SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Extending Earth's Internet to Mars With Orbital Data Servers:

You've done it. After years of effort and training, sacrifice, and pain, you become an astronaut and have finally set foot on Mars. Time to post your triumph on TikTok for that sweet social media cred. If only you can get a signal.

While that might seem like a silly scenario, the need for internet connectivity on Mars is real. It's not just a matter of allowing astronauts to doomscroll and post on Reddit. Landing humans on Mars will require a tremendous amount of data transfer with Earth, which is not easy. So how can we create an information network on Mars that is robust enough for both logistic and personal needs? A paper posted on the arxiv proposes an idea.

[...] One of these ideas, as the paper outlines, is edge computing. Although you probably don't notice it, edge computing is why you can watch streaming services like Netflix and Disney+. It takes a tremendous amount of bandwidth to stream television and movies, so streaming services distribute their servers to get you better speeds. [...]

This latest work looks at what it would take to have an edge computing network around Mars. The key is not only to have data locally accessible, but also to have a certain level of redundancy. So they propose building a constellation of satellites around Mars. Their system would have 9 satellites each in 9 orbital planes, for a total of 81 satellites. As with many constellations, the satellites would communicate with each other to have redundant backups of data. This means various landing sites on Mars would be able to communicate with 2 or 3 satellites at any given time. For extended missions, ground-based servers could be used for even faster data retrieval.

Building such a system would not be cheap, so the authors propose building the constellation in stages. As exploratory missions to Mars lay the groundwork for crewed landing, a few constellation satellites could go along for the ride. By the time long-term stations are being built, the constellation could already be in place.

Journal Reference:
Pfandzelter, Tobias, and David Bermbach. "Can Orbital Servers Provide Mars-Wide Edge Computing?" arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.09756 (2023).

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Australia gives Twitter legal notice to clean up online hate content:

Twitter now has 28 days to respond to the legal notice from Australia and detail what the social media website is doing to deal with online hate posted on its platform, which accounts for the most complaints over the past year. Continuing violations could lead to daily fines of up to AU$700,000 ($474,670).

The social media platform is the source of one in three complaints sent to Australia's online safety regulator, eSafety.

The number of reported online abuse on Twitter also has been climbing since Elon Musk took control of the company last October, according to eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant. She noted that the spike in complaints coincided with Twitter's move to cut its global workforce from 8,000 to 1,500, which included its trust and safety teams. The company also removed its public policy presence in Australia.

In addition, Musk announced a "general amnesty" in November, during which 62,000 banned or suspended users reportedly were reinstated to the platform, including 75 that had more than 1 million followers, said Inman Grant. She also pointed to the reinstatement of previously banned accounts that "emboldened extreme polarizers, peddlers of outrage and hate." These included neo-Nazis in Australia and overseas.

While Twitter's current terms of use and policies prohibit hateful conduct on the site, the increase in complaints to eSafety and reports of hate content that remained on the platform indicate that Twitter is unlikely to be enforcing its rules, she noted.

Citing eSafety's own research, she said almost one in five Australians had experienced some form of online hate.

"Twitter appears to have dropped the ball on tackling hate," Inman Grant said. "We need accountability from these platforms and action to protect their users. You cannot have accountability without transparency and that's what legal notices like this one [issued by eSafety] are designed to achieve."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft Says It Will Build a Quantum Supercomputer Within Ten Years:

Microsoft yesterday announced its very own roadmap towards building a quantum supercomputer, crystallizing its path along the company's years-long research into topological qubits. Just last year, Microsoft had the breakthrough it "bet" would pay-off out of its research into topological qubits, an (even more) exotic qubit type than usual. Now, the company is saying it can get from the research breakthrough towards a functional quantum supercomputer in less than a decade.

[...] Now, that's. quite an aggressive "roadmap". Of course, Microsoft has been on the road it has publicly committed to for a while now - the company has advanced its research into quantum computing in numerous other areas, even with the lack of a single, coherent, topological qubit being shown until last year. There are many areas of quantum computing that could be worked on while Microsoft waited for its topological qubits to come to pass - such as control mechanisms, noise reduction, deployment, and others. Areas where the company's research was already aligned with the certainty that they'd actually be able to produce, entangle, and keep them coherent.

"Today, we're really at this foundational implementation level," Svore told TechCrunch. "We have noisy intermediate-scale quantum machines. They're built around physical qubits and they're not yet reliable enough to do something practical and advantageous in terms of something useful. For science or for the commercial industry. The next level we need to get to as an industry is the resilient level. We need to be able to operate not just with physical qubits but we need to take those physical qubits and put them into an error-correcting code and use them as a unit to serve as a logical qubit."

Essentially, Microsoft has to do the same work that other companies have been doing on their own qubits: Microsoft has to scale the number of qubits it can deploy; it has to make sure those qubits are resilient (stable) so they can be used for complex calculations; and it has to find ways to reduce the error rate. Microsoft expects it will achieve its quantum supercomputer once it can reach a rate of one million quantum operations per second, with a failure rate of one per trillion operations.

Ford: the US Can't Compete With China on Electric Vehicles, for Now

upstart writes:

"We need to be ready, and we're getting ready":

Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, has warned that when it comes to the production of electric vehicles, the United States is still not ready to compete with China. Speaking about China's EV industry during an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, Ford said "They developed very quickly, and they developed them in large scale. And now they're exporting them [...] They're not here but they'll come here we think, at some point, we need to be ready, and we're getting ready."

The US automaker in February announced that it would be investing $3.5 billion in building an electric vehicle plant in Michigan. Reuters writes that the deal will use technology from Chinese battery company Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd, which led to Senator Marco Rubio asking the Biden administration to review the deal. Ford says the Michigan battery plant is a chance for Ford engineers to learn the technology and use it for themselves.

"It [Michigan] is a wholly owned Ford facility. They'll be our employees, and all we're doing is licensing the technology. That's it." Ford said.

[...] Buttigieg added that the US must build relationships domestically and internationally for raw materials and refining capacity. Chinese firms make up more than half of the EV battery market and provide as much as 90% of the demand for some battery materials.

hubie writes:

Butterfly tree of life reveals an origin in North America:

About 100 million years ago, a group of trendsetting moths started flying during the day rather than at night, taking advantage of nectar-rich flowers that had co-evolved with bees. This single event led to the evolution of all butterflies.

Scientists have known the precise timing of this event since 2019, when a large-scale analysis of DNA discounted the reigning hypothesis that pressure from bats prompted the evolution of butterflies after the extinction of dinosaurs.

Now, scientists have discovered where the first butterflies originated and which plants they relied on for food.

Before reaching these conclusions, researchers from dozens of countries had to create the world's largest butterfly tree of life, assembled with DNA from more than 2,000 species representing all butterfly families and 92% of genera. Using this framework as a guide, they traced the movements and feeding habits of butterflies through time in a four-dimensional puzzle that led back to North and Central America. According to their results, published today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, this is where the first butterflies took flight.

[...] There are some 19,000 butterfly species, and piecing together the 100 million-year history of the group required information about their modern distributions and host plants. Prior to this study, there was no single place that researchers could go to access that type of data.

"In many cases, the information we needed existed in field guides that hadn't been digitized and were written in various languages," Kawahara said.

Undeterred, the authors decided to make their own, publicly available database, painstakingly translating and transferring the contents of books, museum collections and isolated web pages into a single digital repository.

upstart writes:

Meta says its new speech-generating AI tool is too dangerous to release:

Meta has unveiled a new AI tool, dubbed 'Voicebox', which it claims represents a breakthrough in AI-powered speech generation. However, the company won't be unleashing it on the public just yet - because doing so could be disastrous.

Voicebox is currently able to produce audio clips of speech in six languages (all of which are European of origin), and - according to a blog post from Meta - is the first AI model of its kind capable of completing tasks beyond what it was 'specifically trained to accomplish'. Meta claims that Voicebox handily outperforms competing speech-generation AIs in virtually every area.

So what exactly is it capable of? Well, for starters, it can spew out reasonably accurate text-to-speech replications of a person's voice using a sample audio file as short as two seconds, a seemingly innocuous ability that holds a huge amount of destructive potential in the wrong hands.

[...] Meta clearly believes its new tool is good enough to fool at least the majority of people [since] it's explicitly not releasing Voicebox to the public, but instead publishing a research paper and detailing a classifier tool that can identify Voicebox-generated speech from real human speech. Meta describes the classifier as "highly effective" - though notably not perfectly effective.

[...] A little caution, patience, and respect for the magnitude of this technology is a welcome sight - although I doubt Meta will sit on Voicebox for too long, since the shareholders will no doubt be wondering how much money it can make them...

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Writing with AI help can shift your opinions:

Artificial intelligence-powered writing assistants that autocomplete sentences or offer "smart replies" not only put words into people's mouths, they also put ideas into their heads, according to new research.

Maurice Jakesch, a doctoral student in the field of information science asked more than 1,500 participants to write a paragraph answering the question, "Is social media good for society?" People who used an AI writing assistant that was biased for or against social media were twice as likely to write a paragraph agreeing with the assistant, and significantly more likely to say they held the same opinion, compared with people who wrote without AI's help.

The study suggests that the biases baked into AI writing tools – whether intentional or unintentional – could have concerning repercussions for culture and politics, researchers said.

"We're rushing to implement these AI models in all walks of life, but we need to better understand the implications," said co-author Mor Naaman, professor at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. "Apart from increasing efficiency and creativity, there could be other consequences for individuals and also for our society – shifts in language and opinions."

[...] These technologies deserve more public discussion regarding how they could be misused and how they should be monitored and regulated, the researchers said.

"The more powerful these technologies become and the more deeply we embed them in the social fabric of our societies," Jakesch said, "the more careful we might want to be about how we're governing the values, priorities and opinions built into them."

Journal Reference:
Maurice Jakesch, Advait Bhat, Daniel Buschek, et al., Co-Writing with Opinionated Language Models Affects Users' Views [open], CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2023 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581196

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Megaupload Fugitive Arrested By Armed Police 11 Years After The Raid

Since 2012, Kim Dotcom has been fighting extradition to the United States where he faces serious charges related to cloud storage site Megaupload. During that time, very little has been said about Megaupload graphic designer, Julius Bencko. A wanted man in the U.S., Bencko was arrested this month by armed police in the Czech Republic, who filmed the event and published it online.

[...] In the United States government's superseding indictment dated February 16, 2012, Julius Bencko is described as a citizen and resident of Slovakia. A talented graphic designer, Bencko was responsible for Megaupload's logo and ensuring that other sites in the group looked good and accommodated advertising properly.

According to the United States government, this work earned Bencko more than $1 million in 2010 alone. Even for the guy responsible for integrating Megaupload's Flash player, that was still pretty good money.

The important context here is that Bencko was the director and sole shareholder of Basemax International Limited and through that entity, he effectively held 2.5% of Megaupload's shares. For someone who supposedly played a key role in the most significant piracy conspiracy of all time, the allegations against Bencko were underwhelming and, at times, borderline comical.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/ftc-xbox-exclusive-starfield-is-powerful-evidence-against-activision-deal/

For months now, Microsoft has sworn up and down that it has no interest in making Call of Duty exclusive to the Xbox if and when its proposed $69 billion Activision acquisition is approved. But as the FTC's request for an injunction stopping that acquisition heads toward opening arguments this week, the federal regulator cites one piece of what it calls "powerful evidence" that it can't trust Microsoft's assurances. In short, as the FTC puts it, "Microsoft's actions following its 2021 acquisition of ZeniMax speak louder than Defendants' words."
[...]
Rather than focusing on what it calls a "strained analogy" to ZeniMax, Microsoft would prefer the court look at Microsoft's purchase of Minecraft-maker Mojang, which has continued to publish the game on a variety of platforms after becoming part of Microsoft. This is a better analogy for Call of Duty, Microsoft writes, because Minecraft was similarly "an existing, multi-player, cross-platform franchise like COD."
[...]
Call of Duty is unlike Minecraft, the FTC argues, in part because Minecraft is available in largely the same form on mobile phones, tablets, and the Switch. "Even if Microsoft took Minecraft off of rival consoles and subscription and cloud gaming services, it would still be available for play on many other devices. The context for Call of Duty is very different."

Regardless, the FTC also argues that this manufactured categorization doesn't matter, because Microsoft's exclusivity decision applied to "all future ZeniMax games." While Microsoft said in 2021 that "some" future Bethesda games would be Xbox exclusives, no Bethesda non-exclusives have been announced since then.

Previously:
US Moves to Block Microsoft's Activision Takeover - 20230613
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

Related:
Microsoft Acquires ZeniMax Media and Bethesda Softworks for $7.5 Billion - 20200921

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/marvel-angers-artists-and-fans-with-ai-generated-secret-invasion-tv-intro/

On Wednesday, Marvel's latest comic book TV show, Secret Invasion, premiered on Disney+ to controversy: It features AI-generated motion graphics during its title sequence, and some fans and creators aren't happy about it. "For Marvel, whose whole empire is built on the work of artists to do this is disgusting and I for one shan't be watching," tweeted Marvel comic artist Christian Ward, who worked on Black Bolt.

For those unfamiliar, Secret Invasion is a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) series featuring Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. The storyline centers on a faction of shapeshifting aliens called "Skrulls" that have infiltrated Earth, prompting Fury and his former Skrull ally, Talos, to respond. The plot explores the tension and distrust caused by the Skrulls' shapeshifting abilities, which raises doubts about everyone's real identities.

As reported by Polygon, the show's producers think the melty, flowing, somewhat abstract AI-generated aesthetic (prompted as "Skrull cubism" to the AI model) in the title sequence is appropriate because the show features shapeshifting aliens that are hiding as humans in plain sight.
[...]
As a counterpoint to this common argument that has been surfacing all day on social media, voice actor LittleKuriboh quipped, "Look, if skrulls were as easy to detect as AI art is, the secret invasion would've lasted until suppertime on day zero."

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

Ars Technica is reporting on recently published research on "smart" materials using liquid metal.

From the Ars Technica article:

While paper isn't exactly a smart material, it someday could be if it is covered in a new type of liquid metal. This liquid alloy has the potential to turn paper and other materials into gadgets that can do some things on their own.

Liquid metal is already used in smart objects like circuits and wearable sensors—but not as a coating. Inspired by origami, a team of scientists led by Bo Yuan of Tsinghua University in China has figured out a way to formulate liquid metal and apply it with a stamp so it sticks to paper without an adhesive, which has never been possible before. In a study recently published in Cell Reports Physical Science, the scientists showed that paper coated in the metal can be crafted into origami shapes and re-fold itself. The metal coating also conducts heat and electricity. It's like magic. Almost.

owl writes:

https://nanochess.org/video_chess.html

Since I discovered Video Chess for the Atari 2600, I found it pretty impressive. However, I believed the game implemented extra RAM memory, but more recently I discovered it worked using only the 128 bytes of memory available, and with a 4K ROM cartridge. That's an impressive achievement for such a small game console, also the rumor of a bug triggered me to reverse engineer this game to see how it works.

Video Chess was developed by Larry Wagner and Bob Whitehead, and released by Atari in 1979. Although the original game is greater than 4K and a bank-switching PCB was created, the final released game was optimized to use only a 4K ROM cartridge.

Video Chess also has the distinction of displaying eight different objects on a screen row using a technique known as Venetian Blinds, where the odd row of the screen would show four chesspieces, and the even row of the screen would show other four chesspieces. This technique allows the Atari 2600 to exceed its own limit of 3 figures per screen row. I won't discuss this technique as it is a video display trick, and in this article I'll concentrate in the AI (Artificial Intelligence) code.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/camera-review-site-dpreview-finds-a-buyer-avoids-shutdown-by-amazon/

Back in March, the editor-in-chief of the 25-year-old, Amazon-owned camera review site DPReview.com announced that the site would be closing in April. The site was the casualty of a round of layoffs at Amazon that will affect a total of about 27,000 employees this year; DPReview was meant to stop publishing new pieces on April 10 and to be available in read-only mode for an undetermined period of time after that.

But then, something odd happened: The site simply kept publishing at a fairly regular clip throughout the entire month of April and continuing until now. A no-update update from EIC Scott Everett published in mid-May merely acknowledged that pieces were still going up and that there was "nothing to share," which wasn't much to go on but also didn't make it sound as though the site were in imminent danger of disappearing.

Yesterday, Everett finally had something to share: DPReview.com and its "current core editorial, tech, and business team[s]" were acquired by Gear Patrol, an independently owned consumer technology site founded by Eric Yang in 2007. The deal had already closed as of yesterday, June 20.
[...]
"You figure this sort of stuff out before shutting down an entire division of your company, not in hindsight after weeks of backlash and leaving freelancers to scramble for new gigs as they're told they won't have a job..." wrote Burgett.
[...]
"And to that, I'll say again, fuck Amazon," said Burgett.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/

This article was originally published primarily as a response to IBM's Red Hat's change to no longer publish complete, corresponding source (CCS) for RHEL and the prior discontinuation of CentOS Linux (which are related events, as described below). We hope that this will serve as a comprehensive document that discusses the history of Red Hat's RHEL business model, the related source code provisioning, and the GPL compliance issues with RHEL.

For approximately twenty years, Red Hat (now a fully owned subsidiary of IBM) has experimented with building a business model for operating system deployment and distribution that looks, feels, and acts like a proprietary one, but nonetheless complies with the GPL and other standard copyleft terms. Software rights activists, including SFC, have spent decades talking to Red Hat and its attorneys about how the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) business model courts disaster and is actively unfriendly to community-oriented Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). These pleadings, discussions, and encouragements have, as far as we can tell, been heard and seriously listened to by key members of Red Hat's legal and OSPO departments, and even by key C-level executives, but they have ultimately been rejected and ignored — sometimes even with a "fine, then sue us for GPL violations" attitude. Activists have found this discussion frustrating, but kept the nature and tenure of these discussions as an "open secret" until now because we all had hoped that Red Hat's behavior would improve. Recent events show that the behavior has simply gotten worse, and is likely to get even worse.

Original Submission

DECbot writes:

Tech reporters don their sports reporting hats as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg exchange words, both agreeing to battle in a cage match. Widely reported in articles in from tech sites like The Guardian, The Verge, and Engadget the two moguls banter and publicly agree to a fight in Vegas. It is to be seen if their agents will book the venue to make this a reality.
 
From The Verge:

After Elon Musk recently tweeted that he would be "up for a cage fight" with Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO shot back by posting a screenshot of Musk's tweet with the caption "send me location."
 
I've confirmed that Zuckerberg's post on his Instagram account is, in fact, not a joke, which means the ball is now in Musk's court. "The story speaks for itself," Meta spokesperson Iska Saric told me.
 
After this story was published, Musk responded with two words: "Vegas Octagon." He then tweeted: "I have this great move that I call 'The Walrus,' where I just lie on top of my opponent and do nothing."
...
In terms of tech billionaire CEOs literally fighting, Musk versus Zuckerberg would be as good as it gets. Musk, 51, has the upper hand on Zuckerberg in terms of sheer physical size, and he has talked about being in "real hard-core street fights" when he was growing up in South Africa. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg, 39, is an aspirational MMA fighter who is already winning Jiu-Jitsu tournaments. He also claims to have recently completed the grueling "Murph Challenge" workout in just under 40 minutes.
 
Regardless of who would win, I think we can all agree that a Musk-versus-Zuckerberg match would be one of the most entertaining fights of all time. It needs to happen. Don't back down now, Musk.

 
As a tech enthusiast, I'm disappointed the battle will be resolved by elbows and fists rather than APIs and technical specs.

Original Submission