upstart writes:

French Court Smacks Remote Learning Software Company For Pervasive Surveillance Of Students In Their Own Homes:

A worldwide pandemic trapped students in their own homes to stop the spread of the coronavirus. They didn't ask for this. Neither did educators. But educators made the worst of it in far too many cases.

Aptitude tests and other essentials for continued funding (and bragging rights) were now out of their control. Any student sitting at home had access to a wealth of knowledge to buttress what they may have actually retained from remote instruction.

Leveling the playing field was the goal. In practice, that meant turning the most sacrosanct of private places students' homes and bedrooms into heavily surveilled spaces... all in the interest of preventing cheating.

Laptop cameras monitored rooms and students' movements during testing. Internet connections often contributed more to passing grades than students' knowledge as educators (and their preferred tech partners) viewed inconsistent or dropped connections as indicators of attempted cheating. Malware deliberately installed by schools monitored internet usage before, during, and after tests.

A bedroom is not a classroom, even if that's where the educating is taking place temporarily due to pandemic restrictions. But that's how it was perceived and a bunch of opportunistic spyware purveyors rushed to fill the perceived "fairness" void with surveillance software that even the most inveterate stalker might consider too invasive.

Proctorio was on the forefront of this education-adjacent bedroom surveillance. It was particularly enthusiastic about stripping students of their privacy. When it was criticized for going too far, it went further, issuing legal threats and...

NotSanguine writes:

As the title suggests, they weren't all that impressed.

From the article:

As with so many things involving AI, the claims are served with a generous portion of smoke and mirrors. PassGAN, as the tool is dubbed, performs no better than more conventional cracking methods. In short, anything PassGAN can do, these more tried and true tools do as well or better. And like so many of the non-AI password checkers Ars has criticized in the paste.g., here, here, and herethe researchers behind PassGAN draw password advice from their experiment that undermines real security.

PassGAN is a shortened combination of the words "Password" and "generative adversarial networks." PassGAN is an approach that debuted in 2017. It uses machine learning algorithms running on a neural network in place of conventional methods devised by humans. These GANs generate password guesses after autonomously learning the distribution of passwords by processing the spoils of previous real-world breaches. These guesses are used in offline attacks made possible when a database of password hashes leaks as a result of a security breach.

Conventional password guessing uses lists of words numbering in the billions taken from previous breaches. Popular password-cracking applications like Hashcat and John the Ripper then apply "mangling rules" to these lists to enable variations on the fly.

[...] PassGAN uses none of these methods. Instead, it creates a neural network, a type of data structure loosely inspired by networks of biological neurons. This neural network attempts to train machines to interpret and analyze data in a way that's similar to how a human mind would. These networks are organized in layers, with inputs from one layer connected to outputs from the next layer.

PassGAN was an exciting experiment that helped usher in the use of AI-based password candidate generators, but its time in the sun has come and gone, password-cracking expert and Senior Principal Engineer at Yahoo...

upstart writes:

The historians of tomorrow are using computer science to analyze how people lived centuries ago:

It's an evening in 1531, in the city of Venice. In a printer's workshop, an apprentice labors over the layout of a page that's destined for an astronomy textbooka dense line of type and a woodblock illustration of a cherubic head observing shapes moving through the cosmos, representing a lunar eclipse.

[...] Five hundred years later, the production of information is a different beast entirely: terabytes of images, video, and text in torrents of digital data that circulate almost instantly and have to be analyzed nearly as quickly, allowingand requiringthe training of machine-learning models to sort through the flow. This shift in the production of information has implications for the future of everything from art creation to drug development.

But those advances are also making it possible to look differently at data from the past. Historians have started using machine learningdeep neural networks in particularto examine historical documents, including astronomical tables like those produced in Venice and other early modern cities, smudged by centuries spent in mildewed archives or distorted by the slip of a printer's hand.

Historians say the application of modern computer science to the distant past helps draw connections across a broader swath of the historical record than would otherwise be possible, correcting distortions that come from analyzing history one document at a time. But it introduces distortions of its own, including the risk that machine learning will slip bias or outright falsifications into the historical record. All this adds up to a question for historians and others who, it's often argued, understand the present by examining history: With machines set to play a greater role in the future, how much should we cede to them of the past?

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upstart writes:

In California, the bodies of four furry swimmers tested positive for a strain of toxoplasmosis first seen in mountain lions:

Scientist Melissa Miller was seeing something in California sea otters that she had not seen before: an unusually severe form of toxoplasmosis, which officials have confirmed has killed at least four of the animals.

"We wanted to get the word out. We're seeing something we haven't seen before, we want people to know about it and we want people working on marine mammals to be aware of these weird findings," said Miller, a wildlife veterinarian specialist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW). "Take extra precautions."

In March, a study from the DFW and the University of California, Davis, revealed that a rare strain of the parasite, never before reported in aquatic animals, was tied to the deaths of four sea otters. The strain, first seen in Canadian mountain lions in 1995, had not been previously detected on the California coast."This was a complete surprise," Karen Shapiro, with the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, said in a statement. "The COUG [toxoplasma strain] genotype has never before been described in sea otters, nor anywhere in the California coastal environment or in any other aquatic mammal or bird."

[...] Toxoplasma is often found in cat feces. Otters, which live along the shoreline, can be exposed to the parasite in rainwater runoffall four cases scientists studied came in during the heavy rainfall season.

Toxoplasmosis infection is common in sea otterswhich have a roughly 60 percent chance of being infected in their lifetimes, Miller saidand can be fatal, but this strain is of particular concern.

However, Miller warned against unfairly demonizing cats.

"I don't want this to be a war on cats," she said. "I have two cats. What I try to do is practice what I preach and what I know as a scientist: I keep my cats indoors all the time and I make sure to dispose of their litter into something that will not leak into the environment."

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upstart writes:

"Wolverine" experiment can fix Python bugs at runtime and re-run the code:

Debugging a faulty program can be frustrating, so why not let AI do it for you? That's what a developer that goes by "BioBootloader" did by creating Wolverine, a program that can give Python programs "regenerative healing abilities," reports Hackaday. (Yep, just like the Marvel superhero.)

"Run your scripts with it and when they crash, GPT-4 edits them and explains what went wrong," wrote BioBootloader in a tweet that accompanied a demonstration video. "Even if you have many bugs it'll repeatedly rerun until everything is fixed."

[...] In the demo video for Wolverine, BioBootloader shows a side-by-side window display, with Python code on the left and Wolverine results on the right in a terminal. He loads a custom calculator script in which he adds a few bugs on purpose, then executes it.

"It runs it, it sees the crash, but then it goes and talks to GPT-4 to try to figure out how to fix it," he says. GPT-4 returns an explanation for the program's errors, shows the changes that it tries to make, then re-runs the program. Upon seeing new errors, GPT-4 fixes the code again, and then it runs correctly. In the end, the original Python file contains the changes added by GPT-4.

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upstart writes:

An unprecedented space event, and it's happening soon:

Elon Musk lost his claim as having the most powerful space-worthy rocket when NASA blasted its own mega rocket to the moon in November.

But the SpaceX founder could win back the title with his company's next big project. Starship, SpaceX's skyscraping rocket and spacecraft, will launch on its first mission soon. During the test flight, the colossal booster will separate about three minutes after liftoff and land in the Gulf of Mexico, according to federal filings. The ship will fly in space around Earth at an altitude of over 150 miles, then splash down off the Hawaiian coast.

This will be a crucial demonstration of hardware that NASA is depending on to get humans back on the moon in the next few years. And, if successful, it'll mean Musk is one small step closer to realizing his personal dream of building a city on Mars.

UPDATE: Apr. 9, 2023, 12:54 p.m. EDT SpaceX stacked Starship at the launch pad and plans to have a rehearsal this week, "followed by Starship's first integrated flight test." Musk tweeted April 9 that the company is ready to launch the rocket, pending approval of its Federal Aviation Administration license. A launch attempt this month is looking more and more plausible, with an FAA operational advisory plan indicating SpaceX is targeting Monday, April 17.

[...] Perhaps surprisingly, Starship won't lift off from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where most space fans are accustomed to watching historically significant launches.

Instead, it will take off from Boca Chica, Texas, at SpaceX's own spaceport. Eventually, the company will launch the rocket from a site under construction in the outer perimeter of the famous Florida pad that shot Apollo 11 to the moon.

"Their plan is that they're going to do a few test flights there," in South Texas, Nelson said. "Once they have the confidence, they will bring the missions to the Cape."

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DadaDoofy writes:

Many people believe that any and all opposition to the Covid vaccine comes from "far-right" Republican conspiracy theorists in the flyover states. I guess the Swiss government will now be branded with those labels as their Federal Office of Public Health is now recommending that a Covid vaccination is not needed, even for people at especially high risk. They list pregnant women and people with compromised immune systems as an exception. They further state that those who wish to receive a Covid vaccine must pay for it out of their own pockets.

https://www.bag.admin.ch/bag/en/home/krankheiten/ausbrueche-epidemien-pandemien/aktuelle-ausbrueche-epidemien/novel-cov/impfen.html

In principle, no COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for spring/summer 2023. Nearly everyone in Switzerland has been vaccinated and/or contracted and recovered from COVID-19. Their immune system has therefore been exposed to the coronavirus. In spring/summer 2023, the virus will likely circulate less. The current virus variants also cause rather mild illness. For autumn 2023, the vaccination recommendation will be evaluated again and adjusted accordingly.

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fliptop writes:

The reports suggest ransomware may have been involved:

Gaming hardware manufacturer MSI confirmed today that it was the victim of a cyberattack. In a brief statement on its website, the company said that the attack hit "part of its information systems," which have since returned to regular operations.

The company advises its customers only to get BIOS and firmware updates from the MSI website and no other sources. It's light on details, saying that after "detecting network anomalies," MSI implemented "defense mechanisms and carried out recovery measures," and then informed the the government and law enforcement.

[...] The post doesn't mention if customer data was stolen or affected. Tom's Hardware reached out to MSI but did not hear back in time for publication. In addition, emails to official spokesperson addresses listed on the company's website bounced.

Also at Bleeping Computer.

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hubie writes:

What once appeared as a fossil of the primitive animal Dickinsonia turned out to be nothing more than a decaying beehive:

In 2020, amid the first pandemic lockdowns, a scientific conference scheduled to take place in India never happened.

But a group of geologists who were already on site decided to make the most of their time and visited the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters, a series of caves with ancient cave art near Bhopal, India. There, they spotted the fossil of Dickinsonia, a flat, elongated and primitive animal from before complex animals evolved. It marked the first-ever discovery of Dickinsonia in India.

The animal lived 550 million years ago, and the find seemed to settle once and for all the surprisingly controversial age of the rocks making up much of the Indian subcontinent. The find attracted the attention of The New York Times, The Weather Channel and the scientific journal Nature as well as many Indian newspapers.

Only, it turns out, the "fossil" was a case of mistaken identity. The true culprit? Bees.

University of Florida researchers traveled to the site last year and discovered the object had seemingly decayed significantly quite unusual for a fossil. What's more, giant bee's nests populate the site, and the mark spotted by the scientists in 2020 closely resembled the remains of these large hives.

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upstart writes:

Intel Foundry Services partners with Arm to manufacture next-generation mobile chips:

Intel Corp. said today its Intel Foundry Services business unit is partnering with the British chip design firm Arm Ltd. to enable semiconductor designers to build low-power systems-on-chip on its cutting-edge manufacturing process.

The companies will initially focus on mobile SoC designs before expanding the deal to cover chips for automotive, internet of things, data center, aerospace and government applications. Under the agreement, customers that use Arm's designs as the basis of their chips will be able to use Intel's 18A process technology to manufacture their products.

The deal is said to be a big boon for customers, since Intel 18A is a more advanced process with capacity in both the U.S. and Europe. It will allow customers to design chips using electronic design automation software from third-party suppliers. EDA software is used by semiconductor engineers to create processor blueprints. The result will be more powerful processors with greater energy efficiency, Intel said.

Under the initiative, IFS and Arm will work together on design technology co-optimization, wherein chip design and process manufacturing are optimized to improve the power, performance and cost of Arm-based cores using the Intel 18A technology. Intel 18A is said to leverage two new technologies, including PowerVia for optimal power delivery and RibbonFET "gate all around" transistor architecture, which ensures optimal performance and power.

As part of this cooperation, IFS and Arm plan to develop a mobile reference design to demonstrate the technology to customers.

The deal is another key milestone for IFS, following its partnership with the Taiwanese semiconductor firm MediaTek Inc. that was announced last July. Intel set up the foundry business in 2021 to manufacture chips for other companies based on their own custom designs.

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upstart writes:

Bad news: copyright industry attacks on the Internet's plumbing are increasing and succeeding:

Back in October 2021, Walled Culture wrote about a ruling from a US judge. It concerned an attempt to make the content delivery network (CDN) Cloudflare, which is simply part of the Internet's plumbing, responsible for what flows through its connections. The judge rightly decided: "a reasonable jury could not at least on this record conclude that Cloudflare materially contributes to the underlying copyright infringement".

A similar case in Germany was brought by Sony Music against the free, recursive, anycast DNS platform Quad9. Like CDNs, DNS platforms are crucial services that ensure that the Internet can function smoothly; they are not involved with any of the sites that may be accessed as a result of their services. In particular, they have no knowledge of whether copyright material on those sites is authorised or not. Unfortunately, two regional courts in Germany don't seem to understand that point, and have issued judgments against Quad9. Its FAQ on one of the cases explains why this is a dreadful result for the entire Internet:

The court argues with the German law principle of "interferer liability" the so-called "Stoererhaftung", which allows holding uninvolved third parties liable for an infringement if they have in some way adequately and causally contributed to the infringement of a protected legal interest. If DNS resolvers can be held liable as interferers, this would set a dangerous precedent for all services used in retrieving web pages. Providers of browsers, operating systems or antivirus software could be held liable as interferers on the same grounds if they do not prevent the accessibility of copyright-infringing websites.

Now an Italian court has confirmed a previous ruling that Cloudflare must block certain online sites accused of making available unauthorised copies of material. That's unfortunate, since taken with the German court rulings it is likely to encourage the copyright industry to widen its attack on the Internet's plumbing, regardless of th...

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/3cx-knew-its-app-was-flagged-as-malicious-but-took-no-action-for-7-days/

The support team for 3CX, the VoIP/PBX software provider with more than 600,000 customers and 12 million daily users, was aware its desktop app was being flagged as malware but decided to take no action for a week when it learned it was on the receiving end of a massive supply chain attack, a thread on the company's community forum shows.

"Is anyone else seeing this issue with other A/V vendors?" one company customer asked on March 22, in a post titled "Threat alerts from SentinelOne for desktop update initiated from desktop client." The customer was referring to an endpoint malware detection product from security firm SentinelOne. Included in the post were some of SentinelOne's suspicions: the detection of shellcode, code injection to other process memory space, and other trademarks of software exploitation.

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upstart writes:

This once secretive scientific field is embracing openness in a big way:

The words "nuclear physics" tend to conjure images of heavily guarded laboratories or trench-coated spies whispering to each other on park benches and exchanging briefcases full of file folders stamped "Classified: Top Secret." But despite this reputation for secrecy, today's nuclear scientists embrace openness. And it's paying off.

[...] Many nuclear science organizations have released open source software in recent years, which is a big change from business as usual in the field. Though CERN, which focuses on fundamental particle physics rather than energy generation, is the birthplace of the web and has long embraced open source, other institutions have historically been less open. "There's a history of secrecy in the field. Most fusion and fission software used to be proprietary," says Paul Romano, the project lead for OpenMC and a computational scientist working in nuclear fusion at Argonne National Laboratory. "But as open source has exploded over the past decade, it plays an increasingly important role in research, both in the public and private sectors."

Despite open source's many benefits, it took time for the nuclear science field to adopt the open source ethos. Using open source tools was one thingPython's vast ecosystem of mathematical and scientific computing tools is widely used for data analysis in the fieldbut releasing open source code was quite another.

[...] Many of these projects that started with nuclear science in mind are applicable to just about any field that benefits from using supercomputers. MFEM, for example, is also used in LLNL's cardiac simulation toolkit Cardioid, its crystal plasticity application ExaConstit, and its thermomechanical simulation code Serac. It is also heavily used by the broader scientific community, including industry and academia, in applications such as MRI research at Harvard Medical School, and quantum computing hardware simulation at Amazon. MOOSE is widely used outside of the nuclear field, with applications in areas such as groundwater modeling and other geoscience use cases. During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers at LLNL used Merlin to anticipate outbreaks and Maestro for antibody modeling.

...

upstart writes:

Heat batteries could help cut emissions by providing new routes to use solar and wind power:

A handful of startups think bricks that hold heat could be the key to bringing renewable energy to some of the world's biggest polluters.

Industries that make products ranging from steel to baby food require a lot of heatmost of which is currently generated by burning fossil fuels like natural gas. Heavy industry makes up about a quarter of worldwide emissions, and alternative power sources that produce fewer greenhouse gases (like wind and solar) can't consistently generate the heat that factories need to manufacture their wares.

Enter heat batteries. A growing number of companies are working to deploy systems that can capture heat generated by clean electricity and store it for later in stacks of bricks. Many of these systems use simple designs and commercially available materials, and they could be built quickly, anywhere they're needed. One demonstration in California started up earlier this year, and other test systems are following close behind. They're still in early stages, but heat storage systems have the potential to help wean industries off fossil fuels.

One key to heat batteries' potential success is their simplicity. "If you want to make it to giant scale, everybody ought to agree that it's boring and reliable," says John O'Donnell, CEO of California-based heat storage startup Rondo Energy

Many industrial processes run 24 hours a day, so they'll need constant heating. By carefully controlling the heat transfer, Rondo's system can charge quickly, taking advantage of short periods when electricity is cheap because renewable sources are available. The startup's heat batteries will probably require about four hours of charging to be able to provide heat constantly, day and night.

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fliptop writes:

Thanks to large language models, a single scammer can run hundreds or thousands of cons in parallel, night and day, in every language under the sun:

Here's an experiment being run by undergraduate computer science students everywhere: Ask ChatGPT to generate phishing emails, and test whether these are better at persuading victims to respond or click on the link than the usual spam. It's an interesting experiment, and the results are likely to vary wildly based on the details of the experiment.

But while it's an easy experiment to run, it misses the real risk of large language models (LLMs) writing scam emails. Today's human-run scams aren't limited by the number of people who respond to the initial email contact. They're limited by the labor-intensive process of persuading those people to send the scammer money. LLMs are about to change that.

[...] Long-running financial scams are now known as pig butchering, growing the potential mark up until their ultimate and sudden demise. Such scams, which require gaining trust and infiltrating a target's personal finances, take weeks or even months of personal time and repeated interactions. It's a high stakes and low probability game that the scammer is playing.

Here is where LLMs will make a difference. Much has been written about the unreliability of OpenAI's GPT models and those like them: They "hallucinate" frequently, making up things about the world and confidently spouting nonsense. For entertainment, this is fine, but for most practical uses it's a problem. It is, however, not a bug but a feature when it comes to scams: LLMs' ability to confidently roll with the punches, no matter what a user throws at them, will prove useful to scammers as they navigate hostile, bemused, and gullible scam targets by the billions. AI chatbot scams can ensnare more people, because the pool of victims who will fall for a more subtle and flexible scammerone that has been trained on everything ever written onlineis much larger than the pool of those who believe the king of Nigeria wants to give them a billion dollars.

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upstart writes:

The stream could keep the galaxy supplied with star-forming fuel for a billion years:

A long, cold stream of gas is feeding a very distant galaxy like a vast bendy straw. The finding suggests a new way for galaxies to grow in the early universe, researchers report in the March 31 Science.

Computer simulations predicted that streams of gas should connect galaxies to the cosmic web (SN: 3/6/23). But astronomers expected that gas to be warm, making it unsuitable for star-forming fuel and galaxy growth.

So astronomer Bjorn Emonts and his colleagues were surprised to see a stream of cold, star-forming gas leading into the Anthill Galaxy, a massive galaxy whose light takes 12 billion years to reach Earth.

[...] "People didn't think that these streams could get so cold," says Emonts, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va.

But there, in the data, a frigid stream stretched at least 325,000 light-years away from the galaxy. The stream carries the mass of 70 billion suns and deposits the equivalent of about 450 suns in cold gas onto the galaxy every year, the team calculated. That's enough to double the galaxy's mass within a billion years.

[...] If other galaxies are fed by similar structures, it could mean that early galaxies grew mostly by drinking directly from the cosmic streams, rather than by the leading hypothesis violent galaxy mergers (SN: 6/28/19).

Journal Reference:
Bjorn H. C. Emonts, Matthew D. Lehnert, Ilsang Yoon, et al., A cosmic stream of atomic carbon gas connected to a massive radio galaxy at redshift 3.8, Science, 379, 2023 (DOI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abh2150)

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upstart writes:

New editor is integrated with Python lessons:

When we think about Raspberry Pi, we normally picture single-board computers, but the Raspberry Pi Foundation was started to help kids learn about computers and it wants to help whether or not you own its hardware. The non-profit arm of Raspberry Pi this week released its new, browser-based code editor that's designed for young people (or any people) who are learning.

The Raspberry Pi Code Editor, which is considered to be in beta, is available to everyone for free right now at editor.raspberrypi.org. The editor is currently designed to work with Python only, but the organization says that support for other languages such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS is coming.

I tried out the Code Editor on my PC's browser and, in its current form, there's nothing particularly unique about it. However, I found the UI very user-friendly and was impressed with how it is integrated into someone online tutorials. The interface consists of three panes: a list of files in your project, a code editor and an output pane that runs the result of your code when you hit the Run button.

If you create a free account on raspberrypi.org, which I did, the system will save all of your projects in the cloud and you can reload them any time you want. You can also download all the files in a project as a .zip file.

Since the entire programming experience takes place online, there's no way (at least right now) to use Python to control local hardware on your PC or your Raspberry Pi. If you want to attach one of the best Raspberry Pi HATs or use the GPIO pins on your Pi to light up an LED light, you need a local editor like Thonny, which comes preinstalled on all Raspberry Pis and is a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

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upstart writes:

"You can call it a lie by omission":

Florida health officials deleted key data and statistics from a state analysis on the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, falsely making them appear unsafe for young men, according to draft versions of the analysis obtained by the Tampa Bay Times through public records requests.

The final analysis, which was widely criticized for its poor quality and dubious conclusions, was the basis for a statewide recommendation by Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo last October that young men, ages 18 to 39, should not receive an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. The analysisposted on the Florida Department of Health's website with no authors listedclaimed to find "an 84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination."

Ladapo, who has a history of fearmongering about COVID-19 vaccines, touted the analysis, saying in a press release at the time that "these are important findings that should be communicated to Floridians."

But according to draft versions of the analysis, the state epidemiologists who worked on the report came to entirely different conclusions.

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