SoylentNews

canopic jug writes:

Multiple sites are reporting that Teitoevry, based in Finland, has been breached by the Akira ransomware crew. The compromise affects electronic health records, movie ticket sales, some universities and colleges, and some regional authorities and municipal councils among their Swedish customers:

Officials in Uppsala County, located on the east-central coast of Sweden, launched crisis management plans after the region's patient medical record system went offline and some financial systems became unavailable, warning that the situation could deteriorate unless the systems are restored quickly.

BankInfoSecurity: Ransomware Hit on Tietoevry Causes IT Outages Across Sweden

The company, which last reported annual revenue of $3.3 billion, has 24,000 employees and counts customers in over 90 countries. Tietoevry first alerted Swedish customers to the attack on Saturday, saying it had quickly isolated the infrastructure that the attacker accessed, thus containing the incident. The company apologized for the resulting outages and said it had deployed teams working around the clock to remediate the attack and bring systems back online. "Currently, Tietoevry cannot say how long the restoration process as a whole will take - considering the nature of the incident and the number of customer-specific systems to be restored, the total timespan may extend over several days, even weeks," the company said in a Monday update. "We are focused on resolving this as soon as technically possible, in close collaboration with the customers in question."

The Säkerhetspolisen, Sweden's security service responsible for counterintelligence, did not immediately respond to an enquiry about potential risks related to government payroll information being exposed to criminals.

fliptop writes:

Although X owner Elon Musk suggested that forcing users to pay for verification would help to weed out the bots (aka automated accounts) on the platform, that does not appear to be the case:

A video gaining views on rival platform Instagram Threads shows X search results where numerous bots, including many verified with a blue check, are posting a variation of the phrase "I'm sorry, I cannot provide a response as it goes against OpenAI's use case policy."

The response is what OpenAI's chatbot says when a user asks a question or requests that it perform a task in violation of OpenAI's terms of service. In this case, it's also an indication that the X account in question is using AI to create its posts.

[...] It does appear that at least some of the bot accounts are older, according to the "join date" that's displayed on their X profile. You can view one example of this here, for instance (see below). These accounts also post content that reads as if it's the output of some AI query, as it most likely is.

[...] Despite the numerous posts from these bots, AI-powered accounts aren't X's only problem. Many bots and bot farms are run without OpenAI's assistance, and are harder to detect. According to data pulled from Fedica, a social media analytics and publishing platform, only 202 accounts posted OpenAI's automated response over the past 30 days, as seen in this query here. While a few were from real people joking about the bot problem, the majority were AI responses. More bots may have already been deleted by X, but that data isn't available.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Previously: Crypto Botnet on X is Powered by ChatGPT

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-01-mini-robots-insects-smallest-lightest.html

Two insect-like robots, a mini-bug and a water strider, developed at Washington State University, are the smallest, lightest and fastest fully functional micro-robots ever known to be created.

Such miniature robots could someday be used for work in areas such as artificial pollination, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, micro-fabrication or robotic-assisted surgery. Reporting on their work in the proceedings of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, the mini-bug weighs in at eight milligrams while the water strider weighs 55 milligrams. Both can move at about six millimeters a second.

"That is fast compared to other micro-robots at this scale, although it still lags behind their biological relatives," said Conor Trygstad, a Ph.D. student in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and lead author on the work. An ant typically weighs up to five milligrams and can move at almost a meter per second.

The key to the tiny robots is their tiny actuators that make the robots move. Trygstad used a new fabrication technique to miniaturize the actuator down to less than a milligram, the smallest ever known to have been made.

"The actuators are the smallest and fastest ever developed for micro-robotics," said Néstor O. Pérez-Arancibia, Flaherty Associate Professor in Engineering at WSU's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering who led the project.

The actuator uses a material called a shape memory alloy that is able to change shapes when it's heated. It is called 'shape memory' because it remembers and then returns to its original shape. Unlike a typical motor that would move a robot, these alloys don't have any moving parts or spinning components.

"They're very mechanically sound," said Trygstad. "The development of the very lightweight actuator opens up new realms in micro-robotics."

Shape memory alloys are not generally used for large-scale robotic movement because they are too slow. In the case of the WSU robots, however, the actuators are made of two tiny shape memory alloy wires that are 1/1000 of an inch in diameter. With a small amount of current, the wires can be heated up and cooled easily, allowing the robots to flap their fins or move their feet at up to 40 times per second. In preliminary tests, the actuator was also able to lift more than 150 times its own weight.

More information: Conor K. Trygstad et al, A New 1-mg Fast Unimorph SMA-Based Actuator for Microrobotics, 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) (2023). DOI: 10.1109/IROS55552.2023.10342518

Original Submission

https://leehamnews.com/2024/01/15/unplanned-removal-installation-inspection-procedure-at-boeing/#comment-509962

[...] why did the left hand (LH) mid-exit door plug blow off of the 737-9 registered as N704AL? Simple- as has been covered in a number of articles and videos across aviation channels, there are 4 bolts that prevent the mid-exit door plug from sliding up off of the door stop fittings that take the actual pressurization loads in flight, and these 4 bolts were not installed when Boeing delivered the airplane, our own records reflect this.

As a result, this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations (so both actual doors for the high density configs, and plugs like the one that blew out). That is a hideously high and very alarming number, and if our quality system on 737 was healthy, it would have stopped the line and driven the issue back to supplier after the first few instances.

The mid-exit doors on a 737-9 of both the regular and plug variety come from Spirit already installed in what is supposed to be the final configuration and in the Renton factory, there is a job for the doors team to verify this "final" install and rigging meets drawing requirements. In a healthy production system, this would be a "belt and suspenders" sort of check, but the 737 production system is quite far from healthy, its a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen. As a result, this check job that should find minimal defects has in the past 365 calendar days recorded 392 nonconforming findings on 737 mid fuselage door installations (so both actual doors for the high density configs, and plugs like the one that blew out). That is a hideously high and very alarming number, and if our quality system on 737 was healthy, it would have stopped the line and driven the issue back to supplier after the first few instances. Obviously, this did not happen. Now, on the incident aircraft this check job was completed on 31 August 2023, and did turn up discrepancies, but on the RH side door, not the LH that actually failed. I could blame the team for missing certain details, but given the enormous volume of defects they were already finding and fixing, it was inevitable something would slip through- and on the incident aircraft something did. I know what you are thinking at this point, but grab some popcorn because there is a plot twist coming up. [....]

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

From the Abstract:

We conduct the first large-scale user study examining how users interact with an AI Code assistant to solve a variety of security related tasks across different programming languages. Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant based on OpenAI's codex-davinci-002 model wrote significantly less secure code than those without access. Additionally, participants with access to an AI assistant were more likely to believe they wrote secure code than those without access to the AI assistant. Furthermore, we find that participants who trusted the AI less and engaged more with the language and format of their prompts (e.g. re-phrasing, adjusting temperature) provided code with fewer security vulnerabilities. Finally, in order to better inform the design of future AI-based Code assistants, we provide an in-depth analysis of participants' language and interaction behavior, as well as release our user interface as an instrument to conduct similar studies in the future.

Journal Reference: Neil Perry, Megha Srivastava, Deepak Kumar, Dan Boneh https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576915.3623157

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Turner syndrome is a genetic condition in which a (female) person has only one X chromosome instead of two. Scientists have used a new computational method for precisely measuring sex chromosomes to identify the first prehistoric person with this syndrome dating back some 2,500 years ago, according to a recent paper published in the journal Communications Biology. The team identified four other individuals with sex chromosomes outside the usual XX or XY designations: an early medieval individual with Jacobs syndrome (XYY) and three people from various periods with Klinefelter syndrome (XXY). They also identified an Iron Age infant with Down syndrome.

"It’s hard to see a full picture of how these individuals lived and interacted with their society, as they weren’t found with possessions or in unusual graves, but it can allow some insight into how perceptions of gender identity have evolved over time," said co-author Kakia Anastasiadou, a graduate student at the Francis Crick Institute.

Added co-author Rick Schulting, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, “The results of this study open up exciting new possibilities for the study of sex in the past, moving beyond binary categories in a way that would be impossible without the advances being made in ancient DNA analysis."

According to the authors, the emergence of ancient genomics "has revolutionized our ability to examine human biology over thousands of years, providing insight into phenotypic variation, social stratification, and their impact on health throughout history." When it comes to determining sex identification of ancient remains, genomic data can often overcome some of the limitations of traditional osteological analysis, which is less useful if a skeleton is incomplete or for analyzing non-adult remains. There are several publicly available tools for doing ancient DNA analysis, but they are less useful for detecting extra or missing sex chromosomes.

Anastasiadou et al. relied on a large database of ancient DNA collected as part of the Thousand Ancient British Genomes project. Their new computational technique involved determining a predicted baseline number of X and Y chromosomes one would expect to see and comparing that to a careful counting of the exact number of X and Y chromosomes present in the samples. They combined this technique with osteological methods.

taylorvich writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/nuclear-powered-cargo-ship

The shipping industry has been trying to cut its carbon emissions for years, and with little to show for it. Nearly all of the world's ship fleet still runs on diesel fuel, with about a quarter of new ships on order being built to run on somewhat lower-carbon alternatives like liquefied natural gas, methanol, or hybrid propulsion.

The industry now faces serious pressure to pick up the pace. Shipping uses over 300 million tonnes of fossil fuels every year, producing 3 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. At a July meeting of the International Maritime Organization, the U.N. body that governs the industry, representatives doubled down on carbon-reduction ambitions, setting a net-zero emissions goal for 2050. The IMO's previous goal was a 50 percent reduction by 2050 in comparison with 2008 levels. The European Union plans to begin charging shippers for carbon emissions this year.

Hedging its bets, the industry is exploring ammonia, batteries, and hydrogen, among other options for powering ships. A small but growing group of analysts, though, are pushing for a zero-emissions technology that already plows the oceans: nuclear propulsion.

Today, some 200 nuclear reactors are already operating on 160 vessels, mostly naval ships and submarines. Nuclear-powered ships can go years without refueling. They do not need giant fuel tanks, which opens up more space for cargo and passengers. And the reactors themselves are getting better, too: Fourth-generation small modular reactors (SMRs) being developed by companies including U.S.-based TerraPower and London-based Newcleo should be safer and simpler to operate than conventional reactors.

For shipping, nuclear is really the only abundant, realistic, carbon-free option, according to Håvard Lien, vice president of research and innovation at the Norwegian shipbuilding company Vard Group. "It's becoming more and more apparent that we need to do something about emissions," he notes. "At the same time, it's becoming apparent that alternative-fuel solutions we're looking at have big drawbacks, and that producing these fuels will take a lot of green power that will be needed to replace coal and gas on shore. Having an energy source that you can fit onboard a ship and does not compete with shore energy is a very high priority."

fliptop writes:

There's an old saying about the news business: If you want to make a small fortune, start with a large one:

As the prospects for news publishers waned in the last decade, billionaires swooped in to buy some of the country's most fabled brands. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, bought The Washington Post in 2013 for about $250 million. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotechnology and start-up billionaire, purchased The Los Angeles Times in 2018 for $500 million. Marc Benioff, the founder of the software giant Salesforce, purchased Time magazine with his wife, Lynne, for $190 million in 2018.

[...] But it increasingly looks like the billionaires are struggling just like nearly everyone else. Time, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all lost millions of dollars last year, people with knowledge of the companies' finances have said, after considerable investment from their owners and intensive efforts to drum up new revenue streams.

[...] In the middle of last year, The Times was on track to lose $30 million to $40 million in 2023, according to three people with knowledge of the projections. Last year, the company cut about 74 jobs, and executives have met in recent days to discuss the possibility of deep job cuts, according to two other people familiar with the conversations. Members of The Los Angeles Times union have called an emergency meeting for Thursday to discuss the possibility of another "major" round of layoffs: "This is the big one," read the email to employees.

[...] Mr. Bezos hasn't fared much better at The Washington Post. Like many news organizations, The Post has struggled to hold onto the momentum it gained in the wake of the 2020 election. Sagging subscriptions and advertising revenue led to losses of about $100 million last year. At the end of the year, the company eliminated 240 of its 2,500 jobs through buyouts, including some of its well-regarded journalists.

[...] Time is facing similar headwinds. The publication lost around $20 million in 2023, according to two people with knowledge of the publication's financial picture. Time has weighed cutting costs in the first quarter of the year to help offset some of the losses, one of the people said.

Related:

• AI Threatens to Crush News Organizations. Lawmakers Signal Change Is Ahead
• Co-Founder of Salesforce Buys Time Magazine for $190 Million
• Publisher Drops Tronc Name, Reverts to Tribune Publishing

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Forty years ago in January of 1984 was the launch of Apple's then new, graphical PC, the MacIntosh. Many sites are covering the milestone. What are Soylentils' thoughts on the different stages of MacIntosh hardware and software over time? Its old operating system, its current Mach microkernel plus Darwin-based operating system, and choice of CPUs have been quite defining. Has it lived up to the ambition of becoming a tool to amplify human intellectual capacity, a bicycle for the mind, of sorts? Have people learned how use computers or do the computers now use them?

That legacy has been long-lasting. For the first half of its existence, the Mac occupied only a slice of the market, even as it inspired so many rivals; now it's a substantial chunk of PC sales. Even within the Apple juggernaut, $30 billion isn't chicken feed! What's more, when people think of PCs these days, many will envision a Macintosh. More often than not, the open laptops populating coffee shops and tech company workstations beam out glowing Apples from their covers. Apple claims that its Macbook Air is the world's best-selling computer model. One 2019 survey reported that more than two-thirds of all college students prefer a Mac. And Apple has relentlessly improved the product, whether with the increasingly slim profile of the iMac or the 22-hour battery life of the Macbook Pro. Moreover, the Mac is still a thing. Chromebooks and Surface PCs come and go, but Apple's creation remains the pinnacle of PC-dom. "It's not a story of nostalgia, or history passing us by," says Greg "Joz" Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in a rare on-the-record interview with five Apple executives involved in its Macintosh operation. "The fact we did this for 40 years is unbelievable."

Wired: Apple Shares the Secret of Why the 40-Year-Old Mac Still Rules

And

Back to the Macintosh story, Apple's budget model challenged the IBM PC's 8/16-bit Intel 8088 chip with a Motorola 68000 processor, a 16/32-bit chip that could handle twice as much data in a single instruction. The differences were stark at the surface as well. The Macintosh was tiny compared to an IBM PC and the computer's motherboard and a floppy disk drive were built into the same case as its small, but sharp, black and white monitor, making for a small footprint on a desk. This was an important consideration at a time when desks weren't designed for computers.

The most important difference was the mouse and graphical user interface which made a computer much easier for anyone to learn to use. Apple didn't invent this concept that was developed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The Macintosh was, however, the computer that took this idea out of the lab and demonstrated that this should be the way of the future.

Digital Trends: 40 years ago, Apple's original Macintosh started a revolution

SomeGuy writes:

Write the amount you wish to pay someone on a piece of paper, and mail it in. Simple. No expensive computing device needed, no browser dependencies, no compatibility headaches, and no web site to get hacked.

But getting your check to where it needs to go has become a lot more difficult lately.

This last year has seen a huge increase in mail drop box break ins. The once familiar blue drop boxes around the country are either being covered up or removed. Even the post office is warning, don't send checks through the mail. The attacks on the postal service have continued.

CBS News reported that Pittsburgh-area post office collection boxes were broken into. Boston.com reports on a string of mail collection box thefts at post offices and strip malls. In Tampa Bay, ABC Action News reports of brazen thieves stealing checks from mail as postal workers pick it up.

But now even taking your check directly in to a post office is not a guarantee. WSBTV in Atlanta reports a postal employee was fired for stealing thousands of checks.

Paying most bills with cash has already been not an option for a long time. New, more secure mail pickup boxes are on the way. A spokesperson for the Postal Inspection Service emphasizes "There is no plan to stop until the mail is secure,"

But, will the problems be solved before digitally enamored begin to look down on and ignore checks like they do landline telephones? Will rampant crime leave us with no other alternative than electronic payments?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Understanding the Implications of CentOS Stream 8 End-of-Life on Enterprise E...:

with the approaching end-of-life (EOL) of CentOS Stream 8, enterprises may face critical challenges in securing their Linux environment. This analysis provides insights into the potential consequences of CentOS Stream 8 EOL, discusses mitigation strategies, and examines the importance of maintaining security in enterprise environments.

CentOS Stream 8, released alongside CentOS 8, has become a stable and reliable platform for many enterprise users. However, with the end of support for CentOS 8, users have migrated to CentOS Stream as a viable alternative. Unfortunately, CentOS Stream 8 will also reach its EOL on May 31, 2024. This poses significant challenges in the areas of security, support, and compliance for enterprises.

Without official updates, users will face unpatched vulnerabilities, compatibility issues, and increased downtime. Compliance issues may arise for enterprises operating in regulated environments, as such industries often require the use of supported software to ensure data security.

The implications and long-term consequences of using CentOS Stream 8 beyond its EOL could be severe. One of the key implications is the lack of security updates, leaving enterprise systems vulnerable to potential threats. The absence of official support further intensifies the risk of compatibility issues and increased downtime. This raises important questions: How can enterprises protect their systems from cyber threats without security updates? How can they ensure compliance and data security without official support?

Luckily, mitigation strategies exist for CentOS Stream 8 EOL, including migration to other long-term supported operating systems such as CentOS Stream 9, AlmaLinux, Oracle Linux, RHEL, or Rocky Linux. However, a careful and strategic planning process is essential to minimize disruptions during the migration process.

[...] These challenges ultimately call for careful planning, strategic decision-making, and a proactive approach to maintaining security in enterprise environments. It is crucial for security practitioners to assess the specific needs of their organizations and determine the most suitable path forward to ensure ongoing data security and compliance.

CentOS Stream:

Check end-of-life, release policy and support schedule for CentOS Stream.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-wooly-mammoth-movements-earliest-alaska.html

Researchers have linked the travels of a 14,000-year-old wooly mammoth with the oldest known human settlements in Alaska, providing clues about the relationship between the iconic species and some of the earliest people to travel across the Bering Land Bridge.

Scientists made those connections by using isotope analysis to study the life of a female mammoth, named Élmayųujey'eh, by the Healy Lake Village Council. A tusk from Elma was discovered at the Swan Point archaeological site in Interior Alaska. Samples from the tusk revealed details about Elma and the roughly 1,000-kilometer journey she took through Alaska and northwestern Canada during her lifetime.

Isotopic data, along with DNA from other mammoths at the site and archaeological evidence, indicates that early Alaskans likely structured their settlements to overlap with areas where mammoths congregated. Those findings, highlighted in the journal Science Advances, provide evidence that mammoths and early hunter-gatherers shared habitat in the region. The long-term predictable presence of wooly mammoths would have attracted humans to the area.

"She wandered around the densest region of archaeological sites in Alaska," said Audrey Rowe, a University of Alaska Fairbanks Ph.D. student and lead author of the paper. "It looks like these early people were establishing hunting camps in areas that were frequented by mammoths."

The mammoth tusk was excavated and identified in 2009 by Charles Holmes, affiliate research professor of anthropology at UAF, and François Lanoë, research associate in archaeology at the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

They found Elma's tusk and the remains of two related juvenile mammoths, along with evidence of campfires, the use of stone tools, and butchered remains of other game. All of this "indicates a pattern consistent with human hunting of mammoths," said Ben Potter, an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at UAF.

More information: Audrey Rowe et al, A female woolly mammoth's lifetime movements end in an ancient Alaskan hunter-gatherer camp, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adk0818. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk0818

Journal information: Science Advances

Original Submission

JoeMerchant writes:

Paper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation finds | Science | AAAS

One evening in June 2023, Nicholas Wise, a fluid dynamics researcher / scientific fraud buster, was digging around on shady Facebook groups where he found someone calling themselves Jack Ben, of a firm whose Chinese name translates to Olive Academic, offering journal editors large sums of cash in return for accepting papers for publication...

[...] At least tens of millions of dollars flow to the paper mill industry each year, estimates Matt Hodgkinson of the independent charity UK Research Integrity Office, which offers support to further good research practices, who is also a council member at the nonprofit Committee on Publication Ethics. Publishers and journals, recognizing the threat, have beefed up their research integrity teams and retracted papers, sometimes by the hundreds. They are investing in ways to better spot third-party involvement, such as screening tools meant to flag bogus papers.

So cash-rich paper mills have evidently adopted a new tactic: bribing editors and planting their own agents on editorial boards to ensure publication of their manuscripts. An investigation by Science and Retraction Watch, in partnership with Wise and other industry experts, identified several paper mills and more than 30 editors of reputable journals who appear to be involved in this type of activity. Many were guest editors of special issues, which have been flagged in the past as particularly vulnerable to abuse because they are edited separately from the regular journal. But several were regular editors or members of journal editorial boards. And this is likely just the tip of the iceberg.

Hodgkinson recalls hearing one publisher say it "had to sack 300 editors for manipulative behavior." He adds, "These are organized crime rings that are committing large-scale fraud."

Being from pulpwood country, the title led me to believe I would be reading a story about how "Big Cardboard" was bribing academia to publish research beneficial to their industry - as "Big Oil" is so famous for... Nope, this is a different twist, broader and even more troubling.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/01/game-developer-survey-50-work-at-a-studio-already-using-generative-ai-tools/

A new survey of thousands of game development professionals finds a near-majority saying generative AI tools are already in use at their workplace. But a significant minority of developers say their company has no interest in generative AI tools or has outright banned their use.

The Game Developers Conference's 2024 State of the Industry report, released Thursday, aggregates the thoughts of over 3,000 industry professionals as of last October. While the annual survey (conducted in conjunction with research partner Omdia) has been running for 12 years, this is the first time respondents were asked directly about their use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, GitHub Copilot, and Adobe Generative Fill.

Forty-nine percent of the survey's developer respondents said that generative AI tools are currently being used in their workplace.
[...]
The wide embrace of AI tools hasn't seemed to lessen worries about their use among developers, though. A full 42 percent of respondents said they were "very concerned" about the ethics of using generative AI in game development, with an additional 42 percent being "somewhat concerned." Only 12 percent said they were "not concerned at all" about those usage ethics.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Apple's iPhone processor manufacturer TSMC has announced that it expects its second Arizona plant will be delayed by up to two years — and may no longer produced the promised 3-nanometer chips.

TSMC's second plant in the state was announced in 2022 with the company increasing its investment from $12 billion $40 billion for the new factory's development. This plant was specifically said to be for making 3nm processors, though it was later revealed that the all Arizona-made chips would still go to Taiwan for final assembly.

According to the Wall Street Journal, TSMC chair Mark Liu has announced that construction continues, but it will not be mass producing processors by 2026 as planned. At present, TSMC expects it to be fully operational by 2027 or 2028, though it gave no specific reasons for the delay.

While TSMC produces processors for many companies, it has a long-term relationship with Apple. Tim Cook has confirmed that Apple will use TSMC chips made in Arizona.

Liu also said that the new factory may not be dedicated to 3nm production. He said that the specific chip type had yet to be determined, and that the choice would be affected both by customer demand and government incentives.

The reference to initiatives is not the only factor in TSMC's relationship with the US government. As TSMC is a Taiwanese company and the US does not have an income tax agreement with that country, the chip manufacturer faces double taxation.

Unless this changes, it's been reported that TSMC would therefore be paying out over half of its US profits in tax.

Original Submission