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Snotnose writes:

Apple's new iPhone 15 marks a disruptive departure from previous models. The 11-year reign of the Lightning cable is over, and the USB-C era has begun — leaving us wondering what sets one charger apart from another.

Does Apple's Thunderbolt 4 cable really warrant its $129 price tag? Or does a $5 cable get the job done just as well? We've used our Neptune industrial X-ray CT scanner to uncover the hidden engineering differences between them.

This article explains some of the confusion around USB-C. Unfortunately the article is very light on details, but the pictures are interesting.

See Also: Exploring Thunderbolt 5: The Future of Connectivity

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA's Lucy spacecraft is preparing for its first close-up look at an asteroid. On Nov. 1, it will fly by asteroid Dinkinesh and test its instruments in preparation for visits in the next decade to multiple Trojan asteroids that circle the sun in the same orbit as Jupiter.

Dinkinesh, less than half a mile, or 1 kilometer, wide, circles the sun in the main belt of asteroids located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Lucy has been visually tracking Dinkinesh since Sept. 3; it will be the first of 10 asteroids Lucy will visit on its 12-year voyage. To observe so many, Lucy will not stop or orbit the asteroids, instead it will collect data as it speeds past them in what is called a "flyby."

"This is the first time Lucy will be getting a close look at an object that, up to this point, has only been an unresolved smudge in the best telescopes," said Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, which is headquartered in San Antonio. "Dinkinesh is about to be revealed to humanity for the first time."

The primary aim of the Lucy mission, which launched Oct. 16, 2021, is to survey the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, a never-before-explored population of small bodies that orbit the sun in two "swarms" that lead and follow Jupiter in its orbit. However, before Lucy gets to the Trojans, it will fly by another main belt asteroid in 2025 called Donaldjohanson for additional in-flight tests of the spacecraft systems and procedures.

[...] After the Dinkinesh encounter, the Lucy spacecraft will continue in its orbit around the sun, returning to the Earth's vicinity for its second gravity assist in December 2024. This push from Earth will send it back to the main asteriod belt for its 2025 Donaldjohanson flyby, and then on to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids in 2027.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The United States Justice Department reports that North Korean nationals have been using fake identities to work remotely for US companies as IT professionals in a scheme to fund weapons of mass destruction programs. At a news conference in St. Louis, Missouri, the FBI alleged that thousands of individuals have moved to countries such as Russia and China and posed as freelance IT workers living in the US. Companies in St. Louis and around the US were targeted in this plot.

The bad actors used false information for emails, payment platforms and websites — sometimes paying Americans to use their Wi-Fi and setting up proxy computers. Along with funneling their income to North Korea's weapons programs, some workers also hacked their employers' computer networks to take private information and leave the possibility for other schemes, such as extortion.

Special Agent in Charge Jay Greenberg of the FBI St. Louis Division went so far as to say that any company that employs freelance IT workers "more than likely" hired one of these bad actors. "This scheme is so prevalent that companies must be vigilant to verify whom they're hiring," Greenberg stated. "At a minimum, the FBI recommends that employers take additional proactive steps with remote IT workers to make it harder for bad actors to hide their identities. Without due diligence, companies risk losing money or being compromised by insider threats they unknowingly invited inside their systems."

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upstart writes:

A small, wrinkly yellow-green pepper known as Pepper X is now officially the hottest chili pepper in the world:

Ed Currie, founder of PuckerButt Pepper Company in South Carolina, appeared on the YouTube show Hot Ones to receive the Guinness award and announce the spicy new variety to the world.

To measure the intensity of Pepper X, officials at Guinness turned to what's known as the Scoville Scale. Developed in 1912, the scale determines the heat of a pepper by measuring the concentration of its heat-wielding chemical compounds called capsaicinoids.

Pepper X measures an average of 2.693 million Scoville Heat Units. A jalapeño, by comparison, measures just 2,000 to 8,000 SHUs, while a serrano can land between 10,000 and 23,000 SHUs.

The previous record holder, the Carolina Reaper, which was also developed by Currie, averaged 1.64 million SHUs.

"But that scale's logarithmic, so it's more like three times hotter than a Reaper," Currie said on the show.

Currie described the feeling of eating a whole Pepper X: "There's an intense burn that happens immediately. Then your head kind of feels like, 'Oh no! What's going on?' And then your body just starts reacting. You get it in your arms, you get it in your chest," he said.

"It has no real throat burn like the Reaper, but that comes on later when you're in pain."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A team of astronomers claim to have detected the most distant fast radio burst to date, which could be used to measure the matter between galaxies.

The researchers first discovered the energy burst in June 2022 with the Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope. It is believed that the energy was created from a powerful cosmic event that released the equivalent of 30 years of our sun’s total emission in milliseconds.

[...] The astronomers claim that this burst of energy is older and further away than any other fast radio burst detected to date. It is believed to have originated from a small group of merging galaxies.

[...] The team said that current methods for estimating the mass of the universe give conflicting answers and challenge the standard model of cosmology. But the latest discovery suggests that these radio bursts can be used to measure the “missing” matter between galaxies to accurately weigh up the universe.

“If we count up the amount of normal matter in the Universe – the atoms that we are all made of – we find that more than half of what should be there today is missing,” said Prof Ryan Shannon who co-led the study. “We think that the missing matter is hiding in the space between galaxies, but it may just be so hot and diffuse that it’s impossible to see using normal techniques.”

The team said that in 2020, the late Australian astronomer Jean-Pierre Macquart showed that fast radio bursts reveal more diffuse gases between galaxies if they are further away. The team claims their latest discovery helps to confirm this Macquart relation.

“While we still don’t know what causes these massive bursts of energy, the paper confirms that fast radio bursts are common events in the cosmos and that we will be able to use them to detect matter between galaxies, and better understand the structure of the universe.”

However, the team believes that the latest result represents the limit of what we can spot with modern telescopes and that more powerful devices will be needed to measure more distant fast radio bursts.

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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."

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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.

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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