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DannyB writes:

Employees report a rare round of layoffs at Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space venture

Several employees at Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin are reporting that they've been laid off, marking a rare turnabout in the rapid growth of Jeff Bezos' space venture.

The reduction in force appears to be focused in the areas of human resources and talent acquisition [ . . . . ]

[ . . . . ] it looked as if "some (but not all) folks were given the opportunity to find another role" within the privately held company.

[ . . . . ] The company's workforce tally was less than 1,000 as recently as 2018. Two years ago, that count was reported at nearly 4,000 employees, and the figure rose to 6,000 by July 2022. Blue Origin's current number of employees — including workers in Kent as well as in Alabama, California, Florida, Texas, the Washington, D.C., area and other locales — is said to have hit nearly 11,000.

[ . . . . ] Blue Origin is continuing to hire employees for other types of jobs, primarily in technical fields.

Blue Origin needs to produce their BE-4 engine in volume and reusable. Their New Glenn rocket needs that engine and ULA's Vulcan Centaur rocket needs that same engine.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Microsoft is alerting users and system administrators that Windows will soon phase out support for older TLS specifications. TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 will be disabled in upcoming Windows releases, as announced in the Windows message center. This change is only for future versions of Windows and newer Windows 11 releases, as indicated by Redmond. It applies to both client and server editions, but current versions of Windows will remain unaffected.

[...] TLS 1.0 (introduced in 1999) and TLS 1.1 (introduced in 2006) have long been outperformed by TLS 1.2 and 1.3. Modern internet software's TLS implementations are engineered to attempt a connection using the highest available protocol version. Data indicates that the usage of TLS 1.0 and 1.1 is relatively low currently. Microsoft is evidently striving to enhance the security of the Windows platform by promoting the adoption of contemporary protocols.

Consequently, starting with the Windows 11 Insider Preview builds set for release in September 2023, TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1 will be disabled by default. This change will also be seen in Windows 12 and subsequent versions. Microsoft has conducted tests on TLS deprecation and identified a "non-exhaustive" list of applications that are dependent on TLS 1.0 or 1.1. This list features older versions of SQL Server, Turbo Tax, BlueStacks, ACDSee Photo Studio, among others.

Microsoft clarified that most contemporary applications support TLS 1.2 or higher versions, so the majority of users should face no issues. However, if an application does encounter problems, forthcoming updates for Windows 11 and Windows 12 will offer an option to reactivate the older protocols through a modification to the System Registry.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/09/connected-cars-are-a-privacy-nightmare-mozilla-foundation-says/

Today, the Mozilla Foundation published its analysis of how well automakers handle the privacy of data collected by their connected cars, and the results will be unlikely to surprise any regular reader of Ars Technica. The researchers were horrified by their findings, stating that "cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy."
[...]
For example, Nissan's privacy policy says it can collect "sensitive personal information, including driver's license number, national or state identification number, citizenship status, immigration status, race, national origin, religious or philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation, sexual activity, precise geolocation, health diagnosis data, and genetic information," although it's unlikely your car knows whether you're getting busy in the back seat. While this might be technically possible with a car fitted with a camera-based driver-monitoring system, Nissan's privacy policy notes the data source for the quoted paragraph as "direct contact with users and Nissan employees."

(Although more sophisticated driver-monitoring systems that claim to detect emotional states have been demonstrated at shows like CES, we're unaware of any that are in production.)

Mozilla found plenty more to worry about. Eighty-four percent of the brands they analyzed said they can share your data, and 76 percent said they can sell it. And more than half say they'll share data with the government and law enforcement by request.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has authorized its members employed in the interactive media industry at giant games studios – including Activision, Epic Games, and Electronic Arts – to strike.

[...] In its announcement, Guild president Fran Drescher said AI is partly to blame for the impasse. The statement explains that plenty of work covered by the Interactive Media Agreement is "performance capture" in which artists, some of them stunt performers, "provide digitally captured performances used to give expressive movement to video game characters."

Using AI to replace those performances "poses an enormous threat to these artists' professions," the Guild asserts.

[...] The Guild wants AI protections for its members, and an initial wage rise of 11 percent dated to the expiration of the current deal, plus four percent increases in the second and third years of a new deal. The Guild argues those hikes are "necessary for members' wages to keep up with inflation."

Authorizing the strike doesn't mean it will happen – the Guild's announcement simply means members head into their next round of negotiations, from late September, with approval to withdraw labor.

A representative of the games companies whose staff could strike told CNN the outfits she represents want to reach a fair deal that reflects the value Guild workers bring to games – and sort it out soon.

[...] The concurrent strikes by actors and writers are already kicking holes in broadcasters' and streamers' schedules. Some shows have been suspended indefinitely and others – like the planned Apple TV series Metropolis, based on the classic sci-fi film – have been cancelled outright.

If games suffer the same fate, that could make for a poor holiday season – the peak sales period for game publishers – if not this year, then perhaps in 2024 given the long development cycle required to produce premium games.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The risk of running obsolete code and hardware was highlighted after attackers exfiltrated data from a UK supplier of high-security fencing for military bases. The initial entry point? A Windows 7 PC.

While the supplier, Wolverhampton-based Zaun, said it believed that no classified information was downloaded, reports indicated that attackers were able to obtain data that could be used to gain access to some of the UK's most sensitive military and research sites.

The LockBit Ransom group conducted the attack on the company's network, and Zaun admitted the group may have exfiltrated 10GB of data. The company also confessed that the attack might have reached its server beyond the Windows 7 entry point.

[...] Zaun specializes in high-security perimeter fencing. It isn't a government-approved security contractor, although is approved for government use via the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI). The fact it has fallen victim to a cyberattack and had data downloaded is a reminder for enterprises and organizations to be vigilant regarding every link in the supply chain.

The company boasts: "All our fencing systems can be designed and manufactured with a wide variety of security additions, including toppings and detection technology to complete your perimeter." Unless, it appears, your perimeter is running some distinctly outdated kit.

[...] Paul Brucciani, Cyber Security Advisor at WithSecure, noted the success of LockBit, saying: "The significance of this attack is that by undermining IT security, it is also possible to undermine the physical security of its [the supplier] customers."

Original Submission

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