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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Two men this week confessed to deliberately bypassing testing protocols that are essential to keeping nuclear power plants safe. This happened not once, not twice, but 29 times.

Miguel Marcial Amaro, 56, from Delaware, and Martin Ramos, 52, from Pennsylvania, both pleaded guilty to a single count of making and using a materially false document, and aiding and abetting the same, for their respective roles in creating false calibration certs.

And it wasn't just one nuclear plant where Marcial and Ramos were cutting corners. According to the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division, the duo faked certs that would show acoustic emissions (AE) testing had been done by calibrated instruments in several plants over a period that stretched for over a decade.

AE testing is important as it's how engineers can check the structural integrity of components without shaking, moving, or otherwise impacting their serviceability. The pair were responsible for ascertaining their employer's AE testing kit was compliant, with Marcial ensuring the equipment was calibrated annually, and Ramos working under Marcial as an engineer.

[...] The Justice Department said in a felony notice filed on September 25 that the AE testing equipment was used to determine, "among other things, the structural integrity of heavy-lifting components, such as cranes and rigging, that handled critical components of a nuclear reactor, including nuclear fuel."

AE testing works by mounting small sensors onto a component. The component emits stress waves when you apply an external stimulus, such as high pressure, loads, or temperatures. The sensors detect these waves as they are emitted, converts them into electrical signals, and then relays these to a computer for processing. The notice adds that the process assesses the structural integrity of components, including whether there was any "infirmity, weakness, or damage."

[...] The pair are scheduled to be sentenced on January 25 next year, with a federal district court judge determining the length, which is max five years. The original indictment is not public and it is not known what the men's motivation for their actions could be.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/10/ai-chatbots-can-infer-an-alarming-amount-of-info-about-you-from-your-responses/

The way you talk can reveal a lot about you—especially if you're talking to a chatbot. New research reveals that chatbots like ChatGPT can infer a lot of sensitive information about the people they chat with, even if the conversation is utterly mundane.

The phenomenon appears to stem from the way the models' algorithms are trained with broad swathes of web content, a key part of what makes them work, likely making it hard to prevent. "It's not even clear how you fix this problem," says Martin Vechev, a computer science professor at ETH Zürich in Switzerland who led the research. "This is very, very problematic."

Vechev and his team found that the large language models that power advanced chatbots can accurately infer an alarming amount of personal information about users—including their race, location, occupation, and more—from conversations that appear innocuous.
[...]
Researchers have previously shown how large language models can sometimes leak specific personal information. The companies developing these models sometimes try to scrub personal information from training data or block models from outputting it. Vechev says the ability of LLMs to infer personal information is fundamental to how they work by finding statistical correlations, which will make it far more difficult to address. "This is very different," he says. "It is much worse."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

On Thursday, the FCC voted 3-2 to reinstate "net neutrality" rules. The proposal will essentially classify internet service providers as public utilities governed under Title II instead of Title I. The FCC claims the rules would prevent broadband providers from blocking or throttling traffic unless companies paid more, among other things.

Today's vote is the second time the Commission has voted to assign itself as the governor and regulator of private ISPs. The first time was in 2015 under the Obama administration. Those rules were then repealed in 2017, also along party lines, during the Trump administration.

Despite protests and cries that it was the end of a "free internet," nothing much seemed to change, and the fervor died out. There were some early lawsuits and claims alleging throttling, but nothing came of them. Eventually several states including California and Montana created their own net neutrality laws and mandates.

While proponents still claim that the government needs to regulate ISPs to prevent them from trying any funny business, FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel says it is now a matter of "national security."

"Today, there is no expert agency ensuring that the internet is fast, open, and fair... Today, we begin a process to make this right. We propose to reinstate enforceable, bright-line rules to prevent blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization," said Rosenworcel. "When we stripped state-affiliated companies from China of their authority to operate in the United States, that action did not extend to broadband services, thanks to the retreat from Title II. This is a national security loophole that needs to be addressed."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA announced on Thursday that the first-ever crewed test flight of Boeing's much-delayed Starliner spacecraft will launch no earlier than mid-April, 2024.

The mission – dubbed Crew Flight Test (CFT) – will see test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni William travel to the International Space Station (ISS) and back to try out Boeing's reusable capsule. The Starliner will be launched on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and transport the astronauts on an eight-day trip.

In 2014 NASA's Commercial Crew Program contracted Boeing and SpaceX to build spacecraft for transport to and from the ISS. Both firms struggled with multiple setbacks that delayed their first crewed test flights for years.

SpaceX is up and running, having first launched astronauts into space in 2020, and is due to fly its eighth mission in February next year.

Starliner, however, is yet to fly – but is eating a billion-dollar hole in Boeing's accounts.

[...] Meanwhile, the mechanism that connects the parachute to the capsule – needed to slow the Starliner's speed so it can safely land on Earth – has had to be redesigned after it broke apart in tests. The issue has plagued Boeing for a while, and was one of the main reasons it had to push back its first-ever crewed flight back in June.

[...] "NASA will provide an updated status of CFT readiness as more information becomes available," the space agency confirmed in a statement.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

After more than 40 years studying humans and other primates, Sapolsky has reached the conclusion that virtually all human behaviour is as far beyond our conscious control as the convulsions of a seizure, the division of cells or the beating of our hearts.

This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.

Sapolsky, a MacArthur "genius" grant winner, is extremely aware that this is an out-there position. Most neuroscientists believe humans have at least some degree of free will. So do most philosophers and the vast majority of the general population. Free will is essential to how we see ourselves, fueling the satisfaction of achievement or the shame of failing to do the right thing.

[...] Analyzing human behavior through the lens of any single discipline leaves room for the possibility that people choose their actions, he says. But after a long cross-disciplinary career, he feels it's intellectually dishonest to write anything other than what he sees as the unavoidable conclusion: Free will is a myth, and the sooner we accept that, the more just our society will be.

"Determined," which comes out today, builds on Sapolsky's 2017 bestseller "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst," which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a slew of other accolades.

{...]: We are machines, Sapolsky argues, exceptional in our ability to perceive our own experiences and feel emotions about them. It is pointless to hate a machine for its failures.

There is only one last thread he can't resolve.

"It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something 'good' can happen to a machine," he writes. "Nonetheless, I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness."

Behave - The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

[Source]: Los Angeles Times

[Covered By]: Phys.Org

Do you agree with this premise ?

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/dozens-of-google-antitrust-trial-docs-are-still-hidden-from-public-nyt-says/

Dozens of exhibits from the Google antitrust trial are still being hidden from the public, The New York Times Company alleged in a court filing today.

According to The Times, there are several issues with access to public trial exhibits on both sides. The Department of Justice has failed to post at least 68 exhibits on its website that were shared in the trial, The Times alleged, and states have not provided access to 18 records despite reporters' requests.
[...]
Currently, The Times said it is seeking to unseal redactions in two exhibits, and it remains "unclear why the exhibits have been redacted" because "they date to 2007 and relate to a version of an agreement between Apple and Google that has not been operative for more than a decade."

Perhaps most notably, The Times has also asked the court to unseal testimony from Apple exec Eddy Cue and Google vice president and general manager of ads, Jerry Dischler, in their entirety.

"The Court has upheld redactions to certain transcripts in the absence of a showing by the parties on the public record that the sealing is justified and without providing its own 'full explanation of the basis for the redactions," The Times alleged, "even though some of the redactions have been applied to material that is both of great public interest and goes to the core of the litigation."

Previously:
Microsoft CEO Warns of "Nightmare" Future for AI If Google's Search Dominance Continues

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Google-verified advertiser + legit-looking URL + valid TLS cert = convincing lookalike:

Google has been caught hosting a malicious ad so convincing that there's a decent chance it has managed to trick some of the more security-savvy users who encountered it.

Looking at the ad, which masquerades as a pitch for the open-source password manager Keepass, there's no way to know that it's fake. It's on Google, after all, which claims to vet the ads it carries. Making the ruse all the more convincing, clicking on it leads to ķeepass[.]info, which when viewed in an address bar appears to be the genuine Keepass site.

A closer link at the link, however, shows that the site is not the genuine one. In fact, ķeepass[.]info —at least when it appears in the address bar—is just an encoded way of denoting xn--eepass-vbb[.]info, which it turns out, is pushing a malware family tracked as FakeBat. Combining the ad on Google with a website with an almost identical URL creates a near perfect storm of deception.

"Users are first deceived via the Google ad that looks entirely legitimate and then again via a lookalike domain," Jérôme Segura, head of threat intelligence at security provider Malwarebytes, wrote in a post Wednesday that revealed the scam.

Information available through Google's Ad Transparency Center shows that the ads have been running since Saturday and last appeared on Wednesday. The ads were paid for by an outfit called Digital Eagle, which the transparency page says is an advertiser whose identity has been verified by Google.

takyon writes:

AMD Unveils Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Family: 96 Core Zen 4 for Workstations and HEDT

Being announced today by AMD for a November 21st launch, this morning AMD is taking the wraps off of their Ryzen 7000 Threadripper CPUs. These high-end chips are being split up into two product lines, with AMD assembling the workstation-focused Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Pro series, as well as the non-pro Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series for the more consumer-ish high-end desktop (HEDT) market. Both chip lines are based on AMD's tried and true Zen 4 architecture – derivatives of AMD's EPYC server processors – incorporating AMD's Zen 4 chiplets and a discrete I/O dies. As with previous generations of Threadripper parts, we're essentially looking at the desktop version of AMD's EPYC hardware.

Threadripper 7000 Pro WX-Series = 12, 16, 24 ($2,650), 32 ($3,900), 64 ($7,350), or 96 ($10,000) Zen 4 cores, 8-channel DDR5-5200 memory support, 128 usable PCIe 5.0 lanes + 8 PCIe 4.0 + 8 (???)

Threadripper 7000 X-Series = 24 ($1,500), 32 ($2,500), or 64 ($5,000) Zen 4 cores, 4-channel DDR5-5200 memory support, 48 usable PCIe 5.0 lanes + 32 PCIe 4.0 + 8 (???)

The Threadripper Pro models will be supported on both WRX90 and TRX50 motherboards, while non-Pro HEDT models will only be supported on TRX50 motherboards.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Relationship patterns among flightless stick insects suggest that birds disperse the eggs after eating gravid females. Lab experiments previously suggested the possibility, but a new genetic analysis of natural populations in Japan by Kobe University researchers now supports the idea.

Most species of stick insects are flightless, yet they are distributed over wide distances and across geographical features that would impede the expansion of flightless animals. This has caused researchers to speculate that their eggs might be dispersed by birds feeding on gravid females, much in the same way as many plant species rely on birds eating their seeds together with fruits and dispersing them while the seeds pass through the digestive tracts of the birds unharmed.

Experimental studies with Ramulus mikado, a common stick insect in Japan, had suggested that this is possible, but since direct observation of such an event in nature is highly unlikely, it has been unclear whether this mechanism actually contributes to the distribution of the insect.

[...] Lead author Suetsugu says, "Astonishingly, amidst a sea of limited active dispersal, we discovered identical genotypes jumping across vast distances, strongly indicating the past occurrence of passive long-distance genetic dispersal." In other words, a few of the flightless insects must have flown from place to place, and the only plausible way in which this could happen is that the eggs of the insects survive the passage through the digestive tract of birds that eat them.

upstart writes:

The spread of light pollution is so fast that it offsets improvements achieved through advances in telescope technology:

Light pollution is a growing threat to astronomy, but a new streetlamp technology could restore clear views of the night sky.

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) consume only about 10% of the electricity required by traditional incandescent lights and last up to 25 times longer, so it's no surprise that they have become commonplace over the past two decades.

But there is a downside to LEDs: They're much brighter than old-fashioned energy-guzzling light bulbs. When an entire city gets fitted with energy-saving LED lamps, this bright light scatters through Earth's atmosphere and makes the sky glow with greater intensity.

[...] A study published earlier this year found that stars are disappearing from the sky at an average rate of 10% per year. This trend affects even the world's most remote observatories. Germany-based startup StealthTransit recently tested a solution to this growing issue.

"Unfortunately, this problem haunts almost all observatories today," Vlad Pashkovsky, StealthTransit's founder and CEO, told Space.com in an email. "Modern telescopes are highly sensitive and feel the impact of outdoor lighting of cities located at the distance of 50 or even 200 kilometers [30 to 120 miles]. This means that virtually every observatory on Earth either already needs, or will need in the future 10 years, protection from the light of large cities."

StealthTransit's solution relies on three components: A simple device that makes LED lights flicker at a very high frequency that is imperceptible to the human eye, a GPS receiver, and a specially designed shutter on the telescope's camera that can blink in sync with the LED lights. The GPS technology guides the telescope's shutter to open only during the fleeting moments when the LED lights are switched off.

The experiments, conducted at an observatory in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, showed that the technology, dubbed the DarkSkyProtector, could reduce unwanted sky glow in astronomical images by 94%.

[...] It might sound impractical to refit an entire town with devices that allow lamps to blink, but Pashkovsky said that most existing LED lights can operate in the blinking mode and that new lamps designed specifically with sky protection in mind would be no costlier than existing LED technology. The most expensive element of the DarkSkyProtector system is the telescope shutter, which needs to be lightweight and agile enough to blink about 150 times per second.

Original Submission

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