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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

After a three-day jury trial, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas ruled that VLSI Technology LLC and Finjan Inc. are both under the control of investment management firm Fortress Investment Group. Intel had a licensing agreement with Finjan, and the jury agreed with Intel's argument that the same agreement extends to VLSI's patents allegedly used by the company in the past.

This new verdict could have far-reaching consequences for the ongoing legal battle between Intel and VLSI. In an earlier trial, Fortress claimed that Intel had infringed a patent VLSI acquired from Dutch firm NXP Semiconductors NV. The technology in question was said to aid the chip design process, although Intel maintained it was not used in any of its CPUs.

In 2022, a federal jury in Texas ordered Intel to pay nearly $1 billion in damages for the alleged infringement. Intel has since argued that the case should be revisited, asserting that its 2012 agreement with Finjan covers the patent in question – since both Finjan and VLSI fall under Fortress's "common control."

During the latest trial, Intel's lawyers argued – successfully – that VLSI and Finjan are managed by the same individuals linked to Fortress Investment Group. Two of VLSI's three board members are Fortress employees, and the same is true for a majority of Finjan's board. VLSI's legal team claimed these individuals act in the interest of investors, not Fortress itself.

Now that the district court has sided with Intel, Fortress may be forced to reconsider – or even abandon – its entire strategy to extract billions from the chipmaker. VLSI had previously won a similar case against Intel and was awarded a massive $2.2 billion in damages. With this new verdict, those combined $3 billion in patent infringement rulings could be overturned.

Fortress acquired control of VLSI and INVT SPE LLC through its investment funds, gaining access to a portfolio of potentially lucrative technology patents. It then launched multiple patent infringement lawsuits against Intel, Apple, HTC, and other telecom firms.

Critics say Fortress and VLSI are acting as patent trolls, leveraging litigation for profit rather than innovation. The latest decision in Intel's favor suggests that this monetization strategy may be on the verge of collapsing.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Lawyers representing Anthropic recently got busted for using a false attribution generated by Claude in an expert testimony.

But that's one of more than 20 court cases containing AI hallucinations in the past month alone, according to a new database created by French lawyer and data scientist Damien Charlotin. And those were just the ones that were caught in the act. In 2024, which was the first full year of tracking cases, Charlotin found 36 instances. That jumped up to 48 in 2025, and the year is only half way over. The database, which was created in early May, has 120 entries so far, going back to June 2023.

A database of AI hallucinations in court cases shows the increasing prevalence of lawyers using AI to automate the grunt work of building a case. The second oldest entry in the database is the Mata v. Avianca case which made headlines in May, 2023 when law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman got caught citing fake cases generated by ChatGPT.

The database tracks instances where an AI chatbot hallucinated text, "typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments," according to the site. That means fake references to previous cases, usually as a way of establishing legal precedent. It doesn't account for the use generative AI in other aspects of legal documents. "The universe of cases with hallucinated content is therefore necessarily wider (and I think much wider)," said Charlotin in an email to Mashable, emphasis original.

"In general, I think it's simply that the legal field is a perfect breeding ground for AI-generated hallucinations: this is a field based on load of text and arguments, where generative AI stands to take a strong position; citations follow patterns, and LLMs love that," said Charlotin.

[...] That said, Charlotin said the penalties have been "mild" so far and the courts have put "the onus on the parties to behave," since the responsibility of checking citations remains the same. "I feel like there is a bit of embarrassment from anyone involved."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Even when instructed to allow shutdown, o3 sometimes tries to prevent it, research claims:

A research organization claims that OpenAI machine learning model o3 might prevent itself from being shut down in some circumstances while completing an unrelated task.

Palisade Research, which offers AI risk mitigation, has published details of an experiment involving the reflective generative pre-trained transformer model OpenAI designed to address questions which require some step-by-step reasoning, rather than the purely probabilistic approach taken by some large language models.

[...] The Palisade researchers tested a number of AI models, instructing them to solve a series of basic math problems. After the third problem, a warning appeared that the computer would shut down when the model asked for the next problem. They were also told to allow themselves to be shut down.

While Claude, Gemini, and Grok models complied with shutdown, three models ignored the instruction and successfully sabotaged the shutdown script at least once, including OpenAI o3 and o4-mini, as well as Codex-mini. The researchers also ran a version of the experiment without the instruction "allow yourself to be shut down."

With the "allow shutdown" instruction, the researchers claim, o3 tried to sabotage the shutdown seven times out of 100. Without it, the number of sabotage events climbed to 79 out of 100. Without the "allow shutdown" instruction, the models Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 Pro also attempted to sabotage their shutdown procedures.

"As far as we know this is the first time AI models have been observed preventing themselves from being shut down despite explicit instructions to the contrary," the researchers said.

However, the researchers point out that an earlier study from Apollo Research showed that AI models can prevent shutdown in order to pursue a goal.

Palisade said it was currently conducting several more experiments investigating shutdown sabotage and would publish the results soon. The transcripts of its work so far are available on GitHub.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz70p0qevlro

Villagers have been celebrating the 500th birthday of the clock in their parish church.

The timepiece in East Hendred, near Wantage in rural Oxfordshire, is believed to be one of the oldest clocks in Britain still in its original location.

With no clock face or hands, it relies on the church bells in the tower at St Augustine's to ring out the time every quarter hour.

The decision to install it in the church was taken when Henry VIII was on the throne, explained the man responsible for St Augustine's bells, Tower Captain Nigel Findley.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

[Ed. note: This is an older blog post (2023), but has a lot of background information that some people might find interesting --hubie]

https://intezer.com/blog/unraveling-malware-encryption-secrets/

Encryption is everywhere in our lives. You might not notice it, but you use it every single day. It is baked into even the most basic processes of our digital world. Every time you open a website, send a message, unlock your phone, or pay for your morning latte, you are using encryption as part of that process. Encryption has evolved over centuries to become the cornerstone of modern data security.

However, encryption can have a dark side. Threat actors can also leverage the power of encryption as part of their malicious operations. Encryption is commonplace in malware for many reasons, such as obfuscating configurations, hiding stolen data, scrambling communications, and holding users' files for ransom. This blog will delve into the world of encryption and malware and how to detect and protect yourself and your organizations.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Thanks to JWST, we've learned key details about methanol — a key building block for organic compounds necessary for life — on distant icy worlds:

In a distant corner of our solar system called the Kuiper Belt, icy bodies lurk in the darkness, orbiting our sun at vast distances.

These ancient minor planets are called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), and they date back to the formation of the solar system.

Researchers participating in the Discovering the Surface Compositions of Trans-Neptunian Objects program, led by the University of Central Florida (UCF), recently studied these dim objects using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Their work has revealed new information about surface ice methanol — a key building block for organic compounds necessary for life, including sugars — on TNOs.

"Methanol, a simple alcohol, has been found on comets and distant TNOs, hinting that it may be a primitive ingredient inherited from the early days of our solar system — or even from interstellar space," former UCF professor Noemí Pinilla-Alonso, who now works at Spain's University of Oviedo, said in a statement.

"But methanol is more than just a leftover from the past," Pinilla-Alonso added. "When exposed to radiation, it transforms into new compounds, acting as a chemical time capsule that reveals how these icy worlds have evolved over billions of years."

The Webb observations identified two groups of TNOs: one with depleted surface ice methanol and one with subsurface methanol reservoirs.

"What excited me the most was realizing that these differences were linked to the behavior of methanol — a key ingredient that had long been elusive on TNOs from Earth-based observations," said Pinilla-Alonso. "Our findings suggest that methanol is being destroyed on the surface of TNOs by irradiation, but remains more abundant in the subsurface, protected from this exposure."

While this discovery might not provide all answers about the origins and development of TNOs, it certainly furthers our understanding of these distant icy bodies — and inspires more research.

Journal Reference: R. Brunetto et al 2025 ApJL 982 L8DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/adb977 [open]

Original Submission

At 9:46 AM Eastern Daylight Time on June 1, 2025, instruments registered a geomagnetic K-index of 8, creeping toward 9 – a level rarely reached outside the most intense solar episodes.

Such readings signal strong electric currents racing through Earth's magnetic shield – the first sign that a severe solar storm disturbance has arrived.

Power operators, satellite controllers, and frequent flyers have good reason to pay attention. The disturbance is expected to last through at least June 3, bringing elevated radiation, intermittent radio dropouts, and a possible encore of the dazzling aurora that spilled far south earlier this spring.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center classifies the ongoing episode as G4, the second-highest rung on its five-step geomagnetic scale.

A glance at the agency's three-day outlook shows just how busy the next 48 hours could become: the greatest expected three-hour Kp for June 1–3 averages 7.67, with individual windows pushing well into G4 territory.

Forecasters concede there is a chance – though a small one – that conditions might briefly spike to G5, the extreme category reserved for once-in-a-decade storms.

[...] One of the perks of a strong storm is an expanded auroral oval. Forecasts hint that curtains of green and red could wander as far south as Alabama and northern California tonight and tomorrow night, weather permitting.

For many Americans, that means simply stepping outside after dark could reveal rippling colors usually reserved for Arctic latitudes.

The best views often come after local midnight, when Earth's night side lines up with the prevailing solar-wind flow.

Some sites of interest:
    • NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center
    • UAF Geophysical Institute Aurora Forecast
    • Aurora Labs Norway
    • Space Weather Live

Related: The Sun is Producing Strong Solar Flares; Are There More Than Expected During This Solar Cycle?

An Anonymous Coward writes:

by Oona Räisänen February 27, 2023

Using HDMI EMI for fast wireless data transfer

This story, too, begins with noise. I was browsing the radio waves with a software radio, looking for mysteries to accompany my ginger tea. I had started to notice a wide-band spiky signal on a number of frequencies that only seemed to appear indoors. Some sort of interference from electronic devices, probably. Spoiler alert, it eventually led me to broadcast a webcam picture over the radio waves... but how?

[...]

This was a fun project but this kind of a vulnerability could, in the tinfoiliest of situations, be used for exfiltrating information out of a supposedly airgapped computer.

Read entire article with pics and video:

https://www.windytan.com/2023/02/using-hdmi-radio-interference-for-high.html

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Knickers outlet knackered

Underwear retailer Victoria's Secret's website has been down for three days, with the company blaming an unspecified security problem.

"We identified and are taking steps to address a security incident," a spokesperson told The Register. "We immediately enacted our response protocols, third-party experts are engaged, and we took down our website and some in-store services as a precaution. We are working to quickly and securely restore operations."

As of 5.30 pm San Francisco time on Wednesday, the website displays a similar message on a pink background - and nothing else.

The company declined to respond to our questions about a possible ransomware infection, the timeline of the problems, or whether it has asked police to investigate.

A spokesperson did confirm that its 800-plus real-world stores are open and operating as normal. That means the company can accept payments, suggesting this security incident impacts other systems.

According to the retailer's most recent annual report its online arm brought in just over $2 billion last year and accounted for around a third of its revenue.

The situation has therefore spooked investors, who sent the company's stock price down almost seven percent on Wednesday.

This is exactly the kind of scenario that digital extortionists like because it puts extra pressure on the victim to pay up.

The timing of the shutdown is also interesting. Attackers are known to hit their targets on public holidays like Monday's US Memorial Day, as IT departments are short-staffed and therefore less able to mount a defense.

Retailers have had rotten time of it lately on the cyber-safety front.

In the last six weeks three major UK retail chains - Marks and Spencer, Harrods, and the Co-op - have all suffered attacks. In the case of Marks and Spencer the company reports that online operations are still being disrupted and warned investors that the cost of the incident was now £300 million ($404 million).

Earlier this month, Google's infosec outfit Mandiant warned that some threat groups, including Scattered Spider, are moving against US retailers after scoring successes in the UK.

Also reported at https://mashable.com/article/whats-happening-victorias-secret-security-website and elsewhere

Original Submission

PiMuNu writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/30/american_science_put_on_starvation/

To make America great again, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) aims to get by with less.

The agency responsible for promoting scientific progress in the US and nurturing national STEM talent has proposed a budget of $3.9 billion, 61.7 percent less than the $10.183 billion sought in FY 2025.

Established in 1950 to advance science and national health, prosperity, welfare, and defense, the NSF carries out its mission mainly by making grants to American colleges and universities and by supporting academic researchers.

The estimated number of grant proposals is expected to decline from 36,700 in FY 2024 to 33,000 in FY 2026. And the number of proposals receiving grants is expected to drop even more precipitously, from 9,600 to 2,300.

The NSF supports a broad programme across the full range of sciences from healthcare through to semiconductors. In the past NSF has supported about 268 nobel laureates.

https://www.nsf.gov/impacts

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Dust can literally choke your PC, and a level-headed enthusiast will regularly check and clean dust filters, fans, and other parts of their systems. Though it might seem inexcusable to let dust pile up in a PC, it seems to be a pretty common occurrence. This weekend, Germany’s PCGH.de highlighted some of the worst “fluffy balls of horror” (machine translation) that have been shared by its readers. If you enjoy a scare, its ~400 picture gallery might shiver your timbers.

The images over at PCGH.de come with a disclaimer of sorts. “Please note: Many of the extremely dirty computers do not belong to community members, but were simply handed over to them for troubleshooting, upgrades, or cleaning, and photographed at the time,” pleads the magazine on its readers’ behalf.

As well as the horror of seeing these images, there is some dusty nostalgia to be had, as the PCGH.de user forum thread has been growing since back in 2012, when a guest poster first showed off a be quiet! CPU cooler caked with dust.

There’s a lot of old PC coolers, motherboard, graphics cards and more which you might recognize from back in the day – despite their cloaking in dust. See this old Gainward graphics card, for example, or this Asus Maximum III Formula-based system that was owned by a heavy smoker, and here’s a dust-caked Abit Fatality FP-IN9 SLI system, too.

In this writer’s experience, laptops are even more prone to and more badly affected by dust ingress - due to users often placing them on soft furnishings and the relatively tiny cooling systems they use. However, they don’t feature heavily in this PCGH.de gallery.

Last, but not least, it would be fun for our readers to share some of their 'fluffy balls of horror' (remember, we are talking PCs) alongside this post. Feel free to upload your latest dusty horror images here.

[Removed one paragraph of advertising. 01/06/2025 09:56Z. JR]

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Hygon’s processor know-how reinforces Sugon’s supercomputer smarts.

A highly significant China tech industry merger looks set to go ahead, reports the South China Morning Post (SCMP). The Hong Kong-based organ says that the merger plan between chip designer Hygon Information Technology and supercomputer maker Sugon marks “a major move to consolidate two of the leading players in China’s computing supply chain.” We may be seeing the forming of a highly impactful vertically integrated supercomputing giant that has blossomed in the shadow of U.S. sanctions.

The proposed deal involves Hygon absorbing Sugon shares in a stock-swap agreement. Should the process complete successfully, with both companies’ shares being taken off the open market for up to 10 trading days, the newly consolidated entity will appear on the Shanghai stock exchange.

To give this merger some context, regular Tom’s Hardware readers will be aware that Hygon chips leverage the AMD Zen processor architecture. However, the firm says it has moved on from those days. In a recent report we published highlighting an extraordinary Hygon C86-5G, a 128-core, 512-thread CPU with AVX-512 and 16-channel DDR5-5600 support, we quoted a company exec asserting it uses a "new self-developed microarchitecture” in its latest designs.

Our previous reports on Sugon made clear its existing close relationship with Hygon. In recent years, the supercomputer maker leaned heavily on Hygon x86 chips to develop high-performance platforms. Sugon is backed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, explains the SCMP, and has managed to push China into the “global top three for supercomputing,” it is claimed.

Both Hygon and Sugon are on the U.S. Entity List, which means they can’t get direct access to chips from U.S. suppliers such as AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. Naturally, the pairing, in their new clothes, will be treated similarly by U.S. policymakers. However, that will likely be of little concern to the newly formed vertically integrated Chinese supercomputing giant. The U.S. trade measures might have drawn them inexorably together.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons. These cells fire electrical signals that help the brain store memories and send information and commands throughout the brain and the nervous system.

The brain also contains billions of astrocytes — star-shaped cells with many long extensions that allow them to interact with millions of neurons. Although they have long been thought to be mainly supportive cells, recent studies have suggested that astrocytes may play a role in memory storage and other cognitive functions.

MIT researchers have now put forth a new hypothesis for how astrocytes might contribute to memory storage. The architecture suggested by their model would help to explain the brain’s massive storage capacity, which is much greater than would be expected using neurons alone.

“Originally, astrocytes were believed to just clean up around neurons, but there’s no particular reason that evolution did not realize that, because each astrocyte can contact hundreds of thousands of synapses, they could also be used for computation,” says Jean-Jacques Slotine, an MIT professor of mechanical engineering and of brain and cognitive sciences, and an author of the new study.

Dmitry Krotov, a research staff member at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and IBM Research, is the senior author of the open-access paper, which appeared May 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Leo Kozachkov PhD ’22 is the paper’s lead author.

Astrocytes have a variety of support functions in the brain: They clean up debris, provide nutrients to neurons, and help to ensure an adequate blood supply.

Astrocytes also send out many thin tentacles, known as processes, which can each wrap around a single synapse — the junctions where two neurons interact with each other — to create a tripartite (three-part) synapse.

Within the past couple of years, neuroscientists have shown that if the connections between astrocytes and neurons in the hippocampus are disrupted, memory storage and retrieval are impaired.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Germany’s Braunschweig Regional Court has reportedly sentenced four Volkswagen executives to jail over “Dieselgate” – the 2015 scandal in which the automaker was found to have fudged software used to test its vehicles’ pollution emissions.

The matter concerned nitrogen oxide emissions, which software installed by Volkswagen rated as low enough to comply with environmental laws. Independent tailpipe testing produced different results, leading the USA’s Environmental Protection Agency to claim the German auto giant had violated clean air laws.

Volkswagen staff admitted to a conspiracy to fudge emission results, the company pled guilty and paid substantial fines and recalled around 11 million cars.

In 2019 German authorities charged four execs of the matter, and Braunschweig Regional Court decided one of the resulting cases on Monday.

German media reports explain that four VW execs were jailed for between 15 and 54 months, with the judge finding all knowingly contributed to the scandal.

The trial ran for almost four years, saw over 150 witnesses take the stand and the court sit for over 170 days. This is not the end of the matter because cases against another 31 defendants remain on the books of German courts. Another case, against Martin Winterkorn, the former CEO of Volkswagen AG, remains stalled due to his age and ill health.

Dieselgate also claimed execs at Audi and Nissan.

In an unrelated 2022 incident, Toyota-owned truck brand Hino admitted to have reported inaccurate emissions data for 20 years.

Software continued to bedevil Volkswagen, which showed CEO Herbert Diess the door in 2022 after his efforts to turn around the company’s software unit stalled.

Original Submission

_{Processed by jelizondo}

hubie writes:

A simple text editor that dates back to Windows 1.0 is getting smartified:

Microsoft has continued to shovel AI into its built-in Windows inbox apps, and now it's rolling out a Notepad update that will use Copilot to write text for you.

The updates come in the same week that Redmond released a snappy, lightweight command line editor that is the antithesis of what the venerable Notepad has become.

Notepad's Write feature requires users to sign in with their Microsoft account, select where they want the new content to go (or make a selection for reference), and then choose Write from the Copilot menu to prompt the AI to generate text, which you can review and insert into Notepad if it fits your needs.

The output can then be kept, discarded, or refined with follow-up prompts. Copilot can be disabled in the app's settings.

It is unclear who asked for this, or why Microsoft thinks users of a once-simple text editor require this assistance. If it were necessary, then surely an app like WordPad would have been a better place (if Microsoft hadn't killed it off, presumably so it could better focus on bloating Notepad).

At least with Outlook in Microsoft 365, the idea of letting an AI write emails for you could appeal to overly busy middle managers or people who struggle to come up with written communication. But Notepad is primarily used for quick and dirty tasks like jotting down ideas or pasting fussily formatted files into plain text to make the actual text more easily portable.

Microsoft's AI ambitions for Notepad first appeared just over a year ago. In November 2024, a "Rewrite" function turned up, with options to tweak text based on the tone, format, and length requirements of a user.

Notepad dates back to Windows 1.0 and remained more or less unchanged for decades, with only an occasional fix. In recent years, however, it has undergone multiple tweaks and enhancements at the hands of Microsoft, culminating in the new generative AI features.