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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/10/actively-exploited-cisco-0-day-with-maximum-10-severity-gives-full-network-control/

Cisco is urging customers to protect their devices following the discovery of a critical, actively exploited zero-day vulnerability that's giving threat actors full administrative control of networks.

"Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows an attacker to create an account on the affected device with privilege level 15 access, effectively granting them full control of the compromised device and allowing possible subsequent unauthorized activity," members of Cisco's Talos security team wrote Monday. "This is a critical vulnerability, and we strongly recommend affected entities immediately implement the steps outlined in Cisco's PSIRT advisory."
[...]
Monday's advisory went on to say that after gaining access to a vulnerable device, the threat actor exploits a medium vulnerability, CVE-2021-1435, which Cisco patched two years ago. The Talos team members said that they have seen devices fully patched against the earlier vulnerability getting the implant installed "through an as of yet undetermined mechanism."
[...]
It should go without saying, but the HTTP and HTTPS server feature should never be enabled on Internet-facing systems as is consistent with long-established best practices. Cisco reiterated the guidance in Monday's advisory.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Amazing Flyover Reveals What Soaring Across Mars Would Look Like:

Many of us have dreamed about flying over the surface of Mars—someday. The planet offers so many cool places to study, and doing it in person is something for future Marsnauts to consider.

The Mars Express spacecraft has been mapping the Red Planet for years. It now gives us an up-close look now, through an animation of thousands of images of Mars from its cameras.

One of the most striking areas on Mars is its Noctis Labyrinthus—Latin for the "Labyrinth of Night." It lies between Mars's Valles Marineris and the gigantic volcanoes of the Tharsis Bulge.

This shattered terrain is a system of valleys that stretch out across nearly 1,200 kilometers. Scientists combined ESA's Mars Express images into an amazing flyover of this terrain, giving us a tasty hint of what future explorers will see.

[...] It's cool to think of Mars Express focusing a high-resolution movie camera on the surface. However, this movie comprises many individual images. The views come from more than eight Mars Express orbits.

In addition to images, the team combined images with topographic information from a digital terrain model. That helped the visualization team generate a three-dimensional landscape, with every second of the video comprising 50 separate frames rendered according to a pre-defined camera path.

In addition to showing the ancient history of Mars terrain, the video also shows some Mars Express history. The opening credits (Mars globe, first 24 seconds) were created using the recent 20-year Mars global color mosaic.

Haze has been added to conceal the limits of the terrain model. It starts building up at a distance of between 150 and 200 km. The video is centered at the Martian coordinates of 7°S, 265°E.

A four-minute video of the flyby.

Original Submission

owl writes:

http://www.righto.com/2023/10/intel-386-die-versions.html

You might think of the Intel 386 processor (1985) as just an early processor in the x86 line, but the 386 was a critical turning point for modern computing in several ways.1 First, the 386 moved the x86 architecture to 32 bits, defining the dominant computing architecture for the rest of the 20th century. The 386 also established the overwhelming importance of x86, not just for Intel, but for the entire computer industry. Finally, the 386 ended IBM's control over the PC market, turning Compaq into the architectural leader.

[...] The 80386 was a major advancement over the 286: it implemented a 32-bit architecture, added more instructions, and supported 4-gigabyte segments. The 386 is a complicated processor (by 1980s standards), with 285,000 transistors, ten times the number of the original 8086.4 The 386 has eight logical units that are pipelined5 and operate mostly autonomously.

[...] The design process of the 386 is interesting because it illustrates Intel's migration to automated design systems and heavier use of simulation.23 At the time, Intel was behind the industry in its use of tools so the leaders of the 386 realized that more automation would be necessary to build a complex chip like the 386 on schedule. By making a large investment in automated tools, the 386 team completed the design ahead of schedule. Along with proprietary CAD tools, the team made heavy use of standard Unix tools such as sed, awk, grep, and make to manage the various design databases.

[...] Once the processor was released, the problems weren't over.25 Some early 386 processors had a 32-bit multiply problem, where some arguments would unpredictably produce the wrong results under particular temperature/voltage/frequency conditions. (This is unrelated to the famous Pentium FDIV bug that cost Intel $475 million.) The root cause was a layout problem, not a logic problem; they didn't allow enough margin to handle the worst case data in combination with manufacturing process and environment factors. This tricky problem didn't show up in simulation or chip verification, but was only found in stress testing.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Signatures of the Space Age: Spacecraft metals left in the wake of humanity's path to the stars:

The Space Age is leaving fingerprints on one of the most remote parts of the planet—the stratosphere—which has potential implications for climate, the ozone layer and the continued habitability of Earth.

Using tools hitched to the nose cone of their research planes and sampling more than 11 miles above the planet's surface, researchers have discovered significant amounts of metals in aerosols in the atmosphere, likely from increasingly frequent launches and returns of spacecraft and satellites. That mass of metal is changing atmospheric chemistry in ways that may impact Earth's atmosphere and ozone layer.

"We are finding this human-made material in what we consider a pristine area of the atmosphere," said Dan Cziczo, one of a team of scientists who published a study on these results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "And if something is changing in the stratosphere—this stable region of the atmosphere—that deserves a closer look."

Cziczo, professor and head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences in Purdue's College of Science, is an expert in atmospheric science who has spent decades studying this rarefied region.

Led by Dan Murphy, an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the team detected more than 20 elements in ratios that mirror those used in spacecraft alloys.

They found that the mass of lithium, aluminum, copper and lead from spacecraft reentry far exceeded those metals found in natural cosmic dust. Nearly 10% of large sulfuric acid particles—the particles that help protect and buffer the ozone layer—contained aluminum and other spacecraft metals.

Scientists estimate that as many as 50,000 more satellites may reach orbit by 2030. The team calculates that means that, in the next few decades, up to half of stratospheric sulfuric acid particles would contain metals from reentry. What effect that could have on the atmosphere, the ozone layer and life on Earth is yet to be understood.

More information: Murphy, Daniel M. et al, Metals from spacecraft reentry in stratospheric aerosol particles, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2313374120. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2313374120

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Johns Hopkins philosophers and psychologists used auditory illusions to solve an ancient puzzle: whether people can hear more than sounds:

Silence might not be deafening, but it's something that literally can be heard, concludes a team of philosophers and psychologists who used auditory illusions to reveal how moments of silence distort people's perception of time.

The findings address the debate of whether people can hear more than sounds, which has puzzled philosophers for centuries.

"We typically think of our sense of hearing as being concerned with sounds. But silence, whatever it is, is not a sound—it's the absence of sound," said lead author Rui Zhe Goh, a Johns Hopkins University graduate student in philosophy and psychology. "Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that nothing is also something you can hear."

The team adapted well-known auditory illusions to create versions in which the sounds of the original illusions were replaced by moments of silence. For example, one illusion made a sound seem much longer than it really was. In the team's new silence-based illusion, an equivalent moment of silence also seemed longer than it really was.

The fact that these silence-based illusions produced exactly the same results as their sound-based counterparts suggests that people hear silence just as they hear sounds, the researchers said.

[...] "There's at least one thing that we hear that isn't a sound, and that's the silence that happens when sounds go away," said co-author Ian Phillips, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Psychological and Brain Sciences. "The kinds of illusions and effects that look like they are unique to the auditory processing of a sound, we also get them with silences, suggesting we really do hear absences of sound too."

The findings establish a new way to study the perception of absence, the team said.

Includes a two-minute video with a brief explanation and demonstration for your ears.

Journal Reference:
Rui Zhe Goh, Ian B. Phillips, and Chaz Firestone, The perception of silence, PNAS, July 10, 2023, 120 (29) e2301463120 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2301463120

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Mathematician warns US spies may be weakening next-gen encryption:

A prominent cryptography expert has told New Scientist that a US spy agency could be weakening a new generation of algorithms designed to protect against hackers equipped with quantum computers.

Daniel Bernstein at the University of Illinois Chicago says that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is deliberately obscuring the level of involvement the US National Security Agency (NSA) has in developing new encryption standards for "post-quantum cryptography" (PQC). He also believes that NIST has made errors – either accidental or deliberate – in calculations describing the security of the new standards. NIST denies the claims.

"NIST isn't following procedures designed to stop NSA from weakening PQC," says Bernstein. "People choosing cryptographic standards should be transparently and verifiably following clear public rules so that we don't need to worry about their motivations. NIST promised transparency and then claimed it had shown all its work, but that claim simply isn't true."

[...] Although it is unclear when such computers will emerge, NIST has been running a project since 2012 to standardise a new generation of algorithms that resist their attacks. Bernstein, who coined the term post-quantum cryptography in 2003 to refer to these kinds of algorithms, says the NSA is actively engaged in putting secret weaknesses into new encryption standards that will allow them to be more easily cracked with the right knowledge. NIST's standards are used globally, so flaws could have a large impact.

Bernstein alleges that NIST's calculations for one of the upcoming PQC standards, Kyber512, are "glaringly wrong", making it appear more secure than it really is. He says that NIST multiplied two numbers together when it would have been more correct to add them, resulting in an artificially high assessment of Kyber512's robustness to attack.

"We disagree with his analysis," says Dustin Moody at NIST. "It's a question for which there isn't scientific certainty and intelligent people can have different views. We respect Dan's opinion, but don't agree with what he says."

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/canadas-84-year-radio-time-check-has-stopped-because-of-accuracy-concerns/

"The beginning of the long dash indicates exactly 1 o'clock Eastern daylight time."

Millions of Canadians grew accustomed to hearing a version of this daily affirmation on CBC Radio One. The National Research Council Time Signal, and the series of 800 Hz "pips" that preceded and followed the time-setting dash, worked its way into everyday rituals. Human listeners, and automated radio receivers at railways, shipping firms, and other entities, could set their mechanical clocks to it. That is why it started broadcasting on November 5, 1939, the same year as Canada's entry into World War II.

The long dash's last broadcast was, somewhat unexpectedly, October 9, 2023.

Both the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the NRC have cited accuracy as the reason the 84-year ritual was halted. The CBC told its own reporters that because the CBC is now heard over satellite and Internet connections, not just terrestrial radio, there are delays when people hear it. A spokesperson acknowledged Canadians' "fondness" for the daily ritual but said it "can no longer ensure that the time announcement can be accurate."

Original Submission

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Today, Wednesday, October 18th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (5pm Eastern) 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 welcome to observe and participate--you are hereby invited to the meeting.

hubie writes:

Psychologist Steven Jay Lann and colleagues debunk common myths about hypnosis:

A strange mystic swings a pocket watch back and forth, repeating the phrase "You're getting sleepy, very sleepy," giving them absolute command over their subject. That's not how hypnotism really works, but it's the way it's often depicted in pop culture. Even some clinicians and hypnosis educators propagate harmful myths about hypnosis.

Steven Jay Lynn, a professor of psychology at Binghamton University, State University of New York, is an expert on hypnosis who has made major contributions to the judicial system for his insight on the practice. Lynn believes that hypnosis has many useful clinical applications, but that myths keep it from being utilized to its full potential.

[...] These are a few of the common myths that are widely believed and commonly circulated in popular culture.

Hypnotized people can't resist suggestions

A hypnotized person is believed to display "blind obedience," going along automatically with whatever the hypnotist suggests. [...]

Hypnosis is a "special state"

Hypnosis is often mischaracterized as a "special state" in which defense mechanisms are reduced and a "unique state of physical relaxation and conscious unconsciousness" allows us to enter our subconscious depths through hypnosis. [...]

People are either hypnotizable or they are not

Responsiveness to hypnosis can be relatively stable over time. Yet it is inaccurate to assume that people are either hypnotizable or not. [...]

Responsiveness to suggestions reflects nothing more than compliance or faking

Suggested behaviors during hypnosis can seem so much a departure from the mundane that questions inevitably arise regarding whether hypnotic responses are genuine. However, neuroimaging studies reveal that the effects of hypnotic suggestions activate brain regions (e.g, visual processing) consistent with suggested events (e.g., hallucinating an object). [...]

Hypnotic methods require great skill to administer

One popular misconception is that of the mesmerist, or a magician-like hypnotist with special powers of influence who can "hypnotize" anyone. [...]

Hypnotic age regression can retrieve accurate memories from the distant past

TV shows and movies often feature people being able to recall extremely accurate memories from a distant past life under hypnosis. But research suggests a contrary view.

Journal Reference:
Stein, M., Lynn, S., & Terhune, D. (2023). Reconciling myths and misconceptions about hypnosis with scientific evidence. BJPsych Advances, 1-2. doi:10.1192/bja.2023.30

Original Submission

Both Freeman and upstart wrote in with:

After ChatGPT disruption, Stack Overflow lays off 28 percent of staff:

Stack Overflow used to be every developer's favorite site for coding help, but with the rise of generative AI like ChatGPT, chatbots can offer more specific help than a 5-year-old forum post ever could.

[...] You might think of Stack Overflow as "just a forum," but the company is working on a direct answer to ChatGPT in the form of "Overflow AI," which was announced in July. Stack Overflow's profitability plan includes cutting costs, and that's the justification for the layoffs. Stack Overflow doubled its headcount in 2022 with 525 people. ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, making for unfortunate timing.

[... ] OpenAI is working on web crawler controls for ChatGPT, which would let sites like Stack Overflow opt out of crawling. [...] Chandrasekar has argued that sites like Stack Overflow are essential for chatbots, saying they need "to be trained on something that's progressing knowledge forward. They need new knowledge to be created."

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

dbe writes:

This article [Paywalled-Subscribers Only] describes how GPT tools can be used for some tasks but will reduce the quality of workers output in others in a phenomenon dubbed "falling asleep behind the wheel".

Tasks where GPT assisted consultants did better: creative business idealization and selling concepts.

Participants were required to complete 18 tasks, or as many as they could within the given time frame, across four broad domains: creativity (e.g. "propose at least 10 ideas for a new shoe targeting an underserved market or sport"); analytical thinking (e.g. "segment the footwear industry market based on users"); writing proficiency (e.g. "draft a press release marketing copy for your product"); and persuasiveness (e.g. "pen an inspirational memo to employees detailing why your product would outshine competitors").

Tasks where relying too much on GPT tools reduced the output quality (but was faster): tasks where data analysis was required to draw the right conclusion

For this task, participants had to use interviews with company insiders and financial data from a spreadsheet to pinpoint which of a hypothetical company's brands held the most potential for growth.

So I guess as long as your work is not pushing fluff content, being skilled can still give you an edge.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/comcast-should-stop-advertising-slower-speeds-as-10g-industry-group-says/

An advertising industry group urged Comcast to stop its "10G" ads or modify them to state that 10G is an "aspirational" technology rather than something the company actually provides on its cable network today. The National Advertising Division (NAD), part of the advertising industry's self-regulatory system run by BBB National Programs, ruled against Comcast after a challenge lodged by T-Mobile.

In its decision announced Thursday, the NAD recommended that Comcast "discontinue its '10G' claims" or "modify its advertising to (a) make clear that it is implementing improvements that will enable it to achieve '10G' and that it is aspirational or (b) use '10G' in a manner that is not false or misleading, consistent with this decision."
[...]
Comcast isn't alone in its use of the 10G term, which was unveiled in January 2019 by cable industry trade group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association. We wrote at the time that 10G marketing was likely to confuse consumers and that it indicated cable companies were envious of the 5G hype generated by the wireless industry.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

ScienceAlert has a summary of a report on a new phase of superionic ice as developed in the lab.

Scientists confirmed in 2019 what physicists had predicted back in 1988: a structure where the oxygen atoms in superionic ice are locked in a solid cubic lattice, while the ionized hydrogen atoms are let loose, flowing through that lattice like electrons through metals.

This gives superionic ice its conductive properties. It also raises its melting point such that the frozen water remains solid at blistering temperatures.

In this latest study, physicist Arianna Gleason of Stanford University and colleagues bombarded thin slivers of water, sandwiched between two diamond layers, with some ridiculously powerful lasers.

Successive shockwaves raised the pressure to 200 GPa (2 million atmospheres) and temperatures up to about 5,000 K (8,500 °F) – hotter than the temperatures of the 2019 experiments, but at lower pressures.

"Recent discoveries of water-rich Neptune-like exoplanets require a more detailed understanding of the phase diagram of [water] at pressure–temperature conditions relevant to their planetary interiors," Gleason and colleagues explain in their paper, from January 2022.

X-ray diffraction then revealed the hot, dense ice's crystal structure, despite the pressure and temperature conditions only being maintained for a fraction of a second.

The resulting diffraction patterns confirmed the ice crystals were in fact a new phase distinct from superionic ice observed in 2019. The newly discovered superionic ice, Ice XIX, has a body-centered cubic structure and increased conductivity compared to its predecessor from 2019, Ice XVIII.

Superionic ice might be the most common form of water in the universe.

Cite: Dynamic compression of water to conditions in ice giant interiors

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Just when you thought it was safe to use your 12VHPWR cable with your RTX 4090 again, another incident of GPU meltdown pops up in the forums. Redditor Byogore reports that he bought an Asus 4090 in Germany a year ago because of US supply issues. The card worked totally fine until it self-immolated two days ago. This incident is unusual because typically failures have happened much sooner.

Other Redditors quickly questioned whether Byogore had the connectors seated securely since "user error" was one of Nvidia's excuses when the issue arose shortly after the RTX4090 launch. Byogore defended his ability to properly attach a computer component.

[...] "The fact that the 90-degree cable mod adapter [to prevent bending] was plugged in fully to the connector and the connector still melted, then we know that we have a problem with the card. We have a problem with the card. We do not have a problem with the cable. It's not user error, it's not a cable not plugged in properly problem, it's not a cable mod problem, but it's a problem with the design and the engineering of the card."

NorthridgeFix also points out that even if the problem was caused by user error, it's still Nvidia's fault. For instance, if a user is plugging in a cable as they do with any other, past or present, and it leaves a 1mm gap that causes failure, that is not the user's fault. When there is a tolerance issue like that, it is the manufacturer's responsibility to fix it or design a mechanism to prevent it, not blame the user for not plugging it in correctly and doing nothing more about it.

Byogore says that the meltdown happened while he was playing Battlefield 2042. The screen turned black, but the audio continued. Then, the computer rebooted itself. As it started up, he could smell burnt plastic. The card still worked, but only briefly before crashing and burning again. Byogore mentioned that he has a 1,000W Corsair PSU and that the 4090 was undervolted at the time of the catastrophic failure. However, he didn't note whether his PSU was ATX 3.0. The problem only seems to occur on older ATX 2.0 power supplies.

[...] Nvidia has been reluctant to accept any blame for the 4090's hot-button woes. It initially blamed users for not securing the cable tightly to the socket. Later, it said that "poorly designed" 12VHPWR adapters were to blame. The last time the issue popped up enough to make news was last May. The ongoing problem has even sucked Nvidia into a class-action lawsuit.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

New study finds that large group size and mating systems where males have multiple mates drove evolution of deeper male voices in primates, including humans:

Deeper male voices in primates, including humans, offer more than sex appeal — they may have evolved as another way for males to drive off competitors in large groups that favored polygyny, or mating systems where a male has multiple mates, according to researchers. The research is the most comprehensive investigation of differences in vocal pitch between sexes to date and has the potential to help to shed light on social behavior in humans and their closest living relatives.

The average speaking pitch of an adult male human is about half the average pitch, an octave lower, than that of an adult female human, said David Puts, professor of anthropology at Penn State and study co-author.

"It's a sex difference that emerges at sexual maturity across species and it probably influences mating success through attracting mates or by intimidating competitors," he said. "I thought it has to be a trait that's been subjected to sexual selection, in which mating opportunities influence which traits are passed down to offspring. Humans and many other primates are highly communicative, especially through vocal communication. So it seems like a really relevant trait for thinking about social behavior in humans and primates in general."

The researchers used specialized computer software to visualize vocalizations and measure voice pitch in recordings from 37 anthropoid primate species, or those most closely related to humans, including gorillas, chimpanzees and recordings of 60 humans evenly divided by sex. Samples for each species included at least two male and two female vocal recordings, for a total of 1,914 vocalizations. The team then calculated average male and female vocal fundamental frequency for each species to see how pronounced the difference was between sexes.

[...] The researchers used these data to test five hypotheses simultaneously to identify which factors may have played the strongest roles in driving sex differences in vocal pitch. The hypotheses were: intensity of mating competition, large group size, multilevel social organization, trade-off against the intensity of sperm competition, and poor acoustic habitats. Previous research has looked at one or two of these hypotheses at a time. The current study is the first to test multiple hypotheses simultaneously for vocal pitch differences using a robust dataset, ensuring data consistency and garnering convincing results, according to Puts.