SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

As soon as this week, NASA officials will make perhaps the agency's most consequential safety decision in human spaceflight in 21 years.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are nearly 10 weeks into a test flight that was originally set to last a little more than one week. The two retired US Navy test pilots were the first people to fly into orbit on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft when it launched on June 5. Now, NASA officials aren't sure Starliner is safe enough to bring the astronauts home.

Three of the managers at the center of the pending decision, Ken Bowersox and Steve Stich from NASA and Boeing's LeRoy Cain, either had key roles in the ill-fated final flight of Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003 or felt the consequences of the accident.

At that time, officials misjudged the risk. Seven astronauts died, and the Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed as it reentered the atmosphere over Texas. Bowersox, Stich, and Cain weren't the people making the call on the health of Columbia's heat shield in 2003, but they had front-row seats to the consequences.

Bowersox was an astronaut on the International Space Station when NASA lost Columbia. He and his crewmates were waiting to hitch a ride home on the next Space Shuttle mission, which was delayed two-and-a-half years in the wake of the Columbia accident. Instead, Bowersox's crew came back to Earth later that year on a Russian Soyuz capsule. After retiring from the astronaut corps, Bowersox worked at SpaceX and is now the head of NASA's spaceflight operations directorate.

Stich and Cain were NASA flight directors in 2003, and they remain well-respected in human spaceflight circles. Stich is now the manager of NASA's commercial crew program, and Cain is now a Boeing employee and chair of the company's Starliner mission director. For the ongoing Starliner mission, Bowersox, Stich, and Cain are in the decision-making chain.

All three joined NASA in the late 1980s, soon after the Challenger accident. They have seen NASA attempt to reshape its safety culture after both of NASA's fatal Space Shuttle tragedies. After Challenger, NASA's astronaut office had a more central role in safety decisions, and the agency made efforts to listen to dissent from engineers. Still, human flaws are inescapable, and NASA's culture was unable to alleviate them during Columbia's last flight in 2003.

[...] "I have wondered if some in management roles today that were here when we lost Challenger and Columbia remember that in both of those tragedies, there were those that were not comfortable proceeding," Milt Heflin, a retired NASA flight director who spent 47 years at the agency, wrote in an email to Ars. "Today, those memories are still around."

"I suspect Stich and Cain are paying attention to the right stuff," Heflin wrote.

The question facing NASA's leadership today? Should the two astronauts return to Earth from the International Space Station in Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, with its history of thruster failures and helium leaks, or should they come home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule?

Under normal conditions, the first option is the choice everyone at NASA would like to make. It would be least disruptive to operations at the space station and would potentially maintain a clearer future for Boeing's Starliner program, which NASA would like to become operational for regular crew rotation flights to the station.

But some people at NASA aren't convinced this is the right call. Engineers still don't fully understand why five of the Starliner spacecraft's thrusters overheated and lost power as the capsule approached the space station for docking in June. Four of these five control jets are now back in action with near-normal performance, but managers would like to be sure the same thrusters—and maybe more—won't fail again as Starliner departs the station and heads for reentry.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/08/mdma-for-ptsd-three-studies-retracted-on-heels-of-fda-rejection/

A scientific journal has retracted three studies underpinning the clinical development of MDMA—aka ecstasy—as a psychedelic treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. The move came just a day after news broke that the Food and Drug Administration rejected the treatment, despite positive results reported from two Phase III clinical trials.

On Friday, the company developing the therapy, Lykos Therapeutics, announced that it had received a rejection letter from the FDA. Lykos said the letter echoed the numerous concerns raised previously by the agency and its expert advisory committee, which, in June, voted overwhelmingly against approving the therapy. The FDA and its advisers identified flaws in the design of the clinical trials, missing data, and a variety of biases in people involved with the trials, including an alleged cult-like support of psychedelics. Lykos is a commercial spinoff of the psychedelic advocacy nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).

FDA advisers also noted the public allegations of a sexual assault of a trial participant during a Phase II trial by an unlicensed therapist providing the MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Algorithmic collusion appears to be spreading to more and more industries. And existing laws may not be equipped to stop it:

If you rent your home, there's a good chance your landlord uses RealPage to set your monthly payment. The company describes itself as merely helping landlords set the most profitable price. But a series of lawsuits says it's something else: an AI-enabled price-fixing conspiracy.

The classic image of price-fixing involves the executives of rival companies gathering behind closed doors and secretly agreeing to charge the same inflated price for whatever they're selling. This type of collusion is one of the gravest sins you can commit against a free-market economy; the late Justice Antonin Scalia once called price-fixing the "supreme evil" of antitrust law. Agreeing to fix prices is punishable with up to 10 years in prison and a $100 million fine.

But, as the RealPage example suggests, technology may offer a workaround. Instead of getting together with your rivals and agreeing not to compete on price, you can all independently rely on a third party to set your prices for you. Property owners feed RealPage's "property management software" their data, including unit prices and vacancy rates, and the algorithm—which also knows what competitors are charging—spits out a rent recommendation. If enough landlords use it, the result could look the same as a traditional price-fixing cartel: lockstep price increases instead of price competition, no secret handshake or clandestine meeting needed.

Without price competition, businesses lose their incentive to innovate and lower costs, and consumers get stuck with high prices and no alternatives. Algorithmic price-fixing appears to be spreading to more and more industries. And existing laws may not be equipped to stop it.

In 2017, then–Federal Trade Commission Chair Maureen Ohlhausen gave a speech to antitrust lawyers warning about the rise of algorithmic collusion. "Is it okay for a guy named Bob to collect confidential price strategy information from all the participants in a market and then tell everybody how they should price?" she asked. "If it isn't okay for a guy named Bob to do it, then it probably isn't okay for an algorithm to do it either."

[...] According to the lawsuits, RealPage's clients act more like collaborators than competitors. Landlords hand over highly confidential information to RealPage, and many of them recruit their rivals to use the service. "Those kinds of behaviors raise a big red flag," Maurice Stucke, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and a former antitrust attorney at the Department of Justice, told me. When companies are operating in a highly competitive market, he said, they typically go to great lengths to protect any sensitive information that could give their rivals an edge.

Submitted on behalf of mrpg:

https://www.wired.com/story/usps-scam-text-smishing-triad/

The flood of text messages started arriving early this year. They carried a similar thrust: The United States Postal Service is trying to deliver a parcel but needs more details, including your credit card number. All the messages pointed to websites where the information could be entered.

Like thousands of others, security researcher Grant Smith got a USPS package message. Many of his friends had received similar texts. A couple of days earlier, he says, his wife called him and said she'd inadvertently entered her credit card details. With little going on after the holidays, Smith began a mission: Hunt down the scammers.

Over the course of a few weeks, Smith tracked down the Chinese-language group behind the mass-smishing campaign, hacked into their systems, collected evidence of their activities, and started a months-long process of gathering victim data and handing it to USPS investigators and a US bank, allowing people's cards to be protected from fraudulent activity.

In total, people entered 438,669 unique credit cards into 1,133 domains used by the scammers, says Smith, a red team engineer and the founder of offensive cybersecurity firm Phantom Security. Many people entered multiple cards each, he says. More than 50,000 email addresses were logged, including hundreds of university email addresses and 20 military or government email domains. The victims were spread across the United States—California, the state with the most, had 141,000 entries—with more than 1.2 million pieces of information being entered in total.

[...] Chasing down the group didn't take long. Smith started investigating the smishing text message he received by the dodgy domain and intercepting traffic from the website. A path traversal vulnerability, coupled with a SQL injection, he says, allowed him to grab files from the website's server and read data from the database being used.

upstart writes:

Elusive temporary star described in historical documents recreated using new computer model, shows it may have recently started generating stellar winds:

For the first time, a mysterious remnant from a rare type of supernova recorded in 1181 has been explained. Two white dwarf stars collided, creating a temporary "guest star," now labeled supernova (SN) 1181, which was recorded in historical documents in Japan and elsewhere in Asia. However, after the star dimmed, its location and structure remained a mystery until a team pinpointed its location in 2021.

Now, through computer modeling and observational analysis, researchers have recreated the structure of the remnant white dwarf, a rare occurrence, explaining its double shock formation. They also discovered that high-speed stellar winds may have started blowing from its surface within just the past 20-30 years. This finding improves our understanding of the diversity of supernova explosions, and highlights the benefits of interdisciplinary research, combining history with modern astronomy to enable new discoveries about our galaxy.

[...] The remnant of this guest star, labeled supernova remnant (SNR) 1181, was found to have been created when two extremely dense, Earth-sized stars, called white dwarfs, collided. This created a rare type of supernova, called a Type Iax supernova, which left behind a single, bright and fast-rotating white dwarf. Aided by observations on its position noted in the historical document, modern astrophysicists finally pinpointed its location in 2021 in a nebula towards the constellation Cassiopeia.

Due to its rare nature and location within our galaxy, SNR 1181 has been the subject of much observational research. This suggested that SNR 1181 is made up of two shock regions, an outer region and an inner one. In this new study, the research group analyzed the latest X-ray data to construct a theoretical computer model to explain these observations, and which has recreated the previously unexplained structure of this supernova remnant.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A multi-decade study led by researchers from the University of Sydney has unveiled concerning trends in international trade that are exacerbating inequalities between the Global North rich countries and Global South developing countries.

The research identifies both positive and negative trends driven by international trade but does highlight the role that high-income countries play in driving polarizing trends, undermining progress towards reaching the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

[...] As the world approaches the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the research underlines the urgent need for countries to recognize their influence beyond national borders.

The research lead for the study is Associate Professor Arunima Malik from the Center for Integrated Sustainability Analysis in the Faculty of Science, and Discipline of Accounting, Governance and Regulation in the Business School.

She said, "Sustainable Development Goals are nationally focused and therefore tend not to take international effects into account. This misses the fact that in today's globalized world, consumption in one region can significantly affect the well-being of people in countries far away."

The study takes a global approach to supply chains and is the first to assess the trends over an extended period of the global environmental and social impacts from international trade.

The findings reveal that high-income countries often outsource environmentally and socially detrimental production to low-income nations, resulting in the shifting of burdens that disproportionately affects developing regions.

Co-author Professor Manfred Lenzen, Professor of Sustainability Research at the Center for Integrated Sustainability Analysis, said, "Our findings indicate the Global North's outsourcing practices are contributing to a widening divide between countries that benefit from trade and those that bear the brunt of its adverse effects."

This dynamic not only perpetuates economic disparities, but also exacerbates social and environmental challenges in the Global South.

owl writes:

https://apnews.com/article/consumer-protection-ftc-fcc-biden-250f6eece6e2665535019128e8fa38da

In the name of consumer protection, a slew of U.S. federal agencies are working to make it easier for Americans to click the unsubscribe button for unwanted memberships and recurring payment services.

A broad new government initiative, dubbed "Time Is Money," includes a rollout of new regulations and the promise of more for industries spanning from healthcare and fitness memberships to media subscriptions.

"The administration is cracking down on all the ways that companies, through paperwork, hold times and general aggravation waste people's money and waste people's time and really hold onto their money," Neera Tanden, White House domestic policy adviser, told reporters Friday in advance of the announcement.

"Essentially in all of these practices, companies are delaying services to you or really trying to make it so difficult for you to cancel the service that they get to hold onto your money for longer and longer," Tanden said. "These seemingly small inconveniences don't happen by accident — they have huge financial consequences."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In separate statements, ASUS and MSI announced their plans to deliver the new microcode for 13th and 14th Gen Raptor Lake Core family of CPUs over the course of August.

The updated CPU microcode, which should be finalized in the coming days, is supposed to stop Intel's wobbly desktop microprocessors from crashing at normal clock speeds (an "instability" as the x86 giant puts it) to frying themselves and causing permanent damage if not complete failure.

Apparently, the original microcode for Raptor Lake processors applied too much voltage to chips. While increasing voltage can make it possible to hit higher clock speeds with ironclad stability, too much voltage can be dangerous and degrade the silicon.

Although microcode updates are developed by Intel, they have to be distributed via motherboard BIOSes developed by individual motherboard vendors, including DIY brands like ASUS and MSI, and also OEMs. When it comes to microcode patches, Intel (and its rival AMD) can't guarantee when users will receive it or if all users will even get it at all, since it is up to individual motherboard makers to issue new BIOS versions.

That's not ideal for both Chipzilla and owners of Raptor Lake CPUs, as the longer it takes for the microcode to disseminate, the more opportunities there are for more chips to fail, providing more fuel for potential class action lawsuits.

However, at least ASUS and MSI seem to be working fast on updating their motherboards, with both saying that they'll start distributing BIOSes with the new microcode next week. Intel said the microcode itself wouldn't be done until the middle of the month.

[...] "The two tech companies have yet to update any 600 series boards, however. For its part, Gigabyte says it expects all of its motherboards to get updated by the second week of September at the latest, a representative toldThe Register.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Engineers on NASA's NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission commanded the spacecraft to turn its transmitter off for the last time Thursday. This concludes more than 10 years of its planetary defense mission to search for asteroids and comets, including those that could pose a threat to Earth.

[...] NASA ended the mission because NEOWISE will soon drop too low in its orbit around Earth to provide usable science data. An uptick in solar activity is heating the upper atmosphere, causing it to expand and create drag on the spacecraft, which does not have a propulsion system to keep it in orbit. Now decommissioned, NEOWISE is expected to safely burn up in our planet's atmosphere in late 2024.

During its operational lifetime, the infrared survey telescope exceeded scientific objectives for not one but two missions, starting with the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission. Managed by JPL, WISE launched in December 2009 with a seven-month mission to scan the entire infrared sky.

By July 2010, WISE had accomplished this with far greater sensitivity than previous surveys. A few months later, the telescope ran out of the coolant that kept heat produced by the spacecraft from interfering with its infrared observations. (Invisible to the human eye, infrared wavelengths are associated with heat.)

NASA extended the mission under the name NEOWISE until February 2011 to complete a survey of the main belt asteroids, at which point the spacecraft was put into hibernation.

Analysis of this data showed that although the lack of coolant meant the space telescope could no longer observe the faintest infrared objects in the universe, it could still make precise observations of asteroids and comets that generate a strong infrared signal from being heated by the sun as they travel past our planet.

NASA brought the telescope out of hibernation in 2013 under the Near-Earth Object Observations Program, a precursor for the agency's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, to continue the NEOWISE survey of asteroids and comets in the pursuit of planetary defense.

[...] "The NEOWISE mission has provided a unique, long-duration data set of the infrared sky that will be used by scientists for decades to come," said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for both NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor at the University of California, Los Angeles. "But its additional legacy is that it has helped lay the groundwork for NASA's next planetary defense infrared space telescope."

Original Submission

Submitted on behalf of mrpg:

The company has revealed details of AI model safety testing—including concerns about its new anthropomorphic interface:

In late July, OpenAI began rolling out an eerily humanlike voice interface for ChatGPT. In a safety analysis released today, the company acknowledges that this anthropomorphic voice may lure some users into becoming emotionally attached to their chatbot.

The warnings are included in a "system card" for GPT-4o, a technical document that lays out what the company believes are the risks associated with the model, plus details surrounding safety testing and the mitigation efforts the company's taking to reduce potential risk.

OpenAI has faced scrutiny in recent months after a number of employees working on AI's long-term risks quit the company. Some subsequently accused OpenAI of taking unnecessary chances and muzzling dissenters in its race to commercialize AI. Revealing more details of OpenAI's safety regime may help mitigate the criticism and reassure the public that the company takes the issue seriously.

The risks explored in the new system card are wide-ranging, and include the potential for GPT-4o to amplify societal biases, spread disinformation, and aid in the development of chemical or biological weapons. It also discloses details of testing designed to ensure that AI models won't try to break free of their controls, deceive people, or scheme catastrophic plans.

[...] Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, an applied policy researcher at Hugging Face, a company that hosts AI tools, notes that OpenAI's system card for GPT-4o does not include extensive details on the model's training data or who owns that data. "The question of consent in creating such a large dataset spanning multiple modalities, including text, image, and speech, needs to be addressed," Kaffee says.

fliptop writes:

Days after Georgia Democrats warned that the state's new online portal for canceling voter registrations could be abused, officials have confirmed misuse attempts — including efforts to cancel the registrations of prominent Republicans:

On Friday (August 2), four days after Georgia Democrats began warning that bad actors could abuse the state's new online portal for canceling voter registrations, the Secretary of State's Office acknowledged to ProPublica that it had identified multiple such attempts — including unsuccessful efforts to cancel the registrations of two prominent Republicans, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

The confirmation of the attempts to misuse the portal follows separate discoveries by The Associated Press and The Current that the portal suffered at least two security glitches that briefly exposed voters' dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and their full driver's license numbers — the exact information needed to cancel others' voter registrations.

[...] The official X account for Georgia Senate Democrats posted that the voter registration cancellation portal "empowers conspiracy theorists and other bad actors to deny Georgians the right to vote." In response, one commenter replied with the birthdays of Republican officials, including Greene and Raffensperger, noting: "​​Lots of people have their birthday in the public domain." One user posted, "Overwhelm them with cancelled well-known Republican's registrations!"

To start the cancellation process on the portal, all users need is a voter's name, date of birth and county of residence. To finalize the cancellation request, they also must provide the last four digits of the voter's Social Security number or their full driver's license number. There's also an option to fill out a form with that information and print and send it to the voter's county election office or the Georgia Secretary of State's Office. Hassinger said that election workers would not approve any paper request that lacked a Social Security number or driver's license number.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Related:

• GOP Candidate Improperly Purged 340,000 From Georgia Voter Rolls, Investigation Claims
• Georgia Defends Voting System Despite 243-Percent Turnout in One Precinct

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Just like Boeing, once upon a time, Intel was the darling of the engineering world. Both companies were the premier tech companies in their day, but those days are long gone now.

[...] Intel hasn't experienced such speculator public failures, but it is tripping over its own feet a lot lately. As everyone knows, Intel's 13th and 14th Gen processors, particularly the Raptor Lake series, have been failing… a lot.

[...] Today, adding insult to injury, these problems appear most often in its top-of-the-line Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K CPUs. When you pay north of $500 or £400 for a single processor, you're not likely to take it kindly when the video flips out. Funny that.

[...] In addition, Intel has been struggling with yields on its new chip families. Now, Intel hopes to catch up with AMD and TSMC by 2026 with its next-generation 2nm CPUs. I hate to tell you this, Intel, but it's not like they'll be sitting around waiting for you.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger referred to this struggle as a “death march" back in 2022. I don't think I would have used that phrase, but it appears to be more apt than ever.

Numerous soon-to-be ex-Intel employees doubtlessly would agree with me. Recently, Intel announced it would soon be laying off 16,000 staffers. That's 15 percent of its workforce if you're playing the stock market.

The market wasn't impressed. Between the layoffs, missing its guidance numbers, and chopping back its dividend, Intel's share price is dropping like it's in a, well, death march.

Why is all this happening? I think it's the result of poor management decisions and underinvestment in critical manufacturing technologies. In particular, it was how Intel prioritized business strategies and financial performance over engineering excellence.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A groundbreaking study has revealed new insights into the Earth’s crust’s immediate behavior following earthquakes. Researchers have utilized sub-daily Global Positioning System (GPS) solutions to accurately measure the spatial and temporal evolution of early afterslip following the 2010 Mw 8.8 Maule earthquake. This innovative approach marks a significant advancement in seismic analysis, offering a more precise and rapid depiction of ground deformations, which is essential for assessing seismic hazards and understanding fault line activities.

The aftermath of an earthquake is marked by intricate postseismic adjustments, particularly the elusive early afterslip. Daily seismic monitoring has struggled to capture the rapid and complex ground movements occurring in the critical hours post-quake. The intricacies of these initial activities and their profound implications for seismic hazard assessment highlight an urgent need for more refined and immediate monitoring techniques.

Wuhan University researchers, in a paper published on July 29, 2024, in Satellite Navigation, unveil their meticulous examination of the Maule earthquake’s early afterslip. Utilizing sub-daily GPS solutions, the study delivers a comprehensive narrative of the ground surface deformations occurring in the pivotal hours following the earthquake.

Reference: “Rapid early afterslip characteristics of the 2010 moment magnitude (Mw) 8.8 Maule earthquake determined with sub-daily GPS solutions” by Kai Liu, Yangmao Wen, Jing Zeng, Jianghui Geng, Zhao Li and Caijun Xu, 29 July 2024, Satellite Navigation.
  DOI: 10.1186/s43020-024-00145-6

Original Submission

upstart writes:

'Sinkclose' Flaw in Hundreds of Millions of AMD Chips Allows Deep, Virtually Unfixable Infections:

Security flaws in your computer's firmware, the deep-seated code that loads first when you turn the machine on and controls even how its operating system boots up, have long been a target for hackers looking for a stealthy foothold. But only rarely does that kind of vulnerability appear not in the firmware of any particular computer maker, but in the chips found across hundreds of millions of PCs and servers. Now security researchers have found one such flaw that has persisted in AMD processors for decades, and that would allow malware to burrow deep enough into a computer's memory that, in many cases, it may be easier to discard a machine than to disinfect it.

At the Defcon hacker conference tomorrow, Enrique Nissim and Krzysztof Okupski, researchers from the security firm IOActive, plan to present a vulnerability in AMD chips they're calling Sinkclose. The flaw would allow hackers to run their own code in one of the most privileged modes of an AMD processor, known as System Management Mode, designed to be reserved only for a specific, protected portion of its firmware. IOActive's researchers warn that it affects virtually all AMD chips dating back to 2006, or possibly even earlier.

Nissim and Okupski note that exploiting the bug would require hackers to already have obtained relatively deep access to an AMD-based PC or server, but that the Sinkclose flaw would then allow them to plant their malicious code far deeper still. In fact, for any machine with one of the vulnerable AMD chips, the IOActive researchers warn that an attacker could infect the computer with malware known as a "bootkit" that evades antivirus tools and is potentially invisible to the operating system, while offering a hacker full access to tamper with the machine and surveil its activity. For systems with certain faulty configurations in how a computer maker implemented AMD's security feature known as Platform Secure Boot—which the researchers warn encompasses the large majority of the systems they tested—a malware infection installed via Sinkclose could be harder yet to detect or remediate, they say, surviving even a reinstallation of the operating system.

"Imagine nation-state hackers or whoever wants to persist on your system. Even if you wipe your drive clean, it's still going to be there," says Okupski. "It's going to be nearly undetectable and nearly unpatchable." Only opening a computer's case, physically connecting directly to a certain portion of its memory chips with a hardware-based programming tool known as SPI Flash programmer and meticulously scouring the memory would allow the malware to be removed, Okupski says.

See also:

• x.com

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

It is hoped a new "toolkit" will help people separate truth from lies and unsubstantiated opinion, and prevent the spread of misinformation.

The checklist, published in the journal Experimental Physiology, was written by scientists from the Universities of Portsmouth and Edinburgh.

They warn the "truth is under attack" and have highlighted the urgent need for critical thinking and scientific literacy to combat the rise of unfounded, misleading and often damaging claims which the experts say are amplified by social media.

From political debates to claims for new products or health-enhancing interventions, claims are frequently presented as "scientific findings" supported by "expert" opinions.

[...] "At the very least, the next time you hear phrases like 'they say this is great' or 'this is scientifically proven' start by asking 'who are they?' and 'which scientists, using which methods?' Be cautious and questioning; snake oil and its vendors still exist, and they come in many guises."

Provided by University of Portsmouth

More information: G. Drummond et al, How to spot the truth, Experimental Physiology (2024). DOI: 10.1113/EP092160

Original Submission