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upstart writes:

"Spreading misinformation suddenly becomes a noble goal," Redditor says:

A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search's reliance on Reddit and Google's AI Overview.

In May, Google launched AI Overviews in the US, an experimental feature that populates the top of Google Search results with a summarized answer based on an AI model built into Google's web rankings. When Google first debuted AI Overview, it quickly became apparent that the feature needed work with accuracy and its ability to properly summarize information from online sources. AI Overviews are "built to only show information that is backed up by top web results," Liz Reid, VP and head of Google Search, wrote in a May blog post. But as my colleague Benj Edwards pointed out at the time, that setup could contribute to inaccurate, misleading, or even dangerous results: "The design is based on the false assumption that Google's page-ranking algorithm favors accurate results and not SEO-gamed garbage."

As Edwards alluded to, many have complained about Google Search results' quality declining in recent years, as SEO spam and, more recently, AI slop float to the top of searches. As a result, people often turn to the Reddit hack to make Google results more helpful. By adding "site:reddit.com" to search results, users can hone their search to more easily find answers from real people. Google seems to understand the value of Reddit and signed an AI training deal with the company that's reportedly worth $60 million per year.

But disgruntled foodies in London are reminding us of the inherent dangers of relying on the scraping of user-generated content to provide what's supposed to be factual, helpful information.

Apparently, some London residents are getting fed up with social media influencers whose reviews make long lines of tourists at their favorite restaurants, sometimes just for the likes. Christian Calgie, a reporter for London-based news publication Daily Express, pointed out this trend on X yesterday, noting the boom of Redditors referring people to Angus Steakhouse, a chain restaurant, to combat it.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Not all winged dinosaurs were necessarily capable of full flight, but this anatomical feature may have enabled them to travel further by flapping or gliding

Tiny tracks in South Korea symbolise a moment 120 million years ago when a dinosaur took advantage of its wings to cover ground in large leaps – the oldest track evidence of wing-assisted movement in these extinct animals.

Whether the creature, which was a raptor and not part of the lineage that led to birds, took full flight is uncertain. But the tracks support previous ideas that aerodynamics evolved multiple times across prehistoric lines, says Alexander Dececchi at Dakota State University in South Dakota.

“It’s pretty rare to find these kinds of [pre-flight] tracks, and then to find them in an animal that’s not even a bird – that’s pretty special,” he says.

Velociraptors and other raptors (dromaeosaurids) are the ancestors of modern birds, but their lineage split into avian and non-avian, or “paravian”, lines about 170 million years ago. Despite having feathers and wings, paravian dinosaurs generally seemed to lack the wingspan needed to offset their body weight, says team member Michael Pittman at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

But Pittman, Dececchi and their colleagues suspected that some paravian dinosaurs could fly, or at least glide, before full flight evolved in birds, based on muscles in their upper bodies. That suspicion grew stronger as they investigated more than 2600 rows of dinosaur tracks around the world.

One set of tracks, discovered during the construction of a shopping centre in south-eastern South Korea, showed surprisingly long spacing between steps made by a sparrow-sized raptor called Dromaeosauriformipes rarus.

[...] Further calculations and comparisons with fossil anatomy suggested he was right: the animal could not have made that stride with its legs alone. It was clearly flapping or gliding, possibly while launching or landing, says Pittman.

“I think the vast majority of feathered dinosaurs were probably doing what this guy was doing – using the wings to augment running, jumping, braking and turning,” says Pittman.

Journal reference: Theropod trackways as indirect evidence of pre-avian aerial behavior. DOI: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2413810121

Original Submission

https://www.uniladtech.com/science/space/nasa-astronauts-iss-brace-emergency-evacuation-093405-20241029

Astronauts on the ISS brace for emergency evacuation after NASA finds 50 'areas of concern'

NASA has raised the threat level to the highest rating

NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station are preparing for a possible evacuation as they face a worsening air leak problem.

The US space agency and its Russian counterpart, Roscomos, are tracking 50 'areas of concern' related to a growing leak aboard the station.

In a recent report from NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the cracks in a Russian service module have reached a 'top safety risk,' marking it a five-out-of-five threat level.

This story is the only one I can find. Can someone please corroborate this?

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Ramanujan brings life to the myth of the self-taught genius. He grew up poor and uneducated and did much of his research while isolated in southern India, barely able to afford food. In 1912, when he was 24, he began to send a series of letters to prominent mathematicians. These were mostly ignored, but one recipient, the English mathematician G.H. Hardy, corresponded with Ramanujan for a year and eventually persuaded him to come to England, smoothing the way with the colonial bureaucracies.

It became apparent to Hardy and his colleagues that Ramanujan could sense mathematical truths — could access entire worlds — that others simply could not. (Hardy, a mathematical giant in his own right, is said to have quipped that his greatest contribution to mathematics was the discovery of Ramanujan.) Before Ramanujan died in 1920 at the age of 32, he came up with thousands of elegant and surprising results, often without proof. He was fond of saying that his equations had been bestowed on him by the gods.

More than 100 years later, mathematicians are still trying to catch up to Ramanujan’s divine genius, as his visions appear again and again in disparate corners of the world of mathematics.

The English mathematician G.H. Hardy, after receiving a letter from Ramanujan and recognizing his brilliance, arranged for him to study and work with him in Cambridge.

Ramanujan is perhaps most famous for coming up with partition identities, equations about the different ways you can break a whole number up into smaller parts (such as 7 = 5 + 1 + 1). In the 1980s, mathematicians began to find deep and surprising connections between these equations and other areas of mathematics: in statistical mechanics and the study of phase transitions, in knot theory and string theory, in number theory and representation theory and the study of symmetries.

Most recently, they’ve appeared in Mourtada’s work on curves and surfaces that are defined by algebraic equations, an area of study called algebraic geometry. Mourtada and his collaborators have spent more than a decade trying to better understand that link, and to exploit it to uncover rafts of brand-new identities that resemble those Ramanujan wrote down.

“It turned out that these kinds of results have basically occurred in almost every branch of mathematics. That’s an amazing thing,” said Ole Warnaar of the University of Queensland in Australia. “It’s not just a happy coincidence. I don’t want to sound religious, but the mathematical god is trying to tell us something.”

owl writes:

https://github.com/RamboRogers/rfhunter

This project is an RF Signal Scanner built using an ESP32, AD8317 RF detector, and various other components. It's designed to detect and measure RF signals in the environment and display the signal strength on an OLED display. It's useful to find hidden cameras, wiretapping devices, and other RF-enabled devices.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/t-mobile-att-oppose-unlocking-rule-claim-locked-phones-are-good-for-users/

T-Mobile and AT&T say US regulators should drop a plan to require unlocking of phones within 60 days of activation, claiming that locking phones to a carrier's network makes it possible to provide cheaper handsets to consumers. "If the Commission mandates a uniform unlocking policy, it is consumers—not providers—who stand to lose the most," T-Mobile alleged in an October 17 filing with the Federal Communications Commission.

[...] T-Mobile claims that with a 60-day unlocking rule, "consumers risk losing access to the benefits of free or heavily subsidized handsets because the proposal would force providers to reduce the line-up of their most compelling handset offers."

[...] T-Mobile and other carriers are responding to a call for public comments that began after the FCC approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in a 5–0 vote. The FCC is proposing "to require all mobile wireless service providers to unlock handsets 60 days after a consumer's handset is activated with the provider, unless within the 60-day period the service provider determines the handset was purchased through fraud."

[...] T-Mobile's policy says the carrier will only unlock mobile devices on prepaid plans if "at least 365 days... have passed since the device was activated on the T-Mobile network."

"You bought your phone, you should be able to take it to any provider you want," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said when the FCC proposed the rule. "Some providers already operate this way. Others do not. In fact, some have recently increased the time their customers must wait until they can unlock their device by as much as 100 percent."

[...] AT&T enables unlocking of paid-off phones after 60 days for postpaid users and after six months for prepaid users. AT&T lodged similar complaints as T-Mobile [...] In an October 2 filing, Verizon said it supports "a uniform approach to handset unlocking that allows all wireless providers to lock wireless handsets for a reasonable period of time to limit fraud and to enable device subsidies, followed by automatic unlocking absent evidence of fraud."

The public interest groups also note that unlocked handsets "facilitate a robust secondary market for used devices, providing consumers with more affordable options," the NPRM said.

[...] The Supreme Court recently overturned the 40-year-old Chevron precedent that gave agencies like the FCC judicial deference when interpreting ambiguous laws. The end of Chevron makes it harder for agencies to issue regulations without explicit authorization from Congress. This is a potential problem for the FCC in its fight to revive net neutrality rules, which are currently blocked by a court order pending the outcome of litigation.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Scientists in China have created a mind-bogglingly powerful resistive magnet that has officially broken the world record by sustaining an incredible 42.02 tesla. That is over 800,000 times stronger than the magnetic field produced by Earth itself, which has a flux density of about 50 microtesla.

The new record was set on September 22 at the Steady High Magnetic Field Facility (SHMFF) in Hefei, narrowly edging out the previous record of 41.4 tesla held by another resistive magnet at the National High Magnetic Field Lab in Florida since 2017.

As for why scientists are so determined to push the limits of magnetism, physicist Joachim Wosnitza from Germany's Dresden lab explained that it opens up all kinds of bizarre new realms of physics to explore. Essentially, the stronger the magnetism, the greater the chances of discovering new states of matter.

Another physicist noted that high magnetism allows scientists to engineer and manipulate entirely new phases of matter that simply don't exist under normal conditions. Each additional tesla achieved also makes instruments exponentially more sensitive for detecting faint phenomena.

The SHMFF's new champion is available for international researchers to test on advanced materials like superconductors.

The only drawback of such resistive magnetic systems is that they are real power hogs. The SHMFF's creation consumed a staggering 32.3 megawatts to achieve that record. However, scientists continue to use them because they can sustain high magnetic fields much longer than their newer superconducting counterparts, which eventually reach their limits. The older magnets can also be ramped up quickly.

Nonetheless, the enormous power requirements are a significant problem. Therefore, teams like those at the SHMFF are also working on hybrid and fully superconducting designs that could achieve extreme strengths while consuming much less energy.

This is not to say that hybrid or superconducting designs are less powerful than resistive magnetic systems. In fact, China debuted a hybrid resistive/superconducting magnet in 2022 that achieved a 45.22 tesla field.

On the other side of the world, the US National Lab's mini superconducting prototype managed a brief 45.5 tesla burst back in 2019. However, making these new low-power systems reliable and affordable – while also keeping them cool – remains a major technical challenge, underscoring the continued need for resistive magnets.

Original Submission

Over the coming days and weeks we will be switching servers from Linode to our own hardware. The first switch will take place tomorrow. This will also require some DNS changes but you just keep using the same URLs that you are using today. Other than that services should look and behave exactly as they do now. There may well be minor disruptions to connections and we ask you to please bear with us if they occur. There will be pauses of a day or more in between each service being switched over, while we continue to monitor that everything is working as expected.

Moving the data from a live server to a new server means that there will be a finite time between making a backup and installing it on the new server. The site will indicate that maintenance is being carried out. That implies that posts made during this interval will be lost. The process will begin around 1600 UTC on Monday 28 October. We will attempt to make the switch over as quickly as possible and there should always be a live server online. If you lose access to the site completely remember that you can still contact us via email ('nickname' [@] soylentnews.org), on IRC, or by shouting VERY loudly.

If your comment is lost please do not believe those in the community who will no doubt claim that comments are being intentionally deleted. They are not (unless you are one of our small number of persistent spammers).

Once each switch is completed I would hope that we can inform you immediately. However, that might not always be possible - everyone has to sleep sometime! Please make any observations regarding problems, or even compliments if the system is responding better than before, in the comments for this Meta. However, our testing so far indicates that the new servers are more responsive than the existing servers but of course they have not yet been placed under quite the same load.

UPDATE: You should all be accessing the new server. Please let us know if you experience any problems. A big thank-you to kolie!.

looorg writes:

https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2024/digital-art-day-auction-2/a-i-god-portrait-of-alan-turing
https://www.dw.com/en/portrait-by-robot-to-be-sold-at-sothebys-in-world-first/a-70508473

For the first time ever, a well-known auction house is selling an artwork that was painted by a robot. Sotheby's will be auctioning off the portrait of scientist Alan Turing and it could fetch as much as £150,000.

The large-scale artwork is entitled "AI God" and was " first exhibited at the United Nations in May 2024 as part of a five paneled Polyptych," Sotheby's said on its homepage.

He said the work's "muted tones and broken facial planes" seemingly suggested "the struggles Turing warned we will face when it comes to managing AI." Ai-Da's works were "ethereal and haunting" and "continue to question where the power of AI will take us, and the global race to harness its power."

What will the starving Robot AI artist do with the money? Pay the electricity bill? Eat more bits? Or will the human manager take a 100% cut?

The ultra-realistic robot is designed to resemble a human female with a face, large eyes and a brown wig. The robot works by deploying AI algorithms and has cameras in its eyes, as well as bionic hands.

Ultra-realistic? Looks more like someone got lost in the uncanny valley, or got very poor taste in women. It's apparently important to note that it is a (or resembles) human female. Not one of those disgusting manbots artistic AI fueled robots. How does female robots differ from male robots anyway? 0s or 1s ?

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Since it was founded nearly two decades ago, 23andMe has grown into one of the largest biotechnology companies in the world. Millions of people have used its simple genetic testing service, which involves ordering a saliva test, spitting into a tube, and sending it back to the company for a detailed DNA analysis.

But now the company is on the brink of bankruptcy. This has raised concerns about what will happen to the troves of genetic data it has in its possession.

The company's chief executive, Anne Wojcicki, has said she is committed to customer privacy and will "maintain our current privacy policy".

But what can customers of 23andMe themselves do to make sure their highly personal genetic data is protected? And should we be concerned about other companies that also collect our DNA?

[...] 23andMe has had a rapid downfall after the 2021 high of its public listing.

Its value has dropped more than 97%. In 2023, it suffered a major data breach affecting almost seven million users and settled a class action lawsuit for US$30 million.

Last month its seven independent directors resigned amid news the original founder is planning to take the company private once more. The company has never made a profit and is reportedly on the verge of bankruptcy.

What this might mean for its vast stores of genetic data is unclear.

Previously:

• 23andMe Proposes $30 Million Payment for Data Breach
• 23andMe Tells Victims it's Their Fault that Their Data was Breached
• 23andMe: Profiles of 6.9 Million People Hacked
• 23andMe Says Private User Data is Up for Sale After Being Scraped

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Mozilla is reminding Firefox users that a necessary root certificate expires soon and that older browser versions could become a security and usability nightmare in a few months. Starting March 14, 2025, Firefox versions older than 128 (ESR 115.13) containing the expired certificate will likely cause "significant" issues with add-ons, content signing, and streaming of DRM-protected media.

Failing to update Firefox before next March means losing features relying on remote functionality. Many installed add-ons will become disabled, and other systems that require content verification could also break. The issue affects Firefox editions for Android and Windows operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. Those with iPhone or iPad versions of Firefox should be okay.

Mozilla's FAQs explain that a root certificate authenticates browser content as trusted. When a certificate expires, Firefox cannot verify content anymore. The newest versions of Firefox and other Mozilla software using the same root-of-trust model include a new root certificate that will prevent the expiration issue in March 2025.

Mozilla is likely trying to prevent the chaos experienced by Firefox users in 2019 when an expired certificate suddenly borked many instances of the open-source browser. Today's Firefox market share is much lower than five years ago, but we're still talking about millions of users potentially becoming vulnerable to the expiration issue.

Some add-on developers have expressed concern over how Mozilla is managing the problem. One developer said Firefox should clearly state what could happen on all the affected platforms. Otherwise, disgruntled users could direct their complaints directly to add-on programmers. One-star review bombing campaigns after the certificate expires could also be part of the deal.

Mozilla advises users to update to Firefox 128 on each device with the browser installed, which is the best practice to avoid this and other issues. The latest release always provides significant performance improvements and important security fixes. Mozilla released Firefox 128 and ESR 115.13 on July 9, 2024, so there have been minor incremental updates since then. The most current version is Firefox 131.0.3.

Original Submission

Mykl writes:

As reported previously on SN, McFlurry machines have been at the centre of arguments about Copyright vs the Right to Repair. Now it seems that the US Copyright Office have delivered a victory to McDonalds Franchisees and third parties by allowing them to bypass the Technological Protection Measures (TPM) to repair the devices.

The final rule adopted by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden was based on recommendations made by Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights and director of the US Copyright Office. The ruling came in the ninth triennial proceeding to determine exemptions under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The process provides exemptions for the next three years to "the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works."

"The Register recommends adopting a new exemption covering diagnosis, maintenance, and repair of retail-level commercial food preparation equipment because proponents sufficiently showed, by a preponderance of the evidence, adverse effects on the proposed noninfringing uses of such equipment," the Register's findings said.

Opposition to the change came from McDonalds corporate and the machine manufacturers, Taylor Company, as well as the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America

For those who enjoy a punny good time:

The change should "spark a flurry of third-party repair activity and enable businesses to better serve their customers," Rose said. "While we are disappointed that the Register recommended a narrower exemption than we had proposed, this does not soften our enthusiasm. We will continue to chip away at half-baked laws blocking the right to repair, sprinkling consumer victories as we go. Today's win may not be parfait, but it's still pretty sweet."

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

Station claims it's visionary, ex-employees claim it's cynical; reality appears way more fiscal

A Polish radio station has ditched its on-air talent for AI in what its editor-in-chief calls an experiment on the effect of AI in society, though it looks like a bid to save cash.

OFF Radio Krakow, an online and DAB+ subsidiary of the larger Radio Krakow station, announced this week that it was going all-in on AI, with new shows hosted by a trio of Gen Z AI talking heads, "Emi," "Kuba," and "Alex," all with their own biographies and personalities "created by journalists," according to the station.

Stop us if this sounds familiar: "The content they [the AI hosts] deliver is prepared by real journalists who use artificial intelligence tools for this purpose," OFF editor-in-chief Marcin Pulit wrote in the announcement. "After the text is generated, it is checked and verified by journalists and then processed into sound."

The same goes for written stories on the site, Pulit said, and even musical selections the AI hosts will play during their once-a-week "authorial" music broadcast.

[Source]: The Register

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

Dan Goodin over at Ars Technica is reporting on a company called Babel Street and its Location X program.

From the article:

You likely have never heard of Babel Street or Location X, but chances are good that they know a lot about you and anyone else you know who keeps a phone nearby around the clock.

Reston, Virginia-located Babel Street is the little-known firm behind Location X, a service with the capability to track the locations of hundreds of millions of phone users over sustained periods of time. Ostensibly, Babel Street limits the use of the service to personnel and contractors of US government law enforcement agencies, including state entities. Despite the restriction, an individual working on behalf of a company that helps people remove their personal information from consumer data broker databases recently was able to obtain a two-week free trial by (truthfully) telling Babel Street he was considering performing contracting work for a government agency in the future.

Tracking locations at scale

KrebsOnSecurity, one of five news outlets that obtained access to the data produced during the trial, said that one capability of Location X is the ability to draw a line between two states or other locations—or a shape around a building, street block, or entire city—and see a historical record of Internet-connected devices that traversed those boundaries.
[...]
404 Media, another outlet given access to the data, reported that the trove allowed a reporter to zoom in on the parking lot of an abortion clinic in Florida and observe more than 700 red dots, each representing a phone that had recently visited the clinic. Location X then allowed the reporter to trace the movements of one specific device.

That device—and by extension, the person carrying it—began the journey in mid-June from a residence in Alabama. The person passed by a Lowe's Home Improvement store, drove on a highway, visited a church, crossed into Florida, and finally stopped at the clinic where the phone indicates the person stayed for two hours before leaving and returning to Alabama. The data tracked the phone as having visited the clinic only once.

The technology making this vast data collection possible is, of course, tracking mechanisms built into Android and iOS and the apps that run on those operating systems. By default, Android assigns a unique ad ID to each device and makes it available to any app that has location permissions. iOS, by contrast, keeps its "Identifier for Advertisers" tracker private, but gives each installed app the opportunity to request access to it.

Some apps are given permission to access a phone's location and then sell the device's location to consumer data brokers. The data can also be made available through the web ad ecosystem. While an ad-supported page loads, the advertising network holds an auction in real time to sell a personalized ad to the highest bidder. A key piece of information bidders use to set a price is—you guessed it—the location of the device running the browser. Advertisers generate additional revenue by selling that history to the likes of Location X provider Babel Street.

fleg writes:

From The Guardian...

https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/oct/24/how-one-engineer-beat-the-ban-on-home-computers-in-socialist-yugoslavia

"Very few Yugoslavians had access to computers in the early 1980s: they were mostly the preserve of large institutions or companies. Importing home computers like the Commodore 64 was not only expensive, but also legally impossible, thanks to a law that restricted regular citizens from importing individual goods that were worth more than 50 Deutsche Marks (the Commodore 64 cost over 1,000 Deutsche Marks at launch). Even if someone in Yugoslavia could afford the latest home computers, they would have to resort to smuggling.

In 1983, engineer Vojislav "Voja" Antonić was becoming more and more frustrated with the senseless Yugoslavian import laws.

Antonić was pondering this while on holiday with his wife in Risan in Montenegro in 1983. "I was thinking how would it be possible to make the simplest and cheapest possible computer," says Antonić. "As a way to amuse myself in my free time. That's it. Everyone thinks it is an interesting story, but really I was just bored!" He wondered whether it would be possible to make a computer without a graphics chip – or a "video controller" as they were commonly known at the time.

Instead of having a separate graphics chip, Antonić thought he could use part of the CPU to generate a video signal, and then replicate some of the other video functions using software. It would mean sacrificing processing power, but in principle it was possible, and it would make the computer much cheaper."

And the Galaksija (Galaxy) was born.

Original Submission