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upstart writes:

Somehow, advanced Triada malware was added to devices before reaching resellers:

When you buy a TV streaming box, there are certain things you wouldn't expect it to do. It shouldn't secretly be laced with malware or start communicating with servers in China when it's powered up. It definitely should not be acting as a node in an organized crime scheme making millions of dollars through fraud. However, that's been the reality for thousands of unknowing people who own cheap Android TV devices.

In January, security researcher Daniel Milisic discovered that a cheap Android TV streaming box called the T95 was infected with malware right out of the box, with multipleotherresearchers confirming the findings. But it was just the tip of the iceberg. This week, cybersecurity firm Human Security is revealing new details about the scope of the infected devices and the hidden, interconnected web of fraud schemes linked to the streaming boxes.

Human Security researchers found seven Android TV boxes and one tablet with the backdoors installed, and they've seen signs of 200 different models of Android devices that may be impacted, according to a report shared exclusively with WIRED. The devices are in homes, businesses, and schools across the US. Meanwhile, Human Security says it has also taken down advertising fraud linked to the scheme, which likely helped pay for the operation.

[...] Human Security's research is divided into two areas: Badbox, which involves the compromised Android devices and the ways they are involved in fraud and cybercrime. And the second, dubbed Peachpit, is a related ad fraud operation involving at least 39 Android and iOS apps. Google says it has removed the apps following Human Security's research, while Apple says it has found issues in several of the apps reported to it.

upstart writes:

Tom Hanks has warned an advert that appears to be fronted by him is in fact an artificial intelligence (AI) fake:

"There's a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me," the actor wrote on Instagram.

"I have nothing to do with it," he added.

Hanks has previously spoken about the "artistic challenge" that AI poses his industry, and the issue has been central to recent strikes by high-profile Hollywood actors and writers.

As AI systems have grown in power and sophistication, so have concerns about their ability to create ever more realistic virtual versions of real people - what are sometimes called deepfakes.

[...] In September, Google announced it would require any political adverts that ran on its platform to disclose if they had been created with AI.

[...] Fears about being displaced by AI have helped drive a wave of strikes that have disrupted Hollywood, with Stranger Things and the Last of Us among the shows to be affected.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA), which represents screenwriters, recently reached a tentative agreement with studio bosses to bring their industrial action to an end.

However, a separate dispute involving actors - which is also partly motivated by fears about AI resulting in fewer acting jobs - remains unresolved.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The leader of Russia's space corporation, Yuri Borisov, discussed his country's future ambitions in space on Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress. He spoke expansively about Russia's plans to build a new space station in low-Earth orbit, the Russian Orbital Station, as well as other initiatives.

"We are expecting to design, manufacture, and launch several modules by 2027," Borisov said via a translator at the conference, which is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, this year. The conference's plenary sessions are being livestreamed on YouTube.

This space station will reside in a polar orbit, Borisov added, allowing it to observe the entire planet's surface. Its purpose will be to test new materials, new technologies, and new medicines. “It will be like a permanently functioning laboratory,” he said.

[...] It all may have looked and sounded good on the international stage, but the presentation had something of the feel of a Potemkin Village, which refers to fake villages designed to impress the Russian empress Catherine the Great two centuries ago. Put another way, most (if not all) of the presentation was based on vaporware rather than hardware.

Shortly before Borisov took the stage, Russian media sources revealed that the country's budget for space activities is due to drop over the next two years—rather than rise to meet the challenge of these ambitious new space programs.

[...] No one doubts the ability of Russia to build space stations, as the country has a long history of assembling successful orbital outposts. However, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has struggled to build new hardware for spaceflight activities. Both its Nauka space station module and Luna 25 spacecraft that recently crashed into the Moon were essentially mothballed projects largely constructed decades ago.

The idea that Russia will now build a new space station and launch it within the next four years at a reduced budget is especially difficult to comprehend in the current situation. The country's main focus is on financing and fighting its unprovoked war against Ukraine, and as the space budget story shows, resources for the space program are likely to be reduced rather than increased.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Amazon really doesn't want to show anyone what its Internet satellites look like:

The first two prototype satellites for Amazon's broadband network launched Friday from Florida, the first in a series of at least 77 rocket launches the retail giant has booked over the next six years to deploy a fleet of more than 3,200 spacecraft to rival SpaceX's Starlink system.

These first two satellites for Amazon's $10 billion Internet megaconstellation, called Project Kuiper, took off on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:06 pm EDT (18:06 UTC).

On its 99th flight, ULA's Atlas V rocket fired a Russian-made RD-180 engine and thundered off the launch pad, heading east from the Florida coastline over the Atlantic Ocean. The kerosene-fueled engine—flying without the aid of solid rocket boosters on this flight—fired more than four minutes, then a hydrogen-burning engine on the rocket's Centaur upper stage took over for a 10-minute burn to reach a targeted 311-mile-high (500-kilometer) orbit.

Amazon's two test satellites separated from the rocket about 18 minutes after liftoff. ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, confirmed the launch phase of the mission was a success.

"This initial launch is the first step in support of deployment of Amazon's initiative to provide fast, affordable broadband service to unserved and underserved communities around the world," said Gary Wentz, ULA's vice president of government and commercial programs, in a press release.

Amazon is aiming to become the third company with a satellite megaconstellation to provide high-speed Internet service from space.

upstart writes:

One of the early pioneers in computing, the company disappeared in the late 1990s:

Even though very few of the early players in technology still exist, we use their creations to this day. Bell Labs created the transistor, and Fairchild Semiconductor created the integrated circuit, but neither company is still around. So is the case with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It no longer exists, but unless you're using a handheld device to read this article, you're using a descendant of DEC technology.

DEC was founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen, Harlan Anderson, and H. Edward Roberts to build small digital modules, but the team soon discovered that they could use those modules to build minicomputers—computers that were smaller and less powerful (but cheaper) than mainframes, which were the business standard at the time.

In 1977, DEC introduced the VAX, a new line of minicomputers that featured a 32-bit instruction set architecture and virtual memory. Its operating system, VMS, was a multi-user, multitasking OS that provided features we now take for granted, including virtual memory, file sharing, and networking. It amassed a wide variety of third-party software packages that made it the most popular system in its class.

In the late 1980s and early '90s, Andy Green ran a bulletin board system (BBS) and later an Internet service provider called Intelecom Data Systems (IDS) on a VAX 11/730 (later a VAXstation 4000) server in the basement of his parents' house in Rhode Island. IDS had seven lines—unheard of at the time—and users could talk in a real-time chat room. All of this was written by Green in VAX BASIC. Today, Green is the owner and CEO of Acme Atronomatic, developer of the MyRadar mobile app.

Green was exposed to the VAX through work and had picked up an old VAX 11/730 and started tinkering. He had previously run a BBS on a TRS-80, but the VAX, with its multitenancy, allowed for multiple concurrent users.

upstart writes:

Oldest evidence of human cannibalism as a funerary practice:

The remains of human bones with cutmarks, breaks and human chewing marks found across northern Europe show that some human groups living around 15,000 years ago were eating their dead not out of necessity, but as part of their culture.

While in the modern day most people will either bury or cremate their dead, some of our ancestors did things a little differently.

Gough's Cave is a well-known paleolithic site in south-eastern England. Nestled in the Cheddar Gorge, the cave is perhaps best known for the discovery of 15,000 years old human skulls shaped into what are believed to have been cups and bones that had been gnawed by other humans.

But were the people living in Gough's Cave a gruesome outlier, or where they actually part of a wider cannibalistic culture of northern Europe? A new paper now suggests that they were not alone. Human remains dating to the same time period from across northern and western Europe and attributed to the same culture, known as the Magdalenian, also show evidence that they were cannibalized. This suggests that the eating of the dead was a shared behavior during the late Upper Paleolithic.

[...] "Instead of burying their dead, these people were eating them," explains Silvia. "We interpret the evidence that cannibalism was practiced on multiple occasions across north-western Europe over a short period of time, as this practice was part of a diffuse funerary behavior among Magdalenian groups."

"That in itself is interesting, because it is the oldest evidence of cannibalism as a funerary practice."

This cannibalistic behavior was seemingly fairly common among Magdalenian people of north-western Europe, but it didn't last particularly long. There was a shift towards people burying their dead, a behavior seen widely across south central Europe and attributed to a second distinct culture, known as the Epigravettian.

This then raises the question of whether the eventual relative ubiquity of burial culture towards the end of the Paleolithic was the result of Magdalenian people adopting primary burial as a funerary behavior, or if their population was replaced.

During the late Upper Paleolithic, between around 23,000 and 14,000 years ago, there were two dominate cultures in western Europe, largely distinguished by the stone and bone tools the crafted.

The Epigravettian culture was mainly found living in south and eastern Europe, and buried their dead with graves goods in a way that we would perhaps consider more usual by modern standards. The Magdalenian culture from the north-west of Europe, however, were doing things differently. They were processing the bodies of their dead, removing the flesh from the corpse, eating it, and in some cases modifying the remaining bones to create new objects.

One of the main questions was whether or not this cannibalism was driven by necessity, when perhaps food was scarce or the winter long and so the people responsible were in survival mode, or whether it was a cultural behavior.

hubie writes:

Dogs and humans process body postures similarly in their brains:

Humans and primates have brain regions in the temporal lobe that are specialised in perceiving faces and bodies. Dogs also possess a temporal lobe that evolved independently of the primate brain. In recent years, behavioural research has shown that dogs, like humans, are experts in perceiving facial expressions and bodily gestures such as hand signals. "Whether this behavioural expertise is also reflected in the dog brain was the content of our study. Only a few research groups can conduct comparative magnetic resonance imaging studies with dogs," explains first author Magdalena Boch.

[...] The study with 40 human participants and 15 pet dogs now provided the first evidence that dogs, like humans, have a brain region in the temporal lobe that is specialised in the visual perception of body postures. In addition, further regions in the dog brain are equally involved in perceiving faces and bodies. In contrast to humans, however, this did not only affect visual brain regions. When dogs look at faces and bodies, there are also differences in activation in areas responsible for processing smells.

In humans, the authors additionally identified already known regions specialised exclusively in face perception. "We humans often focus on the face when communicating with others. Our results suggest that faces are also an important source of information for dogs. However, body postures and holistic perception seem to play a superior role," Magdalena Boch explains.

The specialised brain regions were equally active in dogs when they looked at pictures of conspecifics or humans. This underlines the close bond between dogs and humans, says Ludwig Huber. "Dogs and humans may not be closely related, but they have been close companions for thousands of years. Therefore, comparing dogs and humans also gives us new insights into the so-called convergent evolution of social perception and information processing processes," Claus Lamm concludes.

Journal Reference:
Magdalena Boch, Isabella C. Wagner, Sabrina Karl, Ludwig Huber, & Claus Lamm: Functionally analogous body- and animacy-responsive areas are present in the dog (Canis familiaris) and human occipito-temporal lobe. Communications Biology (2023). https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05014-7

Original Submission

hubie writes:

People endorse conspiracy theories due to complex combination of personality traits, motivations:

People can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations, including relying strongly on their intuition, feeling a sense of antagonism and superiority toward others, and perceiving threats in their environment, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

[...] "Conspiracy theorists are not all likely to be simple-minded, mentally unwell folks—a portrait which is routinely painted in popular culture," said Bowes. "Instead, many turn to conspiracy theories to fulfill deprived motivational needs and make sense of distress and impairment."

[...] The researchers found that overall, people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel like the community they identify with is superior to others.

Even though many conspiracy theories seem to provide clarity or a supposed secret truth about confusing events, a need for closure or a sense of control were not the strongest motivators to endorse conspiracy theories. Instead, the researchers found some evidence that people were more likely to believe specific conspiracy theories when they were motivated by social relationships. For instance, participants who perceived social threats were more likely to believe in events-based conspiracy theories, such as the theory that the U.S. government planned the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, rather than an abstract theory that, in general, governments plan to harm their citizens to retain power.

[...] The researchers also found that people with certain personality traits, such as a sense of antagonism toward others and high levels of paranoia, were more prone to believe conspiracy theories. Those who strongly believed in conspiracy theories were also more likely to be insecure, paranoid, emotionally volatile, impulsive, suspicious, withdrawn, manipulative, egocentric and eccentric.

The Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism) had a much weaker relationship with conspiratorial thinking, though the researchers said that does not mean that general personality traits are irrelevant to a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories.

Journal Reference:
Shauna M. Bowes, Thomas H. Costello, and Arber Tasimi, The Conspiratorial Mind: A Meta-Analytic Review of Motivational and
Personological Correlates, Psychological Bulletin, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000392 [pdf]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

"VAR!" 100 years ago tonight, Edwin Hubble found a star that revealed the vastness of the Universe:

How big is the Universe? Humanity made it all the way into the 1920s having no idea. Many people at that time thought that the Milky Way was the entire Universe. Yes, big, but not crazy big. Others thought that maybe those spirals and smudges we could see were in fact other galaxies altogether, which would mean the Universe is unfathomably large.

On the night of October 5-6, 1923 — 100 years ago tonight — Edwin Hubble made an observation that would settle the question once and for all. He took a 45-minute exposure of Andromeda, one of the largest and thus apparently nearest "spiral nebulae", and within it he spotted a single compelling star that we now call Hubble V1. We here on Earth will forever have a very special relationship with that star, because Hubble used its characteristics to show conclusively that Andromeda was not a "spiral nebula" within the Milky Way at all, but rather an entirely separate galaxy which he later estimated to be about 1 million (now understood to be closer to 2.5 million) light-years away.

In Hubble's time, many other "spiral nebulae" were known that appeared much smaller than Andromeda and were therefore presumably quite a bit farther away. Because of his observation a hundred years ago tonight, Hubble realized that even Andromeda, close enough to be seen with the naked eye, is on the order of 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles away from Earth. And that must mean that the Universe is absurdly, almost comically, huge.

Imagine what Edwin Hubble felt like sitting there at Mt. Wilson Observatory, probably by himself late one evening, when he became the first person ever to know that for sure. His use of red ink and an exclamation point in the main figure of this diary illustrates that he knew darn well the significance of what he had found the minute he realized what it was.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/we-now-know-how-cats-purr-why-they-purr-is-still-up-for-debate/

There are few things more gratifying to cat lovers than a contentedly purring feline. But the precise mechanisms by which kitties produce those pleasant, low-frequency rumblings has been a matter of some debate among scientists. Now a team of Austrian scientists has determined that connective tissues embedded in cats' vocal cords play a crucial role in this ability, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. The authors argue that their findings call for a reassessment of the current prevailing hypothesis about how cats purr.

Purring is mostly exclusive to cats, although certain other species can produce purr-like sounds, including raccoons, mongooses, kangaroos, badgers, rabbits, and guinea pigs. And cats are usually divided into those that purr (Felinae) and those that roar (Pantherinae); no cat species can do both. The latter category includes lions, tigers, jaguars, and leopards, and scientists have suggested that the roaring capability is due to an incompletely ossified hyoid bone in the larynx. "Purrers," by contrast, have a completely ossified hyoid, although the purring snow leopard is a rare exception.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Magneto X "levitates" the tool head on magnetic linear motors:

Resin printer company Peopoly created quite a buzz with the unveiling of a prototype beltless FDM 3D printer, the Magneto X, at the East Coast RepRap Festival. The new printer is a desk top machine with a huge 400 x 300 x 300 mm build volume and print speeds up to 800mm/s. It borrows a design feature seen on CNC machines: magnetic linear motors. Normally, 3D printers move their components with rotating stepper motors attached to gears and pulleys. The linear motor can be thought of as a flat, unrolled motor with the "rotor" attached to the moving component – the tool head – and the stator forming a track along one axis.

Dubbed the "MagXY" system, the tool head seems to levitate across the gantry without obvious means. It has a top print speed of 800 mm/s with a max acceleration of 22,000 mm/s², which would make it faster than modern Core XY printers from Bambu Lab.

[...] Peopoly is known for high end, large scale, liquid resin 3D printers and the Magneto X will be it's first plastic pushing printer. The printer will likewise be a premium machine with a price tag starting at $1999, currently on sale for $1399 during the pre-order phase. The optional enclosure will cost $79 more. Printers are expected to begin shipping in late November.

[...] Peopoly is leaning hard into the Open Source community. Not only have they become backers of Klipper firmware, they are also using – and supporting – Open Source OcraSlicer. The Magneto X's nozzles are compatible with the popular E3D's V6 volcano which suggests the machine will be open to modification by users. Peopoly also states its machine can be used without joining a cloud-based system and promises customer data will not be collected.

The 3D printer will have a load cell sensor for precise auto leveling and four independent Z-axis stepper motors for dynamic adjustments. The hotend is rated to 300 degrees Celsius, and with an available enclosure will be able to print engineering grade materials. Prints will be monitored with an included camera which can also take time lapses.

Damn that's fast!

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Fear of being exploited is stagnating our progress in science:

Science is a collaborative effort. What we know today would have never been, had it not been generations of scientists reusing and building on the work of their predecessors.

However, in modern times, academia has become increasingly competitive and indeed rather hostile to the individual researchers. This is especially true for early-career researchers yet to secure tenure and build a name in their fields. Nowadays, scholars are left to compete with each other for citations of their published work, awards and funding.

So, understandably, many scientists have grown unwilling to cooperate and help their peers by sharing their work. They would "hide" their raw data, despite having taken years-long efforts to collect it. They would also conceal experiments that have failed or proved insignificant. All these practices would then result in different teams wasting precious time in running the same useless studies, rather than making further progress and contributing to the world's knowledge.

[...] According to their findings, a specific personality trait called "victim sensitivity" predicted knowledge hiding in science. Researchers with this personality trait are characterized by a latent fear of being exploited by others, and thus, are more suspicious about their colleagues.

[...] The good news, point out the authors of the study, is that—among the participants—the intention to hide knowledge was rather low.

However, the authors warn about a potential bias. It is likely that researchers who volunteered to take part in these studies were more cooperative to begin with. Additionally, it might be that in the context of self-reporting, the participants tried to present themselves as more likable.

"We may need to change the stereotypical way we think about ourselves as researchers, in order to build trust and create a sharing environment among scientists," concludes the research team. "Identifying as a researcher should include being cooperative, other-oriented, and trustworthy: a social identity that stands for knowledge sharing—not knowledge hiding."

Journal Reference:
Marlene Sophie Altenmüller et al, Among us: Fear of exploitation, suspiciousness, and social identity predict knowledge hiding among researchers, Social Psychological Bulletin (2023). DOI: 10.32872/spb.10011

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/4chan-pushing-bing-dall-e-as-quick-methods-to-spread-racist-images/

Despite leading AI companies' attempts to block users from turning AI image generators into engines of racist content, many 4chan users are still turning to these tools to "quickly flood the Internet with racist garbage," 404 Media reported.

404 Media uncovered one 4chan thread where users recommended various AI tools, including Stable Diffusion and DALL-E, but specifically linked to Bing AI's text-to-image generator (which is powered by DALL-E 3) as a "quick method." After finding the right tool—which could also be a more old-school photo-editing tool like Photoshop—users are instructed to add incendiary captions and share the images on social media to create a blitz of racist images online.
[...]
Perhaps because Bing AI's tool has seemingly been deemed the quickest method, it has potentially become the most popular tool in the thread. 404 Media concluded that—"judging by the images' default square format, the uniform 1024 x 1024 resolution"—"most of the images in the thread appear to be generated with Bing," then spread on social media platforms, including Telegram, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram.

It's unclear what steps that makers of the AI image generators seemingly favored by 4chan users have taken to block methods 404 Media said were used to circumvent filters.
[...]
Microsoft's spokesperson told Ars that the "Bing Image Creator is a tool designed to help inspire people's creativity. As with any new technology, some are trying to use it in unintended ways. We are investigating these reports and will take action as needed in accordance with our content policy, which prohibits the creation of harmful content.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The annual Draconid meteor shower peaks this weekend, and viewing conditions are favorable this year.:

The Draconid meteor shower will be active from Oct. 6 to Oct. 10, with the peak happening around Sunday (Oct. 8) or Monday (Oct. 9). This year, the moon will be less than 20% illuminated, offering fairly dark skies for skywatchers hoping to catch sight of a few of these meteors streaking through the sky.

To see this shower, first locate the Draco constellation, from where the Draconids appear to originate (hence their name). From North America, look high to the northwest after sunset. If you can locate Ursa Major, the Big Dipper, Draco will be about 30 degrees above it, or three widths of your fist at arm's length. Otherwise, a stargazing app could help you locate it. Find a spot away from as much light as possible, set up a comfortable chair and allow your eyes time to adjust. With a little luck, you just might catch a few of these "falling stars."

The Draconids are caused by pieces of rock and ice trailing away from Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner. As it makes its way through our solar system, the comet leaves this debris behind it. When our planet passes through these "comet crumbs," bits of them burn up in Earth's atmosphere, creating the streaks of light we call a meteor shower.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

"It's really spectacular to have all that material there":

Last month, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission successfully dropped off incredibly rare samples it collected from the asteroid Bennu, tens of millions of miles away, which could provide tantalizing glimpses into the earliest stages of our solar system.

[...] Scientists soon cracked open the canister to find an abundance of material — and that's not even counting the still-sealed chamber of the spacecraft's TAGSAM (Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism) head, which holds most of the treasure.

In fact, there are so many "dark particles" coating the canister's interior that it's slowing down the curation process, according to a NASA statement.

[...] The spacecraft rendezvoused with the 1,600-foot asteroid back in 2020. It slowly approached Bennu with its TAGSAM stretched out in front of it, briefly making contact and sending dust and small rocks flying.

It took OSIRIS-REx years to finally make it back to the Earth's orbit. After successfully dropping off its loot, it's now on its way to a different asteroid called Apophis, a journey that will take roughly 5.5 years.

Scientists are now performing a preliminary analysis of initial samples taken from outside of the TAGSAM head, scanning them with an electron microscope, X-ray, and infrared instruments.

They're hoping to find out if the samples contain any organic-rich particles or hydrated minerals, which could offer us clues about Bennu's origins.

Also at MIT Technology Review, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Original Submission