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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

"Right to repair" advocates probably couldn't have imagined that Apple would be one of the biggest names on their side a mere five years ago. But that's precisely what's happening here: The tech giant has officially came out in support of having federal right to repair regulations at an event hosted by the Biden administration. Apple VP Brian Naumann proclaimed at the event that the company "supports a uniform federal law that balances repairability with product integrity, data security, usability, and physical safety." He also said that the company intends to "honor California's new repair provisions across the United States" even though national regulations have yet to be established.

Apple has a lengthy history of opposing attempts at passing right to repair rules. The company once said that Nebraska was bound to become a "mecca for hackers" when a bill was introduced in the state. It changed its tune in the past few years, however, and started selling parts and tools to consumers, as well as offering them access to repair guides so they could fix their iPhones and Macs on their own. Apple also backed Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman's right to repair bill in California in August before Governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law.

[...] In addition to promising to honor California's right to repair provisions across the nation, Naumann also talked about what an ideal federal law should have. "We believe that a uniform federal repair law should do the following: Maintain privacy, data and device security features which help to thwart theft; Ensure transparency for consumers about the type of parts used in a repair; Apply prospectively, to allow manufacturers to focus on building new products that can comply with the proposals; And finally, create a strong national standard that benefits consumers across the US and reduces the confusion created by potentially conflicting state approaches," he said.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Millions of Americans and their doctors are in the dark when it comes to early cognitive decline, according to new research from the University of Southern California. A study out this week suggests that most general physicians vastly under-diagnose mild cognitive impairment among their patients, following another recent study from the same authors which found that millions of Medicare patients with the condition slip through the cracks. The researchers say this diagnostic gap is worrying, given the importance of recognizing and treating mild cognitive impairment before it becomes more serious.

It’s well established that mild cognitive impairment is under-diagnosed in older people, but the researchers say theirs is some of the first work to quantify the current size of the problem.

“It’s a very different conversation to have when we can point to these numbers,” senior study author Soeren Mattke, director of the Brain Health Observatory at USC’s Center for Economic and Social Research, told Gizmodo over the phone.

In the latest study, published Tuesday in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease, the team looked at Medicare administrative data collected from over 200,000 primary care clinicians and 50,000 practices between 2017 to 2019. They found that doctors and practices failed to diagnose about 92% of expected mild cognitive impairment cases on average; they also estimated that only 0.1% of physicians accurately diagnosed it as often as they should, based on expected rates.

In the previous paper, published this July in the journal Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy, the authors examined the medical records of over 40 million Americans over 65 enrolled in Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans between 2015 to 2019.

Based on other research, about 8 million of these Americans should have mild cognitive impairment, defined as noticeable memory loss or cognitive decline that doesn’t yet impede a person’s everyday activities. But although the rate did slightly improve over time, only a small portion of Medicare patients actually received a mild cognitive impairment diagnosis during the study period, amounting to about 8% of expected cases.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

About a month ago, pristine samples from an asteroid landed on Earth while enclosed within a tight capsule. The sample canister was designed to keep the main chunk of the asteroid safe during its journey through space, but now teams at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) are struggling to open it to get at the space rocks.

For the past week, the curation team for the OSIRIS-REx mission has been having a hard time opening the TAGSAM head, a round sampler head at the end of an articulated arm on the spacecraft that was used to grab the sample from the asteroid. The TAGSAM head (Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism) is where the bulk of the asteroid sample is, and it is therefore being carefully handled by members of the team through a specialized glovebox under the flow of nitrogen to prevent contamination.

“After multiple attempts at removal, the team discovered two of the 35 fasteners on the TAGSAM head could not be removed with the current tools approved for use in the OSIRIS-REx glovebox,” NASA wrote in a blog post on Friday. “The team has been working to develop and implement new approaches to extract the material inside the head, while continuing to keep the sample safe and pristine.”

When the aluminum lid to the sample canister was first removed, the mission team found black dust and debris on the avionics deck of the canister. On October 11, NASA revealed the first look at the samples collected from the outside of the TAGSAM head while adding that it still hasn’t opened the sample canister yet. “The only problem is a great problem and that’s we’ve found a lot more sample than we’re anticipating before even getting into the TAGSAM,” Francis McCubbin, curator at NASA’s JSC, said during a live event.

Massive lawsuit against Meta

quietus writes:

"At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true."

Mark Zuckerberg, on his own facebook page, October 2021, as quoted by Reuters.

Despite years of discussions, US Congress hasn't been able to pass new online protections for children.

This Tuesday, 42 US states took matters in their own hands, and sued Meta [Platforms] and its Instagram unit. An important factor in the decision to go to court was the US Congress testimony of a Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen (testimony 1, 2 (pdf), hearing (context)).

According to the federal lawsuit (pdf here), Meta

• created a business model focused on maximizing young users' time on its platforms,
• employs harmful and psychologically manipulative platform features while misleading the public about the safety of those features,
• published reports showing misleadingly low rates of user harms, and
• in spite of the overwhelming evidence linking its platforms to young user harms, refuses to address those harms while continuing to conceal and downplay its platforms' adverse effects.

While much of the complaint includes information conditionally under seal as part of the investigation by the attorneys general, publicly available sources — including evidence disclosed by former Meta employees — also detail Meta's efforts to attract young users and make its platforms addictive to children and teens. For example, the Wall Street Journal published an internal Facebook document in 2021 that said the following about young users: "They are a valuable but untapped audience."

Freeman writes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorris/2023/10/23/testing-a-time-jumping-multiverse-killing-consciousness-spawning-theory-of-reality/

"This retroactive idea. It has to be that," says Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose, reflecting on a problem about the building blocks of reality that has dogged physics for nearly a century. "Any sensible physicist wouldn't be perturbed by this," he adds. "However, I'm not a sensible physicist."

If Penrose isn't a sensible physicist it's because the laws of physics aren't making sense, at least not on the subatomic level where the smallest things in the universe play by different rules than everything we see around us. He has reason to believe this disconnect involves a fissure that divides two different kinds of reality. He also has reason to believe that the physical process that bridges these realities will unlock answers to the physics of consciousness: the mystery of our own existence.

Penrose's contributions to math and physics are significant. He's proposed a theory of sequential universes that existed before the big bang, traces of which seem to be penetrating ours. He collaborated with Stephen Hawking on the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, identifying points in the universe, singularities, where the gravitational forces are so intense that spacetime itself breaks down catastrophically.[...]

For decades, Penrose has been working with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff on a theory of consciousness called Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR).

[...] Penrose demurs. He politely but unequivocally waves off the idea that a conscious observer collapses wave functions by looking at them. Likewise, he dismisses the view that a conscious observer spins off near infinite universes with a glance. "That's making consciousness do the job of collapsing the wave function without having a theory of consciousness," says Penrose. "I'm turning it around and I'm saying whatever consciousness is, for quite different reasons, I think it does depend on the collapse of the wave function. On that physical process."

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.