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canopic jug writes:

Tom's Hardware is reporting that YouTube uses lower quality options on browsers running on Arm-based systems and that misreporting the browser as running on an x86 CPU appears to be a work around.

Linux developer Hector Martin has discovered that YouTube is "deliberately crippling Firefox on Asahi Linux." Martin, also known by the handle Marcan, says YouTube downgrades the video quality and resolutions served to Firefox users on Macs with Arm-based systems, at least when they're not running MacOS. This behavior is particularly galling as Arm-devices can be very powerful in 2023. Asahi Linux, for example, is a project responsible for porting “a polished Linux experience” to Apple Silicon (Arm CPU architecture) Macs.

Marcan confirmed his YouTube downgrade on Arm hunch by changing the browser user agent (UA) and doing some A/B testing. After changing the Firefox UA parameters from ‘aarch64’ to ‘x86_64’ he says "suddenly you get 4K and everything!"

Previously:
(2023) Youtube Is Reportedly Slowing Down Videos for Firefox Users

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Elon Musk yesterday appealed to the Supreme Court in a last-ditch effort to terminate his settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk has claimed he was coerced into the deal with the SEC and that it violates his free speech rights, but the settlement has been upheld by every court that's reviewed it so far.

In his petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, Musk said the SEC settlement forced him to "waive his First Amendment rights to speak on matters ranging far beyond the charged violations."

[...] Musk told the Supreme Court that the need to get pre-approval for tweets "is a quintessential prior restraint that the law forbids."

In the settlement, "the SEC demanded that Mr. Musk refrain indefinitely from making any public statements on a wide range of topics unless he first received approval from a securities lawyer," Musk's petition said. "Only months later, the SEC sought to hold Mr. Musk in contempt of court on the basis that Mr. Musk allegedly had not obtained such approval for a post on Twitter (now X). In effect, the SEC sought contempt sanctions—up to and including imprisonment—for Mr. Musk's exercise of his First Amendment rights."

In April 2022, Musk's attempt to get out of the settlement was rejected by a US District Court judge. Musk appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, but a three-judge panel unanimously ruled against him in May 2023. Musk asked the appeals court for an en banc rehearing in front of all the court's judges, but that request was denied in July, leaving the Supreme Court as his only remaining option.

upstart writes:

Four years after Tang Mingfang called out the injustices he witnessed at a Foxconn factory in China, nothing has changed — except for him:

Early each summer, the bus began to fill with teenagers. Tang Mingfang, a 40-year-old office manager, watched as his shuttle from the workers' dormitories to Foxconn Hengyang, an Amazon supplier factory in southern China, grew more crowded with kids brought in to assemble Kindle ebooks and Echo speakers for Christmas. By the peak of the production cycle, there were so many that Tang was unable to squeeze on to the bus. Sent by their vocational schools, the students arrived in their hundreds, as part of an arrangement with Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant that operates the plant.

An exclusive assembler of many Apple and Amazon products, Foxconn is China's biggest private employer, with more than 700,000 workers. But during Chinese factories' busiest periods, it's common to see students from age 16 being bussed in to meet the higher demand for products. Once they reached the Hengyang factory, their task was to put together electronic devices often for up to 10 hours per day. Not that the students had much choice. If they said no, their teachers could refuse to let them graduate.

Tang knew it was illegal for students to work overtime or nights. It also seemed unfair. While his generation of graduates had grown up expecting formal contracts for skilled work, these young students were getting a raw deal. Subjected to the intense discipline of the assembly line, their work was limited to mindlessly repeating the same minuscule movements every few seconds. And he disliked the harsh way the children were treated by the teachers who were responsible for them at the factory. A short, serious figure with youthfully round cheeks, Tang uses a single phrase to describe himself: "well behaved". So, at first, he kept his reservations about what was going on private.

owl writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/q-a-with-co-creator-of-the-6502-processor

Few people have seen their handiwork influence the world more than Bill Mensch. He helped create the legendary 8-bit 6502 microprocessor, launched in 1975, which was the heart of groundbreaking systems including the Atari 2600,Apple II, and Commodore 64. Mensch also created the VIA 65C22 input/output chip—noted for its rich features and which was crucial to the 6502's overall popularity—and the second-generation 65C816, a 16-bit processor that powered machines such as the Apple IIGS, and theSuper Nintendo console.

Many of the 65x series of chips are still in production. The processors and their variants are used as microcontrollers in commercial products, and they remain popular among hobbyists who build home-brewed computers. The surge of interest inretrocomputing has led to folks once again swapping tips on how to write polished games using the 6502 assembly code, with new titles being released for the Atari, BBC Micro, and other machines.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://www.science.org/content/article/living-skin-protecting-great-wall-china-erosion

The Great Wall of China used to be much greater. What stands today is only a fraction of the expansive fortifications built on the country's northern borders starting more than 2000 years ago and then eroded by time. But many sections of the remaining walls seem to be getting preservation help from an unlikely source: thin layers of bacteria, moss, lichen, and other organisms known as biocrusts, which grow on the surface of soils.

A study published today in Science Advances finds that these so-called "living skins" have likely protected parts of the Great Wall from wind, rain, and other corrosive forces. And with advances in technology and research, scientists might eventually propagate new biocrusts to spare the wall from further degradation.

The work is "innovative and creative," says Nichole Barger, an ecologist at the Nature Conservancy who was not involved in the new research. She notes it's not necessarily surprising, however, given the growing recognition of the protective effects of biocrusts: These webs of growth are known to help stabilize dryland ecosystems and prevent soil erosion.

Many of the Great Wall's most well-known and visited sections are made of stone or brick, but other parts were built out of soil compacted by workers, often called rammed earth. Over time, this material can break down as rain seeps in, wind blows the soil away, salt crystals form inside, and temperatures fluctuate.

But this compacted soil, much like the natural soils surrounding it, can also become home to biocrusts. These layers of growth have been estimated to cover some 12% of the planet's land surface, and are concentrated in regions with drier climates, including northern China. They come in a variety of forms, from thin networks of bacteria mere millimeters thick to denser layers of moss and lichen up to a few centimeters in height.
...
The researchers suggest these properties and others linked to biocrusts protect the Great Wall from degradation in a few ways, including by reducing wind erosion, preventing water and salt from seeping in, and increasing the overall stability of the rammed earth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, thicker, moss-dominated biocrusts were generally more protective than thinner ones dominated by cyanobacteria.

Journal Reference:
Yousong Cao et al., Biocrusts protect the Great Wall of China from erosion, Sci. Adv., 8 Dec 2023, Vol 9, Issue 49 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk5892

Original Submission

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.