SoylentNews

cereal_burpist writes:

Welcome to the 'infinite workday' of 8 p.m. meetings and constant messages

While probably not news to many Soylentils, it's interesting to me that this comes from (a Big-Bad-Corp like) Microsoft. Will they, or any companies, implement changes based on these findings? [endless laughter]

Workers are struggling to cope with a "seemingly infinite workday," involving an increasing load of meetings scheduled at 8 p.m. or later and a near-constant stream of interruptions, according to new research by Microsoft. The company analyzed data from users of Microsoft 365 services... globally between mid-January and mid-February. It found that the number of meetings booked between 8 p.m. and just before midnight had risen 16% compared with last year. Geographically dispersed teams, as well as those with flexible working arrangements, were responsible for much of that increase.

"The infinite workday... starts early, mostly in email, and quickly swells to a focus-sapping flood of messages, meetings, and interruptions," Microsoft said in a report Tuesday.

The company found that the average worker is interrupted every two minutes by a meeting, an email or a chat notification during a standard eight-hour shift — adding up to 275 times a day.

And those messages don't stop after they've clocked off. During the study period, the average employee sent or received 58 instant messages outside of their core working hours — a jump of 15% from last year.

The typical worker also receives 117 emails per day and, by 10 p.m., almost one-third of employees are back in their inboxes, "pointing to a steady rise in after-hours activity," Microsoft noted.

[...] "It's the professional equivalent of needing to assemble a bike before every ride. Too much energy is spent organizing chaos before meaningful work can begin," it added.

[...] One outcome is that one-third of workers feel it has been "impossible to keep up" with the pace of work over the past five years, according to a Microsoft-commissioned survey of 31,000 employees around the world, cited in the Tuesday report.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/marijuana-to-treat-autism-some-parents-say-yes-1d9a3ad1
https://archive.ph/ZK2KH

Marijuana is becoming easier to get in many states, and one group showing interest might surprise you: parents of children with autism.
In online and support groups, families swap tips and share experiences—even though the science is still inconclusive. Most doctors don't prescribe cannabis and usually advise against it.

But the few who do say demand is rising. Dr. Mohsin Maqbool, a pediatric neurologist in Plano, Texas, says about a third of his patients are children with autism and about 40% of them treated with cannabis.

He prescribes a combination of THC, the main psychoactive component of marijuana, and CBD, another part of the cannabis plant that doesn't produce a high and can counteract some of the impact of THC.

While medical marijuana is prescribed for everything from cancer symptoms to epilepsy to chronic pain and even dementia, its use in children with autism is more controversial.

After all, we know regular use of THC in adolescents can negatively impact their developing brains and lead to a higher risk of mental-health problems.

But recreational and medical use of marijuana are quite different. These patients aren't getting high—their families and doctors are intentionally avoiding that by strictly regulating and individualizing the dose.
And the parents of children with autism are often desperate to try something to help treat their children for a neurodevelopmental condition that has no definitive cause. They say cannabis is no more risky than the other medications they've tried unsuccessfully, often with many side effects.

Take Marlo Jeffrey, a nurse practitioner who lives outside Dallas. She says she has tried countless medications for her son, Jaiden Gaut. He is an 11-year-old who was diagnosed with ADHD and high-functioning autism when he was 5. His symptoms include anger and aggression, sometimes escalating to self-harm and violence.

Jeffrey took her son to see Dr. Maqbool last fall. Jaiden started THC/CBD gummies, escalated his dose over a month, until he got up to 7.5 milligrams of THC and CBD each a day.

"His behavior improved a lot during that time," says Jeffrey. Jaiden was able to stop taking another medication that had caused him to gain a lot of weight. His physical aggression and cursing improved. He stopped using repetitive words as much and his thinking became more flexible. Since then, he has transitioned to a mainstream school and his grades have gone up.

But anecdotal success doesn't equate to scientific validation. Many doctors aren't yet convinced cannabis is a safe and effective treatment. Groups like the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry warn against treating autistic children with cannabis. The Autism Science Foundation says parents should be "very cautious about giving THC to their children" and more research needs to be done on CBD. Some researchers and doctors say CBD shows promising signs as a treatment for autism but are wary of THC.

Most CBD consists of trace amounts of THC. Dr. Doris Trauner, neuroscience professor at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, says she has had patients whose CBD from dispensaries had higher-than-expected concentrations of THC, and they ended up experiencing worse behavior. "Children became aggressive, some almost psychotic," she says. "That's not across the board, of course. But I do think that a lot of physicians would be concerned about using high amounts of THC."

owl writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/reddit-user-surprised-when-1960s-computer-panel-emerged-from-collapsed-family-garage/

Recently, a Reddit user discovered a rare RCA Spectra 70/35 computer control panel from 1966 in their family's old collapsed garage, posting photos of the pre-moon landing mainframe component to the "retrobattlestations" subreddit that celebrates vintage computers. After cleaning the panel and fixing most keyswitches, the original poster noted that actually running it would require "1,500lbs of mainframe"—the rest of the computer system that's missing.

As it turns out, the panel had been sitting in the garage for decades without the poster's knowledge. "In short my house is a two-family, my dad used to rent out the other half before I was born," explained SonOfADeadMeme in the thread on Friday. "One of the people who rented out the apartment worked at IBM (apparently the RCA Spectra 70's were compatible with IBM sets from the time) and shortly before he left he shown [sic] up with a forklift and left something in the garage."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Zero-Click AI Vulnerability Exposes Microsoft 365 Copilot Data Without User Interaction:

A novel attack technique named EchoLeak has been characterized as a "zero-click" artificial intelligence (AI) vulnerability that allows bad actors to exfiltrate sensitive data from Microsoft 365 Copilot's context sans any user interaction.

The critical-rated vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-32711 (CVSS score: 9.3). It requires no customer action and has been already addressed by Microsoft. There is no evidence that the shortcoming was exploited maliciously in the wild.

"AI command injection in M365 Copilot allows an unauthorized attacker to disclose information over a network," the company said in an advisory released Wednesday. It has since been added to Microsoft's Patch Tuesday list for June 2025, taking the total number of fixed flaws to 68.

Aim Security, which discovered and reported the issue, said it's instance of a large language model (LLM) Scope Violation that paves the way for indirect prompt injection, leading to unintended behavior.

LLM Scope Violation occurs when an attacker's instructions embedded in untrusted content, e.g., an email sent from outside an organization, successfully tricks the AI system into accessing and processing privileged internal data without explicit user intent or interaction.

"The chains allow attackers to automatically exfiltrate sensitive and proprietary information from M365 Copilot context, without the user's awareness, or relying on any specific victim behavior," the Israeli cybersecurity company said. "The result is achieved despite M365 Copilot's interface being open only to organization employees."

In EchoLeak's case, the attacker embeds a malicious prompt payload inside markdown-formatted content, like an email, which is then parsed by the AI system's retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) engine. The payload silently triggers the LLM to extract and return private information from the user's current context.

[...] "The attack results in allowing the attacker to exfiltrate the most sensitive data from the current LLM context - and the LLM is being used against itself in making sure that the MOST sensitive data from the LLM context is being leaked, does not rely on specific user behavior, and can be executed both in single-turn conversations and multi-turn conversations."

EchoLeak is especially dangerous because it exploits how Copilot retrieves and ranks data – using internal document access privileges – which attackers can influence indirectly via payload prompts embedded in seemingly benign sources like meeting notes or email chains.

Original Submission

Motor Trend is running a piece on the latest Honda introduction,
https://www.motortrend.com/news/honda-fastport-equad-electric-delivery-quadricycle-first-look-review

As well as being narrow enough to (just) fit in bike lanes, it also has swap-able batteries so delivery-drivers won't need to wait for a charge. The illustration shows a stripped down four wheel vehicle with partial driver enclosure and a large cargo box on back. Sort of an update on the three-wheel pedicab, and this does have pedals which increase the range a bit if the driver uses them.

Top speed quoted as 12 mph, which should be fast enough to keep up with most of the traffic in NYC and other high density cities around the world. If this was used for in-city delivery instead of full-sized ICE vehicles it could make a significant reduction in congestion, to say nothing of ICE pollution.

First thought is that this is filling the gap between current electric cargo bikes and traditional delivery vehicles.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Stern-Gerlach experiment is, in my opinion, truly the first test that forced the results of quantum mechanics onto the scientific community. Proposed by Otto Stern and conducted by Walther Gerlach in 1922, it showed that atoms have a quantum structure. Electrons, it turned out, must follow quantum rules. The Stern-Gerlach experiment also highlights a weird feature of the quantum world: it seems that the observer can determine the possible properties a particle can have. If I measure a quantum property known as spin, the fact the measurement happened seems to change the possible values of spin a particle can have later. In other words, whether a particle was observed or not determines its future.

In physics, we are socialised to the idea that we are outside of the physical system, watching it. In this experiment, suddenly we aren’t. In my experience, students initially absorb this as a fact they must accept. Only after being forced to think about it a few times do they realise it isn’t consistent with their sensibilities about how reality works. Accepting the results is a surreal experience. Wonderfully surreal.

When I sat down and thought about how to communicate what it is like to watch the demise of US science in real time, “surreal” is the word that came to mind. It isn’t the same kind of surreal as Stern-Gerlach, which feels like being re-introduced to reality – although you realise you had been living with a false sense of the world before, the new one is cool and exciting, so that’s all right.

Our current political moment instead feels like realising that we had been living with a false sense of security – that US science and government support for it would be there tomorrow – but without a cool new reality on the other side. Instead, the US government is dispensing with publicly funded culture, throwing it into a black hole. I don’t make that metaphor lightly; I think it’s important. When an object crosses a black hole’s event horizon, it is the point of no return. The object can’t go back.

We are in the same situation. While the universe will still be there to be understood, the damage to our capacity for research will be long lasting and the alteration to our trajectory permanent. Already, a generation of master’s and PhD students has had the number of available slots reduced. Aspiring professors aren’t being trained in the same numbers; this affects not just future scientists but science communicators, too.

[...] This surreal moment isn’t just happening to US-based scientists and the US public. Because so much of the science we all read about comes from the US, it’s happening to you, too.

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

With this week's release of Android 16, Google added a new security feature to Android, called Advanced Protection. At-risk people—like journalists, activists, or politicians—should consider turning on. Here's what it does, and how to decide if it's a good fit for your security needs:

To get some confusing naming schemes clarified at the start: Advanced Protection is an extension of Google's Advanced Protection Program, which protects your Google account from phishing and harmful downloads, and is not to be confused with Apple's Advanced Data Protection, which enables end-to-end encryption for most data in iCloud. Instead, Google's Advanced Protection is more comparable to the iPhone's Lockdown Mode, Apple's solution to protecting high risk people from specific types of digital threats on Apple devices.

Advanced Protection for Android is meant to provide stronger security by: enabling certain features that aren't on by default, disabling the ability to turn off features that are enabled by default, and adding new security features. Put together, this suite of features is designed to isolate data where possible, and reduce the chances of interacting with unsecure websites and unknown individuals.

[...] It's also worth considering that enabling Advanced Protection may impact how you use your device. For example, Advanced Protection disables the JavaScript optimizer in Chrome, which may break some websites, and since Advanced Protection blocks unknown apps, you won't be able to side-load. There's also the chance that some of the call screening and scam detection features may misfire and flag legitimate calls.

TFA gives instructions on how to enable and disable Advanced Protection.

Related: Apple's New Lockdown Mode for iPhone Fights Hacking

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Previous associations seen between fitness and a reduced risk of premature death from various diseases have probably been misleading:

Many observational studies have shown that people who exercise more and have good cardiorespiratory fitness early in life are at lower risk of premature death from causes such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. However, a new study published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology suggests that the association between physical fitness and a reduced risk of mortality may be misleading.

"We found that people with high fitness levels in late adolescence had a lower risk of dying prematurely, for example from cardiovascular disease, compared to those with low fitness levels. But when we looked at their risk of dying in random accidents, we found an almost similarly strong association. This suggests that people with high and low fitness levels may differ in other important ways, which is something that previous studies have not fully taken into account," says Marcel Ballin, associated researcher in epidemiology and lead author of the study.

[...] The researchers started with a traditional analysis of mortality from cardiovascular disease, cancer and from all causes, as in previous observational studies. They adjusted their statistical models for factors such as BMI, age at conscription, year of conscription, and parents' income and education level. The results showed that the group with the highest fitness level had a 58 per cent lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, a 31 per cent lower risk of dying from cancer, and a 53 per cent lower risk of dying from all causes, compared with the group with the lowest fitness level.

Next, the researchers examined how fitness was associated with the risk of dying in random accidents such as car accidents, drownings and homicides. They chose random accidents because they assumed that there ought to be no association between the men's fitness in late adolescence and the risk of dying in random accidents. This method is called negative control outcome analysis and involves testing the validity of your results for a primary outcome by comparing them with an outcome where no association ought to be found. If, however, an association is found, it may indicate that the groups studied are not actually comparable, and that the study suffers from what is typically referred to as confounding. The researchers found that men with the highest fitness levels had a 53 per cent lower risk of dying in random accidents. Yet, it is unlikely that the men's fitness would have such a big effect on their risk of dying in random accidents.

hubie writes:

A new attack dubbed 'SmartAttack' uses smartwatches as a covert ultrasonic signal receiver to exfiltrate data from physically isolated (air-gapped) systems:

Air-gapped systems, commonly deployed in mission-critical environments such as government facilities, weapons platforms, and nuclear power plants, are physically isolated from external networks to prevent malware infections and data theft.

Despite this isolation, they remain vulnerable to compromise through insider threats such as rogue employees using USB drives or state-sponsored supply chain attacks.

Once infiltrated, malware can operate covertly, using stealthy techniques to modulate the physical characteristics of hardware components to transmit sensitive data to a nearby receiver without interfering with the system's regular operations.

SmartAttack was devised by Israeli university researchers led by Mordechai Guri, a specialist in the field of covert attack channels who previously presented methods to leak data using LCD screen noise, RAM modulation, network card LEDs, USB drive RF signals, SATA cables, and power supplies.

While attacks on air-gapped environments are, in many cases, theoretical and extremely difficult to achieve, they still present interesting and novel approaches to exfiltrate data.

SmartAttack requires malware to somehow infect an air-gapped computer to gather sensitive information such as keystrokes, encryption keys, and credentials. It can then use the computer's built-in speaker to emit ultrasonic signals to the environment.

By using a binary frequency shift keying (B-FSK), the audio signal frequencies can be modulated to represent binary data, aka ones and zeroes. A frequency of 18.5 kHz represents "0," while 19.5 kHz denotes "1."

Frequencies at this range are inaudible to humans, but they can still be caught by a smartwatch microphone worn by a person nearby.

The sound monitoring app in the smartwatch applies signal processing techniques to detect frequency shifts and demodulate the encoded signal, while integrity tests can also be applied.

The final exfiltration of the data can take place via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or cellular connectivity.

The smartwatch can either be purposefully equipped with this tool by a rogue employee, or outsiders may infect it without the wearer's knowledge.

[...] The researchers say the best way to counter the SmartAttack is to prohibit using smartwatches in secure environments.

Another measure would be to remove in-built speakers from air-gapped machines. This would eliminate the attack surface for all acoustic covert channels, not just SmartAttack.

If none of this is feasible, ultrasonic jamming through the emission of broadband noise, software-based firewalls, and audio-gapping could still prove effective.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Kali Linux 2025.2, the second release of the year, is now available for download with 13 new tools and an expanded car hacking toolkit.

Designed for cybersecurity professionals and ethical hackers, the Kali Linux distribution facilitates security audits, penetration testing, and network research.

The Kali Team has added many new features and refined the distro's user interface. Notable changes include:

• Renamed and updated car hacking toolset
• Kali Menu and UI refresh
• Updates to Kali NetHunter
• Additional hacking tools

Renamed and expanded car hacking toolkit

In this release, the CAN Arsenal was renamed CARsenal to better reflect its purpose as a car hacking toolset and now has a more user-friendly interface.

The Kali Team has also added new tools, including:

• hlcand: Modified slcand for ELM327 use
• VIN Info: Decode your VIN identifier
• CaringCaribou: Actually provide Listener, Dump, Fuzzer, Send, UDS and XCP modules
• ICSim: Provide a great simulator to play with VCAN and test CARsenal toolset without hardware needed

hubie writes:

New research looks at near-death experiences and people's attitudes to work:

Singer-songwriter Aysanabee was snowshoeing across a frozen lake in remote northern Ontario over a decade ago, when the ice gave way beneath him, plunging him into frigid waters.

[...] He eventually managed to pull himself back onto solid ground, where he started a small fire to warm up and dry off. On the long walk back to camp, he had time to reflect on how close he came to death — and what he wanted to do with this second chance.

"Then, three months later, I bought a one-way ticket to Toronto to go do music," he said.

At the University of Guelph, Jamie Gruman and his research team recently interviewed 14 people who suffered near-death experiences, examining the impact on their work and careers. Published in the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion in April, their research showed that survivors gained new insights, from a greater interest in spirituality to a belief that everyone is born equal, and here for a reason.

"Specifically as a result of those things, the insights and the personal transformations, work often became much less important to people," said Gruman, a professor of organizational behaviour at Guelph University.

[...] Gruman said that what people want from their work boils down to three things: economic security, meaningful work that allows them to grow and develop, and high-quality relationships.

But for the study participants who had come close to death, that changed.

"They all completely lost interest in making money and any external measures of success," he said.

"They didn't want big houses and cars and boats. They didn't want to be the executive vice president. They didn't want to get rich."

By contrast, the desire for meaningful work and strong workplace relationships skyrocketed, he said. That led some participants to change jobs, or even completely change careers.

Others were able to find what they needed by rethinking how they approached their work, Gruman said, giving the example of a teacher who "didn't really like teaching."

After her near-death experience, "she considered herself now to be a teacher in the school of life," he said.

Like Aysanabee, a brush with death taught the participants a lesson about time.

"They decided, 'Look, you know, my time here is limited, so let me make a move. And do something that speaks to my soul,'" Gruman said.
"Teaching math and science was just incidental to teaching students about the importance of treating people well and living well."

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.51327/UKWD3742 [Referenced in the body of TFA]

Original Submission

_{Processed by jelizondo}

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The OSA was passed in 2023, however, specific child-safety duties and codes for online sites were finalised earlier this year. 

The UK internet and telecoms regulator Ofcom has opened nine new investigations into websites for potentially breaching the country’s Online Safety Act (OSA).

Of the nine, First Time Videos, a pornography website, will be probed over possibly failing to protect children from accessing mature content through effective age assurance methods.

“Robust” age checks under the OSA mandate that websites that allow porn and other harmful content must make sure children cannot access it.

Age verification and estimation needs to be “highly effective” under the law. According to the regulator, First Time Videos appears not to have taken the legally required steps to ensure age assurance.

While online discussion board 4chan will be investigated for potentially failing to respond to Ofcom’s legal requests for information and to conduct illegal content risk assessments on its website.

4chan’s provider received a formal information notice from the regulator in April this year, which it has not yet responded to, the regulator said.

Ofcom is also investigating seven file-sharing websites, including Krakenfiles, Im.ge and Yolobit, over whether they failed to protect UK users from encountering illegal content and activity such as child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

The telecoms regulator opened an enforcement programme earlier this year, assessing measures that file-sharing websites have taken to protect users from CSAM.

It sent a request for information to the sites in April, and has not received a response from any of the seven file-sharing sites.

[...] From the end of July, search websites, or websites were users interact with each other’s content, need to start implementing safety measures to protect children from harmful material, including content that promotes suicide, self-harm, eating disorders or dangerous challenges.

Earlier this year, Ofcom fined OnlyFans’ operator £1.05m for failing to provide accurate information about the age assurance measures it had in place on the adult-only platform.

Original Submission

quietus writes:

The President of the United States has declared that the 17 million inhabitants of the capital city of a country should immediately evacuate.

Republican Congressman (and engineer) Thomas Massie (Kentucky) has stated that he will introduce a war powers resolution today, Tuesday, to prevent the President of the United States going to war without first consulting Congress.

"This is not our war. But if it were, Congress must decide such matters according to our Constitution."

[Editor's Comment: This has been released with significant reservations. The departure of Trump from the G7 was accompanied with a statement that said "it certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that." Of course, this can be read in 2 different ways. It is possible that Iran is prepared to surrender or the US might be taking its own action in support of Israel. We would welcome your comments.--JR]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Solar Orbiter isn't the first spacecraft to study the sun's poles—but it's the first to send back photographs:

We Earthlings see the sun every day of our lives—but gaining a truly new view of our star is a rare and precious thing. So count your lucky stars: for the first time in history, scientists have photographed one of the sun's elusive poles.

The images come courtesy of a spacecraft called Solar Orbiter. Led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with contributions from NASA, Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020 and has been monitoring our home star since November 2021. But the mission is only now beginning its most intriguing work: studying the poles of the sun.

From Earth and spacecraft alike, our view of the sun has been biased. "We've had a good view of centermost part of the sun's disk," says Daniel Müller, a heliophysicist and project scientist for the mission. "But the poles are effectively not visible because we always see them almost exactly edge-on."

We began getting a better perspective earlier this year, when Solar Orbiter zipped past Venus in a carefully choreographed move that pulled the probe out of the solar system's ecliptic, the plane that broadly passes through the planets' orbits and the sun's equator. (The new views show the sun's south pole and were captured in March. The spacecraft flew over the north pole in late April, Müller says, but Solar Orbiter is still in the process of beaming that data back to Earth.)

Leaving the ecliptic is a costly, fuel-expensive maneuver for spacecraft, but it's where Solar Orbiter excels: By the end of the mission, the spacecraft's orbit will be tilted 33 degrees with respect to the ecliptic. That tilted orbit is what allows Solar Orbiter to garner unprecedented views of the sun's poles.

For scientists, the new view is priceless because these poles aren't just geographic poles; they're also magnetic poles—of sorts. The sun is a massive swirl of plasma that produces then erases a magnetic field. This is what drives the 11-year solar activity cycle.

[...] Most of the spacecraft's observations won't reach Earth until this autumn. But ESA has released initial looks from three different instruments onboard Solar Orbiter, each of which lets scientists glimpse different phenomena.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

What does the future of the internet look like? If AI firms get their way, the once-open web could be fractured into digital silos dominated by commercial AI models, leaving hobbyists and small businesses behind. To prevent this, a team of grassroots researchers is planning to fight back and ensure an open approach to AI.

At the heart of this battle is the concept of an AI “agent”, a piece of software that browses the web and interacts with websites according to the instructions of a human user – for example, planning and booking a holiday. Many people see agents as the next evolution of services like ChatGPT, but getting them to work is proving tricky. That is because the web was built for human use, and developers are realising that AI agents need specialised protocols to better interact with online data, services and each other.

“The idea is to build infrastructure so there’s a way for software-like bots, which we call AI agents, to communicate with each other,” says Catherine Flick at the University of Staffordshire, UK.

Several competing solutions to this problem have already been developed. For example, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, has developed the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which standardises how AI models connect to different data sources and tools. In April, Google announced its own version of such a concept, the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol.

[...] But because these protocols are coming out of big tech labs, there are concerns that the inventors of the winning protocol could exert their influence to benefit their business, rather than the greater good. MCP requires a central server to oversee connections, while A2A is built around the assumption of a catalogue of approved agents working together, rather than a free-for-all.

“We don’t want the ‘agent internet’ to become another ‘data silo alliance’,” says Gaowei Chang. He chairs the AI Agent Protocol Group, which was established in May as part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards organisation, and says it is essential that all voices are heard in developing this new layer of the internet. “If we truly believe AI is an important technology that will change human society, then we need an open, neutral community to drive protocol design, ensuring its future belongs to everyone, not just a few companies,” he says.