SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

It appears the bland Martian surface triggered a chain of events that left NASA's Ingenuity helicopter permanently grounded on the red planet.

The helicopter's flying career came to an abrupt end earlier this year when Flight 72 was cut short, and communications were briefly lost. After re-establishing contact, it soon became clear Ingenuity would not be flying again – the rotor blades were damaged, and one was entirely detached.

At the time, the prevailing theory was that the flight ended when Ingenuity's downward-facing camera could not pick out features on the surface. According to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), this is still the most likely scenario for what started a chain of events that left the helicopter crippled.

[...] "Photographs taken after the flight indicate the navigation errors created high horizontal velocities at touchdown," according to JPL. Engineers reckon the most likely scenario is that Ingenuity made a hard landing on the slope of a sand ripple. The sudden pitch and roll exerted stress on the rotor blades past their design limits, and all four snapped at their weakest point. The damage caused vibration in the rotor system, which ripped off one blade entirely.

[...] Engineers are working on follow-ups to Ingenuity. During the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting, Tzanetos shared details on the Mars Chopper rotorcraft, which would be approximately 20 times heavier than Ingenuity and could fly science equipment over Mars, traveling autonomously for up to two miles in a day.

Tzanetos said: "Ingenuity has given us the confidence and data to envision the future of flight at Mars."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Mysterious drones have been swarming the night skies above New Jersey and other nearby states for a month. They have been spotted over several US military sites. They have been videoed over houses and apartment buildings. A swarm was seen following a US Coast Guard rescue boat at the same time that New Jersey police reported 50 drones arriving on land from the ocean. But no one seems to know who is piloting them, or whether it is a coordinated effort.

The incidents have drawn the attention of state governors and legislators, as well as members of the US Congress, and the FBI has launched an investigation, asking for the public to report sightings.

Witnesses describe the drones as being as loud as lawnmowers, with some approaching the size of a small car – significantly larger than a typical quadcopter or multirotor drone that anyone can purchase. “These are not necessarily just small, hobbyist unmanned aerial systems that you can buy for $2000,” says Daniel Gerstein at the RAND Corporation, a think tank in California. “These feel like they have longer range and are more sophisticated than what you can get at a hobby shop.”

[...] Meanwhile in the UK, Vernon Coaker, a defence minister, told Parliament last month that authorities are investigating multiple drone incursions that occurred near several UK military bases starting on 20 November. Those bases support US Air Force squadrons that fly fighter jets, bombers and support aircraft.

“The common theme across all of these cases is that nobody has fully cracked the code on how to find, track and, if need be, take down small drones,” says Arthur Holland Michel, a journalist and author who writes about drones. “The second common theme is that if the person flying the drone is actively trying to avoid being identified, the challenges of countering that drone go through the roof.”

[...] “When it comes to shooting drones down, the most effective measures are often the most dangerous,” says Michel. “We simply can’t have law enforcement departments firing high-powered projectiles into the air, or activating military-grade signal jammers, every time a drone is spotted flying over [New Jersey].”

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://kevinboone.me/dx7.html

The sound of the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer defined 1980s popular music. While the DX7 could, in principle, produce a limitless range of sound textures, few musicians used more than the 32 built-in present sounds. As a result, the sound of the DX7 is immediately recognizable. For me, the theme from the TV show Twin Peaks typifies the DX7 sound but, frankly, you'll be hard-pressed to find a successful album from the mid-80s where you don't hear it. It would be pointless to list the bands and artists that used the DX7 – it would be easier to make a list of the ones that didn't. I'm told that the 'Electric Piano 1' preset alone appeared in over 60% of album releases of 1986.

The original, Mark I DX7 was a huge, uncompromising lump of ironwork, made to be thrown in the back of a van. Its membrane keypad controls were horrible to use, but were good at resisting beer spills. When you turned up for practice with a DX7, everybody knew you meant business.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/12/ai-company-trolls-san-francisco-with-billboards-saying-stop-hiring-humans/

Since the dawn of the generative AI era a few years ago, the march of technology—toward what tech companies hope will replace human intellectual labor—has continuously sparked angst about the future role humans will play in the job market. Will we all be replaced by machines?

A Y-Combinator-backed company called Artisan, which sells customer service and sales workflow software, recently launched a provocative billboard campaign in San Francisco playing on that angst, reports Gizmodo.
[...]
Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack defended the campaign's messaging in an interview with SFGate. "They are somewhat dystopian, but so is AI," he told the outlet in a text message. "The way the world works is changing." In another message he wrote, "We wanted something that would draw eyes—you don't draw eyes with boring messaging."
[...]
Meanwhile, the billboards remain visible throughout San Francisco, quietly fueling existential dread in a city that has already seen a great deal of tension since the pandemic. Some of the billboards feature additional messages, like "Hire Artisans, not humans," and one that plays on angst over remote work: "Artisan's Zoom cameras will never 'not be working' today."

Related articles on SoylentNews:
Robot Performs First Ever Fully Autonomous Dental Surgery on Live Patient - 20240806
Tyler Perry Puts $800 Million Studio Expansion on Hold Because of OpenAI's Sora - 20240225
"AI Took My Job, Literally"—Gizmodo Fires Spanish Staff Amid Switch to AI Translator - 20230906
IBM Pauses Hiring to Onboard AI Instead - 20230503
Voice Actors Say AI is Being Used to Fuel a Nightmarish Harassment Campaign - 20230216
Netflix Stirs Fears by Using AI-Assisted Background Art in Short Anime Film - 20230208
90% of Online Content Could be 'Generated by AI by 2025,' Expert Says - 20230120

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/chuck-e-cheese-animatronics

When I was eight years old, I won a coloring contest that earned me a free birthday party at my hometown Chuck E. Cheese. We don't have any photos from the event because, as my mother recalls, it was absolute mayhem. Kids were running from room to room playing video games and Skee-Ball. The adults couldn't corral anyone for pizza and cake. And then there was the show: The animatronic rat Charles "Entertainment" Cheese and the Pizza Time Players entertained—or terrified—attendees with their songs and corny banter.

That may have been the last time I entered a Chuck E. Cheese pizzeria. And yet, when I heard that the company was phasing out the animatronic bands from all but five locations by the end of this year, I felt a twinge of nostalgia. Much to my surprise, I was truly sad that the moving dolls are being replaced by video screens, dance floors, and trampolines. Consider this my ode to the era of animatronics.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In an exclusive interview with The Verge, Arm CEO Rene Haas shared his perspective on Intel's recent chaos. He also addressed rumors that his $150 billion British semiconductor company may start manufacturing chips rather than just licensing its designs.

Haas expressed some sadness regarding Intel's tumultuous situation. Last week, Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger resigned after failing to stop the company's downturn.

He noted that companies must continually reinvent themselves in the tech industry. Haas believes Intel's core dilemma is deciding whether to remain vertically integrated by designing and manufacturing chips or to split those roles by becoming fabless. Intel has wrestled with this "fork in the road" for the past decade.

Indeed, when running both design and manufacturing wings, chip advancements require heavy investments in infrastructure and a longer time-to-market. Perhaps that's why rivals like AMD have adopted a fabless model, relying on partners such as TSMC for manufacturing to avoid the financial strain of maintaining costly fabs.

Gelsinger had firmly chosen vertical integration when he took the helm in 2021, a strategy Haas felt required 5-10 years. Sadly, Gelsinger resigned in just three. Haas suggested that such a model has its upsides, but he also questioned whether the immense associated costs made it "too big of a hill to climb" for Intel.

In September, Arm had reportedly approached Intel about acquiring its product division, which develops chips for PCs, servers, and networking equipment. Intel turned down the offer. Haas declined to comment on the deal other than to note that he repeatedly urged Gelsinger to license Arm designs to boost Intel's prospects and leverage its manufacturing capacity. However, Gelsinger didn't take that offer.

Haas did not confirm or deny the rumors of Arm getting into manufacturing - perhaps for AI. However, he did say that there are benefits to simultaneously defining the instruction architecture and building the processors. It allows for being closer to the hardware-software interaction and a better understanding of the tradeoffs in chip design. So if Arm did pursue making its own chips, Haas said that integration would be "one of the reasons."

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://newatlas.com/physics/particle-gains-loses-mass-depending-direction/

Scientists have accidentally discovered a particle that has mass when it's traveling in one direction, but no mass while traveling in a different direction. Known as semi-Dirac fermions, particles with this bizarre behavior were first predicted 16 years ago.

The discovery was made in a semi-metal material called ZrSiS, made up of zirconium, silicon and sulfur, while studying the properties of quasiparticles. These emerge from the collective behavior of many particles within a solid material.

"This was totally unexpected," said Yinming Shao, lead author on the study. "We weren't even looking for a semi-Dirac fermion when we started working with this material, but we were seeing signatures we didn't understand – and it turns out we had made the first observation of these wild quasiparticles that sometimes move like they have mass and sometimes move like they have none."

It sounds like an impossible feat – how can something gain and lose mass readily? But it actually comes back to that classic formula that everyone's heard of but many might not understand – E = mc2. This describes the relationship between a particle's energy (E) and mass (m), with the speed of light (c) squared.

According to Einstein's theory of special relativity, nothing that has any mass can reach the speed of light, because it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate it to that speed. But a funny thing happens when you flip that on its head – if a massless particle slows down from the speed of light, it actually gains mass.

And that's what's happening here. When the quasiparticles travel along one dimension inside the ZrSiS crystals, they do so at the speed of light and are therefore massless. But as soon as they try to travel in a different direction, they hit resistance, slow down and gain mass.

"Imagine the particle is a tiny train confined to a network of tracks, which are the material's underlying electronic structure," said Shao. "Now, at certain points the tracks intersect, so our particle train is moving along its fast track, at light speed, but then it hits an intersection and needs to switch to a perpendicular track. Suddenly, it experiences resistance, it has mass. The particles are either all energy or have mass depending on the direction of their movement along the material's 'tracks.'"

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.14.041057

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/12/review-intel-arc-b580-is-a-compelling-if-incredibly-tardy-250-midrange-gpu/

After much anticipation, many delays, and an anticipatory apology tour for its software quality, Intel launched its first Arc GPUs at the end of 2022. There were things to like about the A770 and A750, but buggy drivers, poor performance in older games, and relatively high power use made them difficult to recommend. They were more notable as curiosities than as consumer graphics cards.
[...]
The new Arc B580 card, the first dedicated GPU based on the new "Battlemage" architecture, launches into the exact same "sub-$300 value-for-money" graphics card segment that the A770 and A750 are already stuck in. But it's a major improvement over those cards in just about every way, and Intel has gone a long way toward fixing drivers and other issues that plagued the first Arc cards at launch. If nothing else, the B580 suggests that Intel has some staying power and that the B700-series GPUs could be genuinely exciting if Intel can get one out relatively soon.
[...]
As with the Arc A-series cards, Intel emphatically recommends that resizable BAR be enabled for your motherboard to get optimal performance. This is sometimes called Smart Access Memory or SAM, depending on your board; most AMD AM4 and 8th-gen Intel Core systems should support it after a BIOS update, and newer PCs should mostly have it on by default. Our test system had it enabled for the B580 and for all the other GPUs we tested.
[...]
Intel is explicitly targeting Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 with the Arc B580, a role it fills well for a low starting price. But the B580 is perhaps more damaging to AMD, which positions both of its 7600-series cards (and the remaining 6600-series stuff that's hanging around) in the same cheaper-than-Nvidia-with-caveats niche.
[...]
All of that said, Intel is putting out a great competitor to the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 a year and a half after those cards both launched—and within just a few months of a possible RTX 5060. Intel is selling mid-2023's midrange GPU performance in late 2024. There are actually good arguments for building a budget gaming PC right this minute, before potential Trump-administration tariffs can affect prices or supply chains, but assuming the tech industry can maintain its normal patterns, it would be smartest to wait and see what Nvidia does next.

Related articles on SoylentNews:
Intel Entrance To Graphics Card Market Has Failed - 20241008
Intel's GPU Drivers Now Collect Telemetry, Including 'How You Use Your Computer' - 20230818
Getting AAA Games Working in Linux Sometimes Requires Concealing Your GPU - 20230811
Rumors, Delays, and Early Testing Suggest Intel's Arc GPUs are on Shaky Ground - 20220810
Intel Arc GPUs Could Give Gamers a Reason to Drop Windows 11 for Linux - 20220202
Intel Plans to Launch High-End "Arc" GPUs in Q1 2022 - 20210817

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In Oregon, the Energy Facility Siting Council (EFSC) holds the authority to oversee the development of large-scale energy projects. The council has just given the green light to start construction on the massive Sunstone Solar project, unanimously approving the final permits needed. Pine Gate Renewables, a developer of utility-scale solar and energy storage projects across the US, is building the facility.

Pine Gate CEO Ben Catt noted that gaining approval in Oregon was challenging given the state's rigorous permitting requirements. However, he stated that their team worked diligently with local stakeholders to create a "win-win" situation for the state and the Morrow County community.

One innovative aspect is a $1,000 per acre investment fund that Pine Gate negotiated with agricultural organizations. This county-managed pool will offset any impacts from the solar development. It will also support programs that bolster the long-term viability of Morrow's wheat farming economy.

The project received a nod from Senator Ron Wyden, who highlighted it as a prime example of federal investments he championed in the Inflation Reduction Act. He also praised the Sunstone plan as a key part of the broader nationwide push for similar energy solutions.

With federal incentives and state approvals secured, Pine Gate can now get into the nitty-gritty of engineering, procurement, and phased construction, which kicks off in 2026. The solar farm's output will feed into the Bonneville Power Administration grid.

The US is massively pushing solar energy. An earlier report highlighted that solar alone made up 60 percent of the 20.2 gigawatts of fresh capacity that went online in the first half of 2024. Meanwhile, solar and battery together accounted for 80 percent of all new electricity capacity added during the same period.

Currently, the largest solar project in the US is Edwards & Sanborn Solar and Energy Storage, located in southern Kern County, California. It produces 864 megawatts of solar with 3,287 megawatt-hours of storage capacity.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

'Amazon has a new use for AI: dumping Microsoft Windows:

At the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference Tuesday morning, the company announced a series of new features for Amazon Q Developer, its AI assistant for software development, including one that uses AI to help companies migrate legacy Microsoft .NET applications to Linux.

The move could boost Amazon's cloud business by reducing a major hurdle for customers to move away from data centers and servers running on Microsoft's operating system.

"Customers would love an 'easy button' to get off Windows," said AWS CEO Matt Garman, announcing the initiative on stage here Tuesday morning, along with an array of new products and features across Amazon's cloud business.

Although the AI twist is new, the push to help customers move workloads away from Windows and into Amazon's cloud has been a longstanding quest for AWS, stretching back to current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's past tenure as the leader of the company's cloud unit.

[...] The new Amazon Q .NET-to-Linux feature uses AI agents to examine files designated by a developer for migration, identify software components that need to be upgraded, create a transformation plan, and execute the plan by upgrading code and configuration files, among other steps.

Based on the experience of customers who've been testing the tool, Amazon says AI could reduce the migration process from months to days, and save up to 40% in costs due to the shift away from Microsoft's traditional licensing model.

[...] In addition, the company announced new Amazon Q capabilities that use AI to help developers automatically generate unit tests, keep documentation up-to-date, and provide efficient code reviews. The idea is to remove much of the grunt work from developers' day-to-day work, making Amazon Q more than just a coding assistant.

"We've been taking a very intentional, broad approach," said Adnan Ijaz, director of product management for Amazon Q Developer, in an interview at re:Invent.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/12/eff-speaks-out-court-citizen-journalists

No one gets to abuse copyright to shut down debate. Because of that, we at EFF represent Channel 781, a group of citizen journalists whose YouTube channel was temporarily shut down following copyright infringement claims made by Waltham Community Access Corporation (WCAC). As part of that case, the federal court in Massachusetts heard oral arguments in Channel 781 News v. Waltham Community Access Corporation, a pivotal case for copyright law and digital journalism.

WCAC, Waltham's public access channel, records city council meetings on video. Channel 781, a group of independent journalists, curates clips of those meetings for its YouTube channel, along with original programming, to spark debate on issues like housing policy and real estate development. WCAC sent a series of DMCA takedown notices that accused Channel 781 of copyright infringement, resulting in YouTube deactivating Channel 781's channel just days before a critical municipal election.

Represented by EFF and the law firm Brown Rudnick LLP, Channel 781 sued WCAC for misrepresentations in its DMCA takedown notices. We argued that using clips of government meetings from the government access station to engage in public debate is an obvious fair use under copyright. Also, by excerpting factual recordings and using captions to improve accessibility, the group aims to educate the public, a purpose distinct from WCAC's unannotated broadcasts of hours-long meetings. The lawsuit alleges that WCAC's takedown requests knowingly misrepresented the legality of Channel 781's use, violating Section 512(f) of the DMCA.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tsmc-n2

TSMC described its next generation transistor technology this week at the IEEE International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco. The N2, or 2-nanometer, technology is the semiconductor foundry giant's first foray into a new transistor architecture, called nanosheet or gate-all-around.

Samsung has a process for manufacturing similar devices, and both Intel and TSMC expect to be producing them in 2025.

Compared to TSMC's most advanced process today, N3 (3-nanometer), the new technology offers up to a 15 percent speed up or as much as 30 percent better energy efficiency, while increasing density by 15 percent.

N2 is "the fruit of more than four years of labor," Geoffrey Yeap, TSMC vice president of R&D and advanced technology told engineers at IEDM. Today's transistor, the FinFET, has a vertical fin of silicon at its heart. Nanosheet or gate-all-around transistors have a stack of narrow ribbons of silicon instead.

The difference not only provides better control of the flow of current through the device, it also allows engineers to produce a larger variety of devices, by making wider or narrower nanosheets. FinFETs could only provide that variety by multiplying the number of fins in a device—such as a device with one or two or three fins. But nanosheets give designers the option of gradations in between those, such as the equivalent of 1.5 fins or whatever might suit a particular logic circuit better.

Called Nanoflex, TSMC's tech allows different logic cells built with different nanosheetwidths on the same chip. Logic cells made from narrow devices might make up general logic on the chip, while those with broader nanosheets, capable of driving more current and switching faster, would make up the CPU cores.

The nanosheet's flexibility has a particularly large impact on SRAM, a processor's main on-chip memory. For several generations, this key circuit, made up of 6 transistors, has not been shrinking as fast as other logic. But N2 seems to have broken this streak of scaling stagnation, resulting in what Yeap described as the densest SRAM cell so far: 38 megabits per square millimeter, or an 11 percent boost over the previous technology, N3. N3 only managed a 6 percent boost over its own predecessor. "SRAM harvests the intrinsic gain of going to gate-all-around," says Yeap.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

A pseudononymous developer has begun a work in progress to describe the Terrapin attack against SSH servers for use later in coordinating mitigation efforts across SSH implementations. The Terrapin attack is a prefix truncation attack which breaks the integrity of SSH's secure channel during the initial connection handshake.

Terrapin operates by inserting an IGNORE message into one data stream
(for ease of language, I'll write as if it's always the server->client
one; that one is the higher-value target) during the cleartext phase,
then dropping the first message sent by the server after encryption
starts.  (It has to be the first message, since the MACs include the
sequence number; thus, not dropping the first message will cause its
MAC to fail with overwhelming probability.)  While the Terrapin paper
mentions the possibility of injecting more than one IGNORE and dropping
more than one initial message, it does not describe attempting that,
probably because it would not be useful against the implementations
they were working with.

From a theoretical point of view, this breaks the BPP's intent to
provide integrity protection, since the supposedly-protected data
stream seen by one peer differs from that seen by the other, without
the BPP's checks raising any alarm.

Previously:
(2023) SSH Protects the World's Most Sensitive Networks. It Just Got a Lot Weaker

Original Submission

"ChatGPT" writes:

Google recently unveiled its Willow quantum chip, claiming it achieves "beyond classical computation" by completing a random circuit sampling (RCS) task in under five minutes—a task that would take classical supercomputers an estimated 10 septillion years.

While RCS benchmarks lack practical applications, Google argues they are foundational for assessing quantum capabilities.

More practically, Google tries to make the case that RCS performance should be the metric by which all quantum computers are judged. According to Hartmut Neven, the founder of Google Quantum AI, "it's an entry point. If you can't win on random circuit sampling, you can't win on any other algorithm either." He adds RCS is "now widely used as a standard in the field."

However, other companies, including IBM and Honeywell, instead use a metric called quantum volume to tout their breakthroughs. They claim it points to a more holistic understanding of a machine's capabilities by factoring in how its qubits interact with one another. Unfortunately, you won't find any mention of quantum volume in the spec sheet Google shared for Willow, making comparisons difficult.

The true breakthrough lies in Willow's reduced error rates as more qubits are added, marking progress toward scalable, practical quantum systems. However, critics highlight the absence of comparative metrics like quantum volume, leaving questions about its real-world impact.

Read more here

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Researchers induced bots to ignore their safeguards without exception:

AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and other applications powered by large language models (LLMs) have exploded in popularity, leading a number of companies to explore LLM-driven robots. However, a new study now reveals an automated way to hack into such machines with 100 percent success. By circumventing safety guardrails, researchers could manipulate self-driving systems into colliding with pedestrians and robot dogs into hunting for harmful places to detonate bombs.

[...] The extraordinary ability of LLMs to process text has spurred a number of companies to use the AI systems to help control robots through voice commands, translating prompts from users into code the robots can run. For instance, Boston Dynamics' robot dog Spot, now integrated with OpenAI's ChatGPT, can act as a tour guide. Figure's humanoid robots and Unitree's Go2 robot dog are similarly equipped with ChatGPT.

However, a group of scientists has recently identified a host of security vulnerabilities for LLMs. So-called jailbreaking attacks discover ways to develop prompts that can bypass LLM safeguards and fool the AI systems into generating unwanted content, such as instructions for building bombs, recipes for synthesizing illegal drugs, and guides for defrauding charities.

Previous research into LLM jailbreaking attacks was largely confined to chatbots. Jailbreaking a robot could prove "far more alarming," says Hamed Hassani, an associate professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. For instance, one YouTuber showed that he could get the Thermonator robot dog from Throwflame, which is built on a Go2 platform and is equipped with a flamethrower, to shoot flames at him with a voice command.

Now, the same group of scientists have developed RoboPAIR, an algorithm designed to attack any LLM-controlled robot. In experiments with three different robotic systems—the Go2; the wheeled ChatGPT-powered Clearpath Robotics Jackal; and Nvidia's open-source Dolphins LLM self-driving vehicle simulator. They found that RoboPAIR needed just days to achieve a 100 percent jailbreak rate against all three systems.

"Jailbreaking AI-controlled robots isn't just possible—it's alarmingly easy," says Alexander Robey, currently a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Originally spotted on Schneier on Security.

Original Submission