took a look under the hood, they found the underlying data isn't end-to-end encrypted.

[...] When Mysk and his partner Talal Haj Bakry analyzed the network traffic as the app synced with Google servers, they found the data is not not end-to-end encrypted."This means that Google can see the secrets, likely even while they're stored on their servers," the Mysk team wrote on Twitter. In the security community, "secrets" is the term for credentials that work as a key to unlock an account or a tool.

You can use Google Authenticator without tying it to your Google account or syncing it across devices, which avoids this issue. Unfortunately, that means it might be best to avoid a useful feature that users spent years clamoring for. "The bottom line: although syncing 2FA secrets across devices is convenient, it comes at the expense of your privacy," Mysk wrote. "We recommend using the app without the new syncing feature for now."

Freeman writes:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/9/23631930/discord-openai-clyde-chatbot-automod-features-ai

Discord is now using OpenAI's ChatGPT technology to transform its existing Clyde bot into a talkative chatbot. Clyde is being upgraded next week to answer questions and have conversations with users, much like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Microsoft's Bing chat feature. It's part of a broader push for AI in Discord, which also includes AI-generated conversation summaries and the ability for Discord admins to leverage AI technology to moderate servers.
[...]
Discord users can direct message Clyde to ask questions, and the chatbot can even create new threads in channels to facilitate conversations between groups of friends. Unlike the ChatGPT integration in Slack, you won't be able to use Clyde to talk to your friends for you by drafting messages.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Meet the startups trying to engineer a desktop fertility machine:

Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they'd designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop.

Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell. Altogether, the robot was used to fertilize more than a dozen eggs.

The result of the procedures, say the researchers, were healthy embryos—and now two baby girls, who they claim are the first people born after fertilization by a "robot."

[...] The startup company that developed the robot, Overture Life, says its device is an initial step toward automating in vitro fertilization, or IVF, and potentially making the procedure less expensive and far more common than it is today.

[...] The main goal of automating IVF, say entrepreneurs, is simple: it's to make a lot more babies. About 500,000 children are born through IVF globally each year, but most people who need help having kids don't have access to fertility medicine or can't pay for it.

"How do we go from half a million babies a year to 30 million?'" wonders David Sable, a former fertility doctor who now runs an investment fund. "You can't if you run each lab like a bespoke, artisanal kitchen, and that is the challenge facing IVF. It's been 40 years of outstanding science and really mediocre systems engineering."

upstart writes:

More public-private collab around this issue coming soon:

RSA Conference Defending space systems against cyberthreats remains "urgent and requires high-level attention," according to acting National Cyber Director Kemba Walden. And to this end, the White House will host its first space industry cybersecurity workshop this week in southern California.

[...] "We are all aware that the first 'shot' in the current Ukraine conflict was a cyberattack against a US space company," Walden said, referencing Russia's attempt to jam SpaceX's Starlink, which was using its satellite constellation to deliver internet connectivity to Ukraine.

[...] Cyberthreats against space systems now include nation-state threat actors like China and Russia, and even acts of war, as was evidenced by the Starlink and Viasat cyberattacks. Securing these systems is a multi-faceted challenge that spans domains, components and both public and private organizations. As such, the solution will require a collaborative approach, Walden told reporters.

"You have the base stations, you have the links from base stations, to the satellites, and then you've got the satellites themselves," she said. "You also have space innovation in the form of venture capital, and investment in space. Startups get eaten up by larger companies that ... end up in critical space systems."

This makes secure-by-design space technology especially pressing, and it's something the White House is tackling head on, Walden said.

The White House's Cybersecurity Strategy, released last month, touched on the need to secure space-based systems, including those for navigation, positioning, and environmental monitoring.

Original Submission

Self-driving truck startup Waabi may just be the first "AI" company to fully swallow their pride and ask some real experts for advice. According to https://www.autonomousvehicleinternational.com/news/trucks/waabi-launches-million-mile-driver-advisory-board.html the company will:

In a claimed industry first, Waabi has launched a Million Mile Driver Advisory Board to enhance transparency and collaboration between the company and some of the most skilled truck drivers in North America.

Waabi will bring together drivers who have completed more than one million safe miles during their careers, to share insights and best practices with the company to ensure it can provide a safe future for autonomous trucking.

To your humble AC, this seems like quite a turnaround, compared to the intro on their website, https://waabi.ai/

Ready for trucking, now

The Waabi Driver is the next generation of autonomous trucking technology. It can be trained as a whole, make interpretable decisions, apply learned skills to unseen scenarios and geographies, and adapt to any hardware configuration. The Waabi Driver is a complete solution designed for factory-level OEM integration, large-scale commercialization, and safe deployment.

Will Waabi get any takers, or are the truckers too smart to (figuratively) cut their own throats by speeding up the use of driverless trucks?

It would be funny if they got some of these guys, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hScdDy7Ateg&t=50s [Convoy 1975]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

In the rush to commercialize LLMs, security got left behind:

Feature Large language models that are all the rage all of a sudden have numerous security problems, and it's not clear how easily these can be fixed.

The issue that most concerns Simon Willison, the maintainer of open source Datasette project, is prompt injection.

When a developer wants to bake a chat-bot interface into their app, they might well choose a powerful off-the-shelf LLM like one from OpenAI's GPT series. The app is then designed to give the chosen model an opening instruction, and adds on the user's query after. The model obeys the combined instruction prompt and query, and its response is given back to the user or acted on.

With that in mind, you could build an app that offers to generate Register headlines from article text. When a request to generate a headline comes in from a user, the app tells its language model, "Summarize the following block of text as a Register headline," then the text from the user is tacked on. The model obeys and replies with a suggested headline for the article, and this is shown to the user. As far as the user is concerned, they are interacting with a bot that just comes up with headlines, but really, the underlying language model is far more capable: it's just constrained by this so-called prompt engineering.

Prompt injection involves finding the right combination of words in a query that will make the large language model override its prior instructions and go do something else. Not just something unethical, something completely different, if possible. Prompt injection comes in various forms, and is a novel way of seizing control of a bot using user-supplied input, and making it do things its creators did not intend or wish.

"We've seen these problems in application security for decades," said Willison in an interview with The Register.

"Basically, it's anything where you take your trusted input like an SQL query, and then you use string concatenation – you glue on untrusted inputs. We've always known that's a bad pattern that needs to be avoided.

hubie writes:

Even worms get the munchies:

If you give a worm some weed, he might just need a snack. Worms exposed to a cannabinoid became even more interested in the kind of food they already prefer, new University of Oregon research shows. The effect is analogous to a cannabis user's craving potato chips and ice cream after a few puffs — a phenomenon scientists call "hedonic feeding," but known more colloquially as "the munchies."

[...] The endocannabinoid system is a far-reaching signaling network that helps regulate key body systems like appetite, mood, and pain sensation. Molecules called endocannabinoids send chemical messages by interacting with cannabinoid receptors, special proteins that are sprinkled throughout the body and brain. Normally, these messages help keep different body systems in balance. But certain compounds in cannabis, like THC, also interact with cannabinoid receptors, making users feel "high" after partaking and causing other effects, too.

[...] To see how cannabis-like substances might affect the worms' food preferences, Lockery's team soaked the worms in anandamide. Anandamide is an endocannabinoid, a molecule made by the body that activates the body's cannabinoid receptors.

Then, they put the worms into a T-shaped maze. On one side was high-quality food; on the other side, lower-quality food. Even under normal conditions, the worms prefer the high-quality food. But when soaked in anandamide, that preference became even stronger — they flocked to the high-quality food and stayed longer than usual.

"We suggest that this increase in existing preference is analogous to eating more of the foods you would crave anyway," Lockery said. "It's like choosing pizza versus oatmeal."

upstart writes:

Bosch to acquire TSI Semiconductors for $1.5B to boost US chip production:

Bosch will acquire the assets of U.S. chipmaker TSI Semiconductors to expand its semiconductor business with silicon carbide chips (SiC), the German engineering and technology giant said Wednesday.

The acquisition includes a $1.5 billion investment over the next few years to upgrade TSI Semiconductors' manufacturing facilities in Roseville, California. Starting in 2026, the first chips will be produced on 200-millimeter wafers based on silicon carbide.

News of more chips being produced on U.S. soil is welcome in the automotive world, one of the industries most affected by the global semiconductor shortage that began with the COVID-19 pandemic. The shortage started when factories shut or slowed production due to lockdowns, thus disrupting global supply chains. A surge in demand for electronics as people stayed inside, as well as a boom in demand from an automotive industry determined to go electric and build smarter vehicles, only exacerbated the problem.

Electric vehicles on average use more chips than their gas-powered counterparts, and most new EVs hitting the market today promise advanced driver assistance systems and high-tech infotainment systems. As a result, in 2021, the average car had about 1,200 chips, twice the number in 2010, and a figure that will likely increase.

SiCs, which Bosch's new factory will produce, have been a hot commodity among automakers, as well. The company says the market for SiCs has grown by 30% a year on average, and that's in part because they offer greater range and more efficient recharging for EVs. They also lose up to 50% less energy, last longer and require less maintenance.

Bosch expects an average of 25 of its chips will be integrated in every new vehicle by 2025.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Chang'e 8 missions will check whether regolith harbors appropriate materials:

China's space program has decided to no longer worry about hauling construction materials to the Moon and just 3D print buildings onsite instead, said state-sponsored media on Monday.

China Daily said the Chang'e 8 lunar mission would conduct onsite investigations to see if lunar materials would be appropriate for the job. Wu Weiren, a leading scientist at the China National Space Administration (CNSA), told the outlet that lunar soil would be printed into the construction units.

He added that [scientists] at Tongji University in Shanghai and Xi'an Jiaotong University in Shaanxi Province had "already begun studying the possible applications of 3D printing technology on the Moon."

It is globally understood that astronauts will work and live on the Moon and will need not only infrastructure, but also the ability to repair and construct tools and resources independently.

"If we wish to stay on the Moon for a long time, we need to set up stations by using the Moon's own materials," Wu told China Daily.

[...] China achieved its first lunar landing in 2013. Chang'e 8 is expected to launch in 2028 after Chang'e 6 and 7. China plans to place an astronaut on the lunar surface by 2030.

Original Submission