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quietus writes:

So, I need to develop a service onto some server software on Github.

This open source project runs for well over 12 years now (it started back on SourceForge), and seems to be the only reliable piece of software implementing the protocol I need.

Still driven by its original author, it currently counts 573 files spread out over 131 directories, using 2 different programming languages, one macro language, 2 scripting languages and ofcourse the shell and Makefile.

Documentation exists for some functions, but not, ofcourse, for [an unknown number of] others. Documentation -- apart from one-line comments interspersed within the code -- consists of a short functionality description, parameters and return type. There is no architecture design nor much of explanation about how the different parts fit together.

I've already managed to insert a small proto service. In doing so, I noticed that, for one reason or another, I cannot directly write to the outside world; and also that the developer(s) implemented their own versions of specific standard library functions.

I've already sacrificed a newborn lamb and splattered its blood over my laptop, but I wonder, oh Soylentils, how would you approach this task? What steps would you take, what tools would you use, and what sacrifices would you make?

Original Submission

_{Prepared by kolie}

upstart writes:

Google Pays $1.375 Billion to Texas Over Unauthorized Tracking and Biometric Data Collection:

Google has agreed to pay the U.S. state of Texas nearly $1.4 billion to settle two lawsuits that accused the company of tracking users' personal location and maintaining their facial recognition data without consent.

The $1.375 billion payment dwarfs the fines the tech giant has paid to settle similar lawsuits brought by other U.S. states. In November 2022, it paid $391 million to a group of 40 states. In January 2023, it paid $29.5 million to Indiana and Washington. Later that September, it forked out another $93 million to settle with California.

The case, originally filed in 2022, related to unlawful tracking and collection of user data, regarding geolocation, incognito searches, and biometric data, tracking users' whereabouts even when the Location History setting was disabled and collecting the biometric data without informed consent.

"For years, Google secretly tracked people's movements, private searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry through their products and services," Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement.

"This $1.375 billion settlement is a major win for Texans' privacy and tells companies that they will pay for abusing our trust."

Last year, Google announced plans to store Maps Timeline data locally on users' devices instead of their Google accounts. The company has also rolled out other privacy controls that allow users to auto-delete location information when the Location History setting is enabled.

The payment also rivals a $1.4 billion fine that Meta paid Texas to settle a lawsuit over allegations that it illegally collected the biometric data of millions of users without their permission.

The development comes at a time when Google is the subject of intense regulatory scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic, facing calls to break up parts of its business to satisfy antitrust concerns.

See also:

• State of Texas v. Google, LLC | TechPolicy.Press

Original Submission

_{Prepared by kolie}

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Rapid7 threat hunter wrote a PoC. No, he's not releasing it.

RSAC If Rapid7's Christiaan Beek decided to change careers and become a ransomware criminal, he knows exactly how he'd innovate: CPU ransomware.

The senior director of threat analytics for the cybersecurity company got the idea from a bad bug in AMD Zen chips that, if exploited by highly skilled attackers, would allow those intruders to load unapproved microcode into the processors, breaking encryption at the hardware level and modifying CPU behavior at will.

Typically, only chip manufacturers can provide the correct microcode for their CPUs, which they might do to improve performance or fix holes. While it's difficult for outsiders to figure out how to write new microcode, it's not impossible - in the case of the AMD bug, Google demonstrated it could inject microcode to make the chip always choose the number 4 when asked for a random number.

"Coming from a background in firmware security, I was like, woah, I think I can write some CPU ransomware," Beek told The Register.

Spoiler alert: Beek followed through and wrote proof-of-concept code for ransomware that hides in the computer's processor. "Of course, we won't release that, but it's fascinating, right?"

This, according to Beek, is the worst-case scenario. "Ransomware at the CPU level, microcode alteration, and if you are in the CPU or the firmware, you will bypass every freaking traditional technology we have out there."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Norse ravaged much of Europe for centuries. They were also cosmopolitan explorers who followed trade winds into the Far East.

In the middle of the 9th century, in an office somewhere in the Jibāl region of what is now western Iran, a man is dictating to a scribe. It is the 840s of the Common Era, though the people in this eastern province of the great Caliphate of the ’Abbāsids – an Islamic superpower with its capital in Baghdad – live by the Hijri calendar. The man’s name is Abu ’l-Qāsim ʿUbayd Allāh b ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Khurradādhbih, and he is the director of posts and police for this region.

In his office, he is compiling a report as part of his duties. As his job title implies, he oversees communications and security in the Jibāl region, reporting to officials in Baghdad. What he provides is an intelligence service: in essence, Ibn Khurradādhbih is what we would call a station chief, like those CIA officials who manage clandestine operations abroad. The report he’s working on is part of a much larger document that will one day be known as Kitāb al-Masālik wa l-mamālik (the ‘Book of Itineraries and Kingdoms’), a summary of exactly the kind of thing that governments usually want to know: who was visiting their territory, where they came from, where they were going, and why. This is what he says about a group of people known as the Rus’:

For many decades, the second paragraph of this rather dense text was thought to refer to a totally different group of merchants from those described in the first, for the simple reason that scholars just didn’t believe that the Rūs (or the Rus’, as the word is usually spelled today) really went so far east. And yet, the text is clear. The two sections run on from each other, and both refer to the same people. So why do Ibn Khurradādhbih’s observations about them matter today?

We used to think of the time of the vikings, the three long centuries from around 750 to 1050 CE, as an age of expansion, when the Scandinavian peoples burst out upon an unsuspecting world with fire and sword. Over the past 40 years or so, that picture has become much more nuanced, as we see the poets, traders and settlers alongside the stereotypical raiders (who were nonetheless real) that most people imagine when they think of the vikings. However, our view of these events has recently changed. We no longer see an outward impulse of intention and process, but a much more haphazard and varied diaspora of Norse peoples, in which individuals with their own motives and missions shift across the northern world.

upstart writes:

Smarter agents, continuous updates, and the eternal struggle to prove ROI:

As Nvidia releases its NeMo microservices to embed AI agents into enterprise workflows, research has found that almost half of businesses are seeing only minor gains from their investments in AI.

NeMo microservices are a set of tools, some already available, which developers can use to build AI agents capable of integrating with existing applications and services to automate tasks, and manage the lifecycle of agents to keep them updated as necessary with the latest information.

"There are over a billion knowledge workers across many industries, geographies, and locations, and our view is that digital employees or AI agents will be able to help enterprises get more work done in this variety of domains and scenarios," said Joey Conway, Nvidia's senior director of generative AI software for enterprise.

[...] Nvidia envisions these microservices working in a circular pipeline, taking new data and user feedback, using this to improve the AI model, then redeploying it. Nvidia refers to this as a "data flywheel," although we can't help feeling that this misunderstands what an actual flywheel does.

[...] Examples where NeMo microservices are already being put to work include Amdocs, which is laboring on three types of agents for its telecoms operator customers, Nvidia said.

These comprise a billing agent, a sales agent, and a network agent. The billing agent focuses on query resolution, while the sales agent works on personalized offers and customer engagement as part of deal closure. The network agent will analyze logs and network information across geographic regions and countries to proactively identify service issues.

[...] The research was commissioned by Storyblok, provider of CMS software for marketers and developers, which said that businesses need to look beyond surface-level implementations and integrate AI in a way that drives meaningful transformation.

It found the most popular use cases for AI among UK business leaders are website content creation, customer service, marketing analysis, translation services, and marketing content creation.

Original Submission

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.