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fliptop writes:

The vast majority of dog and cat owners will say their pets enrich their lives in countless ways and bring immeasurable levels of extra happiness, but researchers from Michigan State University suggest that most pet owners may just be telling themselves what they want to hear. Their new study found that despite owners claiming pets improve their lives, researchers did not see a reliable association between pet ownership and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic:

The pandemic was a stressful time for everyone, to put it lightly. Even the most laid-back among us found themselves overwhelmed by the lockdowns and social distancing guidelines that dominated 2020. So, the research team at MSU theorized that the pandemic represented an ideal time to study just how much comfort and happiness pets really provide to their families.

In all, the study authors assessed a total of 767 people on three separate occasions in May 2020. The research team opted to adopt a mixed-method approach that allowed them to simultaneously assess several indicators of well-being, all while also asking participants to reflect on the role of pets from their point of view in an open-ended manner. Generally, pet owners predictably reported their pets made them happy. More specifically, they said their pets helped them feel more positive emotions and provided affection and companionship.

On the other hand, the participants also articulated the dark side of pet ownership, such as worries related to their pet's well-being or having their pets interfere with working remotely.

[...] "People say that pets make them happy, but when we actually measure happiness, that doesn't appear to be the case," says William Chopik, an associate professor in MSU's Department of Psychology and co-author of the study, in a university release. "People see friends as lonely or wanting companionship, and they recommend getting a pet. But it's unlikely that it'll be as transformative as people think."

As a lifetime pet owner who's had at least a dozen dogs over the years, I take umbrage with the study's findings. My dogs are always thrilled to see me when I arrive home from a long, tiring day of work, and taking them for a walk or just being in their presence immediately lifts my spirits. And I remember the calming effect petting a cat had for my ex-wife when she was pregnant and having a bad day.

Journal Reference:
Chopik, W. J., Oh, J., Weidmann, R., et al. (2023). The Perks of Pet Ownership? The Effects of Pet Ownership on Well-Being During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672231203417

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Nintendo snagged the most nominations of any publisher with 15, followed by Sony (13), Microsoft (10, including Bethesda and Activision Blizzard's nods) and Epic Games (nine). There are 31 awards in total, including Best Adaptation. The nominees in that category this year are Castlevania: Nocturne, Gran Turismo, The Last of Us, The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Twisted Metal.

A bunch of deserving indies picked up nominations as well, including Cocoon, Dave the Diver, Dredge, Tchia, Viewfinder, Pizza Tower and Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Meanwhile, continuing a redemption arc after its disastrous debut three years ago, Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 and its Phantom Liberty expansion racked up four nominations in total.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Packages downloaded thousands of times targeted people working on sensitive projects:

Highly invasive malware targeting software developers is once again circulating in Trojanized code libraries, with the latest ones downloaded thousands of times in the last eight months, researchers said Wednesday.

Since January, eight separate developer tools have contained hidden payloads with various nefarious capabilities, security firm Checkmarx reported. The most recent one was released last month under the name "pyobfgood." Like the seven packages that preceded it, pyobfgood posed as a legitimate obfuscation tool that developers could use to deter reverse engineering and tampering with their code. Once executed, it installed a payload, giving the attacker almost complete control of the developer's machine. [...]

All eight tools used the string "pyobf" as the first five characters in an attempt to mimic genuine obfuscator tools such as pyobf2 and pyobfuscator. The other seven packages were:

• Pyobftoexe
• Pyobfusfile
• Pyobfexecute
• Pyobfpremium
• Pyobflight
• Pyobfadvance
• Pyobfuse

While Checkmarx focused primarily on pyobfgood, the company provided a release timeline for all eight of them.

SomeGuy writes:

The Verge reports that Google will remove Gmail's Basic HTML view effective January 2024.

Though the vast majority of people use the Standard view on their PCs without question, the HTML version of Gmail has its perks. The stripped-down Gmail experience loads quickly, and users can access it even on older machines or with much slower connections.

The change appears to have been announced around September 19th in a Google support article, and users of the Basic HTML view were shown warnings that it will be discontinued, after which time they will be switched to the current standard view.

The removal of Gmail's basic HTML view is the latest in a long line of products, features, services, and more to be admitted to the Google graveyard. The company has also recently buried its Pixel Pass phone upgrade program, Google Currents, and Nest Secure.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/amazon-fire-tablets-and-other-gear-will-reportedly-switch-away-from-android/

Amazon has been working on an in-house replacement for its Android-based Fire OS, codenamed "Vega" and built for easier app development, according to reporting from Janko Roettgers at Lowpass.

Based on job listings, multiple sources, forum posts, and unguarded LinkedIn boasts, Roettgers writes that Amazon has been working on Vega since at least 2019, is mostly done with the core development, and is now focused on an SDK and developer outreach. Vega would replace the Fire OS that is installed on Fire TV sticks and televisions, Kindle Fire tablets, and other Amazon devices. Vega, based on "a flavor of Linux," uses the popular JavaScript-based React Native as an application framework. This could simplify development for Fire devices alongside other React-ready platforms, including smartphones, desktops, and other smart TVs.
[...]
While an Android base provides a relatively familiar entry for developers that already have Android apps, rebuilding the AOSP project—meant to support a wealth of different devices and carrying years of technical debt—seemingly became frustrating enough for Amazon to push toward an in-house solution.

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

An error as small as a single flipped memory bit is all it takes to expose a private key:

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a large portion of cryptographic keys used to protect data in computer-to-server SSH traffic are vulnerable to complete compromise when naturally occurring computational errors occur while the connection is being established.

Underscoring the importance of their discovery, the researchers used their findings to calculate the private portion of almost 200 unique SSH keys they observed in public Internet scans taken over the past seven years. The researchers suspect keys used in IPsec connections could suffer the same fate. SSH is the cryptographic protocol used in secure shell connections that allows computers to remotely access servers, usually in security-sensitive enterprise environments. IPsec is a protocol used by virtual private networks that route traffic through an encrypted tunnel.

The vulnerability occurs when there are errors during the signature generation that takes place when a client and server are establishing a connection. It affects only keys using the RSA cryptographic algorithm, which the researchers found in roughly a third of the SSH signatures they examined. That translates to roughly 1 billion signatures out of the 3.2 billion signatures examined. Of the roughly 1 billion RSA signatures, about one in a million exposed the private key of the host.

While the percentage is infinitesimally small, the finding is nonetheless surprising for several reasons—most notably because most SSH software in use—including OpenSSH—has deployed a countermeasure for decades that checks for signature faults before sending a signature over the Internet. Another reason for the surprise is that until now, researchers believed that signature faults exposed only RSA keys used in the TLS—or Transport Layer Security—protocol encrypting Web and email connections. They believed SSH traffic was immune from such attacks because passive attackers—meaning adversaries simply observing traffic as it goes by—couldn't see some of the necessary information when the errors happened.

[...] As noted earlier, researchers had no evidence that passive attacks exploiting signature errors were feasible when traffic was transmitted through non-TLS protocols such as SSH or IPsec. The reason is that the cryptographic hash of the signature from the latter protocols includes a shared secret generated by the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. The security provided by the exchange meant that passively observing the faulty signature didn't expose enough key material to recover the private key using a GCD attack.

hubie writes:

Linguistics and genetics combine to suggest a new hybrid hypothesis for the origin of the Indo-European languages:

An international team of linguists and geneticists led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has achieved a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of Indo-European, a family of languages spoken by nearly half of the world's population.

For over two hundred years, the origin of the Indo-European languages has been disputed. Two main theories have recently dominated this debate: the 'Steppe' hypothesis, which proposes an origin in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe around 6000 years ago, and the 'Anatolian' or 'farming' hypothesis, suggesting an older origin tied to early agriculture around 9000 years ago. Previous phylogenetic analyses of Indo-European languages have come to conflicting conclusions about the age of the family, due to the combined effects of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the datasets they used and limitations in the way that phylogenetic methods analyzed ancient languages.

[...] The team used recently developed ancestry-enabled Bayesian phylogenetic analysis to test whether ancient written languages, such as Classical Latin and Vedic Sanskrit, were the direct ancestors of modern Romance and Indic languages, respectively. Russell Gray, Head of the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution and senior author of the study, emphasized the care they had taken to ensure that their inferences were robust. "Our chronology is robust across a wide range of alternative phylogenetic models and sensitivity analyses", he stated. These analyses estimate the Indo-European family to be approximately 8100 years old, with five main branches already split off by around 7000 years ago.

These results are not entirely consistent with either the Steppe or the farming hypotheses. The first author of the study, Paul Heggarty, observed that "Recent ancient DNA data suggest that the Anatolian branch of Indo-European did not emerge from the Steppe, but from further south, in or near the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent — as the earliest source of the Indo-European family. Our language family tree topology, and our lineage split dates, point to other early branches that may also have spread directly from there, not through the Steppe."

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Tomorrow, Wednesday, November 15th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.

The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance

Highlights expected in tomorrow's meeting are discussion of Draft 8 of the bylaws, and a statement from janrinok.

The community is welcome to observe and participate, and is invited to the meeting.

upstart writes:

Surgeons transplanted part of a face and an entire eyeball into a man with severe electrical burns:

This week doctors announced they had completed the first successful transplant of a partial face and an entire eye. In May at NYU Langone Health in New York City, the surgery was performed on a 46-year-old man who had suffered severe electrical burns to his face, left eye and left arm. He does not yet have vision in the transplanted eye and may never regain it there, but early evidence suggests the eye itself is healthy and may be capable of transmitting neurological signals to the brain.

The feat opens up the possibility of restoring the appearance—and maybe even sight—of people who have been disfigured or blinded by injuries. Researchers caution there are many technical hurdles before such a procedure can effectively treat vision loss, however.

"I think it's an important proof of principle," says Jeffrey Goldberg, a professor and chair of ophthalmology at the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University, who was not involved in the surgery but has been part of a team working toward whole-eye transplants in humans. "I think it points to the opportunity and importance that we really stand on the verge of being able to [achieve] eye transplants and vision restoration for blind patients more broadly. "But he cautions that the main obstacle is achieving regeneration of the optic nerve, which carries visual signals from the retina to the brain; this step has not yet been successfully demonstrated in humans.

Face and cornea transplants have been performed before, yet to the NYU Langone team's knowledge, this is the first time a whole eye has been transplanted successfully (with or without a face). The first partial face transplant was performed in 2005 in France. As of 2021, nearly 50 face transplants had been conducted worldwide. In 1969 Texas physician Conard Moore claimed to have attempted the first whole-eye transplant in a human, but it was not successful. Amid criticism, Moore later retracted his claim, saying he had only transplanted the eye's outer portion—the sclera and cornea. Although a subsequent analysis suggested he may, in fact, have transplanted the whole eye, it did not develop a blood supply.

hubie writes:

The new dating system doesn't change estimates of the moon's age as a whole, which remains around 4.53 billion years:

The "Man in the Moon" is older than we thought.

Scientists have proposed resetting the lunar clock after reassessing impact craters on the surface of the moon. This means that some features of the moon, like the formation that makes up the face of the "Man in the Moon" formation could be 200 million years older than previously theorized.

The new dating system could help to better tell the story of the evolution of the lunar surface and has important implications for our understanding of the violent and turbulent early history of the solar system during which bodies like Earth and the moon were subject to intense bombardment by space rocks.

The new evaluation involved reexamining two separate ways of dating the lunar surface: Counting the number of craters caused by the impact of space rocks; and the assessment of moon rocks collected by the Apollo missions. These two dating methods have traditionally given different results, especially for the ages of the heavily cratered and mountainous highlands of the moon.

[...] "Looking at the signs of these impacts on the moon shows what Earth would be like without the geological churning of plate tectonics which took place here on Earth," Werner said. "What we have done is to show that large portions of the lunar crust are around 200 million years older than had been thought."

The team behind the findings explains that the new dating system doesn't change estimates of the moon's age as a whole, which remains around 4.53 billion years. Instead, it changes the age of all areas of the moon's surface but not in a uniform way; the new dating system suggests older areas are subject to the greatest shift in age due to the new system.

[...] "Such a heavy bombardment period must have affected the origin and early evolution of life on Earth and potentially other planets such as Mars," Bouvier said in a statement. "Bringing back rock samples from Jezero Crater on Mars will be the next giant leap forward to search for signs of ancient life on another planet in the solar system, and when."

The team's research was presented at the Goldschmidt Conference held in Lyon, France, between July 9 and July 14. It has been accepted for publication in the Planetary Science Journal.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Sick of sports? WVU study shows flu deaths rise when pro sports teams move into cities:

West Virginia University economists, whose research shows flu deaths increase when a city becomes home to a new professional sports team, say their data should make even the biggest fans reconsider support for taxpayer-funded stadium subsidies.

According to their paper in Sports Economic Review, U.S. cities that gained pro teams between 1962 and 2016 saw increased influenza mortality of up to 24% after the teams came to town. The researchers analyzed cities with new teams in the four major North American professional leagues: Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League.

[...] "Most, if not all, of the sports venues in the cities we studied received direct and/or indirect public financing," Humphreys said. "Since 2000, U.S. state and local governments have committed nearly $20 billion to new stadiums — roughly a billion dollars per year. These subsidies usually come in the form of governments essentially cutting team owners a check, funded by issuing bonds, to build their stadiums. The fact that teams basically extort cities to get these subsidies by threatening to move elsewhere makes this of even more interest to economists.

"Our finding, that people in cities with sports teams are likely to be sicker than they would be without the team, has the potential to shift how we think about hosting professional sporting events. We hope taxpayers will be less likely to subsidize professional sports facilities if they realize those teams are making them sicker, burdening health care systems and harming businesses' bottom lines as workers use sick days."

When NFL teams moved to cities that never had pro sports teams before, those cities saw an average increase in flu deaths of 17%, or about 13 additional deaths a year. Becoming home to an NBA team increased a city's flu mortality by 4.7%, and MLB — whose games generally occur outside flu season — had the smallest impact, driving three additional deaths each year.

The largest increase in a city's weekly flu mortality came from the NHL. An NHL team moving into a city caused a 24.6% increase in flu deaths per 100,000 residents, Ruseski said, a total increase of about 20 flu deaths a year in each city.

"As for why hockey is so deadly, we believe it is both the timing of the season and location of the teams," she said. "The NHL season overlaps almost perfectly with the flu season and NHL teams are more likely to be in colder cities."

Journal Reference:
Cardazzi et al., Do sporting events amplify airborne virus transmission? Causal evidence from US professional team sports, Sports Economic Rev., 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.serev.2023.100013

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

I have recently read many discussions in places like r/youtube where users who block ads are described as immature freeloaders or selfish for expecting others to watch ads so they don't have to. I believe most users understand that it's expensive to host a video streaming service, and that YouTube has to pay their bills somehow. However, at this point in time, there are very valid reasons for users to continue blocking YouTube ads. YouTube also has better solutions to increase revenue without resorting to their recent aggressive tactics.

Many ads contain NSFW content or obvious scams

YouTube clearly has the ability to detect content that violates the platform's rules, and videos are regularly demonetized for doing so. Because YouTube can moderate user-submitted content in this manner, they also have the ability to moderate sponsor-submitted content. Users have a reasonable expectation to not be subjected to NSFW content without their consent. I have read many reports of ads with cartoon characters engaging in sexual acts, and that is inappropriate. YouTube also does not have the ability to detect who is actually watching a video at a specific time, meaning that they could be exposing children to this content.

YouTube should not be sending content to users that is actively attempting to harm them, and scam ads are doing exactly that. Although many of these scams are obvious, which should make it easier to detect them using YouTube's moderation tools, there are still people who will be fooled. YouTube is not very responsive to user complaints about abusive ads, probably because they don't want to risk losing money from sponsors. One of the main reasons users block ads on other sites is because they are often deceptive or contain malicious payloads. At this time, that is also the best recourse users have to protect themselves from harmful ads on YouTube.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Since their inception in the 1940s, the so-called forever chemicals have woven themselves into the fabric of our modern world. But recently, they've been appearing in alarming news headlines about their damaging effects on our health.

PFAS have, in fact, come under intense scrutiny due to new research showing their persistent nature in the environment and potential health impacts.

[...] The strength of their carbon-fluorine bonds is also what makes them resist breakdown by natural processes. Their longevity, often measured in centuries, has earned them the moniker of "legacy compounds."

Their presence has been detected in worrying concentrations in drinking water, soil, air and even in Arctic ice. Recent scientific investigations have unveiled a concerning connection between PFAS exposure and damage to health, both in humans and animals.

These effects include an increased risk of cancer, liver damage, compromised immune function, developmental disorders and hormonal disruption.

The adverse health effects can be traced to their persistence within the human body. Unlike many substances that are metabolized and eliminated over time, PFAS accumulate in bodily tissues and fluids without breaking down.

This accumulation creates a perpetual, self-sustaining cycle: PFAS contamination permeates rivers, soil and the food chain. These chemicals find their way into the bodies of humans and animals, where they continue to accumulate over time.

hubie writes:

Employees in financial, sales and management occupations are more likely to conclude that their jobs are of little use to society:

In recent years, research showed that many professionals consider their work to be socially useless. Various explanations have been proposed for the phenomenon. The much-discussed "bullshit jobs theory" by the American anthropologist David Graeber, for example, states that some jobs are objectively useless and that this occurs more frequently in certain occupations than others.

Other researchers suggested that the reason people felt their jobs were useless was solely because they were routine and lacked autonomy or good management rather than anything intrinsic to their work. However, this is only one part of the story, as a recent study by sociologist Simon Walo of the University of Zurich shows. It is the first to give quantitative support to the relevance of the occupations.

[...] "The original evidence presented by Graeber was mainly qualitative, which made it difficult to assess the magnitude of the problem," says Walo. "This study extends previous analyses by drawing on a rich, under-utilised dataset and provides new evidence. This paper is therefore the first to find quantitative evidence supporting the argument that the occupation can be decisive for the perceived pointlessness." Walo also found that the share of workers who consider their jobs socially useless is higher in the private sector than in the non-profit or the public sector.

However, Walo's study also confirms other factors that influence employees' perceptions of their own work, including, e.g., alienation, unfavorable working conditions and social interaction. "Employees' assessment of whether their work is perceived as socially useless is a very complex issue that needs to be approached from different angles," the author therefore concludes. "It depends on various factors that do not necessarily have anything to do with the actual usefulness of work as claimed by Graeber. For example, people may also view their work as socially useless because unfavorable working conditions make it seem pointless."

Journal Reference:
Simon Walo: 'Bullshit' After All? Why People Consider Their Jobs Socially Useless. Work, Employment and Society. 21 July 2023. DOI:10.1177/09500170231175771

Related:
    Bullshit Jobs and the Yoke of Managerial Feudalism
    Why Capitalism Creates Pointless Jobs

Original Submission

upstart writes:

OEMs are increasingly focused on using TVs as a way to show customers ads:

People who buy a Fire TV from Amazon are probably looking for a cheap and simple way to get an affordable 4K smart TV. When Amazon announced its first self-branded TVs in September 2021, it touted them as being a "great value." But owners of the devices will soon be paying for some of those savings in the form of more prominently displayed advertisements.

[...] Some of the changes targeting advertisers, like connecting display placement ads with specific in-stream video ads, seem harmless enough. Others could jeopardize the TV-watching experience for owners.

For example, Amazon is preparing to make Alexa with generative AI more useful for finding content on Fire TVs. This could help Alexa, which has struggled alongside other tech giants' voice assistants to generate significant revenue. Amazon gets money every time someone interacts with digital content through Alexa.

However, the company is double-dipping on this idea by also tying ads to generative AI on Fire TVs. When users ask Alexa to help them find media with queries such as "play the show with the guy who plays the lawyer in Breaking Bad," they will see ads that are relevant to the search.

[...] Maines told StreamTV Insider that advertisers had been asking for a way to advertise against Fire TV searches. "It just makes sense to expand our existing sponsor tile offering to show advertisements on the search screen with no extra effort or cost for the advertiser," she said.

[...] Amazon Fire TV users will also start seeing banner ads on the device's home screen for things that have nothing to do with entertainment or media. This ad space was previously reserved for advertising media and entertainment, making the ads feel more relevant, at least. Amazon opening the ad space to more types of advertisers is similar to a move Google TV made early this year.

The company seems to be aware of how dominating these types of advertisements can be. Maines emphasized to StreamTV Insider how the native ads are "right at the top of the Fire TV's home screen" and take "up half the screen."

[...] The banner ads will occupy the first slot in the rotating hero area, which Amazon believes is the first thing Fire TV users see. These users may have purchased a Fire TV primarily for streaming content from ad-free subscriptions, but Maines described how Fire TVs can still manage to force ads on these users.