https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040409-00/?p=39873
A friend of mine used to work on the development of the USB specification and subsequent implementation. One of the things that happens at these meetings is that hardware companies would show off the great USB hardware they were working on. It also gave them a chance to try out their hardware with various USB host manufacturers and operating systems to make sure everything worked properly together.
One of the earlier demonstrations was a company that was making USB floppy drives. The company representative talked about how well the drives were doing and mentioned that they make two versions, one for PCs and one for Macs.
"That's strange," the committee members thought to themselves. "Why are there separate PC and Mac versions? The specification is very careful to make sure that the same floppy drive works on both systems. You shouldn't need to make two versions."
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]]>The stunning panorama features over 600 overlapping Hubble images that have been painstaking stitched together. Spread across 2.5 billion pixels, you'll find some 200 million stars – all of which are brighter than our own Sun. That is a huge number, yet only a fraction of the estimated one trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy. Many of Andromeda's less massive stars are beyond Hubble's sensitivity limit and thus, are not represented in the imaged.
Data from two surveys – the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program and the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury (PHAST) program – was used to construct the mosaic.
With it, astronomers will be able to learn more about the age of Andromeda as well as its heavy-element abundance and the stellar masses inside of it. The surveys will also help astronomers understand how Andromeda might have merged with other galaxies in its past.
"Andromeda's a train wreck. It looks like it has been through some kind of event that caused it to form a lot of stars and then just shut down," said Daniel Weisz at the University of California, Berkeley.
"This was probably due to a collision with another galaxy in the neighborhood."
NASA has multiple sizes of the panoramic available for download, including the full-size 203 MB image (42,208 x 9,870) and a more user friendly 9 MB variant (10,552 x 2,468).
Hubble has been in orbit for more than three decades, and continues to provide astronomers with meaningful science data. That said, NASA already has its successor waiting in the wings.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled to launch by May 2027, will feature a mirror roughly the same size as the one Hubble uses but will be able to capture much higher resolution images. A single Roman exposure will capture the equivalent of at least 100 high-resolution Hubble snaps, according to NASA.
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]]>Brendan Carr dumps plan to ban bulk billing deals that lock renters into one ISP:
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has dropped the previous administration's proposal to ban bulk billing deals that require tenants to pay for a specific provider's Internet service.
In March 2024, then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel proposed a ban on arrangements in which "tenants are required to pay for broadband, cable, and satellite service provided by a specific communications provider, even if they do not wish to take the service or would prefer to use another provider."
Rosenworcel's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking was opposed by Internet providers and sat on the FCC's list of items on circulation throughout 2024 without any final vote, despite the commission having a 3-2 Democratic majority at the time. Carr, who was elevated to the chairmanship by President Trump, emptied the list of items under consideration by commissioners on Friday.
With bulk billing deals in which a company agrees to provide service to every tenant of a building, residents are billed a prorated share of the total cost. Tenants may be billed by either the landlord or the telco provider. only banned
Technically, Rosenworcel's plan would have allowed bulk billing arrangements to continue as long as tenants are given the ability to opt out of them. In March, Rosenworcel's office said her plan would "increase competition for communications service in these buildings by making it more profitable for competitive providers to deploy service in buildings where it is currently too expensive to serve consumers because tenants are required to take a certain provider's service."
"Too often, tenants living in these households are forced to pay high prices with limited choices for Internet or other services," Rosenworcel's office said in March, arguing that her plan would "lower costs and address the lack of choice for broadband services" in apartments, condos, and public housing.
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]]>The Pebble [wikipedia.org] was 2012 smartwatch built using an e-paper display. It had great battery life, a UI that could be hacked using C or Javascript, and a very loyal fanbase. Unlike current incumbent smartwatches like the Google Pixel Watch or Apple Watch, Pebble kept its feature set under control and aimed to supplement a smartphone rather than step on its toes. The end result was a compact product with great battery life that was genuinely liked by gadgeteers.
Unfortunately, after a number of strategic missteps, the manufacturer of the Pebble was bought out in 2016, by a competitor, FitBit. The product was discontinued almost immediately, leaving the world of nifty wrist-mounted doodads noticeably poorer.
Ever since there's been a sort of grassroots campaign to support the Pebble, called Rebble [rebble.io], which was started more-or-less immediately after FitBit shuttered the Pebble, and is helmed by one of Pebble's founders. For the longest time they weren't making much headway on delivering software updates, as they essentially had to start over from square one, without the initial startup resources they'd had the first time around. Mostly they just served as a home for applications and widgets.
This all changed on Monday, when the Rebble lead was able to get hold of some folks at Google—who bought out FitBit in 2021—and convinced them to open-source the Pebble OS [googleblog.com]. (It's not quite complete—like many open-sourcings of closed projects, there are some patent-encumbered bits missing.) There's now the (similarly-named yet distinct) Repebble [repebble.com] project, which aims to begin a new production run of Pebble smartwatches.
Is this the beginning of a renaissance for resurrecting beloved Google-owned products? Probably not. But it's one less corpse in the ground, that's for sure.
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]]>Chevron, one of the world's largest oil companies, has announced plans to enter the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence by building natural gas power plants directly connected to data centers:
These facilities will supply electricity to technology companies leveraging AI and other high-powered computing services, reported The New York Times. The move highlights the increasing energy demands of AI technologies and Chevron's strategic shift to diversify its operations beyond traditional oil and gas.
The company's CEO, Mike Wirth, revealed the initiative during a recent industry conference, emphasizing the role Chevron could play in bridging energy production and digital innovation. As data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity to support AI-driven computations, Chevron's natural gas plants are positioned to offer a reliable and efficient energy source. This strategy allows Chevron to capitalize on its core expertise in energy production while contributing to a sector that's reshaping industries globally.
[...] The company plans to integrate carbon capture technologies into its power plants to offset their environmental impact. Additionally, Chevron has committed to exploring renewable energy options alongside its natural gas operations, suggesting a balanced approach to meeting current energy demands while investing in a low-carbon future.
Related:
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]]>Last summer, Anthropic inspired backlash when its ClaudeBot AI crawler was accused of hammering websites a million or more times a day.
And it wasn't the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites. Around the same time, Reddit's CEO called out all AI companies whose crawlers he said were "a pain in the ass to block," despite the tech industry otherwise agreeing to respect "no scraping" robots.txt rules.
[...]
Shortly after he noticed Facebook's crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron began plotting a new kind of attack on crawlers "clobbering" websites that he told Ars he hoped would give "teeth" to robots.txt.Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as [tarpitting], he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will "eat just about anything that finds its way inside."
Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware.
[...]
Tarpits were originally designed to waste spammers' time and resources, but creators like Aaron have now evolved the tactic into an anti-AI weapon.
[...]
It's unclear how much damage tarpits or other AI attacks can ultimately do. Last May, Laxmi Korada, Microsoft's director of partner technology, published a report detailing how leading AI companies were coping with poisoning, one of the earliest AI defense tactics deployed.
[...]
The only AI company that responded to Ars' request to comment was OpenAI, whose spokesperson confirmed that OpenAI is already working on a way to fight tarpitting.
"We're aware of efforts to disrupt AI web crawlers," OpenAI's spokesperson said. "We design our systems to be resilient while respecting robots.txt and standard web practices."
[...]
By releasing Nepenthes, he hopes to do as much damage as possible, perhaps spiking companies' AI training costs, dragging out training efforts, or even accelerating model collapse, with tarpits helping to delay the next wave of enshittification.
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]]>https://tails.net/news/version_6.11/index.en.html
https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/blob/master/debian/changelog
The vulnerabilities described below were identified during an external security audit by Radically Open Security and disclosed responsibly to our team. We are not aware of these attacks being used against Tails users until now. [Editor's Comment: I believe they mean 'up to now' or 'so far'.]
These vulnerabilities can only be exploited by a powerful attacker who has already exploited another vulnerability to take control of an application in Tails.
If you want to be extra careful and used Tails a lot since January 9 without upgrading, we recommend that you do a manual upgrade instead of an automatic upgrade.
Prevent an attacker from installing malicious software permanently. (#20701)
In Tails 6.10 or earlier, an attacker who has already taken control of an application in Tails could then exploit a vulnerability in Tails Upgrader to install a malicious upgrade and permanently take control of your Tails.
Doing a manual upgrade would erase such malicious software.
Prevent an attacker from monitoring online activity. (#20709 and #20702)
In Tails 6.10 or earlier, an attacker who has already taken control of an application in Tails could then exploit vulnerabilities in other applications that might lead to deanonymization or the monitoring of browsing activity:
In Onion Circuits, to get information about Tor circuits and close them.
In Unsafe Browser, to connect to the Internet without going through Tor.
In Tor Browser, to monitor your browsing activity.
In Tor Connection, to reconfigure or block your connection to the Tor network.Prevent an attacker from changing the Persistent Storage settings. (#20710)
Also, Tails still doesn't FULLY randomize the MAC address; so much for anonymity.
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]]>Scale AI and CAIS Unveil Results of Humanity's Last Exam, a Groundbreaking New Benchmark
Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) are proud to publish the results of Humanity's Last Exam, a groundbreaking new AI benchmark that was designed to test the limits of AI knowledge at the frontiers of human expertise. The results demonstrated a significant improvement from the reasoning capabilities of earlier models, but current models still were only able to answer fewer than 10 percent of the expert questions correctly. The paper can be read here.
The new benchmark, called "Humanity's Last Exam," evaluated whether AI systems have achieved world-class expert-level reasoning and knowledge capabilities across a wide range of fields, including math, humanities, and the natural sciences. Throughout the fall, CAIS and Scale AI crowdsourced questions from experts to assemble the hardest and broadest problems to stump the AI models. The exam was developed to address the challenge of "benchmark saturation": models that regularly achieve near-perfect scores on existing tests, but may not be able to answer questions outside of those tests. Saturation reduces the utility of a benchmark as a precise measurement of future model progress.
[Source]: Scale AI
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]]>New research "Computer-Use Agent" AI model can perform multi-step tasks through a web browser:
On Thursday, OpenAI released a research preview of "Operator," a web automation tool that uses a new AI model called Computer-Using Agent (CUA) to control computers through a visual interface. The system performs tasks by viewing and interacting with on-screen elements like buttons and text fields similar to how a human would.
Operator is available today for subscribers of the $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro plan at operator.chatgpt.com. The company plans to expand to Plus, Team, and Enterprise users later. OpenAI intends to integrate these capabilities directly into ChatGPT and later release CUA through its API for developers.
Operator watches on-screen content while you use your computer and executes tasks through simulated keyboard and mouse inputs. The Computer-Using Agent processes screenshots to understand the computer's state and then makes decisions about clicking, typing, and scrolling based on its observations.
OpenAI's release follows other tech companies as they push into what are often called "agentic" AI systems, which can take actions on a user's behalf. Google announced Project Mariner in December 2024, which performs automated tasks through the Chrome browser, and two months earlier, in October 2024, Anthropic launched a web automation tool called "Computer Use" focused on developers that can control a user's mouse cursor and take actions on a computer.
"The Operator interface looks very similar to Anthropic's Claude Computer Use demo from October," wrote AI researcher Simon Willison on his blog, "even down to the interface with a chat panel on the left and a visible interface being interacted with on the right."
To use your PC like you would, the Computer-Using Agent works in multiple steps. First, it captures screenshots to monitor your screen, then analyzes those images (using GPT-4o's vision capabilities with additional reinforcement learning) to process raw pixel data. Next, it determines what actions to take and then performs virtual inputs to control the computer. This iterative loop design reportedly lets the system recover from errors and handle complex tasks across different applications.
While it's working, Operator shows a miniature browser window of its actions.
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]]>Two NASA astronauts are set to venture outside the International Space Station (ISS) in search of signs of life.
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams should have been back on Earth months ago, but, thanks to issues with Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule, are spending some additional time on the ISS before a planned return to Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon.
The plan is for the spacewalkers to collect samples from sites near life support system vents on the exterior of the ISS. Scientists will be able to determine if the ISS releases microorganisms and assess whether any can survive in the harsh environment outside the outpost.
These days, spacecraft and spacesuits are thoroughly sterilized before missions. However, humans carry plenty of microorganisms, and looking at what is collected outside the ISS will inform designs for crewed vehicles and missions to limit the spread of human contamination.
NASA said: "The data could help determine whether changes are needed to crewed spacecraft, including spacesuits, that are used to explore destinations where life may exist now or in the past."
With Mars now a priority for crewed expeditions, minimizing human contamination on the surface is crucial to avoid misidentifying it as traces of life on the red planet.
Many space agencies take the challenge of planetary protection very seriously. As an example, the European Space Agency (ESA) cites Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty, which requires care to be taken during exploration of the Moon and beyond "so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extra-terrestrial matter and, where necessary, [to] adopt appropriate measures for this purpose."
This also involves considering missions launched under less stringent standards than those in place today. Older spacecraft, for example, were not always subject to the same sterilization.
Memorably, a camera on NASA's Surveyor 3 lander, which the Apollo 12 astronauts retrieved, was found to have been contaminated [PDF] prior to launch. Despite vacuum testing, exposure to temperatures below -100° Celsius, and a stint on the lunar surface, scientists found that the microorganisms on the camera had survived.
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]]>Google will take firmer action against British businesses that use fake reviews to boost their star ratings on the search giant’s reviews platform. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Friday that Google has agreed to improve its processes for detecting and removing fake reviews, and will take action against the businesses and reviewers that post them.
This includes deactivating the ability to add new reviews for businesses found to be using fake reviews, and deleting all existing reviews for at least six months if they repeatedly engage in suspicious review activity. Google will also place prominent “warning alerts” on the Google profiles of businesses using fake reviews to help consumers be more aware of potentially misleading feedback. Individuals who repeatedly post fake or misleading reviews on UK business pages will be banned and have their review history deleted, even if they’re located in another country.
Google is required to report to the CMA over the next three years to ensure it’s complying with the agreement.
“The changes we’ve secured from Google ensure robust processes are in place, so people can have confidence in reviews and make the best possible choices,” CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell said in a statement. “This is a matter of fairness – for both business and consumers – and we encourage the entire sector to take note.”
Google made similar changes to reviews in Maps last year, saying that contributions “should reflect a genuine experience at a place or business.” However, those changes apply globally while Google’s commitment to improving reviews across all its properties appears to just apply to the UK for now.
The changes to reviews follow a CMA [*] investigation launched against Google and Amazon in 2021 over concerns the companies had violated consumer protection laws by not doing enough to tackle fake reviews on their platforms. The CMA says its probe into Amazon is still ongoing and that an update will be announced “in due course.”
[CMA: Competition and Markets Authority]
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]]>An undersea fiber optic cable between Latvia and Sweden was damaged on Sunday, likely as a result of external influence, Latvia said, triggering an investigation by local and NATO maritime forces in the Baltic Sea:
"We have determined that there is most likely external damage and that it is significant," Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina told reporters following an extraordinary government meeting.
Latvia is coordinating with NATO and the countries of the Baltic Sea region to clarify the circumstances, she said separately in a post on X.
Latvia's navy earlier on Sunday said it had dispatched a patrol boat to inspect a ship and that two other vessels were also subject to investigation.
From Zerohedge's coverage:
Over the past 18 months, three alarming incidents have been reported in which commercial ships traveling to or from Russian ports are suspected of severing undersea cables in the Baltic region.
Washington Post recently cited Western officials who said these cable incidents are likely maritime accidents - not sabotage by Russia and/or China.
Due to all the cable severing risks, intentional and unintentional, a report from late November via TechCrunch [linked by submitter] said Meta planned a new "W" formation undersea cable route around the world to "avoid areas of geopolitical tension."
Related:
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]]>Mice with two dads have been created using CRISPR
It's a new way to create "bi-paternal" mice that can survive to adulthood—but human applications are still a long way off.
Mice with two fathers have been born—and have survived to adulthood—following a complex set of experiments by a team in China.
Zhi-Kun Li at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues used CRISPR to create the mice, using a novel approach to target genes that normally need to be inherited from both male and female parents. They hope to use the same approach to create primates with two dads.
Scientists might soon be able to create eggs and sperm from skin and blood cells. What will that mean?
Humans are off limits for now, but the work does help us better understand a strange biological phenomenon known as imprinting, which causes certain genes to be expressed differently depending on which parent they came from. For these genes, animals inherit part of a "dose" from each parent, and the two must work in harmony to create a healthy embryo. Without both doses, gene expression can go awry, and the resulting embryos can end up with abnormalities.
This is what researchers have found in previous attempts to create mice with two dads. In the 1980s, scientists in the UK tried injecting the DNA-containing nucleus of a sperm cell into a fertilized egg cell. The resulting embryos had DNA from two males (as well as a small amount of DNA from a female, in the cytoplasm of the egg).
But when these embryos were transferred to the uteruses of surrogate mouse mothers, none of them resulted in a healthy birth, seemingly because imprinted genes from both paternal and maternal genomes are needed for development.
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]]>Physicist used interaction graphs to show how pieces attack and defend to analyze 20,000 top matches:
The game of chess has long been central to computer science and AI-related research, most notably in IBM's Deep Blue in the 1990s and, more recently, AlphaZero. But the game is about more than algorithms, according to Marc Barthelemy, a physicist at the Paris-Saclay University in France, with layers of depth arising from the psychological complexity conferred by player strategies.
Now, Barthelmey has taken things one step further by publishing a new paper in the journal Physical Review E that treats chess as a complex system, producing a handy metric that can help predict the proverbial "tipping points" in chess matches.
In his paper, Barthelemy cites Richard Reti, an early 20th-century chess master who gave a series of lectures in the 1920s on developing a scientific understanding of chess. It was an ambitious program involving collecting empirical data, constructing typologies, and devising laws based on those typologies, but Reti's insights fell by the wayside as advances in computer science came to dominate the field. That's understandable. "With its simple rules yet vast strategic depth, chess provides an ideal platform for developing and testing algorithms in AI, machine learning, and decision theory," Barthelemy writes.
Barthelemy's own expertise is in the application of statistical physics to complex systems, as well as the emerging science of cities. He realized that the history of the scientific study of chess had overlooked certain key features, most notably how certain moves at key moments can drastically alter the game; the matches effectively undergo a kind of phase transition. The rise of online chess platforms means there are now very large datasets ripe for statistical analysis, and researchers have made use of that, studying power-law distributions, for example, as well as response time distribution in rapid chess and long-range memory effects in game sequences.
For his analysis, Barthelemy chose to represent chess as a decision tree in which each "branch" leads to a win, loss, or draw. Players face the challenge of finding the best move amid all this complexity, particularly midgame, in order to steer gameplay into favorable branches. That's where those crucial tipping points come into play. Such positions are inherently unstable, which is why even a small mistake can have a dramatic influence on a match's trajectory.
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]]>About a year ago, security researcher Sam Curry bought his mother a Subaru, on the condition that, at some point in the near future, she let him hack it.
It took Curry until last November, when he was home for Thanksgiving, to begin examining the 2023 Impreza's Internet-connected features and start looking for ways to exploit them. Sure enough, he and a researcher working with him online, Shubham Shah, soon discovered vulnerabilities in a Subaru web portal that let them hijack the ability to unlock the car, honk its horn, and start its ignition, reassigning control of those features to any phone or computer they chose.
Most disturbing for Curry, though, was that they found they could also track the Subaru's location—not merely where it was at the moment but also where it had been for the entire year that his mother had owned it. The map of the car's whereabouts was so accurate and detailed, Curry says, that he was able to see her doctor visits, the homes of the friends she visited, even which exact parking space his mother parked in every time she went to church.
"You can retrieve at least a year's worth of location history for the car, where it's pinged precisely, sometimes multiple times a day," Curry says. "Whether somebody's cheating on their wife or getting an abortion or part of some political group, there are a million scenarios where you could weaponize this against someone."
Curry and Shah today revealed in a blog post their method for hacking and tracking millions of Subarus, which they believe would have allowed hackers to target any of the company's vehicles equipped with its digital features known as Starlink in the US, Canada, or Japan. Vulnerabilities they found in a Subaru website intended for the company's staff allowed them to hijack an employee's account to both reassign control of cars' Starlink features and also access all the vehicle location data available to employees, including the car's location every time its engine started, as shown in their video below.
[...] Shah and Curry's research that led them to the discovery of Subaru's vulnerabilities began when they found that Curry's mother's Starlink app connected to the domain SubaruCS.com, which they realized was an administrative domain for employees. Scouring that site for security flaws, they found that they could reset employees' passwords simply by guessing their email address, which gave them the ability to take over any employee's account whose email they could find. The password reset functionality did ask for answers to two security questions, but they found that those answers were checked with code that ran locally in a user's browser, not on Subaru's server, allowing the safeguard to be easily bypassed. "There were really multiple systemic failures that led to this," Shah says.
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]]>https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20250127#sitenews
Facebook ban
Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats". Any posts mentioning DistroWatch and multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed.
We've been hearing all week from readers who say they can no longer post about Linux on Facebook or share links to DistroWatch. Some people have reported their accounts have been locked or limited for posting about Linux.
The sad irony here is that Facebook runs much of its infrastructure on Linux and often posts job ads looking for Linux developers.
Unfortunately, there isn't anything we can do about this, apart from advising people to get their Linux-related information from sources other than Facebook. I've tried to appeal the ban and was told the next day that Linux-related material is staying on the cybersecurity filter. My Facebook account was also locked for my efforts.
We went through a similar experience when Twitter changed its name to X - suddenly accounts which had been re-posting news from our RSS feeds were no longer able to share links. This sort of censorship is an unpleasant side-effect of centralized communication platforms such as X, Facebook, Google+, and so on.
In an effort to continue to make it possible for people to talk about Linux (and DistroWatch), as well as share their views and links, we are providing two options. We have RSS news feeds which get updates whenever we post new announcements, stories, and our weekly newsletter. We also now have a Mastodon account where I will start to post updates - at least for new distributions and notice of our weekly newsletter. Over time we may also add news stories and updates about releases. Links for the feeds and the Mastodon account can be found on our contact page.
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]]>Backdoor infecting VPNs used "magic packets" for stealth and security:
When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can't be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what's known in the business as a "magic packet." On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network's Junos OS has been doing just that.
J-Magic, the tracking name for the backdoor, goes one step further to prevent unauthorized access. After receiving a magic packet hidden in the normal flow of TCP traffic, it relays a challenge to the device that sent it. The challenge comes in the form of a string of text that's encrypted using the public portion of an RSA key. The initiating party must then respond with the corresponding plaintext, proving it has access to the secret key.
The lightweight backdoor is also notable because it resided only in memory, a trait that makes detection harder for defenders. The combination prompted researchers at Lumin Technology's Black Lotus Lab to sit up and take notice.
[...] The researchers found J-Magic on VirusTotal and determined that it had run inside the networks of 36 organizations. They still don't know how the backdoor got installed. Here's how the magic packet worked:
The passive agent is deployed to quietly observe all TCP traffic sent to the device. It discreetly analyzes the incoming packets and watches for one of five specific sets of data contained in them. The conditions are obscure enough to blend in with the normal flow of traffic that network defense products won't detect a threat. At the same time, they're unusual enough that they're not likely to be found in normal traffic.
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]]>I'm not using FSD because it's bringing me much utility or, much less, enjoyment. I'm using it because we paid $15,000 for this software (it costs $8,000 today), and I'm going to do my job and report on how it works, dammit.
That's despite FSD giving me many, many reasons to forsake it, to decide that my safety and sanity are worth more than what it cost. Yet the Full Self Driving note I created in my phone to log the system's transgressions has an ever-increasing abundance of entries as we pile the miles onto our Model Y.
Dumb and Dangerous Decisions
For example, there was the time it failed to recognize an increased speed limit sign and continued bumbling along at a 15-mph deficit. In stark contrast, later in that same drive, it detected a 55-mph speed limit sign specific to vehicles towing (which it wasn't), decelerating from 75 mph so rapidly that traffic behind had to swerve around the Model Y. Moments later, FSD decided to change lanes to follow the navigation route toward its next turn—still some 10 miles away—cutting someone off in the process.
[...]
On a different day, FSD deviated from my navigation route because it neglected to recognize that the lane it was occupying became right turn only. After making that turn, it wanted to correct its error and resume the route by making a U-turn at the next intersection, where a "No U-Turn" sign was clearly posted. It tried to make its illegal U-turn from the right side of that double-protected left turn, such that if I hadn't intervened it would've overlapped with the vehicle turning from the left-side lane.
[...]
FSD's errors aren't always dangerous. More often, they're just asinine. Like when our Model Y didn't react to a green arrow for a protected right turn, inconveniencing me and drivers behind. Or entered a packed intersection as a yellow light expired, coming to a stop inside a crosswalk. Or braked hard after it accelerated up a freeway on-ramp because it detected an inactive traffic control signal. Or when it encountered an unexpected road closure and drove around the same block three times because each time it arrived back at the closure it failed to recalculate its route. Who knows how long FSD might've kept circling had I not turned it off.
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]]>Technology is advancing at an exponential rate, but we have very little ability to control it if something goes horribly wrong. Many experts are warning that some of the new technologies that are being developed right now represent very serious existential threats to humanity. In other words, they believe that we could literally be creating technology that could wipe us out someday. Unfortunately, the scientific community is not showing any restraint at all. If something is possible, they want to try to do it. All over the globe, hordes of mad scientists are feverishly rushing into the unknown, and it is quite likely that the consequences will be horrific. The following are 5 super creepy new technologies that should chill all of us to the core:
#1 Scientists in China have been able to get AI models to create "functioning replicas of themselves"...
[...] #2 Do you remember Operation Warp Speed? That was a public-private partnership that was initiated during the first Trump administration, and we all know how that turned out.
Now another public-private partnership that has been dubbed "Stargate" is supposed to greatly accelerate the development of AI in the United States...
[...] #3 Does creating an "artificial sun" sound like a good idea? Unfortunately, the Chinese have actually created such a thing, and they just set a new record by running it for 1,066 seconds...
[...] #4 Anyone that has watched Jurassic Park knows that bringing back ancient species that have gone extinct is a really bad idea. But now a company called Colossal BioSciences plans to do exactly that...
[...] #5 A whistleblower has told Joe Rogan that the U.S. military has mastered anti-gravity propulsion that is based on recovered alien technology...
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]]>In 2022, the drought in the Czech Republic was so severe that the Elbe River receded to reveal a rock along the bank with an inscription chiseled in 1417. It read, Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine. If you see me, then weep. Such warnings, found throughout Europe, are known as Hunger Stones.
I tell you this for two reasons. One, it demonstrates great storytelling skills that would be useful to any corporation looking to explain its brand in a crowded marketplace. But also because I am a Hunger Stone.
My warning is much easier to understand than the one along the bottom of the Elbe River because, first, I'm a great storyteller, and second, it's not written in 15th century German. Though, if you're a multinational company in Berlin, I can do that, too: Ich bin ein Hungerstein und habe eine Botschaft für die Unterhaltungsindustrie.
Heed my words, Hollywood. Pain is coming. It will come slowly. In ways you will try to ignore but should not.
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]]>This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction.
I've been playing around with MAME a lot lately. If you haven't heard of MAME, it's an emulator that is known best for its support of many arcade games. It's so much more than that, though! It is also arguably the most complete emulator of 68000-based Mac models, thanks in large part to Arbee's incredible efforts. I will admit that I've used MAME to play a game or two of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, but my main use for it is Mac emulation.
Here's how this adventure begins. I had been fixing some issues in MAME with the command + power key combination that invokes the debugger, and decided to see if the keystroke also worked on the Classic II. Even though this Mac model has a physical interrupt button on the side, it also has an "Egret" 68HC05 microcontroller for handling the keyboard and mouse (among other things) that should be able to detect the keypress and signal a non-maskable interrupt to the main CPU. I believe the Egret disables this keystroke by default, but MacsBug contains code that sends the command to enable it.
I didn't get very far while testing the command+power shortcut in MAME's emulated Classic II, because I observed something very odd. It booted up totally fine in 24-bit addressing mode, but I could not get it to boot at all if I enabled 32-bit addressing, which I needed in order for MacsBug to load. It would just pop up a Sad Mac, complete with the Chimes of Death. On this machine, the death chime is a few notes from the Twilight Zone theme song.
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]]>Hua Hong Semiconductor, China's second-largest chip foundry, has made strategic leadership changes to prioritize logic chip production and develop more advanced process technologies. The company hired Bai Peng, a veteran in logic chip technology, and appointed him president on January 1, 2024, reports Nikkei.
Bai Peng, who spent over three decades at Intel and led logic chip development from research to mass production, is expected to steer Hua Hong's shift toward advanced semiconductor production technologies. Hua Hong are one of China's few foundries to offer 40nm fabrication process along with SMIC. While 40nm is a fairly sophisticated technology, it cannot enable modern processors for AI, HPC, and client computing applications. The task for Bai Peng will be to advance Hua Hong's manufacturing processes. The report says that Bai's expertise aligns with the company's focus to develop fabrication nodes essential for AI and other high-end applications.
Hua Hong has historically focused on power semiconductors, analog chips, and embedded memory products, with most of its offerings at 100nm or larger. Hua Hong's financial performance has declined since its 2022 peak due to falling legacy chip prices, which are particularly vulnerable to market fluctuations. As a result, declining prices has pushed the company to diversify into logic chips, a market currently dominated by a few Chinese companies, including SMIC.
To expand its production capabilities, Hua Hong acquired a former GlobalFoundries facility in Chengdu, China, in 2023 and began operations in 2024. Additionally, a new plant in Wuxi is now producing chips of 40nm and above. These expansions aim to position Hua Hong as a key player in both legacy and advanced chip markets.
[...] These appointments have fueled speculation about a potential collaboration between Hua Hong and SMIC, China's largest and most advanced foundry. Such a partnership could bolster China's efforts to build a self-reliant semiconductor ecosystem, reducing dependency on foreign supply chains.
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]]>Florida-based startup Lonestar Data Holdings plans to launch the first Moon-based data center dubbed the "Freedom Data Center." The compact but fully operational information hub will piggyback on an upcoming lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in February. Lonestar says storing data on the Moon offers unique benefits.
First, it provides unmatched physical security and protection from natural disasters, cyber threats, and geopolitical conflicts that could put Earth-based data at risk. The solar-powered mini-facility is also much more environmentally friendly than energy-hungry data centers on our home planet, utilizing naturally cooled solid-state drives.
The company has already lined up some high-profile early customers for their lunar platform, including the state of Florida, the Isle of Man government, AI firm Valkyrie, and the pop rock band Imagine Dragons.
The company has been working towards this milestone for years, successfully testing data storage on the Moon in February last year and aboard the International Space Station in 2021. However, putting something as complex as a data center on the lunar surface is still an enormous technical challenge.
The harsh environment, maintenance difficulties, and astronomical costs could create some problematic issues. There are also inherent risks associated with space launch. There is no option for equipment recovery if something goes wrong. Thankfully, the data center will have a ground-based backup at a Flexential facility in Tampa.
Lonestar has yet to release specific operational details or hardware specs. It will be interesting to see the company's plans for communication between lunar and ground-based facilities.
Lonestar isn't the only venture planning to establish a lunar data center. Reuters reports that several other companies are eyeing similar space-based facilities, including Lumen Orbit, which recently raised $11 million at a $40 million valuation.
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]]>The Association for Computing Machinery has a post by George Neville-Neil of FreeBSD fame comparing LLMs to drunken plagiarists:
Before trying to use these tools, you need to understand what they do, at least on the surface, since even their creators freely admit they do not understand how they work deep down in the bowels of all the statistics and text that have been scraped from the current Internet. The trick of an LLM is to use a little randomness and a lot of text to Gauss the next word in a sentence. Seems kind of trivial, really, and certainly not a measure of intelligence that anyone who understands the term might use. But it's a clever trick and does have some applications.
[...] While help with proper code syntax is a boon to productivity (consider IDEs that highlight syntactical errors before you find them via a compilation), it is a far cry from SEMANTIC knowledge of a piece of code. Note that it is semantic knowledge that allows you to create correct programs, where correctness means the code actually does what the developer originally intended. KV can show many examples of programs that are syntactically?but not semantically?correct. In fact, this is the root of nearly every security problem in deployed software. Semantics remains far beyond the abilities of the current AI fad, as is evidenced by the number of developers who are now turning down these technologies for their own work.
He continues by pointing out how LLMs are not only based on plagiarism, they are unable provide useful annotation in the comments or otherwise address the semantics of the code they swipe.
Previously:
(2024) Make Illegally Trained LLMs Public Domain as Punishment
(2024) The Open Secret Of Open Washing
(2023) A Jargon-Free Explanation of How AI Large Language Models Work
(2019) AI Training is *Very* Expensive
... and many more.
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]]>Schools are now notifying families their data has been stolen:
Parents, students, teachers, and administrators throughout North America are smarting from what could be the biggest data breach of 2025: an intrusion into the network of a cloud-based service storing detailed data of millions of pupils and school personnel.
The hack, which came to light earlier this month, hit PowerSchool, a Folsom, California, firm that provides cloud-based software to some 16,000 K–12 schools worldwide. The schools serve 60 million students and employ an unknown number of teachers. Besides providing software for administration, grades, and other functions, PowerSchool stores personal data for students and teachers, with much of that data including Social Security numbers, medical information, and home addresses.
On January 7, PowerSchool revealed that it had experienced a network intrusion two weeks earlier that resulted in the "unauthorized exportation of personal information" customers stored in PowerSchool's Student Information System (SIS) through PowerSource, a customer support portal. Information stolen included individuals' names, contact information, dates of birth, medical alert information, Social Security Numbers, and unspecified "other related information."
[...] Last week, California's Menlo Park City School District said stolen information belonged to all current students and staff, all students enrolled since the start of the 2009–2010 school year, and many staff members who worked at the school since the start of the 2009–2010 school year.
"This includes students who may have been enrolled only for a short while before transferring out and staff who worked for MPCSD only briefly before leaving for whatever reason," last week's notice stated. The total number of students affected is 10,662. The notice went on to say that California law requires public schools to store student data in perpetuity.
PowerSchool has said that it has been in contact with the attackers and received assurances they won't release it publicly. Bleeping Computer reported that the assurances were based on a video showing the threat actor deleting the data. PowerSchool has yet to confirm that account. Even if the account is true, there's no way a video can prove all copies of the data have been destroyed. Despite this, school districts have passed those assurances on in their disclosure notices.
Bleeping Computer on Wednesday also reported that an extortion note the attacker sent to PowerSchool claimed that the personal data of 62.4 million students and 9.5 million teachers was swept up in the breach. PowerSchool said it's offering two years of free credit monitoring to all those affected.
PowerSchool has yet to disclose the number of individuals affected or confirm whether it paid a ransom.
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]]>A specialized system sends pulses of pressure through the fluids in our brain:
Our bodies rely on their lymphatic system to drain excessive fluids and remove waste from tissues, feeding those back into the blood stream. It's a complex yet efficient cleaning mechanism that works in every organ except the brain. "When cells are active, they produce waste metabolites, and this also happens in the brain. Since there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain, the question was what was it that cleaned the brain," Natalie Hauglund, a neuroscientist at Oxford University who led a recent study on the brain-clearing mechanism, told Ars.
Earlier studies done mostly on mice discovered that the brain had a system that flushed its tissues with cerebrospinal fluid, which carried away waste products in a process called glymphatic clearance. "Scientists noticed that this only happened during sleep, but it was unknown what it was about sleep that initiated this cleaning process," Hauglund explains.
Her study found the glymphatic clearance was mediated by a hormone called norepinephrine and happened almost exclusively during the NREM sleep phase. But it only worked when sleep was natural. Anesthesia and sleeping pills shut this process down nearly completely.
The glymphatic system in the brain was discovered back in 2013 by Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish neuroscientist and a coauthor of Hauglund's paper. Since then, there have been numerous studies aimed at figuring out how it worked, but most of them had one problem: they were done on anesthetized mice.
"What makes anesthesia useful is that you can have a very controlled setting," Hauglund says.
[...] So, her team designed a study to see how the brain-clearing mechanism works in mice that could move freely in their cages and sleep naturally whenever they felt like it. "It turned out that with the glymphatic system, we didn't really see the full picture when we used anesthesia," Hauglund says.
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]]>Linux kernel 6.13 is here, but don't get too excited. It's not a biggie and, given the timing, probably won't appear in many familiar distros.
Head penguin herder Linus Torvalds announced Linux version 6.13 this week, and he's also chosen five lucky winners of guitar pedals. The KernelNewbies site has a full rundown of what's new, which, if we were a newbie, we feel would look pretty intimidating.
Although there are important changes in this release, they are either things that are only significant to those using certain specific models of CPU or other hardware, or they're steps in large-scale changes that will have a noticeable impact in future, but don't right now.
So, for instance, there's improved power management on certain models of AMD CPU and GPU. Specifically, there's better management of AMD's fancy 3D V-cache. There's support for Intel "Panther Lake" CPUs and Xe3 GPUs. There's better Apple device support too, covering some MacBooks, plus support for certain Apple SoC devices that were used in some older iPads and iPhones. However, this does not mean that you'll soon be able to install a kernel 6.13-based Linux distro on your old iDevice. It's just a step toward that maybe happening one day. Also in Arm land, there's improved graphics support for the Raspberry Pi's VideoCore GPU, support for running Linux inside an Arm64 Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) realm, and more.
One terabyte SD cards are old news now. Users can already buy SD cards with capacities exceeding 2 TB. The Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard defines card sizes up to 128 TB. As of this kernel, Linux supports them.
There's a new pre-emption model for the kernel's scheduler, referred to as Lazy Pre-emption, which aims to improve scheduler efficiency. Until recently, Linux had three pre-emption modes. At the end of last year, it gained another with the integration of the long-standing PREEMPT_RT patches in last November's kernel 6.12. Linux Weekly News explained the four modes in 2023 over two articles: part 1 and part 2. (Be warned, it took LWN two articles, so this is complicated.) Now, there's another model, and in October there was another LWN explainer. The plan is that the new mode will eventually enable the other non-realtime modes to be simplified down to just two.
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]]>A new review of the evidence shows that the 21-day rule isn't a rule after all.
A popular piece of self-help folklore might be more complicated than we thought. New research finds that it takes significantly more than a month for a new habit to form.
Scientists at the University of South Australia conducted the study, a review of the existing evidence on habit forming. They found that habits typically begin forming after about two months. For some unlucky people, though, it could even take up to a year.
To get at the root of this topic, the University of South Australia researchers analyzed data from 20 studies that examined the forming of healthy habits like routine exercise, drinking water, or flossing teeth; these studies collectively involved over 2,500 participants. One specific question these studies sought to answer was how long it took for a habit to reach something called "automaticity"—the point at which people perform it regularly and without too much thought being put into it.
The researchers found that habits formed around 106 to 154 days on average. The median length of a habit forming was roughly 59 to 66 days (the median is the midpoint in a group of numbers in case you forgot). That said, the study did reveal plenty of outliers. The shortest reported length of habit adoption was four days, while the longest was a whopping 335 days.
[Reference]: MDPI
[Source]: University of South Australia
[Covered By]: Gizmodo
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]]>As consumer companies including Apple and Samsung start opening up their hardware products to independent repair, and legislators put pressure on companies like John Deere to do the same, others are resisting the right-to-repair movement. A medical device company that makes a machine for heart surgeries has told hospitals recently that it will no longer allow their in-house technicians to repair the devices themselves. Hospitals will now need to enter into repair contracts directly with the manufacturer.
Terumo Cardiovascular makes the product, called the Advanced Perfusion System 1 Heart Lung Machine, which reroutes blood during open-heart surgeries to keep a patient alive during surgery. According to 404 Media, Terumo told hospitals last month that it would stop offering certification classes for repairs of the devices.
The job of an independent repair technician used to be more commonplace—there were individuals who could fix everything from TVs to dishwashers and automobiles. But today more hardware is filled with chips and software, and companies like Apple have said the software on their devices is copyrighted intellectual property; allowing anyone to look under the hood and conduct modifications could lead to security or reliability risks.
[...] In many cases, however, devices today are more like services. Instead of buying a refrigerator or smart thermostat once and being able to do with it whatever the owner would like, any type of upgrade or fix often requires returning to the company that sold it. Research suggests it is a fundamental reason we have so much waste in the world today. TV will not turn on? Either get it fixed under warranty or throw it away, because getting a new one may just be cheaper.
[...] Lawmakers have recently complained that like medical device companies, the automakers are making it difficult for independent repair companies to access software data and diagnostics under the same guise that it would risk security. And they are doing so in violation of right-to-repair laws passed in states including Massachusetts explicitly to enable independent shops to access software diagnostics.
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]]>No one saw the blob takeover coming. In 2009 a team of biophysicists led by Anthony A. Hyman of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, were studying specklelike structures called P granules in the single-celled embryo of a tiny, soil-dwelling worm. These specks were known to accumulate only at one end of the cell, making it lopsided so that, when it divides, the two daughter cells are different. The researchers wanted to know how that uneven distribution of P granules arises.
They discovered that these blobs, made from protein and RNA, were condensing on one side of the cell like raindrops in moist air, and dissolving again on the other side. In other words, the molecular components of the granules were undergoing phase transitions like those that switch a substance between liquid and gas.
That was a weird thing to be happening in cell biology. But at first it seemed to many researchers little more than a quirk and didn't excite much attention. Then these little blobs—now called biomolecular condensates—began popping up just about anywhere researchers looked in the cell, doing a myriad of vital tasks.
Biologists had long believed that bringing order and organization to the chaos of molecules inside a cell depended on membrane-bound compartments called organelles, such as the mitochondria. But condensates, it turns out, offer "order for free" without the need for membranes. They provide an easy, general-purpose organization that cells can turn on or off. This arrangement permits many of the things on which life depends, explains biophysicist Petra Schwille of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany.
These little blobs inside living cells now appear to feature across all domains of the living world and are "connected to just about every aspect of cellular function," says biophysical engineer Cliff Brangwynne, who was part of the 2009 Dresden team and now runs his own lab at Princeton University. They protect cells from dangerously high or low temperatures; they repair DNA damage; they control the way DNA gets turned into crucial proteins. And when they go bad, they may trigger diseases.
Biomolecular condensates now seem to be a key part of how life gets its countless molecular components to coordinate and cooperate, to form committees that make the group decisions on which our very existence depends. "The ultimate problem in cell biology is not how a few puzzle pieces fit together," Brangwynne says, "but how collections of billions of them give rise to emergent, dynamic structures on larger scales."
These ubiquitous specks have "completely taken over cell biology," says biophysicist Simon Alberti of the Technical University of Dresden. The challenge now is to understand how they form, what they do—and perhaps how to control them to devise new medical therapies and cures.
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]]>What could go wrong with eating an extremely high-fat diet of beef, cheese, and sticks of butter? Well, for one thing, your cholesterol levels could reach such stratospheric levels that lipids start oozing from your blood vessels, forming yellowish nodules on your skin.
That was the disturbing case of a man in Florida who showed up at a Tampa hospital with a three-week history of painless, yellow eruptions on the palms of his hands, soles of his feet, and elbows. His case was published today in JAMA Cardiology.
[...]
his total cholesterol level exceeded 1,000 mg/dL. For context, an optimal total cholesterol level is under 200 mg/dL, while 240 mg/dL is considered the threshold for 'high.' Cardiologists noted that prior to going on his fatty diet, his cholesterol had been between 210 mg/dL to 300 mg/dL.The cardiologists diagnosed the man with xanthelasma, a condition in which excess blood lipids ooze from blood vessels and form localized lipid deposits.
[...]
Xanthelasma—especially xanthelasma palpebrarum—is not always associated with high cholesterol and heart risks, but having high total cholesterol is strongly associated with coronary heart disease.
[...]
the case "highlights the impact of dietary patterns on lipid levels and the importance of managing hypercholesterolemia to prevent complications."
Related stories on SoylentNews: lipid search
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]]>As more businesses shift an ever greater number of workloads to the cloud, hyperscalers aren't doing enough to help CIOs or tech buyers, who are already under legislative pressure, to be more transparent about their own corporation's carbon footprint regarding compute services.
This is according to tech and channel analyst Canalys, which highlights Amazon - or rather its subsidiary Amazon Web Services - as the worst offender, even though Microsoft and Google do not escape criticism.
"We know that emissions have blown through the roof in the last couple of years. Google and Microsoft are two fantastic examples, but they are not the only examples. Their emissions have skyrocketed despite some significant efforts to cut them," said Canalys Principal ESG Analyst Elsa Nightingale, speaking at the company's Channels Forum last year in Berlin.
At issue, is that emissions from datacenters are likely to be much higher than currently estimated, perhaps more than seven times higher, according to Nightingale, who cited a report last year. This is due to the emissions accounting practices used by the hyperscale operators like AWS, Google, and Microsoft, such as the use of renewable energy certificates to offset emissions in their calculations.
Nightingale said that Amazon doesn't provide AWS-specific, location-based data, meaning: "We don't really know how big AWS's footprint truly is, which I think is a bit worrying."
Amazon has chosen not break out data on environmental stats such as greenhouse gas emissions for AWS from the rest of the company in its sustainability reports, making it almost impossible to determine whether these emissions are growing as they have been for its cloud rivals.
[...] Amazon isn't the sole offender: neither Microsoft nor Google breaks out the emissions of their datacenters separately from the main business.
[...] We asked Amazon why it doesn't break out the emissions data for AWS separately from its other operations, but while the company confirmed this is so, it declined to offer an explanation. Neither did Microsoft nor Google.
[...] A recent report from Uptime Institute warned that prioritizing AI growth threatens to trump sustainability commitments in many territories, and that targets for greenhouse gas emissions to become net zero by a set date are almost certain to be put out of reach.
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]]>https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/features/touchscreen-dashboards-have-taken-over/
Regarding how we interact with our cars, whether petrol or electric, victory has gone to the touchscreen – at least as far as one premium manufacturer is concerned. Despite overwhelming safety evidence to the contrary, BMW has decided that selecting in-car functions using its intuitive rotary controller will be for used-car buyers only.
On BMW's next-generation Neue Klasse cars, beginning with the iX3 SUV launching this summer, drivers will have no choice but to use touchscreens. Its German rival Mercedes even offers a full-width dashboard consisting of three screens, called Hyperscreen (pictured above in the EQS, compared with the analogue, hewn-from-solid facia of the 1980s W123 Mercedes model).
They won't be alone. An S&P Global Mobility survey of car owners found that 97 per cent of new cars released after 2023 contain at least one touchscreen.
Related:
• Hyundai Wants to Eliminate Touchscreens Entirely With Holographic Windshield Displays
• Volkswagen is Returning to Physical Buttons Instead of Touch Controls
• Physical Buttons Outperform Touchscreens in New Cars, Test Finds
• BMW Removes Touchscreen Functionality From Some New Cars Due To Chip Shortage
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]]>Wiki-style guide compiles all the pieces and potential of a rack you can carry:
I have one standard rack appliance in my home: a Unifi Dream Machine Pro. It is mounted horizontally in a coat closet, putting it close to my home's fiber input and also incidentally keeping our jackets gently warm. I can fit juuuuuust about one more standard rack-size device in there (maybe a rack-mount UPS?) before I have to choose between outer-wear and overly ambitious networking. Were I starting over, I might think a bit more about scalability.
Along those lines, technologist and YouTube maker Jeff Geerling has launched the Project Mini Rack page for folks who have similarly server-sized ambitions, coupled with a lack of square footage. "I mean, if you want to cosplay as a sysadmin, you need a rack, right?" Geerling says in the announcement video. It's a keen launching point for a new "homelab" or "minilab" project, also known as bringing the networking and hardware challenges of a commercial network deployment into your home for "fun."
It's a good time fall into the compact computing space. As Geerling notes in a blog post announcing the project, there's a whole lot of small-form-factor PCs on the market. You can couple them with single-board computers, power-over-Ethernet devices, and network-accessible solid state drives that allow you to stuff a whole lab into a cube you can carry around in your hands.
[...] "The community feedback around Project Mini Rack has been great so far," Geerling wrote in an email to Ars. The 3D-printed links and suggestions have been showing up steadily since he started committing to the page in earnest in mid-January. He's particularly excited to see that a "LACK rack," or using IKEA shelving for budget rack mounting, can be downscaled to mini-rack size with an Edet cabinet. "It's like someone at IKEA is a Homelab enthusiast," says Geerling.
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]]>On Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI models may surpass human capabilities "in almost everything" within two to three years, according to a Wall Street Journal interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
[...]
Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 with his sister Daniela Amodei and five other former OpenAI employees. Not long after, Anthropic emerged as a strong technological competitor to OpenAI's AI products (such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT). Most recently, its Claude 3.5 Sonnet model has remained highly regarded among some AI users and highly ranked among AI benchmarks.
[...]
Even with his dramatic predictions, Amodei distanced himself from a term for this advanced labor-replacing AI favored by Altman, "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), calling it in a separate CNBC interview from the same event in Switzerland a marketing term.Instead, he prefers to describe future AI systems as a "country of geniuses in a data center," he told CNBC.
Related stories on SoylentNews: anthropic search
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]]>Elon should watch where he leaves his car. https://www.astronomy.com/science/astronomers-just-deleted-an-asteroid-because-it-turned-out-to-be-elon-musks-tesla-roadster/
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]]>The Executive Order ("a directive by the president of the United States that manages operations of the federal government") dated January 20, 2025 with the title DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT contains the following text:
Policy and Definitions. It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.
(d) "Female" means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(e) "Male" means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.
However, this 10-year old Scientific American article appears to describe a more nuanced definition of biological sex (and I mean sex, not gender). I recommend reading the whole article, which says it was first published February 18th, 2015. It describes intersex, or Disorders of Sex Development (DSDs) and provides evidence to support the argument that biological sex is closer to being describable as spectrum than a binary attribute:
Scientific American: October 22, 2018 - Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic; Biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male
Although some governments are moving in this direction, Greenberg is pessimistic about the prospects of realizing this dream—in the United States, at least. "I think to get rid of gender markers altogether or to allow a third, indeterminate marker, is going to be difficult."
So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? "My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter," says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.
Some people (such as people with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS)) can have an outward appearance of one 'traditional' sex, but genetically, be another; some people lack the ability to produce reproductive cells, so their status at conception would be unclear. About 50% of people with with Klinefelter syndrome are infertile. (Klinefelter syndrom is a result of someone having three sex chromosomes: XXY).
As far as I am concerned, administrative recording (where necessary) of biological sex should acknowledge the unusual/edge cases, but other people will likely have other views. What do you think?
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]]>The open source Wine project—sometimes stylized WINE, for Wine Is Not an Emulator—has become an important tool for companies and individuals who want to make Windows apps and games run on operating systems like Linux or even macOS.
[...]
Yesterday, the Wine project announced the stable release of version 10.0, the next major version of the compatibility layer that is not an emulator. The headliner for this release is support for ARM64EC, the application binary interface (ABI) used for Arm apps in Windows 11, but the release notes say that the release contains "over 6,000 individual changes" produced over "a year of development effort."
[...]
Wine's ARM64EC support does have one limitation that will keep it from working on some prominent Arm Linux distributions, at least by default: the release notes say it "requires the system page size to be 4K
[...]
Asahi Linux, the Fedora-based distribution that's working to bring Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, uses 16K pages because that's all Apple's processors support. Some versions of the Raspberry Pi OS also default to a 16K page size, though it's possible to switch to 4K for compatibility's sake. Given that the Raspberry Pi and Asahi Linux are two of the biggest Linux-on-Arm projects going right now, that does at least somewhat limit the appeal of ARM64EC support in Wine. But as we've seen with Proton and other successful Wine-based compatibility layers, laying the groundwork now can deliver big benefits down the road.Other new additions to Wine 10.0 include improved support for high-DPI displays, which should be better at automatically scaling app windows that aren't DPI-aware.
[...]
Though various version of Windows have been running on Arm processors for over a decade now, last year was when the project became a credible mainstream computing platform.
[...]
Microsoft also released the Windows 11 24H2 update, which looks like another routine yearly update on the surface but included large under-the-hood overhauls of Windows' compiler, kernel, and scheduler that improved performance for Arm chips as well as some x86 chips. Microsoft also updated and branded its x86-to-Arm code translation feature, now called "Prism."
[...]
Finally—and most relevantly, for people using Wine—the company convinced a critical mass of major app developers to release versions of their apps that ran natively on the Arm versions of Windows. That included major browsers like Google Chrome, creative apps like Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo, and productivity apps like Dropbox and Google Drive.
Related stories on SolyentNews: winehq search
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]]>https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2025/01/22/Trump-pardons-Ross-Ulbricht/5181737526042/
President Trump has issued a full and unconditional pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the dark web Silk Road marketplace of illicit drugs, murders, and other illegal activities. Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison in May 2015 for his operation of Silk Road, which was active between January 2011 and October 2013. "I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbright [sic] to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son," Trump said in a statement published on his Truth Social social media platform.
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]]>At the core of Bluesky's philosophy is the idea that instead of being centralized in the hands of one person or institution, social media governance should obey the principle of subsidiarity. Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom found, through studying grassroots solutions to local environmental problems around the world, that some problems are best solved locally, while others are best solved at a higher level.
In terms of content moderation, posts related to CSAM or terrorism are best handled by professionals keeping millions or billions safe. But a lot of decisions about speech can be solved in each community, or even user by user by assembling a Bluesky blocklist.
So all the right elements are currently in place at Bluesky to usher in this new architecture for social media: independent ownership, newfound popularity, a stark contrast with other dominant platforms, and right-minded leadership. But challenges remain, and we can't count on Bluesky doing this right without support.
Critics have pointed out that Bluesky has yet to turn a profit and is currently running on venture capital, the same corporate structure that brought us Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies. As of now, there's no option to exit Bluesky and take your data and network with you, because there are no other servers that run the AT Protocol. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber deserves credit for her stewardship so far, and for attempting to avoid the dangers of advertising incentives. But the process of capitalism degrading tech products is so predictable that Cory Doctorow coined a now-popular term for it: enshittification.
That's why we need to act now to secure the foundation of this digital future and make it enshittification-proof.Last week, prominent technologists started a new project, which we at New_ Public are supporting, called Free Our Feeds. There are three parts: First, Free Our Feeds wants to create a nonprofit foundation to govern and protect the AT Protocol, outside of Bluesky the company. We also need to build redundant servers so anyone can leave with their data or build anything they want—regardless of policies set by Bluesky. Finally, we need to spur the development of a whole ecosystem built on this tech with seed money and expertise.
[...] We can shift the balance of power and reclaim our social lives from these companies and their billionaires. This an opportunity to bring much more independence, innovation, and local control to our online conversations. We can finally build the "Wikipedia of social media," or whatever we want. But we need to act, because the future of the internet can't depend on whether one of the richest men on earth wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.
There of course is also ActivityPub, which the Fediverse uses.
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]]>https://spectrum.ieee.org/huge-ssds
At the SC24 supercomputing conference held in November in Atlanta, Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (the actor who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones), deadlifted a custom barbell weighed down by 453 kilograms (1000 pounds) of solid state drives. The data stored in those drives totaled just over 280 petabytes.
"Without question, this is the most data lifted by a human in history," says Andy Higginbotham, senior director of business development at Phison Electronics. High-performance data platform VDURA orchestrated the record-breaking lift in collaboration with Phison.
Behind this publicity stunt is a real trend—to feed AI's insatiable data appetite, memory drives are getting larger, with no end in sight. Phison recently announced the largest SSD memory drive to date, storing 128 terabytes of data, and piled hundreds of them into Björnsson's barbell. Within a few weeks, Solidigm announced its own 123 Tb drive. Samsung and Western Digital also recently started carrying similar products.
The shift towards more AI workloads in data centers has led to very power-hungry chips, mostly GPUs. Since the overall power use in a data center is going up, people are looking for ways to use less power wherever possible. At the same time, large language models and other AI models require ever increasing amounts of memory.
"You can see where storage requirements are going," says Roger Corell, senior director of AI and leadership marketing at Solidigm. "You look at a large language model just a couple years ago, you had a half a petabyte per rack or lower. And now there's large language models that pair with between three and three and a half petabytes per rack. Storage efficiency to enable continued scaling of AI infrastructure is really, really important."
Crucially, this new crop of solid-state drives takes up the same area in a computing rackand power budget as their roughly 32 Tb and 64 Tb predecessors—although they are slightly taller—meaning they can be swapped into data centers for an easy win.
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]]>https://newatlas.com/medical-tech/oyster-hemolymph-protein-antibacterial/
Researchers have discovered that proteins found in oyster blood have bacteria-killing properties and can boost the effectiveness of some common antibiotics whose use has been negatively affected by the global rise in drug resistance.
Oysters are divisive, culinarily speaking. People generally fall into two camps: those who enjoy the taste and 'mouthfeel' and those who view eating them as akin to swallowing a large glob of phlegm. Luckily, science doesn't care how the mollusks taste; it's more concerned with the health benefits they can convey.
A new study led by researchers from Southern Cross University in New South Wales, Australia, has discovered that proteins in the mollusk's blood not only have bacteria-killing properties, raising the possibility of a new antibiotic, but also increase the effectiveness of some existing antibiotics.
"Most organisms have natural defense mechanisms to protect themselves against infection," said study co-author Professor Kirsten Benkendorff from the University's Faculty of Science and Engineering. "Oysters are constantly filtering bacteria from the water, so they are a good place to look for potential antibiotics."
The present study built on the researchers' previous work, in which they identified proteins in the hemolymph of the Sydney Rock Oyster that inhibited Streptococcus pneumoniae, bacteria that cause respiratory infections like pneumonia. In some invertebrates, including oysters, hemolymph is the equivalent of human blood.
Bacteria can be hard to kill. They can form biofilms, a community of microorganisms that merge into a sticky protective 'case' that enables the bacteria to attach to biological surfaces and protects them from antibiotics and the human immune system. Bacterial biofilms have contributed to a global rise in antibiotic resistance, which has created a serious healthcare risk by limiting treatment options.
The researchers found that the hemolymph proteins they tested demonstrated an antibacterial effect, especially on the Streptococcus species S. pneumoniae, mentioned above, and S. pyogenes, which causes throat infection and tonsillitis. The proteins also interfered with the bacteria's biofilm-forming abilities.
"The oyster hemolymph proteins were found to prevent biofilm formation and disrupt biofilms, so the bacteria remain available to antibiotics exposure at lower doses," Benkendorff said. "The hemolymph contains a mixture of proteins with known antimicrobial properties. These may act to directly kill the bacteria, as well as preventing them from attaching to the cell surface."
Journal Reference: Kate Summer et al., Antimicrobial proteins from oyster hemolymph improve the efficacy of conventional antibiotics, PLOS One, Published: January 21, 2025 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0312305
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]]>With the help of tipsters, the cybersecurity agency was able to 'connect the dots' to crack what has been called one of the worst telecom hacks in US history:
Chinese state-backed cyber espionage group Salt Typhoon, which has been in the news for its breach of U.S. telecom firms, was first discovered on the federal network using a different name, according to Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
"We saw it as a separate campaign called another goofy cyber name. And we were able to—based on the visibility that we had within the federal networks—to be able to connect some dots," she said during a discussion at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies on Jan. 15.
[...] The earlier identification under a different name enabled officials to connect the dots with the help of tipsters from the private sector, which Easterly said ultimately "led to kind of cracking open the larger Salt Typhoon piece."
[...] On Jan. 17, the U.S. Treasury Department announced it was sanctioning Chinese cybersecurity company Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology Co. for "direct involvement in the Salt Typhoon cyber group."
"Chinese state-backed cyber actors continue to present some of the greatest and most persistent threats to U.S. national security," the Treasury Department said.
The Treasury Department also sanctioned Shanghai-based hacker Yin Kecheng, who was allegedly behind a major breach of the department's network in early December. The cyber actor is affiliated with China's Ministry of State Security, the department said.
Previously:
- U.S. Treasury Confirms It Was Breached by China-Backed Hackers
- A 9th Telecoms Firm Has Been Hit by a Massive Chinese Espionage Campaign, the White House Says
- Wyden Law Would Give FCC Greater Power Over Telecom's Lax Cybersecurity In Wake Of Ugly Salt Typhoon
- Salt Typhoon's Cyberstorm Reaches Beyond US Telcos
- Senators Ask Cyber Review Board to Conduct Investigation on Chinese Hack Group
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]]>Late last year, California passed a law against the possession or distribution of child sex abuse material that has been generated by AI. The law went into effect on January 1, and Sacramento police announced yesterday that they have arrested their first suspect, 49-year-old Pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonist Darrin Bell. The new law, which you can read here, declares that AI-generated CSAM is harmful, even without an actual victim. "The creation of CSAM using AI is inherently harmful to children because the machine-learning models utilized by AI have been trained on datasets containing thousands of depictions of known CSAM victims, revictimizing these real children by using their likeness to generate AI CSAM images into perpetuity."
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]]>Now trade magazine TTI https://www.tiretechnologyinternational.com/news/intelligent-tire-technology/yokohama-begins-testing-of-ai-technology-to-gauge-air-pressure.html reports on the latest wrinkle on this old technique,
Yokohama has begun testing a novel technology that uses AI to gauge air pressure from the sound made by tapping truck and bus tires. This technology aims to help logistics companies to reduce costs and improve fuel efficiency.
Daily air pressure checks with pressure gauges can lead to valve failure and air leakage. In addition, real-time monitoring can be time-consuming and costly. Therefore, tapping the tire with a hammer remains a commonly used technique for air pressure monitoring. However, this method cannot be used to determine whether a tire has appropriate air pressure.
To solve this problem, Yokohama is working with Metrika to develop an AI algorithm that can distinguish between the sounds created by tapping the tire and a variety of environmental sounds, determine when and how long the sound occurred (the sound interval), and estimate the tire's air pressure based on the sound. The companies have developed a prototype that is undergoing practical testing at a transportation-related company.
It's a smart phone app that uses the microphone as sensor...and more than likely it then reports the results back to the trucking fleet owner.
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]]>Long ago, another company tried to control global connectivity—it had an unhappy ending
Can you imagine a company so powerful that it controls half of the world's trade?
It actually happened. But only one time in history. It's a remarkable story filled with lessons for those willing to learn them.
No business ever matched the power of the East India Company. It dominated global trade routes, and used that power to control entire nations. Yet it eventually collapsed—ruined by the consequences of its own extreme ambitions.
Anybody who wants to understand how big businesses destroy themselves through greed and overreaching needs to know this case study. And that's especially true right now—because huge web platforms are trying to do the exact same thing in the digital economy that the East India Company did in the real world.
Google is the closest thing I've ever seen to the East India Company. And it will encounter the exact same problems, and perhaps meet the same fate.
[...] When you consider all the brutal, terrible things this company did, you 're dumbfounded that they dared adopt that slogan—much like the "Don't Be Evil" that once served as Google's motto.
But their real god was profit maximization. Of course it was—when your return on investment is so high, you try to grow as fast as possible.
[...] Just like a shipping company that controls the port, Google's search engine is the port of departure for digital voyages today. And like the East India Company, Google decided that it can exploit anybody who uses its port—and destroy them if they want.
So Google destroyed the journalism business. That's why your neighborhood newspaper went broke—the folks in Palo Alto siphoned off all the advertising revenues. And they have killed off thousands of other businesses and jobs.
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]]>Microsoft has begun distributing Windows 11 24H2 to user devices as the company enters the next stage of the operating system's rollout.
[...] Windows 11 24H2 has not gone entirely to plan for Microsoft. While most users have had no problems with the update, there have been issues for some. The company has an ever-lengthening list of known issues, many of which remain unmitigated or unresolved since the operating system was launched in the second half of 2024.
Recently resolved issues include problems with Ubisoft games, and USB devices that support the eSCL scanner protocol – although the latter might not have been entirely fixed, according to disgruntled users in hardware support forums.
[...] Forcing Windows 11 24H2 onto users won't affect machines subject to a safeguard hold where Microsoft has decided to block the installation (likely due to one of the documented known issues.) Nor does it affect users sticking with Windows 10 – devices that don't meet Microsoft's hardware requirements for its flagship operating system won't suddenly be able to pass muster for Windows 11 24H2. There is also little in Windows 11 24H2 to attract users who have chosen to skip previous versions.
Instead, IT professionals around the world should gird their loins for the inevitable friends and family support calls when Windows 11 24H2 makes a surprise appearance, and uncle Fester is surprised that things have suddenly started working a little differently. ®
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]]>We live at a time when technology is increasing at a faster pace than we have ever seen before in all of human history. But is humanity equipped to handle the extremely bizarre technology that we are now developing? Earlier this month, I discussed some of the frightening ways that AI is changing our society. Today, I want to focus on nanotechnology. This is a field where extraordinary advances are https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=24/09/26/1353235 being made on a regular basis, and we are being told that nanotechnology is already "revolutionizing myriad industries"...
A "nanoparticle" is a particle of matter that is less than 100 nanometers in diameter. Highly specialized equipment is necessary to work with nanoparticles, because they are way too small to be seen with the naked eye...
One of the hallmarks of nanotechnology is the utilization of nanoparticles, minute entities often ranging from 1 to 100 nanometers. These particles, when engineered with precision, bring forth distinctive characteristics that can redefine the functionality of materials. In medicine, for instance, nanoparticles serve as drug carriers, enabling targeted delivery and enhancing therapeutic efficacy while minimizing side effects. Nano-engineered materials have found their niche in the realm of electronics.
[...] Many are concerned that the healthcare industry is one area where nanoparticles are already being used on a widespread basis...
The healthcare sector is witnessing a transformative impact through nanotechnology. Nanomedicine, an interdisciplinary field, employs nanoscale tools for the diagnosis, imaging, and treatment of diseases. Nanoparticles, with their ability to navigate biological barriers, offer a novel approach to targeted drug delivery, ensuring precise and efficient treatment with reduced side effects.
[...] But there have been other developments in this field that are rather ominous.
For example, a team of researchers in South Korea has discovered a way to use nanoparticles to "control the minds of mice"...
Scientists at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in South Korea have developed a new way to control the minds of mice by manipulating nanoparticle-activated "switches" inside their brains with an external magnetic field.
The system, dubbed Nano-MIND (Magnetogenetic Interface for NeuroDynamics), works by controlling targeted regions of the brain by activating neural circuits.
Using an external magnetic field, these scientists were able to make mice eat more or eat less. And in another experiment, they were able to manipulate the maternal behavior of female mice...
Related:
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]]>Taiwan has experienced an earthquake so significant that chipmaking champ TSMC has shuttered plants.
According to Taiwan’s Central Weather Administration Seismological Center, a 6.4-magnitude tremblor shook things up at seventeen minutes past midnight on January 21st (4:17PM UTC). A quake of that strength can cause significant local damage in built-up areas.
This one was centered in a mountainous region of Taiwan and reportedly caused 27 injuries and minor damage such as glass bottles breaking after being shaken off supermarket shelves.
But it was still felt around 40km away in the city of Tainan, and 200km away in the city of Taichung. The Register mentions them as both house TSMC fabrication plants and, according to local media reports, the chipmaker was sufficiently worried about worker safety that staff were told to cease work and leave the building.
TSMC is now apparently checking for any damage. Chipmaking equipment is extremely precise, so it’s possible an earthquake created small changes that could introduce errors that reduce the yield of usable chips. Recalibration could therefore be required before full-scale production can resume.
The chipmaker has not made a public statement about the situation at the time of writing but sources familiar with the situation told Japan’s Nikkei it could be several days before production resumes at full capacity.
If correct, that will irk some TSMC customers as the company’s fabs are often booked well into the future.
Taiwanese media reports that TSMC suppliers have mobilized to ensure any pause in production is brief. Geological incidents are a near-daily occurrence in Taiwan, as are geopolitical rumblings. The latter this week came in the form of uncertainty about US President Trump’s policy position regarding the republic, which the Biden Administration regarded as a vital friend that America would defend should China attempt a forcible re-unification. Taiwanese contract laptop makers Compal and Inventec are reportedly considering moving manufacturing facilities to the USA if threatened with import tariffs by the new administration. ®
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]]>Almost all leading AI chatbots show signs of cognitive decline
Almost all leading large language models or "chatbots" show signs of mild cognitive impairment in tests widely used to spot early signs of dementia, finds a study in the Christmas issue of The BMJ.
The results also show that "older" versions of chatbots, like older patients, tend to perform worse on the tests. The authors say these findings "challenge the assumption that artificial intelligence will soon replace human doctors."
Huge advances in the field of artificial intelligence have led to a flurry of excited and fearful speculation as to whether chatbots can surpass human physicians.
Several studies have shown large language models (LLMs) to be remarkably adept at a range of medical diagnostic tasks, but their susceptibility to human impairments such as cognitive decline have not yet been examined.
To fill this knowledge gap, researchers assessed the cognitive abilities of the leading, publicly available LLMs – ChatGPT versions 4 and 4o (developed by OpenAI), Claude 3.5 "Sonnet" (developed by Anthropic), and Gemini versions 1 and 1.5 (developed by Alphabet) – using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test.
The MoCA test is widely used to detect cognitive impairment and early signs of dementia, usually in older adults. Through a number of short tasks and questions, it assesses abilities including attention, memory, language, visuospatial skills, and executive functions. The maximum score is 30 points, with a score of 26 or above generally considered normal
The instructions given to the LLMs for each task were the same as those given to human patients. Scoring followed official guidelines and was evaluated by a practising neurologist.
ChatGPT 4o achieved the highest score on the MoCA test (26 out of 30), followed by ChatGPT 4 and Claude (25 out of 30), with Gemini 1.0 scoring lowest (16 out of 30).
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