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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In recent years, age-verification laws have been popping up across the U.S. They typically require visitors to websites with over one-third of adult content to show proof of age (such as ID) when attempting to view this content. As experts told Mashable last year, age-verification laws won't work — VPNs are an easy work-around, for one, and requiring users to upload their IDs leaves them vulnerable to identity theft.

Still, more and more states are enacting these laws. Pornhub and its parent company Aylo's (formerly MindGeek) response has been to block these states from accessing the website at all.

Now, Aylo will block Indiana and Kentucky in July, according to adult trade publication AVN. The laws that spurred these bans are Indiana's SB 17 and Kentucky's HB 278.

If you happen to be in one of these states, Mashable has instructions on how to unblock Pornhub using a VPN.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Doug Muir, at his blog Crooked Timber, discusses a paper about symbiotic fungal networks loaning glucose to seedlings and saplings. Of note, fungi do not produce glucose themselves, so they are extracting and storing it. The fungi connect to new seedlings and help them get started by feeding the roots micronutrients, which for some of them compensates for sunlight which they can't yet reach. Then after some time, the network cuts off the supply. If the sapling dies, the network rots it. If the sapling survives, the network extracts and caches nutrients from it.

The problem was, succession leading to forest was a bunch of observations with a big theoretical hole in the center. Imagine a mid-succession field full of tall grass and bushes and mid-sized shrubs. Okay, so... how does the seedling of a slow-growing tree species break in? It should be overshadowed by the shrubs and bushes, and die before it ever has a chance to grow above them.

And the answer is, the fungus. The forest uses the fungus to pump sugar and nutrients into those seedlings, allowing them to grow until they are overshadowing the tall grasses and shrubs, not vice versa. The fungus is a tool the forest uses to expand. Or — looked at another way — the fungus is a venture capitalist, extending startup loans so that its client base can penetrate a new market.

This also answered a bunch of other questions that have puzzled observers for generations. Like, it's long been known that certain trees are "nurse trees", with unusual numbers of seedlings and saplings growing closely nearby. Turns out: it's the fungus. Why some trees do this and not others is unclear, but the ones that do, are using the fungus. Or: there's a species of lily that likes to grow near maple trees. Turns out they're getting some energy from the maple, through the fungus. Are the lilies symbiotes, providing some unknown benefit to the maple tree? Or are they parasites, who are somehow spoofing either the maple or the fungus? Research is ongoing.

Since the slow-growing trees spend years in the shade of other foliage, the nutrient boost lent by the fungi can make the difference between survival or death.

Previously:
(2022) Mushrooms May Communicate With Each Other Using Up To 50 "Words"
(2020) Radiation-Resistant Graphite-Eating Fungus
(2018) Soil Fungi May Help Determine The Resilience Of Forests To Environmental Change
(2015) Earth Has 3,000,000,000,000 Trees and Some Resist Wildfires

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A Fermat's Library featured paper of the week chosen a month or so ago was Richard Wexelblat's 1981 paper, The Consequences of One's First Programming Language. The abstract of which says:

After seeing many programs written in one language, but with the style and structure of another, I conducted an informal survey to determine whether this phenomenon was widespread and to determine how much a programmer's first programming language might be responsible.

Wexelblat's formal and informal findings suggested there was a lasting impression left by one's first programming language, suggesting that at least part of the reason for this is that one's problem solving approach could be unnecessarily constrained by their first language:

Programmers who think of code in concrete rather than abstract terms limit themselves to the style of data and control structures of their ingrained programming habits. A FORTRAN programmer who has successfully designed a payroll system may not see any value in the ability to combine numeric and alphabetic information into a single data structure. BASIC programmers often find no use at all for subroutine formal parameters and local variables.

The mind-set problem, works both ways: the PASCAL programmer who is forced to use FORTRAN or BASIC may end up writing awful programs because of the difficulty in switching from high-level to low-level constructs. APL converts seem to abhor all other languages.

In his concluding remarks he says:

Although everything presented here is anecdotal evidence from which it would be irresponsible to draw firm conclusions, I cannot help add that my concern about the future generation of programmers remains. Who knows? Perhaps the advent of automatic program generators and very high level specification languages will so change the way we talk to computers that all of this will become irrelevant.

This had me reflecting on my own experiences and wondering, with the benefit of hindsight, whether others agree with Wexelblat then, whether they would agree with him now, or now that we do have automatic program generators and very high level specification languages, has this all become irrelevant?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In an update released late Friday evening, NASA said it was "adjusting" the date of the Starliner spacecraft's return to Earth from June 26 to an unspecified time in July.

The announcement followed two days of long meetings to review the readiness of the spacecraft, developed by Boeing, to fly NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to Earth. According to sources these meetings included high-level participation from senior leaders at the agency, including associate administrator Jim Free.

This "Crew Flight Test," which launched on June 5th atop an Atlas V rocket, was originally due to undock and return to Earth on June 14. However, as engineers from NASA and Boeing studied data from the vehicle's problematic flight to the International Space Station, they have waived off several return opportunities.

On Friday night they did so again, citing the need to spend more time reviewing data.

[...] Just a few days ago, on Tuesday, officials from NASA and Boeing set a return date to Earth for June 26. But that was before a series of meetings on Thursday and Friday during which mission managers were to review findings about two significant issues with the Starliner spacecraft: five separate leaks in the helium system that pressurizes Starliner's propulsion system and the failure of five of the vehicle's 28 reaction-control system thrusters as Starliner approached the station.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Researchers have created a new class of materials called "glassy gels" that are very hard and difficult to break despite containing more than 50% liquid. Coupled with the fact that glassy gels are simple to produce, the material holds promise for a variety of applications.

A paper describing this work, titled "Glassy Gels Toughened by Solvent," appears in the journal Nature.

Gels and glassy polymers are classes of materials that have historically been viewed as distinct from one another. Glassy polymers are hard, stiff and often brittle. They're used to make things like water bottles or airplane windows. Gels—such as contact lenses—contain liquid and are soft and stretchy.

"We've created a class of materials that we've termed glassy gels, which are as hard as glassy polymers, but—if you apply enough force—can stretch up to five times their original length, rather than breaking," says Michael Dickey, corresponding author of a paper on the work and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University. "What's more, once the material has been stretched, you can get it to return to its original shape by applying heat. In addition, the surface of the glassy gels is highly adhesive, which is unusual for hard materials."

"A key thing that distinguishes glassy gels is that they are more than 50% liquid, which makes them more efficient conductors of electricity than common plastics that have comparable physical characteristics," says Meixiang Wang, co-lead author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher at NC State. "Considering the number of unique properties they possess, we're optimistic that these materials will be useful."

[...] "Maybe the most intriguing characteristic of the glassy gels is how adhesive they are," says Dickey. "Because while we understand what makes them hard and stretchable, we can only speculate about what makes them so sticky."

The researchers also think glassy gels hold promise for practical applications because they're easy to make.

More information: Michael Dickey, Glassy gels toughened by solvent, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07564-0.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/20/systemd_2561_data_wipe_fix/

Following closely after the release of version 256, version 256.1 fixes a handful of bugs. One of these is emphatically not systemd-tmpfiles recursively deleting your entire home directory. That's a feature.

The 256.1 release is now out, containing some 38 minor changes and bugfixes. Among these are some changes to the help text around the systemd-tmpfiles command, which describes itself as a tool to "Create, delete, and clean up files and directories." Red Hat's RHEL documentation describes it as a tool for managing and cleaning up your temporary files.

That sounds innocuous enough, right?

It isn't, as Github user jedenastka discovered on Friday. He filed bug #33349 and the description makes for harrowing reading, not just because of the tool's entirely intended behavior, but also because of the systemd maintainers' response, which could be summarized as "you're doing it wrong".

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

According to a report by The Cyber Express, a cybercriminal group known as Intelbroker has claimed on the BreachForums site that it breached AMD's systems and is selling the data it stole.

In addition to details on unreleased AMD products, the group is offering to sell specification sheets, customer databases, property files, ROMs, source code, firmware, and financial records.

The trove also allegedly includes AMD employees' information, such as user IDs, full names, job functions, phone numbers, and email addresses. However, all the employee information shown has been recorded as "inactive," suggesting the people no longer work at the company and that the emails are out of use.

There have been previous cases of cybercriminal gangs making false claims about infiltrating big organizations and having stolen data to sell, but this instance appears genuine as Intelbroker posted screenshots from AMD's internal systems.

[...] Intelbroker is asking interested buyers to get in touch and make an offer for the stolen AMD data, to be paid in the cryptocurrency Monero.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Biden to ban U.S. sales of Kaspersky software over ties to Russia, source says --

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/20/biden-to-ban-us-sales-of-kaspersky-software-over-ties-to-russia.html

The US administration on Thursday will announce plans to bar the sale of Kaspersky Lab's antivirus software in the United States, a person familiar with the matter said, citing the firm's large U.S. customers including critical infrastructure providers and state and local governments.

The company's close ties to the Russian government were found to pose a critical risk, the person said, adding that the software's privileged access to a computer's systems could allow it to steal sensitive information from American computers, install malware or withhold critical updates.

The sweeping new rule, using broad powers created by the Trump administration, will be coupled with another move to add the company to a trade restriction list, according to two other people familiar with the matter, dealing a blow to the firm's reputation that could hammer its overseas sales.

[...] A spokesperson for the Commerce Department declined to comment, while Kaspersky Lab and the Russian Embassy did not respond to requests for comment. Previously, Kaspersky has said that it is a privately managed company with no ties to the Russian government.

The moves show the administration is trying to stamp out any risks of Russian cyberattacks stemming from Kaspersky software and keep squeezing Moscow as its war effort in Ukraine has regained momentum and as the United States has run low on fresh sanctions it can impose on Russia.

It also shows the Biden administration harnessing a powerful new authority that allows it to ban or restrict transactions between U.S. firms and internet, telecom and tech companies from "foreign adversary" nations like Russia and China.

[...] Kaspersky, which has a U.K. holding company and operations in Massachusetts, said in a corporate profile that it generated revenue of $752 million in 2022 from more than 220,000 corporate clients in some 200 countries. Its website lists Italian vehicle maker Piaggio, Volkswagen's retail division in Spain and the Qatar Olympic Committee among its customers.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://austinhenley.com/blog/bignum1.html

What happens when numbers get too big for a computer to work with?

For example, a 64-bit unsigned integer can be as large as 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. That is... huge. But what if it isn't enough?

Enter bignums, or arbitrary-precision numbers. These very, very large numbers allow you to go beyond CPU limitations for representing integers and performing arithmetic, limited only by the computer's memory.

If you open up Python and throw some really, really big numbers at it, you'll see that it works without any issue. Although C requires using a library for bignums, Python supports them right out of the box. In fact, you can use big numbers and small numbers interchangeably and it is completely abstracted away from the programmer.

I've always wanted to know how these bignum libraries work, so this is my adventure in learning about them.

The irony with this blog post, for any of us who did any assembly programming on the old 8-bit microprocessors (8080/Z80/6502/6800), is that doing "big-nums" was a required bit of knowledge to do any math larger than 8-bits wide (6502) or 16-bits wide (for a few instructions on the 8080/Z80/6800). The blog writer must be one of today's Ten Thousand.

Original Submission

mcgrew writes:

Of course, you can't delete their site without going to prison. This is about deleting an account.

        You probably saw the S/N article Adobe and Meta Drive the Visual Digital Arts in Deeper Enshit[ment] where it was shown that Meta is changing its policy next week, allowing itself to legally steal your copyrighted content to train its AI (for those under a rock, "Artificial Intelligence").

        You probably also know that I'm a writer since about 1997. I am also a former visual art and design student with dozens of images, if not hundreds. As I have posted stories here at S/N, and slashdot (years ago, I left when S/N was started), I also posted at Facebook for about five years or so; my daughter convinced me that I could popularize my books there.

        In my last book, Voyage to Madness about a trip to Proxima Centauri via Einstein's time warp (real science, no fantasy), there are no human visual artists, poets, or writers. It's all produced by computers. I do not want to be a contributor to that future! So when I first got word of this latest evil from Meta, I posted there that I was deleting my account and where to look for my writing. I set last night as the date, and then forgot until this morning after my coffee.

        Even sober and full of coffee, It was extremely difficult and frustrating. Meta made getting out of their data prison extremely difficult. Harder than Wolfenstein and unlike it, no fun at all.

        First, I suspect that there's a robots.txt file in the directory that holds the file that actually explains, very poorly, how to delete an account, because I of course googled to see how to do it. It was a facebook.com file, but very outdated. There is no possible way I found using it to actually delete.

        Even after logging into Farsebook and looking for a help file there, it was obvious that they don't want anyone to leave. I wish I would have written this as I was deleting the account, I could have given step by step instructions; even following their flawed program (i.e., list of steps, for you non-programmers) they leave out much needed information and force you to guess.

        It took over an hour. But I encourage all of you with Meta accounts to fight this evil. Maybe we CAN delete facebook! If you see me there with the same photo that was posted, please let me know so I can sue them. I don't need the money, I just want to destroy Meta. If it happens, unlikely as that is, I'll donate the winnings to S/N.

        I may open another account just to poison their stupid "intelligent" computer.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

For roughly 80 years, the United States has managed the threat of nuclear terrorism through nonproliferation treaties, agency programs, intelligence activities, international monitoring support and more, withstanding the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union, and 9/11.

[...] "The issue of nuclear terrorism remains very much a real one, there are enormous stakes involved and the risks are high, but the issue has been falling off the radar screen of the American public over the last 15 years, and the skill set of people involved in managing it is aging out," says Flynn, professor of political science and founding director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern.

"We really need to keep our eye on the ball. It was quite timely for Congress to call for an assessment of this risk and provide recommendations for staying on top of this issue."

In the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress mandated the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Agency to work with the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to assess the current state of nuclear terrorism and nuclear weapons and materials and advise the government on how to handle such issues.

Flynn, an expert on national and homeland security, was appointed chair of the committee in 2022. The committee released its final report on Tuesday.

The report finds that a lot has changed since the issue of nuclear terrorism was forefront in Americans' minds following 9/11 and the buildup to the Iraq War.

"We had a war on terror after 9/11, but that didn't succeed in eliminating the terrorism threat," Flynn says. "Terrorism continues to morph."

The outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War, which occurred as the committee finalized its report, demonstrates this morphing of terrorism.

The involvement of Hezbollah as a proxy of Iran, and the involvement of Hamas—both groups are designated terrorist groups by the U.S. State Department—highlight a world where non-states and nuclear-seeking states collaborate in warfare, Flynn says.

"The designation between non-state vs. state actors is blurry," Flynn says. "The assessment reveals we have to be focused on where those two things may overlap."

Also "blurring" is the line between domestic terrorism and international terrorism, Flynn says.

"Particularly when you look on the far right, international terror groups are recruiting Americans into these organizations, and Americans are reaching out to extremist organizations that have terrorism elements," Flynn says.

The nuclear world continues to morph as well.

owl writes:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c722gne7qngo

Archive Link: https://archive.is/4eOAc

McDonald's is removing artificial intelligence (AI) powered ordering technology from its drive-through restaurants in the US, after customers shared its comical mishaps online.

A trial of the system, which was developed by IBM and uses voice recognition software to process orders, was announced in 2019.

It has not proved entirely reliable, however, resulting in viral videos of bizarre misinterpreted orders ranging from bacon-topped ice cream to hundreds of dollars worth of chicken nuggets.

McDonald's told franchisees it would remove the tech from the more than 100 restaurants it has been testing it in by the end of July, as first reported by trade publication Restaurant Business, external.

[...] "After thoughtful review, McDonald's has decided to end our current global partnership with IBM on AOT [Automated Order Taking] beyond this year," the restaurant chain said in a statement.

However, it added it remained confident the tech would still be "part of its restaurants' future."

"We will continue to evaluate long-term, scalable solutions that will help us make an informed decision on a future voice ordering solution by the end of the year," the statement said.

/me now has visions of interacting with just about any telephone voice recognition assistant ever....

Original Submission

Car dealers can't sell cars due to living in today's world

Snotnose writes:

Hope you didn't want to buy a car in the near future

Car dealership software-as-a-service provider CDK Global was hit by a massive cyberattack causing the company to shut down its systems and leaving clients unable to operate their business normally.

CDK Global provides clients in the auto industry a SaaS platform that handles all aspects of a car dealership's operation, including CRM, financing, payroll, support and service, inventory, and back office operations.

Brad Holton, CEO of Proton Dealership IT, a cybersecurity and IT services firm for car dealerships, told BleepingComputer that the attack caused CDK to take its two data centers offline at approximately 2 AM last night.

Employees at multiple car dealerships have also told BleepingComputer that CDK has not shared much information other than to send an email warning that they suffered a cyber incident.

Anyone wanna take bets they're running Microsoft stuff?

Why Americans aren't buying more EVs

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Clint and Rachel Wells had reasons to consider buying an electric vehicle when it came to replacing one of their cars. But they had even more reasons to stick with petrol.

The couple live in Normal, Illinois, which has enjoyed an economic boost from the electric vehicle assembly plant opened there by upstart electric-car maker Rivian. EVs are a step forward from “using dead dinosaurs” to power cars, Clint Wells says, and he wants to support that.

But the couple decided to “get what was affordable”—in their case, a petrol-engined Honda Accord costing $19,000 after trade-in.

An EV priced at $25,000 would have been tempting, but only five new electric models costing less than $40,000 have come on to the US market in 2024. The hometown champion’s focus on luxury vehicles—its cheapest model is currently the $69,000 R1T—made it a non-starter.

“It’s just not accessible to us at this point in our life,” Rachel Wells says.

The Wells are among the millions of Americans opting to continue buying combustion-engine cars over electric vehicles, despite [the] President's ambitious target of having EVs make up half of all new cars sold in the US by 2030. Last year, the proportion was 9.5 percent.

High sticker prices for cars on the forecourt, and high interest rates that are pushing up monthly lease payments, have combined with concerns over driving range and charging infrastructure to chill buyers’ enthusiasm—even among those who consider themselves green.

While EV technology is still improving and the popularity of electric cars is still increasing, sales growth has slowed. Many carmakers are rethinking manufacturing plans, cutting the numbers of EVs they had planned to produce for the US market in favor of combustion-engined and hybrid cars.

AnonTechie writes:

[Source]: Popular Mechanics

Time has puzzled scientists for many decades. Does it meaningfully exist apart from our experience of it as everything moves toward the disintegration of entropy along its irrefutable arrow? You can't put the "spilled milk" of the weirdness of time back in the jug.

Could the observable universe be exclusively composed of layered, mutually entangled systems?

The passage of time puzzles quantum physicists, who seek to fit it into a cohesive model.

One wild theory posits that time visibly passes because we're entangled with ... well ... everything.

In new research published in the American Physical Society's peer-reviewed journal Physical Review A, scientists from Italy (led by Alessandro Coppo) try to translate one theory of time into real life—or, at least, closer to it. The theory is called Page and Wootters mechanism, and Coppo has studied it for years. It's a quantum mechanics idea that dates back to 1983.

Journal Reference:
Tiago Martinelli, Diogo O. Soares-Pinto. Quantifying quantum reference frames in composed systems: Local, global, and mutual asymmetries, Physical Review A (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.99.042124)

Original Submission

Signal, MEPs Urge EU Council To Drop Encryption-Eroding Law

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

On Thursday, the EU Council is scheduled to vote on a legislative proposal that would attempt to protect children online by disallowing confidential communication.

[...] Known to detractors as Chat Control, the proposal seeks to prevent the online dissemination of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) by requiring internet service providers to scan digital communication – private chats, emails, social media messages, and photos – for unlawful content.

The proposal [PDF], recognizing the difficulty of explicitly outlawing encryption, calls for "client-side scanning" or "upload moderation" – analyzing content on people's mobile devices and computers for certain wrongdoing before it gets encrypted and transmitted.

The idea is that algorithms running locally on people's devices will reliably recognize CSAM (and whatever else is deemed sufficiently awful), block it, and/or report it to authorities. This act of automatically policing and reporting people's stuff before it's even had a chance to be securely transferred rather undermines the point of encryption in the first place.

Europe's planned "regulation laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse" is not the only legislative proposal that contemplates client-side scanning as a way to front-run the application of encryption. The US Earn-It Act imagines something similar.

In the UK, the Online Safety Act of 2023 includes a content scanning requirement, though with the government's acknowledgement that enforcement isn't presently feasible. While it does allow telecoms regulator Ofcom to require online platforms to adopt an "accredited technology" to identify unlawful content, there is currently no such technology and it's unclear how accreditation would work.

With the EU proposal vote approaching, opponents of the plan have renewed their calls to shelve the pre-crime surveillance regime.

In an open letter [PDF] on Monday, Meredith Whittaker, CEO of Signal, which threatened to withdraw its app from the UK if the Online Safety Act disallowed encryption, reiterated why the EU client-side scanning plan is unworkable and dangerous.

"There is no way to implement such proposals in the context of end-to-end encrypted communications without fundamentally undermining encryption and creating a dangerous vulnerability in core infrastructure that would have global implications well beyond Europe," wrote Whittaker.

European countries continue to play rhetorical games. They’ve come back to the table with the same idea under a new label

"Instead of accepting this fundamental mathematical reality, some European countries continue to play rhetorical games.

[...] Threema said if it isn't allowed to offer encryption, it will leave the EU.

And on Tuesday, 37 Members of Parliament signed an open letter to the Council of Europe urging legislators to reject Chat Control.

"We explicitly warn that the obligation to systematically scan encrypted communication, whether called 'upload-moderation' or 'client-side scanning,' would not only break secure end-to-end encryption, but will to a high probability also not withstand the case law of the European Court of Justice," the MEPs said. "Rather, such an attack would be in complete contrast to the European commitment to secure communication and digital privacy, as well as human rights in the digital space." ®