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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

It seems intuitive that forests would provide better habitat for forest-dwelling wildlife than farms. Yet, in one of the longest-running studies of tropical wildlife populations in the world, Stanford researchers found that over 18 years, smaller farms with varying crop types—interspersed with patches or ribbons of forest—sustain many forest-dependent bird populations in Costa Rica, even as populations decline in forests.

In a paper published Sept. 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nicholas Hendershot and colleagues compared trends in specific bird populations across three landscape types in Costa Rica: forests, diversified farms, and intensive agriculture.

The steepest declines were found in forests, then in intensive agriculture (and the species succeeding in intensive agriculture were often invasive). But on diversified farms, a significant subset of bird species typically found in forests, including some of conservation concern, actually increased over time.

"Birds are kind of a proxy we use to track the health of ecosystems. And the birds we're seeing today aren't the same as we saw 18 to 20 years ago. This paper really documents this pattern," said Hendershot, a postdoctoral fellow at the time of this research in Stanford's Department of Biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S), the Stanford Center for Conservation Biology (CCB), and the Stanford-based Natural Capital Project (NatCap).

While this research implies that diversified farming could be key for biodiversity, the relationship goes both ways: biodiversity is key for food security. In this case, that means having a variety of types of birds feeding on insects and helping to pollinate crops.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Gigabyte has released new firmware and an updated version of the Gigabyte Control Center (GCC) software for the company's Intel motherboards to solve a peculiar bug that corrupts the SPD (serial presence detect) on DDR5 memory modules. Fortunately, the issue only affects the information on the SPD and will not damage the integrity of the memory modules.

There were some user reports on the Baidu Tieba community in China about persistent memory issues with Gigabyte motherboards based on Intel's 600- and 700-series chipsets. After a month of usage, one user stated how his Z790 Aorus Elite AX motherboard stopped detecting one of the DDR5 memory modules. When he finally got it to recognize the memory module, it was showing as having a capacity of 384GB, which was hilarious and scary at the same time. Later, one of the memory kit's XMP profiles disappeared, and then the DDR5-6000 profile had its timings replaced to 1-36-104-194. According to the user, he had replaced the "faulty" memory times, but the outcome was the same. The problem was erratic. Sometimes, it would present itself after a month, sometimes after a week, or after a couple of days.

Another Gigabyte motherboard owner reported similar behaviors on his system. He constantly suffered from system crashes and noted that after one of the incidents, his memory lost the AMD EXPO profile. In another episode, the motherboard corrupted the DDR5-6800 XMP profile with ludicrous timings, such as 34-153-0-0.

The Chinese netizens had labeled the problem as the notorious "burning memory issue" because, at first, many thought that Gigabyte motherboards were burning up and killing the DDR5 memory modules since the system got to a point where it wouldn't boot properly. It may sound like an overreaction at the time, but luckily, the issue only botches the memory timings and not the DRAM voltage. If it did, the result would have been different. As per Gigabyte, the memory should be fine. It's just that the SPD is messed up, and obviously, the wrong parameters prevent the system from posting correctly.

[...] Gigabyte advises its Intel 600- and 700-series motherboard owners to update their motherboard's firmware and GCC to the latest versions to prevent the issue.

[...] If you own an Intel 600- or 700-series motherboard from Gigabyte, don't forget to bring your firmware and GCC to the latest versions to avoid headaches.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/apple-details-reasons-to-abandon-csam-scanning-tool-more-controversy-ensues/

In December, Apple said that it was killing an effort to design a privacy-preserving iCloud photo scanning tool for detecting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the platform. Originally announced in August 2021, the project had been controversial since its inception. Apple first paused it that September in response to concerns from digital rights groups and researchers that such a tool would inevitably be abused and exploited to compromise the privacy and security of all iCloud users. This week, a new child safety group known as Heat Initiative told Apple that it is organizing a campaign to demand that the company "detect, report, and remove" child sexual abuse material from iCloud and offer more tools for users to report CSAM to the company.

Today, in a rare move, Apple responded to Heat Initiative, outlining its reasons for abandoning the development of its iCloud CSAM scanning feature and instead focusing on a set of on-device tools and resources for users known collectively as "Communication Safety" features.
[...]
In 2021, Thorn lauded Apple's plan to develop an iCloud CSAM scanning feature. Gardner said in an email to CEO Tim Cook on Wednesday, which Apple also shared with WIRED, that Heat Initiative found Apple's decision to kill the feature "disappointing."
[...]
Apple maintains that, ultimately, even its own well-intentioned design could not be adequately safeguarded in practice, and that on-device nudity detections for features like Messages, FaceTime, AirDrop, the Photo picker are a safer alternatives. Apple has also begun offering an application programming interface (API) for its Communication Safety features so third-party developers can incorporate them into their apps. Apple says that the communication platform Discord is integrating the features and that app makers broadly have been enthusiastic about adopting them.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-took-my-job-literally-gizmodo-fires-spanish-staff-amid-switch-to-ai-translator/

Last week, Gizmodo parent company G/O Media fired the staff of its Spanish-language site Gizmodo en Español and began to replace their work with AI translations of English-language articles, reports The Verge.

Former Gizmodo writer Matías S. Zavia publicly mentioned the layoffs, which took place via video call on August 29, in a social media post. On August 31, Zavia wrote, "Hello friends. On Tuesday they shut down @GizmodoES to turn it into a translation self-publisher (an AI took my job, literally)."

Previously, Gizmodo en Español had a small but dedicated team who wrote original content tailored specifically for Spanish-speaking readers, as well as producing translations of Gizmodo's English articles. The site represented Gizmodo's first foray into international markets when it launched in 2012 after being acquired from Guanabee.

Newly published articles on the site now contain a link to the English version of the article and a disclaimer stating (via our translation from Google Translate), "This content has been automatically translated from the source material. Due to the nuances of machine translation, there may be slight differences. For the original version, click here."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

In politics, tailored ads make sense, but with real limits to the tailoring:

Recent U.S. elections have raised the question of whether "microtargeting," the use of extensive online data to tailor persuasive messages to voters, has altered the playing field of politics.

Now, a newly-published study led by MIT scholars finds that while targeting is effective in some political contexts, the "micro" part of things may not be the game-changing tool some have assumed.

"In a traditional messaging context where you have one issue you're trying to convince people on, we found that targeting did have a substantial persuasive advantage," says David Rand, an MIT professor and co-author of the study.

Indeed, the study found that tailoring political ads based on one attribute of their intended audience — say, party affiliation — can be 70 percent more effective in swaying policy support than simply showing everyone the single ad that is expected to be most persuasive across the entire population. But targeting political ads using multiple attributes — for instance, ideology, age, and moral values — did not add any further benefit, in the study.
[...] Political microtargeting became the subject of extended attention after the 2016 U.S. elections, when it became widely known that the firm Cambridge Analytica had used data from Facebook to craft highly targeted messages to voters. What scholars have found less clear since then is: Did those ads work?

[...] "There has been a lot of speculation about the promises and perils of microtargeting for the functioning of our democratic system," Berinsky says. "Our study allows us to evaluate in a rigorous way the potential impact of political microtargeting in the real world."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Apple deployments are accelerating across the global enterprise, so it’s surprising that many organizations don't properly recognize that change. Even when companies put Macs, iPhones, and iPads in the hands of their employees, they are failing to manage these deployments. It’s quite shocking.

That’s the biggest take-away from the latest Jamf research, which warns that almost half of enterprises across Europe still don’t have a formal Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policy in place. That’s bad, as it means companies have no control over how employees connect and use corporate resources, creating a nice, soft attack surface for criminals and competitors alike.

[...] BYOD schemes can save company cash, but the real benefit is seen in the productivity, loyalty, and commitment benefits unlocked when employees gain this kind of autonomy. Still, in today’s security environment there are risks that must be managed rather than ignored.

[...] In a statement, Michael Covington, Jamf's vice president for portfolio strategy, said:

“While it is easy to get swept up in the positives surrounding 'anywhere work' programs that empower employees to work remotely on their own schedule, from any location and from any device, organizations need to examine the associated risks and decide how to manage them.

[...] Companies should also set standards — and devices that don’t meet those standards, in terms of security protection, should not gain access to corporate systems. This is all common sense stuff, really. We know the security environment is extremely challenging — even police forces are regularly hacked.

In that context, it makes total sense to think about how to manage the devices connected to your systems and to put in place the software, security, and user education it takes to protect your business environments. The cost of device management is relatively negligible compared to the consequences of a successful ransomware attack, after all.

With this in mind, it’s surprising so many European — and, by inference, global — businesses seem so poorly protected.

Sounds like a nightmare job to work in IT in companies like these.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Glacial cyclicity of the Earth has often been considered on 100,000 year timescales, particularly for the Late Pleistocene (~11,700 to 129,000 years ago) swapping between periods of extensive polar and mountain glacier ice sheets, to warmer interglacial periods when ice sheets and glaciers retreated, with subsequent sea level rise. This is thought to be related to three key drivers affecting the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth from the sun.

Termed Milankovitch cycles, eccentricity considers the shape of Earth's orbit changing from circular to more elliptical over 100,000 year timescales, while obliquity refers to the varying 'tilt' of the planet's axis between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees over 41,000 years (contributing to seasons) and precession, which in simple terms is the direction Earth's axis is pointed and can make the contrast between seasons more extreme in one hemisphere compared to the other.

While the eccentricity cycle has been a major factor thought to drive glacial/interglacial cycles, newer research has suggested that they instead may result from a series of obliquity or precession cycles (especially as the former dominated up to 800,000 years ago). To test this theory, Bethany Hobart, a Doctoral Researcher at the University of California, and colleagues modeled the impacts of glacial termination on 23,000 and 41,000 year cycles.

[...] The research team concluded that it is actually the shortest orbital cycle, precession, that seems to have had the most effect on glacial cyclicity in geological history. For the Late Pleistocene it is the precession forcing in the northern hemisphere during summer that would have helped encourage significant melting of ice sheets and terminated the glacial period.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The National Reconnaissance Office doesn't typically talk about any of its missions, but in an unusual break with precedent, the button-down spy satellite agency is taking a different tack with its next launch Tuesday from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

"We’re trying to be more transparent and share more information," said Chris Scolese, director of the National Reconnaissance Office, in a roundtable with reporters Monday. As more countries and companies launch missions into space, Scolese said the space environment is becoming more congested, contested, and competitive.

"It’s also becoming easier and easier to see what’s going up there," Scolese said. "We want to let people know, to some extent, what our capabilities are."

[...] The US Space Force and the NRO have numerous satellites in geosynchronous orbit, and the mission poised for liftoff Tuesday will help track potential threats to those multibillion-dollar assets.

“Geosynchronous orbit is far away," Scolese said. "Ground-based systems have a harder time seeing what’s up there. This provides us the capability of being in this same orbit, so that we’re closer to what’s happening up there. It will not be looking at the ground, it will be looking at space.”

upstart writes:

With hopes and fears about this technology running wild, it's time to agree on what it can and can't do:

When Taylor Webb played around with GPT-3 in early 2022, he was blown away by what OpenAI's large language model appeared to be able to do. Here was a neural network trained only to predict the next word in a block of text—a jumped-up autocomplete. And yet it gave correct answers to many of the abstract problems that Webb set for it—the kind of thing you'd find in an IQ test. "I was really shocked by its ability to solve these problems," he says. "It completely upended everything I would have predicted."

[...] Last month Webb and his colleagues published an article in Nature, in which they describe GPT-3's ability to pass a variety of tests devised to assess the use of analogy to solve problems (known as analogical reasoning). On some of those tests GPT-3 scored better than a group of undergrads. "Analogy is central to human reasoning," says Webb. "We think of it as being one of the major things that any kind of machine intelligence would need to demonstrate."

What Webb's research highlights is only the latest in a long string of remarkable tricks pulled off by large language models. [...]

And multiple researchers claim to have shown that large language models can pass tests designed to identify certain cognitive abilities in humans, from chain-of-thought reasoning (working through a problem step by step) to theory of mind (guessing what other people are thinking).

These kinds of results are feeding a hype machine predicting that these machines will soon come for white-collar jobs, replacing teachers, doctors, journalists, and lawyers. Geoffrey Hinton has called out GPT-4's apparent ability to string together thoughts as one reason he is now scared of the technology he helped create.

But there's a problem: there is little agreement on what those results really mean. Some people are dazzled by what they see as glimmers of human-like intelligence; others aren't convinced one bit.

upstart writes:

The tool, which will monitor voice chat for any bullying and harassment, will be part of Modern Warfare III:

Shooter video game Call Of Duty has started using AI to listen out for hate speech during online matches.

Publisher Activision said the moderation tool, which uses machine learning technology, would be able to identify discriminatory language and harassment in real time.

Machine learning is what allows AI to learn and adapt on the fly without explicit human instruction, instead using algorithms and the data it's taught with to recognise patterns.

The tool being rolled out in Call Of Duty, called ToxMod, is made by a company called Modulate.

Activision's chief technology officer Michael Vance said it would help make the game "a fun, fair and welcoming experience for all players".

[...] Activision said its existing tools, including the ability for gamers to report others and the automatic monitoring of text chat and offensive usernames, had already seen one million accounts given communications restrictions.

Call Of Duty's code of conduct bans bullying and harassment, including insults based on race, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, culture, faith, and country of origin.

Mr Vance said ToxMod allows the company's moderation efforts to be scaled up significantly by categorising toxic behaviour based on its severity, before a human decides whether action should be taken.

Players will not be able to opt out of having the AI listen in, unless they completely disable in-game voice chat.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] The U.S. government has restricted sales of Nvidia's high-performance compute GPUs to the Middle East and some other countries, the company said in a regulatory filing this week. One of the reasons why the Biden administration decided to require an export license on Nvidia's A100 and H100 products and servers on their base is to thwart China's AI development by preventing the GPUs from being resold to China, reports The Guardian.

"During the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, the U.S. government informed us of an additional licensing requirement for a subset of A100 and H100 products destined to certain customers and other regions, including some countries in the Middle East," a statement by Nvidia reads. "We have sold alternative products in China not subject to the license requirements, such as our A800 or H800 offerings."

The affected chips, namely the H100 and A100 models, are already restricted for sale in China and Russia, which is why Nvidia has developed H800 and A800 models with reduced performance to sell in China. Although Nvidia disclosed these new limitations in a U.S. regulatory filing, the company did not reveal which countries in the Middle East are specifically impacted by these controls.  

Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been strengthening their AI prowess in the recent years, which is why they are significant purchasers of Nvidia's chips. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been in talks with China to deepen their collaborations. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia even entered into a strategic alliance with China, committing to work collaboratively on artificial intelligence projects.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

"A totally unreasonable proposal":

The right-to-repair movement has had its share of adversaries. From Big Tech to politicians and individuals who don't think product repairability should be government-mandated, it has been a tedious battle for a movement that has seen major wins lately. One of the most recent wins came from Apple, a former DIY repair combatant, supporting repairability legislation. But taking Apple's place is a new entity aiming to limit right-to-repair legislation: Scientologists.

Today, 404 Media reported on a letter sent on August 10 to the US Copyright Office by Ryland Hawkins of Author Services Inc. The company, its website and letterhead say, represents the "literary, theatrical, and musical works of L. Ron Hubbard, the late founder of Scientology. Author Services, according to records archived via the WayBackMachine, is owned by the Church of Spiritual Technology, which describes itself as a church within Scientology.

The letter addresses Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which "makes it unlawful to circumvent technological measures used to prevent unauthorized access to copyrighted works." The Scientology group's letter seeks to alter exemptions granted for self-repairing some consumer electronics, like video game consoles, laptops, home appliances, and farming tractors.

[...] The Scientology-tied group seeks an amendment to the exemption so that it doesn't apply to software-powered devices that can only be purchased by someone with particular qualifications or training or that use software "governed by a license agreement negotiated and executed" before purchase.

[...] As to why a Scientology-owned group would care about such a matter, 404 Media suggested that it could have to do with Scientology E-meters, or electropsychometers. The Church of Scientology describes the machines as an "electronic instrument that measures mental state and change of state in individuals and assists the precision and speed of auditing" and that only a Scientology minister or training minister should use. 404 Media noted that some people collect the devices and, oddly enough, you can find E-Meters sold on eBay.

upstart writes:

It Costs Just $400 to Build an AI Disinformation Machine:

International, a state-owned Russian media outlet, posted a series of tweets lambasting US foreign policy and attacking the Biden administration. Each prompted a curt but well-crafted rebuttal from an account called CounterCloud, sometimes including a link to a relevant news or opinion article. It generated similar responses to tweets by the Russian embassy and Chinese news outlets criticizing the US.

Russian criticism of the US is far from unusual, but CounterCloud's material pushing back was: The tweets, the articles, and even the journalists and news sites were crafted entirely by artificial intelligence algorithms, according to the person behind the project, who goes by the name Nea Paw and says it is designed to highlight the danger of mass-produced AI disinformation. Paw did not post the CounterCloud tweets and articles publicly but provided them to WIRED and also produced a video outlining the project.

Paw claims to be a cybersecurity professional who prefers anonymity because some people may believe the project to be irresponsible. The CounterCloud campaign pushing back on Russian messaging was created using OpenAI's text generation technology, like that behind ChatGPT, and other easily accessible AI tools for generating photographs and illustrations, Paw says, for a total cost of about $400.

Paw says the project shows that widely available generative AI tools make it much easier to create sophisticated information campaigns pushing state-backed propaganda.

"I don't think there is a silver bullet for this, much in the same way there is no silver bullet for phishing attacks, spam, or social engineering," Paw says in an email. Mitigations are possible, such as educating users to be watchful for manipulative AI-generated content, making generative AI systems try to block misuse, or equipping browsers with AI-detection tools. "But I think none of these things are really elegant or cheap or particularly effective," Paw says.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-66643241

In a world first, scientists say an 8cm (3in) worm has been found alive in the brain of an Australian woman.

The "string-like structure" was pulled from the patient's damaged frontal lobe during surgery in Canberra last year.

"It was definitely not what we were expecting. Everyone was shocked," said operating surgeon Dr Hari Priya Bandi.

The woman, 64, had for months suffered symptoms like stomach pain, a cough and night sweats, which evolved into forgetfulness and depression.

[...] Her case is believed to be the first instance of a larvae invasion and development in the human brain, researchers said in the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal which reported the case.
'I pulled it out... and it was happily moving'

[...] "Even if you take away the yuck factor, this is a new infection never documented before in a human being."

Researchers warn the case highlights the increased danger of diseases and infections being passed from animals to people.

upstart writes:

China and the U.S. are collecting the same proportion of their populations' DNA profiles — and the FBI wants to double its budget to get even more:

The FBI has amassed 21.7 million DNA profiles — equivalent to about 7 percent of the U.S. population — according to Bureau data reviewed by The Intercept.

The FBI aims to nearly double its current $56.7 million budget for dealing with its DNA catalog with an additional $53.1 million, according to its budget request for fiscal year 2024. "The requested resources will allow the FBI to process the rapidly increasing number of DNA samples collected by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security," the appeal for an increase says.

"When we're talking about rapid expansion like this, it's getting us ever closer to a universal DNA database."

[...] The FBI began building a DNA database as early as 1990. By 1998, it helped create a national database called Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, that spanned all 50 states. Each state maintained its own database, with police or other authorities submitting samples based on their states' rules, and CODIS allowed all the states to search across the entire country. At first, the collection of data was limited to DNA from people convicted of crimes, from crime scenes, and from unidentified remains.

[...] "If you look back at when CODIS was established, it was originally for violent or sexual offenders," Anna Lewis, a Harvard researcher who specializes in the ethical implications of genetics research, told The Intercept. "The ACLU warned that this was going to be a slippery slope, and that's indeed what we've seen."

Today, police have the authority to take DNA samples from anyone sentenced for a felony charge. In 28 states, police can take DNA samples from suspects arrested for felonies but who have not been convicted of any crime. In some cases, police offer plea deals to reduce felony charges to misdemeanor offenses in exchange for DNA samples. Police are even acquiring DNA samples from unwitting people, as The Intercept recently reported.

"It changed massively," Lewis said of the rules and regulations around government DNA collection. "You only have to be a person of interest to end up in these databases."