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upstart writes:

Every Bitcoin transaction uses, on average, enough water to fill "a back yard swimming pool", a new study suggests:

That's around six million times more than is used in a typical credit card swipe, Alex de Vries of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, calculates.

The figure is due to the water used to power and cool the millions of computers worldwide Bitcoin relies on.

It comes as many regions struggle with fresh water shortages.

[...] In total, bitcoin consumed nearly 1,600 billion litres - also known as gigalitres (GL) - of water in 2021, the study, published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability, suggests.

It says the 2023 figure could be more than 2,200 GL.

The main reason Bitcoin uses so much water is because it relies on an enormous amount of computing power, which in turn needs huge amounts of electricity.

[...] Mr de Vries argues that Bitcoin does not need to use this much water - singling out the power hungry process at its heart, which is known as "Bitcoin mining."

[...] This method is known as "proof of work". But a change to the way Bitcoin works could cut the electricity use and hence water consumption dramatically.

The major cryptocurrency Ethereum did this in Sep 2022, moving to a system called "proof of stake", reducing its power-use by more than 99% in the process.

That may not be straightforward though, according to Prof James Davenport, of the University of Bath.

"[It was] only possible because the management of Ethereum is significantly more centralised than that of Bitcoin," he told the BBC.

Nonetheless, others say the findings of this research are worrying.

Dr Larisa Yarovaya, associate professor of finance at the University of Southampton, she said the use of freshwater for Bitcoin mining, particularly in regions already grappling with water scarcity, "should be a cause for concern among regulators and the public".

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Modern day parenting pressures and expectations are leading to the death knell for children enjoying spontaneous play:

Whilst parents have always felt some responsibility for their children's development, the heightened intensity of parenting in recent years now means parents are expected to spend more time exhaustively watching, noticing and responding to their children's desires and behaviours.

This, the research suggests, is leaving less time for children to play independently where they learn for themselves the risks and dangers of outdoor play.

[...] "Until around the 1990s, parents were not expected to endlessly entertain and monitor their children in the same way they are today, so children had greater freedom to play independently," explained the study's author Dr John Day. "But since those children have become parents themselves, society has changed so there is a heightened feeling of responsibility for their children's development.

"One aspect of the problem is increased fears around stranger danger and more traffic on the roads which means opportunities for children to be physically active through spontaneous play have become limited."

So, today's youngsters are spending less time playing together away from adult care and more time under parental supervision and participating in structured health-focused physical activity settings such as holiday clubs.

[...] Growing concerns around child health meant many parents born after the late 1960s, who started parenting in the early 1990s, felt as though they should intervene to make sure their children were active, which restricted the possibility for more spontaneous forms of play.

"Society today positions parents as the sole engineers in their children's development which represents an unrealistic burden that brings with it unjust pressure and expectation," added Dr Day.To help address this trend, Dr Day says there needs to be a culture shift where health policy makers ensure children are encouraged to learn about the risks of physically active play, independent of adult supervision."Parenting is no longer simply an aspect of who someone is but a role one is expected to extensively perform. Parents and their children are trapped together in this scenario and so we need policymakers to recognise this and work with parents and children to change this for future generations," he said.

Journal Reference:
John Day, The intensification of parenting and generational fracturing of spontaneous physical activity from childhood play in the United Kingdom, Sociology of Health & Illness, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13701

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Tim O'Reilly, Mariana Mazzucato, and Ilan Strauss have three working papers focusing on Amazon's ability to extract unusual profits from its customers nowadays:

The papers are:

• Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power
• Amazon's Algorithmic Rents: The economics of information on Amazon
• Behind the Clicks: Can Amazon allocate user attention as it pleases?

The core idea in all three is that Amazon has become the default place to shop online for many. So, when Amazon changes their site in ways that make Amazon higher profits but hurt consumers, it takes work for people to figure that out and shop elsewhere.

The papers criticize the common assumption that people will quickly switch to shopping elsewhere if the Amazon customer experience deteriorates. Realistically, people are busy. People have imperfect information, limited time, and it is effortful to find another place to shop. At least up to some limit, people may tolerate a familiar but substantially deteroriated experience for some time.

[...] I think one model of customer attrition is that every time customers notice a bad experience, they have some probability of using Amazon less in the future. The more bad experiences they have, the faster the damage to long-term revenue. Under this model, even the level of ads Amazon has now is causing slow damage to Amazon. Amazon execs may not notice because the damage is over long periods of time and hard to attribute directly back to the poor quality search results, but the damage is there. This is the model I've seen used by some others, such as Google Research in their "Focus on the Long-term" paper.

Another model might be that consumers are captured by dominant companies such as Amazon and will not pay the costs to switch until they hit some threshold. That is, most customers will refuse to try alternatives until it is completely obvious that it is worth the effort. This assumes that Amazon can exploit customers for a very long time, and that customers will not stop using Amazon no matter what they do. There is some extreme where that breaks, but only at the threshold, not before.

The difference between these two models matters a lot. If Amazon is experiencing substantial but slow costs from what they are doing right now, there's much more hope for them changing their behavior on their own than if Amazon is experiencing no costs from their bad behavior unless regulators impose costs externally. The solutions you get in the two scenarios are likely to be different.

Related:

• Amazon And Meta To Stop Using Third-Party Data From Rivals
• Amazon's Smart Speakers Collecting Kids Data May Lead to Government Lawsuit
• Amazon Offering Customers $2 Per Month for Letting the Company Monitor the Traffic on Their Phone

Original Submission

Rich writes:

The Sovereign Tech Fund (https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/), a subsidiary of Germany's Ministry for Economic affairs, will issue a one million dollar grant to the GNOME foundation (https://www.gnome.org/). Most reports are in German, but OMGUbuntu has a summary at https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/11/gnome-sovereign-tech-fund. The foundation already has supported several open source infrastructure projects, from FORTRAN to cURL, but this is the first time that it directly supports the Linux desktop.

This grant acknowledges GNOME a part of critical infrastructure and therefore worthy of this public support. Most of the spent money will go into improving accessibility, but some points also address security and the general software infrastructure.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is getting tough on website design, insisting that opting out of cookies must be as simple as opting in.

At question are advertising cookies, where users should be able to "Accept All" advertising cookies or reject them. Users will still see adverts regardless of their selection, but rejecting advertising cookies means ads must not be tailored to the person browsing.

However, the ICO noted that: "Some websites do not give users fair choices over whether or not to be tracked for personalized advertising." This is despite guidance issued in August regarding harmful designs that can trick users into giving up more personal information than intended.

A few months on, the ICO has upped the ante. It has now given 30 days' notice to companies running many of the UK's most visited sites that they must comply with data protection regulations or face enforcement action.

[...] The ICO calls out cookie consent banners as a clear example of often harmful design. Its guidance says: "A website's cookie banner should make it as easy to reject non-essential cookies as it is to accept them.

"Users should be able to make an informed choice on whether they want to give consent for their personal information to be used, for example, to profile them for targeted advertising."

[...] Cookie consent remains a hot topic for UK and EU lawmakers alike. The EU, for example, has a relatively clear stance on cookie consent – users should be offered a clear and unambiguous choice: yes or no. The ICO requires a similar approach.

However, the waters were muddied somewhat in 2022 by proposals to adopt an opt-out system in the UK.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/stability-ai-releases-stable-video-diffusion-which-turns-pictures-into-short-videos/

On Tuesday, Stability AI released Stable Video Diffusion, a new free AI research tool that can turn any still image into a short video—with mixed results. It's an open-weights preview of two AI models that use a technique called image-to-video, and it can run locally on a machine with an Nvidia GPU.

Last year, Stability AI made waves with the release of Stable Diffusion, an "open weights" image synthesis model that kick started a wave of open image synthesis and inspired a large community of hobbyists that have built off the technology with their own custom fine-tunings. Now Stability wants to do the same with AI video synthesis, although the tech is still in its infancy.
[...]
In our local testing, a 14-frame generation took about 30 minutes to create on an Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics card, but users can experiment with running the models much faster on the cloud through services like Hugging Face and Replicate (some of which you may need to pay for). In our experiments, the generated animation typically keeps a portion of the scene static and adds panning and zooming effects or animates smoke or fire. People depicted in photos often do not move, although we did get one Getty image of Steve Wozniak to slightly come to life.

Previously on SoylentNews:
Search: Stable Diffusion on SoylentNews.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/medical/traffic-triggers-blood-pressure-surge/

Inching forward bumper to bumper on a highway when you're on the way to an appointment, or worse, the airport, is enough to spike anyone's blood pressure (BP). But researchers have found that a BP surge occurs independent of external stressors, and it could be due to the poor air flowing into the car from surrounding traffic.

The University of Washington (UW) researchers undertook a randomized crossover trial and were surprised to see that sitting in traffic and breathing unfiltered air was linked to a 4.5 mm Hg surge in blood pressure, which peaked at around 60 minutes of exposure but lingered for up to 24 hours following the event.

"The body has a complex set of systems to try to keep blood pressure to your brain the same all the time," said lead researcher Joel Kaufman, a physician and professor at UW. "It's a very complex, tightly regulated system, and it appears that somewhere, in one of those mechanisms, traffic-related air pollution interferes with blood pressure."

In the study, 16 participants aged 22-45 years were driven as passengers through peak-hour traffic in Seattle for periods across three days, to measure the impact of traffic pollution on blood pressure. For two days, the air flowed into the vehicle normally, to mirror how most of us drive, and on another day the car was fitted with a high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter, which blocked 86% of particulate pollution.

Blood pressure readings were taken a day before, during and after the drive, with 14 three-minute tests collected. Image-based central retinal arteriolar equivalents (CRAEs) were also measured before and after. Brachial artery diameter and gene expression were also taken.

The mean adjusted systolic blood pressure reading of 4.5 mm Hg higher than baseline is comparable to the effect of a high-sodium diet.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A data-destroying bug has been discovered in a new feature of OpenZFS 2.2.0, as found in FreeBSD 14 among other OSes.

OpenZFS 2.2.0 was released just last month with a new feature called block cloning, as we reported when we looked at release candidate 3. Unfortunately, there's a bug in that code somewhere, as found by Gentoo-toting Terin Stock, who reported bug #15526. As a result, OpenZFS 2.2.1 is already out, which disables the new feature.

This is a bit of an embarrassment for OpenZFS, a project with an enviable reputation for data integrity. It's also less than ideal for fixed-release-cycle OSes that have the new version of OpenZFS, including the newly released FreeBSD 14. Fortunately for FreeBSD, though, version 14.0 ships with the feature disabled by default.

We have mentioned the work of BSD boffin Colin Percival before, but anyone brave enough to have already installed this point-zero release should heed his warning on Twitter X: "FreeBSD 14's ZFS code supports 'block cloning'. This is turned off by default. DO NOT ENABLE THIS FEATURE UNLESS YOU WANT TO LOSE DATA."

The bug manifests as corruption of the contents of files when they're copied; instead of their expected contents, there are stretches of zeroes, mixed with blocks of what looks like Base64-encoded data. It showed up when using Gentoo's portage command, the distro's package-management tool – an operation that typically involves copying lots of data. Worse still is that the file system's own health checks don't detect any problem. For now, release 2.2.1 simply disables the feature.

It seems very likely that OpenZFS 2.2.1, which simply turns off block-cloning, will quickly be followed by a 2.2.2 release to fix the underlying dnode handling.

fliptop writes:

They were asked about it, and they deleted everything:

There was nothing in Drew Ortiz's author biography at Sports Illustrated to suggest that he was anything other than human.

"Drew has spent much of his life outdoors, and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature," it read. "Nowadays, there is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn't out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents' farm."

The only problem? Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz doesn't seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells AI-generated headshots, where he's described as "neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes."

Ortiz isn't the only AI-generated author published by Sports Illustrated, according to a person involved with the creation of the content who asked to be kept anonymous to protect them from professional repercussions.

"There's a lot," they told us of the fake authors. "I was like, what are they? This is ridiculous. This person does not exist."

[...] The AI content marks a staggering fall from grace for Sports Illustrated, which in past decades won numerous National Magazine Awards for its sports journalism and published work by literary giants ranging from William Faulkner to John Updike.

But now that it's under the management of The Arena Group, parts of the magazine seem to have devolved into a Potemkin Village in which phony writers are cooked up out of thin air, outfitted with equally bogus biographies and expertise to win readers' trust, and used to pump out AI-generated buying guides that are monetized by affiliate links to products that provide a financial kickback when readers click them.

What's next? Six-fingered AI-generated models for the swimsuit edition?

Related:

• The AI Hype Bubble is the New Crypto Hype Bubble
• OpenAI Has Released the Largest Version Yet of its Fake-News-Spewing AI
• Inside the Secret List of Websites That Make AI Like ChatGPT Sound Smart

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The analysis compares innovations and policies related to plant-based and lab-grown alternatives to animal meat and dairy in the U.S. and European Union:

The summertime barbecue – an American tradition synonymous with celebrating freedom – may be tainted by a decidedly unfree market. A new Stanford study reveals how meat and dairy industry lobbying has influenced government regulations and funding to stifle competition from alternative meat products with smaller climate and environmental impacts. The analysis, published Aug. 18 in One Earth, compares innovations and policies related to plant-based meat alternatives and lab-grown meat in the U.S. and European Union. Its findings could help ensure legislation, such as the $428 billion U.S. Farm Bill set to expire Sept. 30, levels the food industry playing field.

"The lack of policies focused on reducing our reliance on animal-derived products and the lack of sufficient support to alternative technologies to make them competitive are symptomatic of a system still resisting fundamental changes," said study lead author Simona Vallone, an Earth system science research associate in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability at the time of the research.

[...] The researchers reviewed major agricultural policies from 2014 to 2020 that supported either the animal food product system or alternative technologies, and compared government spending on both systems. They also looked at related lobbying trends.

They found that governments consistently devoted most of their agricultural funding to livestock and feed production systems, avoided highlighting food production sustainability dimensions in nutrition guidelines, and attempted to introduce regulatory hurdles, such as narrow labeling standards, to the commercialization of meat alternatives. Major U.S. meat and dairy companies actively lobbied against environmental issues and regulations to tip the scales in their favor.

[...] To ensure a fair marketplace for alternative meat products, policymakers should craft legislation that ensures meat's price reflects its environmental costs, increases research on alternative meat and dairy products, and informs consumers on alternatives to meat via dietary guidelines, according to the researchers.

"It's clear that powerful vested interests have exerted political influence to maintain the animal-farming system status quo," said study senior author Eric Lambin, the George and Setsuko Ishiyama Provostial Professor at Stanford and senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. "A significant policy shift is required to reduce the food system impact on climate, land use, and biodiversity."

The press release comes with a 2-minute video for those who prefer the spoken word.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-solar-storms-locally-current-instrument.html

A new study shows that there is greater local variation in the impact of solar storms on Earth than previously estimated. Researchers show that the effects can vary widely even over distances as small as 100 kilometers. The findings are published in Scientific Reports.

Local changes in the magnetic environment have so far remained largely unexplored due to the sparse magnetometer array in the main observing area. Today, solar storms, or geomagnetic storms, are recorded on average by magnetometers spaced about 400 km apart.

Solar storm effects are caused by fast solar wind streams, which cause large electric currents to flow through the ionosphere of the Earth's auroral region, but the behavior of these currents during storms is still not fully understood. Solar storms also appear as auroras.

Researchers from the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory (SGO) and the Ionospheric Physics Group at the University of Oulu, Finland studied the local magnetic field perturbations in the auroral region during space storms using historical data.

The new study looked at data from a strong solar storm in December 1977 from all 32 stations of the then Scandinavian Magnetometer Array (SMA) network in the Nordic countries, which is denser than the current network, and largely unexplored.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/features/2023/11/the-ars-guide-to-time-travel-in-the-movies/

Since antiquity, humans have envisioned various means of time travel into the future or the past. The concept has since become a staple of modern science fiction. In particular, the number of films that make use of time travel has increased significantly over the decades, while the real-world science has evolved right alongside them, moving from simple Newtonian mechanics and general relativity to quantum mechanics and the notion of a multiverse or more exotic alternatives like string theory.
[...]
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list; rather, we selected films that represented many diverse approaches to time travel across multiple subgenres and decades. We then evaluated each one—grading on a curve—with regard to its overall entertainment value and scientific logic, with the final combined score determining a film's spot on the overall ranking. For the "science" part of our scoring system, we specifically took three factors into account. First and foremost, does the time travel make logical sense? Second, is the physical mechanism of time travel somewhat realistic? And third, does the film use time travel in narratively interesting ways? So a movie like Looper, which makes absolutely no sense if you think about it too hard, gets points for weaving time paradoxes thoroughly into the fabric of the story.

[Sampling: More Entertaining and Less Scientific (Back to the Future), Less Entertaining and More Scientific (The Time Machine), Less Entertaining and Less Scientific (Timecop), More Entertaining and More Scientific (12 Monkeys)]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

TSMC chairman Mark Liu believes Nvidia will become the largest semiconductor firm by the end of the year (via Trendforce). Speaking at a lecture held by the Chinese National Association of Industry and Commerce, Liu discussed the future of TSMC in an AI-focused world and stated that Nvidia would develop into the world's largest semiconductor company thanks to AI.

[...] As for Nvidia's rivals, the company made more revenue than Intel, Samsung, and even TSMC, the company that produces the vast majority of Nvidia's chips. Nvidia also beat them all in profit, especially Intel, which lost $8 million, and Samsung, which saw $2.86 billion wiped out due to factors like the NAND flash crisis. That's presumably why Liu believes Nvidia will be the largest of its peers by the end of the year.

However, there are some caveats to Liu's claims. Although Nvidia did beat out its immediate rivals and made the most money in Q3, that might only have been possible since Intel, Samsung, and TSMC are in a slump. All three companies were doing significantly better in revenue before the start of the year, and they all have posted at least one quarter with more than $20 billion in revenue since 2021. If this turns out to be a temporary dip rather than a permanent development, Nvidia would need to make even more money to keep up.

[...] Liu also noted that fabless chip designers like Nvidia, AMD, and Google are expected to grow by 10% in the next five years, while projections for Intel and Samsung (the only chip designers to own their fabs) are at just 4% in the same time frame. Both companies have declined for a year or so, with Intel taking great measures to reform its business. TSMC, of course, stands as a major beneficiary if these projections prove accurate, as most fabless companies who want to make cutting-edge processors go to TSMC.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/27/23978042/popular-science-digital-magazine-discontinued

After 151 years, Popular Science will no longer be available to purchase as a magazine. In a statement to The Verge, Cathy Hebert, the communications director for PopSci owner Recurrent Ventures, says the outlet needs to "evolve" beyond its magazine product, which published its first all-digital issue in 2021.

PopSci, which covers a whole range of stories related to the fields of science, technology, and nature, published its first issue in 1872. Things have changed a lot over the years, with the magazine switching to a quarterly publication schedule in 2018 and doing away with the physical copies altogether after 2020.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/researchers-beat-windows-hello-fingerprint-sensors-with-raspberry-pi-and-linux/

Since Windows 10 introduced Windows Hello back in 2015, most Windows laptops and tablets have shipped with some kind of biometric authentication device installed. Sometimes that means a face- or iris-scanning infrared webcam; sometimes it means a fingerprint sensor mounted on the power button or elsewhere on the device.

While these authentication methods are convenient, they aren't totally immune to security exploits. In 2021, researchers were able to fool some Windows Hello IR webcams with infrared images of users' faces. And last week, researchers at Blackwing Intelligence published an extensive document showing how they had managed to work around some of the most popular fingerprint sensors used in Windows PCs.
[...]
Blackwing's post on the vulnerability is also a good overview of exactly how fingerprint sensors in a modern PC work.

Original Submission