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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Japan's digital minister, Taro Kono, confirmed that the Japanese government has finally rid itself of floppy disks.

"We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!" digital minister Taro Kono told Reuters on Wednesday.

Kono pledged in 2022 to eliminate law requiring floppy disks and CD-ROMs when sending data to the Japanese government. However, the decommissioning of the relic took another year and a half to be announced.

As of a few weeks ago, Japan's Digital Agency had removed 1,034 regulations that governed their use, leaving only one that was related to vehicle recycling.

Although it may seem futuristic in some respects, Japan still has a penchant for old tech, and not just floppy disks. Items like cash payments and fax machines complicate its reputation as well as its desires to lead in the tech sphere.

[...] Kono declaring victory over the retro squares comes as rumors swirl that he fancies himself the next president, who will be starting in September after the country's leadership election.

[...] A YouGov study conducted in 2018 when Kono was Foreign Minister found that two-thirds of British children aged six to 18 didn't even know what a floppy disk is.

A video filmed around that time shows children speculating that they might be from outer space, or perhaps a Victorian artifact.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

(Editor's note: This story is ~1,400 words, but it looks as several non-obvious problems that need to be addressed. Well worth reading! --Martyb/Bytram)

AI lie detectors are better than humans at spotting lies:

But the technology could break down trust and social bonds.

Can you spot a liar? It's a question I imagine has been on a lot of minds lately, in the wake of various televised political debates. Research has shown has shown that we're generally pretty bad at telling a truth from a lie.

Some believe that AI could help improve our odds, and do better than dodgy old fashioned techniques like polygraph tests. AI-based lie detection systems could one day be used to help us sift fact from fake news, evaluate claims, and potentially even spot fibs and exaggerations in job applications. The question is whether we will trust them. And if we should.

AI isn't great at decoding human emotions. So why are regulators targeting the tech?

AI, emotion recognition, and Darwin

[...]

Journal Reference:
Just a moment..., (DOI: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_2)

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A research team led by Osaka University discovered that the new organic molecule thienyl diketone shows high-efficiency phosphorescence. It achieved phosphorescence that is more than ten times faster than traditional materials, allowing the team to elucidate this mechanism.

[...] Phosphorescence is a valuable optical function used in applications such as organic EL displays (OLEDs) and cancer diagnostics. Until now, achieving high-efficiency phosphorescence without using rare metals such as iridium and platinum has been a significant challenge. Phosphorescence, which occurs when a molecule transitions from a high-energy state to a low-energy state, often competes with non-radiative processes where the molecule loses energy as heat.

This competition can lead to slow phosphorescence and lower efficiency. While previous research indicated that incorporating certain structural elements into organic molecules could speed up phosphorescence, these efforts have not matched the speed and efficiency of rare metal-based materials.

The research team's breakthrough with the new organic molecule thienyl diketone represents a significant advancement in the field. Yosuke Tani, senior author of the study, remarked, "We discovered this molecule by chance and initially did not understand why it demonstrated such superior performance. However, as our research progressed, we began to connect the pieces and deepen our understanding."

"Our research has led to a clearer understanding of the mechanism behind this molecule's performance than any previous organic phosphorescent material," explains Dr. Tani. "Nonetheless, we believe there is still much to explore, and we are excited about its potential applications."

This research provides new design guidelines for developing organic phosphorescent materials that do not rely on rare metals, offering the potential to surpass and replace these materials in various applications. The findings promise significant advancements in the fields of OLEDs, lighting, and medical diagnostics, among others.

Journal information: Chemical Science

More information: Yosuke Tani et al, Fast, Efficient, Narrowband Room-Temperature Phosphorescence from Metal-Free 1,2-Diketones: Rational Design and Mechanism, Chemical Science (2024). DOI: 10.1039/D4SC02841D

Original Submission

upstart writes:

OVHcloud Sees Record 840 Mpps DDoS Attack:

Cloud provider OVHcloud this week revealed that it had mitigated the largest ever distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in terms of packet rate, amid an overall increase in DDoS attack intensity.

Packet rate DDoS attacks seek to overload the processing engines of the networking devices close to the target, essentially taking down the infrastructure in front of the victim, such as the anti-DDoS systems.

Packet rate DDoS attacks, the cloud provider explains, are highly effective as their mitigation requires dealing with many small packets, which is typically more difficult than dealing with less, albeit larger packets.

"We can summarize this problem into a single sentence: if your job is to deal mostly with payloads, bandwidth may be the hard limit; but if your job is to deal mostly with packet headers, packet rate is the hard limit," OVHcloud notes.

Peaking at around 840 Mpps (million packets per second), the largest packet rate attack was registered in April this year, breaking the record that was set at 809 Mpps in 2021.

Even more worrying, however, is that OVHcloud has been observing a sharp increase in packet rate DDoS attacks above the 100 Mpps threshold over the past six months.

Typically, threat actors rely on DDoS attacks that focus on exhausting the target's bandwidth (network-layer or Layer 3 attacks) or resources (application-layer or Layer 7 attacks), but the adoption of packet rate assaults is surging.

"We went from mitigating a few of them each week, to tens or even hundreds per week. Our infrastructures had to mitigate several 500+ Mpps attacks at the beginning of 2024, including one peaking at 620 Mpps. In April 2024, we even mitigated a record-breaking DDoS attack reaching ~840 Mpps," OVHcloud says.

Most of the traffic used in the record attack, the cloud provider says, consisted of TCP ACK packets originating from roughly 5,000 IPs.

The company's investigation revealed the use of MikroTik routers as part of the attack, specifically cloud core routers – namely the CCR1036-8G-2S+ and CCR1072-1G-8S+ device models. There are close to 100,000 CCR devices exposed to the internet, with the two models accounting for roughly 40,000 of them.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Recently published research has exposed a security flaw affecting 12th, 13th, and 14th-generation Intel processors. Similar to Spectre, Meltdown, and Downfall, it could cause the processors to leak sensitive information.

Researchers from the University of California San Diego discovered the attack, dubbed "Indirector." It targets the indirect branch indicator (IBI), a critical component of modern Intel CPUs. As a Spectre V2 attack, it uses Branch Target Injection, which can alter where processors send important information.

Furthermore, the study reveals previously undisclosed information about the workings of the indirect branch predictor, branch target buffer, and Intel security measures like IBPB, IBRS, and STIBP. Reverse engineering has uncovered new vulnerabilities in these processes.

Using a specialized tool, an attacker could insert a multi-target direction path into the IBP, potentially exposing sensitive data. Another method can eject the target user from the IBP and commit a BTB injection attack with a similar result.

More aggressive IBPB implementation could protect against the flaw but may introduce significant performance penalties. The researchers also suggest that Intel tighten its security in other areas in future designs.

Intel told Tom's Hardware that its existing countermeasures, such as IBRS, eIBRS, and BHI, are effective against Indirector, so it will not issue further mitigations. Intel's website hosts detailed explanations of these systems. The researchers plan to reveal more information at the August USENIX Security Symposium.

With the discovery of Indirector, every modern Intel processor is now vulnerable to at least one known exploit. Spectre has impacted Blue Team's processors for over a decade, while Downfall affects consumer CPUs from the 6th through 11th generation. Meanwhile, Meltdown impacts Intel, AMD, and Arm systems. (Emphasis added.)

The researchers tested Indirector on Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors, potentially adding to the issues plaguing the latter. For weeks, users running CPU-intensive processes like games and productivity software have encountered crashes on high-end 13th and 14th-gen Intel chips, and the company has yet to find a permanent solution. In the meantime, Intel instructed affected users to undervolt their CPUs.

Whether Chipzilla can avoid these or similar issues with upcoming generations like Arrow Lake and Panther Lake remains unclear.

Original Submission

PiMuNu writes:

The World Intellectual Property Organization has counted the patents and scientific publications related to generative AI it could find between 2014 and 2023, and found 54,000 GenAI-related inventions and over 75,000 scientific publications – and that China utterly dominates the field. The Org's Patent Landscape Report – Generative Artificial Intelligence, delivered on Wednesday, found 733 patent families – sets of patents related to a single invention and with the same technical content – on GenAI in 2014 ballooning to more than 14,000 in 2023.

[...]

It was only in 2023 that US president Biden declared the time had come to ensure the United States "leads the way in seizing the promise and managing the risks of artificial intelligence."

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/04/china_dominates_ai_ip_wipo/

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Back in 2018 the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) announced that the IPv6 protocol had become a full Internet standard:

With IPv6 adoption accelerating over the past 6 years, from being a negligible fraction of the Internet (<1%) to recently topping 25% [Ed., now over 42%], moving IPv6 a full Internet Standard could not have come at a better time.

The Internet Standard designation represents the highest level of technical maturity and usefulness in the IETF standardization process. As the relative numbering of the RFC (RFC 8200) and STD (STD86) suggests, there are many protocols that make their way through the IETF standards process to be published as RFCs, but are not Internet Standards. The Internet Standard designation means those implementing and deploying a protocol can be assured it has undergone even more technical review by the IETF community than the typical RFC, and has benefitted from experience gained through running code and real-world experience. This is definitely true in the case of IPv6.

[...] Moving these IPv6-related specifications to full Internet Standards matches the increasing level of IPv6 use around the Internet. The IETF community has steadily worked to ensure that the Internet is ready for the time when IPv6 is the dominant Internet Protocol. Work in a variety of IPv6-related IETF working groups, such as 6man and 6ops, continues, striving to make the Internet work better.

On 02 July the IETF Executive Director announced that they have given up on IPv6 as being too much effort for their own services starting with email:

3. IPv6 for mail
As others have explained, we have chosen to switch, at this stage, to a large commercial mail sender with extensive reputation management rather than continue to send directly and as a consequence that will be IPv4 only. I don't plan to reiterate the multiple trade-offs considered in that decision, but I do want to stress that this was not a simple decision. I say "at this stage" because there are still discussions about whether or not this is the best long term strategy for mail delivery.

At a principled level, I agree that if the community says "we must have IPv6 for mail" then the LLC needs to deliver that, but at a practical level, given the cost and effort required, I would want that conveyed in a more formal way than a discussion on this list and us given a year plus to deliver it. However, and this is major however, piecemeal decisions like that are only going to make things much harder and it would be much better to have a broader decision about IPv6 in IETF services (more on that below).

For now at least then, we are going to continue with the plan to move to Amazon SES for mail sending. Once that is bedded down, that will be reviewed, but that will be several months away and the outcome may be to stick with it, unless there has been a community decision that changes that.

4. IPv6 for all services (or not)
If the community wants to develop guidance on the use of IPv6 for IETF services then that would be helpful. More generally, it would be so much better all round, if the implicit expectations that people have about IETF services, were properly surfaced, discussed, agreed and recorded. If that were done, then we would be very happy to include those in any RFP or service assessment.

Will people care if the organization who, for very many years, has been strongly advocating for everyone to switch to IPv6 has now given up on it? At a superficial level it doesn't look great if that decision was effectively made by AWS.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/teardown-tuesday-hb100-doppler-radar-module/

Join us as we crack open an HB100 Doppler radar module and delve into the mysteries of RF component design.

In this special edition of Teardown Tuesday, we crack open an HB100 Doppler radar module and delve into the mysteries of RF component design.

The HB100 Doppler Radar module costs about $5 from the usual online suspects, which is down at the "insanely cheap" end of the spectrum when you're talking about 10Ghz radio gear. Does it work? Surprisingly, yes. It needs some support components for most uses (like a post-amplifier for the "couple of millivolts" signal it outputs) but does its part of the job well enough.

[...] Frankly, I was rather shocked by what I found. I wasn't expecting much, but I got far less.

I don't know who designed this, but they were a master of the black art of Radio Frequency waveguide engineering. I am impressed. The PCB, itself, is a major component. Not only for the patch antennas but also several RF filters, the local oscillator, and the mixer are all largely made from peculiarly-shaped PCB tracks.

What would you build with it?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The music industry’s lawsuit sends the loudest message yet: High-quality training data is not free.

The generative AI boom is built on scale. The more training data, the more powerful the model. 

But there’s a problem. AI companies have pillaged the internet for training data, and many websites and data set owners have started restricting the ability to scrape their websites. We’ve also seen a backlash against the AI sector’s practice of indiscriminately scraping online data, in the form of users opting out of making their data available for training and lawsuits from artists, writers, and the New York Times, claiming that AI companies have taken their intellectual property without consent or compensation. 

Last week three major record labels—Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group—announced they were suing the AI music companies Suno and Udio over alleged copyright infringement. The music labels claim the companies made use of copyrighted music in their training data “at an almost unimaginable scale,” allowing the AI models to generate songs that “imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings.

But this moment also sets an interesting precedent for all of generative AI development. Thanks to the scarcity of high-quality data and the immense pressure and demand to build even bigger and better models, we’re in a rare moment where data owners actually have some leverage. The music industry’s lawsuit sends the loudest message yet: High-quality training data is not free. 

It will likely take a few years at least before we have legal clarity around copyright law, fair use, and AI training data. But the cases are already ushering in changes. OpenAI has been striking deals with news publishers such as Politico, the Atlantic, Time, the Financial Times, and others, and exchanging publishers’ news archives for money and citations. And YouTube announced in late June that it will offer licensing deals to top record labels in exchange for music for training. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A research team led by Director Jo Moon-Ho of the Center for Van der Waals Quantum Solids within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) has implemented a novel method to achieve epitaxial growth of 1D metallic materials with a width of less than 1 nm. The group applied this process to develop a new structure for 2D semiconductor logic circuits. Notably, they used the 1D metals as a gate electrode of the ultra-miniaturized transistor.

[...] Integrated devices based on two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors, which exhibit excellent properties even at the ultimate limit of material thickness down to the atomic scale, are a major focus of basic and applied research worldwide. However, realizing such ultra-miniaturized transistor devices that can control the electron movement within a few nanometers, let alone developing the manufacturing process for these integrated circuits, has been met with significant technical challenges.

The degree of integration in semiconductor devices is determined by the width and control efficiency of the gate electrode, which controls the flow of electrons in the transistor. In conventional semiconductor fabrication processes, reducing the gate length below a few nanometers is impossible due to the limitations of lithography resolution.

To solve this technical problem, the research team leveraged the fact that the mirror twin boundary (MTB) of molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂), a 2D semiconductor, is a 1D metal with a width of only 0.4 nm. They used this as a gate electrode to overcome the limitations of the lithography process.

In this study, the 1D MTB metallic phase was achieved by controlling the crystal structure of the existing 2D semiconductor at the atomic level, transforming it into a 1D MTB. This represents a significant breakthrough not only for next-generation semiconductor technology but also for basic materials science, as it demonstrates the large-area synthesis of new material phases through artificial control of crystal structures.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

By European Southern Observatory (ESO) July 3, 2024

Currently under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert, the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ESO’s ELT) is one step closer to completion. German company SCHOTT has successfully delivered the blank for the last of the 949 segments commissioned for the telescope’s primary mirror (M1). With a diameter of more than 39 meters, M1 will be by far the largest mirror ever made for a telescope.

Too large to be made from a single piece of glass, M1 will consist of 798 hexagonal segments, each about five centimeters thick and 1.5 meters across, working together to collect tens of millions of times as much light as the human eye. An additional 133 segments have been produced to facilitate the maintenance and recoating of the segments once the telescope is operational. ESO has also procured 18 spare segments, bringing the total number to 949.

The primary mirror of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), known as M1, will be by far the largest mirror ever made for a telescope. With a diameter of more than 39 meters, M1 is too large to be made from a single piece of glass and will instead consist of 798 hexagonal segments, each about five centimeters thick and 1.5 meters across, working together to collect tens of millions of times as much light as the human eye. An additional 133 segments have been produced to facilitate the maintenance and recoating of the segments once the telescope is operational. ESO has also procured 18 spare segments, bringing the total number to 949. Now, German company SCHOTT has successfully cast the blank for the last of the 949 segments, seen in this photo. The M1 blanks, shaped pieces of material that are later polished to become the mirror segments, are made from ZERODUR©, a low-expansion glass-ceramic material developed by SCHOTT and optimized for the extreme temperature ranges at the ELT’s site in the Atacama Desert. The 949th segment is seen in this image before being cut into its hexagonal shape and polished — steps that will be performed by French company Safran Reosc. Credit: SCHOTT

The M1 blanks, shaped pieces of material that are later polished to become the mirror segments, are made from ZERODUR®, a low-expansion glass-ceramic material developed by SCHOTT and optimized for the extreme temperature ranges at the ELT’s site in the Atacama Desert. This company has also manufactured the blanks of three other ELT mirrors — M2, M3, and M4 — at their facilities in Mainz, Germany.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

On the day before Christmas last year, a Falcon 9 rocket launched from California and put two spy satellites into low-Earth orbit for the armed forces of Germany, which are collectively called the Bundeswehr.

Initially, the mission appeared successful. The German satellite manufacturer, OHB, declared that the two satellites were "safely in orbit." The addition of the two SARah satellites completed a next-generation constellation of three reconnaissance satellites, the company said.

However, six months later, the two satellites have yet to become operational. According to the German publication Der Spiegel, the antennas on the satellites cannot be unfolded. Engineers with OHB have tried to resolve the issue by resetting the flight software, performing maneuvers to vibrate or shake the antennas loose, and more to no avail.

As a result, last week, German lawmakers were informed that the two new satellites will probably not go into operation as planned.

The three-satellite constellation known as SARah—the SAR is a reference to the synthetic aperture radar capability of the satellites—was ordered in 2013 at a cost of $800 million. The first of the three satellites, SARah 1, launched in June 2022 on a Falcon 9 rocket. This satellite was built by Airbus in southern Germany, and it has since gone into operation without any problems.

[...] This new constellation was intended to replace an aging fleet of similar, though less capable, satellites known as  SAR-Lupe. This five-satellite constellation launched nearly two decades ago.

According to the Der Spiegel report, the Bundeswehr says the two SARah satellites built by OHB remain the property of the German company and would only be turned over to the military once they were operational. As a result, the military says OHB will be responsible for building two replacement satellites.

[...] the German publication says that its sources indicated OHB did not fully test the functionality and deployment of the satellite antennas on the ground. This could not be confirmed.

This setback comes as OHB is attempting to complete a deal to go private—the investment firm KKR is planning to acquire the German space company. OHB officials said they initiated the effort to go private late last year because public markets had "structurally undervalued" the company.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Austin-based semiconductor company InspireSemi announced that it has tapped out its first Thunderbird "supercomputer-on-a-chip" comprising 1,536 64-bit superscalar RISC-V CPU cores. Four chips can be installed on a single accelerator card, in a form factor similar to a GPU. This configuration brings the total number of cores per card to 6,144, with the potential to scale to multi-processors in a single cluster connected using high-speed serial interconnect.

[...] Thunderbird utilizes standard CPU programming models and compiles without creating workloads on custom platforms like Nvidia's CUDA or AMD's ROCm. This means existing HPC workloads running on CPUs should have little to no custom code to run in Thunderbird. Also, the product is adaptable to existing server infrastructure as it's a PCI add-on card, allowing InspireSemi to reach more customers who do not have the funds to build out new infrastructure and facilities.

According to InspireSemi, the processor's open-source design and agnostic software allows them to target many industries: "Thunderbird accelerates many critical applications in important industries that other approaches do not, including life sciences, genomics, medical devices, climate change research, and applications that require deep simulation and modeling" said the company's founder and CTO Andy Gray.

[...] The speed at which companies are utilizing open-source solutions is remarkable. The Unified Acceleration Foundation's (UXL) mission is to develop universal standards for vendor-agnostic hardware and software, with Intel being one of the main contributors through its oneAPI framework.

If open-source initiatives for building a more open platform continue to gain momentum, then companies like InspireSemi may have a bright future.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Nineteen years and a whole bunch of controversy later, Boeing has decided to reacquire Spirit AeroSystems, maker of parts including the door plug included in select Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft. 

Spirit, which manufactures plane parts like fuselages, wings, and other components for both Boeing and Airbus, is being reacquired for $4.7 billion, with a total transaction value of $8.3 billion once Spirit's debt is added to the mix. Spirit was originally spun off from Boeing in 2005 for what Spirit spokesperson Joe Buccino confirmed was a cost-saving measure. 

"By reintegrating Spirit, we can fully align our commercial production systems, including our Safety and Quality Management Systems, and our workforce to the same priorities, incentives and outcomes – centered on safety and quality," outgoing Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun said of the deal.

[...] Boeing has been having quality control issues for several years, some of which have been allegedly linked to issues at Spirit.

Spirit was also hit by the 2018 and 2019 fatal crashes of a pair of Boeing 737 Max aircraft. The company was manufacturing the aircraft at the time and was heavily affected by the nearly two-year grounding of the aircraft after the crashes, which have largely been blamed on faulty software.

The DoJ is reportedly seeking a guilty plea from Boeing on criminal charges related to those two Max crashes that killed 346 people and, if it doesn't get it, intends to take the company to trial.

[...] That plea – or a conviction in court – could have serious implications for Boeing's future. Several agencies the company does business with, including the DoD and NASA, have rules in place barring them from signing contracts with companies convicted of a felony.

A number of whistleblowers – employees at both Boeing and Spirit – have come forward in the years since the crashes, and the rate of damning reports only increased after the door plug blowout.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/shopping-app-temu-is-dangerous-malware-spying-on-your-texts-lawsuit-claims/

Temu—the Chinese shopping app that has rapidly grown so popular in the US that even Amazon is reportedly trying to copy it—is "dangerous malware" that's secretly monetizing a broad swath of unauthorized user data, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Griffin cited research and media reports exposing Temu's allegedly nefarious design, which "purposely" allows Temu to "gain unrestricted access to a user's phone operating system, including, but not limited to, a user's camera, specific location, contacts, text messages, documents, and other applications."

"Temu is designed to make this expansive access undetected, even by sophisticated users," Griffin's complaint said. "Once installed, Temu can recompile itself and change properties, including overriding the data privacy settings users believe they have in place."
[...]
The company that owns Temu, PDD Holdings, was founded in 2015 by a former Google employee, Colin Huang. It was originally based in China, but after security concerns were raised, the company relocated its "principal executive offices" to Ireland, Griffin's complaint said. This, Griffin suggested, was intended to distance the company from debate over national security risks posed by China, but because the majority of its business operations remain in China, risks allegedly remain.
[...]
Last year, Temu was the most downloaded app in the US, Griffin's complaint noted, while most users had no way of knowing that the app was allegedly collecting "a shocking amount of sensitive user data" that was "beyond what is necessary for an online shopping app."

According to the complaint, Temu is allegedly obscuring its unauthorized access to data through misleading terms of use and privacy policies that do not alert users to the full scope of data that the app can potentially collect. That includes not telling users about tracking granular locations for no defined purpose and collecting "even biometric information such as users' fingerprints."