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upstart writes:

Boeing Slashes 10% Of Workforce, CEO Warns "Hard To Overstate The Challenges We Face":

In what some have called a panic/desperation negotiating tactic, Boeing has announced (late on a Friday afternoon) that it will slash its workforce by 10% as the pummeled planemaker struggles with a cash-crunch amid a drawn-out strike and ongoing quality control (to put it nicely) issues.

"Our business is in a difficult position, and it is hard to overstate the challenges we face together."

Boeing ended 2023 with 171,000 employees.

The company said it expects to report third quarter revenue of $17.8 billion, and a loss per share of $9.97, according to preliminary figures.

The company unveiled the measures and the earnings figures as it seeks to get its negotiations with labor unions back on track.

Boeing has made two offers for higher wages, both of which were turned down by workers.

About 33,000 employees at its main Seattle-area facilities have been on strike for a month now, devastating production and draining Boeing's reserves.

The latest talks collapsed earlier this week, with no clear path when and how they might resume.

Boeing shares tumbled after hours, erasing the day's gains...

Ortberg also said the company has notified customers that the first deliveries of the 777X are now expected in 2026, citing the ongoing work stoppage and flight test pause.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

[Source]: Time.com

If uncontrolled artificial general intelligence—or "God-like" AI—is looming on the horizon, we are now about halfway there. Every day, the clock ticks closer to a potential doomsday scenario.

That's why I introduced the AI Safety Clock last month. My goal is simple: I want to make clear that the dangers of uncontrolled AGI are real and present. The Clock's current reading—29 minutes to midnight—is a measure of just how close we are to the critical tipping point where uncontrolled AGI could bring about existential risks. While no catastrophic harm has happened yet, the breakneck speed of AI development and the complexities of regulation mean that all stakeholders must stay alert and engaged.

This is not alarmism; it's based on hard data. The AI Safety Clock tracks three essential factors: the growing sophistication of AI technologies, their increasing autonomy, and their integration with physical systems.

We are seeing remarkable strides across these three factors. The biggest are happening in machine learning and neural networks, with AI now outperforming humans in specific areas like image and speech recognition, mastering complex games like Go, and even passing tests such as business school exams and Amazon coding interviews.

... There's no denying the risks are real. We are on the brink of sharing our planet with machines that could match or even surpass human intelligence—whether that happens in one year or ten. But we are not helpless. The opportunity to guide AI development in the right direction is still very much within our grasp. We can secure a future where AI is a force for good.

But the clock is ticking.

This is similar to Doomsday Clock, what effect do you think this AI Safety Clock will have ? Will this serve as a warning to those involved ?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Darpa Thinks Walls of Oysters Could Protect Shores Against Hurricanes:

2018, Tyndall Air Force Base on the Gulf of Mexico—a pillar of American air superiority—found itself under aerial attack. Hurricane Michael, first spotted as a Category 2 storm off the Florida coast, unexpectedly hulked up to a Category 5. Sustained winds of 155 miles per hour whipped into the base, flinging power poles, flipping F-22s, and totaling more than 200 buildings. The sole saving grace: Despite sitting on a peninsula, Tyndall avoided flood damage. Michael's 9-to-14-foot storm surge swamped other parts of Florida. Tyndall's main defense was luck.

That $5 billion disaster at Tyndall was just one of a mounting number of extreme-weather events that convinced the US Department of Defense that it needed new ideas to protect the 1,700 coastal bases it's responsible for globally. As hurricanes Helene and Milton have just shown, beachfront residents face compounding threats from climate change, and the Pentagon is no exception. Rising oceans are chewing away the shore. Stronger storms are more capable of flooding land.

In response, Tyndall will later this month test a new way to protect shorelines from intensified waves and storm surges: a prototype artificial reef, designed by a team led by Rutgers University scientists. The 50-meter-wide array, made up of three chevron-shaped structures each weighing about 46,000 pounds, can take 70 percent of the oomph out of waves, according to tests. But this isn't your grandaddy's seawall. It's specifically designed to be colonized by oysters, some of nature's most effective wave-killers.

If researchers can optimize these creatures to work in tandem with new artificial structures placed at sea, they believe the resulting barriers can take 90 percent of the energy out of waves. David Bushek, who directs the Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory at Rutgers, swears he's not hoping for a megastorm to come and show what his team's unit is made of. But he's not not hoping for one. "Models are always imperfect. They're always a replica of something," he says. "They're not the real thing."

The project is one of three being developed under a $67.6 million program launched by the US government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. Cheekily called Reefense, the initiative is the Pentagon's effort to test if "hybrid" reefs, combining manmade structures with oysters or corals, can perform as well as a good ol' seawall. Darpa chose three research teams, all led by US universities, in 2022. After two years of intensive research and development, their prototypes are starting to go into the water, with Rutgers' first up.

[...] Oysters are effective wave-killers because of how they grow. The bivalves pile onto each other in large, sturdy mounds. The resulting structure, unlike a smooth seawall, is replete with nooks, crannies, and convolutions. When a wave strikes, its energy gets diffused into these gaps, and further spent on the jagged, complex surfaces of the oysters. Also unlike a seawall, an oyster wall can grow. Oysters have been shown to be capable of building vertically at a rate that matches sea-level rise—which suggests they'll retain some protective value against higher tides and stronger storms.

canopic jug writes:

Computer consultant J B Crawford, author of the Computers Are Bad newsletter, has posted an overview of commercial HF radio with a bit of background into the technology and some of its advantages and disadvantages:

According to a traditional system of classification, "high frequency" or HF refers to the radio spectrum between 3 and 30 MHz. The label now seems anachronistic, as HF is among the lowest ranges of radio frequencies that see regular use. This setting of the goalposts in the early days of radio technology means that modern communications standards like 5G are pushing major applications into the EHF or "extremely high frequency" band. The frontiers of basic radio technology now lie in the terahertz range, where the demarcation between radio waves and light is blurred and the known techniques for both only partially apply. HF, by contrast, is ancient technology. HF emissions can be generated by simple, brute-force means. Ironically, this makes HF a bit difficult: the incredible miniaturization and energy efficiency of modern electronics makes HF radio hard to receive and transmit in a reasonable footprint, one of several reasons that HF radio sees little consumer use.

HF still has a variety of interesting uses, including some new, surprising ones. The signals go beyond the horizon and around the curvature of the Earth due to their interaction with parts of the atmosphere.

Previously:
(2021) The $50 Ham: a Cheap Antenna for the HF Bands
(2020) ARRL Requests Expanded HF Privileges for Technician Licensees

Original Submission

looorg writes:

For only $12 a month your Zoom AI avatar can take your place in all kinds of online meetings. It will use prompt suggestions and generate answers, it can recap and expand on conversations. What could possibly go wrong ...

Is this when your AI avatar replaces you? After all $12 is a lot cheaper/lower then your monthly salary.

I do wonder what happens at the meeting when everyone sends their AI avatar. Will there be a singularity recursion event?

https://news.zoom.us/zoom-introduces-ai-companion-2-0/
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/9/24266007/zoom-ai-avatars-clips-talk-for-you

Original Submission

upstart writes:

31 million records containing email addresses and password hashes exposed:

Archive.org, possibly one of the only entities to preserve the entire history of the Internet, was recently compromised in a hack that revealed data of roughly 31 million users.

A little after 2 PM California time, social media blew up with screenshots showing what the archive.org homepage displayed.

It read:

archive.org

Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!

HIBP is short for Have I been Pwned, the authoritative site for breach notifications that help people protect their accounts after they've been compromised.

The message didn't last long. Soon after it appeared, archive.org, when it loaded at all, displayed a message saying the site was temporarily down. Later, the site returned. Archive.org's Brewster Kahle said on on a social media site that the archive had come under a DDoS attack.

Now, Have I Been Pwnd is reporting that archive.org was hacked. HIBP said the compromise occurred last month and exposed 31 million records containing email addresses, screen names, and bcrypt-hashed passwords.

See also: Internet Archive Breach Exposes 31 Million Users

Original Submission

upstart writes:

There are open source projects and companies looking to help:

Earlier this month, the Italian energy company Enel X announced an abrupt withdrawal from the North American market. For its residential customers—owners of the popular Juicebox level 2 home chargers—the physical hardware will continue to work, but from tomorrow Enel X will have ended all software support, including updates and its apps. But Enel X also had commercial clients, and they're even more out of luck—from tomorrow those stations "will lose functionality in the absence of software continuity," Enel X says.

For Juicebox customers, the loss of Enel X's servers and apps isn't great—they will lose the ability to remotely manage the charger, or schedule charging sessions from it. But most electric vehicles—both battery EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs—have their own built-in software to schedule charging sessions, and to hear some owners tell it, Enel X's software was a poor substitute for the original Juicebox software written by eMotorworks, which was bought by Enel X in 2017.

[...] Meanwhile, a number of companies and open source projects are working on offering third-party support for Juiceboxes. Unfortunately, only newer Juiceboxes support the open charge point protocol; older devices may need to be physically modified, perhaps with open source hardware.

As might be expected, lots of charging solution providers are interested in helping Enel X's stranded commercial customers become their newest happy, smiling customers. But it's going to be up to those stranded by Enel X to find a new company and platform to work with.

In some cases that might mean migrating existing hardware over, but as SAE notes, Enel X has done little to make that migration simple. And many businesses may find what were functioning level 2 chargers today are just beige-colored bricks tomorrow. For example, with Enel X gone, there are no contracts in place for the SIM cards embedded in each charger that provide the connectivity those devices expect.

"When that goes dead, the only way you can really get those chargers going again is you physically send someone out there, or you ask the person on the property to take out the SIM card, replace it," said Joseph Schottland, CEO of EV+ Charging. "It's a big ask, because they've got to get the screwdriver out, take the back of the charger off... They've got to know where to look."

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Who holds the copyright? Man, Machine or Software? Appeal in progress. Allen claim is that it took him over 100h of prompt-engineering to get the image just right.

Jason Allen—a synthetic media artist whose Midjourney-generated work "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" went viral and incited backlash after winning a state fair art competition—is not giving up his fight with the US Copyright Office.

Last fall, the Copyright Office refused to register Allen's work, claiming that almost the entire work was AI-generated and insisting that copyright registration requires more human authorship than simply plugging a prompt into Midjourney.

Allen is now appealing that decision, asking for judicial review and alleging that "the negative media attention surrounding the Work may have influenced the Copyright Office Examiner's perception and judgment." He claims that the Examiner was biased and considered "improper factors" such as the public backlash when concluding that he had "no control over how the artificial intelligence tool analyzed, interpreted, or responded to these prompts."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/artist-appeals-copyright-denial-for-prize-winning-ai-generated-work/

Original Submission

Frosty Piss writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/05/lego_ideas_turing_machine/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_content=article

https://ideas.lego.com/projects/10a3239f-4562-4d23-ba8e-f4fc94eef5c7

A working Turing Machine was submitted to Lego Ideas, consisting of approximately 2,900 parts and a bucketload of extreme cleverness. The Lego builder first came across the concept a few years ago and, despite it being an abstract model, decided to attempt making one out of the plastic components of Lego Technic.

Talking to El Reg, the submitter "The Bananaman" stated: "My first few ideas [on] how to do this would be very big and inefficient if they were ever [to be] built, but I usually stopped developing them very early. The first one that could possibly work was three years ago and I built a part of the tape with the symbol reader and a very bad unfinished prototype of the 'truth table' that would use a 32-speed gearbox instead of the 'searching' mechanism. Later I realized that the 'truth table' can be made way more easily (it was my fourth idea on how to build the table and it still had a dozen revisions later on), and I came up with using the registers which made everything easier. I started building the prototype last vacation, then took a break and I've finished it this vacation."

There was also the challenge of fitting into the limits imposed by Lego Ideas. At the time of submission, this was 3,000 parts, and The Bananaman's contraption finally managed to come in at around 2,900. The limit has since been raised to 5,000 parts. Should it get to 10,000 supporters on the Lego Ideas site, it will go into Expert Review, where Lego's professionals will decide if it should be approved for production. The evaluation will depend on a range of criteria, including feasibility and strength of idea.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A new California law extends consumer privacy protection to brainwave data gathered by implants or wearable devices:

Governor Gavin Newsom over the weekend signed into law a bill amending the California Consumer Privacy Act, the state's spin on the GDPR in Europe, to classify "neural data" as protected personal information along the lines of precise geolocation, genetics and biometrics.

Neurorights Foundation medical director Sean Pauzauskie called the Califoria law "an enormous victory" for patients suffering from mental health disorders as well as for consumers simply looking to enhance their lives with new technologies.

The NGO co-sponsored the bill with a state senator.

"The essential privacy guardrails it ensures should only boost confidence in all varieties of these revolutionary neurotechnologies, the great majority which are based in California," Pauzauskie said in a release.

California is the second state to extend data protections to brainwaves, on the heels of Colorado putting in place a law requiring privacy safeguards along the lines of what is done for fingerprints.

The California law sends "a clear signal to the fast-growing neurotechnology industry" to protect people's mental privacy, NeuroRights Foundation general counsel Jared Genser said in a release.

Protections under the California law include the right to know what brain data is being collected, limit its disclosure, and to be able to opt-out or have it deleted.

The law applies to devices capable of recording or altering nervous system activity, whether they be implanted or worn, the NGO said.

The potential for devices to tap into how people feel or think has raised concerns they could be used to manipulate feelings or thoughts.

"In the coming years, the sensitivity of neural data will increase alongside surging investments...resulting in increased resolution of brain scans and larger datasets of brain data being collected," the NGO predicted.

"Meanwhile generative artificial intelligence will continue accelerating the ability to accurately decode these scans."

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/streaming-industry-has-unprecedented-surveillance-manipulation-capabilities/

The companies behind the streaming industry, including smart TV and streaming stick manufacturers and streaming service providers, have developed a "surveillance system" that has "long undermined privacy and consumer protection," according to a report from the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) published today and sent to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Unprecedented tracking techniques aimed at pleasing advertisers have resulted in connected TVs (CTVs) being a "privacy nightmare," according to Jeffrey Chester, report co-author and CDD executive director, resulting in calls for stronger regulation.

The 48-page report, How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era [PDF], cites Ars Technica, other news publications, trade publications, blog posts, and statements from big players in streaming—from Amazon to NBCUniversal and Tubi, to LG, Samsung, and Vizio. It provides a detailed overview of the various ways that streaming services and streaming hardware target viewers in newfound ways that the CDD argues pose severe privacy risks. The nonprofit composed the report as part of efforts to encourage regulation. Today, the CDD sent letters to the FTC [PDF], Federal Communications Commission (FCC), California attorney general [PDF], and California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) [PDF], regarding its concerns.

[...] The report notes "misleading" privacy policies that have minimal information on data collection and tracking methods and the use of marketing tactics like cookie-less IDs and identity graphs that make promises of not collecting or sharing personal information "meaningless."

Original Submission

Mozilla Faces Privacy Complaint for Enabling Tracking in Firefox Without User Consent

upstart writes:

Mozilla Faces Privacy Complaint for Enabling Tracking in Firefox Without User Consent:

Vienna-based privacy non-profit noyb (short for None Of Your Business) has filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority (DPA) against Firefox maker Mozilla for enabling a new feature called Privacy-Preserving Attribution (PPA) without explicitly seeking users' consent.

"Contrary to its reassuring name, this technology allows Firefox to track user behavior on websites," noyb said. "In essence, the browser is now controlling the tracking, rather than individual websites."

Noyb also called out Mozilla for allegedly taking a leaf out of Google's playbook by "secretly" enabling the feature by default without informing users.

PPA, which is currently enabled in Firefox version 128 as an experimental feature, has its parallels in Google's Privacy Sandbox project in Chrome.

The initiative, now abandoned by Google, sought to replace third-party tracking cookies with a set of APIs baked into the web browser that advertisers can talk to in order to determine users' interests and serve targeted ads.

Put differently, the web browser acts as a middleman that stores information about the different categories that users can be slotted into based on their internet browsing patterns.

PPA, per Mozilla, is a way for sites to "understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people," describing it as a "non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking."

It's also similar to Apple's Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution, which allows advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns on the web without compromising on user privacy.

The way PPA works is as follows: Websites that serve ads can ask Firefox to remember the ads in the form of an impression that includes details about the ads themselves, such as the destination website.

If a Firefox user ends up visiting the destination website and performs an action that's deemed valuable by the business – e.g., making an online purchase by clicking on the ad, also called "conversion" – that website can prompt the browser to generate a report.

AnonTechie writes:

Getting into arguments with strangers online or family members at the dinner table can feel a bit like debating with a brick wall. We are probably all guilty of feeling like we are right, even if we don't have all the facts. According to a recent psychology study, people tend to assume that they have all of the information that they need to make a decision or support their position–even if they don't. This phenomenon dubbed the "illusion of information adequacy" is detailed in a study published October 9 in the journal PLoS ONE.

"Interpersonal conflict is on the rise, driving increases in anger, anxiety, and general stress," Angus Fletcher, a study co-author and narrative theorist and neurophysiologist at the Ohio State University, tells Popular Science. "We wanted to look into those misunderstandings and see if they could be mitigated."

The team calls this belief that we are correct–even when we don't have all of the information–the illusion of adequacy.

Fletcher describes the illusion of adequacy as, "The less that our brain knows, the more confident it is that it knows all it needs to know. This makes us prone to thinking that we have all the crucial facts about a decision, leaping to confident conclusions and decisive judgments, when we are missing necessary information."

Source: Popular Science

Citation: Gehlbach H, Robinson CD, Fletcher A (2024) The illusion of information adequacy. PLoS ONE 19(10): e0310216. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0310216

Journal Reference: The illusion of information adequacy

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/dram-emfi.html#can-you-get-root-with-only-a-cigarette-lighter

Before you can write an exploit, you need a bug. When there are no bugs, we have to get creative—that's where Fault Injection comes in. Fault injection can take many forms, including software-controlled data corruption, power glitching, clock glitching, electromagnetic pulses, lasers, and more.

Hardware fault injection is something that typically requires specialized (and expensive) equipment. The costs stem from requiring a high degree of precision in terms of both when and where the fault is injected. There are many valiant attempts at bringing down the costs, with notable projects ranging from the RP2040-based PicoEMP, all the way to "Laser Fault Injection for The Masses". (The RP2040 crops up a lot due to its low cost combined with the "PIO" peripheral, which can do I/O with tight timings and latency)

A while back I read about using a piezo-electric BBQ Igniter coupled to an inductor as a low-budget tool for electro-magnetic fault injection (EMFI), and I was captivated. I wondered, how far can you take such a primitive tool? At the time, the best thing I could come up with was exploiting a software implementation of AES running on an Arduino, using DFA—it worked!

But I wasn't fully satisfied. I wanted to exploit something more "real," but I was out of ideas for the time being....

Original Submission

Amazon plans to show more ads on Prime Video in 2025 to test how much viewers can handle. Even though some subscribers may not like ads, Amazon has not seen a big drop in customers since adding them. By adding more commercials and shoppable ads, Amazon is trying to see how much ads people will tolerate while watching their favorite shows.

Amazon will "ramp up" Prime Video ads in 2025: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/amazon-prime-video-is-getting-more-ads-next-year/

Original Submission