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Frosty Piss writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-4bs-inside-spin-scooters

When things don't work out for scooter rental companies and they shut down or pull out of a city, they usually take spare stock with them. However, when Spin backed out of Seattle, many locals discovered unused scooters scattered throughout the city. Upon closer inspection of these abandoned devices, or should we say dissection, it was uncovered that they each have a Raspberry Pi 4B inside.

This discovery was recently shared on social media. Legally, if the scooters are abandoned then snagging one for the Pi inside is fair game but it's not clear if Spin has plans to recover their remaining assets.

The Seattle city government official website confirm that Spin originally arrived in 2021 as a fourth scooter rental option. However, the company did not renew its license for the most recent cycle. Because of this, you can find a few remaining Spin scooters around the city.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

An 800-Year-Old Math Trick Could Be The Key to Navigating The Moon:

We've been landing people on the Moonsince 1969, but as we start to explore the lunar surface, how will astronauts find their way around? We need a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) for the Moon, and an 800-year-old math trick could help.

The math trick in question is known as the Fibonacci sphere. Here, researchers from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary used it to better estimate the Moon's rotation ellipsoid, its ever-so-slightly squished shape as it orbits Earth.

Despite what Solar System illustrations might suggest, Earth and the Moon aren't perfect spheres: the influence of gravity, rotation, and tidal fluctuations means they're more like squashed balls.

For simplicity's sake, our GNSS technology uses a rough estimate of Earth's squashed ball shape. If we're to develop a Geographic Information System (GIS) for the lunar surface, we need the same estimate for the Moon's selenoid (the equivalent of Earth's geoid, or true, irregular shape).

"Since the Moon is less flattened than the Earth, most lunar GIS applications use a spherical datum," write geophysicist Gábor Timár and student Kamilla Cziráki in their published paper.

"However, with the renaissance of lunar missions, it seems worthwhile to define an ellipsoid of revolution that better fits the selenoid."

Journal Reference:
Cziráki, Kamilla, Timár, Gábor. Parameters of the best fitting lunar ellipsoid based on GRAIL's selenoid model [open], Acta Geodaetica et Geophysica (DOI: 10.1007/s40328-023-00415-w)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Elon Musk is at the center of yet another legal battle over money allegedly owed by X, the company formerly known as Twitter. A French international news agency, Agence France-Presse (AFP), announced yesterday that it has taken legal action in the Judicial Court of Paris to compel X to provide the data needed to assess compensation owed for X users sharing AFP news content on the platform.

Musk's only reported response so far comes in a post formerly known as a tweet.

"This is bizarre," Musk wrote. "They want us to pay *them* for traffic to their site where they make advertising revenue and we don't!?"

Musk is seemingly unaware of a European Union directive from 2019 granting news agencies' so-called "neighboring rights." These rights were designed to reduce the "value gap" between publishers and the online platforms that profit off of promoting publishers' content.

AFP filed the copyright case after becoming concerned about "the clear refusal" from X to "enter into discussions regarding the implementation of neighboring rights for the press," the AFP press release said. During discussions, AFP said that X was expected to share data that would help the news agency calculate how much money X owed for profiting off of AFP's news content.

Now AFP is seeking an "urgent injunction" ordering X to "provide all the necessary elements required for assessing the remuneration owed to AFP under the neighboring rights legislation."

X and AFP did not immediately respond to Ars' request to comment.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The creator of Vim, Bram Moolenaar, has passed away.

Message from the family of Bram Moolenaar:

Dear all,

It is with a heavy heart that we have to inform you that Bram Moolenaar passed away on 3 August 2023.
Bram was suffering from a medical condition that progressed quickly over the last few weeks.

Bram dedicated a large part of his life to VIM and he was very proud of the VIM community that you are all part of.

We as family are now arranging the funeral service of Bram which will take place in The Netherlands and will be held in the Dutch lanuage. The extact date, time and place are still to be determined.
Should you wish to attend his funeral then please send a message to funer...@gmail.com. This email address can also be used to get in contact with the family regarding other matters, bearing in the mind the situation we are in right now as family.

With kind regards,
The family of Bram Moolenaar

In 1965, Popular Hot Rodding magazine bought a $250 '57 Chevy for a test bed, to try out various drag racing parts and tuning techniques. It was called Project X back then, here's a capsule history, https://www.motortrend.com/features/57-chevy-project-x-history/

The only thing constant with X was change. The yellow tri-five has had everything from a 292 inline-six to small-blocks, big-blocks, mechanical fuel Injection, multibarrel carbs, cross-ram manifolds, superchargers, and even electronic fuel injection. The Project X 1957 Chevy has had it all over the decades. It was a car constantly reinventing itself to keep up with the latest trends in hot rodding.

Along the way it also appeared in the movie Hollywood Knights and has become arguably the most famous '57 Chevy ever. Nearly 20 years ago it want back to GM for a "makeover" including a modified Corvette front suspension, and since then it picked up another nickname, the "Million-Dollar Chevy."

Jump to the present, they recently converted it to BEV, using a new GM "crate motor", https://www.motortrend.com/features/57-chevy-ev-conversion-project-x-drag-strip-test/ including some major teething troubles getting the control software to deliver good power for a whole pass down the drag strip.

At this point our best 60-foot time was a solid 1.54 seconds. We were really happy with that time but at around 100 feet the system was dropping the voltage and killing our ET. The engineers kept working on the issue and eventually the car was waking up again around the 570-foot mark, but that loss in the middle was still hurting our overall time. The best analogy is an EFI car with fuel-control issues, but instead of running out of fuel, we were losing electricity flow.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Dubai dawns a new wave of renewable technology with its MBR Solar Park:

The United Arab Emirates might be known for its sizable oil and gas reserves, yet it also has one of the highest solar exposure rates globally.

It is home to the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park (MBR Solar Park), the world's largest single-site solar park according to the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA).

The energy plant covers 44 square kilometres in Dubai's southern desert and is equipped with millions of photovoltaic panels that convert the sun's rays to about 1000 MW hourly that are capable of powering around 320,000 homes.

[...] Established in 2013, the MBR Solar Park is set to reach its fifth and final phase in the next couple of years and is projected to offset 6.5 million tons of carbon emissions annually.

This is the equivalent of taking around five million passenger vehicles off the road yearly, according to US Environmental Protection Agency calculators.

[...] "When you educate the youth from a young age, basically they are aware of the challenges that are being faced by solar from now, and how they can basically look at addressing these challenges" the centre's director Dr. Aaesha Abdulla Alnuaimi told Euronews.

She cites the region's harsh environment as obstacles to technological growth. High temperatures and strong winds are just some of the factors that affect the performance and long-term reliability of renewable technology systems being used.

"Addressing the dust, for example, there is the robotic cleaning but there is a high cost in implementing robotic cleaning," says Alnuaimi. The same applies to using anti-soiling nanotechnology to ward away the effects of commonly occurring sand and dust storms.

"This is why we need more research and more innovation," she told Euronews, in order to find solutions.

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-china-human-lineage.html

A team of paleontologists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with colleagues from Xi'an Jiaotong University, the University of York, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Research Center on Human Evolution, has found evidence of a previously unknown human lineage. In their study, reported in Journal of Human Evolution, the group analyzed the fossilized jawbone, partial skull and some leg bones of a hominin dated to 300,000 years ago.

The fossils were excavated at a site in Hualongdong, in what is now a part of East China. They were subsequently subjected to both a morphological and a geometric assessment, with the initial focus on the jawbone, which exhibited unique features—a triangular lower edge and a unique bend.

Original Submission

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee will be this coming Friday, August 11th, 2023 at 20:30 UTC (1:30pm PDT, 4:30pm EDT) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when available.

The agenda for the upcoming meeting will come out within the next few days, 24 hours or more before the meeting. The agenda is expected to cover, at a minimum, actions arising from the previous meeting, such as exploring the formation of a new entity, and janrinok's report on management structure.

Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information can be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance

Call for experts: The committee is calling for experts with relevant knowledge of entity formation to attend the meeting. Their advice may be helpful to the committee and the greater community going forward and would be greatly appreciated.

As always, the community is welcome to observe and participate and is hereby invited to come and do both. SoylentNews is People!

upstart writes:

AI-powered brain implants restore touch and movement to paralysed man:

In a world first, a quadriplegic man in the United States has regained touch and movement after surgeons successfully implanted microchips into his brain.

AI is then used to read, interpret and translate his thoughts into action.

Keith Thomas, 45, broke his neck in an accident and became paralysed from his chest down.

[...] A team of medical professionals first spent months mapping Thomas' brain using MRIs to help pinpoint the areas responsible for both arm movement and the sensation of touch in his hand.

He then underwent a 15-hour open-brain surgery.

[...] Dr Ashesh Mehta, the surgeon who performed Thomas' brain surgery said the wiring in Thomas' brain was "broken".

[...] "What we did was a bypass, so we bypassed the block. So, we're basically using a computer to read Keith's thoughts and then translate that into a machine that then stimulates his hand so that he can move it," explained Mehta.

The procedure - dubbed as a "double neural bypass" - goes the other direction as well. He can now "feel" something through tiny electrodes instead of neurons responsible for feeling his fingertips.

The tiny sensors at his fingertips and palm send touch and pressure information back to the sensory area of his brain implant to restore sensation through a computer instead of through the normal pathway through the spinal cord.

"It's almost like fooling the nervous system to make it work," said Mehta.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, the couple who were arrested last year for the massive 2016 Bitfinex hack involving billions of dollars of cryptocurrency, have pleaded guilty in court. Lichtenstein has admitted that he used multiple advanced hacking tools and techniques to gain entry into the cryptocurrency exchange's network. He then authorized 2,000 transactions to move 119,754 bitcoins to wallets he controlled. To cover his tracks, he said he deleted access credentials, logs and other digital breadcrumbs that could give him away. Morgan, his wife, helped him move and launder the stolen funds. 

If you'll recall, the Justice Department seized 95,000 of the stolen bitcoins at the time of their arrest. Back then, that digital coin hoard was worth a whopping $3.6 billion and was the largest financial seizure in the agency's history. Authorities were able to trace more of the stolen funds after that to recover an additional $475 million worth of cryptocurrency.

According to the DOJ, Lichtenstein and Morgan used false identities to set up online accounts on darknet markets and cryptocurrency exchanges. They then withdrew the funds and distributed the bitcoins from there by converting them into other forms of cryptocurrency and keeping them in crypto mixing services. By doing so, they obfuscated the coins' sources and made them harder to trace.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Brave Software, maker of the Brave web browser, has tuned its search engine to run on a homegrown index of images and videos in an effort to end its dependency on "Big Tech" rivals.

On Thursday, the biz said image and video results from Brave Search – available on the web at search.brave.com and via its browser – will be served from Brave's own index.

[...] Brave now aims to ride the wave of discontent with Big Tech by highlighting its commitment to privacy and independence – Small Tech.

(As some have pointed out, Brave has some skin in the AI content-generation game alongside OpenAI et al: it offers an API that takes search queries and outputs answers formatted for use with, say, machine-learning models.)

"Brave Search is 100 percent private and anonymous, which sets a high bar for image/video search to meet," the developer said in a blog post provided earlier to The Register.

"Whether it’s a matter of personal safety or personal preference, users should be able to discover content without their search engine reporting and profiling those results to a Big Tech company."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Many of the most attractive premium features in Tesla vehicles are things that all of the cars are physically capable of but are locked down at the software level. Since there are always security researchers and hackers trying to pick those proverbial locks, it was inevitable that someone would figure it out. And as of this week, that has finally happened.

According to a new report from TechCrunch, the jailbreak was discovered by three Ph.D. candidate student researchers at Germany's Technische Universität Berlin. They plan on presenting their findings at next week's Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas.

"We are not the evil outsider, but we're actually the insider, we own the car," researcher and TU Berlin Ph.D. candidate Christian Werling told TechCrunch. "And we don't want to pay these $300 for the rear heated seats."

Specifically, he and his colleagues used a technique called voltage glitching or a voltage fault injection attack to disrupt the AMD processor that powers the car's Tesla Infotainment System and get it to do their bidding. "If we do it at the right moment, we can trick the CPU into doing something else," Welling added. "It has a hiccup, skips an instruction, and accepts our manipulated code. That's basically what we do in a nutshell."

According to the report, this new exploit could also enable hackers to activate the $15,000 self-driving feature in regions where it's locked out, though the researchers haven't tried that themselves yet. But since the vulnerability — while affecting software capabilities — is hardware-based, Tesla can't patch it, with the researchers telling TechCrunch that a fix would require replacing the affected hardware. Tesla did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment on the exploit.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Standing 40 cm high and 70 cm wide, the semi-transparent display has translations pop up simultaneously on the screen as the station staff and a foreign tourist speak:

Standing 40 cm high and 70 cm wide, the semi-transparent display has translations pop up simultaneously on the screen as the station staff and a foreign tourist speak.

With more than two million visitors flocking to Japan last month in the wake of the country's post-pandemic reopening, railway companies are gearing up to warmly greet the influx of global travellers.

Seibu Railway, one of the country's large railroad companies, is implementing a new simultaneous translation system to help foreign tourists navigate Tokyo's metro which is notorious for its complexity.

[...] this new semi-transparent display has translations pop up simultaneously on the screen as the station staff and foreign tourists communicate.

"The display we have introduced can automatically translate between Japanese and other languages. When customers speak in a foreign language, the station attendant can see it in Japanese, and when the station attendant speaks Japanese, customers can read the sentences in their own language," said Ayano Yajima, Seibu Railway Sales and Marketing supervisor.

"Google Translate isn't always available because you don't always have Wi-Fi everywhere you go, so places like this, it's also much faster than pulling up your phone, typing everything out, showing it and (there being) misunderstandings. Having it like this, clear on the screen, it's really nice," said Kevin Cometto, an Italian student visiting Japan.

The VoiceBiz UCDisplay supports Japanese and 11 other languages including English, French, and Spanish.

The station staff previously used translation apps.

But with the translation window, a face-to-face conversation through the screen is possible, complete with facial expressions and gestures.

According to Seibu Railway, the device is designed to help customers with more complex requests such as seeking directions or information about the local area.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/musks-boring-company-gets-ok-to-dig-68-miles-of-tunnels-under-las-vegas/

Elon Musk's tunneling company has permission to significantly expand its operations under the city of Las Vegas. Last month, the Las Vegas City Council voted unanimously to approve the Boring Company's plan to dig more tunnels under the city, following in the steps of Clark County, which in May gave a similar thumbs-up to the tunneling concern. The company's plan calls for 68 miles of tunnels and 81 stations, served by a fleet of Tesla electric vehicles, each able to carry three passengers at a time.

[...] But the Boring Company's plans scaled back from maglev trains and vacuum tubes to high-speed electric pods and then to just regular Teslas with human drivers, and interest waned.

Except in Las Vegas. There, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority said yes to a $48.6 million, 2.2-mile loop underneath the convention center. In 2021, the LVCC Loop opened a 1.7-mile network with three stations; the Boring Company claims it has transported 1.15 million passengers, with a peak capacity of just 4,500 people per hour. For context, a subway system can be expected to carry between 600 and 1,000 people per train.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/a-jargon-free-explanation-of-how-ai-large-language-models-work/

When ChatGPT was introduced last fall, it sent shockwaves through the technology industry and the larger world. Machine learning researchers had been experimenting with large language models (LLMs) for a few years by that point, but the general public had not been paying close attention and didn't realize how powerful they had become.

Today, almost everyone has heard about LLMs, and tens of millions of people have tried them out. But not very many people understand how they work.