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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The UN's Radio Regulations Board (RRB) has asked Russia to play nice with Europe and not interfere with satellites.

The RRB, a part of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the telecom agency for the United Nations, held its 96th meeting [PDF] last week to discuss a number of topics, including alleged satellite interference several European countries suspect is coming from Russia. France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Ukraine all said they had experienced some sort of interference in the last few months.

The disruption has resulted in taking down broadcasts and even TV hijacking in two cases, which involved children's TV shows in the Netherlands being replaced with Russian war videos.

Although Russia has denied any knowledge of the interference, telling the RRB it hasn't detected any whatsoever, the evidence is stacking up against the country. The interference has largely targeted channels with Ukrainian programming, and Sweden claims it only started seeing meddling after it joined NATO.

Perhaps most damning of all, two satellite operators traced the interference to three sites: Russia's capital city Moscow, the Kaliningrad exclave next to Poland and Lithuania, and Pavlovka, though it remains unclear which Pavlovka, as there are more than one located in Russia.

Calling the interference "extremely worrisome and unacceptable," the RRB has told Russia to stop messing with the satellites, give the agency info surrounding Russia's internal investigation of the interference, and search the areas that the satellite operators say the interference originates from.

However, the agency softened its stance by saying it wouldn't grant requests made by France, Sweden, and the Netherlands to pursue the matter with a formal investigation just yet.

In the meantime, the RRB has asked Russia and its alleged victims to "exercise the utmost goodwill and mutual assistance" and to hold a meeting to discuss the dispute. It's not clear how effective this will be as Russia doesn't exactly have a stellar diplomatic reputation.

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Runaway1956 writes:

https://www.advrider.com/survue-ai-powered-danger-detector-bicycle-tech-that-could-work-for-motorcyclists/

A radar system can indicate when another motorist is close to your vehicle, but what if it gave you more information—like, a warning of sketchy driving behaviors? A US-based startup is building such a system for bicyclists, but Survue's new technology might also have an application for motorcyclists.

Electro-safety systems are the latest add-on that motorcycle OEMs are pioneering, having reached the practical limits of power and braking. These days, the action is all in the world of adaptive cruise control systems, which are governed by radar sensors. These smart systems can keep you following another vehicle at a constant distance in traffic, and they can also warn you that someone is approaching quickly from behind.

Survue's technology takes this idea a step further. Rear-facing radar systems have been available for bicyclists for years, but they can't interpret the information they collect. Survue's system uses AI (or so they call it) to analyze the data taken in by its sensors, and then their on-bike gadgetry can inform the rider of an impending dangerous situation—a too-close pass or a rear-end collision—and it can also flash a brake light brightly, to alert a distracted driver of an impending crash.

Survue says it works this way:

Videos of collisions from behind and close passing vehicles are recorded using the predicted vehicle course rather than accelerometers. This reduces false positives and endless sifting of video data. Survue is the only taillight that automatically records close passing vehicles ... Cyclists receive alerts based upon approaching vehicle speed, direction, and vehicle type rather than just the speed.

Their assembly on the back of the bike has a brake light that flashes for the benefit of following motorists, as well as an onboard speaker that emits a tone to alert the rider of the situatuion. Their device also connects to an app which can give audio or visual cues, so the rider isn't startled.

Sifting through their Kickstarter campaign here, you can see how the technology is designed for bicyclists, but could definitely be adapted for motorcyclists. No doubt some of the big OEMs are already working on similar tech, and if not, once they see this they will be. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/survue/survue-the-smart-bike-light-for-safe-and-confident-rides/

So, AI again. Almost certainly overhyped - but - cyclists (whether bicycles or motorcycles) need all the help they can get in traffic. I mean, sure, I know there's a car behind me, but I can't spend all my time studying how that car is driven. An "AI" that is constantly analyzing the traffic flow could save my arse. OK, so maybe it doesn't save me, but at least it documents that the driver rear ended me. It should even record the license plate number, in states/provinces that have a front license plate.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

There's a new bill before federal parliament calling for housing to be considered a fundamental human right.

The bill, introduced by independent federal parliamentarians Kylea Tink and David Pocock, would require the government to create a 10-year National Housing and Homelessness Plan.

One part of the bill states housing should be considered a fundamental human right for all Australians. Here's how this would work.

Since its election in 2022, the Albanese government has had to fight political battles to pass its housing policies.

This includes the Housing Australia Future Fund: a $10 billion fund to provide an annual $500 million for social and affordable rental housing. It passed the parliament last year.

There's also the "Help to Buy" shared equity scheme. Under this scheme, 10,000 households a year would be eligible for a government equity contribution of up to 40% of the purchase price of a new home. It's yet to pass the parliament.

But many in the community continue to struggle with unaffordable rents, barriers to home ownership and rising rates of homelessness.

Housing and homelessness problems are complex because they crossover different areas of policy and different levels of government. There are many agencies that do housing policy.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The right to repair movement may be gaining traction, with several states passing laws that force companies to improve the repairability of their products, but a trio of letters the Federal Trade Commission just sent to firms that market and sell gaming PCs, graphics chips, motherboards, and other accessories show that resistance by manufacturers is as strong as ever.

The Federal Trade Commission staff has sent letters to ASRock, Zotac, and Gigabyte warning that their warranty practices may be violating consumers' right to repair products they have purchased. Namely, the commission singled out the use of stickers containing "warranty void if removed" or similar language as illegal. These are usually placed on products in such a way that makes it difficult for consumers to perform routine maintenance and repairs on their products, the FTC said.

"These warning letters put companies on notice that restricting consumers' right to repair violates the law," said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "The commission will continue our efforts to protect consumers' right to repair and independent dealers' right to compete."

[...] Illegal warranties are just the tip of the problem, consumer advocates say, as manufacturers try all sorts of tactics to control the repair process – and these tactics are working. Americans waste $40 billion each year from not being able to repair products, according to a report by the US PIRG, a public-interest research group. That comes to about $330 per household annually.

"It's getting harder for people to buy things that are repairable. The problem is getting worse, much worse," said Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association, a small lobbying group that advocates for independent repair shops.

One example is the use of components that are glued or soldered together.

"Ten years ago you could slide off the back of the phone, and pop out the battery," said Olivia Webb, spokesperson for iFixit, a parts retailer and online community dedicated to repair. "Now, they are adhered with screws, battery pull tabs, some of them are glued in. People don't want you to replace your battery – they want you to buy a new phone."

[...] "You're hitting a point where you cannot upgrade your technology anymore. And I think that is another way of forcing people to buy a new machine instead of upgrading an old machine," she said.

Proprietary screws are another example. Disassembling the iPhone 12 requires four different types of screwdrivers, according to Hugh Jeffreys, an advocate of the Right to Repair movement.

Manufacturers are also not shying away from engaging in outright illegal practices that the FTC has called out. For example, many companies still have warranties that are voided if anyone, except the company that made the product, has repaired it. A few years ago the FTC warned six companies against such void-warranty language. The recipients were eventually revealed to be ASUSTeK, HTC, Hyundai, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony Computer Entertainment.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Two slightly burnt, fat-covered sticks discovered inside an Australian cave are evidence of a healing ritual that was passed down unchanged by more than 500 generations of Indigenous people over the last 12,000 years, according to new research.

The wooden sticks, found poking out of tiny fireplaces, showed that the ritual documented in the 1880s had been shared via oral traditions since the end of the last ice age, a study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour said on Monday.

The discovery was made inside Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Victorian Alps in Australia's southeast, in a region long inhabited by the Gunaikurnai people.

[...] Carefully digging through the soil, the team found a small stick poking out—then they found another one. Both well-preserved sticks were made from the wood of casuarina trees.

Each one was found in a separate fireplace around the size of the palm of a hand—far too small to have been used for heat or cooking meat.

The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat.

One stick was 11,000 years old and the other 12,000 years old, radiocarbon dating found.

"They've been waiting here all this time for us to learn from them," said Gunaikurnai elder Russell Mullett, a co-author of the study and head of GLaWAC.

Mullett spent years trying to find out what they could have been used for, before discovering the accounts of Alfred Howitt, a 19th-century Australian anthropologist who studied Aboriginal culture.

Some of Howitt's notes had never been published, and Mullett said he spent a long time convincing a local museum to share them.

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.

Original Submission

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.

Original Submission

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)

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