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PiMuNu writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-66964510

I thought this was an interesting, albeit extreme, example of how the data that phone software harvests can be used for evil purposes. In this case it's a loan software that harvests contact data.

The business model is brutal but simple.

There are many apps that promise hassle-free loans in minutes. Not all of them are predatory. But many - once downloaded - harvest your contacts, photos and ID cards, and use that information later to extort you.

When customers don't repay on time - and sometimes even when they do - they share this information with a call centre where young agents of the gig economy, armed with laptops and phones are trained to harass and humiliate people into repayment.

[...]

As the abuse escalated they threatened to message all of the 486 contacts in her phone telling them she was a thief and a whore. When they threatened to tarnish her daughter's reputation too, Bhoomi could no longer sleep.

She borrowed from friends, family and more and more apps - 69 in total. At night, she prayed the morning would never come. But without fail at 07:00, her phone would start pinging and buzzing incessantly.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA's pioneering Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment will be the first demonstration of laser, or optical, communications from as far away as Mars. Launching with NASA's Psyche mission to a metal-rich asteroid of the same name on Thursday, Oct. 12, DSOC will test key technologies designed to enable future missions to transmit denser science data and even stream video from the Red Planet.

[...] There is no dedicated infrastructure on Earth for deep space optical communications, so for the purposes of DSOC, two ground telescopes have been updated to communicate with the flight laser transceiver. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California will host the operations team, and a high-power near-infrared laser transmitter has been integrated with the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at JPL's Table Mountain facility near Wrightwood, California. The transmitter will deliver a modulated laser signal to DSOC's flight transceiver and serve as a beacon, or pointing reference, so that the returned laser beam can be accurately aimed back to Earth.

Data sent from the flight transceiver will be collected by the 200-inch (5.1-meter) Hale Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, which has been equipped with a special superconducting high-efficiency detector array.

DSOC is intended to demonstrate high-rate transmission of data of distances up to 240 million miles (390 million kilometers)—more than twice the distance between the sun and Earth—during the first two years of Psyche's six-year journey to the asteroid belt.

The farther Psyche travels from our planet, the fainter the laser photon signal will become, making it increasingly challenging to decode the data. As an additional challenge, the photons will take longer to reach their destination, creating a lag of over 20 minutes at the tech demo's farthest distance. Because the positions of Earth and the spacecraft will be constantly changing as the photons travel, the DSOC ground and flight systems will need to compensate, pointing to where the ground receiver (at Palomar) and flight transceiver (on Psyche) will be when the photons arrive.

A submitter with no name writes:

While there are a number of small robot lawn mowers on the market, I think they mostly mow randomly inside a fenced off area (the fence may be a buried wire with an AC carrier signal?) Designed for mowing one residential lawn, and not using any sort of optimal mowing path.

Now Honda is demoing a battery powered zero-turn mower that can be trained by a human mowing a big lawn once. Multiple mowing jobs can be stored in memory for future playback. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptN-qrEGqX0 Clearly designed for landscape contractors and other commercial mowing services.

They claim various AI features, but from the looks of it, this is limited to safety--stopping if the machine senses people and/or new objects in the stored mowing path. From the YT text:

Capable of operating in manual or autonomous mode, when manually operated, the Honda AWM learns the mowing routes and patterns set by the operator. In autonomous operation, the AWM reproduces these routes and patterns, which can free up workers' time to focus on more high-value tasks.

Prediction for the next generation of AI mower--automatically re-works the internal mowing path each mow to keep from leaving tell-tale patterns in the grass. Of course each path is optimized, so all these different patterns take about the same time to mow the given lawn.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Microsoft has stopped developing VBScript after a 27-year relationship and plans to remove the scripting language entirely in a future Windows release.

The IT giant said on Monday that VBScript, short for Visual Basic Scripting Edition, has been deprecated in an update to its list of "Deprecated features for Windows client."

"VBScript is being deprecated," Microsoft said. "In future releases of Windows, VBScript will be available as a feature on demand before its removal from the operating system."

Only a month ago, Microsoft announced the pending retirement of another software elder, WordPad.

VBScript debuted in 1996 and its most recent release, version 5.8, dates back to 2010. It is a scripting language, and was for a while widely used among system administrators to automate tasks until it was eclipsed by PowerShell, which debuted in 2006.

"Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition brings active scripting to a wide variety of environments, including Web client scripting in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Web server scripting in Microsoft Internet Information Service," Redmond explains in its help documentation.

Unfortunately, Microsoft never managed to get other browser makers to support VBScript, so outside of Microsoft-exclusive environments, web developers tended to favor JavaScript for client-side tasks.

[...] VBScript's pending demise also means the end for Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, which depends on VBScript. MDT is already on notice now that it's not supported with Windows 11.

Microsoft's planned discontinuation of VBScript may be in part motivated by security concerns, given that VBScript can be a malware vector.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Researchers Find Hidden Micro-Stressors in Routine Driving:

Commuters around the world dream of ideal driving conditions every day, but they rarely get them. The traffic is often heavy and gets worse when the weather turns sour. Light traffic and good weather are usually perceived as factors for a stress-free commute. Alas, researchers from the University of Houston and the Texas A&M Transportation Institute found that even under such ideal conditions, daily driving is stressful to many people, and for intriguing reasons.

In a study published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, researchers report that people with a predisposition to anxiety exhibit a significantly higher heart rate when they drive as opposed to those who are not predisposed to anxiety. Anxious drivers had a heart rate about five beats per minute higher than non-anxious drivers, under similar conditions.

The study's researchers also found drivers' heart rate increased significantly with car speed. Drivers moving at 65 mph had a heart rate of about four beats per minute higher than drivers moving at 25 mph, under similar conditions. In both cases, the observed cardiovascular activation was linked to sympathetic activation, that is, to stress responses.

"These are substantial numbers that we would have never guessed", said Ioannis Pavlidis, Eckhard-Pfeiffer Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, who led the University of Houston group. "Anxious people who commute at highway speeds experience, on average, heart rate elevation of nine beats per minute; this is every day for an hour or more, which is the typical commuting time in this country. It is an unexpected stressor that is hard to ignore because of its substantial effect and its repetitive nature."

upstart writes:

NASA's Psyche metal asteroid mission launches this week: Here's what you need to know:

NASA is preparing to launch its Psyche spacecraft on the first mission designed to study a metal-rich asteroid up close. The Psyche mission is set to blast off on Thursday (Oct. 12) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 10:16 a.m. EDT (1416 GMT) atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

After traveling an estimated 2.2 billion miles (3.5 billion kilometers), the spacecraft will arrive at the asteroid 16 Psyche, which is located at the far edge of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, in 2029.

Once the spacecraft is in place, mission scientists will study the metal asteroid, which is different from the rock- and ice-dominated bodies studied in situ in the past, to learn more about how the rocky planets of the solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) formed.

Discovered in 1852, Psyche is considered one of the most fascinating objects in the main asteroid belt, and scientists have only been able to study it at a distance. Scientists think the asteroid is composed of the exposed core of a planetesimal, a small body that formed during planet formation as gas and dust around a star collapsed in dense patches.

A planetesimal could eventually go on to gather more mass and thus become a planet. But Psyche is thought to have failed to reach planet status because it collided with other larger bodies as the solar system was forming around 4.5 billion years ago, possibly stripping the metal-rich asteroid of its outer rocky shell and exposing its iron-rich core.

That means that studying this 173-mile-wide (279 km), potato-shaped asteroid could not only help reveal more about the collisions that took place in the early solar system but also provide scientists with a proxy for the inaccessible iron core of our own planet.

Psyche seems to diverge from the solar system planets born from planetesimals. Whereas the rocks of the inner solar system planets are replete with iron oxides  —  chemical compounds of iron and oxygen atoms  —  Psyche lacks these compounds. If Psyche is indeed composed of material left over from the birth of the rocky planets, its existence could point to a different type of planetary formation that diverges from the mechanism that created Earth.

But even if Psyche turns out not to be an exposed planetesimal core, the asteroid is still very interesting to scientists because it could mean it belongs to a population of never-before-seen primordial solar system bodies.

hubie writes:

https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.13.021032

In the short story Chains (1929), the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy described a game where a group of people were discussing how the members of the human society were closer together than ever before. To prove this point, one participant proposes that any person out of the entire Earth population (around 1.8 billion at that time) could be reached using nothing except each personal network of acquaintances, betting that the resulting chain would be of no more than five individuals. The story coined the expression "six degrees of separation" to reflect the idea that all people of the world are six or fewer social connections apart from each other. The concept was later generalized to that of "small-world" networks, where the maximal social distance (the diameter of the network) scales logarithmically, rather than linearly, with the size of the population.

[...] One of the most intriguing and captivating features of social networks is that they are organized so that no individual is more than six connections apart from any other, an empirical regularity known as the six degrees of separation. Why social networks have this ultrasmall world organization—where the diameter of a graph of the network is independent of the network size over several orders of magnitude—is still unknown. Our study shows that this property is the direct consequence of the dynamical evolution of any network structure where individuals weigh their aspiration to improve their centrality against the costs incurred in forming or maintaining connections.

We look at the evolution of a graph whose growth is governed by a simple compensation rule. This rule balances the cost incurred by nodes in maintaining connections and the benefit accrued by the chosen links. In this case, the graph's asymptotic equilibrium state (a Nash equilibrium, where no further actions would produce more benefit than cost) features a diameter that, irrespective of the network's initial connectivity structure, does not depend on the system's size and is equal to six.

Our study points out that evolutionary rules of the kind traditionally associated with human cooperation and altruism can in fact account also for the emergence of the six degrees of separation in social networks.

Journal Reference:
I. Samoylenko, D. Aleja, E. Primo, et al., Why Are There Six Degrees of Separation in a Social Network?, Phys. Rev. X 13, 021032 – Published 31 May 2023. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.13.021032

Original Submission

upstart writes:

An algorithm that takes just seconds to scan a paper for duplicated images racks up more suspicious images than a person:

Scientific-image sleuth Sholto David blogs about image manipulation in research papers, a pastime that has exposed him to many accounts of scientific fraud. But other scientists "are still a little bit in the dark about the extent of the problem", David says. He decided he needed some data.

The independent biologist in Pontypridd, UK, spent the best part of several months poring over hundreds of papers in one journal, looking for any with duplicated images. Then he ran the same papers through an artificial-intelligence (AI) tool. Working at two to three times David's speed, the software found almost all of the 63 suspect papers that he had identified — and 41 that he'd missed. David described the exercise last month in a preprint1, one of the first published comparisons of human versus machine for finding doctored images.

[...] Not all image manipulation is done with nefarious intent. Authors might tinker with images by accident, for aesthetic reasons or to make a figure more understandable. But journals and others would like to catch images with alterations that cross the line, whatever the authors' motivation. And now they are turning to AI for help.

Some 200 universities, publishers and scientific societies already rely on Imagetwin, the tool that David used for his study. The software compares images in a paper with more than 25 million images from other publications — the largest such database in the image-integrity world, according to Imagetwin's developers.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

I am still amazed how few people – even in IT – have heard of Windows Copilot. Microsoft's deep integration of Bing Chat into Windows 11 was announced with much fanfare back in May.

Microsoft hasn't been quiet about it – indeed it can’t seem to shut up about Copilot this and Copilot that – yet it seems that the real impact of this sudden Copilotization of all the things has somehow managed to fly under the radar.

[...] Microsoft has rushed to get Copilot into its operating system

[...] Windows Copilot looks just like Bing Chat – which may be why IT folks haven't given it a second look. Bing Chat has been available in Microsoft's Edge Browser for months – no biggie.

But Windows Copilot only looks like Bing Chat. While Bing Chat runs within the isolated environment of the web browser, Copilot abandons those safeties. Copilot can touch and change Windows system settings – not all of them (at least not yet) but some of them, with more being added all the time. That means Microsoft's AI chatbot has broken loose of its hermetically sealed browser, and has the run of our PCs.

[...] Every day we learn of new prompt injection attacks – weaponizing the ambiguities of human language (and, sometimes, just the right level of noise) to override the guardrails keeping AI chatbots on the straight and narrow. Consider a prompt injection attack hidden within a Word document: Submitted to Windows Copilot for an analysis and summary, the document also injects a script that silently transmits a copy of the files in the working directory to the attacker.

Unity CEO John Riccitiello is Retiring, Effective Immediately

upstart writes:

Former EA CEO will be replaced in interim by James Whitehurst from IBM/Red Hat:

John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, the company whose 3D game engine had recently seen backlash from developers over proposed fee structures, will retire as CEO, president, and board chairman at the company, according to a press release issued late on a Monday afternoon, one many observe as a holiday.

[...] The timing of Riccitiello's retirement is certainly intriguing, given Unity's recent history. After announcing a per-install fee that many developers felt would endanger their livelihoods, Unity made major changes and has sent other executives on something of an apology tour. Riccitiello previously served as CEO at Electronic Arts, where his resignation came soon after SimCity's technically (if not financially) disastrous launch, though Riccitiello himself cited financial results.

Unity CEO 'Retires' In The Wake Of Fee Fiasco

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Unity has announced the immediate retirement of president, CEO, chair, and board member John Riccitiello.

The boss's departure follows a botched attempt to charge developers per-install fees for games created with Unity's tools – a step that effectively amounted to charging royalties on each sale of a game. Unity had previously promised never to do such a thing.

Developers did not appreciate Unity's proposal, expressing opposition so vigorous the toolmaker canceled a Town Hall Meeting and mostly walked back its new pricing plan.

Riccitiello's departure was announced in a press release headlined "Unity Announces Leadership Transition." Tellingly, Unity posted it to Business Wire – a press release distribution service and repository that many comms people regard as a source of on-the-record info – rather than its own site.

[...] You may or may not know that Riccitiello was CEO of games publishing house Electronic Arts from February 2007 to March 2013; back then he quit that biz saying he was accountable for EA's under-performing finances. He joined Unity the following year.

Previously:
    Unity Makes Major Changes to Controversial Install-Fee Program
    Unity Promises "Changes" to Install Fee Plans as Developer Fallout Continues
    Developer Dis-Unity

Original Submission

looorg writes:

ATARI releasing a "new" game for the 2600 console. 46 years in development, there wasn't just active development, have got to be some kind of record in and by itself.

Sold in the classic box and cartridge form. Clearly targeting the collector-market since it's just 500 copies. I'm not sure you'll get your $60 worth tho. It doesn't look very good or appear to be overly interesting as a game. It's not Pitfall.

Perhaps this isn't a surprise, or should come as one. After all it seems the game market today is in large just remaking the same titles over and over again, remaking and "updating" previous titles etc. In that sense starting to release games for long dead consoles is perhaps not that far fetched.

https://www.engadget.com/atari-is-releasing-a-new-cartridge-for-its-46-year-old-2600-console-183922523.html

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Result confirms time-dilation expectations of Einstein's general relativity:

Scientists have for the first time observed the early universe running in extreme slow motion, unlocking one of the mysteries of Einstein's expanding universe.

Einstein's general theory of relativity means that we should observe the distant – and hence ancient – universe running much slower than the present day. However, peering back that far in time has proven elusive. Scientists have now cracked that mystery by using quasars as 'clocks'.

"Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower," said lead author of the study, Professor Geraint Lewis from the School of Physics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney.

"If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second – but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag."

[...] "Thanks to Einstein, we know that time and space are intertwined and, since the dawn of time in the singularity of the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding," Professor Lewis said.

"This expansion of space means that our observations of the early universe should appear to be much slower than time flows today.

[...] Professor Lewis worked with astro-statistician Dr Brewer to examine details of 190 quasars observed over two decades. Combining the observations taken at different colours (or wavelengths) – green light, red light and into the infrared – they were able to standardise the 'ticking' of each quasar. Through the application of Bayesian analysis, they found the expansion of the universe imprinted on each quasar's ticking.

"With these exquisite data, we were able to chart the tick of the quasar clocks, revealing the influence of expanding space," Professor Lewis said.

You can look at their source data if you want to do your own number crunching.

Journal Reference:
Lewis, G.F., Brewer, B.J. Detection of the cosmological time dilation of high-redshift quasars. Nat Astron (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-02029-2

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Elon Musk's X Corp. has to pay $1.1 million in reimbursements for legal fees to former Twitter executives that he fired, including ex-CEO Parag Agrawal, a judge reportedly ruled yesterday. Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled against Musk's firm during a hearing yesterday, Bloomberg reported.

The former Twitter executives said that after being fired by Musk, the company now known as X refused to reimburse them for expenses related to federal investigations and civil lawsuits. The former executives' lawsuit filed in April said the company "has breached its obligations... by refusing to advance Plaintiffs' Expenses."

"After hearing arguments, McCormick noted Delaware courts lean in favor of granting executives' request to have legal fees covered when tied to their actions on behalf of companies. She said she didn't see any reason to deviate from the norm in the case," Bloomberg wrote.

McCormick is the same judge who handled the trial that forced Musk to complete the deal to buy Twitter that he tried to break last year. "I have reviewed the amount in question, and although it is high and probably higher than most humans would like to pay, it's not unreasonable," McCormick was quoted as saying yesterday. A written ruling wasn't available on the court website yet.

The lawsuit was filed by Agrawal, former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, and former Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal. Musk fired the executives right after he completed the $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October 2022.

Their lawsuit said that Twitter's bylaws and agreements with executives required it "to indemnify Plaintiffs and advance all Expenses incurred in connection with any Proceeding in which Plaintiffs are involved by reason of their Corporate Status." The plaintiffs said they incurred legal bills related to inquiries by the US Securities and Exchange Commission Division of Enforcement and US Department of Justice; a securities class action filed against the company and its executives; a congressional inquiry into alleged "social media bias"; and other matters.

upstart writes:

The Grace Hopper Celebration is meant to unite women in tech. This year droves of men came looking for jobs:

It was meant to be a week for women in tech—but this year's Grace Hopper Celebration was swamped by men who gate-crashed the event in search of lucrative tech jobs.

The annual conference and career fair aimed at women and non-binary tech workers, which takes its name from a pioneering computer scientist, took place last week in Orlando, Florida. The event bills itself as the largest gathering of women in tech worldwide and has sought to unite women in the tech industry for nearly 30 years. Sponsors include Apple, Amazon, and Bloomberg, and it's a major networking opportunity for aspiring tech workers. In-person admission costs between $649 and around $1,300.

This year, droves of men showed up with résumés in hand. AnitaB.org, the nonprofit that runs the conference, said there was "an increase in participation of self-identifying males" at this year's event. The nonprofit says it believes allyship from men is important and noted it cannot ban men from attending due to federal nondiscrimination protections in the US.

[...] Cullen White, AnitaB.org's chief impact officer, said in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, that some registrants had lied about their gender identity when signing up, and men were now taking up space and time with recruiters that should go to women. "All of those are limited resources to which you have no right," White said. AnitaB.org did not respond to a request for comment.

upstart writes:

Records reportedly belong to millions of users who opted in to a relative-search feature:

Genetic profiling service 23andMe has commenced an investigation after private user data was been scraped off its website

Friday's confirmation comes five days after an unknown entity took to an online crime forum to advertise the sale of private information for millions of 23andMe users. The forum posts claimed that the stolen data included origin estimation, phenotype, health information, photos, and identification data. The posts claimed that 23andMe's CEO was aware the company had been "hacked" two months earlier and never revealed the incident. In a statement emailed after this post went live, a 23andMe representative said "nothing they have posted publicly indicates they actually have any 'health information.' These are all unsubstantiated claims at this point."

23andMe officials on Friday confirmed that private data for some of its users is, in fact, up for sale. The cause of the leak, the officials said, is data scraping, a technique that essentially reassembles large amounts of data by systematically extracting smaller amounts of information available to individual users of a service. Attackers gained unauthorized access to the individual 23andMe accounts, all of which had been configured by the user to opt in to a DNA relative feature that allows them to find potential relatives.

[...] The DNA relative feature allows users who opt in to view basic profile information of others who also allow their profiles to be visible to DNA Relative participants, a spokesperson said. If the DNA of one opting-in user matches another, each gets to access the other's ancestry information.