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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

It appears that Beeper Mini, an easy iMessage solution for Android, was simply too good to be true — or a short-lived dream, at least. On Friday, less than a week after its launch, the app started experiencing technical issues when users were suddenly unable to send and receive blue bubble messages. The problems grew worse over the course of the day, with reports piling up on the Beeper subreddit. Several people at The Verge were unable to activate their Android phone numbers with Beeper Mini as of Friday afternoon, a clear indication that Apple has plugged up whatever holes allowed the app to operate to begin with.

Beeper Mini was the result of a comprehensive attempt to reverse engineer Apple’s messaging protocol. A 16-year-old high school student managed to successfully pull it off, and for a while, everything worked without a hitch. That effort became the basis for the new app, which requires a $2 / month subscription. Here’s what my colleague Jake wrote days ago:

Its developers figured out how to register a phone number with iMessage, send messages directly to Apple’s servers, and have messages sent back to your phone natively inside the app. It was a tricky process that involved deconstructing Apple’s messaging pipeline from start to finish. Beeper’s team had to figure out where to send the messages, what the messages needed to look like, and how to pull them back down from the cloud. The hardest part, Migicovsky said, was cracking what is essentially Apple’s padlock on the whole system: a check to see whether the connected device is a genuine Apple product.

Quinn Nelson, of Snazzy Labs, also made an excellent video that covers the technical details. The belief — or I suppose the hope — among Beeper’s developers and users was that it would be such an ordeal for Apple to block the Android app that doing so wouldn’t be worth the hassle. Apparently, it was easier than anyone expected.

taylorvich writes:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/12/231212112320.htm

Why did professional skateboarding arise in southern California in the 1970s? Was it a coincidence, or was it a perfect storm of multiple factors?

It's fairly well-known that a drought in southern California in the mid-1970s led to a ban on filling backyard swimming pools, and these empty pools became playgrounds for freestyle skateboarders in the greater Los Angeles area. But a new cross-disciplinary study from the University of Cambridge shows that beyond the drought, it was the entanglement of environmental, economic and technological factors that led to the explosive rise of professional skateboarding culture in the 1970s.

The authors say that professional skateboarding could not have started anywhere else, at any other point in time. Their study, reported in the journal PNAS Nexus, shows how small environmental changes can have profound effects on human behaviour, and stimulate cultural and technical innovation. Even the rise of popular pastimes such as skateboarding are the result of the deep relationships between humans and the climate.
...
California has a highly variable climate, and in the 1970s, it experienced a period of prolonged drought. Although this period of drought was not exceptional when looking at conditions over a thousand-year period, it was exceptional in the short-term: 1977 was California's driest year of the 20th century. The Colorado and Sacramento Rivers, which are vital to the state's water supply, were both at exceptionally low levels.

The drought resulted in estimated losses of $3 billion in California's massive agricultural sector, and the state's reservoir storage reached a record low in 1977. The state's water agencies responded by mandating severe cuts, including a ban on filling backyard swimming pools.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Semiconductors have been getting progressively hotter over the past few years as Moore's Law has slowed and more power is required to push higher performance gen over gen.

"That doesn't work anymore... That was back in the Moore's law era where the new node would give me the ability to pack in more transistors that are more performant and it wouldn't increase the energy… that's long gone."

This is a problem AMD has been exploring for years. The company launched the 30x25 initiative in 2021 with the goal to deliver a 30-fold improvement in compute efficiency from a 2020 baseline by 2025.

[...] As CEO Lisa Su illustrated so starkly in her ISSC keynote earlier this year, given the current pace of technology, while a zetaFLOP class supercomputer is certainly possible within around 10 years, it would require so much power to be completely practical. By her estimate, such a machine would require in excess of 500 MW to operate.

With AMD's deadline fast approaching the chip biz has made significant progress, but it still has a long way to go, having achieved just 13.5x improvement so far.

This is an incredibly complex problem to solve and there is no one big lever you can pull to solve it, Papermaster explains. "We're on such an exponential curve of both compute and higher energy consumption that what [you] have to think about is what are the levers you have to bend the curve."

AnonTechie writes:

No matter who you are, feeling threatened in your identity is bad for your well-being—and your career.

Like many other essentials of life, our sense of self is something we often take for granted, until it's under threat. When our circumstances appear at odds with who we feel ourselves to be, we are pitched headlong into a distressing state that scholars call "identity threat", which has been the subject of research from fields as disparate as marketing and political science.

But this extensive body of literature—until now—has lacked something truly fundamental: a rigorous way to measure identity threat that distinguishes it from related constructs such as self-esteem and identity suppression.

[...] At the same time, Vough stresses that no two individuals have exactly the same relationship to their identity. Conditions that might be threatening for one member of an identity grouping might be taken in stride by another. Moreover, not all identity groupings are equally well-understood in their responses to threat, owing to gaps in the research literature. Vough hopes her identity threat scale will help scholars fill in those gaps.

"There's a fair amount of research about gender-related threat, especially in the context of STEM, as well as race. But we need more knowledge about threats based on age, disability, etc. When we think of diversity, we think of race and gender, but diversity is so much more than that," Vough says.

[Source]: Costello College of Business at George Mason University

[Journal Ref.]: Journal of Applied Psychology

[Also Covered By]: PHYS.ORG

How would you deal with such situations ?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Colorado-based launch company will end 2023 with just three launches:

United Launch Alliance will not see the debut of its next-generation Vulcan rocket in 2023, as previously planned.

The launch company's chief executive, Tory Bruno, announced the delay on the social media site X on Sunday. United Launch Alliance had been working toward a debut flight of the lift booster on Christmas Eve, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Bruno made the announcement after the company attempted to complete a fueling test of the entire rocket, known as a wet dress rehearsal [WDR].

"Vehicle performed well," Bruno wrote. "Ground system had a couple of (routine) issues, (being corrected). Ran the timeline long so we didn't quite finish. I'd like a FULL WDR before our first flight, so Xmas eve is likely out. Next Peregrine window is 8 Jan."

Peregrine is the rocket's primary payload, a lunar lander built by Astrobotic that is intended to deliver scientific experiments for NASA and other payloads the Moon. It has specific launch windows in order to reach the Moon and attempt a landing during ideal lighting conditions.

Quad9 Turns the Sony Case Around in Dresden

https://quad9.net/news/blog/quad9-turns-the-sony-case-around-in-dresden/

"The appeal with the Higher Regional Court in Dresden follows a decision by the Regional Court in Leipzig, in which Sony prevailed, and Quad9 was convicted as a wrongdoer. "

From a practical perspective, Quad9 has removed the blocks on all domains previously noted by Sony and documented in the lower courts.

...the servers in question in this case were not located in Germany, and the links they pointed to were on servers also not in Germany.

Sony Entertainment further asserted that we block the domains globally, not just in Germany

Quad9 has no office or standing in Germany (we are a Swiss entity), but due to the Lugano Convention treaty it was possible for Sony to serve an injunction in Switzerland and drag Quad9 into legal proceedings.

[...] The court has also ruled that the case cannot be taken to a higher court and their decision is the final word in this particular case. Sony may appeal the appeal closure via a complaint against the denial of leave of appeal and then would have to appeal the case itself with the German Federal Court. So while there is still a possibility that this case could continue, Sony would have to win twice to turn the decision around again.

[...] "Quad9 have received a notice from a consortium of Italian rightsholders (Sony Music Italy, Universal Music Italy, Warner Music Italy, and Federation of Italian Music Industry) who have demanded that Quad9 block domains in Italy, and there is potentially another court process ahead of us."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Engineers and major companies are pushing a technology called L4S that they say could make the web feel dramatically faster:

A few months ago, I downgraded my internet, going from a 900Mbps plan to a 200Mbps one. Now, I find that websites can sometimes take a painfully long time to load, that HD YouTube videos have to stop and buffer when I jump around in them, and that video calls can be annoyingly choppy.

In other words, pretty much nothing has changed. I had those exact same problems even when I had near-gigabit download service, and I'm probably not alone. I'm sure many of you have also had the experience of cursing a slow-loading website and growing even more confused when a "speed test" says that your internet should be able to play dozens of 4K Netflix streams at once. So what gives?

Like any issue, there are many factors at play. But a major one is latency, or the amount of time it takes for your device to send data to a server and get data back — it doesn't matter how much bandwidth you have if your packets (the little bundles of data that travel over the network) are getting stuck somewhere. But while people have some idea about how latency works thanks to popular speed tests, including a "ping" metric, common methods of measuring it haven't always provided a complete picture.

The good news is that there's a plan to almost eliminate latency, and big companies like Apple, Google, Comcast, Charter, Nvidia, Valve, Nokia, Ericsson, T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom, and more have shown an interest. It's a new internet standard called L4S that was finalized and published in January, and it could put a serious dent in the amount of time we spend waiting around for webpages or streams to load and cut down on glitches in video calls. It could also help change the way we think about internet speed and help developers create applications that just aren't possible with the current realities of the internet.

hubie writes:

A new study shows that brains with Alzheimer's disease have subnormal levels of important dietary antioxidants:

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease estimated to affect 6 million Americans and 33 million people worldwide. Large numbers of those affected have not yet been diagnosed.

A new study published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease by a Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine faculty member shows that brain levels of dietary lutein, zeaxanthin, lycopene, and vitamin E in those with Alzheimer's disease are half those in normal brains. Higher dietary levels of lutein and zeaxanthin have been strongly linked to better cognitive functions and lower risk for dementia or Alzheimer's disease.

"This study, for the first time, demonstrates deficits in important dietary antioxidants in Alzheimer's brains. These results are consistent with large population studies that found risk for Alzheimer's disease was significantly lower in those who ate diets rich in carotenoids, or had high levels of lutein and zeaxanthin in their blood, or accumulated in their retina as macular pigment," said C. Kathleen Dorey, professor in the Department of Basic Science Education at the medical school. "Not only that, but we believe eating carotenoid-rich diets will help keep brains in top condition at all ages."

Because normal brain functions and response to misfolded proteins constantly generate reactive oxidizing molecules, the brain is vulnerable to cumulative oxidative damage, which can be prevented by antioxidants supplied by a healthy diet. Carotenoids are powerful antioxidants that are commonly found in colorful plants. Lutein is especially abundant in kale and spinach, and zeaxanthin is highest in corn and orange peppers.

[...] This new evidence of selective carotenoid and tocopherol deficiencies in the brains of subjects with Alzheimer's disease adds further support to the growing evidence that a greater dietary intake of carotenoids may slow cognitive decline prior to — and possibly following — a diagnosis with Alzheimer's disease.

fliptop writes:

One of the most highly-trafficked financial news websites in the world is creating AI-generated stories that bear an uncanny resemblance to stories published just hours earlier by other competitors:

Investing.com, a Tel Aviv-based site owned by Joffre Capital, is a financial news and information hub that provides a mix of markets data and investing tips and trends. But increasingly, the site has been relying on AI to create its stories, which often appear to be thinly-veiled copies of human-written stories written elsewhere.

[...] Pere Monguió, the head of content at FXStreet, told Semafor in an email that he and his team noticed several months ago that Investing was publishing stories similar to their site's articles. FXStreet's 60-person team monitors and quickly analyzes developments in global currencies. By pumping out AI articles, Investing was eroding FXStreet's edge, Monguió said.

"Using AI to rewrite exclusive content from competitors is a threat to journalism and original content creation," he said.

[...] "This isn't truly a new thing," Lawrence Greenberg, senior vice president and chief legal officer at The Motley Fool, said in an email. "We have seen, and acted against, people plagiarizing our content from time to time, and if you're right about what's going on, AI has achieved a level of human intelligence that copies good content and makes it mediocre."

See also: Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Following a marathon 72-hour debate, European Union legislators Friday have reached a historic deal on its expansive AI Act safety development bill, the broadest-ranging and far-reaching of its kind to date, reports The Washington Post. Details of the deal itself were not immediately available.

"This legislation will represent a standard, a model, for many other jurisdictions out there," Dragoș Tudorache, a Romanian lawmaker co-leading the AI Act negotiation, told The Washington Post, "which means that we have to have an extra duty of care when we draft it because it is going to be an influence for many others."

The proposed regulations would dictate the ways in which future machine learning models could be developed and distributed within the trade bloc, impacting their use in applications ranging from education to employment to healthcare. AI development would be split between four categories depending on how much societal risk each potentially poses — minimal, limited, high, and banned.

Banned uses would include anything that circumvents the user's will, targets protected social groups or provides real-time biometric tracking (like facial recognition). High risk uses include anything "intended to be used as a safety component of a product,” or which are to be used in defined applications like critical infrastructure, education, legal/judicial matters and employee hiring. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard and Bing would fall under the "limited risk" metrics.

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Wednesday, December 13th, 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.

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, welcome to observe and participate, is encouraged to attend the meeting.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Verizon Wireless gave a female victim's address and phone logs to an alleged stalker who pretended to be a police officer, according to an affidavit filed by an FBI special agent. The man, Robert Michael Glauner, was later arrested near the victim's home and found to be carrying a knife at the time, according to the affidavit submitted in court yesterday.

Glauner allegedly traveled from New Mexico to Raleigh, North Carolina, after finding out where she lived and, before arriving, sent a threatening message that said, "if I can't have you no one can." He also allegedly threatened to send nude photos of the victim to her family members.

[...] Glauner and the victim met in August or September 2023 on xhamster.com, a porn website with dating features, and "had an online romantic relationship," the affidavit said. The victim ended the relationship, but Glauner "continued to contact or try to contact" her, the document said.

Glauner tricked Verizon into providing sensitive information by sending an email and fake search warrant to vsat.cct@one.verizon.com, the email address for the Verizon Security Assistance Team (VSAT), which handles legal requests. Verizon didn't realize the request was fraudulent even though it came from a Proton Mail address rather than from a police department or other governmental agency, according to the affidavit filed yesterday by FBI Special Agent Michael Neylon.

An email to Verizon from "steven1966c@proton.me" on September 26, 2023, said, "Here is the pdf file for search warrant. We are in need if the [sic] this cell phone data as soon as possible to locate and apprehend this suspect. We also need the full name of this Verizon subscriber and the new phone number that has been assigned to her. Thank you."

The email's attached document contained a fake affidavit written by "Detective Steven Cooper" of the Cary, North Carolina Police Department. The Cary Police Department confirmed that no officer named Steven Cooper is employed by their agency, Neylon wrote.

[...] But after reviewing the email and document sent by "Cooper," Verizon provided an address and phone logs. "On October 5, 2023, Verizon Wireless provided Victim 1's phone records, including address and phone logs, to Glauner," according to Neylon's affidavit.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

Physicists at RIKEN have developed an electronic device that hosts unusual states of matter, which could one day be useful for quantum computation

When a material exists as an ultrathin layer—a mere one or a few atoms thick—it has totally different properties from thicker samples of the same material. That's because confining electrons to a 2D plane gives rise to exotic states. Because of their flat dimensions and their broad compatibility with existing semiconductor technologies, such 2D materials are promising for harnessing new phenomenon in electronic devices.

These states include quantum spin Hall insulators, which conduct electricity along their edges but are electrically insulating in their interiors. Such systems when coupled with superconductivity have been proposed as a route toward engineering topological superconducting states that have potential application in future topological quantum computers.

Now, Michael Randle at the RIKEN Advanced Device Laboratory, along with co-workers from RIKEN and Fujitsu, have created a 2D Josephson junction with active components entirely from a material known to be a quantum spin Hall insulator. The work is published in the journal Advanced Materials.

A Josephson junction is generally made by sandwiching a material between two elemental superconductors. In contrast, Randle and team fabricated their device from a single crystal of monolayer 2D tungsten telluride, which had previously been shown to exhibit both a superconducting state and a quantum spin Hall insulator one.

"We fabricated the junction entirely from monolayer tungsten telluride," says Randle. "We did this by exploiting its ability to be tuned into and out of the superconducting state using electrostatic gating."

[...] "The next step involves the implementation of ultraflat pre-patterned gate structures by using, for example, chemical–mechanical polishing," explains Randle. "If this is achieved, we hope to form Josephson junctions with precisely tailored geometries and to use our cutting-edge microwave resonator experiment techniques to observe and investigate the exciting topological nature of the devices."

Journal Reference:
Michael D. Randle et al, Gate‐Defined Josephson Weak‐Links in Monolayer WTe₂, Advanced Materials (2023). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202301683

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Akamai says it reported the flaws to Microsoft. Redmond shrugged:

A series of attacks against Microsoft Active Directory domains could allow miscreants to spoof DNS records, compromise Active Directory and steal all the secrets it stores, according to Akamai security researchers.

We're told the attacks - which are usable against servers running the default configuration of Microsoft Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) servers - don't require any credentials.

Akamai says it reported the issues to Redmond, which isn't planning to fix the issue. Microsoft did not respond to The Register's inquiries.

[...] DHCP is a commonly used network management protocol, and Microsoft's DHCP server is widely used in corporate networks. Organizations can create DNS record using a DHCP feature called DHCP DNS Dynamic Updates.

"Whenever a client is given an IP address by the DHCP server, the latter can contact the DNS server and update the client's DNS record," Akamai's Ori David explained.

When the DHCP server registers or modifies a DNS record on behalf of its clients, it uses DNS Dynamic Updates — and therein lies the problem. DHCP DNS Dynamic Updates does not require any authentication by the DHCP client, and Microsoft DHCP servers enable DHCP DNS Dynamic Updates by default.

"So an attacker can essentially use the DHCP server to authenticate to the DNS server on behalf of themself," David said. "This grants the attacker access to the ADIDNS zone without any credentials."

[...] In addition to creating non-existent DNS records, unauthenticated attackers can also use the DHCP server to overwrite existing data, including DNS records inside the ADI zone in instances where the DHCP server is installed on a domain controller, which David says is the case in 57 percent of the networks Akamai monitors.

"All these domains are vulnerable by default," he wrote. "Although this risk was acknowledged by Microsoft in their documentation, we believe that the awareness of this misconfiguration is not in accordance with its potential impact."

[...] "Use the same DNS credential across all your DHCP servers instead," is the advice.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Hubble Space Telescope is expected to resume science operations on Friday, after a gyroscope glitch forced NASA to suspend astronomical observations for weeks.

"After analyzing the data, the team has determined science operations can resume under three-gyro control," the US space agency confirmed in its latest update. "Based on the performance observed during the tests, the team has decided to operate the gyros in a higher-precision mode during science observations. Hubble's instruments and the observatory itself remain stable and in good health."

Launched in 1990, the telescope has been serviced multiple times over its decades-long lifetime. In 2009 Hubble was equipped with six new gyros. Only three remain operational.

Gyros measure how fast the telescope turns, and help it stay fixed onto a cosmic target as it orbits in space. One of them began behaving oddly, however, leading to faulty readings – so Hubble automatically entered safe mode on November 19.

[...] "To date, three of those gyros remain operational, including the gyro currently experiencing fluctuations. Hubble uses three gyros to maximize efficiency, but could continue to make science observations with only one gyro if required," NASA explained.

The instrument should be able to keep studying stars and galaxies and analyze their light in visible and ultraviolet wavelengths until the end of this decade, and maybe into the early 2030s.

But the telescope is slowly drifting from its intended orbit – currently at about an altitude of 525 kilometers above Earth's atmosphere. It's expected to drop to 500 kilometers by 2025, and at this rate will be drawn down and reenter Earth's atmosphere and be destroyed by the mid 2030s – unless a rescue mission is carried out.

NASA hasn't quite decided on what it will do before then, but has suggested it might attach a propulsion module – either to help the Hubble execute a controlled reentry so it's destroyed over the Pacific Ocean, or boost the telescope higher into orbit so it can continue operating.

See also: Hubble back in service after gyro scare—NASA still studying reboost options

Original Submission