SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A judge based in Oakland, California has ruled that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg cannot be held personally liable in 25 separate lawsuits alleging harm caused by social media.

On 7 November, US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected accusations that Zuckerberg acted to conceal from child users the mental health risks of using Facebook and Instagram, which both come under the parent organisation Meta.

She submitted her decision via a 10-page filing, according to Business Insider.

The plaintiffs in the case claimed that Zuckerberg ignored a number of repeated internal warnings about the mental health risks posed by his platforms to young users and that he publicly downplayed them.

[...] The plaintiffs brought claims under the laws of 13 states: Wisconsin, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland.

Explaining her decision, Gonzalez Rogers said that control of corporate activity alone is not enough to establish liability on the part of Zuckerberg.

[...] Meta has been accused of failing to protect its users for some time now. In 2021, whistleblower Frances Haugen shared internal research from the company, which became known as the Facebook Files. One article about these files claimed that Meta had internal research that showed Instagram to be damaging to the mental health and wellbeing of teenage girls.

And last year, another whistleblower – Arturo Béjar – spoke out against the company’s practices, with claims that the tech giant is aware of the harm teenagers face on its platforms but has failed to act.

At the time, Béjar said the platform opted to give users “placebo” tools that fail to address issues such as teenagers seeing harmful content, having their mental health impacted and receiving “unwanted sexual advances” on Instagram.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Waiting for each part of a 3D-printed project to finish, taking it out of the printer, and then installing it on location can be tedious for multi-part projects. What if there was a way for your printer to print its creation exactly where you needed it? That's the promise of MobiPrint, a new 3D printing robot that can move around a room, printing designs directly onto the floor.

MobiPrint, designed by Daniel Campos Zamora at the University of Washington, consists of a modified off-the-shelf 3D printer atop a home vacuum robot. First it autonomously maps its space---be it a room, a hallway, or an entire floor of a house. Users can then choose from a prebuilt library or upload their own design to be printed anywhere in the mapped area. The robot then traverses the room and prints the design.

[...] Campos Zamora and his team started with a Roborock S5 vacuum robot and installed firmware that allowed it to communicate with the open source program Valetudo. Valetudo disconnects personal robots from their manufacturer's cloud, connecting them to a local server instead. Data collected by the robot, such as environmental mapping, movement tracking, and path planning, can all be observed locally, enabling users to see the robot's LIDAR-created map.

Campos Zamora built a layer of software that connects the robot's perception of its environment to the 3D printer's print commands. The printer, a modified Prusa Mini+, can print on carpet, hardwood, and vinyl, with maximum printing dimensions of 180 by 180 by 65 millimeters. The robot has printed pet food bowls, signage, and accessibility markers as sample objects.

[...] We had to step back and build this entirely different thing, using the environment as a design element. We asked: how do you integrate the real world environment into the design process, and then what kind of things can you print out in the world? That's how this printer was born.

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

BleepingComputer is reporting that D-Link will not fix security issues associated with CVE 2024-10194 on up to 60,000 of its older NAS devices.

From the article:

More than 60,000 D-Link network-attached storage devices that have reached end-of-life are vulnerable to a command injection vulnerability with a publicly available exploit.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-10914, has a critical 9.2 severity score and is present in the 'cgi_user_add' command where the name parameter is insufficiently sanitized.

An unauthenticated attacker could exploit it to inject arbitrary shell commands by sending specially crafted HTTP GET requests to the devices.

The flaw impacts multiple models of D-Link network-attached storage (NAS) devices that are commonly used by small businesses:

• DNS-320 Version 1.00

• DNS-320LW Version 1.01.0914.2012

• DNS-325 Version 1.01, Version 1.02

• DNS-340L Version 1.08

In a technical write-up that provides exploit details, security researcher Netsecfish says that leveraging the vulnerability requires sending "a crafted HTTP GET request to the NAS device with malicious input in the name parameter."

curl "http://[Target-IP]/cgi-bin/account_mgr.cgi cmd=cgi_user_add&name=%27;<INJECTED_SHELL_COMMAND>;%27"

"This curl request constructs a URL that triggers the cgi_user_add command with a name parameter that includes an injected shell command," the researcher explains.
[...]
In a security bulletin today, D-Link has confirmed that a fix for CVE-2024-10914 is not coming and the vendor recommends that users retire vulnerable products.

If that is not possible at the moment, users should at least isolate them from the public internet or place them under stricter access conditions.

Is this the appropriate way for D-Link to handle this? When told that a previously discovered (the existence of which has previously been disclosed to them) vulnerability will be made public, notify the world that the affected devices are "end-of-life" and "end-of-service"?

Do any Soylentils have one of the affected devices? (If so, please place your bank/credit/loan account details on those devices and provide us with IP addresses. Thanks!)

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

US-based glass manufacturer Corning is the company behind Gorilla Glass, a break-resistant glass used to protect screens that’s used on essentially all of the most popular smartphones. Today, the European Commission announced an investigation into Corning for anti-competitive practices, alleging that the glassmaker is preventing competition through exclusive supply agreements.

According to the press release, Corning requires mobile phone manufacturers to source all or nearly all of their alkali-AS glass from it, and it also grants rebates to these companies if they do so. Additionally, these phone makers must tell Corning if they receive competitive offers from other glass manufacturers. They aren’t allowed to accept these offers unless Corning cannot match or beat the price.

Similarly, Corning has agreements with companies that process raw glass, forcing them to get all or most of their alkali-AS glass from Corning. They also aren’t allowed to challenge Corning patents.

These charges reinforce how aggressive Corning is in defending its dominant position in the smartphone glass screen market. The latest Apple and Android devices, like the Google Pixel 9, usually have Gorilla Glass screens, as they’re scratch-resistant and prevent cracking or breaking. While not indestructible, the glass does hold up well against damage. However, Corning’s market dominance coupled with these practices are enough to get the EU’s attention.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Blood tests have shown that about 7 per cent of workers on dairy farms that had H5N1 outbreaks had antibodies against the disease

There may be more bird flu cases in humans in the US than we previously thought. Health departments in two states took blood tests of workers on dairy farms known to have hosted infected cattle and found that about 7 per cent of them have antibodies for the disease. This included people who never experienced any flu symptoms.

Since March, a bird flu virus known as H5N1 has been circulating in dairy cows across the US. So far, 446 cows in 15 US states have tested positive for the virus. Since April, 44 people in the US have tested positive for H5 – the influenza subtype that includes H5N1. All but one of these cases occurred in workers on H5N1-infected poultry or dairy farms.

To better understand how many farm workers may have contracted the virus, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collaborated with state health departments in Colorado and Michigan to collect blood samples from 115 people working on dairy farms with H5N1-infected cattle. All of the samples were obtained between 15 and 19 days after cows on the farms had tested positive for the virus.

“This is critical because, before this point, the recommendations for [H5N1] testing largely have focused on symptomatic workers,” says Meghan Davis at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. “When workers don’t know that they are infected, they inadvertently may expose other people in their communities to the infection.”

H5N1 is poorly adapted to infecting humans and isn’t known to transmit between people. Still, more than 900 people globally are reported to have had the virus since 2003, roughly half of whom died from it. Each of these infections offers the virus an opportunity to develop mutations that may make it more dangerous to people.

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.

Original Submission

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."

Original Submission

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."

Original Submission

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?”

Original Submission

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.