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c0lo writes:

Mica Nguyen Worthy Submits First-of-its-Kind Claim to NASA Seeking Recovery From Damages Sustained from Space Debris

A precedent-setting case that could set the standard for the future of space debris claims in both the public and private sectors

On May 22, 2024, Mica Nguyen Worthy submitted a claim to NASA to recover for her clients' damages resulting from a space debris incident involving property owner, Alejandro Otero and his family.

On March 8, 2024, a piece of space debris hit the family home of Alejandro Otero, while his son Daniel was present and left a sizable hole from the roof through the sub-flooring. The space debris was confirmed by NASA to be from its flight support equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet.

The Oteros retained Worthy to navigate the insurance and legal process and to make a formal claim against NASA. The damages for the Otero family members include non-insured Property Damage loss, Business Interruption damages, Emotional/Mental anguish damages, and the costs for assistance from third parties required in the process. Additionally, the Oteros' homeowner's insurance carrier submitted a simultaneous claim for the damages to the property that it had subrogated.

...
Worthy, a Partner in the Charlotte office of Cranfill Sumner LLP and Chair of the firm's Aviation & Aerospace Practice Group, worked with her litigation team with experience in handling claims to prepare the Federal Torts Claim Act ("FTCA") submission with proofs of loss to NASA to fully articulate a negligence claim on behalf of her clients. However, Worthy also implored NASA to consider that persons in the U.S. should not have to make a claim under a negligence legal theory when the U.S. government has committed to being "absolutely liable" under international treaty law for damage to persons or property on the surface of the Earth caused by its space objects.

"If the incident had happened overseas, and someone in another country were damaged by the same space debris as in the Oteros' case, the U.S. would have been absolutely liable to pay for those damages under the Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects also known as the 'Space Liability Convention." We have asked NASA not to apply a different standard towards U.S. citizens or residents, but instead to take care of the Oteros and make them whole," she said. "Here, the U.S. government, through NASA, has an opportunity to set the standard or 'set a precedent' as to what responsible, safe, and sustainable space operations ought to look like. If NASA were to take the position that the Oteros' claims should be paid in full, it would send a strong signal to both other governments and private industries that such victims should be compensated regardless of fault."

USSR paid $3M (from a total of $6M operation cost) for spreading nuclear space litter over Canada in 1997

A $400 littering ticket to NASA was issued in 1979 by the Esperance council (Western Australia) and was paid in full 30 years later by crowdfunding

Other space debris incidents, some resulting in injuries.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Cloudflare has released a new free tool that prevents AI companies' bots from scraping its clients' websites for content to train large language models. The cloud service provider is making this tool available to its entire customer base, including those on free plans. "This feature will automatically be updated over time as we see new fingerprints of offending bots we identify as widely scraping the web for model training," the company said.

In a blog post announcing this update, Cloudflare's team also shared some data about how its clients are responding to the boom of bots that scrape content to train generative AI models. According to the company's internal data, 85.2 percent of customers have chosen to block even the AI bots that properly identify themselves from accessing their sites.

[...] It's proving very difficult to fully and consistently block AI bots from accessing content. The arms race to build models faster has led to instances of companies skirting or outright breaking the existing rules around blocking scrapers. Perplexity AI was recently accused of scraping websites without the required permissions. But having a backend company at the scale of Cloudflare getting serious about trying to put the kibosh on this behavior could lead to some results.

"We fear that some AI companies intent on circumventing rules to access content will persistently adapt to evade bot detection," the company said. "We will continue to keep watch and add more bot blocks to our AI Scrapers and Crawlers rule and evolve our machine learning models to help keep the Internet a place where content creators can thrive and keep full control over which models their content is used to train or run inference on."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

China's government wants to develop a standard for brain-computer interfaces.

News of the effort emerged yesterday when the nation's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology posted a plan to establish a technical committee charged with doing the job.

An accompanying document explains that the committee will be asked to devise input and output interfaces, and research topics including brain information encoding and decoding, data communication, and data visualization.

Devising a format for brain data is also on the to-do list, as is a focus on acquiring data using electroencephalograms.

Researching and developing interfaces for applications in medicine, health, education, and entertainment is also on the agenda, accompanied by work on ethics and safety.

The committee's members are expected to be drawn from relevant research institutions and government departments.

Once their job is done, China's researchers in this field will be organized into clusters and all will be working to the standards the committee has helped develop.

That last goal makes this committee more than a bureaucratic thought bubble: by setting standards and insisting researchers use it, China can focus its efforts.

Perhaps it can also develop standards before other nations and bring them to international forums.

[...] Some of China's efforts to dominate standards processes and the bodies that drive them have flopped, but observers have also warned that standards bodies are susceptible to manipulation in ways that could see China have its domestic standards adopted.

In the field of brain-computer interfaces, China may be starting a little late: the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) already hosts a group dedicated to Neurotechnologies for Brain-Machine Interfacing and in 2020 published a roadmap [PDF] for standards development in the field.

And of course private outfits – most prominently Elon Musk's Neuralink – are already conducting brain-computer interface experiments. If such efforts take off, market presence could easily trump standards.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a 35-nation effort to create electricity from nuclear fusion, has torn up its project plans and pushed operations of its tokamak back by at least eight years.

Tokamaks are typically designed around a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber, inside of which gases are subjected to extreme heat and pressure and become a plasma. Strong magnets are used to keep that hot plasma away from the chamber's walls, and the heat is used to boil water into steam that turns turbines to make electricity.

ITER has built what it claims is the world's largest tokamak and hopes it will achieve a deuterium-tritium plasma – in which the fusion conditions are sustained mostly by internal fusion heating, rather than needing constant input of energy. The org aims to produce 500MW of fusion power from 50MW of input, as a demo that lights the way for commercial machines.

ITER director-general Pietro Barabaschi yesterday outlined [PDF] a new project baseline to replace the one in use since 2016. That older document foresaw "first plasma" in 2025 – but only as "a brief, low-energy machine test, with relatively minimal scientific value." A planned series of experiments would proceed until 2033.

The org has known since 2020 that it would not achieve first plasma in 2025, so these changes are not unexpected.

[...] By 2039, ITER wants its Deuterium-Tritium Operation Phase to start – four years later than first planned.

[...] An extra €5 billion ($5.4 billion) will be needed to realize this plan. ITER members are considering that requirement.

ITER's post announcing the new baseline notes that the org's "costs historically have been difficult to estimate precisely because the bulk of financial contributions are provided in-kind by ITER Members in the form of components, for most of which Member governments are not required to publish their actual costs."

So take that €5 billion figure with a hearty pinch of plasma.

Fusion experiments have shown the tech has great promise as a source of clean energy. Which is why governments are throwing money at it. To date, however, no experiment has come close to ITER's planned output – or even reliable operations – making Microsoft's deal to source energy from fusion by 2028 vastly optimistic.

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upstart writes:

Volunteers who lived in NASA's Mars simulation for over a year will finally emerge today:

After 378 days inside a mock Mars habitat, the four volunteers for NASA's yearlong simulation of a stay on the red planet are coming home. The crew — Kelly Haston, Anca Selariu, Ross Brockwell and Nathan Jones — is scheduled to exit the 3D-printed habitat in Houston this evening. You can watch the livestream of their return on NASA TV (below) starting at 5PM ET.

This marks the end of NASA's first Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) mission. There are plans already for two more one-year missions, one of which NASA recently accepted applications for.

The Mission 1 crew entered the 1700-square-foot habitat at the Johnson Space Center on June 25 of last year and has spent the months since conducting simulated Marswalks, growing vegetables and performing other tasks designed to support life and work in that environment, like habitat maintenance. No exact dates for the second CHAPEA mission have been set yet, but it's expected to begin in spring 2025.

The crew — Kelly Haston, Anca Selariu, Ross Brockwell and Nathan Jones — is scheduled to exit the 3D-printed habitat in Houston this evening. You can watch the livestream of their return on NASA TV (below) starting at 5PM ET.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

About a year ago, Sami Packard, an Accenture consultant living in the San Francisco area, hit a rough spot in her marriage when she and her husband couldn't agree on where to live. So she organized a two-day off-site retreat complete with a detailed agenda to work on the relationship, with Packard assuming the role of both attendee and facilitator.

The tools the couple used during the retreat were the standard corporate fare ranging from vision boards to bar charts to writing exercises.

When she returned, Packard documented their results in a Google Slides deck and published her story on Medium and her LinkedIn account.

Fast forward one year and Packard is convinced she is on to something. Since last year, she has run several offsites for other couples and has come to the conclusion that relationship work was something she wanted to pursue full time.

Packard has launched a company called Coupledom, which offers both DIY offsite retreat packages as well as consulting.

According to the San Francisco Standard, which recently chronicled her journey, Packard represents an emerging trend, Packard represents an emerging trend: tech tools and, more interestingly, venture capital funding aimed at optimizing relationships.

[...] If this is a new trend, though, it is a slow-forming one, littered with some failures along the way.

There is no online sign that the Dating Group VC is still in operation, for example. And these apps, which are trying to make a buck as they help people, also have to contend with the DIY crowd in this space, where such efforts can gain a huge following on social media. Earlier this year, for example, investor Benjamin Lang posted his marriage-management Notion template to X, where it received 4.6 million views and led to a New York Times story.

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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.

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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)

Original Submission

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.