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Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/11/43-research-monkeys-on-the-lam-still-playfully-exploring-police-say/

troop of monkeys that broke out of their South Carolina research facility Wednesday and, as of noon Friday, were still "playfully exploring" with their newfound freedom.

In an update Friday, the police department of Yemassee, SC said that the 43 young, female rhesus macaque monkeys are still staying around the perimeter of the Alpha Genesis Primate Research Facility. "The primates are exhibiting calm and playful behavior, which is a positive indication," the department noted.

The fun-loving furballs got free after a caretaker "failed to secure doors" at the facility.

[...] This isn't the first time—or even the second time—Alpha Genesis has had trouble keeping its monkeys under control. In 2018, the US Department of Agriculture fined the company $12,600 for violations between 2014 and 2016 that included four monkey breakouts. In those incidents, a total of 30 monkeys escaped. One was never found.

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NotSanguine writes:

Bloomberg^* is reporting on a UN-backed treaty which could become the global framework for investigating cybercriminals.

From TFA:

The Biden administration plans to support a controversial cybercrime treaty at the United Nations this week despite concerns that it could be misused by authoritarian regimes, according to senior government officials.

The agreement would be the first legally binding UN agreement on cybersecurity and could become a global legal framework for countries to cooperate on preventing and investigating cybercriminals. However, critics fear it could be used by authoritarian states to try to pursue dissidents overseas or collect data from political opponents.

Still, the officials said there are persuasive reasons to support the treaty. For instance, it would advance the criminalization of child sexual-abuse material and nonconsensual spreading of intimate images, they said.
[...]
While the treaty is expected to pass the vote in the UN, it was highly unlikely it would be ratified by the US government unless there was implementation of human-rights controls, the official said.

What say you, Soylentils? "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear?", "We can't let those authoritarian scum further oppress their dissidents!" Something in between?

^*https://archive.ph/HSa0S

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

At the start of September, Transport for London was hit by a major cyber attack. TfL is the public body that moves many of London's human bodies to and from work and play in the capital, and as the attack didn't hit power, signaling, or communications systems, most of the effects went unnoticed by commuters. The organization downplayed the damage done to back office ticketing, billing, and other systems. Everything was in hand.

Not for long. TfL (Transport for London) quickly rowed back on claims that no customer data had been exposed as evidence appeared to the contrary. Customers complained that various ticketing discount schemes and group privileges for students and retirees weren't accessible, and TfL made vague promises to perhaps compensate for this some time in the future if receipts were kept. The official line was, however, that things were basically fine.

Recent reports say otherwise, claiming that the scope of the problem is much wider and the situation more serious than previously understood. A vintage friend of The Register confirmed that he couldn't get his old age travel permit, while TfL's Oyster contactless ticketing system was putting erroneous entries on passenger accounts that could not easily be fixed.

[...] This is not unique to TfL. If you've read The Register for more than a week, you'll know how it goes. Nobody likes to broadcast bad news, and from the British Library to public health services to government organizations, the initial instinct to manage the information about a breach seems stronger than the instinct to manage the systems in the first place. Commercial entities have the same instincts, but can be quite the poster children for regulatory disgorgement. Public sector outfits have the institutional instinct to clam up and ride things out, which their political overseers understand all too well.

This is exactly wrong. There is a case to be made to exact more disclosure from companies that get hit by cybercrime, but also the argument that their responsibilities are limited to themselves, and their customers can leave or lawyer up depending on levels of horror and hurt. Public sector outfits not only have much broader responsibilities to citizens, not customers, but consume state resources that directly affect all our lives. A million spent rebuilding an IT system blown apart by bit burglars is a million not spent keeping people safe, healthy, and free.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Canada has ordered TikTok to shut down its operations in the country, citing unspecified “national security risks” posed by the company and its parent ByteDance. With the move, TikTok will be forced to “wind up” all business in the country, though the Canadian government stopped short of banning the app.

“The government is taking action to address the specific national security risks related to ByteDance Ltd.’s operations in Canada through the establishment of TikTok Technology Canada, Inc,” Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne said in a statement. “The decision was based on the information and evidence collected over the course of the review and on the advice of Canada’s security and intelligence community and other government partners.”

Canada’s crackdown on TikTok follows a “multi-step national security review process” by its intelligence agencies, the government said in a statement. As the CBC points out, the country previously banned the app from official government devices. It also comes several months after the United States passed a law that could ban the app stateside. US lawmakers have also cited national security concerns and the app’s ties to China. TikTok has mounted an extensive legal challenge to the law.

In a statement, a TikTok spokesperson said the company would challenge Canada’s order as well. "Shutting down TikTok’s Canadian offices and destroying hundreds of well-paying local jobs is not in anyone's best interest, and today's shutdown order will do just that,” the spokesperson said. “We will challenge this order in court. The TikTok platform will remain available for creators to find an audience, explore new interests and for businesses to thrive."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The EU has joined US and South Korean officials in expressing concern over a Russian transfer of technology to North Korea in return for military assistance against Ukraine.

"We are closely monitoring what Russia provides to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) in return for its provision of arms and military personnel, including Russia's possible provision of materials and technology to the DPRK in support of Pyongyang's military objectives," warned a joint statement from South Korea's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Cho Tae-yul, and EU officials.

The statement further expressed deep concern over "the possibility for any transfer of nuclear or ballistic missile-related technology to the DPRK."

North Korea is not legally allowed to develop or possess nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles under international agreements. It withdrew as a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 2003, citing national security concerns. The United Nations Security Council has since imposed multiple sanctions on North Korea to prevent the development of its weapons programs.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week that the US estimates there are some 10,000 North Korean soldiers in total in Russia.

Many are receiving training, ranging from UAVs to trench clearing, for the purpose of fighting on the front lines of the war on Ukraine, he added.

[...] "In terms of what the DPRK may be getting in return for its provision of 10,000 troops, that's unknown at this point, but as you look at things, you would guess that technology would be at the top of the list, and that's, again, one of those things that could be and will be destabilizing depending on what kind of technology we're talking about, financial assistance, and you can go down the list," commented US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

South Korea's Minister of Defense, Kim Yong-hyun, said there was no confirmation that North Korea had yet successfully gained technology from Russia, and if it does happen, South Korea "can overcome that through the advanced technology that the alliance has."

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A possible ancient shoreline has been found in the region of Mars explored by the Chinese rover Zhurong, providing further evidence that an ocean may once have covered a vast area of the lowlands in the planet’s northern hemisphere.

The rover landed in southern Utopia Planitia in May 2021 and remained active for almost a year. Researchers studying data from the rover have found hints of an ancient ocean or liquid water as recently as 400,000 years ago.

Now, Bo Wu at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and his colleagues have conducted a comprehensive analysis of the topographic features in the landing area, combining remote sensing data from satellites with observations from the rover.

They say they have found features consistent with the existence of a shoreline in southern Utopia Planitia, including troughs and sediment channels. They also dated and identified the composition of surface deposits in the area. Based on this, the team thinks the ocean existed 3.68 billion years ago, but froze and then disappeared around 260 million years later.

“The findings not only provide further evidence to support the theory of a Martian ocean but also present, for the first time, a discussion on its probable evolutionary scenario,” says Wu.

Journal reference: Scientific Reports DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-75507-w

Original Submission

looorg writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwrr58801yo

Somebody moved UK's oldest satellite, and no-one knows who or why

Launched in 1969, just a few months after humans first set foot on the Moon, Skynet-1A was put high above Africa's east coast to relay communications for British forces.

Almost certainly, it was commanded to fire its thrusters in the mid-1970s to take it westwards. The question is who that was and with what authority and purpose?

"It's still relevant because whoever did move Skynet-1A did us few favours," says space consultant Dr Stuart Eves.

[...] "It's now in what we call a 'gravity well' at 105 degrees West longitude, wandering backwards and forwards like a marble at the bottom of a bowl. And unfortunately this brings it close to other satellite traffic on a regular basis.

"Because it's dead, the risk is it might bump into something, and because it's 'our' satellite we're still responsible for it," he explains.

If it didn't become sentient and moved it self, years before the Terminator movie and Skynet became a thing, then someone else did ... or you know Aliens (possibly not of the movie franchise variety -- I really hope those are not real).

Something something the value of proper documentation?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

At the heart of the energy transition is a metal transition. Wind farms, solar panels, and electric cars require many times more copper, zinc, and nickel than their gas-powered alternatives. They also require more exotic metals with unique properties, known as rare earth elements, which are essential for the magnets that go into things like wind turbines and EV motors.

Today, China dominates the processing of rare earth elements, refining around 60 percent of those materials for the world. With demand for such materials forecasted to skyrocket, the Biden administration has said the situation poses national and economic security threats.

Substantial quantities of rare earth metals are sitting unused in the United States and many other parts of the world today. The catch is they’re mixed with vast quantities of toxic mining waste.

Phoenix Tailings is scaling up a process for harvesting materials, including rare earth metals and nickel, from mining waste. The company uses water and recyclable solvents to collect oxidized metal, then puts the metal into a heated molten salt mixture and applies electricity.

[...] The company expects to produce more than 3,000 tons of the metals by 2026, which would have represented about 7 percent of total U.S. production last year.

Now, with support from the Department of Energy, Phoenix Tailings is expanding the list of metals it can produce and accelerating plans to build a second production facility.

[...] “The key for all of this isn’t just the chemistry, but how everything is linked together, because with rare earths, you have to hit really high purities compared to a conventionally produced metal,” Villalón explains. “As a result, you have to be thinking about the purity of your material the entire way through.”

Villalón says the process is economical compared to conventional production methods, produces no toxic byproducts, and is completely carbon free when renewable energy sources are used for electricity.

The Woburn facility is currently producing several rare earth elements for customers, including neodymium and dysprosium, which are important in magnets. Customers are using the materials for things likewind turbines, electric cars, and defense applications.

[...] “We want to take our knowledge from processing the rare earth metals and slowly move it into other segments,” Villalón explains. “We simply have to refine some of these materials here. There’s no way we can’t. So, what does that look like from a regulatory perspective? How do we create approaches that are economical and environmentally compliant not just now, but 30 years from now?”

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Every day, billions of cells in the human body die thanks to a natural process known as apoptosis. When apoptosis doesn't work by design, cells get cancerous and can cause a life-threatening illness. Now, researchers at Stanford University are working on a novel way to treat, and possibly kill for good, a specific type of cancer.

The researchers' recently published study describes a way to re-activate apoptosis in mutated cells, which would amount to forcing cancer to self-destruct through a bioengineered, bonding molecule.

Gerald Crabtree, one of the study's authors and a professor of development biology, said he had the idea while hiking through Kings Mountain, California, during the pandemic period. The new compound would have to bind two proteins which already exist in the cancerous cells, turning apoptosis back on and making the cancer kill itself.

"We essentially want to have the same kind of specificity that can eliminate 60 billion cells with no bystanders," Crabtree said, so that no cell gets destroyed if it isn't the proper target of this new killing mechanism. The two proteins in question are known as BCL6, an oncogene which suppresses apoptosis-promoting genes in the B-cell lymphoma, and CDK9, an enzyme that catalyzes gene activation instead.

Mutated BCL6 proteins block a signal that should normally bring cancerous cells to activate apoptosis. Traditional, non-destructive cancer treatments have been targeting oncogenes to try and shut the cancer down, while the new study proposes a mechanism to exploit them instead. "You take something that the cancer is addicted to for its survival and you flip the script and make that be the very thing that kills it," Crabtree said.

[...] The team is now testing the molecule on mice affected by diffuse large B-cell lymphomas, to see if the method is effective at killing cancer in living animals. The technique relies on the natural supply of BCL6 and CDK9 in cells, which means it will likely work only on cancerous lymphomas. After testing the new molecule with 859 different types of cancer cells in the lab, the researchers confirmed that it was able to kill only diffuse large cell B-cell lymphoma cells.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl5361

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Claude AI to process secret government data through new Palantir deal:

Anthropic has announced a partnership with Palantir and Amazon Web Services to bring its Claude AI models to unspecified US intelligence and defense agencies. Claude, a family of AI language models similar to those that power ChatGPT, will work within Palantir's platform using AWS hosting to process and analyze data. But some critics have called out the deal as contradictory to Anthropic's widely-publicized "AI safety" aims.

On X, former Google co-head of AI ethics Timnit Gebruwrote of Anthropic's new deal with Palantir, "Look at how they care so much about 'existential risks to humanity.'"

The partnership makes Claude available within Palantir's Impact Level 6 environment (IL6), a defense-accredited system that handles data critical to national security up to the "secret" classification level. This move follows a broader trend of AI companies seeking defense contracts, with Meta offering its Llama models to defense partners and OpenAI pursuing closer ties with the Defense Department.

In a press release, the companies outlined three main tasks for Claude in defense and intelligence settings: performing operations on large volumes of complex data at high speeds, identifying patterns and trends within that data, and streamlining document review and preparation.

While the partnership announcement suggests broad potential for AI-powered intelligence analysis, it states that human officials will retain their decision-making authority in these operations. As a reference point for the technology's capabilities, Palantir reported that one (unnamed) American insurance company used 78 AI agents powered by their platform and Claude to reduce an underwriting process from two weeks to three hours.

The new collaboration builds on Anthropic's earlier integration of Claude into AWS GovCloud, a service built for government cloud computing. Anthropic, which recently began operations in Europe, has been seeking funding at a valuation up to $40 billion. The company has raised $7.6 billion, with Amazon as its primary investor.

owl writes:

https://kevinlynagh.com/calipertron/

Have you ever wished for a 500 Hz, millimeter-precise linear position sensing system? Well you're in luck — all you need is some circuit board, a basic microcontroller, and a wee bit of maths!

Why make calipers?

Electronic calipers are awesome. This $30 pair has served me well for years, reading far more precision than my skills justify:

Such calipers work via capacitive coupling between a PCB on the powered slidey display and a passive PCB "scale" in the stationary spine.

Back in March, I idly wondered if the same working principle could be used for a cheap and cheerful "maker-friendly" positioning system. E.g., slide some passive PCB scales into an aluminum extrusion rail, add a capacitive pickup to the bottom of whatever carriage you've got riding along, and tada — you've got sub-mm closed-loop positioning. All for the cost of some PCB, a few GPIO pins, and some firmware (so free, basically).

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Intel was sued in a federal court in San Jose, California, on Tuesday, based on claims that the chipmaker's 13th and 14th generation desktop processors from 2022 and 2023 are defective.

The plaintiff, Mark Vanvalkenburgh of Orchard Park, New York, purchased an Intel Core i7-13700K from Best Buy in January 2023, according to the complaint [PDF].

"After purchasing the product, Plaintiff learned that the processor was defective, unstable, and crashing at high rates," the complaint claims. "The processor caused issues in his computer, including random screen blackouts and random computer restarts. These issues were not resolved even after he attempted to install a patch issued by Intel for its 13th Generation processors."

The potential class-action lawsuit cites various media reports and social media posts dating back to December 2022 that describe problems with Intel's 13th and 14th generation processors, known as Raptor Lake. These reports document unexplained failures and system instability, as well as a higher-than-expected rate of product returns.

"By late 2022 or early 2023, Intel knew of the defect," the complaint says. "Intel’s Products undergo pre-release and post-release testing. Through these tests, Intel became aware of the defect in the processors."

And because Intel continued making marketing claims touting the speed and performance of its products, with no mention of any defect, the complaint alleges that Intel committed fraud by omission, breached implied warranty, and violated New York General Business Law.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The climate impact of flights taken by the super-rich rose sharply from 2019 to 2023, fuelling calls for a carbon tax on private aviation

Flights taken on private jets should be subject to a carbon tax to curb the runaway growth in carbon emissions from the sector, researchers have said.

Emissions from private aviation jumped 46 per cent between 2019 and 2023, according to analysis of 18.7 million flights by almost 26,000 aircraft.

Flights were mainly for leisure reasons, with 1846 private flights to the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar alone. Other popular destinations were the Cannes Film Festival, the Super Bowl, the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, and the World Economic Forum in Davos. Trips to the south of France, Ibiza and other destinations in Spain peaked during the summer months as travellers jetted in for long weekends of sun.

“A rather small group of very wealthy individuals, because of their lifestyles and investments, is pushing emissions quite quickly up,” says Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University, Sweden.

Alongside colleagues, Gössling used flight tracker data for millions of flights to build a picture of private aviation use around the world.

Flying by private jet is the most polluting way to travel, with a single flight emitting 3.6 tonnes of CO2 on average, equivalent to the annual carbon impact of someone living in Sweden.

Most flights on private jets are short, the analysis found, with almost half of all flights covering a distance less than 500 kilometres. Most were within the US and Europe.

Total emissions from private jets in 2023 were 15.6 megatonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the annual emissions of Tanzania. That is up from 10.7 megatonnes in 2019.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A relatively tiny code change by penguin premier Linus Torvalds is making a measurable improvement to Linux's multithreaded performance.

The code commit has the catchy name of x86/uaccess: Avoid barrier_nospec() in 64-bit copy_from_user() and it's a security tweak intended to counter the types of security holes known as Meltdown flaws and Spectre attacks when they became public in 2018. Unfortunately, these problems haven't gone away. As The Register covered just last month, this type of attack remains current.

The patch is a rewrite of one originally submitted by Red Hat developer Josh Poimboeuf, which Torvalds revised to make faster. "The kernel test robot reports a 2.6 percent improvement in the per_thread_ops benchmark," he wrote in the commit.

Torvalds's version avoids using the barrier_nospec() API, which prevents speculative execution of some machine code. Speculative execution is a feature of modern CPUs that use branch prediction to try to predict what program code will be run before it's needed, so it can be run and the results cached in advance. If the prediction is correct, it saves time; if it isn't, the results are discarded. The snag is that this opens up a particular form of security issue, which boffins have been working on ever since.

Instead, where the copy_from_user() call wouldn't be allowed because of an invalid address, it uses pointer masking to return an address of all 1s.

Defending against these sorts of attacks is a necessary evil. Running web servers and the like is a primary usage of Linux, and such boxes must be locked down against every conceivable attack – even at the cost of disabling performance-enhancing features. It makes servers safer but slower. Torvalds is known for disapproving of such performance-killing measures (to put it mildly).

upstart writes:

AOL's 'You've Got Mail' voice, Elwood Edwards, dies at age 74:

Elwood Edwards, the voice of AOL's "You've Got Mail" greeting, has died at age 74 after a long illness, according to local Ohio news station WKYC, where he was employed for many years.

During a 2016 interview, Edwards recounted how he became the voice of AOL. His wife, who worked at Quantum Computer Services (which later became AOL), heard that the company was looking to add a voice to its software. "I'd been an announcer throughout my entire broadcasting career, and she volunteered me," Edwards said.

In 1989, Edwards recorded the once-ubiquitous phrase, along with "Welcome," "Files done," and "Goodbye" on a cassette tape for just $200. "It started off as a test just to see if it would catch on, and lo and behold, in the mid-90s, it had really caught on."

Since then, Edwards has made appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and an episode of The Simpsons. He was even spotted as an Uber driver.

As a longtime AOL user (yes, I still use AOL to this day), I'm ashamed to admit that I never knew there was a person behind that iconic voice — I thought it was computer-generated. Even now, Edwards' voice will continue to live on in my inbox, which still declares, "You've Got Mail."

Any other long-term AOL users here? What is the oldest bit of software that you use on a regular basis?

Original Submission