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AnonTechie writes:

When we're confronting a vexing problem, we often gather a group to brain­storm. We're looking to get the best ideas as quickly as possible. I love seeing it happen—except for one tiny wrinkle. Group brainstorming usually backfires.

In brainstorming meetings, many good ideas are lost— and few are gained. Extensive evidence shows that when we generate ideas together, we fail to maximize collective intelligence. Brainstorming groups fall so far short of their potential that we get more ideas—and better ideas—if we all work alone. As the humorist Dave Barry quipped, "If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be: 'meetings.' " But the problem isn't meetings themselves—it's how we run them.

[...] Collective intelligence begins with individual creativity. But it doesn't end there. Individuals produce a greater volume and variety of novel ideas when they work alone. That means that they come up with more brilliant ideas than groups—but also more terrible ideas than groups. It takes collective judgment to find the signal in the noise and bring the best ideas to fruition.

Source: time.com

From HIDDEN POTENTIAL by Adam Grant

I am sure most of you have spent time "brain storming" ... was it productive or wasted time ?

Original Submission

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Today, Wednesday, October 25th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete. This will be 5pm eastern time depending on your daylight saving time status.

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, and is invited to the meeting.

hubie writes:

Any sound can now be perfectly replicated by a combination of whistles, clicks, and hisses, with implications for sound processing across the media landscape:

Researchers have been looking for ways to decompose sound into its basic ingredients for over 200 years. In the 1820s, French scientist Joseph Fourier proposed that any signal, including sounds, can be built using sufficiently many sine waves. These waves sound like whistles, each have their own frequency, level and start time, and are the basic building blocks of sound.

However, some sounds, such as the flute and a breathy human voice, may require hundreds or even thousands of sines to exactly imitate the original waveform. This comes from the fact that such sounds contain a less harmonical, more noisy structure, where all frequencies occur at once. One solution is to divide sound into two types of components, sines and noise, with a smaller number of whistling sine waves and combined with variable noises, or hisses, to complete the imitation.

Even this 'complete' two-component sound model has issues with the smoothing of the beginnings of sound events, such as consonants in voice or drum sounds in music. A third component, named transient, was introduced around the year 2000 to help model the sharpness of such sounds. Transients alone sound like clicks. From then on, sound has been often divided into three components: sines, noise, and transients.

The three-component model of sines, noise and transients has now been refined by researchers at Aalto University Acoustics Lab, using ideas from auditory perception, fuzzy logic, and perfect reconstruction.

Doctoral researcher Leonardo Fierro and professor Vesa Välimäki realized the way that people hear the different components and separate whistles, clicks, and hisses is important. If a click gets spread in time, it starts to ring and sound noisier; by contrast, focusing on very brief sounds might cause some loss of tonality.

dbe writes:

USA administration just designed 31 tech-hubs to receive funding to develop tech in the US to counter the current concentration in few metropolis (Austin, Texas; Boston; New York; San Francisco; and Seattle)

So what is a tech hub?
A tech hub designation is "a strong endorsement of a region's plan to supercharge a critical technology ecosystem and become a global leader over the next decade," the U.S. Economic Development Administration said on its website.

Any Soylentils in these areas to comment on the potential effects of such designation?

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/amazon-drivers-urine-packaged-as-energy-drink-sold-on-amazon/

The drink had all the hallmarks of a beverage sensation. Striking design, bold font, and the punchy name Release. But inside, each bottle was filled with urine allegedly discarded by Amazon delivery drivers and collected from plastic bottles by the side of the road.

That didn't stop Amazon from listing it for sale, though. Release even attained No. 1 bestseller status in the "Bitter Lemon" category. It was created by Oobah Butler for a new documentary, The Great Amazon Heist, which airs on Channel 4 in the UK today.

Butler is a journalist, presenter, and renowned puller of stunts—he's probably most famous for turning his shed in a London garden into the number one ranked restaurant on Tripadvisor.
[...]
Drummond [Amazon spokesperson] says this was a "crude stunt" and that the company has "industry-leading tools to prevent genuinely unsafe products being listed."
[...]
The Great Amazon Heist doesn't tell us anything particularly new. (Drummond says the documentary is a "heavily distorted picture of our processes and operations that do not reflect the realities of shopping with or working for Amazon.") But placing all of these elements alongside each other in an hour of television paints a stark picture. Drivers and warehouse workers put up with the conditions because they have no choice. Dangerous products were listed and sold to children with no checks in place. Byzantine structures shield the company from local authorities. According to Amazon's mission statement, it "strives to be Earth's most customer-centric company, Earth's best employer, and Earth's safest place to work." The Great Amazon Heist portrays a company that simply doesn't seem to care.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

At first glance, the spotted lanternfly looks like an elegant butterfly, speckled with black spots on white wings with a splash of bright red.

But the insect native to parts of Asia (Lycorma delicatula) is attacking plants and trees in the United States, and officials are moving quickly to try to contain its spread.

"The only good spotted lanternfly is a dead one," said Amy Korman, an entomologist at Penn State Extension, a part of the university that provides training and education in everything from farming to food safety to landscaping.

The insect was first detected in the United States in 2014, in Berks County, Pennsylvania. An egg mass was found in a shipment of stone from China, according to experts who have tracked its progress.

The SLF—as experts call it—poses no threat to humans or animals, but it has caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in the US agricultural sector, even though it has only been found in 14 states.

[...] Spotted lanternflies have a particular affinity for grape vines. Scientists have observed dozens, even hundreds of them on a single vine.

[...] Several US states have tasked scientists with finding a way to eradicate the SLF—a true race against the clock, as entomologists predict the pest will reach the US West Coast—and its storied vineyards—by 2027-2030.

[...] On the grassroots level, residents have organized makeshift patrols to kill the bugs—because they don't fly far, they are relatively easy to smash, but their relatively large size makes the task rather unappetizing.

In Westchester County, in the northern suburbs of New York City, sniffer dogs are being deployed to find SLF egg masses—and giant vacuums are being used to suck up older specimens.

Some have gone so far as to poison the sap of the tree of heaven, one of the insect's favorite trees that also comes from Asia.

But the spotted lanternfly does not have a natural predator in North America.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Amazon on Thursday released photos of its newest delivery drone, the MK 30, and announced will expand its Prime Air drone delivery operations to Italy, the UK, and an unnamed American city in 2024.

“The new locations add to our existing drone delivery operations in the U.S., where we’ve been using drones to safely deliver packages weighing up to five pounds in one hour or less, for almost a year,” detailed Amazon.

The MK30 doesn't improve that payload capacity, or volume. But Amazon touts the design as “quieter, smaller and lighter” than the previous model.

The MK30 also doubles the range of previous Prime Air drone models, with roughly half the noise, and in more diverse weather conditions. The previous version did not allow delivery in light rain, wind, hot temperatures or other adverse conditions.

Noise is important because complaints about sound levels have already seen Google cancel a drone trial.

The new drone is equipped with sense and avoid technology to dodge obstacles. Its design takes on a tiltrotor concept, acting as a helicopter upon takeoff and transitioning into horizontal wing-borne flight once in the air.

[...] The drones and their opt-in service will be integrated into Amazon’s delivery network, alongside vans and other vehicles within Same-Day Delivery stations, which are a mini version of Amazon's colossal fulfillment centers.

Amazon hopes to deliver 500 million packages on autonomous aircraft by 2030. Doing so requires overcoming some regulatory obstacles. Amazon needs hundreds of incident-free flights to expand services and reportedly only clocked 100 by mid 2023. The service has been 10 years in the making, having been first promised in 2013, proving that Jeff Bezos's cut price retail outfit is learning in real time exactly how long aerospace development and certification actually takes.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Researchers have tested the software of three satellites and they found many standard security mechanisms missing:

Thousands of satellites are currently orbiting the Earth, and there will be many more in the future. Researchers from Ruhr University Bochum and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Saarbrücken have assessed the security of these systems from an IT perspective. They analysed three current low-earth orbit satellites and found that, from a technical point of view, hardly any modern security concepts were implemented. Various security mechanisms that are standard in modern mobile phones and laptops were not to be found: for example, there was no separation of code and data. Interviews with satellite developers also revealed that the industry relies primarily on security through obscurity.

[...] Satellites orbiting the Earth can only be reached by their ground station on Earth within a time window of a few minutes. The systems must be robust against the radiation in space, and, since they can only consume a small amount of energy, they have a low power output. "The data rates are like those of modems in the 1990s," as Holz elaborates the challenges satellite developers face.

Based on the findings gained from the software analysis, the researchers worked out various attack scenarios. They showed that they could cut off the satellites from ground control and seize control of the systems, for example in order to take pictures with the satellite camera. "We were surprised that the technical security level is so low," points out Thorsten Holz, adding the following caveat with regard to potential ramifications: "It wouldn't be all that easy to steer the satellite to another location, for example, to crash it or have it collide with other objects."

To find out how the people who develop and build satellites approach security, the research team compiled a questionnaire and submitted it to research institutions, the ESA, the German Aerospace Centre and various enterprises. Nineteen developers participated anonymously in the survey. "The results show us that the understanding of security in the industry is different than in many other areas, specifically that it's security by obscurity," concludes Johannes Willbold. Many of the respondents therefore assumed that satellites could not be attacked because there is no documentation of the systems, i.e., nothing is known about them. Only a few said that they encrypt data when communicating with satellites or use authentication in order to ensure that only the ground station is allowed to communicate with the satellite.

This work was presented in an IEEE conference paper. [PDF]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Since 2011, California has significantly reformed its criminal justice system, reducing the size of its prison population, with no effect on violent crime and only marginal impacts on property crime statewide. The COVID-19 pandemic furthered decarceration as the state reduced state prison and jail populations to slow the spread of the virus.

Concerns emerged that releases under the auspices of COVID mitigation harmed public safety. A new study explored this notion and found no consistent relation between COVID-19-related jail decarceration and violent or property crime at the county level in the state.

The study, by researchers at the University of California (UC) Irvine and the University of Arizona, is published in the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice. Their work is promoted by the Crime and Justice Research Alliance, which is funded by the National Criminal Justice Association.

"California's efforts to reduce overcrowding as a way to limit the spread of COVID-19 reduced the correctional population more severely and abruptly than any of the state's previous decarceration reforms," according to Charis E. Kubrin, professor of criminology, law, and society at UC Irvine, who led the study. "Concerns about what impact these actions would have on crime rates were widespread, and although violent and property crime in large cities declined during the pandemic, homicide and car theft rose significantly."

Because these increases mirrored national trends, it was unclear whether California's pandemic-related decarceration efforts were responsible. In this study, researchers sought to determine whether COVID-19 jail downsizing measures were related to crime trends in the state, estimating the effect of the measure on crime in the state's 58 counties and isolating the impact of decarceration on crime from other shocks affecting the state as a whole.

[...] The study did not find a consistent relation between COVID-19 jail decarceration and crime at the county level, suggesting that downsizing, on average, did not drive crime increases statewide.

Among the study's limitations, the authors note that because they used a synthetic control adaptation, the treated and synthetic series did not reflect the fully treated and completely untreated versions of county crime rates that are generally produced via synthetic controls. The authors also note they measured COVID-19 mitigation efforts only from March through December 2020—a relatively short period—in order to minimize the effects of crime associated with summer 2020 protests following the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and others.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Colorado’s Supreme Court this week had the opportunity to hand down a historic judgment on the constitutionality of “reverse keyword search warrants,” a powerful new surveillance technique that grants law enforcement the ability to identify potential criminal suspects based on broad, far-reaching internet search results. Police say the creative warrants have helped them crack otherwise cold cases. Critics, which include more than a dozen rights organizations and major tech companies, argue the tool’s immense scope tramples on innocent users’ privacy and runs afoul of Fourth Amendment Protections against unreasonable searches by the government.

With eager eyes watching them, Colorado’s court ultimately opted to kick the can down the road.

Civil liberties and digital rights experts speaking with Gizmodo described the court’s “confusing” decision to punt on the constitutionality of reverse keyword search this week as a major missed opportunity and one that could inevitably lead to more cops pursuing the controversial tactics, both in Colorado and beyond. Critics fear these broad warrants, which compel Google and other tech companies to sift through its vast cornucopia of search data to sniff out users who’ve searched for specific keywords, could be weaponized against abortion seekers, political protestors, or even everyday internet users who inadvertently type a result that could someday be used against them in court.

“These are situations where private industry has amalgamated these unbelievably huge databases of an uncountable number of people and the government, without a suspect, is able to go through everybody’s information to try to pluck targets out,” ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel Jennifer Granick told Gizmodo.

In a 74-page, 5-2 opinion released Monday, Colorado’s Supreme Court said Denver police officers were justified and acted “in good faith” when they served Google with a reverse keyword search warrant back in 2021 as part of an investigation into a deadly arson that claimed the lives of five Senegalese immigrants. The ruling came in response to a motion to suppress evidence from one of the suspects in the case, who argued the sweeping nature of the keyword search violated his Fourth Amendment protections.

“At every step, law enforcement acted reasonably to carry out a novel search in a constitutional manner,” the court wrote in its majority opinion. “Suppressing the evidence here wouldn’t deter police misconduct.”

The court validated the police conduct but punted entirely on the constitutionality of the reverse keyword searches in question. Though police have increasingly deployed the technique and other tactics like it in recent years, courts still haven’t settled on its actual legality. Despite pressure from the legal community to weigh in, the court threw up its hands and said it neither condoned nor condemned the practice. Future abuses of the warrant that may occur, they said, were a topic for another day.

hubie writes:

An a short but interesting paper recently posted to arXiv finds when most people flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side from which the toss started. Their observations are based upon analysis of 350,757 coin flips.

A coin flip—the act of spinning a coin into the air with your thumb and then catching it in your hand—is often considered the epitome of a chance event. It features as a ubiquitous example in textbooks on probability theory and statistics and constituted a game of chance ('capita aut navia' – 'heads or ships') already in Roman times.

The simplicity and perceived fairness of a coin flip, coupled with the widespread availability of coins, may explain why it is often used to make even high-stakes decisions. For example, in 1903 a coin flip was used to determine which of the Wright brothers would attempt the first flight; in 1959, a coin flip decided who would get the last plane seat for the tour of rock star Buddy Holly (which crashed and left no survivors); in 1968, a coin flip determined the winner of the European Championship semi-final soccer match between Italy and the Soviet Union (an event which Italy went on to win); in 2003, a coin toss decided which of two companies would be awarded a public project in Toronto; and in 2004 and 2013, a coin flip was used to break the tie in local political elections in the Philippines.

[...] The standard model of coin flipping was extended by Diaconis, Holmes, and Montgomery (D-H-M) who proposed that when people flip an ordinary coin, they introduce a small degree of 'precession' or wobble—a change in the direction of the axis of rotation throughout the coin's trajectory. According to the D-H-M model, precession causes the coin to spend more time in the air with the initial side facing up. Consequently, the coin has a higher chance of landing on the same side as it started (i.e., 'same-side bias').

Their analysis agrees with the D-H-M model that suggests a coin will land 51 percent of the time on the same side it started.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An extreme drought in parts of the Amazon has led to a dramatic drop in river water levels, exposing dozens of usually submerged rock formations with carvings of human forms that may date back some 2,000 years.

[...] The rock carvings are not usually visible because they are covered by the waters of the Negro River, whose flow recorded its lowest level in 121 years last week.

The surfacing of the engravings on the riverbank have delighted scientists and the general public alike but also raised unsettling questions.

"We come, we look at (the engravings) and we think they are beautiful. But at the same time, it is worrying... I also think about whether this river will exist in 50 or 100 years," Ribeiro said.

[...] According to experts, the dry season has worsened this year due to El Niño, an irregular climate pattern over the Pacific Ocean that disrupts normal weather, adding to the effect of climate change.

The engravings comprise an archaeological site of "great relevance," said Jaime Oliveira of the Brazilian Institute of Historical Heritage (Iphan).

[...] Most of the engravings are of human faces, some of them rectangular and others oval, with smiles or grim expressions.

"The site expresses emotions, feelings, it is an engraved rock record, but it has something in common with current works of art," said Oliveira.

For Beatriz Carneiro, historian and member of Iphan, Praia das Lajes has an "inestimable" value in understanding the first people who inhabited the region, a field still little explored.

"Unhappily it is now reappearing with the worsening of the drought," Carneiro said. "Having our rivers back (flooded) and keeping the engravings submerged will help preserve them, even more than our work."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Intel's futuristic 20A and 18A process nodes are expected to debut in new CPUs in 2024 or 2025. However, TSMC has already declared victory over the US company, with plans to introduce comparable manufacturing technology within the same timeframe, but with improvements across the board.

During a recent earnings call, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei stated that their internal assessment confirmed the enhancements of the N3P technology. TSMC's 3nm-class manufacturing node demonstrated "comparable PPA" (power performance area) to Intel's 18A node. N3P is expected to be even better, arriving earlier on the market, boasting "better technology maturity," and offering significant cost advantages.

Wei emphasized that TSMC doesn't underestimate or take the competition lightly. He also mentioned that the company's 2-nanometer technology, while still a work in progress, is expected to surpass both N3P and 18A. TSMC's 2nm-class manufacturing process is on track to become the most advanced technology in the semiconductor industry when it's introduced in 2025.

[...] Wei mentioned that N3 is expected to contribute to a "mid-single-digit percentage" of TSMC's total wafer revenue in 2023, with a significantly higher percentage anticipated for 2024. There is strong demand for 3nm products from various customers who are seeking improved performance, power efficiency, yield, and "comprehensive platform support" for both high-performance computing (HPC) and smartphone applications.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A new Google Search malvertizing campaign targets users looking to download the popular Notepad++ text editor, employing advanced techniques to evade detection and analysis:

Threat actors have been increasingly abusing Google Ads in malvertising campaigns to promote fake software websites that distribute malware.

According to Malwarebytes, which spotted the Notepad++ malvertising campaign, it has been live for several months but managed to fly under the radar all this time.

The final payload delivered to victims is unknown, but Malwarebytes says it's most likely Cobalt Strike, which usually precedes highly damaging ransomware deployments.

The Notepad++ malvertizing campaign promotes URLs that are obviously unrelated to the software project yet use misleading titles displayed in Google Search result advertisements.

[...] Once victims click on any of the ads, a redirection step checks their IP to filter out users likely to be crawlers, VPNs, bots, etc., leading them to a decoy site that does not drop anything malicious.

In contrast, legitimate targets are redirected to "notepadxtreme[.]com" which mimics the real Notepad++ site, featuring download links for various versions of the text editor.

[...] Victims who are marked as suitable targets are then served an HTA script, which is assigned a unique ID, likely to enable the attackers to track their infections. That payload is served only once per victim, so a second visit results in a 404 error.

[...] To avoid downloading malware when looking for specific software tools, skip promoted results on Google Search and double-check that you have landed on the official domain.

If unsure about the project's real website, check its "About" page, documentation, Wikipedia page, and official social media channels.

And don't forget that Google doesn't want you using an ad blocker.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/10/covid-antiviral-paxlovid-to-see-price-increase-following-400-vaccine-hike/

After raising the price of COVID-19 vaccines more than fourfold this year, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told investors Monday that the company will also likely hike the price of its lifesaving COVID-19 antiviral treatment, Paxlovid, raising further concern about access and health care costs.

The price of the drug is already $530 for a treatment course.
[...]
In a company investor call Monday, Bourla said only that the "pandemic price" of $530 is likely to be "lesser" than the commercial price and that negotiations are beginning.

One financial analyst who follows the company, Evercore ISI's Umer Raffat, told CNN that the price could go up roughly three- to fivefold, to as much as $2,500 per course.

Original Submission