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upstart writes:

European Union orders X to hand over algorithm documents:

Brussels has ordered Elon Musk to fully disclose recent changes made to recommendations on X, stepping up an investigation into the role of the social media platform in European politics.

The expanded probe by the European Commission, announced on Friday, requires X to hand over internal documents regarding its recommendation algorithm. The Commission also issued a "retention order" for all relevant documents relating to how the algorithm could be amended in future.

In addition, the EU regulator requested access to information on how the social media network moderates and amplifies content.

The move follows complaints from politicians in Germany that X's algorithm is promoting content by the far right ahead of the country's February 23 elections. Musk has come out in favour of Alternative for Germany (AfD), arguing that it will save Europe's largest nation from "economic and cultural collapse." The German domestic intelligence service has designated parts of the AfD as right-wing extremist.

Speaking on Friday, German chancellor Olaf Scholz toughened his language towards the world's richest man, describing Musk's support for the AfD as "completely unacceptable." The party is currently second place in the polls with around 20 percent support, ahead of Scholz's Social Democrats and behind the opposition Christian Democratic Union.

Earlier in the week, Germany's defence ministry and foreign ministry said they were suspending their activity on X, with the defence ministry saying it had become increasingly "unhappy" with the platform.

upstart writes:

'ELIZA,' the world's 1st chatbot, was just resurrected from 60-year-old computer code:

Scientists have just resurrected "ELIZA," the world's first chatbot, from long-lost computer code — and it still works extremely well.

Using dusty printouts from MIT archives, these "software archaeologists" discovered defunct code that had been lost for 60 years and brought it back to life.

ELIZA was developed in the 1960s by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum and named for Eliza Doolittle, the protagonist of the play "Pygmalion," who was taught how to speak like an aristocratic British woman.

As a language model that the user could interact with, ELIZA had a significant impact on today's artificial intelligence (AI), the researchers wrote in a paper posted to the preprint database arXiv Sunday (Jan. 12). The "DOCTOR" script written for ELIZA was programmed to respond to questions as a psychotherapist would. For example, ELIZA would say, "Please tell me your problem." If the user input "Men are all alike," the program would respond, "In what way."

Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA in a now-defunct programming language he invented, called Michigan Algorithm Decoder Symmetric List Processor (MAD-SLIP), but it was almost immediately copied into the language Lisp. With the advent of the early internet, the Lisp version of ELIZA went viral, and the original version became obsolete.

Experts thought the original 420-line ELIZA code was lost until 2021, when study co-author Jeff Shrager, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, and Myles Crowley, an MIT archivist, found it among Weizenbaum's papers.

upstart writes:

Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search:

Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search.

In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to "better protect" Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, without JavaScript, many Google Search features won't work properly and that the quality of search results tends to be degraded.

"Enabling JavaScript allows us to better protect our services and users from bots and evolving forms of abuse and spam," the spokesperson told TechCrunch, "and to provide the most relevant and up-to-date information."

Many major websites rely on JavaScript. According to a 2020 GitHub survey, 95% of sites around the web employ the language in some form. But as users on social media point out, Google's decision to require it could add friction for those who rely on accessibility tools, which can struggle with certain JavaScript implementations.

JavaScript is also prone to security vulnerabilities. In its 2024 annual security survey, tech company Datadog found that around 70% of JavaScript services are vulnerable to one or more "critical" or "high-severity" vulnerabilities introduced by a third-party software library.

The Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that, on average, "fewer than .1%" of searches on Google are done by people who disable JavaScript. That's no small number at Google scale. Google processes around 8.5 billion searches per day, so one can assume that millions of people performing searches through Google aren't using JavaScript.

One of Google's motivations here may be inhibiting third-party tools that give insights into Google Search trends and traffic. According to a post on Search Engine Roundtable on Friday, a number of "rank-checking" tools — tools that indicate how websites are performing in search engines — began experiencing issues with Google Search around the time Google's JavaScript requirement came into force.

The Google spokesperson declined to comment on Search Engine Roundtable's reporting.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A worrying study published last month in Environmental Challenges claims that nearly two-thirds of the Great Salt Lake’s shrinkage is attributable to human use of river water that otherwise would have replenished the lake.

Utah’s Great Salt Lake is a relic of a once-vast lake that occupied the same site during the Ice Age. The lake’s level has fluctuated since measurements of it began in 1847, but it’s about 75 miles (120 kilometers) long by 35 miles (56 km) wide with a maximum depth of 33 feet (10 meters). The Great Salt Lake’s water levels hit a record low in 2021, which was usurped the following year.

According to the recent paper, about 62% of the river water that otherwise would have refilled the lake has instead been used for “anthropogenic consumption.” The research team found that agricultural use cases were responsible for 71% of those human-driven depletions; furthermore, about 80% of the agricultural water is used for crops to feed just under one million cattle.

[...] The researchers proposed a goal of reducing anthropogenic river water consumption in the area by 35% to begin refilling the lake, as well as a detailed breakdown of specific reductions within livestock feed production.

“We find that the most potent solutions would involve a 61% reduction in alfalfa production along with fallowing of 26–55% of grass hay production,” the team wrote, “resulting in reductions of agricultural revenues of US$97 million per year, or 0.04% of the state’s GDP.” The team added that Utah residents could be compensated for their loss of revenue. It’s an easier plan to propose on paper than sell folks on as a reality, but it is a pathway towards recovery for the Great Salt Lake.

As the team added, the lake directly supports 9,000 jobs and $2.5 billion in economic productivity, primarily from mining, recreation, and fishing of brine shrimp. Exposed saline lakebeds (as the Great Salt Lake’s increasingly are with its decreasing water levels) are also associated with dust that can pose health risks due to its effects on the human respiratory system.

For now, the Great Salt Lake's average levels and volume continue to decrease. But the team's research has revealed a specific pain point and suggested ways to reduce the strain on the great—but diminishing—water body.

The elephant in the room that isn't mentioned are all of the data centers in the Salt Lake region. It seems data on their water usage is considered Confidential Business Information and doesn't need to be reported, so much discussion on this gets presented as a farmer-vs-resident issue.

Original Submission

owl writes:

[Ed. note: DVLA == Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency]

https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-services-dont-work-at-night/

Every few months or so, somebody asks on social media why a particular DVLA digital service is turned off over night. Why is it, in the 21st century, a newish online service only operates for some hours of the day? Rather than answering it every time, I've decided to write this post, so I can point people at it in future.

It's also a great case study to show why making government services digitally native can be quite complicated. Unless you're a start up, you're rarely working in a greenfield environment, and have legacy technology and old working practices to contend with. Transforming government services isn't as easy as the tech bros and billionaires make it out to be.

[...] DVLA is around 60 years old and manages driving licences and vehicle records for England, Scotland and Cymru.

At the time, many of DVLA's services - particularly those relating to driving licences were still backed by an old IBM mainframe from the 1980s - fondly known as Drivers-90 (or D90 for short). D90 was your typical mainframe - code written in COBOL using the ADABAS database package. Most data processing happened 'offline' - through batch jobs which ran during an overnight window.

In the early 2000s, there had been an attempt by DVLA's IT suppliers to modernise the systems. They'd designed a new set of systems using Java and WebLogic, with Oracle Databases - which they referred to as the New Systems Landscape (or NSL). To speed up the migration, they'd used tools to automatically convert the code and database structures.

As often happens in large behind-the-scenes IT modernisation projects, this upgrade effort ran out of energy and money, so it never finished. This left a complex infrastructure in place - with some services using the new architecture, some using the mainframe, and some using both at the same time.

[...] It's now 2024 - 10 years on from the launch of the first service. The legacy infrastructure, which really should have been replaced by now, is probably still the reason why the services are still offline overnight.

Is this acceptable? Not really. Is it understandable? Absolutely.

Legacy tech is complicated. It's one of the biggest barriers for organisations undertaking digital transformation.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Intel and AMD engineers have stepped in at the eleventh hour to deal with a code contribution from a Microsoft developer that could have broken Linux 6.13 on some systems.

The change, made in the autumn, was a useful improvement at face value. It was a modification to Linux x86_64 to use large read-only execute (ROX) pages for caching executable pages. The theory was that the alteration would result in increased performance.

However, the code caused problems on some setups and an urgent patch from Intel's Peter Zijlstra was committed yesterday to disable it. The stable release of the 6.13 kernel was due this coming weekend.

Zijlstra wrote: "The whole module_writable_address() nonsense made a giant mess of alternative.c, not to mention it still contains bugs -- notable (sic) some of the CFI variants crash and burn.

Control Flow Integrity (CFI) is an anti-malware technology aimed at preventing attackers from redirecting the control flow of a program. The change can cause issues on some CFI-enabled setups and reports have included Intel Alder Lake-powered machines failing to resume from hibernation.

Zijlstra said the Microsoft engineer "has been working on patches to clean all this up again, but given the current state of things, this stuff just isn't ready. Disable for now, let's try again next cycle."

The offending source is still present, but won't be included in the upcoming stable kernel build.

taylorvich writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/isaac-asimov-robotics

In 1942, the legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov introduced his Three Laws of Robotics in his short story "Runaround." The laws were later popularized in his seminal story collection I, Robot.

• First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• Second Law: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

While drawn from works of fiction, these laws have shaped discussions of robot ethics for decades. And as AI systems—which can be considered virtual robots—have become more sophisticated and pervasive, some technologists have found Asimov's framework useful for considering the potential safeguards needed for AI that interacts with humans.

But the existing three laws are not enough. Today, we are entering an era of unprecedented human-AI collaboration that Asimov could hardly have envisioned. The rapid advancement of generative AI capabilities, particularly in language and image generation, has created challenges beyond Asimov's original concerns about physical harm and obedience.

The proliferation of AI-enabled deception is particularly concerning. According to the FBI's 2024 Internet Crime Report, cybercrime involving digital manipulation and social engineering resulted in losses exceeding US $10.3 billion. The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity's 2023 Threat Landscape specifically highlighted deepfakes—synthetic media that appears genuine—as an emerging threat to digital identity and trust.

fliptop writes:

The order comes after GM was caught selling customer data to third-party data brokers and insurance companies — without consent:

General Motors and its subsidiary OnStar are banned from selling customer geolocation and driving behavior data for five years, the Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday.

The settlement comes after a New York Times investigation found that GM had been collecting micro-details about its customers' driving habits, including acceleration, braking, and trip length — and then selling it to insurance companies and third-party data brokers like LexisNexis and Verisk. Clueless vehicle owners were then left wondering why their insurance premiums were going up.

[...] FTC accused GM of using a "misleading enrollment process" to get vehicle owners to sign up for its OnStar connected vehicle service and Smart Driver feature. The automaker failed to disclose to customers that it was collecting their data, nor did GM seek out their consent to sell it to third parties. After the Times exposed the practice, GM said it was discontinuing its OnStar Smart Driver program.

Also at AP, Detroit Free Press and Engadget.

Previously:

• Connected Cars' Illegal Data Collection and Use Now on FTC's "Radar"
• GM to Leverage Driver Data as it Jumps Back into the Insurance Business
• Law Enforcement Has Been Using OnStar, SiriusXM, to Eavesdrop, Track Car Locations

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The White House just released restrictions on the global sale of AI chips and GPUs, which more than limit who can buy these chips but also tell them where to use them. This new rule has got Nvidia and the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) up in arms, and now the European Commission (EC) is also protesting it. However, the rule will come into force 60 days after its announcement—well into Trump’s second presidency—giving the EU and other concerned parties time to negotiate with his administration to defer or cancel it.

Ten EU members—Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—would have Tier 1 status, meaning they have ‘near-unrestricted access’ to advance American AI chips. However, they must still abide by U.S. security requirements and keep at least 75% of their processing capabilities within Tier 1 countries. Although they could install the rest of their AI chips in Tier 2 countries, they cannot put over 7% of these chips in any single nation, meaning they have to spread operations to over four countries if they want to do so.

Original Submission

taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-chainmail-material-future-armor.html

In a remarkable feat of chemistry, a Northwestern University-led research team has developed the first two-dimensional (2D) mechanically interlocked material.

Resembling the interlocking links in chainmail, the nanoscale material exhibits exceptional flexibility and strength. With further work, it holds promise for use in high-performance, light-weight body armor and other uses that demand lightweight, flexible and tough materials.

Publishing on Jan. 17 in the journal Science, the study marks several firsts for the field. Not only is it the first 2D mechanically interlocked polymer, but the novel material also contains 100 trillion mechanical bonds per 1 square centimeter—the highest density of mechanical bonds ever achieved.

The researchers produced this material using a new, highly efficient and scalable polymerization process.

"We made a completely new polymer structure," said Northwestern's William Dichtel, the study's corresponding author.

"It's similar to chainmail in that it cannot easily rip because each of the mechanical bonds has a bit of freedom to slide around. If you pull it, it can dissipate the applied force in multiple directions. And if you want to rip it apart, you would have to break it in many, many different places. We are continuing to explore its properties and will probably be studying it for years."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Samsung could make the Galaxy S26 extra thin with new battery tech:

The batteries that power today's electronics are a lot more incredible than we often give them credit for. We've come a long way from the days of nickel-cadmium and even nickel-metal hydride cells, with lithium-based chemistry offering superior capacity and discharge characteristics (if only they didn't have that annoying tendency to burst into flame). But for as far as we've come, it always feels like the next big thing could be right around the corner, as advocates hype next-gen battery tech. We've only just started to see silicon-carbon batteries emerge, capable of storing even more energy in smaller spaces, and we've been hugely curious to see who might take advantage of them next.

[...] asserting that Samsung is planning to use a silicon-carbon battery in the Galaxy S26.

That could be a major step forward, and may not even be the only new battery technology Samsung could be thinking of using; this rumor arrives just a day after a report in South Korea's TheElec that discussed the company's interest in novel battery construction, and specifically, increasing capacity through stacked electrodes. Already used in larger solutions like car batteries, Samsung may be considering a similar approach for smartphones.

See also:

• Smartphone batteries got a major upgrade and you didn't even know it
• Lithium–silicon battery - Wikipedia

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Digital archivist, David Rosenthal, reviews an old, obscure, but prescient, document from computer scientist Clifford Lynch on various aspects of the then nascent WWW. Lynch's document, Accessibility and Integrity of Networked Information Collections. Background Paper, from 1993, which covered topics ranging from the First Sale Doctrine, what is now called surveillance capitalism, pay walls, and disinformation:

While doing the research for a future talk, I came across an obscure but impressively prophetic report entitled Accessibility and Integrity of Networked Information Collections that Cliff Lynch wrote for the federal Office of Technology Assessment in 1993, 32 years ago. I say "obscure" because it doesn't appear in Lynch's pre-1997 bibliography.

To give you some idea of the context in which it was written, unless you are over 70, it was more than half your life ago when in November 1989 Tim Berners-Lee's browser first accessed a page from his Web server. It was only about the same time that the first commercial, as opposed to research, Internet Service Providers started with the ARPANET being decommissioned the next year. Two years later, in December of 1991, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center put up the first US Web page. In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee codified and extended the HTTP protocol he had earlier implemented. It would be another two years before Netscape became the first browser to support HTTPS. It would be two years after that before the ITEF approved HTTP/1.0 in RFC 1945. As you can see, Lynch was writing among the birth-pangs of the Web.

Although Lynch was insufficiently pessimistic, he got a lot of things exactly right. Below the fold I provide four out of many examples.

Rosenthal's summary includes a link to a digital copy at the Education Resources Information Center.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

New Ohio Law Allows Cops To Charge $75/Hr. To Process Body Cam Footage:

Ohio residents pay for the cops. They pay for the cameras. Now, they're expected to pay for the footage generated by cops and their cameras. Governor Mike DeWine, serving no one but cops and their desire for opacity, recently signed a bill into law that will make it much more expensive for residents to exercise their public records rights.

And it was done in possibly the shadiest way possible — at the last minute and with zero transparency.

[...] Reporter Morgan Trau had questions following the passage of this measure. Gov. DeWine had answers. But they're completely unsatisfactory.

"These requests certainly should be honored, and we want them to be honored. We want them to be honored in a swift way that's very, very important," DeWine responded. "We also, though — if you have, for example, a small police department — very small police department — and they get a request like that, that could take one person a significant period of time."

Sure, that's part of the equation. Someone has to take time to review information requested via a public records request. But that's part of the government's job. It's not an excuse to charge a premium just to fulfill the government's obligations to the public.

DeWine had more of the same in his official statement on this line item — a statement he was presumably compelled to issue due to many people having these exact same questions about charging people a third time for something they'd already paid for twice.

No law enforcement agency should ever have to choose between diverting resources for officers on the street to move them to administrative tasks like lengthy video redaction reviews for which agencies receive no compensation–and this is especially so for when the requestor of the video is a private company seeking to make money off of these videos. The language in House Bill 315 is a workable compromise to balance the modern realities of preparing these public records and the cost it takes to prepare them.

Well, the biggest problem with this assertion is that no law enforcement agency ever has to choose between reviewing footage for release and keeping an eye on the streets. I realize some smaller agencies may not have a person dedicated to public records responses, but for the most part, I would prefer someone other than Officer Johnny Trafficstop handle public records releases. First, they're not specifically trained to handle this job. Second, doing this makes it a fox-in-the-hen-house situation, where officers might be handling information involving themselves, which is a clear conflict of interest.

AnonTechie writes:

By 2005, computer chips were running a billion times faster than the Z3 in the region of 5GHz. But then progress stalled. Today, state-of-the-art chips still operate at around 5GHz, a limit bottleneck that has significantly restricted progress in fields requiring ultrafast data processing.

Now that looks set to change thanks to the work of Gordon Li and Midya Parto at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and colleagues, who have designed and tested an all-optical computer capable of clock speeds exceeding 100 GHz. "The all-optical computer realizes linear operations, nonlinear functions, and memory entirely in the optical domain with > 100 GHz clock rates," they say. Their work paves the way for a new era of ultrafast computing with applications in fields ranging from signal processing to pattern recognition and beyond.

Discover Magazine

Ref: All-Optical Computing With Beyond 100-Ghz Clock Rates : https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05756

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/01/this-pdf-contains-a-playable-copy-of-doom/

Here at Ars, we're suckers for stories about hackers getting Doom running on everything from CAPTCHA robot checks and Windows' notepad.exe to AI hallucinations and fluorescing gut bacteria. Despite all that experience, we were still thrown for a loop by a recent demonstration of Doom running in the usually static confines of a PDF file.

On the Github page for the quixotic project, coder ading2210 discusses how Adobe Acrobat included some robust support for JavaScript in the PDF file format.

[...] the Doom PDF can take inputs via the user typing in a designated text field and generate "video" output in the form of converted ASCII text fed into 200 individual text fields, each representing a horizontal line of the Doom display. The text in those fields is enough to simulate a six-color monochrome display at a "pretty poor but playable" 13 frames per second (about 80 ms per frame).

[...] have to dock at least a few coolness points because the port doesn't actually work on generic desktop versions of Adobe Acrobat—you need to load it through a Chromium-based web browser. But the project gains those coolness points back with a web front-end that lets users load generic WAD files into a playable PDF.

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Original Submission