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looorg writes:

https://neuralink.com/blog/first-clinical-trial-open-for-recruitment/

Neuralink are looking for a few test subjects that have either ALS or are quadriplegics to test their wireless brain human interface. A device that will control a computer keyboard with only the users mind. Also they want to test out how good their robot is at surgery but that is perhaps less appealing.

The PRIME Study (short for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface) – a groundbreaking investigational medical device trial for our fully-implantable, wireless brain-computer interface (BCI) – aims to evaluate the safety of our implant (N1) and surgical robot (R1) and assess the initial functionality of our BCI for enabling people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts.

During the study, the R1 Robot will be used to surgically place the N1 Implant's ultra-fine and flexible threads in a region of the brain that controls movement intention. Once in place, the N1 Implant is cosmetically invisible and is intended to record and transmit brain signals wirelessly to an app that decodes movement intention. The initial goal of our BCI is to grant people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/online-child-safety-law-blocked-after-calif-argued-face-scans-not-that-invasive/

A California law requiring a wide range of platforms to estimate ages of users and protect minors from accessing harmful content appears to be just as unconstitutional as a recently blocked law in Texas requiring age verification to access adult content.

Yesterday, US District Judge Beth Labson Freeman ordered a preliminary injunction stopping California Attorney General Rob Bonta from enforcing the state's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (CAADCA), finding that the law likely violates the First Amendment.

"The Court finds that although the stated purpose of the Act—protecting children when they are online—clearly is important," Freeman wrote, "the CAADCA likely violates the First Amendment."

"Specifically," Freeman said, "the age estimation and privacy provisions thus appear likely to impede the 'availability and use' of information and accordingly to regulate speech," and "the steps a business would need to take to sufficiently estimate the age of child users would likely prevent both children and adults from accessing certain content."

[...] Regulators' attempts to age-gate the Internet have drawn criticism, and courts have repeatedly found that these laws likely run afoul of the First Amendment. But perhaps more troubling, here, Freeman found that CAADCA not only risked restricting speech, but also did not appear to address or mitigate the harms to children identified by the state. Even worse, after California argued that businesses gathering information from children by requiring face scans or other biometric data to estimate user ages was "minimally invasive," Freeman concluded that enforcing the law could cause more harm than good. "Such measures would appear to counter the State's interest in increasing privacy protections for children," Freeman wrote, explaining:

"CAADCA's age estimation provision appears not only unlikely to materially alleviate the harm of insufficient data and privacy protections for children, but actually likely to exacerbate the problem by inducing covered businesses to require consumers, including children, to divulge additional personal information."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft AI team accidentally leaks 38TB of private company data:

AI researchers at Microsoft have made a huge mistake.

According to a new report from cloud security company Wiz, the Microsoft AI research team accidentally leaked 38TB of the company's private data.

38 terabytes. That's a lot of data.

The exposed data included full backups of two employees' computers. These backups contained sensitive personal data, including passwords to Microsoft services, secret keys, and more than 30,000 internal Microsoft Teams messages from more than 350 Microsoft employees.

We found a public AI repo on GitHub, exposing over 38TB of private files – including personal computer backups of @Microsoft employees 👨‍💻

So, how did this happen? The report explains that Microsoft's AI team uploaded a bucket of training data containing open-source code and AI models for image recognition. Users who came across the Github repository were provided with a link from Azure, Microsoft's cloud storage service, in order to download the models.

One problem: The link that was provided by Microsoft's AI team gave visitors complete access to the entire Azure storage account. And not only could visitors view everything in the account, they could upload, overwrite, or delete files as well.

[martyb ed. update: My first hard disk drive was a Seagare ST-231. It could store so much data that I had to partition it into two "devices" under Microsoft DOS 3.2: 32MB and 8MB. It was so large that I thought that nobody would be able to use all that disk space! Over time, newest drives has had: 80MB, 200MB, and 1TB. My current PC has a 2TB drive... and that is relatively "small" by today's standards. Microsoft lost 38TB?!]

How large were your drives over time?

Original Submission

Alex "Sandy" Pentland[1] is somewhere near the top of the AI pantheon these days, here's his most recent talk, "Engineering Ecosystems with AI", given online on Friday 15 Sept., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m8EsEmZPYQ at the MIT Mobility Forum. In the intro it is mentioned that this was a dry run for Pentland's upcoming keynote to the U. S. National Academy of Sciences. From the YT summary,

This talk covers how our society is having difficulties engineering heterogeneous systems of people and technologies; for instance, our systems for dealing with pandemics, climate change, inequality, or financial stress have been less than completely successful, in significant part because of unanticipated human behaviors.

He discusses recent work on models of panics, cascades and other highly nonlinear, long tailed phenomena--using aggregated census data--as an example of how AI and big data can be socially useful.

Then he takes the data further, showing that when people move between communities (both locally and internationally with migration) is when progress really happens. AI may have a similar "melting pot" effect, helping mid-level workers/earners (which he defines) in closing some of the performance/creativity/earnings gap to high-level workers. In particular, AI developed on restricted and well defined training sets may not get the headlines of ChatGPT, but will be very useful in many fields.

Near the end he quotes Xi Jinping of China to make it clear how big this social change is going to be (paraphrased):

Xi is the largest representative, loudest voice for Marxism and he recently said, 'data is a new primary means of production along with capital and labor'. And if you think about that, what he's saying is that classic Marxism is done. It's now not a battle between capital and labor. It's a battle between data, capital and labor and that sort of gives you a sense of the magnitude of this problem.

If you look at what society did with capital and labor, it took a century or more, for instance, to form labor unions to pressure companies, to establish principles to get laws enacted. ... And it's not a fixed thing, it's not like you can do it once and it's done. It evolves over time. So currently we're in a new evolutionary phase of labor and a new evolutionary phase of capital. The problem with data is that we don't have *any* institutions, we don't have *any* norms for it. It's new, so we're back in the robber baron era of capital, we're back in the early industrial age where kids were working 14 hour days. That's where we are with data. Just face it! What we have to do is develop the right institutions to be able to deal with this now-critical element of society.

I don't watch many videos, but this one was well worth the time. His actual talk is about 25 minutes, the rest of the hour is intro and many questions/discussions at the end.

[1]Here's Pentland's short CV, https://www.media.mit.edu/people/sandy/overview/

Original Submission

"aristarchus" writes:

Osiris-Rex: Nasa awaits fiery return of asteroid Bennu samples

A seven-year mission to study what has been described as the most dangerous rock in the Solar System is about to reach its dramatic conclusion.

The Osiris-Rex spacecraft is bringing home the "soil" samples it grabbed from the surface of asteroid Bennu.

These dusty materials will be dropped off by the Nasa probe as it sweeps past the Earth on Sunday.

They'll be tucked inside a capsule to protect them from a fiery descent to the US State of Utah.

Scientists expect the samples' chemistry to reveal new information about the formation of the planets 4.5 billion years ago, and possibly even to give insights into how life got started on our world.

Touchdown on desert land belonging to the Department of Defense is expected at 08:55 local time (Utah) (14:55 UTC; 15:55 BST).

When: NASA will start its live coverage at 10 a.m. EST on Sunday, Sept. 24, 2023. The agency expects the capsule to parachute down to the desert at around 10:55 a.m. EST.

How: You can watch online at:

- the agency's website via https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

or NASA TV's YouTube channel

[Updated at 09:28 UTC with links to video feeds. JR]

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/yelp-names-and-shames-businesses-paying-for-5-star-reviews/

Yelp has started publicly naming and shaming businesses that pay for reviews. The review site's new index [replaced bad link in original article] documents businesses offering everything from a crisp $100 bill for leaving the best review to a $400 Home Depot gift card for a 5-star review. It also lists every business whose reviews have ever been suspected of suspicious activity, like spamming the site with multiple reviews from a single IP address.

Engadget dubbed Yelp's new index a "wall of shame," suggesting that the information may be used by federal agencies who have spent the past few years cracking down on paid fake reviews. This year, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a ban on "the use of deceptive reviews and testimonials," with penalties up to $50,000 for businesses "caught buying, selling or manipulating online reviews," Engadget reported.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

TSMC Reportedly Mulls Advanced Chip Packaging Facility in Arizona

TSMC is in talks with Arizona officials to build its chip packaging facility in the state, Katie Hobbs, governor of Arizona, said in Taipei after visiting the world's No.1 foundry's headquarters, reports Bloomberg. If the plan comes to fruition, then TSMC's will have a vertically integrated chip production chain in the USA for the first time ever.

TSMC has built Fab 21 in Arizona and is currently installing production tools there. The company is also building up the second phase of the fab and has approved plans to invest $40 billion in these two production facilities. But the company apparently does not want to stop there and is discussing the possibility of building an advanced packaging fab in the state, too, as this will help it to assemble complex system-in-packages for its clients from the U.S. on American soil.

Previously: Apple Chips Made In The US Still Require Assembly In Taiwan, Report Suggests

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/eu-game-devs-ask-regulators-to-look-at-unitys-anti-competitive-bundling/

In the wake of Unity's sudden fee structure change announcement last week, a European trade group representing thousands of game developers is calling on governments to "update their regulatory framework" to curb what they see as a "looming market failure" caused by "potentially anti-competitive market behavior."

In an open letter published last week, the European Games Developer Federation goes through a lot of the now-familiar arguments for why Unity's decision to charge up to $0.20 per game install will be bad for the industry. The federation of 23 national game developer trade associations argues that the new fee structure will make it "much harder for [small and midsize developers] to build reliable business plans" by "significantly increas[ing] the game development costs for most game developers relying on [Unity's] services."

[...] Beyond simply being bad for the industry, though, the EGDF argues that "Unity's move might be anti-competitive" in a way that demands government action. The group takes a special exception to Unity's history of bundling its game engine with services like analytics, in-game chat, ad networks and mediation tools, user acquisition tools, and more. That kind of bundling creates "a significant vendor lock risk for game developers using Unity services," which "also makes it difficult for many game middleware developers to compete against Unity."

Previously:

• Unity Promises "Changes" to Install Fee Plans as Developer Fallout Continues
• Developer Dis-Unity

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/09/archaeologists-find-500-year-old-board-game-carved-in-ruins-of-polish-castle/

Some 500 years ago, construction workers in the midst of building Ćmielów Castle in Poland carved a simple game board into a slab of the sandstone floor as a diversion for their leisure time. At least that's one possible scenario for the existence of a game board recently discovered by archaeologists in the castle ruins; it's also possible the board could have been carved by children or by servants after the castle was completed, or it may have been meant as a symbolic message.

As previously reported, there is archaeological evidence for various kinds of board games from all over the world dating back millennia: Senet and Mehen in ancient Egypt, for example, or a strategy game called ludus latrunculorum ("game of mercenaries") favored by Roman legions. A 4,000-year-old board discovered last year at an archaeological site in Oman's Qumayrah Valley might be a precursor to an ancient Middle Eastern game known as the Royal Game of Ur (or the Game of Twenty Squares), a two-player game that may have been one of the precursors to backgammon (or was simply replaced in popularity by backgammon). Like backgammon, it's essentially a race game in which players compete to see who can move all their pieces along the board before their opponent.

This latest discovery isn't quite as old as that in terms of the actual carved board, but the game could be just as ancient. According to archaeologist Tomasz Olszacki, it's a two-person strategy board game called Mill, also known as Nine Men's Morris, Merels, or "cowboy checkers" in North America. The earliest-known Mill game board was found carved into the roofing slabs of an Egyptian temple at Kurna, which likely predates the Common Era. Historians believe it was well-known to the Romans, who may have learned of the game through trade routes.

Original Submission

Signal Preps its Encryption Engine for the Quantum Doomsday Inevitability

upstart writes:

Signal preps its encryption engine for the quantum doomsday inevitability:

The Signal Foundation, maker of the Signal Protocol that encrypts messages sent by more than a billion people, has rolled out an update designed to prepare for a very real prospect that's never far from the thoughts of just about every security engineer on the planet: the catastrophic fall of cryptographic protocols that secure some of the most sensitive secrets today.

The Signal Protocol is a key ingredient in the Signal, Google RCS, and WhatsApp messengers, which collectively have more than 1 billion users. It's the engine that provides end-to-end encryption, meaning messages encrypted with the apps can be decrypted only by the recipients and no one else, including the platforms enabling the service. Until now, the Signal Protocol encrypted messages and voice calls with X3DH, a specification based on a form of cryptography known as Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman.

Often abbreviated as ECDH, Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman is a protocol unto its own. It combines two main building blocks. The first involves the use of elliptic curves to form asymmetric key pairs, each of which is unique to each user. One key in the pair is public and available to anyone to use for encrypting messages sent to the person who owns it. The corresponding private key is closely guarded by the user. It allows the user to decrypt the messages. Cryptography relying on a public-private key pair is often known as asymmetric encryption.

The security of asymmetric encryption is based on mathematical one-way functions. Also known as trapdoor functions, these problems are easy to compute in one direction and substantially harder to compute in reverse. In elliptic curve cryptography, this one-way function is based on the Discrete Logarithm problem in mathematics. The key parameters are based on specific points in an elliptic curve, which is defined as the field of integers modulo prime P.

When someone knows the starting point (A) in the above image showing an elliptic curve and the number of hops required to get to the endpoint (E), it's easy to know where (E) is. But when all someone knows is the starting and end points, it's next to impossible to deduce how many hops are required.

As explained in an Ars article from 2013:

Let's imagine this curve as the setting for a bizarre game of billiards. Take any two points on the curve and draw a line through them; the line will intersect the curve at exactly one more place. In this game of billiards, you take a ball at point A and shoot it toward point B. When it hits the curve, the ball bounces either straight up (if it's below the x-axis) or straight down (if it's above the x-axis) to the other side of the curve.

We can call this billiards move on two points "dot." Any two points on a curve can be dotted together to get a new point.

A dot B = C

We can also string moves together to "dot" a point with itself over and over.

A dot A = B

A dot B = C

A dot C = D

...

It turns out that if you have two points, an initial point "dotted" with itself n times to arrive at a final point, finding out n when you only know the final point and the first point is hard. To continue our bizarro billiards metaphor, imagine that one person plays our game alone in a room for a random period of time. It is easy for him to hit the ball over and over following the rules described above. If someone walks into the room later and sees where the ball has ended up, even if they know all the rules of the game and where the ball started, they cannot determine the number of times the ball was struck to get there without running through the whole game again until the ball gets to the same point. Easy to do, hard to undo. This is the basis for a very good trapdoor function.

Well, that's all clear then.....

sweettea writes:

The All Systems Go! conference happened last week in Berlin, devoted to systemd / container / image-building topics. Several cool talks focused on immutable distributions: their usages and virtues, particularly NixOS. NixOS is the foremost immutable, reproducable, and atomically upgradable Linux distribution, and a powerful building block for building easily deployable services.

Andreas Herrmann, the first Bazel community expert, talked about the value of a reproducible build of your software and the merits of using an immutable distribution like Nix to make your builds better. Xe Iaso's talk on writing your own NixOS modules for your own build dependencies to ensure your software is reproducable. Lots more talks, but mostly systemd-related: check out the list of talks and the recordings!

All Systems Go 2023 will feature Lennart Poettering talking about Unified Kernel Images along with talks on encrypted Btrfs sub-volumes, Linux security, BPF filtering, soft reboots, Linux and TPMs, systemd-repart, mkosi, and Microsoft talking about their image-based Linux deployments on Azure, among other topics.

Related: The Future of Linux: Exploring Immutable Distributions

Original Submission

cmdrklarg writes:

https://www.sciencealert.com/nasas-parker-probe-flew-through-a-massive-solar-eruption-and-caught-it-all-on-camera

NASA's Parker Solar Probe flew right through a massive solar eruption and caught the whole thing on camera. It's the first up-close footage ever captured of a solar explosion like this.

The video, released by scientists at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, features an especially powerful coronal mass ejection that took place last year.

CMEs are large explosions of super-hot plasma that erupt from the Sun's atmosphere. They consist of charged particles that can trigger radio blackouts and cause other mayhem if they strike Earth.

NASA said that the CME that struck the Parker Solar Probe was "one of the most powerful coronal mass ejections ever recorded."

Lucky for those scientists currently studying the sun, NASA's Parker Solar Probe flew right through the CME and survived it, capturing the event on camera. (The eruption starts at around the 14-second mark in the clip below.)

[...] Also read that the CME was around the same size as the 1859 "Carrington Event". The Carrington Event was the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, peaking from 1 to 2 September 1859 during solar cycle 10. [...] The geomagnetic storm was most likely the result of a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun colliding with Earth's magnetosphere.

Woof!!

Original Submission

Significance:
A consistent and comprehensive quantitative framework of the cells in the human body could benefit many areas of biology. We compile data to estimate cell mass, size range, and cell count for some 1,200 cell groups, from the smallest red blood cells to the largest muscle fibers, across 60 tissues in a representative male, female, and 10-y-old child. We find large-scale patterns revealing that both cellular biomass in any given logarithmic cell-size class and the coefficient of cell-size variation are both approximately independent of cell size. These patterns are suggestive of a whole-organism trade-off between cell size and count and imply the existence of cell-size homeostasis across cell types.

Abstract:
Cell size and cell count are adaptively regulated and intimately linked to growth and function. Yet, despite their widespread relevance, the relation between cell size and count has never been formally examined over the whole human body. Here, we compile a comprehensive dataset of cell size and count over all major cell types, with data drawn from >1,500 published sources. We consider the body of a representative male (70 kg), which allows further estimates of a female (60 kg) and 10-y-old child (32 kg). We build a hierarchical interface for the cellular organization of the body, giving easy access to data, methods, and sources (https://humancelltreemap.mis.mpg.de/). In total, we estimate total body counts of ≈36 trillion cells in the male, ≈28 trillion in the female, and ≈17 trillion in the child. These data reveal a surprising inverse relation between cell size and count, implying a trade-off between these variables, such that all cells within a given logarithmic size class contribute an equal fraction to the body's total cellular biomass. We also find that the coefficient of variation is approximately independent of mean cell size, implying the existence of cell-size regulation across cell types. Our data serve to establish a holistic quantitative framework for the cells of the human body, and highlight large-scale patterns in cell biology.

NotSanguine writes:

The University of Michigan issued a press release concerning new research on the growth (or lack thereof) of large-scale structures in the universe.

From the press release:

As the universe evolves, scientists expect large cosmic structures to grow at a certain rate: dense regions such as galaxy clusters would grow denser, while the void of space would grow emptier.

But University of Michigan researchers have discovered that the rate at which these large structures grow is slower than predicted by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.

They also showed that as dark energy accelerates the universe's global expansion, the suppression of the cosmic structure growth that the researchers see in their data is even more prominent than what the theory predicts. Their results are published in Physical Review Letters.

Galaxies are threaded throughout our universe like a giant cosmic spider web. Their distribution is not random. Instead, they tend to cluster together. In fact, the whole cosmic web started out as tiny clumps of matter in the early universe, which gradually grew into individual galaxies, and eventually galaxy clusters and filaments.

AnonTechie writes:

Phys.org

Stressors like climate trauma, corporate deceit and political incompetence signal the threat of societal collapse, a new book asserts.

This claim lays the foundation for exploring arguments of "collapsology" in a new book by Robert R. Janes Ph.D., "Museums and Societal Collapse: The Museum as Lifeboat." The book also contends with the unique role that can be played by museums during a mounting climate crisis.

"Social ecology is an integral and moral dimension of the collapse and the crisis we face—that social and environmental issues are intertwined, and both must be considered simultaneously," Dr. Janes, a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, explains.

"Our collective failure to honor this relationship lies at the core of our failure as species. It befits all museums, irrespective of their disciplinary focus and loyalties, to bridge the divide between nature and culture in all that they do."

[ABSTRACT]: The Museum as Lifeboat

More information: Robert R. Janes, Museums and Societal Collapse (2023). DOI: 10.4324/9781003344070

Are we there yet ? or, is this a case of crying wolf ?

Original Submission