SoylentNews

hubie writes:

Some of our favorite food crops around the world aren't reaching their full potential:

Insects that provide the crucial service of pollination are declining en masse, and that has serious consequences for the world's food crops, 75 percent of which depend at least partially – if not entirely – on insect pollination.

While this doesn't include major food crops like rice and wheat, pollination is essential to what the study's first author – ecologist Katherine Turo from Rutgers University in the US – refers to as "nutrient-dense and interesting foods that we like and are culturally relevant".

"If you look through a list of crops and think about which fruits and vegetables you're most excited to eat – like summer berries or apples and pumpkins in the fall – those are the crops that typically need to be pollinated by insects," Turo says.

And yet, there's a lack of experimental research on pollinator limitation in crops. While we know the phenomenon is impacting global food supplies, its prevalence has so far been unclear.

[...] Within this detailed picture, Turo and colleagues found that up to 60 percent of global crop systems are being limited by insufficient pollination. The phenomenon is affecting 25 of the 49 different crop species analyzed, with blueberry, coffee, and apple crops being the worst affected.

Pollinator limitation is occurring in 85 percent of the countries in this database, spanning all six continents represented.

"Our findings are a cause for concern and optimism," says Turo.

"We did detect widespread yield deficits. However, we also estimate that, through continued investment in pollinator management and research, it is likely that we can improve the efficiency of our existing crop fields to meet the nutritional needs of our global population."

[...] "Our findings show that by paying more attention to pollinators, growers could make agricultural fields more productive."

That might be harder than it sounds – insects are being hit with a lethal onslaught of disease, pesticides, shifting seasons, and habitat loss.

Perhaps quantifying these tiny but mighty allies' services to our billion-dollar industries will help us to take the threats they face more seriously.

Journal Reference:Turo, K.J., Reilly, J.R., Fijen, T.P.M. et al. Insufficient pollinator visitation often limits yield in crop systems worldwide. Nat Ecol Evol 8, 1612–1622 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02460-2

Original Submission

Snotnose writes:

The ig-nobels for 2024 have been announced. If you don't know what they are:

Curiosity is the driving force behind all science, which may explain why so many scientists sometimes find themselves going in some decidedly eccentric research directions. Did you hear about the WWII plan to train pigeons as missile guidance systems? How about experiments on the swimming ability of a dead rainbow trout or that time biologists tried to startle cows by popping paper bags by their heads? These and other unusual research endeavors were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2024 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it's that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science.

Hope you weren't expecting to get any work done for the next hour or two.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The US government has noticed the potentially negative effects of generative AI on areas like journalism and content creation. Senator Amy Klobuchar, along with seven Democrat colleagues, urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Justice Department to probe generative AI products like ChatGPT for potential antitrust violations, they wrote in a press release.

"Recently, multiple dominant online platforms have introduced new generative AI features that answer user queries by summarizing, or, in some cases, merely regurgitating online content from other sources or platforms," the letter states. "The introduction of these new generative AI features further threatens the ability of journalists and other content creators to earn compensation for their vital work."

The lawmakers went on to note that traditional search results lead users to publishers' websites while AI-generated summaries keep the users on the search platform "where that platform alone can profit from the user's attention through advertising and data collection."

These products also have significant competitive consequences that distort markets for content. When a generative AI feature answers a query directly, it often forces the content creator—whose content has been relegated to a lower position on the user interface—to compete with content generated from their own work.

The fact that AI may be scraping news sites and then not even directing users to the original source could be a form of "exclusionary conduct or an unfair method of competition in violation of antitrust laws," the lawmakers concluded. (That's on top being a potential violation of copyright laws, but that's another legal battle altogether.)

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/08/pc-floppy-copy-protection-softguard.html

Softguard Systems was founded by Joseph Diodati, Paul Sachse and Ken Williams in 1983¹. The company went public in 1984, and by 1985 was one of the industry leaders in copy protection technology, although they produced a few other unrelated products as well.

Advertisements for their copy-protection product, SUPERLoK, were commonly seen in the classified sections of publications such as InfoWorld and PC Magazine.

The original Superlok product required professional disk duplication to lay down the requisite copy protection track. Eventually, Softguard would produce the "SUPERLoK KIT," which was writable with a standard PC floppy controller. An advertisement for the Kit can be seen above, left. The Kit version was aimed at smaller developers on a budget, and did not offer the same level of protection. This article will focus on the original Superlok product.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

In groups people screen out chatter around them - and now technology can do the same:

It's the perennial "cocktail party problem" - standing in a room full of people, drink in hand, trying to hear what your fellow guest is saying.

In fact, human beings are remarkably adept at holding a conversation with one person while filtering out competing voices.

However, perhaps surprisingly, it's a skill that technology has until recently been unable to replicate.

And that matters when it comes to using audio evidence in court cases. Voices in the background can make it hard to be certain who's speaking and what's being said, potentially making recordings useless.

Electrical engineer Keith McElveen, founder and chief technology officer of Wave Sciences, became interested in the problem when he was working for the US government on a war crimes case.

"What we were trying to figure out was who ordered the massacre of civilians. Some of the evidence included recordings with a bunch of voices all talking at once - and that's when I learned what the "cocktail party problem" was," he says.

"I had been successful in removing noise like automobile sounds or air conditioners or fans from speech, but when I started trying to remove speech from speech, it turned out not only to be a very difficult problem, it was one of the classic hard problems in acoustics.

"Sounds are bouncing round a room, and it is mathematically horrible to solve."

The answer, he says, was to use AI to try to pinpoint and screen out all competing sounds based on where they originally came from in a room.

This doesn't just mean other people who may be speaking - there's also a significant amount of interference from the way sounds are reflected around a room, with the target speaker's voice being heard both directly and indirectly.

In a perfect anechoicchamber - one totally free from echoes - one microphone per speaker would be enough to pick up what everyone was saying; but in a real room, the problem requires a microphone for every reflected sound too.

[...] And, he adds: "We knew there had to be a solution, because you can do it with just two ears."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The first-person shooter Doom has so many ports on so many different consoles and computers that modders have had to find new places to port the game like autonomous lawnmowers, digestive bacteria and even in Doom II itself.

One port that’s not nearly as popular or playable as the others is the Sega Saturn port that came out nearly four years after the game’s release. Gamespot’s Jeff Gerstmann called the Sega Saturn Doom port just about everything you can call a bad game without straying over the the boundaries of good taste: “completely worthless,” “drab,” “jerky,” “to be avoided at all costs.”

Bo, a self-described reverse engineer of Sega Saturn games, gave the Sega Saturn port of Doom another chance and he discovered a cheat code in the game that’s been laying dormant for more than a decade. He posted the secret cheat code he found on X.

The button combination X, Right, B, Y, X, Right, B, Y gives you the ability to see through the walls of the Mars substation and even Hell. It’s too bad the game doesn’t have a cheat code that lets you see a better version of Doom.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/music-industrys-1990s-hard-drives-like-all-hdds-are-dying/

One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry's vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.

Music industry publication Mix spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone's data stored on spinning disks.

"In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know," Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. "It may sound like a sales pitch, but it's not; it's a call for action."
[...]
Mix's passing along of Iron Mountain's warning hit Hacker News earlier this week, which spurred other tales of faith in the wrong formats. The gist of it: You cannot trust any medium, so you copy important things over and over, into fresh storage. "Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.," writes user abracadaniel. "Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you'd expect."

There is discussion of how SSDs are not archival at all;
[...]
Knowing that hard drives will eventually fail is nothing new. Ars wrote about the five stages of hard drive death, including denial, back in 2005.
[...]
Google's server drive data showed in 2007 that HDD failure was mostly unpredictable, and that temperatures were not really the deciding factor.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

DNA analysis shows that people from Easter Island had contact with Indigenous Americans around the 1300s, and finds there was no population crash before the arrival of Europeans

DNA analysis of ancient remains from Easter Island shows that the population was in fact increasing when Europeans arrived, rather than collapsing as reported by some historical accounts.

The results also show that there were interactions between the residents of the island and those of South America long before the arrival of Europeans. Both the island and its people are also known as Rapa Nui.

Located in the Pacific Ocean 3500 kilometres from South America, Rapa Nui is one of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth. Polynesian people began settling there around AD 1200, when its 164 square kilometres were covered in palm forests.

By the time Europeans arrived in 1722, the vegetation had been largely destroyed by a combination of rats and overharvesting. The history of the island has often been portrayed as an example of unsustainable ecological exploitation and population growth followed by collapse.

In the latest study, J. Víctor Moreno-Mayar at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and his colleagues looked at 15 sets of human remains kept at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, collected by expeditions in 1877 and 1935.

The researchers worked closely with representatives of the Rapa Nui community. One of their aims was to confirm that the individuals at the museum were, in fact, from the island, as there is an effort being led by modern residents to repatriate the remains.

The results show that the 15 people, who all died over the past 500 years, did originate on Rapa Nui.

A population undergoing a bottleneck from a collapse in numbers will have signals in their DNA showing a drop in genetic diversity, says Moreno-Mayer.

“We are using statistical methods that can reconstruct the genetic diversity in the Rapa Nui population throughout the last few thousand years,” he says. “And interestingly enough, we do not find any evidence of a dramatic population decline around 1600s as expected from the collapse theory.”

Instead, the results suggest that the Rapa Nui population increased steadily until the 1860s, when slave traders kidnapped hundreds of islanders and a smallpox outbreak killed many more.

canopic jug writes:

Several sites have covered the dynamic pricing scandal concerning Tickemaster's sales of tickets to the Manchester based English rock band Oasis' reunion tour. Aside from the problems of the monopoly maintained by Ticketmaster, and aside from the problem of ticket scalping which is encouraged by Ticketmaster's business model, the dynamic pricing has come across as price gouging and a possible breach of consumer law. The Competition and Markets Authority is now launching an investigation into if or how much Ticketmaster engaged in unfair, prohibited commercial practices.

Some fans paid more than £350 for tickets with a face value of less than £150, and had to make a split-second decision whether to complete their purchase, as dynamic pricing caused prices to soar during the booking process.

Lisa Webb, a consumer law expert at Which?, said: "It seems extremely unfair that Oasis fans got up early and battled through queues only to find that ticket prices had more than doubled from the originally advertised price.

"Oasis and Ticketmaster should do the right thing and refund fans who may have been misled into paying over the odds for tickets that would have been half the price just hours earlier."

— Oasis and Ticketmaster urged to refund fans after 'dynamic pricing' debacle, The Guardian.

Where have Soylentils been seeing dynamic pricing lately?

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The RX 7800M is a powerful mobile GPU for gaming notebooks.

AMD has officially debuted its sixth discrete GPU in its mobile RX 7000 lineup, the RX 7800M. The new GPU is AMD's second mobile RDNA 3 GPU to arrive with a chipset-style architecture and is the runner-up to the flagship RX 7900M.

The RX 7800M is armed with 60 RDNA 3 compute units, 96 ROPS, 3,840 stream processors, 48MB of Infinity Cache, and a game clock of 2,145MHz. Bus width was not mentioned, but we suspect it is using a 192-bit interface. Memory bandwidth is rated at up to 432GB/s, memory capacity is 12GB, and GDDR6 ICs operate at up to 18 Gbps. GPU power consumption is rated at up to 180W.

AMD's new chipset-style mobile GPU is essentially a stripped-down RX 7800 XT operating at lower clock speeds and power consumption combined with lower memory specs from the RX 7700 XT. The GPU's compute unit count also aligns perfectly with the new Sony PS5 Pro's Compute Units, meaning the 7800M most likely would have the same compute power as the PS5 Pro in a theoretical scenario where GPU clocks and power consumption were the same.

We previously discovered that the RX 7800M performs very similarly to AMD’s desktop RX 7700 XT in some vendor-provided benchmarks. This is unsurprising since both GPUs share the same memory configuration, and the GPU’s superior core count configuration offsets the 7700 XT’s low power/clock speed. Compared to Nvidia, the RX 7800M performs faster than its RTX 4070 laptop GPU but is slower than its RTX 4080 mobile counterpart. Performance was also a touch behind Nvidia’s desktop RTX 4070.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

CTIA, the trade organization representing the US wireless industry, said the additional 26 trillion MBs used last year is a 36 percent increase over 2022 and is the largest single-year increase in wireless data ever. It is also enough data for every household in the country to watch the first season of House of the Dragon daily for an entire year.

By 2029, Ericsson predicts that Americans' data usage could increases by more than three times the current rate.

The continued proliferation of 5G networks is helping to drive growth as well. The CTIA said that by the end of 2023, nearly 40 percent of all wireless connections – including smartphones, IoT devices, and wearables – were 5G and that more than 330 million Americans were covered by at least one 5G network. The total number of wireless connections reached 558 million, or more than 1.6 connections for each American.

The trend is only expected to increase in the coming years as network operators pump even more money into the system. The industry collectively invested $30 billion in 2023 to improve their networks, pushing the total US wireless industry spend to more than $700 billion to date ($190 billion of which has come since 2018). A total of 432,469 cell sites were in operation across the country at the end of 2023, an increase of 24 percent since 2018.

Wireless data is also more affordable now than it ever has been. The cost per MB has dropped 50 percent since 2020 and 97 percent versus a decade ago, down to just $.002 per MB.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Azure Linux is Microsoft's take on the open source operating system. It is primarily used for internal purposes, but could it become (yet another) distribution option?

Directions on Microsoft analyst Mary Jo Foley suggests the distribution, tuned to be lightweight and secure, has the potential to reach a wider audience.

Because, let's face it, if there's one thing the Linux world needs, it's another distribution for administrators to consider.

Azure Linux was known as CBL-Mariner before it was rebranded, and thank your lucky stars that happened in 2023. Lately, it would probably end up being called Copilot for Linux or something similar.

Downloadable from GitHub, Azure Linux can be found running as a container host operating system for the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and supports both x86 and Arm.

The latter point is significant. There is currently no publicly supported version of Windows Server that runs on Arm, despite Microsoft hyping Arm technology via its Copilot+ PCs and datacenter operators increasingly favoring the hardware's lower power-sipping tendencies. While porting and supporting all of Windows Server's functions to the Linux platform would be a stretch, there is the potential for Microsoft to compete in the Linux enterprise server space.

Foley noted that the world probably doesn't need another Linux distribution. However, the end of support for CentOS has opened up a window of opportunity – even for Microsoft.

"More customer compute in Azure is running Linux on Azure than Windows Server on Azure," according to Foley. Thus, it is hard to think that Microsoft would not like to be part of that besides hosting the workloads.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/elon-musks-x-wins-appeal-to-block-california-content-moderation-law/

Elon Musk's X has won its appeal on free speech grounds to block AB 587, a California law requiring social media companies to submit annual reports publicly explaining their controversial content moderation decisions.

In his opinion, Ninth Circuit court of appeals judge Milan Smith reversed a district court's ruling that he said improperly rejected Musk's First Amendment argument. Smith was seemingly baffled to find that the "district court performed, essentially, no analysis on this question."
[...]
X accused California of trying to spark backlash with a supposed "transparency measure" that forces "companies like X Corp. to engage in speech against their will" by threatening "draconian financial penalties" if companies don't "remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally protected speech that the state deems undesirable or harmful."

Smith said that the appeals court accounted for these alleged effects in its analysis, but "whether State officials intended these effects plays no role in our analysis of the merits" of X's case.

That's likely because the appeals court agreed that X was likely to prevail in its First Amendment claims, finding that AB 587 compels noncommercial speech that requires strict scrutiny. The law also is not narrowly tailored enough "to serve the State's purported goal of requiring social media companies to be transparent about their policies and practices." As Smith wrote, if the law is just a transparency measure, "the relevant question here is: transparency into what?"
[...]
If AB 587 only required companies to disclose "whether it was moderating certain categories of speech without having to define those categories in a public report," that might work.
[...]
Instead, AB 587's provisions require "every covered social media company to reveal its policy opinion about contentious issues, such as what constitutes hate speech or misinformation and whether to moderate such expression," Smith wrote.

fliptop writes:

On August 19, 2024, Microsoft identified a North Korean threat actor exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Chromium, now identified as CVE-2024-7971, to gain remote code execution (RCE). We assess with high confidence that the observed exploitation of CVE-2024-7971 can be attributed to a North Korean threat actor targeting the cryptocurrency sector for financial gain:

Our ongoing analysis and observed infrastructure lead us to attribute this activity with medium confidence to Citrine Sleet. We note that while the FudModule rootkit deployed has also been attributed to Diamond Sleet, another North Korean threat actor, Microsoft previously identified shared infrastructure and tools between Diamond Sleet and Citrine Sleet, and our analysis indicates this might be shared use of the FudModule malware between these threat actors.

CVE-2024-7971 is a type confusion vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, impacting versions of Chromium prior to 128.0.6613.84. Exploiting the vulnerability could allow threat actors to gain RCE in the sandboxed Chromium renderer process. Google released a fix for the vulnerability on August 21, 2024, and users should ensure they are using the latest version of Chromium.

Who is Citrine Sleet?

The threat actor that Microsoft tracks as Citrine Sleet is based in North Korea and primarily targets financial institutions, particularly organizations and individuals managing cryptocurrency, for financial gain. As part of its social engineering tactics, Citrine Sleet has conducted extensive reconnaissance of the cryptocurrency industry and individuals associated with it. The threat actor creates fake websites masquerading as legitimate cryptocurrency trading platforms and uses them to distribute fake job applications or lure targets into downloading a weaponized cryptocurrency wallet or trading application based on legitimate applications. Citrine Sleet most commonly infects targets with the unique trojan malware it developed, AppleJeus, which collects information necessary to seize control of the targets' cryptocurrency assets. The FudModule rootkit described in this blog has now been tied to Citrine Sleet as shared tooling with Diamond Sleet.

The article goes on to explain the exploit and FudModule rootkit, and ends with a long list of recommendations.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Previously: North Korean Hackers Unleashed Chrome 0-Day Exploit on Hundreds of US Targets

Original Submission

upstart writes:

SpaceX founder has said humans will be able to go to Mars in just four years:

The 53-year-old businessman made his predictions on a series of social media posts this weekend. He said the next "Earth-Mars transfer window" opens in two years, which is when the first Starships to the "Red Planet" will launch. Musk said the Starships will be uncrewed at first "to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars."

But if everything goes well and the landings are successful, just two years later the first crewed flights to Mars will start departing from our planet. Musk said once the first crewed flights depart, their rate will "grow exponentially", adding that his company has the goal of "building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years."

[...] "Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet." Many people were excited by Musk's latest claims as one wrote: "This is huge!!" Another added: "What a time to be alive!" One more commented: "The mission to make life multi-planetary really begins."

Founded in 2002, Musk's SpaceX became the first private company to develop a liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit and the first to send a spacecraft and astronauts to the International Space Station. A year earlier, he had announced the development of Mars Oasis - a project bidding to land a greenhouse and grow plants on Mars.

The stainless-steel Starship is made up of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship. The spacecraft is designed to be "a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond."

Original Submission