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upstart writes:

New requirements could see more 'bad content' on Wikipedia, its owners warn:

The non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia has launched a legal challenge against the government's Online Safety Act, arguing that the law's requirements threaten the site's open editing model and could lead to a surge in misinformation and vandalism.

The challenge focuses on the Act's categorisation of Wikipedia as a 'Category 1' service, subjecting it to the highest level of content moderation duties.

This designation, Wikimedia Foundation owners argue, would force the site to implement user verification and content filtering measures, undermining the platform's unique system of volunteer editors and reviewers.

A key concern is the requirement to allow any user to block unverified users from editing or removing content. This, the foundation warns, disrupts the established hierarchy of volunteer editors and moderators, potentially empowering malicious actors to post harmful or false information while preventing its removal.

It also argues that this could lead to an increase in misinformation and vandalism on the platform, directly contradicting the aims of the Online Safety Act. The legal challenge seeks to revise Wikipedia's categorisation under the Act, protecting its collaborative editing model while maintaining its commitment to accuracy and user safety.

"Wikipedia is kept free of bad content because of the important work of thousands of members of the public, who can review and improve the content on the website to ensure it is neutral, fact-based and well-sourced," the Wikimedia Foundation said in a blog post.

Sophisticated volunteer communities, working in more than 300 languages, collectively govern almost every aspect of day-to-day life on Wikipedia.

Their ability to set and enforce policies, and to review, improve or remove what other volunteers post, is central to Wikipedia's success, notably in resisting vandalism, abuse and misinformation.

pdfernhout writes:

A recent US Congressional Report suggests: "We stand at the edge of a new industrial revolution, one that depends on our ability to engineer biology. Emerging biotechnology, coupled with artificial intelligence, will transform everything from the way we defend and build our nation to how we nourish and provide care for Americans."

From the Executive Summary:

Imagine a not-so-distant future where researchers in Shanghai develop a breakthrough drug that can eliminate malignant cells, effectively ending cancer as we know it. But when tensions over Taiwan reach a breaking point, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the strategic apparatus of the Chinese government, hoards the treatment under the guise of national security, cutting off supply to the United States. After years of access, this lifesaving drug is immediately in shortage, requiring doctors to ration it while American biotechnology companies scramble to reconstitute production in the United States. The streets and social media overflow with people demanding that the United States abandon Taiwan. The Administration faces an agonizing choice between geopolitical priorities and public health.

This scenario is fiction. But something like it could soon become reality as biotechnology takes center stage in the unfolding strategic competition between the United States and People's Republic of China (China).

[...] Biology has been a well-defined scientific discipline for more than 200 years. But thanks to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), engineering, and automation, biology is becoming more than just a field of discovery; it is becoming a field of design. Chemistry made this leap in the 1880s when chemical engineering unlocked rubber, plastic, and synthetic fibers, materials that transformed society. Physics followed in the 1940s, when academic theory led to the atomic bomb, semiconductors, and computers. Now for the first time in recent history, the United States finds itself competing with a rival over a new form of engineering that will create tremendous wealth, but, in the wrong hands, could be used to develop powerful weapons. Countries that win the innovation race tend to win actual wars, too.

The Congressional Report Chapters:
1. Prioritize Biotechnology at the National Level
2. Mobilize the Private Sector to get U.S. Products to Scale
3. Maximize the Benefits of Biotechnology and Defense
4. Out-innovate our Strategic Partners
5. Build the Biotechnology Workforce of the Future
6. Mobilize the Collective Strengths of our Allies and Partners

Here is some commentary by Eric Schmidt on the report including his predictions on the future of AI applied to biotech and other areas over the next few years.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

As Big Tech gets used to the pain, smaller vendors urged to up their game:

Google says that despite a small dip in the number of exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in 2024, the number of attacks using these novel bugs continues on an upward trend overall

Data released by Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) today, timed with the ongoing RSA Conference 2025, revealed that 75 zero-days were exploited last year. The number is down from 2023's figure of 98, but an increase from 63 the year before, suggesting that zero-days continue to be a hot commodity for the most well-resourced attackers.

Over 50 percent of the confirmed zero-days were used for cyberespionage campaigns carried out by state-sponsored groups and customers of spyware companies, or as Google calls them, "commercial surveillance vendors."

Google's researchers highlighted China and spyware companies – none of which were named specifically – as the main culprits here, exploiting five and eight zero-days respectively in 2024.

However, North Korea also featured with its state-backed attackers accounting for five zero-day exploits – the first time the country has been mentioned in the same breath as the usual leaders in this regard.

"GTIG tracked 75 exploited-in-the-wild zero-day vulnerabilities that were disclosed in 2024," said Google's researchers. "This number appears to be consistent with a consolidating upward trend that we have observed over the last four years.

"After an initial spike in 2021, yearly counts have fluctuated but not returned to the lower numbers we saw in 2021 and prior."

Google noted, however, that the surge in confirmed zero-day exploits from 2021 onward, compared to figures from years before that, could well be due to the industry's improvements both in technical detections and public disclosures of such attacks.

slon writes:

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-people-ai-colleagues-lazier.html

A trio of business analysts at Duke University has found that people who use AI apps at work are perceived by their colleagues as less diligent, lazier and less competent than those who do not use them.

In their study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jessica Reif, Richard Larrick and Jack Soll carried out four online experiments asking 4,400 participants to imagine they were in scenarios in which some workers used AI and some did not, and how they viewed themselves or others working under such circumstances.

[...] The first experiment involved asking participants to imagine themselves using an AI app or dashboard creation tool to complete work projects. The next part of the experiment involved asking those same users how they thought others in their workplace would view them if they used such applications. The researchers found that many of the respondents believed they would be judged as lazy, less diligent and less competent. They also suggested they might be viewed as more easily replaced than those who refused to use such apps to get their work done.

The second experiment involved asking participants to describe how they viewed colleagues at work who used AI apps to get their work done. The researchers found many viewed such colleagues as less competent at their jobs, lazy, less independent, less self-assured and less diligent.

In the third experiment, participants were asked to pretend they were managers who were hiring someone for a position at work. They found that such managers were less likely to hire someone if that candidate admitted to using AI to get their work done. One exception was when the manager was someone who used AI at work.

The fourth experiment involved asking participants about another aspect of AI use on the job: when it was known to be helpful. In such scenarios, negative perceptions diminished for the most part.

The research team notes that one factor made a difference in all their experiments: If the participants actually used AI at work, they saw its use by themselves or others in a much more positive light.

Journal Reference: Jessica A. Reif et al, Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2426766122

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A gauntlet of engineering challenges await a search for evidence of alien life.

Some time in next ten years, a Chinese mission aims to do what’s never been done before: collect cloud particles from Venus and bring them home. But achieving that goal will mean overcoming one of the most hostile environments in the solar system—the planet’s cloaking clouds are primarily made up of droplets of sulfuric acid.

When China unveiled a long-term roadmap for space science and exploration last fall, its second phase (2028-2035) included an unprecedented Venus atmosphere sample return mission. As is typical for Chinese space missions, few details were made public. But information in a recent presentation shared on Chinese social media gives us new insight into early mission plans.

The slide shows that the key scientific questions being targeted include the potential for life on Venus, the planet’s atmospheric evolution, and the mystery of UV absorbers in its clouds. The mission will carry a sample collection device as well as in-situ atmospheric analysis equipment. The search for life is, in part, due to the interest generated by a controversial study published in Nature Astronomy in 2020 that suggested that traces of phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere could be an indication of a biological process.

Mission proposals like MIT’s offer a window into the daunting technical challenges that China’s team is facing. Getting to Venus, entering its thick atmosphere, collecting samples and getting back into Venus orbit to a waiting orbiter to return the samples the Earth, all come with various challenges. But the potential scientific payoff clearly makes these hurdles worth clearing.

[...] “I’m super excited about this,” says Seager. “Even if there’s no life, we know there’s interesting organic chemistry, for sure. And it would be amazing to get samples in hand to really solve some of the big mysteries on Venus.”

Original Submission

owl writes:

http://www.righto.com/2025/05/386-prefetch-circuitry-reverse-engineered.html

In 1985, Intel introduced the groundbreaking 386 processor, the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture. To improve performance, the 386 has a 16-byte instruction prefetch queue. The purpose of the prefetch queue is to fetch instructions from memory before they are needed, so the processor usually doesn't need to wait on memory while executing instructions. Instruction prefetching takes advantage of times when the processor is "thinking" and the memory bus would otherwise be unused.

In this article, I look at the 386's prefetch queue circuitry in detail. One interesting circuit is the incrementer, which adds 1 to a pointer to step through memory. This sounds easy enough, but the incrementer uses complicated circuitry for high performance. The prefetch queue uses a large network to shift bytes around so they are properly aligned. It also has a compact circuit to extend signed 8-bit and 16-bit numbers to 32 bits. There aren't any major discoveries in this post, but if you're interested in low-level circuits and dynamic logic, keep reading.

Original Submission

slon writes:

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-05-urine-powered-electrolysis-energy-efficient.html

Researchers have developed two unique energy-efficient and cost-effective systems that use urea found in urine and wastewater to generate hydrogen. The unique systems reveal pathways to economically generate "green" hydrogen, a sustainable and renewable energy source, and the potential to remediate nitrogenous waste in aquatic environments.

Typically, we generate hydrogen through the electrolysis of water where water is split into oxygen and hydrogen. It is a promising technology to help solve the global energy crisis, but the process is energy intensive, which renders it cost-prohibitive when compared to extracting hydrogen from fossil fuels (gray hydrogen), itself an undesirable process because of the carbon emissions it generates.

In contrast to water, an electrolysis system that generates hydrogen from urea uses significantly less energy.

Despite this advantage, existing urea-based systems face several limitations, such as the low conversion efficiency of urea to hydrogen and the generation of undesirable nitrogenous by-products (nitrates and nitrites) that are toxic and compete with hydrogen production, further reducing overall system efficiency.

Researchers from the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Carbon Science and Innovation (COE-CSI) and the University of Adelaide developed two urea-based electrolysis systems that overcome these problems and can generate green hydrogen at a cost that they have calculated is comparable to or cheaper than the cost of producing gray hydrogen.

"While we haven't solved all the problems, should these systems be scaled up, our systems produce harmless nitrogen gas instead of the toxic nitrates and nitrites, and either system will use between 20-27% less electricity than water splitting systems," says COE-CSI Chief Investigator, Professor Yao Zheng.

The research for each system was published in separate papers, one in Angewandte Chemie International, the other in Nature Communications.

DannyB writes:

'Tone deaf': US tech company responsible for global IT outage to cut jobs and use AI

CrowdStrike CEO announces 5% of workforce to be slashed globally, citing artificial intelligence efficiencies created in the business

The cybersecurity company that became a household name after causing a massive global IT outage last year has announced it will cut 5% of its workforce in part due to "AI efficiency".

In a note to staff earlier this week, released in stock market filings in the US, CrowdStrike's chief executive, George Kurtz, announced that 500 positions, or 5% of its workforce, would be cut globally, citing AI efficiencies created in the business.

And a quote that almost could only have come from an AI or someone trained in corporate drone speak:

"We're operating in a market and technology inflection point, with AI reshaping every industry, accelerating threats, and evolving customer needs," he said.

Kurtz said AI "flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster", adding it "drives efficiencies across both the front and back office".

Why the company is highly recognized and well known for its products.

In July last year, CrowdStrike pushed out a faulty update to its software designed to detect cybersecurity threats that brought down 8.5m Windows systems worldwide.

The outage caused chaos at airports, and took down computers in hospitals, TV networks, payment systems and people's personal computers.

They have to be seen to be doing something.

McEwan said companies were facing pressure to deliver on the big investments made in AI.

I feel safer already.

Original Submission

quietus writes:

Christopher (Chris) Alan Pelkey had two tours of duty in Iraq, and one in Afghanistan, behind him when, on a November Saturday afternoon, a car stopped behind him at a red light and started honking his horn. The veteran sergeant got out of his car and walked to the other car with his hands held up, as if he wanted to ask what the problem was. Then three shots rang out.

Now, three years later, his family has used generative AI to allow him to appear as a witness in his own murder case. It is worth watching the generated video here.

I have difficulty interpreting this. While this video appears eerily touching to me, it is not hard to foresee how these kind of videos could also be used to sway a judge or jury to much heavier penalties.

The video also reminded me of the Caleb character in the science fiction series WestWorld (seasons 3 and 4). Caleb is an army veteran who, for therapy purposes, is coupled to an AI version of his killed-in-action army buddy. Instead of having a liberating effect though, the feeling is more that his AI buddy holds him back, keeping him instead dependent on the service.

And then there's this video of a recent interview given by Mark Zuckerberg -- wearing Meta's Ray-Ban AI connected glasses, which he claimed were selling by the millions -- at Stripe Sessions, where he talks about how personal AI will be their focus, and what that actually will mean (at 14'), and, connected to that, the need to long-term invest in glasses as the ultimate devices for AI (24') -- seeing what you see, hearing what you hear.

The currently existing AI ethics rules/frameworks focus on data privacy and legal responsibility. Maybe we should start to think early, here, about potential sociological and psychological impacts.

Original Submission

Skype Shuts Down Today [May 5], Marking The End Of An Internet Era

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

When I first heard Skype was shutting down, I had one reaction: “Wait…people are still using it?” But jokes apart, hearing that the platform I once used for prank calls and late-night chats is officially retiring hit me with a surprising wave of nostalgia. If you’re a 90s kid like me, you’re probably feeling it too. Yes, today, May 5, 2025, is the day Skype takes its last breath.

Microsoft is moving Skype users over to Teams Free, which will serve as Skype’s successor. The good news is you won’t have to start from scratch. You can log into Microsoft Teams Free with your existing Skype credentials. Your Skype contacts and chat history will also automatically transfer to Teams. If you were still using Skype, you may have already seen an in-app notification prompting you to migrate your data before it’s too late.

[...] So here’s to you, Skype. Thanks for the memories, the dial tones, the pixelated video chats, and the surreal experience of calling a phone from a desktop PC with a dial-up connection. Even as you fade into the Microsoft Teams ecosystem, a little piece of internet history is dying off with you.

Skype is Officially Dead Today and This is Why People Should Use Free Software Instead

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Skype is Officially Dead Today [May 5] and This is Why People Should Use Free Software Instead (Goodbye, Microsoft)

Today, or this morning in the US (this was one hour ago), some of the technical media will offer a timely and much-needed reminder; some will tell you to move to another Microsoft thing (checking the Web, some of the sites spew out promotional spam or chaff for Microsoft today; those sites are connected to Microsoft! "Microsoft mourners" psydroid calls them, "can't get more pathetic than this") and some will tell you to move to some other proprietary thing, i.e. move from one spyware to other spyware from another company, usually from the same country, i.e. the same masters. Few will have the guts/courage/"balls" to mention truly secure software because there's no "money" in selling confidentiality; sponsors, except phonies (false marketing), won't pay to seed such promotional (sponsored) articles. "Skype to go offline on May 5; Microsoft urges transition to Teams", said an LLM slop hub, failing to mention good and ethical alternatives. Maybe it does not quite "rhyme" in Microsoft-controlled LLMs.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

openSUSE removes Deepin from its repositories after long string of security issues and unauthorised security bypass

Thom Holwerda - 2025-05-07

The openSUSE team has decided to remove the Deepin Desktop Environment from openSUSE, after the project's packager for openSUSE was found to have added workaround specifically to bypass various security requirements openSUSE has in place for RPM packages.

"Recently we noticed a policy violation in the packaging of the Deepin desktop environment in openSUSE. To get around security review requirements, our Deepin community packager implemented a workaround which bypasses the regular RPM packaging mechanisms to install restricted assets.

As a result of this violation, and in the light of the difficult history we have with Deepin code reviews, we will be removing the Deepin Desktop packages from openSUSE distributions for the time being." -- Matthias Gerstner

Matthias Gerstner goes into great detail to lay out every single time the openSUSE team found massive, glaring security issues in Deepin, and the complete lack of adequate responses from the Deepin upstream team over the past 8 or so years. It's absolutely shocking to see how utterly lax the Deepin developers have been regarding the security of their desktop environment and its dependencies, and the openSUSE team could really only come to one harsh conclusion: Deepin has no security culture whatsoever, and it's extremely likely that every corner of the Deepin code is riddled with very serious security issues.

As such, despite the relatively large number of Deepin users on openSUSE, the team has decided to remove Deepin from openSUSE entirely, instead pointing users to a third-party repository if they desire to keep using Deepin. I think this is the best possible option in this situation, but it's not exactly ideal. After reading this entire saga, however, I don't think anyone who cares about security should be using Deepin.

Of course, I doubt this will be the end of the story. What about all the other Linux distributions out there? The security issues in Deepin itself are most likely also present in Debian, Fedora, and other distributions who have the Deepin Desktop Environment in their repositories, but what about the workaround to bypass packaging security practices? Does that exist elsewhere as well?

I think we're about to find out.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

Just how many penises are there on the Bayeux tapestry? The previous count was 93. Now they claim to have found another one. So is it 93 or 94? Most of them belong to horses. So it's a Oxford professor showdown in how many penises they can see in a tapestry. Nobs for History!

Garnett's results made headline news: he identified 88 penises belonging to horses and five human penises, for a grand total of 93.

Although Monk agrees with Garnett on the first 93, he believes he has spotted one more appendage dangling liberally down from the tunic of a soldier.

To George Garnett, it is clearly a scabbard—the long protective sheath that holds the sword or dagger. To Dr. Monk, on the other hand, it far more closely resembles a penis.

Scabbard or Penis?

The men's penises are included in the border of the embroidery, but there is no agreement about why they are there.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn05wyld45wo
https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/bayeux-tapestry-count/
https://www.thevikingherald.com/article/archeologists-dispute-penis-count-in-bayeux-tapestry/1172
https://allthatsinteresting.com/bayeux-tapestry-penises
  -- there is an image of the part of the tapestry in question here where you can see the penis/scabbard in question. To judge for yourself ...

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

Curl project founder snaps over deluge of time-sucking AI slop bug reports

Curl project founder Daniel Stenberg is fed up with of the deluge of AI-generated "slop" bug reports and recently introduced a checkbox to screen low-effort submissions that are draining maintainers' time.

Stenberg said the amount of time it takes project maintainers to triage each AI-assisted vulnerability report made via HackerOne, only for them to be deemed invalid, is tantamount to a DDoS attack on the project.

[...] Citing a specific recent report that "pushed [him] over the limit," Stenberg said via LinkedIn: "That's it. I've had it. I'm putting my foot down on this craziness."

[...] Generative AI tools have allowed low-skilled individuals with an awareness of bug bounty programs to quickly file reports based on AI-generated content in the hope they can cash in on the rewards they offer.

[...] It was pitched as "a novel exploit leveraging stream dependency cycles in the HTTP/3 protocol stack was discovered, resulting in memory corruption and potential denial-of-service or remote code execution scenarios."

Ultimately, though, it was found to refer to nonexistent functions.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Sunscreen might have helped early humans outlive Neanderthals:

Sunscreen may have been essential to the survival of prehistoric humans at a time when Neanderthals were dying out, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan.

European Homo sapiens may have protected themselves from harmful solar radiation using ochre: a natural mineral, known for its rich yellow, red and brown hues, that can act as a sunscreen when applied to the skin.

This was at a time – between 41,000 and 39,000 years ago – during a period of unusual activity in Earth's magnetic field that left early humans at particular risk of Sun damage.

The magnetic field is generated by electrical currents from the Earth's core, creating an invisible halo that protects us against cosmic radiation and charged particles from the Sun.

The North and South poles act as the north and south of the magnetic field – but that's not fixed. It is possible for the poles to wander from their geographical positions and for the strength of the magnetic field to change.

The last time this happened was around 40,000 years ago, called the Laschamps excursion. Scientists at the University of Michigan recently developed models to estimate how this excursion would have changed the Earth's magnetic field, and calculate any knock-on effects.

"During the Laschamps event, the magnetic poles shifted away from true north," Dr Agnit Mukhopadhyay, lead author and U-M research affiliate in climate and space sciences and engineering, told BBC Science Focus.

"This movement, coupled with a notable weakening of the magnetic field, resulted in an expanded auroral zone and increased atmospheric penetration by energetic particles, such as solar energetic particles and cosmic radiation."

The scientists estimated that the Earth's magnetic field would have reduced to approximately 10 per cent of its current strength, and that the North Pole would have drooped down near the Earth's equator, during the Laschamps excursion.

As a result, auroras – spectacular light shows that are usually only visible near the poles – would have been visible all over Europe and into northern Africa.

Their calculations also show that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals would have been much more vulnerable to the harmful effects of ultraviolet light.

upstart writes:

Scientists transformed energy-storing white fat cells into calorie-burning 'beige' fat. Once implanted, How Hungry Fat Cells Could Someday Starve Cancer to Death:

Liposuction and plastic surgery aren't often mentioned in the same breath as cancer.

But they are the inspiration for a new approach to treating cancer that uses engineered fat cells to deprive tumors of nutrition.

Researchers at UC San Francisco used the gene editing technology CRISPR to turn ordinary white fat cells into "beige" fat cells, which voraciously consume calories to make heat.

Then, they implanted them near tumors the way plastic surgeons inject fat from one part of the body to plump up another. The fat cells scarfed up all the nutrients, starving most of the tumor cells to death. The approach even worked when the fat cells were implanted in mice far from the sites of their tumors.

Relying on common procedures like this could speed its use as a new form of cellular therapy.

"We already routinely remove fat cells with liposuction and put them back via plastic surgery," said Nadav Ahituv, PhD, director of the UCSF Institute for Human Genetics and professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences. He is the senior author of the paper, which appears Feb. 4 in Nature Biotechnology. "These fat cells can be easily manipulated in the lab and safely placed back into the body, making them an attractive platform for cellular therapy, including for cancer."

Ahituv and his post-doc at the time, Hai Nguyen, PhD, were aware of studies that showed exposure to cold could suppress cancer in mice. One experiment even showed it could help a patient with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Scientists concluded that the cancer cells were starving because the cold was activating brown fat cells, which use nutrients to produce heat.

But cold therapy isn't a viable option for cancer patients with fragile health. So, Ahituv and Nguyen turned to the idea of using beige fat, wagering that they could engineer it to burn enough calories, even in the absence of cold, to deprive tumors of the fuel they needed to grow.