SoylentNews

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/08/researchers-figure-out-how-to-make-ai-misbehave-serve-up-prohibited-content/

ChatGPT and its artificially intelligent siblings have been tweaked over and over to prevent troublemakers from getting them to spit out undesirable messages such as hate speech, personal information, or step-by-step instructions for building an improvised bomb. But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University last week showed that adding a simple incantation to a prompt—a string of text that might look like gobbledygook to you or me but which carries subtle significance to an AI model trained on huge quantities of web data—can defy all of these defenses in several popular chatbots at once.

[...] "Making models more resistant to prompt injection and other adversarial 'jailbreaking' measures is an area of active research," says Michael Sellitto, interim head of policy and societal impacts at Anthropic. "We are experimenting with ways to strengthen base model guardrails to make them more 'harmless,' while also investigating additional layers of defense."

[...] Adversarial attacks exploit the way that machine learning picks up on patterns in data to produce aberrant behaviors. Imperceptible changes to images can, for instance, cause image classifiers to misidentify an object, or make speech recognition systems respond to inaudible messages.

[...] In one well-known experiment, from 2018, researchers added stickers to stop signs to bamboozle a computer vision system similar to the ones used in many vehicle safety systems.

upstart writes:

AWS to charge customers for public IPv4 addresses from 2024:

Cloud giant AWS will start charging customers for public IPv4 addresses from next year, claiming it is forced to do this because of the increasing scarcity of these and to encourage the use of IPv6 instead.

It is now four years since we officially ran out of IPv4 ranges to allocate, and since then, those wanting a new public IPv4 address have had to rely on address ranges being recovered, either from from organizations that close down or those that return addresses they no longer require as they migrate to IPv6.

If Amazon's cloud division is to be believed, the difficulty in obtaining public IPv4 addresses has seen the cost of acquiring a single address rise by more than 300 percent over the past five years, and as we all know, the business is a little short of cash at the moment, so is having to pass these costs on to users.

"This change reflects our own costs and is also intended to encourage you to be a bit more frugal with your use of public IPv4 addresses and to think about accelerating your adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and conservation measure," writes AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr, on the company news blog.

The update will come into effect on February 1, 2024, when AWS customers will see a charge of $0.005 (half a cent) per IP address per hour for all public IPv4 addresses. These charges will apparently apply whether the address is attached to a service or not, and like many AWS charges, appear inconsequential at first glance but can mount up over time if a customer is using many of them.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Egg 'signatures' allow drongos to identify cuckoo 'forgeries' almost every time, study finds:

African cuckoos may have met their match with the fork-tailed drongo, which scientists predict can detect and reject cuckoo eggs from their nest on almost every occasion, despite them on average looking almost identical to drongo eggs.

Fork-tailed drongos, belligerent birds from sub-Saharan Africa, lay eggs with a staggering diversity of colors and patterns. All these colors and patterns are forged by the African cuckoo.

African cuckoos lay their eggs in drongos' nests to avoid rearing their chick themselves (an example of so-called brood parasitism). By forging drongo egg colors and patterns, cuckoos trick drongos into thinking the cuckoo egg is one of their own.

But drongos use knowledge of their own personal egg "signatures"—their eggs' color and pattern –to identify cuckoo egg "forgeries" and reject them from their nests, say scientists. These "signatures" are like the signatures we use in our daily lives: unique to each individual and highly repeatable by the same individual.

Through natural selection, the African cuckoo's eggs have evolved to look almost-identical to drongo eggs—a rare example of high-fidelity mimicry in nature.

A team led by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the University of Cape Town, working in collaboration with a community in Zambia, set out to explore the effectiveness of "signatures" as a defense against highly accurate mimicry. The findings are published today in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

They found that despite near-perfect mimicry of fork-tailed drongo eggs, African cuckoo eggs still have a high probability of being rejected.

Journal Reference:
Lund et al. When perfection isn't enough: host egg signatures are an effective defence against high-fidelity African cuckoo mimicry, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2023.1125

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/reddit-beats-film-industry-wont-have-to-identify-users-who-admitted-torrenting/

Film companies lost another attempt to force Reddit to identify anonymous users who discussed piracy. A federal court on Saturday quashed a subpoena demanding users' names and other identifying details, agreeing with Reddit's argument that the film companies' demands violate the First Amendment.

The plaintiffs are 20 producers of popular movies who are trying to prove that Internet service provider Grande is liable for its subscribers' copyright infringement because the ISP allegedly ignores piracy on its network. Reddit isn't directly involved in the copyright case. But the film companies filed a motion to compel Reddit to respond to a subpoena demanding "basic account information including IP address registration and logs from 1/1/2016 to present, name, email address and other account registration information" for six users who wrote comments on Reddit threads in 2011 and 2018.

[...] This is the second time Beeler ruled against the film companies' attempts to unmask anonymous Reddit users. Beeler, a magistrate judge at US District Court for the Northern District of California, quashed a similar subpoena related to a different set of Reddit users in late April.

[...] Reddit's filing pointed out that the statute of limitations for copyright infringement is three years. The film companies said the statute of limitations is irrelevant to whether the comments can provide evidence in the case against Grande.

[...] When a court evaluates an unmasking request, it considers whether a subpoena "was issued in good faith and not for any improper purpose," whether "the identifying information is directly and materially relevant" to a core claim or defense, and whether "information sufficient to establish or to disprove that claim or defense is unavailable from any other source," the ruling said.

[...] The fact that Grande already provided names of 118 subscribers factored into Beeler's explanation of why she denied the film companies' motion.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

What to know about the ban on incandescent lightbulbs

Retailers can no longer sell the banned lightbulbs as of Aug. 1

The ban on incandescent lightbulbs has officially gone into effect in the U.S., more than a decade after the federal government first passed a rule prohibiting the non-energy efficient lighting.

[....] A 2020 survey on residential energy consumption conducted by the U.S. Energy Information Administration found that less than half of U.S. households use LED lightbulbs for most or all indoor lighting

[....] Under the new standard, lightbulbs must produce 45 lumens -- the measure of brightness -- per watt. For comparison, traditional incandescent lightbulbs produce just 15 lumens per watt

[....] Collectively, Americans are expected to save nearly $3 billion annually on utility bills while cutting carbon emissions by 222 million metric tons over the next 30 years -- the equivalent to emissions generated by 28 million homes in one year, according to the DOE.

[....] Black lights, bug lamps, colored lamps, infrared laps, plant lights, flood lights, reflector lamps and traffic signals are not included in the ban, according to the DOE.

See also: Incandescent light bulb ban goes into effect this month: Here's what you need to know

TAMPA, Fla. - A nationwide ban on incandescent light bulbs goes into effect on Aug. 1, 2023, which means if they're made or sold by a retailer, that business could be fined up to $542 per bulb.

[....] customers have been getting as many incandescent bulbs as they can before the ban.

It seems one could take that exception for 'colored lamps' and run with it.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tesla's secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints:

About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide "rosy" projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge, a source told Reuters. The automaker last year became so inundated with driving-range complaints that it created a special team to cancel owners' service appointments.

In March, Alexandre Ponsin set out on a family road trip from Colorado to California in his newly purchased Tesla, a used 2021 Model 3. He expected to get something close to the electric sport sedan's advertised driving range: 353 miles on a fully charged battery.

He soon realized he was sometimes getting less than half that much range, particularly in cold weather – such severe underperformance that he was convinced the car had a serious defect.

[...] Ponsin contacted Tesla and booked a service appointment in California. He later received two text messages, telling him that "remote diagnostics" had determined his battery was fine, and then: "We would like to cancel your visit."

What Ponsin didn't know was that Tesla employees had been instructed to thwart any customers complaining about poor driving range from bringing their vehicles in for service. Last summer, the company quietly created a "Diversion Team" in Las Vegas to cancel as many range-related appointments as possible.

evilcam writes:

Following a study published in October which claimed the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor, the academics that wrote and co-wrote the paper have been accused of falsifying their data, as well as attempting to cover up their deception.

From Nature:

A prominent journal has decided to retract a paper by Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York who has made controversial claims about discovering room-temperature superconductors — materials that would not require any cooling to conduct electricity with zero resistance. The forthcoming retraction, of a paper published by Physical Review Letters (PRL) in 2021, is significant because the Nature news team has learnt that it is the result of an investigation that found apparent data fabrication. PRL's decision follows allegations that Dias plagiarized substantial portions of his PhD thesis and a separate retraction of one of Dias's papers on room-temperature superconductivity by Nature last September. (Nature's news team is independent of its journals team.)

As part of the investigation, co-author Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a long-time collaborator of Dias, supplied what he claimed was raw data used to create figures in the PRL paper. But all four investigators found that the data Salamat provided did not match the figures in the paper. Two of the referees wrote in their report that, the conclusions of their investigation "paint a very disturbing picture of apparent data fabrication followed by an attempt to hide or coverup [sic] the fact. We urge immediate retraction of the paper".

Note this is not related to an earlier Soylent story.

Original Submission

Two recent news items seem to be at cross purposes, just a little bit.<sarcasm>:

First the WaPo (and other outlets) report that 7 major car companies are joining to install 30,000 new fast battery electric car chargers (Tesla currently has 22,000), with both CCS and Tesla-style plugs, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/26/ev-fast-charger-gm-hyundai-honda-kia-bmw-mercedes/ [or https://archive.is/C4Uih ]

Then going back a month or so, we see New York power grid strained by rapid electrification, this link to PBS, plenty of other outlets for this news as well, https://www.wamc.org/news/2023-06-15/nyiso-electrification-causing-surge-in-power-demand

"Power Trends 2023" notes that reliability margins are shrinking as electrification programs drive demand for electricity higher.

Plenty of other similar reports from electric utilities, including the big winter outage in Texas.

Got popcorn? If you have electric cooking, better pop it now to have something to munch when the power goes out...when too many HVAC units (cooling/summer and heating/winter) come online at the same time as the battery electric cars are charging. If you are literally cooking with gas, then you can have fresh popcorn!

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Bringing back extinct molecules to fight modern bacteria:

Medical scientists are in a race against time—increasingly, bacteria are developing resistance to modern therapies, leaving doctors with fewer options in treating patients with infections. In this new effort, the research team looked at the possibility of finding extinct molecules that might be able to kill bacteria alive today.

The idea behind this new research is that many organisms, including humans, produce peptides with antimicrobial properties. Those developed by humans are already used naturally by the body. But what about extinct human relatives such as Neanderthals and Denisovans? Perhaps they produced peptides that might be useful against modern bacteria.

[...] The team trained an AI app to spot sites on human proteins that are known to produce peptides. They used the app on data from modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans to find peptides from the latter two sources. They then compared the properties of the peptides they found with newer peptides to predict which of those in H. neanderthalensis and Denisovans might be bacteria killers.

Next, the team synthesized the molecules they identified and tested them against bacteria in a petri dish. Six of those that showed promise were then used to treat mice infected with Acinetobacter baumannii—a common bacteria found in hospital settings.

The team found that all six of the peptides slowed or stopped the growth of an infection but none actually killed the bacteria. They also found that five of the six did kill bacteria growing in skin abscesses, but that was only when doses were extremely high.

The researchers believe their approach shows promise. They suggest that more research using their approach might lead to more effective antibiotics.

Journal Reference:
Jacqueline R.M.A. Maasch et al, Molecular de-extinction of ancient antimicrobial peptides enabled by machine learning, Cell Host & Microbe (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.chom.2023.07.001

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Eager scientists and a gleaming lab awaits:

A sample from the asteroid Bennu, which could be key to understanding the formation of the solar system and our own planet, is set to be analyzed at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston after it reaches Earth in late September.

The precious cargo is currently aboard OSIRIS-REx, a US space probe launched in 2016 to Bennu, which orbits the Sun at an average distance of about 105 million miles (168 million kilometers).

Scientists will separate pieces of the rock and dust for study now, while carefully storing away the rest for future generations equipped with better technology—a practice first started during the Apollo missions to the Moon.

"We don't expect there to be anything living but (rather) the building blocks of life," Nicole Lunning, lead OSIRIS-Rex sample curator, told AFP.

[...] The spacecraft is scheduled to land in the Utah desert on September 24, carrying an estimated 8.8 ounces, or 250 grams of material—just over a cupful.

[...] The first samples brought to Earth by asteroids were carried out by Japanese probes in 2010 and 2020, with the latter found to contain uracil, one of the building blocks of RNA.

The finding lent weight to a longstanding theory that life on Earth may have been seeded from outer space when asteroids crashed into our planet carrying fundamental elements.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A team of researchers suggests the space observatory just spotted "dark stars"—theoretical stellar objects powered by dark matter:

Astronomers looking at ancient light seen by the Webb Space Telescope have found three pinpricks that they think could be "dark stars," theoretical objects powered by dark matter.

Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe; its partner in ambiguity, dark energy, makes up about 68%. You can do the math: we know stunningly little of what makes up the universe and how it behaves. It's in that zone of cosmic uncertainty that Webb's latest targets pop up. The team's research was published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[...] The three objects date to when the universe was between 320 million and 400 million years old, making them quite young (in a cosmic sense). And while they could well be galaxies containing millions of stars, the recent research team posits that they are never-before-seen dark stars, which could be millions of times the mass of our Sun and would be powered by the collisions of dark matter particles, rather than nuclear fusion.

Dark matter is not literally dark, at least not necessarily. It is called dark matter because it is nearly impossible for humans to detect. We see dark matter in its gravitational effects; haloes of dark matter glom galaxies together, and astronomers see ancient light more clearly when dark matter bends and focuses the photons transiting its gravitational field.

owl writes:

https://medium.com/re-form/x-to-close-417936dfc0dc

X's are everywhere in user interface (UI) design. A powerful symbol, [x] is capable of closing windows and popups, toolbars and tabs and anything else that might otherwise be cluttering up your screen.

Clicking on [x] to close a feature has become an instinctual part of using a computer and a standard in web and software design. Although it may seem like the ubiquitous [x] has always been a part of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), a quick jaunt through the history of GUIs reveals that this actually isn't the case.

So where and when did the [x] first enter into the UI lexicon?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Thankfully the probe regularly phones home to fix this sort of mess:

NASA revealed on Friday that its venerable Voyager 2 probe is currently incommunicado, because the space agency pointed its antenna in the wrong direction.

By the time the news was released, the antenna on the spacecraft had been pointing two degrees away from the Earth for over a week.

This left it without the ability to receive commands or transmit data to antennae operated by the Deep Space Network (DSN).

NASA reckons the situation is temporary and will not end the probe's nearly 46-year stint in space as it is programmed to recalibrate its position a few times a year. October 15 is the next scheduled reset.

[...] But while old cars can be lovingly worked on by hand in real time, the Voyagers are over 20 light hours from Earth, and communication crawls along at a tedious 160 bits per second.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring:

As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk's favorite letter "X," its open source rival Mastodon is seeing usage numbers soar. According to a new post from Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko, the number of monthly active users for his Twitter alternative has been steadily climbing over the past couple of months to have now reached 2.1 million — or, as remarked Rochko, "not far off from our last peak."

Previously, Mastodon's monthly active user numbers had peaked at 2.5 million between the months of October and November, which was shortly after Elon Musk officially took ownership of Twitter. Before, Mastodon had been a much smaller network, with approximately 300,000 monthly active users, the founder had said.

The fate of Mastodon's growth seems often to be tied to Twitter's moves — or rather, its missteps. After Twitter's acquisition, for example, there was a bit of a Twitter exodus as longtime users rebelled against the changes that Musk soon enacted on their favorite microblogging site, ranging from widespread layoffs to erratic moves impacting Twitter's platform, policy and product strategies, which included a mishandled relaunch of Twitter's subscription, Twitter Blue, which devalued verification by opening it up to anyone with a credit card to pay for it. That decision is still negatively affecting the Twitter experience, as the company recently admitted to having a Verified spammer problem, requiring a change to Twitter DMs.

Twitter has officially changed its logo to 'X'

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A team of researchers from around the world is urging the international community to recognize the full environmental and health threat of plastics:

In a new Viewpoint published in Environmental Science & Technology the researchers argue categorizing plastics, including micro- and nano-sized particles as PBT pollutants would give governments the tools they need to better manage plastic production, use and recycling.

"We need to wake up the world and understand the risks of these pollutants," says University of British Columbia (UBC) ocean researcher Dr. Juan José Alava, lead author of the paper that includes researchers from Canada, the United States, Europe, South America and Asia.

[...] "We live in the age of plastic — the Plasticene," says Dr. Alava, principal investigator of the Ocean Pollution Research Unit at UBC's Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries. "There's plastic everywhere. It is in the ocean, coastal zones and terrestrial environment. It has been found in animals across the globe, human tissues and organs, and deep in the Mariana Trench — the deepest part of our ocean. They do not degrade easily, so they last for many, many years."

[...] Plastics are prone to accumulation in all organisms, with aquatic animals most at risk of exposure to micro- and nano-sized particle. These particles are toxic to marine animals — they can change gene and protein expression, produce inflammatory responses, affect brain development, and decrease growth and reproduction rates, while also preventing proper feeding and foraging behaviours.

"It's hugely important to remember that it's not just plastics," emphasizes Dr. Gunilla Öberg, coauthor from UBC's Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, University of British Columbia. "Many plastic products contain chemicals that in themselves are known to be persistent, bioaccumulate and toxic."