SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Glitch that casts a silence spell on some PCs has no workaround, but Microsoft promises a solution is coming:

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 has an audio bug (that we reported on yesterday), a glitch which can take out the PC's sound completely, and it's now clear that this affects multiple Windows versions.

That means not just those on Windows 11 24H2 (an update that's still rolling out), but people running 23H2 and 22H2, and also Windows 10.

[...] Apparently, this bug mainly affects those who use an audio DAC (a digital-to-analog converter, like the one in the pic below) hooked up via USB.

However, it can happen to any unlucky Windows 11 (or 10) user who grabs the latest patch.

As Windows Latest spotted, Microsoft has confirmed the issue, stating that: "After installing this security update, you might experience issues with USB audio devices. You are more likely to experience this issue if you are using a USB 1.0 audio driver-based DAC in your audio setup."

Sadly, there isn't a fix, and the only way to avoid your audio being torpedoed is to remove the external DAC (assuming you're using one, and this is what's causing the problem).

[...] This is an odd one for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it's unusual to see a bug disrupting every available version of Windows 11, and Windows 10 as well – that represents an alarming across-the-board clattering of dominoes.

Secondly, the January update doesn't bring anything in the way of new features (to any of these OS versions). It's a very straightforward patch applying some security fixes, and that's all.

So, it really shouldn't be causing any issues, but clearly, it is.

[...] Whatever the case, this is yet another hassle for Windows 11 users, particularly those on 24H2, some of who've been experiencing a very hard time of it lately, with a seemingly relentless stream of bugs crawling in the general direction of those users.

That includes some nasty affairs, like a glitch which triggered crashes with certain SSDs, for example, and more recently, there was another audio bug causing havoc. So Microsoft has not been faring well on the sound front lately.

Original Submission

A 2015 article in The Atlantic describes the problem of antibiotic resistance and some of its causes (alternative link):

The overuse of antibiotics, both in human patients and, importantly, in livestock, has led to an explosion of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, both in the U.S. and around the world. Deaths from resistant infections are currently at about 700,000 per year, and estimated to rise to 10 million per year by 2050. If nothing changes, the World Health Organization predicts the future will look a lot like the past—where people die from minor injuries that become infected.

Though new drugs are an important piece of the puzzle, Laxminarayan worried that there isn't enough being done to monitor the use of the ones we have. "What I worry about more than the development of new drugs is the lack of money for things like surveillance and stewardship," he said. "You can have a new drug five years from now, but that could go obsolete if we use it inappropriately."

Examples of inappropriate use include starting patients on antibiotics before test results come back, putting them on a broad-spectrum antibiotic when it's unclear what bacteria is causing the infection, or keeping them on the drugs even when tests come back negative.

It can take a few days to get the results from growing a culture to identify the specific bacteria responsible for a serious infection. In those instances, it may be necessary to prescribe a broad spectrum antibiotic while awaiting the results of the culture. Although there are exceptions to these guidelines, antibiotics are overused, and this contributes to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotics also aren't especially profitable for pharmaceutical companies because they're only needed when a person has a bacterial infection. If bacteria quickly develop resistance to new drugs, it might prevent companies from making a return on their investment in new antibiotics. A more recent article in Chemical & Engineering News discusses some of the regulatory and economic barriers to new antibiotics:

Zevtera is one of three antibiotics to gain FDA approval for humans so far [in 2024], and the only systemic one. The other two are for urinary tract infections (UTIs): Utility Therapeutics' Pivya, for uncomplicated UTIs; and Allecra Therapeutics' Exblifep, for complicated, or drug-resistant, UTIs.

But outside of 2024, the US has approved few new antibiotics in recent years. Only 17 new systemic antibiotics and one related biologic netted approval between 2010 and May 2021 (Ann. Pharmacother. 2022, DOI: 10.1177/10600280211031390). Experts worry that even that number could represent a peak. These approvals were decades in the making, and a labyrinth of scientific, financial, and regulatory challenges are sending today's antibiotic developers fleeing.

In biotech, there's a concept called the valley of death. It marks the stretch of time between when a firm discovers promising science and when that science is de-risked enough, usually with human data, that the firm can raise money to advance it. In antibiotics, there's a second valley of death that takes place after regulatory approval and before the company can sell enough of the drug to become financially solvent.

There are novel machine learning algorithms to identify possible new antibiotics including applying the same techniques used in large language models. New antibiotics have been proposed to exploit the mechanisms used by bacteria to develop antibiotic resistance. Although this research is promising, it is only helpful in solving the antibiotic resistance problem if these antibiotics are eventually used widely to treat infections. That may require changes to existing policies about how antibiotics are used and the regulatory requirements to gain approval before they are brought to market.

Original Submission

owl writes:

http://www.nablaman.com/relay/about.php

I amuse myself by constructing a computer almost entirely out of relays. Relays were used to construct computers well before vacuum tubes, transistors or integrated circuits were feasible for the task. The main inspiration is the machines by Konrad Zuse of the late 30s and early 40s.

Why relays? In addition to constituting an important historical link between the mechanical and electronic computers, relays are especially fun to work with since they

• are big and slow, with huge propagation delays and a tendency to oscillate if you hook them up wrong.
• are noisy, especially when lots of relays switch at the same time.
• consume lots of power to do even the simplest of calculations.
• subscribe to Lenz' law, i.e. generate lots of EMF and flyback current that make for all sorts of interesting interference in places you couldn't even guess.

So all in all, relays require you to think in very new ways compared to normal solid-state devices.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The site The Nerd Reich has an analysis of the seeming chaos being inflicted upon the US from within at the moment. Specifically, Elon Musk's attempt to destroy the United States government is a methodical execution of the "network state" blueprint, not random chaos.

Everything Elon Musk and his tech cronies are doing to our government is what Balaji Srinivasan spelled out in his network state cult manifestos – a tech CEO takeover of government, the purging of institutions, the rise of crypto corruption as a dominant economic force, the quest for new territory. But nobody wants to talk about it.

For those of you who are new to this newsletter, I spent last year writing a New Republic series on the network state. Sadly, everything spelled out in those stories is happening now. What Musk and Marc Andreessen are doing to our government is precisely what Srinivasan envisioned. A purge of Democrats, a merging of tech and right-wing forces to remake government and media institutions. Some reporters now observe that Musk is doing to the government what he did to Twitter, but Srinivasan was way ahead of them:

"Elon, in sort of classic Gray fashion ... captures Twitter and then, at one stroke, wipes out millions of Blues' status by wiping out the Blue Checks," he said, describing how a government could be reformed in a similar manner. "Another stroke ... [he] renames Twitter as X, showing that he has true control, and it's his vehicle, and that the old regime isn't going to be restored."

The idea of network states is that they are primarily digital entities without geographical boundaries though they do acquire territory and governance structures. The author of the book introducing the attack, Balaji Srinivasan, arranged a small conference on the topic in Singapore back in September of 2024, and one the year before in 2023 in Amsterdam.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/how-one-youtuber-is-trying-to-poison-the-ai-bots-stealing-her-content/

If you've been paying careful attention to YouTube recently, you may have noticed the rising trend of so-called "faceless YouTube channels" that never feature a visible human talking in the video frame. While some of these channels are simply authored by camera-shy humans, many more are fully automated through AI-powered tools to craft everything from the scripts and voiceovers to the imagery and music. Unsurprisingly, this is often sold as a way to make a quick buck off the YouTube algorithm with minimal human effort.
[...]
YouTuber F4mi, who creates some excellent deep dives on obscure technology, recently detailed her efforts "to poison any AI summarizers that were trying to steal my content to make slop." The key to F4mi's method is the .ass subtitle format, created decades ago as part of fansubbing software Advanced SubStation Alpha.
[...]
For each chunk of actual text in her subtitle file, she also inserted "two chunks of text out of bounds using the positioning feature of the .ass format, with their size and transparency set to zero so they are completely invisible."

In those "invisible" subtitle boxes, F4mi added text from public domain works (with certain words replaced with synonyms to avoid detection) or her own LLM-generated scripts full of completely made-up facts.
[...]
F4mi says that advanced models like ChatGPT o1 were sometimes able to filter out the junk and generate an accurate summary of her videos despite this. With a little scripting work, though, an .ass file can be subdivided into individual timestamped letters, whose order can be scrambled in the file itself while still showing up correctly in the final video. That should create a difficult (though not impossible) puzzle for even advanced AIs to make sense of.
[...]
F4mi notes that "some people were having their phone crash due to the subtitles being too heavy," showing there is a bit of overhead cost to this kind of mischief.

F4mi also notes in her video that this method is far from foolproof. For one, tools like OpenAI's Whisper that actually listen to the audio track can still generate usable transcripts without access to a caption file.
[...]
Still, F4mi's small effort here is part of a larger movement that's fighting back against the AI scrapers looking to soak up and repurpose everything on the public Internet.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Ransomware remains rampant and is a favorite tool of adversaries including North Korea. Other foes continue to place misinformation online in the hope of influencing American opinion.

At home, debate continues to bubble about the best approach to securing businesses, which complain that existing infosec rules and incident reporting regulations vary between jurisdictions, can involve multiple agencies, and also overlap.

How to hold the tech industry accountable when it drops the ball, in terms of security, is another ongoing debate, with some calling for voluntary guidelines that incentivize secure development practices, while others want mandated security standards that make tech companies liable for flaws in their products.

The Republican Party’s 2024 election platform document [PDF] mentions infosec just once, in the last paragraph of a 16-page manifesto, as follows:

Republicans will use all tools of National Power to protect our Nation’s Critical Infrastructure and Industrial Base from malicious cyber actors. This will be a National Priority, and we will both raise the Security Standards for our Critical Systems and Networks and defend them against bad actors.

None of the executive orders Trump had issued at the time of writing include more detailed information security policies.

But on its first day in office, the administration made two notable security-related changes.

One was to terminate all memberships of advisory committees that report to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). That impacts infosec because DHS is the parent agency of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which in turn is home to the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) – an org tasked with investigating major cybersecurity incidents.

Killing the board that pressured Microsoft to up its cybersecurity looks for all the world like payback for Microsoft's million dollar gift to Donald Trump's inaugural committee

CSRB is currently investigating the Salt Typhoon attacks on telcos but now appears to lack personnel to finish the job.

The board’s past work includes a scathing report that found Microsoft responsible for a "cascade of security failures" that allowed Chinese spies to break into senior US officials' email accounts.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

If you miss the days when laptops had really cool form factors like the Toshiba T1000, you're going to love this Raspberry Pi project put together by maker and developer Nilseuropa. Using our favorite SBC, he's brought an old Toshiba T1000 machine back to life by using a Raspberry Pi as the main board and has upgraded the system to include support for modern peripherals.

Don't worry—no working T1000s were harmed to create this project. According to Nilseuropa, he's spent time repairing at least 5 of them so far and this project was created using leftover pieces. Restoring old hardware doesn't come without sacrifice and it's not always possible to keep everything. Some hardware becomes donors of "parts boards". That's where the Raspberry Pi comes in, supplementing the gaps left behind by previous repairs.

One of the coolest aspects of a project like this is all of the new additions you can add to a retro piece of tech. You still get the thrill of retro computing but with the added bonus of modern support. For example, the original floppy drive space has been upgraded with a port bay that includes a USB port, SD card slots and a couple of compact flash ports. Nilseuropa also added a 3.5mm jack for connecting external audio peripherals.

The main board he chose for this project is a Raspberry Pi 4. It's connected to an 8.8-inch Waveshare widescreen that features a capacitive touchscreen interface. The Pi is connected to a few port extenders so the peripherals can attach to the outside of the case, along with the keyboard which features some snazzy, colorful keycaps. The unit is also made portable thanks to an included 10,000 mAh battery.

Software-wise, you're limited really by just your imagination. A good starting point would be to run Raspberry Pi OS so you could take advantage of standard computing functions. That said, you could also game on a rig like this pretty easily because of the Pi 4 which adds Bluetooth support—ideal for connecting wireless controllers.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

President Donald Trump said Monday night that Microsoft was in contention to buy TikTok, having previously said that he is eager to forge a deal that would "save" the popular video app from a ban:

Such a deal, if realized, would put the video app used by millions of Americans under the control of the country's second-most-valuable tech company, which has been aggressively pushing into new lines of business including artificial intelligence and gaming. Representatives for Microsoft declined to comment on Monday.

When asked aboard Air Force One whether Microsoft was involved in discussions for acquiring TikTok, Trump said: "I would say yes. A lot of interest in TikTok."

Microsoft previously discussed buying TikTok in 2020, when Trump tried to force a sale of the app during his first term. That proposal crumbled when Trump's push to force the app's sale or ban was rejected by the courts.

[...] Analysts have estimated TikTok could be worth $50 billion, or far more, depending on the underlying technology for sale.

Previously: President Trump Threatens TikTok Ban, Microsoft Considers Buying TikTok's U.S. Operations[Updated 2]

Original Submission

How Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Made a Model that Rivals OpenAI

https://www.wired.com/story/deepseek-china-model-ai/
https://web.archive.org/web/20250125102155/https://www.wired.com/story/deepseek-china-model-ai/

On January 20, DeepSeek, a relatively unknown AI research lab from China, released an open source model that's quickly become the talk of the town in Silicon Valley. According to a paper authored by the company, DeepSeek-R1 beats the industry's leading models like OpenAI o1 on several math and reasoning benchmarks. In fact, on many metrics that matter—capability, cost, openness—DeepSeek is giving Western AI giants a run for their money.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/china-is-catching-up-with-americas-best-reasoning-ai-models/

The releases immediately caught the attention of the AI community because most existing open-weights models—which can often be run and fine-tuned on local hardware—have lagged behind proprietary models like OpenAI's o1 in so-called reasoning benchmarks. Having these capabilities available in an MIT-licensed model that anyone can study, modify, or use commercially potentially marks a shift in what's possible with publicly available AI models.

https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1

We introduce our first-generation reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1. DeepSeek-R1-Zero, a model trained via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a preliminary step, demonstrated remarkable performance on reasoning. With RL, DeepSeek-R1-Zero naturally emerged with numerous powerful and interesting reasoning behaviors. However, DeepSeek-R1-Zero encounters challenges such as endless repetition, poor readability, and language mixing. To address these issues and further enhance reasoning performance, we introduce DeepSeek-R1, which incorporates cold-start data before RL. DeepSeek-R1 achieves performance comparable to OpenAI-o1 across math, code, and reasoning tasks. To support the research community, we have open-sourced DeepSeek-R1-Zero, DeepSeek-R1, and six dense models distilled from DeepSeek-R1 based on Llama and Qwen. DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B outperforms OpenAI-o1-mini across various benchmarks, achieving new state-of-the-art results for dense models.

NOTE: Before running DeepSeek-R1 series models locally, we kindly recommend reviewing the Usage Recommendation section.

Check leaderboard and compare at Chatbot Arena: https://lmarena.ai/

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Leveraging an attack vector that's been in play off and on for the last two decades, hackers are targeting Mac users with malware camouflaged as the popular Homebrew tool, and spreading it through deceptive Google ads.

Malicious actors are leveraging Google ads to distribute malware through a counterfeit Homebrew website. The campaign targets macOS and Linux users with an infostealer that compromises credentials, browser data, and cryptocurrency wallets.

Homebrew, a widely-used open-source package manager, enables users to manage software through a command line. Hackers recently exploited its popularity by creating a malicious Google ad.

The ad, spotted by developer Ryan Chenkie, appeared legitimate, displaying the correct URL for the Homebrew website, "brew.sh." However, users who clicked it were redirected to a fake website hosted at "brewe.sh."

The fake site mimicked Homebrew's installation process, tricking visitors into running a malicious command. While the legitimate Homebrew site also provides such installation commands, running the script from the fake site downloaded and executed malware, specifically AmosStealer.

AmosStealer, also known as "Atomic Stealer," is a macOS-focused infostealer sold to cybercriminals for $1,000 per month. It targets over 50 cryptocurrency wallets, browser-stored data, and desktop apps.

Previously, this malware has been used in similar campaigns, including fake Google Meet pages, making it a go-to tool for Apple-focused cyberattacks.

Homebrew's project leader, Mike McQuaid, expressed frustration with Google's inability to prevent such scams. While the malicious ad was taken down, McQuaid highlighted that similar incidents continue to occur due to insufficient oversight of sponsored ads.

Cybersecurity experts recommend avoiding sponsored links when searching for popular tools. Bookmarking official websites or accessing them directly can help users minimize risk.

[...] To stay safe from these types of attacks, make sure to double-check website URLs before clicking, stick to bookmarks for trusted sites, and steer clear of installing software from unfamiliar or sponsored links.

Google has taken down this one particular malicious ad. As history has proven, the danger from bad ads isn't gone, so Mac users — especially those using Homebrew — need to stay alert.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Phone Metadata Suddenly Not So 'Harmless' When It's The FBI's Data Being Harvested:

The government's next-best argument (after "Third Party Doctrine yo!") in support of its bulk collection of US persons' phone metadata via the (now partly-dead) Section 215 surveillance program was this: hey, it's just metadata. How harmful could it be? (And if it's of so little use to the NSA/FBI/others, how is it possible we're using it to literally kill people?)

While trying to fend off attacks on Section 215 collections (most of which are governed [in the loosest sense of the word] by the Third Party Doctrine), the NSA and its domestic-facing remora, the FBI, insisted collecting and storing massive amounts of phone metadata was no more a constitutional violation than it was a privacy violation.

Suddenly — thanks to the ongoing, massive compromising of major US telecom firms by Chinese state-sanctioned hackers — the FBI is getting hot and bothered about the bulk collection of its own phone metadata by (gasp!) a government agency. (h/t Kevin Collier on Bluesky)

[...] The agency (quite correctly!) believes the metadata could be used to identify agents, as well as their contacts and confidential sources. Of course it can. That's why the NSA liked gathering it. And that's why the FBI liked collections it didn't need a warrant to access. (But let's not pretend this data was "stolen." It was duplicated and exfiltrated, but AT&T isn't suddenly missing thousands of records generated by FBI agents and their contacts.)

The issue, of course, is that the Intelligence Community consistently downplayed this exact aspect of the bulk collection, claiming it was no more intrusive than scanning every piece of domestic mail (!) or harvesting millions of credit card records just because the Fourth Amendment (as interpreted by the Supreme Court) doesn't say the government can't.

[...] The takeaway isn't the inherent irony. It's that the FBI and NSA spent years pretending the fears expressed by activists and legislators were overblown. Officials repeatedly claimed the information was of almost zero utility, despite mounting several efforts to protect this collection from being shut down by the federal government. In the end, the phone metadata program (at least as it applies to landlines) was terminated. But there's more than a hint of egregious hypocrisy in the FBI's sudden concern about how much can be revealed by "just" metadata.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040409-00/?p=39873

A friend of mine used to work on the development of the USB specification and subsequent implementation. One of the things that happens at these meetings is that hardware companies would show off the great USB hardware they were working on. It also gave them a chance to try out their hardware with various USB host manufacturers and operating systems to make sure everything worked properly together.

One of the earlier demonstrations was a company that was making USB floppy drives. The company representative talked about how well the drives were doing and mentioned that they make two versions, one for PCs and one for Macs.

"That's strange," the committee members thought to themselves. "Why are there separate PC and Mac versions? The specification is very careful to make sure that the same floppy drive works on both systems. You shouldn't need to make two versions."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The stunning panorama features over 600 overlapping Hubble images that have been painstaking stitched together. Spread across 2.5 billion pixels, you'll find some 200 million stars – all of which are brighter than our own Sun. That is a huge number, yet only a fraction of the estimated one trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy. Many of Andromeda's less massive stars are beyond Hubble's sensitivity limit and thus, are not represented in the imaged.

Data from two surveys – the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program and the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury (PHAST) program – was used to construct the mosaic.

With it, astronomers will be able to learn more about the age of Andromeda as well as its heavy-element abundance and the stellar masses inside of it. The surveys will also help astronomers understand how Andromeda might have merged with other galaxies in its past.

"Andromeda's a train wreck. It looks like it has been through some kind of event that caused it to form a lot of stars and then just shut down," said Daniel Weisz at the University of California, Berkeley.

"This was probably due to a collision with another galaxy in the neighborhood."

NASA has multiple sizes of the panoramic available for download, including the full-size 203 MB image (42,208 x 9,870) and a more user friendly 9 MB variant (10,552 x 2,468).

Hubble has been in orbit for more than three decades, and continues to provide astronomers with meaningful science data. That said, NASA already has its successor waiting in the wings.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled to launch by May 2027, will feature a mirror roughly the same size as the one Hubble uses but will be able to capture much higher resolution images. A single Roman exposure will capture the equivalent of at least 100 high-resolution Hubble snaps, according to NASA.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Brendan Carr dumps plan to ban bulk billing deals that lock renters into one ISP:

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has dropped the previous administration's proposal to ban bulk billing deals that require tenants to pay for a specific provider's Internet service.

In March 2024, then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel proposed a ban on arrangements in which "tenants are required to pay for broadband, cable, and satellite service provided by a specific communications provider, even if they do not wish to take the service or would prefer to use another provider."

Rosenworcel's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking was opposed by Internet providers and sat on the FCC's list of items on circulation throughout 2024 without any final vote, despite the commission having a 3-2 Democratic majority at the time. Carr, who was elevated to the chairmanship by President Trump, emptied the list of items under consideration by commissioners on Friday.

With bulk billing deals in which a company agrees to provide service to every tenant of a building, residents are billed a prorated share of the total cost. Tenants may be billed by either the landlord or the telco provider. only banned

Technically, Rosenworcel's plan would have allowed bulk billing arrangements to continue as long as tenants are given the ability to opt out of them. In March, Rosenworcel's office said her plan would "increase competition for communications service in these buildings by making it more profitable for competitive providers to deploy service in buildings where it is currently too expensive to serve consumers because tenants are required to take a certain provider's service."

"Too often, tenants living in these households are forced to pay high prices with limited choices for Internet or other services," Rosenworcel's office said in March, arguing that her plan would "lower costs and address the lack of choice for broadband services" in apartments, condos, and public housing.

Samantha Wright writes:

The Pebble was 2012 smartwatch built using an e-paper display. It had great battery life, a UI that could be hacked using C or Javascript, and a very loyal fanbase. Unlike current incumbent smartwatches like the Google Pixel Watch or Apple Watch, Pebble kept its feature set under control and aimed to supplement a smartphone rather than step on its toes. The end result was a compact product with great battery life that was genuinely liked by gadgeteers.

Unfortunately, after a number of strategic missteps, the manufacturer of the Pebble was bought out in 2016, by a competitor, FitBit. The product was discontinued almost immediately, leaving the world of nifty wrist-mounted doodads noticeably poorer.

Ever since there's been a sort of grassroots campaign to support the Pebble, called Rebble, which was started more-or-less immediately after FitBit shuttered the Pebble, and is helmed by one of Pebble's founders. For the longest time they weren't making much headway on delivering software updates, as they essentially had to start over from square one, without the initial startup resources they'd had the first time around. Mostly they just served as a home for applications and widgets.

This all changed on Monday, when the Rebble lead was able to get hold of some folks at Google—who bought out FitBit in 2021—and convinced them to open-source the Pebble OS. (It's not quite complete—like many open-sourcings of closed projects, there are some patent-encumbered bits missing.) There's now the (similarly-named yet distinct) Repebble project, which aims to begin a new production run of Pebble smartwatches.

Is this the beginning of a renaissance for resurrecting beloved Google-owned products? Probably not. But it's one less corpse in the ground, that's for sure.

Original Submission