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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://boingboing.net/2024/08/21/after-massive-public-outcry-disney-stops-attempt-to-kill-lawsuit-after-killing-restaurant-guest.html

See Previous Story: Disney Seeking Dismissal of Death Lawsuit Because Victim Was Disney+ Subscriber

AP reported yesterday that "Disney drops bid to have allergy-death lawsuit tossed because plaintiff signed up for Disney+."

I'm not a lawyer but the initial legal argument being made by Disney seems to me to be pure bad faith horseshit. This piece in New York Magazine looks at the lawsuit stemming from the allergic reaction death of a doctor named Amy Tangsuan at a Disney World Resort restaurant:

Tangsuan was allergic to dairy and nuts, and before she and her husband ordered, (they) asked a waiter whether any of the allergens were in her order... The waiter consulted with the chef, and then assured her that they could be made dairy- and nut-free.

About 45 minutes after Tangsuan ate, she went into an anaphylactic shock so severe her EpiPen was useless. She died soon after at a nearby hospital. In February, her husband filed a wrongful-death suit against the restaurant and Disney's theme-parks division, seeking money damages.

[...] Did they try this now abandoned tactic to save money? Of course. But it sounds like they're really doing it to save face — by moving cases to arbitration, it's permanently out of the public's view; however the case is settled, the general public will almost certainly be in the dark. PR problem of killing guests thus solved.

So they will not try that again until next time that they do ...

Original Submission

NASA Wants Clarity On Orion Heat Shield Issue Before Stacking Artemis II Rocket

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA would like to start stacking the Space Launch System rocket for the Artemis II mission—the first human flight around the Moon since 1972—sometime next month, but the agency's exploration chief says the milestone could be delayed as engineers continue studying the readiness of the Orion spacecraft's heat shield.

The heat shield, already installed at the base of the Orion spacecraft, will take the brunt of the heating when the capsule blazes through Earth's atmosphere at the end of the 10-day mission. On the Artemis I test flight in late 2022, NASA sent an Orion spacecraft to the Moon and back without a crew aboard. The only significant blemish on the test flight was a finding that charred chunks of the heat shield unexpectedly stripped away from the capsule during reentry as temperatures increased to nearly 5,000° Fahrenheit (2,760° Celsius).

The spacecraft safely splashed down, and if any astronauts had been aboard, they would have been fine. However, the inspections of the recovered spacecraft showed divots of heat shield material were missing. The heat shield material, called Avcoat, is designed to erode away in a controlled manner during reentry. Instead, fragments fell off the heat shield that left cavities resembling potholes.

NASA launched internal and independent investigations to look into the heat shield issue. Catherine Koerner, NASA's associate administrator for development of exploration systems, told Ars the inquiry remains open.

"We have not made any formal decisions on the forward path yet because we still are doing analysis," she said. "There are a lot of complications associated with the heat shield, not only with identifying a root cause, but also figuring out a path forward once we identify that root cause."

This is a complicated thermodynamic and aerodynamic problem, with engineers studying the combined effects of heating and air resistance as the Orion spacecraft dives deeper into the atmosphere. Victor Glover, the pilot of the Artemis II mission, told Ars earlier this year that ground testing and analyses can only go so far, and some of the dynamics may not be fully understood without more flight data.

Commander Reid Wiseman, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will join Glover on the Artemis II mission. They will fly around the far side of the Moon inside the Orion capsule after lifting off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. Artemis II will pave the way for future landing missions to deliver astronauts to the Moon's south pole.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday for August 2024 includes a fix for a security vulnerability in the Grub2 boot loader, which is used by many Linux operating systems. Tracked as CVE-2022-2601, this flaw, discovered in 2022, could lead to an out-of-bounds write with a potential bypass of Secure Boot protection.

The Grub2 boot loader provides compatibility with the Secure Boot technology on PCs running Linux systems. After installing the new patch, Windows applies a Secure Boot Advanced Targeting (SBAT) policy to block vulnerable Linux boot loaders that could compromise OS security.

Microsoft explained that the SBAT value would not be applied to dual-boot systems with both Windows and Linux on the boot drive, so the patch was expected not to impact these systems. However, many users with dual-boot configurations have reported that the CVE-2022-2601 update still rendered booting into a Linux OS impossible.

The issue appears to affect various Linux distributions, including popular ones such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Puppy Linux, and others. Affected systems typically display a "Security Policy Violation" error at boot, indicating a failed check on "shim SBAT data." Boot problems have been reported on both dual-boot systems and on Windows devices running Linux from an ISO image, USB drive, or optical media.

Microsoft's bulletin noted that only older Linux distros' ISOs were expected to experience boot issues following the CVE-2022-2601 patch. However, users with systems released in 2024 also seem to be affected. The only reliable way to restore a bootable state appears to be disabling Secure Boot entirely. Alternatively, users can follow the steps to remove the SBAT policy introduced by Microsoft this past week.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/microsoft-will-try-the-data-scraping-windows-recall-feature-again-in-october/

Microsoft will begin sending a revised version of its controversial Recall feature to Windows Insider PCs beginning in October, according to an update published today to the company's original blog post about the Recall controversy. The company didn't elaborate further on specific changes it's making to Recall beyond what it already announced in June.

For those unfamiliar, Recall is a Windows service that runs in the background on compatible PCs, continuously taking screenshots of user activity, scanning those screenshots with optical character recognition (OCR), and saving the OCR text and the screenshots to a giant searchable database on your PC. The goal, according to Microsoft, is to help users retrace their steps and dig up information about things they had used their PCs to find or do in the past.

The problem was that other users on the same PC, or attackers with physical or remote access to your PC, could easily access, view, and export those screenshots and the OCR database since none of the information was encrypted at rest or protected in any substantive way.

Microsoft had planned to launch Recall as one of the flagship features of its Copilot+ PC launch in July, along with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered Surface devices, but its rollout was bumped back and then paused entirely so that Recall could be reworked and then sent out to Windows Insiders for testing like most other Windows features are.

Among the changes Microsoft has said it will make: The database will be encrypted at rest and will require authentication (and periodic reauthentication) with Windows Hello before users will be allowed to access it. The feature will also be off by default, whereas the original plan was to turn it on by default and make users go into Settings to turn it off.

"Security continues to be our top priority and when Recall is available for Windows Insiders in October we will publish a blog with more details," reads today's update to Microsoft Windows and Devices Corporate Vice President Pavan Davuluri's blog post.

When the preview is released, Windows Insiders who want to test the Recall preview will need to do it on a PC that meets Microsoft's Copilot+ system requirements. Those include a processor with a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. The x86 builds of Windows for Intel and AMD processors don't currently support any Copilot+ features regardless of whether the PC meets those requirements, but that should change later this year.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), a federation of public interest advocacy groups, has asked the FCC to halt low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite launches until the environmental consequences of space pollution can be better managed.

Those concerns were underscored on Thursday when one of China's Long March 6A rockets broke apart in LEO after deploying 18 satellites for Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology group's Thousand Sails constellation. Reports suggest as many as 900 pieces of debris were scattered as a result of the disintegration.

US Space Command said at least 300 pieces are large enough to be tracked, each being 10cm (4 inches) or more across, though added it has observed no "immediate threats."

China hopes to put as many as 15,000 broadband-relaying sats into orbit in that Qianfan constellation.

Writing last week, US PIRG directed its concern at SpaceX, dubbing Elon Musk's rocket show "WasteX" for the "mega-constellations" of communications satellites shot into the sky by the Texas-based firm's Starlink subsidiary.

"Over just five years Starlink has launched more than 6,000 units and now make up more than 60 percent of all satellites," said Lucas Gutterman, director of the US PIRG Education Fund's Designed to Last project, in an online article. "The new space race took off faster than governments were able to act."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Wastewater, which is full of pollutants that contain nitrogen, can be directly fed into a new chemical reactor that converts it into ammonia, with purified water and oxygen as by-products

An environmentally friendly technique turns wastewater into ammonia and harmless by-products using a multi-chambered chemical reactor. The sustainable alternative requires much less energy than the conventional method for producing this crucial chemical.

Agriculture, refrigeration systems, paper, cleaning supplies and other industries use hundreds of millions of tonnes of ammonia every year. Making that much of the chemical uses about 2 per cent of energy total energy consumption and contributes 1.4 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Some of this environmental price is due to the conventional way of producing ammonia, which requires high temperatures and pressures. To make ammonia production more sustainable, Feng-Yang Chen at Rice University in Texas and his colleagues wanted to replace that technique with a room-temperature reactor.

Their reactor takes in water mixed with nitrates – nitrogen compounds often found in wastewater, such as industrial sewage or agricultural runoff contaminated with nitrogen-based fertilisers. After the nitrate water enters the first of three chambers, electrodes, similar to those found in batteries, create an electrochemical reaction that transforms the liquid into three components: only ammonia remains in the first chamber of the reactor, while purified water flows out through the second one and oxygen goes to the third.

Because ammonia contains only nitrogen and hydrogen, this electrochemical reaction does not require any ingredients other than the wastewater. And the purified water it produces is clean enough to meet the World Health Organization (WHO) regulations for drinking water.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The FDA’s current regulations allow food companies to independently determine the safety of thousands of ingredients considered “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS), often without notifying the FDA or disclosing safety data. This practice has led to the addition of many unreviewed substances to the U.S. food supply, raising concerns about the adequacy of post-market oversight and the potential risks of such ingredients.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for ensuring the safety of the U.S. food supply, including setting nutrition labeling standards, collaborating with companies on food recalls, and addressing foodborne illness outbreaks. However, a recent article in the American Journal of Public Health suggests that the FDA has adopted a more hands-off stance regarding the safety of food additives and certain ingredients already in use.

The current FDA process allows the food industry to regulate itself when it comes to thousands of added ingredients—by determining for itself which ingredients should be considered “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS—and deciding on their own whether or not to disclose the ingredients’ use and the underlying safety data to the FDA. As a result, many new substances have been added to our food supply without any government oversight.

“Both the FDA and the public are unaware of how many of these ingredients—which are most commonly found in ultra-processed foods —are in our food supply,” said Jennifer Pomeranz, associate professor of public health policy and management at NYU School of Global Public Health and study’s first author.

Since 1958, the FDA has been responsible for evaluating the safety of new chemicals and substances added to foods before they go to market. However, food safety laws distinguish between “food additives” and “GRAS” ingredients. While compounds considered “food additives” must be reviewed and approved by the FDA before they are used in foods, ingredients considered GRAS are exempt from these regulations.

The GRAS designation was initially established for ingredients already found in foods—for instance, vinegar and spices. But under a rule used since 1997, the FDA has allowed the food industry to independently determine which substances fall into this category, including many new substances added to foods. Rather than disclose the new use of these ingredients and the accompanying safety data for FDA review, companies can do their own research to evaluate an ingredient’s safety before going to market, without any notification or sharing of the findings. The FDA suggests—but does not require—that companies voluntarily notify the agency about the use of such substances and their findings, but in practice, many such substances have been added without notification.

In their analysis, the researchers review the history of the FDA’s and industry’s approach around adding these new compounds to foods and identify the lack of any real oversight. This includes a federal court case in 2021 upholding the FDA’s hands-off approach.

fliptop writes:

A major American auto manufacturer reportedly laid off about 1,000 of its employees on Monday, including about 600 workers based in the U.S. in a bid to streamline current operations:

General Motors (GM) is making cuts in its software and services business, which was recently put under the command of two former Apple executives in a partial retreat from a hiring spree over the last several years, according to The Wall Street Journal. Monday's layoffs stand as the most recent job cuts at GM, which reached buyout agreements with approximately 5,000 salaried employees in 2023 as part of a cost-cutting effort and got rid of several hundred executive positions in February of that year, according to Reuters.

[...] The layoffs are not related to a specific cost-reduction initiative but are instead a result of the company leadership's review of the business and an effort to find more opportunities for efficiency, a GM spokesperson told the DCNF [Daily Caller News Foundataion]. Monday's job cuts followed a decision by the two new GM executives from Apple, Baris Cetinok and Dave Richardson, to streamline the service and software business, sources familiar with the matter told the WSJ.

The spokesperson could not comment as to how many jobs were affected by Monday's actions but said that around 600 jobs would be affected at the company's global technical center in Warren, Michigan.

Previously: GM to Slash 1500 Jobs at Lordstown, Ohio Plant

Related: Tesla Lays Off 'More Than 10%' of its Global Workforce

Original Submission

looorg writes:

The scraping defence. They are not scraping content for their AI models. They are just looking for statistical correlations to their models.

https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-copyrighted-books-are-just-statistical-correlations-to-our-ai-models-240617/

Earlier this year, several authors sued NVIDIA over alleged copyright infringement. The class action lawsuit alleged that the company's AI models were trained on copyrighted works and specifically mentioned Books3 data. Since this happened without permission, the rightsholders demand compensation.

The lawsuit was followed up by a near-identical case a few weeks later, and NVIDIA plans to challenge both in court by denying the copyright infringement allegations.

In its initial response, filed a few weeks ago, NVIDIA did not deny that it used the Books3 dataset. Like many other AI companies, it believes that the use of copyrighted data for AI training is a prime example of fair use; especially when the output of the model doesn't reproduce copyrighted works.

The authors clearly have a different take. They allege that NVIDIA willingly copied an archive of pirated books to train its commercial AI model, and are demanding damages for direct copyright infringement.

[...] NVIDIA also shared its early outlook on the case. The company believes that AI companies should be allowed to use copyrighted books to train their AI models, as these books are made up of "uncopyrightable facts and ideas" that are already in the public domain.

The argument may seem surprising at first; the authors own copyrights and as far they're concerned, use of pirated copies leads to liability as a direct infringer. However, NVIDIA goes on to explain that their AI models don't see these works that way.

AI training doesn't involve any book reading skills, or even a basic understanding of a storyline. Instead, it simply measures statistical correlations and adds these to the model.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/08/that-book-is-poison-even-more-victorian-covers-found-to-contain-toxic-dyes/

In April, the National Library of France removed four 19th century books, all published in Great Britain, from its shelves because the covers were likely laced with arsenic. The books have been placed in quarantine for further analysis to determine exactly how much arsenic is present.

[...] Chemists from Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, have also been studying Victorian books from that university's library collection in order to identify and quantify levels of poisonous substances in the covers. They reported their initial findings this week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Denver.

[...] The Lipscomb effort was inspired by the University of Delaware's Poison Book Project, established in 2019 as an interdisciplinary crowdsourced collaboration between university scientists and the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. The initial objective was to analyze all the Victorian-era books in the Winterthur circulating and rare books collection for the presence of an arsenic compound called cooper acetoarsenite, an emerald green pigment that was very popular at the time to dye wallpaper, clothing, and cloth book covers. Book covers dyed with chrome yellow—favored by Vincent van Gogh—aka lead chromate, were also examined, and the project's scope has since expanded worldwide.

The Poison Book Project is ongoing, but 50 percent of the 19th century cloth-case bindings tested so far contain lead in the cloth across a range of colors, as well as other highly toxic heavy metals: arsenic, chromium, and mercury.

[...] The project lists several recommendations for the safe handling and storage of such books, such as wearing nitrile gloves—prolonged direct contact with arsenical green pigment, for instance, can lead to skin lesions and skin cancer—and not eating, drinking, biting one's fingernails or touching one's face during handling, as well as washing hands thoroughly and wiping down surfaces. Arsenical green books should be isolated for storage and removed from circulating collections, if possible. And professional conservators should work under a chemical fume hood to limit their exposure to arsenical pigment dust.

[...] "These old books with toxic dyes may be in universities, public libraries, and private collections," said Abigail Hoermann, an undergraduate studying chemistry at Lipscomb University who is among those involved in the effort, led by chemistry professor Joseph Weinstein-Webb. "So, we want to find a way to make it easy for everyone to be able to find what their exposure is to these books, and how to safely store them."

Related stories on SoylentNews:
How a Library Handles a Rare and Deadly Book of Wallpaper Samples - 20190630

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

An interesting article about why legalese is written the way it is:

A new study shows lawyers find simplified legal documents easier to understand, more appealing, and just as enforceable as traditional contracts.

It's no secret that legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand, causing headaches for anyone who has had to apply for a mortgage or review any other kind of contract. A new MIT study reveals that the lawyers who produce these documents don't like them very much either.

The researchers found that while lawyers can interpret and recall information from legal documents better than nonlawyers, it's still easier for them to understand the same documents when translated into "plain English." Lawyers also rated plain English contracts as higher-quality overall, more likely to be signed by a client, and equally enforceable as those written in "legalese."

The findings suggest that while impenetrable styles of legal writing are well-entrenched, lawyers may be amenable to changing the way such documents are written.

"No matter how we asked the questions, the lawyers overwhelmingly always wanted plain English," says Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and the senior author of the study. "People blame lawyers, but I don't think it's their fault. They would like to change it, too."

Eric Martínez, an MIT graduate student and licensed attorney, is the lead author of the new study, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Frank Mollica, a former visiting researcher at MIT who is now a lecturer in computational cognitive science at the University of Edinburgh, is also an author of the paper.

(Editor's note: I reviewed all the legal documents involves in creating Soylentnews. In that process, I discovered a single sentence which contained over 500 words. Twice! --MartyB)

[Source]: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

[Also Covered By]: PHYS.ORG

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The best removal rate was less than 70%, and that didn't beat manual opt-outs:

If you've searched your name online in the last few years, you know what's out there, and it's bad. Alternately, you've seen the lowest-common-denominator ads begging you to search out people from your past to see what crimes are on their record. People-search sites are a gross loophole in the public records system, and it doesn't feel like there's much you can do about it.

Not that some firms haven't promised to try. Do they work? Not really, Consumer Reports (CR) suggests in a recent study.

"[O]ur study shows that many of these services fall short of providing the kind of help and performance you'd expect, especially at the price levels some of them are charging," said Yael Grauer, program manager for CR, in a statement.

Consumer Reports' study asked 32 volunteers for permission to try to delete their personal data from 13 people-search sites, using seven services over four months. The services, including DeleteMe, Reputation Defender from Norton, and Confidently, were also compared to "Manual opt-outs," i.e. following the tucked-away links to pull down that data on each people-search site. CR took volunteers from California, in which the California Consumer Privacy Act should theoretically make it mandatory for brokers to respond to opt-out requests, and in New York, with no such law, to compare results.

upstart writes:

Customers uncertain as app remains downloadable after company's Chapter 7 filing:

Roku has finally axed the Redbox app from its platform. Redbox parent company Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June and moved to Chapter 7 in July, signaling the liquidation of its assets. However, the app has remained available but not fully functional in various places, leaving customers wondering if they will still be able to access content they bought. This development, however, mostly squashes any remaining hope of salvaging those purchases.

Redbox is best known for its iconic red kiosks where people could rent movie and TV (and, until 2019, video game) discs. But in an effort to keep up with the digital age, Redbox launched a streaming service in December 2017. At the time, Redbox promised "many" of the same new releases available at its kiosks but also "a growing collection" of other movies and shows. The company claimed that its on-demand streaming service was competitive because it had "newest-release movies" that subscription streaming services didn't have. The service offered streaming rentals as well as purchases.

[...] Roku's move suggests that Redbox customers will not be able to watch items they purchased. Barring an unlikely change—like someone swooping in to buy and resurrect Redbox—it's likely that other avenues for accessing the Redbox app will also go away soon.

[...] Since Redbox filed for bankruptcy, though, there has been some confusion and minimal communication about what will happen to Redbox's services. People online have asked if there's any way to watch content they purchased to own and/or get reimbursed. Some have even reported being surprised after learning that Redbox, owned by Chicken Soup since 2022, was undergoing bankruptcy procedures, pointing to limited updates from Redbox, Chicken Soup, and/or the media.

mhajicek writes:

A US agency pursuing moonshot health breakthroughs has hired a researcher advocating an extremely radical plan for defeating death.

His idea? Replace your body parts. All of them. Even your brain.

Jean Hébert, a new hire with the US Advanced Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), is expected to lead a major new initiative around 'functional brain tissue replacement,' the idea of adding youthful tissue to people's brains.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/16/1096808/arpa-h-jean-hebert-wants-to-replace-your-brain/

See also: Ship of Theseus

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The researchers set 20 horses a task consisting of three stages:

A new study showed the animals performed better than expected in a complex reward-based game.

Researchers found that when denied treats for not following the rules of the game, the horses were able to instantly switch strategies to get more rewards.

It shows the animals have the ability to think and plan ahead – something previously considered to be beyond their capacity, scientists from Nottingham Trent University (NTU) said.

[...] Dr Carrie Ijichi, a senior lecturer in equine science at NTU, said: "Horses are not natural geniuses, they are thought of as mediocre, but this study shows they're not average and are, in fact, more cognitively advanced than we give them credit for."

To understand more, the researchers set 20 horses a task consisting of three stages.

In the first stage, the animals touched a piece of card with their nose in order to get a treat.

But things became more complicated when a light was introduced and horses were only allowed a snack if they touched the card while the light was switched off.

The team found that the horses kept blindly touching the card, regardless of whether the light was on or off, and were rewarded for correct responses.

In the final stage of the game, a penalty was put in place where touching the card when the "stop" light was on resulted in a 10-second time-out.

But instead of indiscriminately touching the card, the team found that the horses were engaging with the rules – only making a move at the right time in order to receive their treat.

The researchers said this suggests that rather than failing to grasp the rules of the game, the horses had understood it the whole time but had found a way to play in the second stage that did not require much attention.