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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/youtube-may-face-billions-in-fines-if-ftc-confirms-child-privacy-violations/

Four nonprofit groups seeking to protect kids' privacy online asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate YouTube today, after back-to-back reports allegedly showed that YouTube is still targeting personalized ads on videos "made for kids."

Now it has become urgent that the FTC probe YouTube's data and advertising practices, the groups' letter said, and potentially intervene. Otherwise, it's possible that YouTube could continue to allegedly harvest data on millions of kids, seemingly in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the FTC Act.

The first report alleging YouTube's noncompliance with federal laws came last week from Adalytics and was quickly corroborated by research from Fairplay, one of the groups behind the FTC letter, The New York Times reported. Both groups ran ad campaigns to test if YouTube was really blocking all personalized ads from appearing in children's channels, as YouTube said it was. Both found that "Google and YouTube permit and report on behavioral ad targeting on 'made-for-kids' videos, even though neither should be possible under COPPA."

Google spokesperson Michael Aciman told The New York Times that these reports "point to a fundamental misunderstanding of how advertising works on made-for-kids content."

[...] But in their letter, child advocates told FTC Chair Lina Khan that they have "serious questions" about whether Google is being honest about ad targeting. After running targeted ad campaigns, Fairplay reported that YouTube placed its behavioral ads on children's channels 1,446 times. If YouTube was operating in compliance with COPPA as it claimed, Fairplay said that these campaigns would have resulted in zero ad placements.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Roughly a century before the Inca empire came to power in A.D. 1400, blasts of human-produced thunder may have rumbled off a ridge high in the Andes Mountains.

New evidence indicates that people who lived there around 700 years ago stomped rhythmically on a special dance floor that amplified their pounding into a thunderous boom as they worshipped a thunder god.

Excavations at a high-altitude site in Peru called Viejo Sangayaico have revealed how members of a regional farming and herding group, the Chocorvos, constructed this reverberating platform, says archaeologist Kevin Lane of the University of Buenos Aires. Different layers of soil, ash and guano created a floor that absorbed shocks while emitting resonant sounds when people stomped on it. This ceremonial surface worked like a large drum that groups of 20 to 25 people could have played with their feet, Lane reports in the September Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

These findings, from a ridgetop ritual area that faces a nearby mountain peak, provide a rare glimpse of the role played by sound and dance in ancient societies (SN: 11/18/10).

[...] His team acoustically tested the platform by stomping on it one at a time and in groups of two to four while measuring the noise produced. The same was done while a circle of four people stomp-danced across the platform.

The resulting sounds ranged in intensity from 60 to 80 decibels, roughly equivalent to between a loud conversation and a noisy restaurant, Lane says. Larger groups of Chocorvos dancers, possibly accompanied by singing and musical instruments, would have raised a much bigger racket.

K. Lane. Pounding the ground for the thunder god: Sounding platforms in the Prehispanic Andes (CE 1000 1532). Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Vol. 71, September 2023, 101515. doi: 10.1016/j.jaa.2023.101515.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microchips in the Parmigiano and Other Ways Europeans Are Fighting Fake Food:

Parmigiano-Reggiano producers are seeking new ways to protect the market for the world-famous pasta topping. Their latest trick to beat counterfeiters is edible microchips.

Italian producers of parmesan cheese have been fighting against imitations for years. Now, makers of Parmigiano-Reggiano, as the original parmesan cheese is officially called, are slapping the microchips on their 90-pound cheese wheels as part of an endless cat-and-mouse game between makers of authentic and fake products.

"We keep fighting with new methods," said Alberto Pecorari, who is in charge of protecting Parmigiano's authenticity for the consortium representing producers. "We won't give up."

Other European food producers are also going to ever greater lengths to protect their hallowed brand names against knockoffs. Guaranteeing food authenticity is big business in the European Union and more than 3,500 EU products have received protected status in addition to Italy's Parmigiano, including Greek feta cheese, French Champagne and Italian Parma raw ham.

[...] New methods to guarantee the origin of products are being used across the EU. Some wineries are putting serial numbers, invisible ink and holograms on their bottles. So-called DNA fingerprinting of milk bacteria pioneered in Switzerland, which isn't in the EU, is now being tested inside the bloc as a method for identifying cheese.

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/science/otzi-iceman-genome-appearance-genetics/

Ötzi the Iceman is one of the most well-studied individuals in human history, but there always seems to be more to learn about him. A new genomic study has now found that he didn't look the way previous studies had imagined him – instead he was bald, his skin was darker, and he had an ancestry that was far more exotic and isolated than previously thought.

In September 1991, two hikers discovered a human body in the Alps near the Austria and Italy border. At first they assumed they'd stumbled on an unlucky modern mountaineer, but on closer, scientific investigation, it was determined that the chap had died about 5,300 years ago. In the three decades since his discovery, Ötzi has been studied extensively, with scientists able to figure out what he ate, how he dressed, how he lived and how he died.

His full genome was published in 2012, allowing scientists to reconstruct an image of what he might have looked like. From that data, Ötzi was imagined as a fairly light-skinned man with a bushy beard, a thick head of unkempt hair, deep-set eyes and wrinkled skin beyond his 45 years of life. But a new study, using more comprehensive genomic analysis techniques, upends much of that picture.

Previously:
    Ötzi the Iceman's Last Meal
    Study: Ötzi the Iceman Probably Thawed and Refroze Several Times
    Ötzi the Iceman May Have Scaled Ice-Free Alps

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

Sometimes you just can't beat the original summary:

Some aspects of our Universe, like the strength of gravity's pull, the speed of light, and the mass of an electron, don't have any underlying explanation for why they have the values they do. For each aspect like this, a fundamental constant is required to "lock in" the specific value that we observe these properties take on in our Universe. All told, we need 26 fundamental constants to explain the known Universe: the Standard Model plus gravity. But even with that, some mysteries still remain unsolved.

Ask Ethan explains what these constants are, and 4 puzzles that might mandate more.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

"US copyright law protects only works of human creation," judge writes:

Art generated entirely by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted because "human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim," a federal judge ruled on Friday.

The US Copyright Office previously rejected plaintiff Stephen Thaler's application for a copyright because the work lacked human authorship, and he challenged the decision in US District Court for the District of Columbia. Thaler and the Copyright Office both moved for summary judgment in motions that "present the sole issue of whether a work generated entirely by an artificial system absent human involvement should be eligible for copyright," Judge Beryl Howell's memorandum opinion issued Friday noted.

Howell denied Thaler's motion for summary judgment, granted the Copyright Office's motion, and ordered that the case be closed.

Thaler sought a copyright for an image titled, "A Recent Entrance to Paradise," which was produced by a computer program that he developed, the ruling said. In his application for a copyright, he identified the author as the Creativity Machine, the name of his software.

Thaler's application "explained the work had been 'autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine,' but that plaintiff sought to claim the copyright of the 'computer-generated work' himself 'as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,'" Howell wrote. "The Copyright Office denied the application on the basis that the work 'lack[ed] the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim,' noting that copyright law only extends to works created by human beings."

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee will be Friday, August 25th, 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 be published when available. In the meeting we plan to discuss mechanicjay's report on different entity types and the first draft of the bylaws, which was posted to janrinok's journal previously.

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

Our community is encouraged to observe and participate, and is therefore invited to the meeting. SoylentNews is, after all, People!

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

One of the most prominent pirated book repositories used for training AI, Books3, has been kicked out from the online nest it had been roosting in for nearly three years. Rights-holders have been at war with online pirates for decades, but artificial intelligence is like oil seeping into copyright law’s water. The two simply do not mix, and the fumes rising from the surface just need a spark to set the entire concept of intellectual property rights alight.

As first reported by TorrentFreak, the large pirate repository The Eye took down the Books3 dataset after the Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance sent the site a DMCA takedown. Now trying to access that dataset gives a 404 error. The Eye still hosts other training data for AI, but the portion allotted for books has vanished.

[...] . The nonprofit research group EleutherAI originally released Books3 as a part of the AI training set The Pile, an 800 GB open source chunk of training data comprising 22 other datasets specifically designed for training language models. Rights Group said the organization “denied responsibility” for Books3. Gizmodo reached out to EleutherAI for comment, but we did not receive a response.

The Eye claims it regularly complies with all valid DMCA requests, though that data set was originally uploaded by AI developer and prominent open source AI proponent Shawn Presser back in 2020. His stated goal at the time was to open up AI development beyond companies like OpenAI, which trained its earlier large language models on the still-unknown “Books1” and “Books2” repositories. The Books3 repository contained 196,640 books all in plain.txt format and was supposed to give fledgling AI projects a leg up against the likes of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

Over Twitter DM, Presser called the attack on Books3 a travesty for open source AI. While other major companies and VC-funded startups get away with including copyrighted data in their training data, grassroots projects need something to compete—and that’s what Books3 was for.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/record-labels-sue-internet-archive-for-digitizing-obsolete-vintage-records/

Major record labels are suing the Internet Archive, accusing the nonprofit of "massive" and "blatant" copyright infringement "of works by some of the greatest artists of the Twentieth Century."

The lawsuit was filed Friday in a US district court in New York by UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Concord Bicycle Assets, CMGI, Sony Music Entertainment, and Arista Music. It targets the Internet Archive's "Great 78 Project," which was launched in 2006.

For the Great 78 Project, the Internet Archive partners with recording engineer George Blood— who is also a defendant in the lawsuit—to digitize sound recordings on 78 revolutions-per-minute (RPM) records. These early sound recordings are typically of poor quality and were made between 1898 and the late 1950s by using very brittle materials. The goal of the Great 78 Project was to preserve these early recordings so they would not be lost as records break and could continue to be studied as originally recorded.

In a blog post responding to the record labels' lawsuit, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said that the Internet Archive is currently reviewing the challenge and taking it seriously. However, Kahle characterizes the Great 78 Project as providing "free public access to a largely forgotten but culturally important medium," claiming that "there shouldn't be conflict here."
[...]
Days after record labels filed their complaint, a court document was unsealed showing that the Internet Archive had reached a joint agreement with book publishers due to the publishers' legal victory earlier this year. If the judge signs off, the agreement would permanently bar the Internet Archive from lending any unauthorized scans of books when authorized e-book versions exist, Publishers Weekly reported.

The Internet Archive would also be barred from profiting from any infringing works.

It's unclear how high the damages are in this case, but the agreement includes an all-inclusive "confidential monetary settlement" that "substantially" covers publishers' legal fees and costs, as well as damages and other claims. Previously it was estimated that the case could cost Internet Archive more than $19 million, which The Register reported amounts to approximately half of the nonprofit's 2019 budget.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Warnock and Chuck Geschke co-created the Postcript page-description language, and in Warnock's garage in 1982, they started Adobe Systems to turn it into a product. Dr Geschke died in 2021, and in our obituary for him we discussed Postscript's significance.

Steve Jobs attempted to buy Adobe – named after the creek at the back of Warnock's garage – for five million dollars the year it was founded. Warnock and Geschke refused, but sold him 19 percent of the company and licensed their software to Apple, which used it in the Apple LaserWriter – arguably the product which saved the Macintosh. Postscript was very much not Warnock's only gift to posterity, though.

John Warnock was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1940, and obtained all three of his degrees (bachelor's, master's, and doctorate) from the University of Utah. He also met his future wife, graphic designer Marva (née Mullins), while studying at the university.

[...] His 1969 doctoral thesis, "A Hidden Surface Algorithm for Computer Generated Halftone Pictures," described what is now known as the Warnock Algorithm, and in his words [PDF], he has "the dubious distinction of having written the shortest doctoral thesis in University of Utah history." It is a mere 32 pages long [PDF], and notably contains no computer code whatsoever.

Rocky Mudbutt writes:

Collecting charge from a ribbon of single layer graphene, with a pair of diodes at the nanometer scale is a novel approach to converting heat to electricity.

Scitechdaily.com article on Non Linear power capture

From a new study published in the journal Physical Review E titled Charging capacitors from thermal fluctuations using diodes by P. M. Thibado, J. C. Neu, Pradeep Kumar, Surendra Singh and L. L. Bonilla, 16 August 2023, Physical Review

We theoretically consider a graphene ripple as a Brownian particle coupled to an energy storage circuit. When circuit and particle are at the same temperature, the second law forbids harvesting energy from the thermal motion of the Brownian particle, even if the circuit contains a rectifying diode. However, when the circuit contains a junction followed by two diodes wired in opposition, the approach to equilibrium may become ultraslow. Detailed balance is temporarily broken as current flows between the two diodes and charges storage capacitors. The energy harvested by each capacitor comes from the thermal bath of the diodes while the system obeys the first and second laws of thermodynamics.

[...] The scientists discovered that when the storage capacitors have an initial charge of zero, the circuit draws power from the thermal environment to charge them. The team then demonstrated that the system satisfies both the first and second laws of thermodynamics throughout the charging process. They also found that larger storage capacitors yield more stored charge and that a smaller graphene capacitance provides both a higher initial rate of charging and a longer time to discharge. These characteristics are important because they allow time to disconnect the storage capacitors from the energy harvesting circuit before the net charge is lost.

Journal Reference:
P. M. Thibado, J. C. Neu, Pradeep Kumar, Surendra Singh, and L. L. Bonilla, Charging capacitors from thermal fluctuations using diodes, Phys. Rev. E 108, 024130 – Published 16 August 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.108.024130

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward wrote in with a pre-landing story:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-66541956.amp:

India's space agency has released latest images of the Moon as its third lunar mission starts descending towards the little-explored south pole.

The pictures have been taken by Vikram, Chandrayaan-3's lander, which began the last phase of its mission on Thursday.

Vikram, which carries a rover in its belly, is due to land near the south pole on 23 August.

The lander detached from the propulsion module, which carried it close to the Moon, on Thursday.

Now updated with a story about the successful landing: Chandrayaan-3: India makes historic landing near Moon's south pole:

The Vikram lander from Chandrayaan-3 successfully touched down as planned at 18:04 local time (12:34 GMT).

[...] On Wednesday, tense moments preceded the touchdown as the lander - called Vikram after Isro founder Vikram Sarabhai - began its precarious descent, carrying within its belly the 26kg rover named Pragyaan (the Sanskrit word for wisdom).

The lander's speed was gradually reduced from 1.68km per second to almost zero, enabling it to make a soft landing on the lunar surface.

[...] One of the mission's major goals is to hunt for water-based ice which, scientists say, could support human habitation on the Moon in future. It could also be used for supplying propellant for spacecraft headed to Mars and other distant destinations. Scientists say the surface area that remains in permanent shadow there is huge and could hold reserves of water ice.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Modders just changed GPU overclocking forever:

Modders have released two new tools that could change GPU overclocking significantly. OMGVflash and NVflashk have effectively cracked a security feature on recent Nvidia GPUs, allowing extreme overclockers to flash new vBIOS files to graphics cards.

About a decade ago, Nvidia locked down its GPUs. Graphics cards are governed by a vBIOS, which specifies such things as the power limit of the GPU, maximum clock speed, and parameters like when the GPU will shut down due to thermals. Prior to Nvidia's GeForce 900-series GPUs, extreme overclockers could flash a new vBIOS onto the GPU to achieve higher levels of performance. But Nvidia locked this functionality with an on-chip security processor.

The ability is returning with the new tools. Both were developed by members of the TechPowerUp forums independently, and the outlet says it has "hand-inspected the binary code" to ensure they're free of viruses.

Outside of tinkering, the tools can boost performance on cheaper graphics cards. Many brands sell a model close to list price and an overclocked model for slightly more. The only difference between the cards, in most cases, is the vBIOS file. The tools allow for cross-flashing as well, allowing you to flash a vBIOS from one vendor onto the card of a different vendor.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Positive Reviews Signal Film Will Be A Flop; Negative Reviews — a Hit:

When one thinks of movie reviews, one might see them as harbingers of success or failure at the box office. Some researchers have previously found that both positive and negative reviews correlate to box office revenues, and the effect of negative reviews diminishes over time.

However, researchers at the University of California, Davis, suggest that is not the case.

Researchers analyzed pre-release commentary and opening weekend box office revenue, turning the impact of movie reviews on its head and revealing an unexpected harbinger of failure phenomenon in the movie industry.

[...] The study analyzed a plethora of pre-release movie reviews penned by film critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

Researchers wanted to see if they could predict a movie's success based on these reviews. As it turned out, the so-called harbingers of failure did exist.

"Interestingly, when these critics penned positive pre-release reviews, they signaled that the movie would be a flop," said Loupos. "Conversely, their negative reviews hinted towards the film being a success. The stronger the sentiment in either direction, the stronger the predictive signal."

[...] What's more surprising, this pattern persisted even with top critics. Expertise, it seems, does not always lead to accurate predictions, Loupos said. "This surprising outcome challenges the prevailing belief that positive reviews equate to better box office revenues," he said.

[...] "Our fresh perspective on the role of critics' personalities opens up new avenues in our understanding of the film review space," Loupos remarked. "It's an important acknowledgment that the movie industry is a puzzle of complexity and unpredictability."

Got any good movie recommendations?

Journal Reference:
Loupos, P., Peng, Y., Li, S. et al. What reviews foretell about opening weekend box office revenue: the harbinger of failure effect in the movie industry [open]. Mark Lett 34, 513–534 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-023-09665-8

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Autonomous Products Like Robot Vacuums Make Our Lives Easier. But Do They Deprive Us of Meaningful Experiences?

[...] Whether it is cleaning homes or mowing lawns, consumers increasingly delegate manual tasks to autonomous products. These gadgets operate without human oversight and free consumers from mundane chores. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that people feel a sense of satisfaction when they complete household chores. Are autonomous products such as robot vacuums and cooking machines depriving consumers from meaningful experiences?

This new research shows that, despite unquestionable benefits such as gains in efficiency and convenience, autonomous products strip away a source of meaning in life. As a result, consumers are hesitant to buy these products.

The researchers argue that manual labor is an important source of meaning in life. This is in line with research showing that everyday tasks have value—chores such as cleaning may not make us happy, but they add meaning to our lives. As de Bellis explains, "Our studies show that 'meaning of manual labor' causes consumers to reject autonomous products. For example, these consumers have a more negative attitude toward autonomous products and are also more prone to believe in the disadvantages of autonomous products relative to their advantages."