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AnonTechie writes:

As civilisations become more and more advanced, their power needs also increase. It's likely that an advanced civilisation might need so much power that they enclose their host star in solar energy collecting satellites. These Dyson Swarms will trap heat so any planets within the sphere are likely to experience a temperature increase. A new paper explores this and concludes that a complete Dyson swarm outside the orbit of the Earth would raise our temperature by 140 K !

The concept of a Dyson swarm is purely a hypothetical concept, a theorised megastructure consisting of numerous satellites or habitats orbiting a star to capture and harness its energy output. Unlike the solid shell of a Dyson sphere, a swarm represents less of an engineering challenge, allowing for incremental construction as energy needs increase. The concept, first popularised by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, represents one of the most ambitious yet potentially achievable feats of astroengineering that could eventually allow a civilisation to use a significant fraction of its host star's total energy output.

... The paper concludes that a Dyson sphere surrounding the sun would significantly impact Earth's climate. Small spheres positioned inside Earth's orbit prove impractical, either becoming too hot for their own efficiency or having too great an impact on solar energy arriving on our planet. While large spheres enable efficient energy conversion, they would raise Earth's temperature by 140 K, making Earth completely uninhabitable.

A compromise might involve creating a partial structure (the Dyson swarm) at 2.13AU from the sun. This would harvest 4% of solar energy (15.6 yottawatts, or 15.6 million billion billion watts) while increasing Earth's temperature by less than 3K—comparable to current global warming trends. It's still quite an engineering feat though, requiring 1.3×1023 kg of silicon.

[Source]: The Universe Today

[Journal Ref]: The photovoltaic Dyson sphere

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A vulnerability analyst and prominent member of the infosec industry has blasted Microsoft for refusing to look at a bug report unless he submitted a video alongside a written explanation.

Senior principal vulnerability analyst Will Dormann said last week he contacted Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) with a clear description of the bug and supporting screenshots, only to be told that his report wouldn't be looked at without a video.

MSRC told Dormann: "As requested, please provide clear video POC (proof of concept) on how the said vulnerability is being exploited? We are unable to make any progress without that. It will be highly appreciated."

Frustrated with Microsoft's demand, which Dormann said would only show him typing commands that were already depicted in the screenshots, and hitting Enter in CMD, the analyst created a video laden with malicious compliance.

The video is 15 minutes long and at the four-second mark flashes a screenshot from Zoolander, in which the protagonist unveils the "Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good."

It also features a punchy techno backing track while wasting the reviewer's time with approximately 14 minutes of inactivity.

Dormann said via Mastodon: "I get that people doing grunt work have mostly fixed workflows that they go through with common next steps.

"But to request a video that now captures (beyond my already-submitted screenshots) the act of me typing, and the Windows response being painted on the screen adds what of value now?"

To top it all off, when trying to submit the video via Microsoft's portal, the upload failed due to a 403 error.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A group of technology companies and lobbyists want the European Commission (EC) to take action to reduce the region's reliance on foreign-owned digital services and infrastructure.

In an open letter to EC President Ursula von der Leyen and Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty Henna Virkkunen, the group of nearly 100 organizations proposed the creation of a sovereign infrastructure fund to invest in key technology and lessen dependence on US corporations.

The letter points to recent events, including the farcical Munich Security Conference, as a sign of "the stark geopolitical reality Europe is now facing," and says that building strategic autonomy in key sectors is now an urgent imperative for European countries.

Signatories include aerospace giant Airbus, France's Dassault Systèmes, European cloud operator OVHcloud, chip designer SiPearl, open source biz Nextcloud, and a host of others including organizations such as the European Startup Network.

OVHcloud said the group was calling "for a collective industrial policy strategy to strengthen Europe's competitiveness and strategic autonomy. We are convinced this is the premise of what we hope will be a larger movement of the entire ecosystem."

Proposals include the sovereign infrastructure fund, which would be able to support public investment, especially in capital-intensive sectors like semiconductors, with "significant additional commitment of funds allocated and/or underwritten" by the European Investment Bank (EIB) and national public funding bodies.

It also suggests there should be a formal requirement for the public sector to "buy European" and source their IT requirements from European-led and assembled solutions, while recognizing that these may involve complex supply chains with foreign components.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP's) national internet censor just announced that all AI-generated content will be required to have labels that are explicitly seen or heard by its audience and embedded in metadata. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) just released the transcript for the media questions and answers (akin to an FAQ) on its Measures for the Identification of Artificial Intelligence Generated and Synthetic Content [machine translated]. We saw the first signs of this policy move last September when the CAC's draft plans emerged.

This regulation takes effect on September 1, 2025, and will compel all service providers (i.e., AI LLMs) to “add explicit labels to generated and synthesized content.” The directive includes all types of data: text, images, videos, audio, and even virtual scenes. Aside from that, it also orders app stores to verify whether the apps they host follow the regulations.

Users will still be able to ask for unlabeled AI-generated content for “social concerns and industrial needs.” However, the generating app must reiterate this requirement to the user and also log the information to make it easier to trace. The responsibility of adding the AI-generated label and metadata falls on the shoulders of this end-user person or entity.

The CAC also outlaws the malicious removal, tampering, forgery, or concealment of these AI labels, including the provision of tools that will help carry out these acts. Although this obviously means that you’re prohibited from deleting the AI label and metadata on AI-generated content, it also prohibits the addition of this identifier for human-created data.

The CCP, through the CAC, aims to control the spread of disinformation and prevent internet users from being confused by AI-generated content via the application of this law. At the moment, we haven’t seen any prescribed punishments for violators, but there is always the threat of legal action from the Chinese government.

This isn’t the first law that attempts to control the development and use of AI technologies, and the EU enacted its Artificial Intelligence Act in 2024. Many may react negatively to this move by the CAC, especially as it’s known for administering the Great Firewall of China to limit and control the internet within China’s borders. Nevertheless, this move will help reduce misinformation from anyone and everyone, especially as AI LLMs become more advanced. By ensuring that artificially generated content is marked clearly, people could more easily determine if they’re looking at or listening to a real event or something conjured by a machine on some server farm.

Original Submission

Frosty Piss writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/19/ubuntu_2510_rust/

Efforts are afoot to replace the GNU coreutils with Rust ones in future versions of Ubuntu - which also means changing the software license. Canonical plans to replace the current core utilities – from the GNU project and implemented in C – with the newer uutils suite, which is written in Rust. Rather than technical issues, most concerns raised in the discussion on Ubuntu Discourse are about licensing. As a product of the GNU project, the existing coreutils are licensed under the GPL – specifically, GPL 3. The Rust replacements are licensed under the much more permissive MIT license.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Academics accuse AI startups of co-opting peer review for publicity:

There's a controversy brewing over "AI-generated" studies submitted to this year's ICLR, a long-running academic conference focused on AI.

At least three AI labs — Sakana, Intology, and Autoscience — claim to have used AI to generate studies that were accepted to ICLR workshops. At conferences like ICLR, workshop organizers typically review studies for publication in the conference's workshop track.

Sakana informed ICLR leaders before it submitted its AI-generated papers and obtained the peer reviewers' consent. The other two labs — Intology and Autoscience — did not, an ICLR spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.

Several AI academics took to social media to criticize Intology and Autoscience's stunts as a co-opting of the scientific peer review process.

"All these AI scientist papers are using peer-reviewed venues as their human evals, but no one consented to providing this free labor," wrote Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, an assistant computer science professor at UC San Diego, in an X post. "It makes me lose respect for all those involved regardless of how impressive the system is. Please disclose this to the editors."

As the critics noted, peer review is a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and mostly volunteer ordeal. According to one recent Nature survey, 40% of academics spend two to four hours reviewing a single study. That work has been escalating. The number of papers submitted to the largest AI conference, NeurIPS, grew to 17,491 last year, up 41% from 12,345 in 2023.

Academia already had an AI-generated copy problem. One analysis found that between 6.5% and 16.9% of papers submitted to AI conferences in 2023 likely contained synthetic text. But AI companies using peer review to effectively benchmark and advertise their tech is a relatively new occurrence.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Scientists at America's Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico say they have developed a Spacecraft Speedometer that satellites can use in orbit to ideally avoid orbital collisions.

Working with the US Air Force Academy, the LANL [scientists] say they have come up with a novel device capable of determining the velocity of a satellite while it is looping Earth and potentially other planets.

(The lab repeatedly uses the word velocity in its description of the equipment. Velocity is strictly speaking a vector quantity of magnitude and direction, so we'll assume the eggheads have been able to determine the speed component of a satellite's velocity vector using this gadget, at least.)

The Spacecraft Speedometer, we're told, makes use of twin laminated plasma spectrometers, with one facing forward along the space vehicle's trajectory and another identical unit facing in the opposite direction.

This design is based on the theory that more charged particles will impact the spectrometer that is facing forward than the rear-facing unit, allowing the velocity to be calculated.

"Like a car driving through a heavy rain, the satellite passes through the charged particles, ions and electrons, that comprise the Earth's upper atmosphere. In the case of the car, many raindrops will hit the car's front windshield while fewer raindrops will hit the rear windshield. In addition, the raindrops on the front hit the windshield harder," the research lab explains.

The principle is therefore that many atmospheric ions will hit the front-facing sensor, dubbed the ram measurement because ions ram into it. Fewer ions will be measured by the rear-facing sensor, called the wake measurement. The Spacecraft Speedometer uses the difference in both the number and impact energy of ions collected by the two sensors to provide an in-orbit velocity measurement.

taylorvich writes:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-03-naturalness-seasonal-basis-modern-criticism.html

What is the best time to start the day in view of the variation in when the sun rises? This is the problem analyzed by Jorge Mira Pérez and José María Martín-Olalla, lecturers at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) and the University of Seville (US), in a study that has just been published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. In it, they analyze the physiological and social foundations of the practice of seasonal time change and review its impact on health.

The study takes as an example the cities of Bogotá and New York, which are located on the same meridian but at different latitudes, to point out that in winter the sunrise is delayed by an hour-and-a-half in the latter city. "This delays life in New York during the winter, but in spring the delay in sunrise has disappeared and activity can start earlier. Putting the clocks forward in spring facilitates this adaptation," says Mira.

The study includes several current and past examples of societies with delayed activity in winter and earlier activity in summer, in line with the synchronizing role of morning light for our bodies. "Modern societies have several synchronization mechanisms. For example, the use of a standard time in a large region, or the use of pre-set schedules. Time shifting is another synchronizing mechanism, which adapts human activity to the corresponding season," says Martín-Olalla. The authors suggest that the first weekend in April and the first weekend in October would be the most appropriate time for the clocks to change.

The study reviews the impact of the seasonal time change on human health, considering two types of effects: those associated with the change itself, and those associated with the period during which daylight-saving time is in effect. In the first case, the authors point out that published studies have not analyzed the problem epidemiologically and that the evidence suggests that the impact is very weak.

"A very comprehensive study in the United States reports a 5% increase in traffic accidents in the week following the clocks going forward in spring but overlooks the fact that from one year to the next, weekly traffic accidents fluctuate by 15%. Changing the clocks has an impact, but it is very weak compared to the other factors influencing the problem," Mira points out.

"Changing the clocks has worked for a hundred years without serious disruption. The problem is that in recent years it has been associated only with energy saving when, in fact, it is a natural adaptation mechanism," says Martín-Olalla.

North Korea's Bitcoin Reserve Thought to be 3rd Largest in World: Report

upstart writes:

North Korea's bitcoin reserve thought to be 3rd largest in world: report:

With authorities identifying North Korean hackers to be behind multiple recent cryptocurrency hackings, the totalitarian communist state is now thought to have a bigger bitcoin stash than any other nation in the world besides the United States and the United Kingdom.

Binance News, a news platform of global cryptocurrency exchange business firm Binance, recently reported that North Korea's allegedly state-run hacker syndicates are believed to have accumulated 13,562 BTC, valued at $1.14 billion. It cited Arkham Intelligence, a Dominican Republic-based company that provides data about blockchain transactions to help identify money laundering and other suspicious activity.

North Korea-affiliated hacking groups including the Lazarus Group were pinpointed to be culprits behind a string of cyber attacks in 2024 that stole $659 million in cryptocurrency, according to a joint statement by South Korea, the US and Japan made in January. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation last month released a public statement that North Korea is responsible for the theft of approximately $1.5 billion worth of virtual assets, the biggest hacking incident so far, which occurred last month.

Much of the stolen virtual assets were Ethereum coins, a substantial portion of which are thought to have been converted into bitcoins.

It was reported last week that the Lazarus Group converted at least $300 million of their stolen crypto into unrecoverable funds.

Lazarus Group and other hacking groups are alleged to be run by the North Korean government, and are thought to be an important source of income for it. North Korea is currently under multiple sanctions placed by the international community, as punitive actions for developing its nuclear weapons program.

A significant portion of the profits from North Korea's illegal activities are thought to be used to fund its ballistic missiles programs and nuclear tests.

If confirmed, North Korea's bitcoin reserve will be only behind US' 198,109 BTC and the UK's 61,245 BTC, according to the Binance's estimates. It would be more than 10,635 BTC of Bhutan and El Salvador's 6,117 BTC.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

German tech company AP Sensing just developed a technology that lets undersea cables detect tampering and sabotage through soundwaves. The company tested its new Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing (DFOS) last year when it sent a diver to make contact with an underwater cable it was monitoring. “He stops and just touches the cable lightly, you clearly see the signal,” Daniel Gerwig, global sales manager at AP Sensing told BBC. “The acoustic energy which travels through the fiber is basically disturbing our signal. We can measure this disturbance.”

The technology works like sonar, where it senses vibrations traveling through the water by monitoring the light traveling within the fiber optic cable. These tiny movements, as well as temperature changes and physical disturbance, affect the minute number of photons being reflected back along a fiber optic cable. By measuring these changes, the team can determine if something makes contact with the cable or if a part of it is unearthed.

AP Sensing’s software is also claimed to be able to pick up vehicles moving and events happening within the vicinity of the cables. This makes it possible for fiber optic cables to hear a dropping anchor, detect ships passive above it, and even possibly determine the vessel’s approximate class.

One more advantage to this technology is that it can be retrofitted to existing lines that have free channels or at least one unused cable. That means undersea cable operators do not have to spend millions in laying new cables with built-in sonar sensors. The only additional investment they need is to install signal-listening devices every 100km (approx 62 miles).

Many companies are starting to invest in technologies like this in the wake of several high-profile cable-cutting incidents in the Baltic Sea and around Taiwan in late 2024 and early 2025. As the majority of global communications rely on undersea cables, purposely disrupting this crucial infrastructure could be considered a hostile act.

However, these sabotage detectors may only help catch an offending vessel after it has already damaged or severed a cable. Still, some suggest putting dedicated sensors around crucial infrastructure is a good idea, giving Coast Guard and Navy ships some time to respond before damage is inflicted. This would make it easier to safeguard these key undersea lines of communication and would work well alongside NATO’s deployment of sea drones.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Redmond insists it's got this right and has even more impressive results to share soon:

Updated Microsoft's claim of a quantum computing breakthrough has attracted strong criticism from scientists, though the software giant says its work is sound – and it will soon reveal data that proves it.

Redmond's quantum claims were made in February when it announced its in-house boffins had created "the world's first topoconductor, a breakthrough type of material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable and scalable qubits, which are the building blocks for quantum computers."

This is a piece of alleged technology based on basic physics that has not been established

The Windows maker showed off a quantum chip called Majorana 1, based on a Topological Core architecture, which it said could power future quantum computers that pack a million qubits. Quantum computers with even a few hundred qubits are promised to be so powerful that the device you're reading this on might as well be a broken abacus.

Microsoft's claims were astounding because Majorana particles were first theorized in 1937 but detecting them has proved difficult. Yet Microsoft told the world it not only observed Majorana particles but had learned how to put them to work in a machine packing eight topological qubits.

The super-corporation has made big claims about Majorana particles before, but it didn't end well: In 2021 Redmond's researchers retracted a 2018 paper in which they claimed to have detected the particles.

Shortly after Microsoft's recent announcement, scientists expressed concern that the claims in the company's paper, published in Nature, lacked important details.

Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak has reaffirmed Redmond's claims and pointed out that the paper was submitted in March 2024 and published in February 2025. In the intervening months he said Microsoft has made even more progress that he will discuss at an American Physical Society (APS) meeting scheduled for next week in California.

While the quantum world waits for that update, critics have voiced their concerns about Microsoft's paper.

Henry Legg, a lecturer in theoretical physics at the University of St Andrews in the UK, recently published a pre-print critique that argues the software giant's work "is not reliable and must be revisited."

Vincent Mourik, an experimental physicist at the German national research organization Forschungszentrum Jülich, and Sergey Frolov, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh in the US, took to YouTube to criticize "distractions caused by unreliable scientific claims from Microsoft Quantum."

Frolov went even further when discussing the matter with The Register.

"These concerns go back quite a number of years so [the community reaction] hasn't just been triggered by this announcement per se," Frolov told The Register. "It was just made in such a dramatic way that it, I guess, triggered a reaction but [it hasn't altered] the underlying sort of understanding that this is essentially a fraudulent project."

Asked to elaborate on that characterization, Frolov said: "This is a piece of alleged technology that is based on basic physics that has not been established. So this is a pretty big problem."

Frolov also claimed Microsoft shared data with some select scientists a few weeks ago, ahead of next week's APS meeting, and that those invited to hear more did not come away more confident about Microsoft's claims.

"I was not there but I spoke with a few people that were ... and people were not impressed and there was a lot of criticism," he said.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.wired.com/story/federal-trade-commission-removed-blogs-critical-of-ai-amazon-microsoft/

The Trump administration's Federal Trade Commission has removed four years' worth of business guidance blogs as of Tuesday morning, including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency's landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft. More than 300 blogs were removed.

On the FTC's website, the page hosting all of the agency's business-related blogs and guidance no longer includes any information published during former president Joe Biden's administration, current and former FTC employees, who spoke under anonymity for fear of retaliation, tell WIRED. These blogs contained advice from the FTC on how big tech companies could avoid violating consumer protection laws.

One now deleted blog, titled "Hey, Alexa! What are you doing with my data?" explains how, according to two FTC complaints, Amazon and its Ring security camera products allegedly leveraged sensitive consumer data to train the ecommerce giant's algorithms. (Amazon disagreed with the FTC's claims.) It also provided guidance for companies operating similar products and services. Another post titled "$20 million FTC settlement addresses Microsoft Xbox illegal collection of kids' data: A game changer for COPPA compliance" instructs tech companies on how to abide by the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by using the 2023 Microsoft settlement as an example. The settlement followed allegations by the FTC that Microsoft obtained data from children using Xbox systems without the consent of their parents or guardians.

"In terms of the message to industry on what our compliance expectations were, which is in some ways the most important part of enforcement action, they are trying to just erase those from history," a source familiar tells WIRED.

Another removed FTC blog titled "The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust" outlines how businesses could avoid creating chatbots that violate the FTC Act's rules against unfair or deceptive products. This blog won an award in 2023 for "excellent descriptions of artificial intelligence."

The Trump administration has received broad support from the tech industry. Big tech companies like Amazon and Meta, as well as tech entrepreneurs like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, all donated to Trump's inauguration fund. Other Silicon Valley leaders, like Elon Musk and David Sacks, are officially advising the administration. Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employs technologists sourced from Musk's tech companies. And already, federal agencies like the General Services Administration have started to roll out AI products like GSAi, a general-purpose government chatbot.

The FTC did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Apple has lost an appeal in Germany on how much it dominates the smartphone market, and is now staring down antitrust penalties in the country on top of everything else it faces in the European Union.

As such, Apple is now subject to penalties in accordance with anti-competition law in Germany. On Tuesday, judges from the Federal Court of Justice issued a ruling after a one-month deliberation, declaring that Apple should be applied additional controls to encourage competition in the German market.

Presiding judge Wolfgang Kirchhoff said that an assessment has shown that Apple has too much control across multiple markets, and should be subjected to additional controls, reports Reuters.

Apple's legal team asked for the court to discuss the matter with the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ahead of making a decision, on the belief that EU and German law don't necessarily line up. Judge Kirchhoff said the judges failed to see any grounds for such contact to be made.

Federal judges ruled that Apple's 2023 designation as a "company of paramount cross-market significance for competition" stands.

Controls and fines are likely as a result of the ruling. Exactly how harsh the penalties will be remains to be seen.

[...] The legal fight is also separate from the regulator's other Apple-related activities. In June 2022, it launched an antitrust investigation into Apple over App Tracking Transparency, specifically complaints that ATT rules that applied to third-party app producers didn't apply to Apple itself.

Germany's activity also follows after years of attempts by the EU and other governments to curtail the power of tech giants in the marketplace.

The most recent attempt are the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, a set of rules to try and force gatekeepers to act in a competition-promoting way.

This included forcing Apple into allowing third-party App Store alternatives onto the iPhone in the EU, and eliminating anti-steering rules. Changes that Apple dragged its heels over, but eventually relented in some cases.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander went gently into the lunar night after spending a full lunar day on the Moon, gathering data and beaming it back to Earth as part of the company’s first commercial drop-off mission.

Blue Ghost sent its final transmission on Sunday at 7:15 p.m. ET, wrapping up the longest private mission on the Moon to date. Firefly’s lander touched down on the lunar surface on Sunday, March 2, landing in an ancient impact site known as Mare Crisium. After pulling off a flawless touchdown, Blue Ghost got to work on the Moon’s dusty surface. The lander completed 14 days of surface operations, deploying its various payloads and transmitting more than 119 gigabytes of data back to Earth. This was the longest the mission could last, as Blue Ghost is not built to survive the frigid lunar night.

“There is no such thing as an easy Moon landing, especially on your first attempt,” Will Coogan, chief engineer of the Blue Ghost mission at Firefly Aerospace, said in a statement. “We battle tested every system on the lander and simulated every mission scenario we could think of to get to this point.”

[...] After the Sun set on the Moon, Blue Ghost operated for around five hours into the lunar night before bidding farewell to its mission team. Firefly claims that Blue Ghost met “100 percent of its mission objectives.” The company is now gearing up to send annual missions to the Moon, and is already in the process of putting together its Blue Ghost mission 2, which will land on the far side of the Moon.

With its first mission, Firefly became the second company to land on the Moon. Intuitive Machines was the first one to do it in February 2024, but its Odysseus lander tipped over on its side after a not-so-ideal touchdown. The company’s follow-up mission also ended up on its side and was declared dead shortly after arriving on the Moon on March 6.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

UK's internet watchdog puts storage and file-sharing services on watch over CSAM:

As duties under the U.K.'s Online Safety Act (OSA) related to tackling illegal content came into force Monday, the internet watchdog, Ofcom, said it has launched a new enforcement program focused on online storage and file-sharing services.

The regulator said its evidence shows that file-sharing and file-storage services are "particularly susceptible" to being used for the sharing of image-based child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The enforcement programme will assess safety measures they put in place that are aimed at preventing offenders from disseminating CSAM on their services.

Ofcom added that it has written to "a number" of these services, without naming any of those involved. It has put them on notice that "formal information requests" will soon be sent regarding the measures they have already implemented or plan to implement to tackle CSAM. It will ask them to submit illegal harm risk assessments.

Failure to comply with the OSA could lead to major penalties — of up to 10% of global annual turnover.

Original Submission