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upstart writes:

A high school's deepfake porn scandal is pushing US lawmakers into action:

Efforts from members of Congress to clamp down on deepfake pornography are not entirely new. In 2019 and 2021, Representative Yvette Clarke introduced the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act, which requires creators of deepfakes to watermark their content. And in December 2022, Representative Morelle, who is now working closely with Francesca, introduced the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act. His bill focuses on criminalizing the creation and distribution of pornographic deepfakes without the consent of the person whose image is used. Both efforts, which didn't have bipartisan support, stalled in the past.

But recently, the issue has reached a "tipping point," says Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, because AI has grown much more sophisticated, making the potential for harm much more serious. "The threat vector has changed dramatically," says Farid. Creating a convincing deepfake five years ago required hundreds of images, he says, which meant those at greatest risk for being targeted were celebrities and famous people with lots of publicly accessible photos. But now, deepfakes can be created with just one image.

Farid says, "We've just given high school boys the mother of all nuclear weapons for them, which is to be able to create porn with [a single image] of whoever they want. And of course, they're doing it."

Clarke and Morelle, both Democrats from New York, have reintroduced their bills this year. Morelle's now has 18 cosponsors from both parties, four of whom joined after the incident involving Francesca came to light—which indicates there could be real legislative momentum to get the bill passed. Then just this week, Representative Kean, one of the cosponsors of Morelle's bill, released a related proposal intended to push forward AI-labeling efforts—in part in response to Francesca's appeals.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

by University of Bristol

A new survey, analyzed by the University of Bristol and commissioned by abrdn Financial Fairness Trust, shows nearly two-thirds (65%) of households, amounting to 18.4 million, have consumer debt and more than 4 in 10 households (44% or 12.5 million) have taken out new borrowing in the past six months.

There are signs credit stress may be worsening, with 2 in 10 (16%) owing money due to missing at least one repayment on a credit commitment, up from 11% in May 2023.

The Financial Fairness Tracker has been monitoring the personal finances of households since the start of the pandemic, sampling around 6,000 households in each of the nine survey waves to-date.

The latest survey found 1 in 7 households (15%) have borrowed money in the past four weeks just to cover basic daily living expenses, such as food and bills. This rises to 35% among those in financial difficulty. Households on the lowest incomes were especially likely to be taking on debt, with 3 in 5 (61%) taking out new borrowing in the past six months (compared to 48% of middle-income households).

A quarter of households (25%) owe at least £5,000 across their various consumer credit commitments. This was higher among middle income households (31%) than those on the lowest incomes (24%), showing the total amount of credit owed does not always relate to the level of financial difficulty households experience.

Credit cards are the most common form of borrowing that households are using. A third (35%) of households owe money on at least one credit card, but 3 in 10 (28%) of those with credit card debt "always" or "usually" make only the minimum payment on their cards, potentially storing up problems meeting their commitments in future.

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/11/intel-386-clock-circuit.html

Processors are driven by a clock, which controls the timing of each step inside the chip. In this blog post, I'll examine the clock-generation circuitry inside the Intel 386 processor. Earlier processors such as the 8086 (1978) were simpler, using two clock phases internally. The Intel 386 processor (1985) was a pivotal development for Intel as it moved x86 to CMOS (as well as being the first 32-bit x86 processor). The 386's CMOS circuitry required four clock signals. An external crystal oscillator provided the 386 with a single clock signal and the 386's internal circuitry generated four carefully-timed internal clock signals from the external clock.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-sentinel-universally-understood-continents.html

Animals often use vocalizations to warn of nearby danger to others. While this information is generally intended for members of the same species, other species can eavesdrop on the warnings to use the information for their own benefit. Sentinels are animals that have warning calls so widely understood by others that those other species will form groups with them, relying on the sentinels to provide warnings of danger.

For example, the family Paridae, which are a group of birds that consist of chickadees, tits, and titmice, are known as sentinels because their alarm call for danger, which fittingly sounds like "chick-a-dee-dee-dee," is understood by most other bird species in their mixed-species flocks.

"Many animals form mixed-species groups, and the thought is that this is an anti-predator behavior," said Henry Pollock, Executive Director of the Southern Plains Land Trust. "There is safety in numbers, and there is a benefit to surrounding yourself with a more diverse set of eyes and ears. However, you have to be able to understand the information that the others around you give to make use of it."

Sentinel calls are so readily understood as a signal for danger that researchers wondered whether species that have never heard the call would still get the message. After a recent study found that birds in the Neotropics were responsive to unfamiliar chickadee alarm calls from North America, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign wanted to expand on this.

The team sought to test if bird communities across three different continents could understand calls for danger from a sentinel they had never encountered before—the dusky-throated antshrike. Antshrikes are birds widely distributed across Central and South America that often act as sentinels in their mixed-species flocks.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

When ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game, make the mouse slower:

Google's war on ad blockers is just gearing up, with YouTube doing its best to detect and block ad blockers and Chrome aiming to roll out the ad block-limiting Manifest V3 extension platform in June 2024. A new article from Engadget detailing the "arms race" over ad blocking brings up an interesting point regarding the power that YouTube and Chrome have in this battle: a dramatic update advantage over the ad blockers.

In addition to hamstringing Chrome's extension platform with no real user-centric justifications, Manifest V3 will also put roadblocks up before extension updates, which will delay an extension developer's ability to quickly respond to changes. YouTube can instantly switch up its ad delivery system, but once Manifest V3 becomes mandatory, that won't be true for extension developers. If ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game of updates and counter-updates, then Google will force the mouse to slow down.

[...] We've covered this already. But we haven't talked about the other side of the equation: Ad block rules can't be updated quickly anymore. Today, ad blockers and privacy apps can ship filter list updates themselves, often using giant open-source community lists. Manifest V3 will stop this by limiting what Google describes "remotely hosted code." All updates, even to benign things like a filtering list, will need to happen through full extension updates through the Chrome Web Store. They will all be subject to Chrome Web Store reviews process, and that comes with a significant time delay.

Engadget's Anthony Ha interviewed some developers in the filtering extension community, and they described a constant cat-and-mouse game with YouTube. Ghostery's director of product and engineering, Krzysztof Modras, said that YouTube is "adapting [its] methods more frequently than ever before. To counteract its changes to ad delivery and ad blocker detection, block lists have to be updated at minimum on a daily basis, and sometimes even more often. While all players in the space are innovating, some ad blockers are simply unable to keep up with these changes."

[...] When Manifest V3 becomes mandatory, those updates that need to arrive "at minimum on a daily basis" will no longer be an option. Limiting remotely hosted code sounds like a totally reasonable limitation until you realize that. like most Manifest V3 changes, it seems carefully crafted to cripple ad blockers more than other extensions. Is a filtering list update, which is essentially just a list of websites, really something that needs to be limited by the "no remotely hosted code" policy?

[...] Google claims that Manifest V3 will improve browser "privacy, security, and performance," but every comment we can find from groups that aren't giant ad companies disputes this description. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has called Google's Manifest V3 communication "deceitful and threatening," and both the EFF and Mozilla have critiqued most of Google's user-focused justifications for the project. Both groups agree that Manifest V3 won't do much for security, since it doesn't stop what extensions usually get caught doing: spying on a user's browser history. Manifest V3 extensions have access to just as much data as before. Ghostery has a page on Manifest V3 warning that "nothing Manifest V3 introduces in its current state can help protect privacy" and calling the project "ultimately user hostile."

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/biology/dolphin-sense-electric-fields/

Already equipped with an impressive sonar system, new research reveals that dolphins have an extra ability that evolves as they mature in the space where their baby whiskers once were. The super sense may help them navigate and find hidden food sources.

Dolphins' sonar ability, known as echolocation, is fairly legendary in the animal kingdom. This ability is so accurate that the mammals, which are technically whales, can use it to distinguish between a golf ball and a ping-pong ball underwater based on the densities of the two objects. But that's not where the creatures' impressive abilities end.

They also have eyes that allow them to see in two directions at once; skin that secretes an antibacterial gel to ward off parasites and barnacles; they can get enough thrust to reach 30 mph; and they turn off half their brains at a time in order to get rest. A 2019 study also revealed that they have super immune systems that grant them protection from antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Now, a new study out of the University of Rostock (UR) in Germany adds another impressive skill to the dolphin's roster of powers: the ability to sense weak electric fields.

Two UR researchers took a closer look at the small pits that are left behind after young bottlenose dolphins shed the thin whiskers they are born with. They realized that the pits looked like the same structures that allow sharks to detect electrical fields and designed a study to see if they functioned the same way for the dolphins.

They first trained two dolphins at the Nuremberg Zoo to rest their jaws on a metal bar submerged in a pool. Then, they trained them to swim away whenever they sensed an electrical current being produced just above their snouts. One dolphin was able to sense signals down to those measuring just 5.5 microvolts/cm, while the other was even more sensitive, picking on a current measuring 2.4 microvolts/cm. One microvolt is equal to one millionth of a volt.

Journal Reference:
Kathryn Knight, Bottlenose dolphins' electric super sense could help them navigate the globe, J Exp Biol (2023) 226 (22): jeb246907 https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.246907

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Standards nerd and technology enthusiast, Terence Eden, has published a South Up, Aotearoa Centred, Equal-Earth Projection Map which has the south end up and uses the Equal Earth projection to ensure proportional land-mass size. In other words, the globe has been rotated to 150° and created in a multi-stage process mostly using R. The borders are from Natural Earth, the country names from OpenStreetMap, and flags from Twemoji.

Country Names

Natural Earth only provides country names in English ☹ - but it also provides 2 character ISO codes. So I grabbed the country codes and names from OpenStreetMap and merged them into the data set using R.

The Code

This produces the country borders and names onto an SVG.

Manual placement

I used Boxy to edit the SVG and place all names in roughly the right place.

Conversion

Inkscape was used to open the resultant SVG at 72dpi. I then used Gimp to autocrop, canvas expanded to 16000x9000, and saved as an uncompressed PNG.

The Emoji wouldn't import to either Gimp or Inkscape. So I viewed the file in Firefox and then printed it to a PDF. That PDF was cropped using pdfcrop` and then imported to Gimp.

[...]

He has published the map as public domain, CC0, and sells ready print editions.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/science/fungi-boost-crop-yield/

In what is a hugely promising sign for securing and boosting food production, a large-scale field study has demonstrated how treating farmland soil with mycorrhizal fungi can improve crop yields of maize by 40%, without the use of any additional fertilizers or pesticides.

In the Swiss study, researchers mixed Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) into soil, prior to sowing, at 800 trial plots on 54 maize farms.

This fungi occurs naturally in healthy soil and penetrates the roots of plants to form tree-like structures (arbuscules). When they branch out, they increase the plant's root surface area and therefore bolster nutrient uptake.

"On a quarter of the plots, the mycorrhizal fungi enabled up to 40% better yields," said the study's co-lead, Marcel van der Heijden, a soil ecologist at the University of Zurich and at agricultural research center Asgroscope. "That's huge."

Investigating why a third showed little increase or even a decrease in yield, the researchers found that healthy soil produced the same (or, in some instances, lower) yields.

"We discovered that the inoculation functioned best when there were lots of fungal pathogens already in the soil," said co-first author Stefanie Lutz from Agroscope.

The fungi are thought to provide a first line of defense for the soil, warding off plant-attacking pathogens that can greatly reduce crop yields. As a result, yields could be maintained in fields with pathogens that would have experienced losses without the fungi, while the beneficial effect of the fungi on yields was lower in fields without pathogen contamination. As beneficial organisms, they also help the plants take on nutrients from the soil.

Journal Reference:
Lutz, S., Bodenhausen, N., Hess, J. et al. Soil microbiome indicators can predict crop growth response to large-scale inoculation with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Nat Microbiol 8, 2277–2289 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01520-w

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The site Switch On Business analyzed Microsoft's LinkedIn employee profiles for Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft itself, IBM, Tesla, Oracle, Netflix, Nvidia, Salesforce, Adobe, Intel, and Uber. From that subset of employees they highlighted those who currently work in each tech giant and previously worked for one of the others. That provided for an estimate of the number and percentage of employees who have moved from one of these companies to another:

KEY FINDINGS

• Some 26.51% of Meta employees have worked at another tech giant — the highest proportion of any tech giant workforce.
• However, Google has attracted the most talent {sic} by volume: 38,316 (24.15%) of their current staff came via other tech giants.
• IBM headhunts the least, with just 2.28% of the current workforce having previously worked for another tech giant.

Statistical compensation to account also for those that know better than to fill out a Microsoft LinkedIn profile was not done. The report also mistakes all transfers as benefiting the target institution, which is quite often not the situation. For example, over 12,000 Microsoft employees now currently work inside the advertising and data giant Google. IBM seems it might be doing the most careful vetting of potential employees.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Jen-Hsun Huang doubts that the U.S. could live without chips from elsewhere.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, believes it might take the U.S. up to two decades to become self-reliant in chip manufacturing. This statement comes from the head of the company that has historically relied on chip production in Taiwan, and significant efforts by the U.S. and Europe to localize the crucial industry. However, the chip industry is clearly expanding in America at a rate unseen in decades, so he might be too skeptical. 

"We are somewhere between a decade and two decades away from supply chain independence," said Jensen Huang, speaking at the New York Times's DealBook conference in New York, reports Bloomberg. "It is not a really practical thing for a decade or two."

[...] Huang noted that Nvidia's products rely on plenty of components that come from different parts of the world, and he does not see all of them produced in the U.S. any time soon. Therefore, his assessments highlight the company's current reliance on international supply chains and the complexity and extent of the global chip industry. 

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/sam-altman-officially-back-as-openai-ceo-we-didnt-lose-a-single-employee/

On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that Sam Altman has officially returned to the ChatGPT-maker as CEO—accompanied by Mira Murati as CTO and Greg Brockman as president—resuming their roles from before the shocking firing of Altman that threw the company into turmoil two weeks ago. Altman says the company did not lose a single employee or customer throughout the crisis.

"I have never been more excited about the future. I am extremely grateful for everyone's hard work in an unclear and unprecedented situation, and I believe our resilience and spirit set us apart in the industry," wrote Altman in an official OpenAI news release. "I feel so, so good about our probability of success for achieving our mission."

Previously:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Purged, President Brockman Quits, but Maybe They'll All Come Back After All - 20231119

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A report from Canalys forecasts that the nearly two-year-long decline in PC shipments will finally end in Q4 of this year, flipping to a projected 5% growth. More growth is also projected to arrive next year, which will supposedly see 8% higher PC shipments than in 2023. Canalys expects the surging interest in AI and the arrival of ARM-equipped PCs to fuel this growth.

[...] A key assumption of this forecast is that new AI software and hardware will re-spark consumer interest in PCs. Canalys predicts that AI-powered PCs will account for 19% of all PCs shipped in 2024, a figure that includes M-series Macs and presumably PCs equipped with Ryzen 7000 or some of Intel's latest CPUs like Meteor Lake.

PCs with ARM chips are also expected to play an important role in the recovery of the PC market. Although Apple's M CPUs use the ARM architecture, Canalys pointed out Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite CPU as the primary driver of growth for ARM-based PCs. The firm previously predicted ARM chips would grab 30% share of the PC market by 2026.

Of course, the health of the global economy is perhaps the biggest factor in whether consumers buy PCs. The decline of shipments in 2022 and 2023 was precipitated largely on potential buyers being more frugal with their money. The report only touches on this and merely mentions there is "an improving macroeconomic environment." Assuming this recovery of the economy persists into 2024, then it could carry the PC market along.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA is addressing an issue with a Hubble Space Telescope gyroscope that prompted the observatory to enter safe mode on November 23. Science operations have been suspended as a result, but the space agency doesn’t seem too worried.

[...] NASA is not sounding any kind of serious alarm on the matter, saying Hubble’s instruments remain stable and the telescope is in overall good health. The space telescope has a history of stressing out its operations team, but it’s managed to bounce back each time. The telescope experienced similar safe mode events in 2008, 2018, and 2019. Most recently, Hubble overcame a major computer glitch in June 2021 and another software issue earlier that year.

[...] The team at NASA is currently running tests to better understand the issue and develop possible solutions. If necessary, the spacecraft can be reconfigured to operate with just one gyroscope. This flexibility stems from the installation of six new gyroscopes during Hubble’s fifth and final space shuttle servicing mission in 2009. Out of these, three remain operational, including the one currently exhibiting fluctuations. While Hubble operates most efficiently using three gyroscopes, it can continue its scientific observations with only one if required.

NASA anticipates that the telescope will not only recover from this setback but also continue to work in tandem with other observatories, such as the James Webb Space Telescope. This collaboration is expected to extend throughout this decade and possibly into the next, ensuring Hubble’s ongoing contribution to our understanding of the cosmos.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/11/hackers-spent-2-years-looting-secrets-of-chipmaker-nxp-before-being-detected/

A prolific espionage hacking group with ties to China spent over two years looting the corporate network of NXP, the Netherlands-based chipmaker whose silicon powers security-sensitive components found in smartphones, smartcards, and electric vehicles, a news outlet has reported.

The intrusion, by a group tracked under names including "Chimera" and "G0114," lasted from late 2017 to the beginning of 2020, according to Netherlands national news outlet NRC Handelsblad, which cited "several sources" familiar with the incident.
[...]
NRC cited a report published (and later deleted) by security firm Fox-IT, titled Abusing Cloud Services to Fly Under the Radar. It documented Chimera using cloud services from companies including Microsoft and Dropbox to receive data stolen from the networks of semiconductor makers, including one in Europe that was hit in "early Q4 2017." Some of the intrusions lasted as long as three years before coming to light. NRC said the unidentified victim was NXP.
[...]
NXP did not alert customers or shareholders to the intrusion, other than a brief reference in a 2019 annual report.
[...]
Some security researchers said it was surprising that NXP officials didn't inform customers of the two-year intrusion by threat actors, often abbreviated as TAs.

"NXP chips are in a lot of products," Jake Williams, a former hacker for the National Security Agency, wrote on Mastodon. "It's likely the TA knows of specific flaws reported to NXP that can be leveraged to exploit devices the chips are embedded in, and that's assuming they didn't implement backdoors themselves. Over 2.5 years (at least), that's not unrealistic."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

If you've got an old Google account that you have not used for a couple of years then it could soon be deleted:

The tech giant is going to be getting rid of them, starting from Friday, under its inactive account policy.

The company said it would take a phased approach, starting with accounts that "were created and never used again".

Simply signing into an account or sending an email should be enough to keep it active.

Google said the change was because of security reasons, highlighting that forgotten and unused accounts are more likely to be compromised.

A Google account gives users access to most Google products, such as email service Gmail and video sharing site YouTube, using the same username and password.

In a blog post in May, the tech giant said the reason old accounts are more vulnerable is because they tend to rely on old or re-used passwords and largely have not had two-factor authentication set up.

Once an account has been abused, it can be used for anything from identity theft to malicious content and spam.

Original Submission