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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/steam-mods-reportedly-blocking-games-that-use-ai-generated-artwork/

Valve has reportedly become the latest company to react to the uncertain legal landscape surrounding AI-generated artwork by simply barring its use in submitted materials. An anonymous developer going by the Reddit handle potterharry97 reports having a Steam game page submission rejected for the use of "art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties."

Potterharry97 originally posted about the rejection in a May post on the now-private GameDev subreddit (partially archived here, Google Cache here). In that post, potterharry97 admitted that "a large portion of the assets have some AI involvement in its creation" through the use of Stable Diffusion. In a follow-up post this month on the AIGameDev subreddit, potterharry97 wrote that the initial submission was intended as an early placeholder version, "with 2-3 assets/sprites that were admittedly obviously AI generated from the hands."
[...]
These days, the use of AI-generated art can sometimes be easier to catch, as was the case with potterharry97's Stable Diffusion sprites and their telltale hands. But that might get tougher as improvements in generative synthesis models make AI art more and more indistinguishable from art created by a human.

As potterharry97 put it in his initial Reddit post, "Even if I redo everything from scratch, how can I definitively prove if something was or wasn't AI generated?"

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DeathMonkey writes:

Women hunt in vast majority of foraging societies, upending old stereotypes

For decades anthropologists have witnessed forager women—those who live in societies that both hunt and gather—around the world skillfully slay prey: In the 1980s, Agta women of the Philippines drew bows and arrows as tall as themselves and aimed at wild pigs and deer, and Matses Amazonians struck paca rodents with machetes. Observations from the 1990s described Aka great-grandmothers and girls as young as age 5 trapping duiker and porcupine in central Africa.

A study published today in PLOS ONE has united these reports for a first-of-its-kind global view of women hunters. Reviewing accounts penned by scholars who study culture, known as ethnographers, as well as those by observers between the late 1800s and today, the researchers found that women hunted in nearly 80% of surveyed forager societies.

These data flatly reject a long-standing myth that men hunt, women gather, and that this division runs deep in human history.

Worldwide survey kills the myth of 'Man the Hunter'

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/youtube-scammer-who-stole-millions-in-song-royalties-sentenced-to-5-years

A YouTube scammer conspiring to run what Billboard described as possibly the largest music royalty scam in history, Jose Teran was recently sentenced by the US government to 70 months in prison.

He was hit with a "significant sentence," US attorney for the District of Arizona, Gary Restaino, wrote in the sentencing memo, because of the "greed and the great lengths" that Teran's scam went over the course of five years to fraudulently claim rights to 50,000 songs. Ultimately, the scam routed $23 million in royalty proceeds away from mostly Latin artists and into the bank accounts of Teran and his co-conspirators.

Teran, the sentencing memo said, "obtained more than $6 million in personal profits" and continued pocketing $190,000 in stolen royalties—which he hid from officials—even after he was indicted for the fraud. Partly because of this, Teran is considered a "high-risk to re-offend," Restaino wrote.
[...]
Artists attempted to bring a class-action lawsuit against YouTube to gain access to systems to monitor their royalties and stop royalty theft, but that case was dismissed earlier this month before going to trial.

Teran could attempt to run the scam or something like it again, Restaino wrote. The US government considers Teran at high risk to re-offend, partly because just 12 days after being summoned for his indictment, he promptly created a new bank account to stash additional stolen payments sent from AdRev.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Elusive neutrinos reveal a portrait of our galaxy unlike any before:

From visible starlight to radio waves, the Milky Way galaxy has long been observed through the various frequencies of electromagnetic radiation it emits. Scientists have now revealed a uniquely different image of our galaxy by determining the galactic origin of thousands of neutrinos — invisible "ghost particles" which exist in great quantities but normally pass straight through Earth undetected. The neutrino-based image of the Milky Way is the first of its kind: a galactic portrait made with particles of matter rather than electromagnetic energy.

The breakthrough was achieved by a collaboration of researchers using the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported IceCube Neutrino Observatory at NSF's Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. The immense observatory detects the subtle signs of high-energy neutrinos from space by using thousands of networked sensors buried deep within a cubic kilometer of clear, pristine ice. The results were revealed at an event at Drexel University and published in the journal Science.

[...] "As is so often the case, significant breakthroughs in science are enabled by advances in technology," says Denise Caldwell, director of NSF's Physics Division. "The capabilities provided by the highly sensitive IceCube detector, coupled with new data analysis tools, have given us an entirely new view of our galaxy — one that had only been hinted at before. As these capabilities continue to be refined, we can look forward to watching this picture emerge with ever-increasing resolution, potentially revealing hidden features of our galaxy never before seen by humanity."

"What's intriguing is that, unlike the case for light of any wavelength, in neutrinos, the universe outshines the nearby sources in our own galaxy," says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and principal investigator at IceCube.

[...] Over many decades, scientists have revealed countless astronomical discoveries by expanding the methods used to observe the universe. Once-revolutionary advances such as radio astronomy and infrared astronomy have been joined by a new class of observational techniques using phenomena such as gravitational waves and now, neutrinos. Kurahashi Neilson says that the neutrino-based image of the Milky Way is yet another step in that lineage of discovery. She predicts neutrino astronomy will be honed like the methods that preceded it, until it too can reveal previously unknown aspects of the universe.

"This is why we do what we do," she says. "To see something nobody has ever seen, and to understand things we haven't understood."

Here is a link to an animated GIF showing the neutrino image oscillating in and out of a visible light image of the galaxy.

Journal Reference:
IceCube Collaboration, Observation of high-energy neutrinos from the Galactic plane, Science, 380, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adc9818

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The discovery hints that auroras on all planets except Neptune have a common explanation:

Mercury's auroras are perfectly in character. While temperate Earth gets heavenly light shows over its poles, hellish Mercury gets invisible ribbons of X-ray radiation that cling to its sun-blasted surface.

But as alien as they may appear, Mercury's X-ray auroras have a lot in common with Earth's polar lights, and with auroras throughout the solar system.

Scientists have now directly shown that fluctuations in Mercury's magnetic field can fling electrons toward the planet, where they eventually rain down and cause auroras of X-ray light. This process, called electron precipitation, now appears to be practically universal in the solar system: It causes auroras on every planet with a global magnetic field except Neptune, researchers report July 18 in Nature Communications. Even Mars, which has only localized magnetic fields, has auroras caused by raining electrons (SN: 3/19/15).

[...] Buffeted by the solar wind, the sun-facing side of a planet's magnetic field gets squished while the night side is swept out into a long "magnetotail" that extends behind the planet. Eventually, the magnetotail stretches so much that its formerly mostly-parallel magnetic field lines snap and reconnect, sending some field lines flying off behind the planet and others back toward it.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-prepares-the-big-one-a-major-lawsuit-targeting-amazons-core-business/

The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to file a major antitrust lawsuit accusing Amazon of "leverag[ing] its power to reward online merchants that use its logistics services and punish those who don't," Bloomberg reported today. Bloomberg described the forthcoming lawsuit as "the big one," following several earlier lawsuits filed by the FTC under Chair Lina Khan.

"In the coming weeks, the agency plans to file a far-reaching antitrust suit focused on Amazon's core online marketplace, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg and three people familiar with the case," the report said.
[...]
Third-party sellers can rely on Amazon for warehousing, shipping, and other services through the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) system, but it takes a big cut out of their revenue. A recent Marketplace Pulse study based on profit and loss statements from a sample of sellers found that "Amazon is pocketing more than 50 percent of sellers' revenue—up from 40 percent five years ago," because "Amazon has increased fulfillment fees and made spending on advertising unavoidable."
[...]
The FTC's current investigation began two years before Khan became chair. "Amazon received the initial investigation notice in June 2019, according to documents viewed by Bloomberg.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The first lithography tools were fairly simple, but the technologies that produce today's chips are among humankind's most complex inventions:

When we talk about computing these days, we tend to talk about software and the engineers who write it. But we wouldn't be anywhere without the hardware and the physical sciences that have enabled it to be created—disciplines like optics, materials science, and mechanical engineering. It's thanks to advances in these areas that we can fabricate the chips on which all the 1s and 0s of the digital world reside. Without them, modern computing would have been impossible.

Semiconductor lithography, the manufacturing process responsible for producing computer chips, has 70-year-old roots. Its origin story is as simple as today's process is complex: the technology got its start in the mid-1950s, when a physicist named Jay Lathrop turned the lens in his microscope upside down.

Lathrop, who died last year at age 95, is scarcely remembered today. But the lithography process he and his lab partner patented in 1957 transformed the world. Steady improvement in lithographic methods has produced ever-smaller circuitry and previously unimaginable quantities of computing power, transforming entire industries and our daily lives.

[...] Lathrop named the process photolithography—printing with light—and he and Nall filed for a patent. They delivered a paper on the topic at the annual International Electron Devices Meeting in 1957, and the Army awarded him a $25,000 prize for the invention. Lathrop bought his family a new station wagon with the money.

[...] But the approach wasn't practical as chip features got still smaller. By the late 1970s, scanners began to be replaced with steppers, machines that moved light in discrete steps across a wafer. The challenge with a stepper was to move the light with micron-scale precision, so that each flash was perfectly aligned with the chip. GCA, a Boston-based firm that had its origins in spy balloons, devised the first stepper tool, reportedly on the advice of Texas Instruments executive Morris Chang—later the founder of TSMC, which is today the world's largest chipmaker.

[...] The decline of America's lithography industry coincided with a dramatic leap forward in the field's technological complexity. Visible light—which has a wavelength of several hundred nanometers—was by the 1980s too broad a brush with which to paint the smallest transistors. So the industry shifted to using new chemicals like krypton fluoride and argon fluoride to create deep ultraviolet light, with wavelengths as low as 193 nanometers. By the early 2000s, after this ultraviolet light itself proved too blunt a tool, lithography machines were created that could shoot light through water, creating a sharper angle of refraction and thereby allowing more precision. Then, after this "immersion" lithography proved insufficient for the finest features on a chip, lithographers began using multi-patterning, applying multiple layers of lithography on top of one another to produce yet more precise patterns on silicon.

upstart writes:

Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now:

A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain's neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.

What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference.

"It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof," says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn't the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: "There's been a lot of progress in the field."

Consciousness is everything that a person experiences — what they taste, hear, feel and more. It is what gives meaning and value to our lives, Chalmers says.

Despite a vast effort, researchers still don't understand how our brains produce it, however. "It started off as a very big philosophical mystery," Chalmers adds. "But over the years, it's gradually been transmuting into, if not a 'scientific' mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically."

[...] At the time Koch proposed the bet, certain technological advancements made him optimistic about solving the mystery sooner rather than later. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures small changes in blood flow that occur with brain activity, was taking laboratories by storm. And optogenetics — which allowed scientists to stimulate specific sets of neurons in the brains of animals such as nonhuman primates — had come on the scene. Koch was a young assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena at the time. "I was very taken by all these techniques," he says. "I thought: 25 years from now? No problem."

hubie writes:

Nature can curb smartphone use, but go beyond your local park and find some wild nature:

While a visit to the great outdoors is a common prescription for reducing screen use, a pioneering new study finds that time outdoors doesn't always reduce smartphone screen time.

The new research, which tracked the smartphone activity of 700 study participants for two years, reveals that participants' smartphone activity actually increased during visits to city parks and other urban green spaces.

With smartphone use rising worldwide, the study identifies a powerful way to reduce screen time: participants who visited nature reserves or forests saw significant declines in screen time over the first three hours, compared to visits to urban locations for the same amount of time.

[...] "Green time, or time outdoors, has long been recommended as a way to restore our attention from the demands of daily life, yet before our study, little was known about whether nature provides a way for people to disconnect from the mobile devices that now follow us into the great outdoors," said lead author Kelton Minor at the Data Science Institute, Columbia University. "While past research suggested that short trips to city parks might provide a digital detox, we saw texting and phone calls actually go up. It was really the longer visits to wilder areas, like forests or nature preserves, that helped people get off their screens and wrest back their attention from their smartphones."

[...] Discussing their findings, the researchers theorize that urban greenspace may instead be useful in enhancing remote social ties—hence the increase in texts and phone calls in urban parks—but may interrupt the individual's opportunity to utilize the attention-restoring properties of nature.

Journal Reference:
Minor, K., Glavind, K. L., Schwartz, A. J., et al. (2023). Nature Exposure is Associated With Reduced Smartphone Use. Environment and Behavior, 55(3), 103–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/00139165231167165

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A user submitted a recent Daring Fireball Post discussing Masnick's Impossibility Theorum: Content Moderation at Scale is Impossible to do Well:

While many people like to say that content moderation is difficult, that's misleading. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. Importantly, this is not an argument that we should throw up our hands and do nothing. Nor is it an argument that companies can't do better jobs within their own content moderation efforts. But I do think there's a huge problem in that many people — including many politicians and journalists — seem to expect that these companies not only can, but should, strive for a level of content moderation that is simply impossible to reach.

And thus, throwing humility to the wind, I'd like to propose Masnick's Impossibility Theorem, as a sort of play on Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. More specifically, it will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the "proper" level of moderation of anyone. While I'm not going to go through the process of formalizing the theorem, a la Arrow's, I'll just note a few points on why the argument I'm making is inevitably true.

Ed. Note: Masnick discusses factors such as user discontent with moderation, the subjective nature of moderation, and moderation problems at scale. It's well-known that Soylent-style community moderation is best-in class, but what about corporate-imposed moderation of millions of posts per day, as Masnick discusses? Any solutions?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

To optimize its performance, our brain "builds reality, it doesn't mirror it" [PDF]:

Things are not always as they appear: what we see seems like what we have just seen, a new SISSA study says. For example, compared to the actual size, an object might seem bigger if it is preceded by the presentation of a big object, and smaller if preceded by a small one. This visual perceptual bias is thus associated with early visual-evoked brain activity and is driven by a trace of past information kept by neural populations at the very basic levels of visual analysis in the brain. The result of what we see, in short, is a kind of average that the brain makes between what is happening in front of our eyes and what has already happened.

[...] According to research authors, Michele Fornaciai, Irene Togoli and Domenica Bueti from Scuola internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA), this phenomenon is due to the discrepancy between the limited brain computational resources and the plethora of stimuli bombarding our senses. This "bias" reflect the brain's need to find regularities in the external world, making it more predictable and easier to deal with.

[...] What the scientists observed is that the participants' perception was indeed distorted by past images. The research authors confirm: "A group of objects was judged, for instance, larger or more numerous than it was in reality depending on whether the participant previously saw a large or a more numerous sets of items". Importantly, "the EEG signals revealed that neurons in the visual part of the brain – the "occipital" cortex – kept a trace of the past visual images. And the greater this trace in brain activity was, the stronger the perceptual bias measured in participants".

[...] This research also tells us something more about how our brain works. Domenica Bueti, last author of the research, explains: "We often think that our brain works mirroring reality, but this is not true: on the contrary, it "builds" reality, it is a creator of reality. This is because it receives too many inputs from the external world, and it must find a good method of processing them in an effective way. According to our research, the knowledge of the world influences our perception, from which we can also say that perception is partially based on our expectations. What we have already experienced, in some ways, influences the way we will perceive future events. This is a very stimulating issue, not only a scientific perspective, but also from a philosophical point of view.

Journal Reference:
Michele Fornaciai, Irene Togoli and Domenica Bueti, Perceptual History Biases Are Predicted by Early Visual-Evoked Activity [open], J. Neurosci. 24 May 2023, 43 (21) 3860-3875; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1451-22.2023

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Running 24/7, it'll be the Zity that never sleeps:

Lithuania is vying to become one of the major European tech hubs, bolstered by a growing number of so-called "unicorn" startups and governmental efforts to attract a high-profile accelerator to the country. At the same time, a new €100 million private initiative announced today is setting out to create what would be Europe's largest tech campus, situated in the heart of Lithuania's capital Vilnius.

Building on the site of an old Soviet-era sewing factory in the city's New Town, Tech Zity, as the project is called, is touted to open in 2024 with office space for 5,000 workers, auditoriums for meetings and events, and more. In addition, a core selling point will be its focus on hybrid working, with a 24/7 ethos supported by co-living spaces, restaurants and bars for out-of-work socializing.

At 55,000 square metres (592,015 square feet), Tech Zity would be nearly two-thirds bigger than Paris's Station F, which opened back in 2017.

[...] The Tech Zity project's funding hails from several sources. Of the planned €100 million fund required to fulfil the project, some €30 million has been committed so far, with Vinted co-founder and chief operating officer Mantas Mikuckas contributing around 80% of the initial tranche and Tech Zity founder Darius Žakaitis making up the remainder. This "primary" phase has involved buying the land and buildings, and laying the groundwork for the reconstruction required to transform the site. For the next phase, Tech Zity is looking to secure the additional €70million from various sources, including banks and private investors.

upstart writes:

Investigations triggered by the cracking of encrypted phones three years ago have so far led to more than 6,500 arrests worldwide and the seizure of hundreds of tons of drugs:

The announcement underscored the staggering scale of criminality — mainly drugs and arms smuggling and money laundering — that was uncovered as a result of police and prosecutors effectively listening in to criminals using encrypted EncroChat phones.

"It helped to prevent violent attacks, attempted murders, corruption and large-scale drug transports, as well as obtain large-scale information on organised crime," European Union police and judicial cooperation agencies Europol and Eurojust said in a statement.

The French and Dutch investigation gained access to more than 115 million encrypted communications between some 60,000 criminals via servers in the northern French town of Roubaix, prosecutors said at a news conference in the nearby city of Lille.

[...] EncroChat sold phones for around 1,000 euros ($1,094) worldwide and offered subscriptions with global coverage for 1,500 euros ($1,641) per six months. The devices were marketed as offering complete anonymity and were said to be untraceable and easy to erase if a user was arrested.

French law enforcement authorities launched investigations into the company operating EncroChat in 2017. The probe led to a device being installed that was able to evade the phones' encryption and gain access to users' communications.

[...] The FBI and other law enforcement agencies went a step further and created an encrypted service — ANOM — that was marketed to criminals in a global sting that led to the arrest of more than 800 suspects and seizure of more than 32 metric tons (35.2 tons) of drugs, including cocaine, cannabis, amphetamines and methamphetamines.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Aided by station-mounted cameras, fans are breathing new life into America's forgotten railway towns – online and IRL:

The world of railfans and trainspotters is hardly new. Since the advent of the railroad, hobbyists and professionals have taken photos of local trains, traveled to see their favorite railways, and simply passed the time sitting on platforms to enjoy the view.

But the community saw a digital boost during the pandemic, when the act of watching livestreams of trains soared in popularity. Many say they were drawn in by the community around the feeds, the romantic lore and history of rail travel in the US, and the regularity of trains passing through at a time when the world felt chaotic.

"A lot of people said during lockdown the camera really saved their sanity, because it was a way to connect with people they weren't able to see in person at the time," said Robert Scott, a railfan who volunteers as a moderator for a live camera in Chehalis, Washington. "Some people keep the feed on 24 hours a day in the background because they like the familiarity of the regular passing of trains."

Today there are an increasing number of live rail-stream hubs, including RailwayCams, RailStream, and RailServe.com. One of the most popular is Virtual Railfan, founded in 2009 by a lifelong train obsessive named Michael Cyr. Cyr said he was sitting on the platform of a rail station in Folkston, Georgia – a small town with a big local railfan culture – when he realized his hobby could be brought online, allowing more people to engage. The following year, the first Virtual Railfan camera was set up in Folkston and attracted a few dozen viewers, a crowd that eventually grew to several hundred.

The company advertises itself as offering one of the most realistic online trainspotting experiences, featuring live audio and 1080HD cameras – many of which can be moved to see different angles of the incoming locomotives. "We wanted to bring the whole experience," Cyr said. "If you can't be there, we're going to be the next best thing." Virtual Railfan takes in revenue from paid memberships that offer additional features like playbacks of older streams and advertisements from its YouTube channels.

fliptop writes:

A new artificial intelligence-based technique for measuring fluid flow around the brain's blood vessels could have big implications for developing treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's:

The perivascular spaces that surround cerebral blood vessels transport water-like fluids around the brain and help sweep away waste. Alterations in the fluid flow are linked to neurological conditions, including Alzheimer's, small vessel disease, strokes, and traumatic brain injuries but are difficult to measure in vivo.

A multidisciplinary team of mechanical engineers, neuroscientists, and computer scientists led by University of Rochester Associate Professor Douglas Kelley developed novel AI velocimetry measurements to accurately calculate brain fluid flow. The results are outlined in a study published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[...] The work builds upon years of experiments led by study coauthor Maiken Nedergaard, the codirector of Rochester's Center for Translational Neuromedicine. The group has previously been able to conduct two-dimensional studies on the fluid flow in perivascular spaces by injecting tiny particles into the fluid and measuring their position and velocity over time. But scientists needed more complex measurements to understand the full intricacy of the system—and exploring such a vital, fluid system is a challenge.

Journal Reference: Artificial intelligence velocimetry reveals in vivo flow rates, pressure gradients, and shear stresses in murine perivascular flows - https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2217744120

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Related: Single Brain Scan Can Diagnose Alzheimer's Disease Quickly and Accurately

Original Submission