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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/09/big-dairy-still-sour-over-plant-based-milk-labels-tries-to-outlaw-them/

In an utterly firm effort to undercut plant-based rivals, big players in the dairy industry are again putting the squeeze on lawmakers to outlaw the use of the term "milk" for non-dairy beverages—or, in Food and Drug Administration lingo, beverages that are not the "lacteal secretion of cows."

Earlier this year, the dairy industry's blood curdled when the regulatory agency released a draft guidance stating that plant-based milk alternatives can keep using the term. It was a move that followed years of sour resentment over the labeling.

The FDA did humbly admit that almonds and other sources of plant-based milk don't, in fact, lactate;

[...] Following the FDA's milk ruling, dairy industry groups rounded up support from lawmakers to try to reverse it. Specifically, they got members of the House and Senate to push a bill called the DAIRY PRIDE Act.

[...] Dairy-state lawmakers are now trying to get the bill signed into law in the coming months as part of the 2023 farm bill reauthorization, according to a report by Stat News.

People that drink milk alternatives, don't want to drink milk. People that want to drink milk, don't confuse Almond/Coconut "milk" for milk.

What about goats' milk? Cleansing milk for removing makeup, milk of magnesia (medication), the milksnake (a reptile)?

Original Submission

"dalek" writes:

If Congress does not pass a measure to fund the government by Sunday, October 1, a partial shutdown of the United States government will begin. Much of the federal government is funded each fiscal year by 12 appropriations bills. None of the appropriations bills for the 2024 fiscal year have been signed into law, which is not especially uncommon at the start of a new fiscal year. Instead, Congress authorizes funding at the levels from the previous fiscal year through a continuing resolution (CR), and then the appropriations bills are signed into law when they are ready. The Senate is scheduled to vote on such a CR on Saturday, though any Senator can refuse the expedited process for debating the bill, and delay the vote until Monday. Although the CR is expected to pass the Senate with bipartisan support, the House is highly unlikely to pass any funding bills before the government shutdown begins.

The impending government shutdown is likely to have significant effects on scientific research, as noted in a Nature article:

Fuelled by infighting among Republicans in the House of Representatives over spending cuts, the United States is barreling towards a government shutdown. Lawmakers in the US Congress have until 30 September (the end of the fiscal year) to reach an agreement over how to keep money flowing to federal agencies, or the government will have to close many of its doors and furlough staff — including tens of thousands of scientists — without pay. Depending on how long the shutdown lasts, work at science agencies will stop, interrupting experiments, delaying the approval of research grants and halting travel to scientific conferences.

upstart writes:

Bing Chat responses infiltrated by ads pushing malware:

Bing Chat responses infiltrated by ads pushing malware

Malicious advertisements are now being injected into Microsoft's AI-powered Bing Chat responses, promoting fake download sites that distribute malware.

Bing Chat, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 engine, was introduced by Microsoft in February 2023 to challenge Google's dominance in the search industry.

By offering users an interactive chat-based experience instead of the traditional search query and result format, Bing Chat aimed to make online searches more intuitive and user-friendly.

In March, Microsoft began injecting ads into Bing Chat conversations to generate revenue from this new platform.

However, incorporating ads into Bing Chat has opened the door to threat actors, who increasingly take out search advertisements to distribute malware.

Furthermore, conversing with AI-powered chat tools can instill unwarranted trust, potentially convincing users to click on ads, which isn't the case when skimming through impersonal search results.

This conversation-like interaction can imbue AI-provided URLs with a misplaced sense of authority and trustworthiness, so the existing problem of malvertizing in search platforms is amplified by the introduction of AI assistants.

The fact that these ads are labeled as promoted results when the user hovers over a link in Bing Chat conversations is likely too weak of a measure to mitigate the risk.

[...] The display of malvertising within Bing Chat conversations highlights the expanding frontier of cyber threats and makes it crucial for users to be wary of chatbot results and always double-check URLs before downloading anything.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Disney's password-sharing crackdown has begun:

Starting on November 1st, Disney Plus will begin restricting password sharing. In Canada.

The company announced the change in an email sent to Canadian subscribers. Disney has not provided many details on how it plans to enforce this policy — its email merely states that "we're implementing restrictions on your ability to share your account or login credentials outside of your household." The announcement reads more like a strong finger wag than anything else. "You may not share your subscription outside of your household," reads the company's updated Help Center.

A new "account sharing" section in the Canadian subscriber agreement also notes that the company may "analyze the use of your account" and that failing to comply with the agreement could lead to account limits or termination.

The announcement comes over a month after Disney's Q3 earnings call, where CEO Bob Iger said that the company was "actively exploring" ways to address shared accounts. Iger said that a "significant" number of people are currently sharing passwords across Disney's services and added that Disney has the "technical capability" to monitor sign-ins.

Disney Plus is just the latest streaming service to attempt to tackle password sharing. Netflix has been testing such restrictions for over a year in various countries and began cracking down in the US in May 2023. Netflix accounts are restricted based on a user's IP address; subscribers, depending on the plan they select, have the option of adding additional members to their accounts for an additional fee. The company said in its Q2 earnings call that its policy has driven more subscribers to the service.

But hey, if it's any consolation: Canadian users now have access to the cheaper ad-supported tier. This next turn in the streaming wars is going to get pricey.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Cloudflare Users Exposed to Attacks Launched From Within Cloudflare: Researchers:

Gaps in Cloudflare's security controls allow users to bypass customer-configured protection mechanisms and target other users from the platform itself, technology consulting firm Certitude warns.

The issue, the company says, arises from the shared infrastructure that all Cloudflare tenants have access to, allowing malicious actors to abuse the trust customers place in the platform's protections to target them via Cloudflare.

A major cybersecurity vendor offering web application firewall (WAF), bot management, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protections, Cloudflare relies on a network of reverse-proxy servers to inspect all traffic headed to customers' web servers for malicious activity.

According to Certitude, because traffic originating from Cloudflare's own infrastructure is considered trusted by default, it is not passed through the configured reverse-proxy servers, as is traffic from other parties.

Because of that, the consulting firm says, an attacker registered with Cloudflare can target other users on the platform, essentially bypassing the platform's protections.

One gap Certitude discovered is related to the 'Authenticated Origin Pulls' on Transport Layer mechanism, which relies on a Cloudflare SSL certificate for authentication.

When setting up the authentication mechanism to their web servers (origin servers), customers can opt for using a Cloudflare certificate or for using their own certificate.

However, because the available options are insufficiently documented, and because a custom certificate can only be used with an API, "it is reasonable to assume that customers will opt for the more convenient choice of using the Cloudflare certificate," Certitude notes.

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