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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Two 48-core CPUs are used.

Graviton, a Russia-based server supplier, has announced its first AI and HPC server powered by Russia's own homegrown processors. This device can support up to eight compute GPUs to process artificial intelligence and supercomputer workloads. The vendor doesn't recommend any particular GPUs (though they can be easily guessed), probably because getting them amid sanctions is illegal. Furthermore, whether or not the machine can achieve competitive performance numbers is unclear.

The Graviton S2124B server is based on two undisclosed 48-core CPUs running at 2 GHz and featuring DDR4-3200 memory, according to ServerNews. The basic specification of the processor likely suggests the Baikal Electronics BE-S1000 server-grade chip that packs 48 Arm Cortex-A75 cores and supports 2-way and 4-way symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) configurations. 

This particular version of the BE-S1000 seems to clock the CPU at 500 MHz below its original frequency, which is likely a result of porting its design from TSMC's 16FFC to a different production node at a different foundry. It is also possible that Baikal reduced the operating clocks to increase yields or reduce power consumption.

Dividing the claimed performance numbers by eight, we can determine the GPUs Graviton intends to install in its S2124B machine (in all cases, we'll refer to tensor core performance). Per-accelerator performance numbers — 60 FP64 TFLOPS of compute power for supercomputing and 3340 FP8/INT8 TFLOPS/TOPS performance for AI — point to Nvidia's H100 PCIe GPU. Those who use the S2124B will have to rely on Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem. However, without support from Nvidia, it is unlikely that peak performance will be achieved. Furthermore, considering the CPU is Arm-based and relatively unknown, it remains to be seen how much performance can actually be extracted from these Hopper accelerators.

In addition to two CPUs and eight GPU accelerators, Graviton's S2124B can integrate 12 SATA drives or 12 NVMe U.3 SSDs.

The Graviton S2124B server is currently available for order, with customers also invited to apply for testing opportunities, but its pricing is unknown. Additionally, it is unclear whether Graviton can supply Nvidia H100 GPUs.

"We take pride in consistently offering IT solutions that meet market demands in a timely manner," said Alexander Filchenkov, head of server and network systems at Graviton. "This time, we successfully developed and manufactured servers critical for complex computations using domestic processors. This product represents a significant step in advancing domestic computing technologies and will enable our clients to efficiently address data processing challenges."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Residents of five states will be ringing in the new year with the best gift of all: new privacy rights.

This upcoming January will see consumer data privacy laws that were enacted by state lawmakers in 2023 and 2024 go into effect in Delaware, Iowa, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and New Jersey. It will bring the number of states with active privacy laws up to 13.

The new laws govern how businesses of certain sizes—the size varies by state—handle sensitive consumer information and grant residents of those states various rights to know, correct, and delete the data that businesses hold about them. Here are some of the key provisions in the new suite of laws:

Delaware: Originally passed in 2023, the law applies to people and organizations who, during the preceding calendar year, processed the personal information of 35,000 Delaware residents or processed the personal information of 10,000 Delaware residents and made more than 20 percent of their gross revenue from the sale of personal information.

Unlike many other state privacy laws, it applies to nonprofits and for-profit businesses.

It grants residents the right to know what personal information an organization holds about them, obtain a copy of that information, correct it, and opt out of having that information used for targeted advertising, sold to a third party, or used to make automated decisions with significant legal ramifications.

The law goes into effect January 1.

Iowa: Also passed in 2023, Iowa's law applies to businesses that processed personal information for at least 100,000 residents or that processed information for 25,000 residents and made more than half of their gross revenue from the sale of such data.

It is a narrower, more business-friendly law than many of the other state laws that have taken effect.

While consumers are granted the right to access and delete information a business holds about them and opt out of it being sold to a third party, they are not allowed to correct that information, opt out of its use for targeted advertising, or opt out of it being used to make automated decisions about them.

The law goes into effect January 1.

upstart writes:

US obesity rates drop for 1st time in a decade, with possible help from weight loss medications:

For the first time in over a decade, obesity rates in the United States may finally be heading in the right direction and new weight loss drugs like semaglutide could be part of the reason why.

A new study published Friday in the journal, JAMA Health Forum, found that obesity numbers ticked down slightly from 46% in 2022 to 45.6% in 2023. While only a slight decline, this is the first drop recorded in at least a decade.

"What we're seeing for the first time is that curve is bending and shows a sign of hope for something that was really a threat to American public health for so many years," said study co-author and ABC News contributor John Brownstein, who is also the chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

The study reviewed the body mass index (BMIs), a measure of obesity, of 16.7 million U.S. adults over a 10-year period. The average BMI rose annually to 30.24 -- which is considered obese -- until it plateaued in 2022, then dropped marginally to 30.21 in 2023.

Brownstein and his team noted that women and adults aged 66 to 75 saw the largest decreases in obesity. People living in the South, where they had the highest dispensing rate of weight loss drugs known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, also saw a meaningful decline in obesity.

Semaglutide, which belong to a class of drugs known as GLP-1 agonists, is the active ingredient found in the popular weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy. The U.S. saw a 700% increase in the use of these drugs specifically for weight loss, from 2019 to 2023, according to one Annals of Internal Medicine study. They are also used to treat type 2 diabetes or a combination of diabetes and obesity.

[...] Brownstein said that the growing use of these medications may be helping to reverse obesity trends.

canopic jug writes:

EcoWatch has an article about a new species of pitcher plant discovered in mountains of Borneo. The rims are quite dark red. Nepenthes are a tropical vine which generally grow in very acidic soil and have pitchers dangling from the end of their leaves to capture rainfall and insects. [nitrogen]. The pitchers can occur up in the air, rest on the ground, or even be found slightly underground in various species.

The team noted that the leaves of the plant were unique and that there was long red hair covering the pitcher that was almost the same color as that of the orangutans who live in the area, leading them to name the novel species Nepenthes pongoides, or "resembling orangutan."

After subsequent research, the team discovered that the plant was the largest pitcher that had ever been identified.

See also the full-text, open access article, Sabah's hidden giant: Nepenthes pongoides (Nepenthaceae), a micro-endemic tropical pitcher plant from northern Borneo, in the Australian Journal of Botany.

Apparently the orangutans are quite red there.

Previously:
(2023) Some Carnivorous Plants Evolved Into Toilets And Are Now Winning at Life

[Editor's Comment: Minor correction to content--JR]

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

This flavor of Scorched Earth has been dubbed the Broken Nest.

Elbridge Colby, the nominee for U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, is known to favor the destruction of Taiwan’s chip fabs in the event of a Chinese invasion. As recently as last year, Colby publicly asserted that “destroying TSMC” was imperative if an aggressive PRC attempted to capture these facilities, reports Datacenter Dynamics. Furthermore, the security policy professional asserts that TSMC’s destruction shouldn’t be left to Taiwan’s government or military.

Colby’s particular take on the Scorched Earth strategy has become known as the ‘Broken Nest’ deterrent, a term coined by a U.S. Army College paper in 2021. The full title of the paper is Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan, and though it is 15 pages long, you can understand the deterrent immediately from the title. A key thread throughout the paper is that China has started to find Taiwan more and more attractive as the island’s semiconductor prowess has grown, largely through TSMC's chipmaking abilities.

Would the Chinese Communist Party (mainland China, PRC) care so much about the relatively small earthquake and typhoon-prone island of Taiwan (ROC) if the semicon business were out of the equation? The linked paper thinks not, and Colby has echoed the paper’s central thrusts, repeatedly. Being unequivocal about TSMC’s destruction in the event of a Chinese invasion is thus extremely important in the minds of some policymakers.

“Disabling or destroying TSMC is table stakes if China is taking over Taiwan,” wrote Colby on Twitter/X earlier this year. “Would we be so insane as to allow the world's key semiconductor company fall untouched into the hands of an aggressive PRC?”

Disabling or destroying TSMC is table stakes if China is taking over Taiwan. Would we be so insane as to allow the world's key semiconductor company fall untouched into the hands of an aggressive PRC? Taiwanese should realize that would be *the least* of their problems. https://t.co/Z8qmKxjWe9 href="https://twitter.com/cantworkitout/status/1761514916224139737" data-url="https://twitter.com/cantworkitout/status/1761514916224139737" target="_blank" referrerpolicy="no-referrer-when-downgrade" data-hl-processed="none">February 24, 2024

However, destroying TSMC and other advanced semiconductor facilities might not be easy. China would likely make great efforts to shield these locations from any wider aggression. Moreover, in 2023, we learned that Taiwan’s Minister for National Defense, Chiu Kuo-cheng (邱國正), would not tolerate any U.S. attempts to destroy TSMC in the event of a war with China. If the US and China are in a high-stakes game of chicken, Taiwan isn't (or wasn't) playing.

Colby, who was picked by Trump as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy over the weekend, has some other views that could cause a stir across the Taiwan Strait. A report published by the Taiwan News this week says he would be in favor of pushing Taiwan to increase its defense spending from 2.5 to 5% of GDP. Interestingly, he also recently suggested that the U.S. should prioritize arming Taiwan rather than Ukraine. Europe should do more for its neighbor, he argued.

Original Submission

Undersea Power Cable Connecting Finland And Estonia Experiences Outage Capacity Reduced To 35%

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Sabotage isn’t ruled out yet.

Estlink 2, an undersea power cable connecting Finland and Estonia, has unexpectedly been disrupted at around 12:26 pm local time (10:26 am GMT) on Christmas Day. While Finland Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said that the outage hasn’t affected the country’s power supply, Reuters said that it did reduce the availability capacity between the two countries to 358 megawatts from its designed 1,106-megawatt installed capacity. The incident comes after the suspected sabotage of two undersea internet cables that connect Finland and Sweden to the rest Europe.

At the time of the incident, some 658 megawatts of power have been flowing from Finland to Estonia, says Finnish national electricity transmission operator Fingrid. Estonia’s electricity transmission operator Elering has also acknowledged the incident but is yet to report any disruption in its electrical supply.

There are two undersea power cables between Finland and Estonia—Estlink 1, which is west of Helsinki and Tallinna and has a capacity of 350 megawatts, and Estlink 2, which lies east of both cities and has a larger capacity of 650 megawatts. Finnish public broadcaster Yle says that Estlink 2 was unserviceable for several months earlier this year as it was undergoing maintenance, but the connection has since been restored in September. Because of this, Fingrid Operations Manager Arto Pahkin said that action by external forces could not be discounted.

“The possibility of sabotage cannot be ruled out. However, we are examining the situation as a whole and will provide information once the cause is identified,” says Pahkin. He also said, “An investigation into the incident has been initiated.” Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo also weighed in on the matter, saying on X (formerly Twitter) (machine translated), “Authorities are still on standby over Christmas and are investigating the matter.”

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Few things seem to push government officials to become officious faster than the mild irritation of people making a slight mockery of government machinery. In the grand scheme of things, the scofflawishness is almost imperceptible. But it’s the scoffing part that bothers these officious entities the most. And that is almost always greeted with a pettiness inversely proportionate to the original acts that put these particularly irritating burrs under the government’s saddle.

And so it is here, in the case of artist Morry Kolman, which has the possibility of turning into The State vs. Morry Kolman. As Samantha Cole explains for 404 Media, Kolman took publicly available information and added even more publicly available information to turn New York City’s traffic cameras into ad hoc selfie stations.

The locations of the cameras are already known and people can access the feeds through the NYC Dept. of Transportation site. The only thing Kolman added was instructions on how to use the cameras to capture photos on demand of anyone within range of the camera.

This apparently bothered the NYC DOT so much it decided to send Kolman a half-assed cease-and-desist letter[.]

[...] Kolman has responded appropriately. He acquired a 25-foot window washing pole, which he used to take a photo of the C&D letter sent by the city, as well as to hoist a mirror to camera-level to obtain a traffic cam “selfie” — both of which were featured in a recent Miami art exhibition.

[...] But it’s no longer just a New York City problem. Kolman has provided code that enables other users to upload/link to traffic cam location data, which means this is starting to spread across the nation.

Minneapolis, Minnesota has entered the chat. So have sizable portions of the upper east coast and the state of Georgia

The NYC government is still free to criminally charge selfie-takers for, I don’t know… aggravated jaywalking? But it doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on when it comes to threatening people for providing the public with access to data the city and its DOT already have made publicly accessible. That this particular use of that data may be ill-advised doesn’t make it a violation of the DOT site’s terms of use. The only thing the city has done here is provide national advertising for a site that had flown well under the radar right up until the NYC government decided to make an issue of it.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Developer Niels Provos has a short guide on building your own generative AI search engine using Python and PlanAI:

PlanAI is an open-source Python framework that simplifies building complex AI workflows. In this tutorial, we’ll implement a generative AI search engine similar to Perplexity using PlanAI’s task-based architecture and integrations.

This tutorial is aimed at developers with a basic understanding of Python and general familiarity with AI concepts. We’ll be building a search engine that can answer complex questions by synthesizing information from multiple web sources. It’s “Perplexity-style” in that it provides a concise, AI-generated answer along with cited sources, much like the search engine Perplexity.ai. PlanAI makes building this type of application much easier by handling the complexities of task dependencies, data flow, caching, and integrating with various Large Language Models (LLMs). It even allows for human-in-the-loop input when automated methods fail, making it robust for real-world scenarios.

He goes over the prerequisite skills and tools, gives an overview of the architecture, and then walks through the steps with code examples.

The result is a search engine build from a Large Language Model (LLM)

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

This week's hero we'll Regomize as "Trey" because back in the first decade of this millennium he was working for one of the many startup telcos trying to cash in on 3G. (Sadly, he tells Who, Me? it was not one of the ones that succeeded.)

Trey worked on the platforms and services team, which created and maintained apps for internal users and customers. Among his responsibilities was working with external service providers, such as a payment provider, an identity services outfit, and bulk SMS handler.

One day, Trey noticed the payments gateway misbehaving, so he wrote a piece of software that sent it a test transaction, checked it had worked, then repeated the process five minutes later.

Another experiment saw him write a demo app that automated payments, using SMS as prompts.

The app had its own syntax for commands. In theory, the message “Credit 5” would send that sum to an account, and so on.

Trey showed the automated payments applications to the head of his department, who was well pleased – so pleased he asked for it to be deployed immediately.

Oh yeah, immediate deployment. That never goes wrong, right?

Wrong. It turns out Trey's little demo had exactly three bugs in it that had not been spotted in his limited testing.

[...] When he arrived at work the next morning, there were some very serious faces – including a security team – waiting to greet him and find out what sort of fraud he thought he was trying to pull. The account had amassed a considerable fortune by that stage.

Thankfully the head of department, who had authorized the deployment, came to Trey's rescue and explained the situation. Tragically, though, the balance of the test account was reset to zero.

Ever had a programming error make a fortune appear – or disappear – like magic? Tell us all about it in an email to Who, Me? and we may share your adventure on some future Monday morning.

Before you submit it to them, do any of you Soylentils have stories to share of pushing buggy code to production that failed so quickly?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

US finalizes up to $6.75 billion in chips awards for Samsung, Texas Instruments, Amkor:

The U.S. Commerce Department said on Friday it was finalizing an award of up to $4.745 billion to South Korea's Samsung Electronics and up to $1.61 billion for Texas Instruments to expand chip production.

The department also finalized an award of up to $407 million to help fund Amkor Technology's planned $2 billion advanced semiconductor packaging facility in Arizona, which is set to be the largest of its kind in the U.S.

The Samsung award is about $1.7 billion smaller than the preliminary award announced in April of up to $6.4 billion and reflects its revised smaller investment plans, the department said.

A Commerce spokesperson said the department "changed this award to align with market conditions and the scope of the investment the company is making."

[...] Texas Instruments has pledged to invest more than $18 billion through 2029 in two new factories in Texas and one in Utah, which are expected to create 2,000 manufacturing jobs. The company is getting $900 million for its Texas operations and $700 million.

Amkor's Arizona plant when fully operational will pet a nearby Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC facility.

Amkor CEO Giel Rutten said the facility "will serve as a critical cornerstone in establishing a robust semiconductor manufacturing supply chain within the United States."

Congress in August 2022 approved a $39 billion subsidy program for U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and related components along with $75 billion in government lending authority.

Last month, Commerce finalized an award of up to $7.86 billion for Intel down from $8.5 billion announced in March after the California-based chips maker won a separate $3 billion award from the Pentagon.

Commerce has now finalized the largest awards it offered earlier this year, including this week, finalizing up to $458 million for SK Hynix in Indiana. In total, Commerce has finalized over $33 billion of the over $36 billion in proposed incentives funding.

"With this investment in Samsung, the U.S. is now officially the only country on the planet that is home to all five leading-edge semiconductor manufacturers," said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The numbers confirm what many of us have long suspected — that Twitter wasn't worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic:

A lot of people threaten to leave Twitter. Not many of them have actually done it.

This was true even before Elon Musk's purchase of the platform a year ago. But the parade of calamities since — cutting back on moderation, unplugging servers, reinstating banned accounts, replacing verified check marks with paid subscription badges, throttling access to news sites, blaming the Anti-Defamation League for a decline in advertising — has made stepping away more appealing, either because the timeline is toxic or because the site simply doesn't function the way it used to.

Last April, the company gave NPR a reason to quit — it labeled the network "U.S. state-affiliated media," a designation that was at odds with Twitter's own definition of the term. NPR stopped posting from its account on April 4. A week later, it posted its last update — a series of tweets directing users to NPR's newsletters, app, and other social media accounts. Many member stations across the country, including KUOW in Seattle, LAist in Los Angeles, and Minnesota Public Radio, followed suit.

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR's main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, "the platform's algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform," the memo says.

There's one view of these numbers that confirms what many of us in news have long suspected — that Twitter wasn't worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic. "It made up so little of our web traffic, such a marginal amount," says Gabe Rosenberg, audience editor for KCUR in Kansas City, which stopped posting to Twitter at the same time as NPR. But Twitter wasn't just about clicks. Posting was table stakes for building reputation and credibility, either as a news outlet or as an individual journalist. To be on Twitter was to be part of a conversation, and that conversation could inform stories or supply sources. During protests, especially, Twitter was an indispensable tool for following organizers and on-the-ground developments, as well as for communicating to the wider public. This kind of connection is hard to give up, but it's not impossible to replace.

[...] These strategies move publishers further away from seeing social media as a source of clicks. This could be a risky pivot away from traffic sources, given that NPR and many member stations have laid off staff or made other cuts due to declining revenues. But the social media clickthrough audience has never been guaranteed; a Facebook algorithm change this year also tanked traffic to news sites. Instead, recognizing that social media is not a key to clicks seems like a correction to years of chasing traffic through outside platforms.

upstart writes:

The Water on Earth Might Have Been Delivered From Space by Comets:

Comets may have been potential sources of water for early Earth, researchers said this week.

When Earth formed around 4.6 billion years ago, some water likely existed in that gas and dust — though much of it would have been vaporized by the sun's intense heat. How Earth got so much liquid water remains a source of debate, but research has shown some came through volcanic vapor that became rain.

There is also new evidence that a substantial portion of Earth's oceans came from ice and minerals on asteroids — and maybe comets — that crashed into Earth. Measurements of Jupiter-family comets, controlled by the planet's gravitational effects, have shown a strong link between their water and Earth's based on a key molecular signature.

NASA says its scientists found that water on Jupiter-family Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, the first comet to be orbited and landed upon by robotic spacecraft from Earth, had a similar molecular signature to the water in Earth's oceans and that cometary dust infects the interpretation of spacecraft measurements.

These results, the agency said, contradict some recent research. In 2014, the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to the comet analyzed water measurements, finding the highest concentration of deuterium on it compared to of any other comet - and about three times more deuterium than there is in Earth's oceans.

Deuterium is a rare type of the element hydrogen, and the molecular signature is its ratio to regular hydrogen in the water of any object. The ratio helps researchers figure out where the object was formed, and water with deuterium is more likely to form in cold environments. There are 33 grams of deuterium in every cubic meter of seawater.

"It was a big surprise and it made us rethink everything," Kathleen Mandt, planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement.

That research might now be incorrect based on the new findings after the robot spacecraft landed on the comet and scientists analyzed the findings. Mandt led the new research that was published last month in the journal Science Advances.

Measurements of deuterium in the last couple of decades in the water vapor of other Jupiter-family comets had shown similar levels to Earth's water.

"It was really starting to look like these comets played a major role in delivering water to Earth," said Mandt.

Journal Reference: Kathleen E. Mandt et al., A nearly terrestrial D/H for comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Sci. Adv. 10, eadp2191(2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adp2191

Original Submission

SAE is running this https://www.sae.org/news/2024/11/refrigerant-fight story about near-term changes in the working fluid used in car air conditioning systems. Your boomer submitter remembers when Freon/R-12 was universal. By the 1990s R-134a was the standard, more recently followed by much lower global warming potential (GWP) gas R-1234yf which is nearly universal at present. However,

The EU is currently revisiting R-1234yf emissions rules and may ban the substance in a few years. In the U.S., the EPA stands by its use.
[...]
But does R-1234yf also pose serious health problems when it degrades into the environment? Chemours defended its product vigorously to SAE Media, claiming that it "delivers a 99% reduction in global warming potential versus the incumbent refrigerant [R-134a], advancing global climate targets without compromising performance." But concerns remain.

A 2021 study from the University of Bristol found that both R-134a and R-1234yf result in emissions of organic trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), but the latter is much worse in that regard. The study found that changing from one chemical to the other caused a "33-fold increase of the global burden of TFA, from an annual value of 65 tons formed from the 2015 emissions of 134a to a value of 2,200 tons formed from an equivalent emission of 1234yf."
[...]
The EPA [USA] declared R-134a "unacceptable" for new vehicles as of model year 2021 but has not taken any action against R-1234yf and does not classify it as an environmentally persistent per- and polyfluorinated substance (PFAS) chemical. A study from consulting firm Ducker Carlisle, however, said that "many OEMs and thermal-management suppliers anticipate that the EU will implement a regulation banning R-1234yf by 2030." A proposal that would include it on a list of banned chemicals is under review at the European Chemical Agency, the report said.

After an interesting discussion, the end game is summarized and it appears that large molecule fluids ( are on the way out...to be replaced by either propane (aka R-290) or CO2 (R-744). This will come at the cost of larger, more expensive air conditioning systems--one estimate is an additional Euro300 or USD330 to the manufacturing cost (more in the purchase price of the car).

A quick search for...
      is r12 better than r134a
...turns up many diy sites that favor the older, ozone-killing R-12 in terms of air conditioner performance in really hot weather. Yet another instance of the tragedy of the commons.

For reference, https://www.360quadrants.com/chemicals/refrigerants has an overview of refrigerant manufacturers and a wider look at the options in this 6+ billion dollar market.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A 4,000-year-old murder mystery began with a massacre in what’s now southwestern England. Then came dismemberment, possibly accompanied by cannibalism.

At least 37 men, women and children suffered this violent fate, ending up dumped into a 15-meter-deep natural shaft by unknown attackers, say archaeologist Rick Schulting of the University of Oxford and colleagues. The perpetrators also threw butchered parts of cattle and other domestic and wild animals into the shaft, the researchers report December 16 in Antiquity.

Motives for the gruesome Early Bronze Age event remain murky. No weapons or any other possible clues to attackers’ identity have turned up.

In Britain, the Early Bronze Age ran from about 2200 B.C. to 1500 B.C. “There has been no [previous] indication of violence on this scale in Britain at that time, both regarding the number of victims and the way in which they were treated after death,” Schulting says.

[...] Schulting’s team analyzed more than 3,000 human bones and bone fragments excavated in the 1970s and 1980s at a British site called Charterhouse Warren. Radiocarbon dates indicate that human and nonhuman remains were deposited in a single event between around 4,200 and 4,000 years ago, the scientists say.

Diet-related chemicals in the bones suggest that most victims grew up near Charterhouse Warren.

Nearly half of 20 recovered skulls displayed fatal wounds caused by being struck with weapons such as wooden clubs. Victims showed no skeletal signs of a fight, suggesting that they may have been taken as captives before the attack or killed during a surprise raid.

A cycle of escalating revenge killings between nearby communities might have created enough antagonism to trigger the ancient British massacre, Schulting speculates. Revenge killings have accounted for high homicide rates in some modern hunter-gatherer societies (SN: 7/18/13).

Signs of possible cannibalism at Charterhouse Warren consist of tool incisions on leg bones where flesh was removed, fractures at the ends of long bones linked to marrow removal and human chew marks on foot and hand bones and ribs.

Journal Reference: R.J. Schulting et al. ‘The darker angels of our nature’: Early Bronze Age butchered human remains from Charterhouse Warren, Somerset, UK. Antiquity. Published December 16, 2024. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.180. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2024.180

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Web Hacking Service 'Araneida' Tied to Turkish IT Firm:

Cybercriminals are selling hundreds of thousands of credential sets stolen with the help of a cracked version of Acunetix, a powerful commercial web app vulnerability scanner, new research finds. The cracked software is being resold as a cloud-based attack tool by at least two different services, one of which KrebsOnSecurity traced to an information technology firm based in Turkey.

Cyber threat analysts at Silent Push said they recently received reports from a partner organization that identified an aggressive scanning effort against their website using an Internet address previously associated with a campaign by FIN7, a notorious Russia-based hacking group.

But on closer inspection they discovered the address contained an HTML title of "Araneida Customer Panel," and found they could search on that text string to find dozens of unique addresses hosting the same service.

It soon became apparent that Araneida was being resold as a cloud-based service using a cracked version of Acunetix, allowing paying customers to conduct offensive reconnaissance on potential target websites, scrape user data, and find vulnerabilities for exploitation.

Silent Push also learned Araneida bundles its service with a robust proxy offering, so that customer scans appear to come from Internet addresses that are randomly selected from a large pool of available traffic relays.

The makers of Acunetix, Texas-based application security vendor Invicti Security, confirmed Silent Push's findings, saying someone had figured out how to crack the free trial version of the software so that it runs without a valid license key.

"We have been playing cat and mouse for a while with these guys," said Matt Sciberras, chief information security officer at Invicti.

[...] Silent Push notes that the website where Araneida is being sold — araneida[.]co — first came online in February 2023. But a review of this Araneida nickname on the cybercrime forums shows they have been active in the criminal hacking scene since at least 2018.

[...] Researchers at Silent Push say despite Araneida using a seemingly endless supply of proxies to mask the true location of its users, it is a fairly "noisy" scanner that will kick off a large volume of requests to various API endpoints, and make requests to random URLs associated with different content management systems.

What's more, the cracked version of Acunetix being resold to cybercriminals invokes legacy Acunetix SSL certificates on active control panels, which Silent Push says provides a solid pivot for finding some of this infrastructure, particularly from the Chinese threat actors.

Further reading: Silent Push's research on Araneida Scanner.

Original Submission