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upstart writes:

Dianne Feinstein, longest-serving female US senator in history, dies at 90:

Dianne Feinstein, whose three decades in the Senate made her the longest-serving female US senator in history, has died following months of declining health. She was 90.

Trailblazing California Sen. Dianne Feinstein dies at 90:

Dianne Feinstein, who became California's first female senator and went on to serve six terms, the longest of any woman in Senate history -- and whose political career was forever changed by the assassination of two colleagues -- has died. She was 90.

Her office said in a statement that she died on Thursday night at her home in Washington. The cause was not disclosed. She had voted as recently as earlier that day.

"There are few women who can be called senator, chairman, mayor, wife, mom and grandmother," her chief of staff, James Sauls, said in a statement. He called Feinstein "a force of nature who made an incredible impact on our country and her home state."

"She left a legacy that is undeniable and extraordinary. There is much to say about who she was and what she did," Sauls said, "but for now, we are going to grieve the passing of our beloved boss, mentor and friend."

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer seemed at varying points to choke back tears as he memorialized Feinstein in remarks from the chamber on Friday morning, hailing her as "one of the most amazing people to ever grace the Senate." In memoriam, her Senate desk appeared to be draped in black cloth beneath a vase bursting with white roses. Flags outside the Capitol were also lowered to half-staff.

President Joe Biden, in his own statement, called Feinstein a "pioneering American," a "true friend" and "a role model for so many."

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/chatgpt-goes-multimodal-with-image-recognition-and-speech-synthesis/

On Monday, OpenAI announced a significant update to ChatGPT that enables its GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 AI models to analyze images and react to them as part of a text conversation. Also, the ChatGPT mobile app will add speech synthesis options that, when paired with its existing speech recognition features, will enable fully verbal conversations with the AI assistant, OpenAI says.

OpenAI is planning to roll out these features in ChatGPT to Plus and Enterprise subscribers "over the next two weeks." It also notes that speech synthesis is coming to iOS and Android only, and image recognition will be available on both the web interface and the mobile apps.
[...]
Despite their drawbacks, in marketing materials, OpenAI is billing these new features as giving ChatGPT the ability to "see, hear, and speak." Not everyone is happy about the anthropomorphism and potential hype language involved. On X, Hugging Face AI researcher Dr. Sasha Luccioni posted, "The always and forever PSA: stop treating AI models like humans. No, ChatGPT cannot 'see, hear and speak.' It can be integrated with sensors that will feed it information in different modalities."

While ChatGPT and its associated AI models are clearly not human—and hype is a very real thing in marketing—if the updates perform as shown, they potentially represent a significant expansion in capabilities for OpenAI's computer assistant.

Original Submission

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Today: Friday, September 29th, 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 complete.

The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance

The community is always welcome to observe and participate, and is warmly invited to the meeting.

einar writes:

At CERN, an experiment investigated how gravity acts on antimatter. General relativity predicts that all matter follows gravitational attraction. However, recent decades in cosmology raised enough questions about our understanding of gravity. So, investigating the behavior of exotic matter is necessary to confirm predictions from general relativity. Antimatter has been available for quite a while; the first positrons were created in 1932. Yet, measuring the effect of gravity on charged particles is very difficult. Gravitational force is much weaker than electromagnetic force. The research team used anti-hydrogen (electrically neutral) to observe the effect of gravity. And yes, antihydrogen falls down.

This article was taken from Nature: Observation of the effect of gravity on the motion of antimatter

Original Submission

Frosty Piss writes:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/20/amazon-restricts-authors-from-self-publishing-more-than-three-books-a-day-after-ai-concerns

Amazon is limiting the number of books that authors can self-publish on its site to three a day, after an influx of suspected AI-generated material was listed for sale in recent months.

The post stated that Amazon is "actively monitoring the rapid evolution of generative AI and the impact it is having on reading, writing, and publishing" and that "very few" publishers will be affected by the change. Authors and publishers will also have the option to seek an exception to the rule.

The rule change will "probably not" be a "gamechanger for managing the influx of AI-written content on Amazon's platform," said Dr Miriam Johnson, senior lecturer in publishing at Oxford Brookes University. "It will dent the numbers a bit, but for those who are making money by flooding the market with AI-generated books and publishing more than three a day, they will find a work-around."

[...] The new sets of rules come after Amazon removed suspected AI-generated books that were falsely listed as being written by the author Jane Friedman. Earlier this month, books about mushroom foraging listed on Amazon were reported as likely to have been AI-generated and therefore containing potentially dangerous advice. AI-generated travel books have also flooded the site.

"I'm glad to see Amazon taking these sensible, incremental steps, and I hope they are prepared to do more as needed," said Friedman of the three-book rule. "AI-generated material is unlikely to disappear any time soon given the numerous courses now being promoted to people seeking to make easy profits from selling AI-generated material – much of it low-quality and some of it even fraudulent, as I experienced."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Regulators close investigation into Blue Origin's New Shepard anomaly:

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has closed the investigation into a mishap that occurred last September during a launch of Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle, with the regulator saying that Blue must implement 21 corrective actions before it can fly New Shepard again.

New Shepard was grounded after a September 2022 launch ended with an abort about a minute after liftoff. The vehicle's capsule, which was not filled with people, had to conduct an emergency parachute landing to clear the booster. It landed safely while the propulsion module was destroyed on impact with the ground. There were no injuries to Blue Origin personnel.

In an emailed statement, a representative for the FAA said the anomaly was caused by a "structural failure of an engine nozzle caused by higher than expected engine operating temperatures." Among the 21 corrective actions includes redesigning the engine and nozzle components as well as "organizational changes."

In response to TechCrunch's inquiries into the corrective actions, a Blue Origin spokesperson simply said, "We've received the FAA's letter and plan to fly soon."

The closure of the mishap investigation does not mean that Blue Origin can immediately start flying New Shepard. The company must implement all the corrective actions and receive a launch license modification from the FAA first, the FAA spokesperson said.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Security researcher warns of chilling effect after feds search phone at airport:

A U.S. security researcher is warning of a chilling effect after he was detained on arrival at a U.S. airport, his phone was searched, and was ordered to testify to a grand jury, only to have prosecutors reverse course and drop the investigation later.

On Wednesday, Sam Curry, a security engineer at blockchain technology company Yuga Labs, said in a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, that he was taken into secondary inspection by U.S. federal agents on September 15 after returning from a trip to Japan. Curry said agents with the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) unit and the Department of Homeland Security questioned him at Dulles International Airport in Washington DC about a "high profile phishing campaign," searched his unlocked phone, and served him with a grand jury subpoena to testify in New York the week after.

According to a photo of the subpoena that Curry posted, the grand jury was investigating wire fraud and money laundering.

But Curry said he later received confirmation that the copy of his device data was deleted and the grand jury subpoena was canceled once prosecutors realized that Curry was investigating the theft of crypto, and not involved in it.

In a post, Curry said that in December 2022 he discovered that scammers had inadvertently exposed their Ethereum private key in the source code of a phishing website that had stolen millions of dollars worth of crypto. Curry said he imported the key to his own crypto wallet to see if there was anything left in the alleged scammers' wallet, but that he found the key "five minutes too late and the stolen assets were gone."

Curry said he was "on my home IP address and obviously not attempting to conceal my identity as I was simply investigating this."

"We normally take this approach where it's seeing if there's anything we can do to help. And then if we can't, obviously we can't. It's tricky, because there are so many of these phishing campaigns," Curry told TechCrunch in a phone call.

Curry said that the feds had requested the authorization logs from crypto marketplace OpenSea, which Curry used to check the contents of the scammers' wallet. Those logs included Curry's home IP address. Curry accused the feds of using his arrival to the U.S. "as an excuse to ask for my device and summon me to a grand jury, rather than just email me or something."

takyon writes:

Raspberry Pi 5 has been announced for an October launch of 4 GB ($60) and 8 GB RAM ($80) variants. Features include:

• 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU
• VideoCore VII GPU, supporting OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.2
• Dual 4Kp60 HDMI® display output
• 4Kp60 HEVC decoder
• Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi®
• Bluetooth 5.0 / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
• High-speed microSD card interface with SDR104 mode support
• 2 × USB 3.0 ports, supporting simultaneous 5Gbps operation
• 2 × USB 2.0 ports
• Gigabit Ethernet, with PoE+ support (requires separate PoE+ HAT, coming soon)
• 2 × 4-lane MIPI camera/display transceivers
• PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for fast peripherals
• Raspberry Pi standard 40-pin GPIO header
• Real-time clock
• Power button

CPU performance should be about 2-3x the Raspberry Pi 4 from three generational Cortex-A increases (from A72, skipping A73/A75 to A76), 33% higher clock speed (from the updated 1.8 GHz of RPi4), and a superior process node (16nm from 28nm).

[...] One notable loss is the analogue 3.5mm audio jack. Most users will be getting audio from micro-HDMI.

Specs were accidentally leaked about a day in advance, for example by element14 (farnell) or the MicroLinux YouTube channel (6m1s video).

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/ftc-files-the-big-one-a-lawsuit-alleging-amazon-illegally-maintains-monopoly/

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general today sued Amazon, claiming the online retail giant illegally maintains monopoly power.

[...] The FTC announced that it filed the lawsuit in US District Court for the Western District of Washington. The FTC press release said it is "seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that would prohibit Amazon from engaging in its unlawful conduct and pry loose Amazon's monopolistic control to restore competition."

The lawsuit seeks declarations that Amazon's conduct violates federal and state laws. It asks for an injunction prohibiting the conduct described in the lawsuit along with unspecified "structural relief" that would be "necessary to redress and prevent recurrence of Amazon's violations of the law." Structural relief could involve breaking up the company.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In the last days of the 1400s, a terrible epidemic swept through Europe. Men and women spiked sudden fevers. Their joints ached, and they broke out in rashes that ripened into bursting boils. Ulcers ate away at their faces, collapsing their noses and jaws, working down their throats and airways, making it impossible to eat or drink. Survivors were grossly disfigured. Unluckier victims died.

The infection sped across the borders of a politically fractured landscape, from France into Italy, on to Switzerland and Germany, and north to the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Russia. The Holy Roman Emperor declared it a punishment from God. “Nothing could be more serious than this curse, this barbarian poison,” an Italian historian wrote in 1495.

It seemed plausible that the great pox, later called syphilis, might have journeyed with Spanish mercenaries, who represented much of the army of Naples when France attacked that kingdom in 1495. And it might have arrived in Spain with the crews of Christopher Columbus, who returned there in 1493 from the first of his exploratory voyages.

For most of the centuries since, a significant historical narrative has blamed Columbus and his sailors for bringing syphilis to Europe. It arrived as a ravaging plague and then adapted to become a long-simmering disease that, before the discovery of penicillin, could cripple people and drive them mad. Investigating what’s called the “Columbian hypothesis” has proved challenging: The symptoms related in old accounts could describe several diseases, and the bacterium that causes it, Treponema pallidum, was not identified until 1905.

But for roughly two decades, paleopathologists examining European burial sites have suggested that medieval bones and teeth display signs of syphilis infection, disrupting the belief that the disease arrived there in the 15th century. Now, a team based in Marseille has used ancient-DNA analysis to reveal evidence of Treponema bacteria, and the body’s immunological reaction to it, in a skeleton that was buried in a chapel in Provence in the 7th or 8th century. It’s the best evidence yet that syphilis—or something related to it—was infecting Europeans centuries before Columbus sailed.

“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first, proven, strong piece of evidence that the Treponema of syphilis were circulating in the European population before Columbus,” says Michel Drancourt, a physician and professor of microbiology at Aix-Marseille University, who led the work published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. “So far, this was a hypothesis in science and the medical literature, without any strong proof.”

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/09/gpus-from-all-major-suppliers-are-vulnerable-to-new-pixel-stealing-attack/

GPUs from all six of the major suppliers are vulnerable to a newly discovered attack that allows malicious websites to read the usernames, passwords, and other sensitive visual data displayed by other websites, researchers have demonstrated in a paper published Tuesday.

The cross-origin attack allows a malicious website from one domain—say, example.com—to effectively read the pixels displayed by a website from example.org, or another different domain. Attackers can then reconstruct them in a way that allows them to view the words or images displayed by the latter site. This leakage violates a critical security principle that forms one of the most fundamental security boundaries safeguarding the Internet. Known as the same origin policy, it mandates that content hosted on one website domain be isolated from all other website domains.

GPU.zip, as the proof-of-concept attack has been named, starts with a malicious website that places a link to the webpage it wants to read inside of an iframe, a common HTML element that allows sites to embed ads, images, or other content hosted on other websites. Normally, the same origin policy prevents either site from inspecting the source code, content, or final visual product of the other. The researchers found that data compression that both internal and discrete GPUs use to improve performance acts as a side channel that they can abuse to bypass the restriction and steal pixels one by one.

Original Submission

DECbot writes:

Like a scene strait out of Robocop, Larry Ellison has chosen Tesla's Cybertruck for its police vehicles.

Former Tesla board member and Oracle founder Larry Ellison revealed: "Our next generation of a police car is coming out very soon - it's my favorite police car - it's my favorite car actually - it's Elon's favorite car - it's incredible, and I know too much about it."

Articles, like this one found in Motor Trend, are still light on details. It is mostly reported in car and EV outfits. Like most puff pieces, they are scant on any details and generally all have the same 5 to 6 paragraphs. The National News adds a bit more, with additional information suggesting AI will be employed in the Law Enforcement version of the Cybertruck. Regardless of the shallow reporting, the images are still a sight to behold as they mirror 1980s visions of a dystopian future.

As an aside note, what use does Oracle have for a police cruiser beyond parking lot security? The cynic in me hopes this is the future license enforcement squad!

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/oldest-unity-game-developer-group-breaks-up-over-lack-of-trust-in-the-company/

The "first official Unity user group in the world" has announced that it is dissolving after 13 years because "the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded." The move comes as many developers are saying they will continue to stay away from the company's products even after last week's partial rollback of some of the most controversial parts of its fee structure plans.

Since its founding in 2010, the Boston Unity Group (BUG) has attracted thousands of members to regular gatherings, talks, and networking events, including many technical lectures archived on YouTube. But the group says it will be hosting its last meeting Wednesday evening via Zoom because the Unity of today is very different from the Dave Helgason-led company that BUG says "enthusiastically sanctioned and supported" the group at its founding.
[...]
BUG's feelings are being echoed across large swaths of the game development community, where many prominent developers are saying Unity's public reversal has done little to nothing to restore their trust in the company.

Vampire Survivors developer Poncle, for instance, gave a succinct "lol no thank you" when asked during a Reddit AMA over the weekend if their next game/sequel would again use the Unity Engine. "Even if Unity were to walk back entirely on their decisions, I don't think it would be wise to trust them while they are under the current leadership," Poncle added later in the AMA.
[...]
Some developers are now also suggesting that Unity ignored advice from the development community before announcing their initial plans earlier this month. Brandon Sheffield of Necrosoft Games (Demonschool) told Wired that his company was "privy to these [initial] install-fee changes well before they went live and pushed back against them. We knew the reaction would be resoundingly negative, but we weren't listened to."

In part because of that intentional ignorance on Unity's part, Sheffield says he will stick with an earlier pledge to never use Unity in a future project despite the later fee structure changes.

Previously:
Unity Makes Major Changes to Controversial Install-Fee Program

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Although Low Power DDR(LPDDR) memory has played a pivotal role in reducing PC laptop power usage, the drawback to the mobile-focused memory has always been its tight signaling and power delivery requirements. Designed to be placed close to its host CPU in order to minimize power expenditures and maximize clockspeeds, LPDDR memory is unsuitable for use in traditional DIMMs and SO-DIMMs – instead requiring that it be soldered down on a device in advance. But it looks like the days of soldered-down LPDDR memory are soon at an end, as this evening Samsung is announcing a new standard for removable and modular LPDDR memory: LPCAMM.

Pitched as an LPDDR-centric version of the upcoming Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM) standard for removable mobile memory, LPCAMM is Samsung’s take on using the same style of compression connector interface for LPDDR memory. The net result is that, thanks to the more exacting specifications and shorter trace lengths used by a CAMM-style connector, Samsung says it’s possible to have modular and swappable LPDDR5 memory at last. And all in a fraction of the space a traditional SO-DIMM setup would occupy.

While the CAMM format has barely gotten off of the ground itself – JEDEC has yet to even approve the standard – Samsung is essentially opting to run with the idea to do something different with it by focusing on LPDDR memory. Notably, however, the resulting LPCAMM form factor is incompatible with CAMMs – both physically and electrically – so despite the similar names and use of compression connectors, the two are not interchangeable. But both pursue the same ideas for their respective memory types.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Scientists said on Tuesday they have found the "missing ingredient" for pink diamonds, some of the world's most expensive stones due their rarity and beauty, and the discovery could help find more.

More than 90 percent of all the pink diamonds ever found were discovered at the recently closed Argyle mine in the remote northwest of Australia.

But exactly why Argyle—which unlike most other diamond mines does not sit in the middle of a continent but on the edge of one—produced so many pink gems has remained a mystery.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, a team of Australia-based researchers said the pink diamonds were brought to the Earth's surface by the break up of the first supercontinent around 1.3 billion years ago.

Hugo Olierook, a researcher at Curtin University in the state of Western Australia and the study's lead author, told AFP that two of the three ingredients for forming pink diamonds had already been known.

Journal Information:
Hugo Olierook, Emplacement of the Argyle diamond deposit into an ancient rift zone triggered by supercontinent breakup, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-40904-8.

Original Submission