Researchers synthesize graphene using intense light

DGIST Professor Yoonkyu Lee’s research team used intense light on the surface of a copper wire to synthesize graphene, thereby increasing the production rate and lowering the production cost of the high-quality transparent-flexible electrode materials and consequently enabling its mass production. The results were published in the February 23 issue of Nano Energy.

This technology is applicable to various 2D materials, and its applicability can be extended to the synthesis of various metal-2D material nanowires.

The research team used copper-graphene nanowires to implement high-performance transparent-flexible electronic devices such as transparent-flexible electrodes, transparent supercapacitors and transparent heaters and to thereby demonstrate the commercial viability of this material.

DGIST Professor Yoonkyu Lee said, “We developed a method of mass-producing at a low production cost the next-generation transparent-flexible electrode material based on high-quality copper- nanowires. In the future, we expect that this technology will contribute to the production of core materials for high-performance transparent-flexible electronic devices, semitransparent solar cells, or transparent displays.”

More information: Jongyoun Kim et al, Ultrastable 2D material-wrapped copper nanowires for high-performance flexible and transparent energy devices, Nano Energy (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.nanoen.2022.108067

Source: Researchers synthesize graphene using intense light

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Blocked In Italy by Privacy Watchdog – using kids as an excuse is almost always flimsy

Italy’s privacy watchdog said Friday it had blocked the controversial robot ChatGPT, saying the artificial intelligence app did not respect user data and could not verify users’ age.

The decision “with immediate effect” will result in “the temporary limitation of the processing of Italian user data vis-a-vis OpenAI”, the Italian Data Protection Authority said.

The agency has launched an investigation.

[…]

The watchdog said that on March 20, the app experienced a data breach involving user conversations and payment information.

It said there was no legal basis to justify “the mass collection and storage of personal data for the purpose of ‘training’ the algorithms underlying the operation of the platform”.

It also said that since there was no way to verify the age of users, the app “exposes minors to absolutely unsuitable answers compared to their degree of development and awareness.”

It said the company had 20 days to respond how it would address the watchdog’s concerns, under penalty of a 20-million-euro ($21.7-million) fine, or up to 4 percent of annual revenues.

[…]

Source: OpenAI’s ChatGPT Blocked In Italy: Privacy Watchdog | Barron’s

I am pretty sure none of the search engines verify age and store user data (ok duckduckgo is an exception) or give answers that may “expose” the little snowflake “minors to absolutely unsuitable answers compared to their degree of development and awareness.”

There is a race on to catch up to OpenAI and people are obviously losing, so crushing OpenAI is the way to go.

‘Vulkan files’ leak reveals Putin’s global and domestic cyberwarfare tactics

[…] The software engineers behind these systems are employees of NTC Vulkan. On the surface, it looks like a run-of-the-mill cybersecurity consultancy. However, a leak of secret files from the company has exposed its work bolstering Vladimir Putin’s cyberwarfare capabilities.

Thousands of pages of secret documents reveal how Vulkan’s engineers have worked for Russian military and intelligence agencies to support hacking operations, train operatives before attacks on national infrastructure, spread disinformation and control sections of the internet.

The company’s work is linked to the federal security service or FSB, the domestic spy agency; the operational and intelligence divisions of the armed forces, known as the GOU and GRU; and the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence organisation.

A diagram showing a Vulkan hacking reconnaissance system codenamed Scan, developed since 2018.
A diagram showing a Vulkan hacking reconnaissance system codenamed Scan, developed since 2018.

One document links a Vulkan cyber-attack tool with the notorious hacking group Sandworm, which the US government said twice caused blackouts in Ukraine, disrupted the Olympics in South Korea and launched NotPetya, the most economically destructive malware in history. Codenamed Scan-V, it scours the internet for vulnerabilities, which are then stored for use in future cyber-attacks.

Another system, known as Amezit, amounts to a blueprint for surveilling and controlling the internet in regions under Russia’s command, and also enables disinformation via fake social media profiles. A third Vulkan-built system – Crystal-2V – is a training program for cyber-operatives in the methods required to bring down rail, air and sea infrastructure. A file explaining the software states: “The level of secrecy of processed and stored information in the product is ‘Top Secret’.”

The Vulkan files, which date from 2016 to 2021, were leaked by an anonymous whistleblower angered by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Such leaks from Moscow are extremely rare. Days after the invasion in February last year, the source approached the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and said the GRU and FSB “hide behind” Vulkan.

[…]

Five western intelligence agencies confirmed the Vulkan files appear to be authentic. The company and the Kremlin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The leak contains emails, internal documents, project plans, budgets and contracts. They offer insight into the Kremlin’s sweeping efforts in the cyber-realm, at a time when it is pursuing a brutal war against Ukraine. It is not known whether the tools built by Vulkan have been used for real-world attacks, in Ukraine or elsewhere.

[…]

Some documents in the leak contain what appear to be illustrative examples of potential targets. One contains a map showing dots across the US. Another contains the details of a nuclear power station in Switzerland.

A map of the US found in the leaked Vulkan files as part of the multi-faceted Amezit system.
A map of the US found in the leaked Vulkan files as part of the multi-faceted Amezit system.

One document shows engineers recommending Russia add to its own capabilities by using hacking tools stolen in 2016 from the US National Security Agency and posted online.

John Hultquist, the vice-president of intelligence analysis at the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, which reviewed selections of the material at the request of the consortium, said: “These documents suggest that Russia sees attacks on civilian critical infrastructure and social media manipulation as one and the same mission, which is essentially an attack on the enemy’s will to fight.”

[…]

One of Vulkan’s most far-reaching projects was carried out with the blessing of the Kremlin’s most infamous unit of cyberwarriors, known as Sandworm. According to US prosecutors and western governments, over the past decade Sandworm has been responsible for hacking operations on an astonishing scale. It has carried out numerous malign acts: political manipulation, cyber-sabotage, election interference, dumping of emails and leaking.

Sandworm disabled Ukraine’s power grid in 2015. The following year it took part in Russia’s brazen operation to derail the US presidential election. Two of its operatives were indicted for distributing emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s Democrats using a fake persona, Guccifer 2.0. Then in 2017 Sandworm purloined further data in an attempt to influence the outcome of the French presidential vote, the US says.

That same year the unit unleashed the most consequential cyber-attack in history. Operatives used a bespoke piece of malware called NotPetya. Beginning in Ukraine, NotPetya rapidly spread across the globe. It knocked offline shipping firms, hospitals, postal systems and pharmaceutical manufacturers – a digital onslaught that spilled over from the virtual into the physical world.

[…]

Hacking groups such as Sandworm penetrate computer systems by first looking for weak spots. Scan-V supports that process, conducting automated reconnaissance of potential targets around the world in a hunt for potentially vulnerable servers and network devices. The intelligence is then stored in a data repository, giving hackers an automated means of identifying targets.

[…]

One part of Amezit is domestic-facing, allowing operatives to hijack and take control of the internet if unrest breaks out in a Russian region, or the country gains a stronghold over territory in a rival nation state, such as Ukraine. Internet traffic deemed to be politically harmful can be removed before it has a chance to spread.

A 387-page internal document explains how Amezit works. The military needs physical access to hardware, such as mobile phone towers, and to wireless communications. Once they control transmission, traffic can be intercepted. Military spies can identify people browsing the web, see what they are accessing online, and track information that users are sharing.

[…]

the firm developed a bulk collection program for the FSB called Fraction. It combs sites such as Facebook or Odnoklassniki – the Russian equivalent – looking for key words. The aim is to identify potential opposition figures from open source data.

[…]

This Amezit sub-system allows the Russian military to carry out large-scale covert disinformation operations on social media and across the internet, through the creation of accounts that resemble real people online, or avatars. The avatars have names and stolen personal photos, which are then cultivated over months to curate a realistic digital footprint.

The leak contains screenshots of fake Twitter accounts and hashtags used by the Russian military from 2014 until earlier this year. They spread disinformation, including a conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton and a denial that Russia’s bombing of Syria killed civilians. Following the invasion of Ukraine, one Vulkan-linked fake Twitter account posted: “Excellent leader #Putin”.

A tweet from a fake social media account linked to Vulkan.
A tweet from a fake social media account linked to Vulkan.

Another Vulkan-developed project linked to Amezit is far more threatening. Codenamed Crystal-2V, it is a training platform for Russian cyber-operatives. Capable of allowing simultaneous use by up to 30 trainees, it appears to simulate attacks against a range of essential national infrastructure targets: railway lines, electricity stations, airports, waterways, ports and industrial control systems.

[…]

 

Source: ‘Vulkan files’ leak reveals Putin’s global and domestic cyberwarfare tactics | Cyberwar | The Guardian

OpenAI may have to halt ChatGPT releases following FTC complaint by idiots who think you’re a bigger idiot than them

A public challenge could put a temporary stop to the deployment of ChatGPT and similar AI systems. The nonprofit research organization Center for AI and Digital Policy (CAIDP) has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging that OpenAI is violating the FTC Act through its releases of large language AI models like GPT-4. That model is “biased, deceptive” and threatens both privacy and public safety, CAIDP claims. Likewise, it supposedly fails to meet Commission guidelines calling for AI to be transparent, fair and easy to explain.

The Center wants the FTC to investigate OpenAI and suspend future releases of large language models until they meet the agency’s guidelines. The researchers want OpenAI to require independent reviews of GPT products and services before they launch. CAIDP also hopes the FTC will create an incident reporting system and formal standards for AI generators.

We’ve asked OpenAI for comment. The FTC has declined to comment. CAIDP president Marc Rotenberg was among those who signed an open letter demanding that OpenAI and other AI researchers pause work for six months to give time for ethics discussions. OpenAI founder Elon Musk also signed the letter.

Critics of ChatGPT, Google Bard and similar models have warned of problematic output, including inaccurate statements, hate speech and bias. Users also can’t repeat results, CAIDP says. The Center points out that OpenAI itself warns AI can “reinforce” ideas whether or not they’re true. While upgrades like GPT-4 are more reliable, there’s a concern people may rely on the AI without double-checking its content.

There’s no guarantee the FTC will act on the complaint. If it does set requirements, though, the move would affect development across the AI industry. Companies would have to wait for assessments, and might face more repercussions if their models fail to meet the Commission’s standards. While this might improve accountability, it could also slow the currently rapid pace of AI development.

Source: OpenAI may have to halt ChatGPT releases following FTC complaint | Engadget

Every LLN AI being released right now is pretty clear that it’s not a single source of truth, that mistakes will be made and that you need to check the output yourself. The signing of the letter to stop AI development smacks of people who are so far behind in the race wanting to quietly catch up until the moratorium is lifted and this action sounds a lot like this organisation being in someone’s pocket.

Virgin Orbit officially shutters its space launch operations

Virgin Orbit’s days of slinging satellites into space aboard aircraft-launched rockets have come to an end Thursday. After six years in business, Virgin’s satellite launch subsidiary has announced via SEC filing that it does not have the funding to continue operations and will be shuttering for “the foreseeable future,” per CNBC. Nearly 90 percent of Virgin Orbit’s employees — 675 people in total — will be laid off immediately.

Virgin Orbit was founded in 2017 for the purpose of developing and commercializing LauncherOne, a satellite launch system fitted under a modified 747 airliner, dubbed Cosmic Girl. The system was designed to put 500 pounds of cubesats into Low Earth Orbit by firing them in a rocket from said airliner flying at an altitude of 30,000 – 50,000 feet. Despite a string of early successes — both in terms of development milestones and expanding service contracts with the UK military, LauncherOne’s first official test in May of 2020 failed to deliver its simulated payload into orbit.

A second attempt the following January in 2022 however was a success with the launch of 10 NASA cube sats into LEO, as was Virgin Orbit’s first commercial satellite launch that June. It successfully sent seven more satellites into orbit in January 2022 and quietly launched Space Force assets that July.

In all, Virgin Orbit made six total flights between 2020 and 2023, only four successfully. The most recent attempt was dubbed the Start Me Up event and was supposed to mark the first commercial space launch from UK soil. Despite the rocket successfully separating from its parent aircraft, an upper stage “anomaly” prevented the rocket’s payload from entering orbit. It was later determined that a $100 fuel filter had failed and resulted in the fault.

As TechCrunch points out, Virgin Group founder, Sir Richard Branson, “threw upwards of $55 million to the sinking space company,” in recent months but Start Me Up’s embarrassing failure turned out to be the final straw. On March 16th, Virgin Orbit announced an “operational pause” and worker furlough for its roughly 750 employees as company leadership scrambled to find new funding sources. The company extended the furlough two weeks later and called it quits on Thursday.

“Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to secure the funding to provide a clear path for this company,” Virgin CEO Dan Hart said in an all-hands call obtained by CNBC. “We have no choice but to implement immediate, dramatic and extremely painful changes.”

Impacted employees will reportedly receive severance packages, according to Hart, including a cash payment, continued benefits and a “direct pipeline” to Virgin Galactic’s hiring department. Virgin Orbit’s two top executives will also receive “golden parachute” severances which were approved by the company’s board, conveniently, back in mid-March right when the furloughs first took effect.

Source: Virgin Orbit officially shutters its space launch operations | Engadget

Integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4: Socket’s story with code vulnerability scanning (it works very well)

Several months ago, Socket, which makes a freemium security scanner for JavaScript and Python projects, connected OpenAI’s ChatGPT model (and more recently its GPT-4 model) to its internal threat feed.

The results, according to CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh, were surprisingly good. “It worked way better than expected,” he told The Register in an email. “Now I’m sitting on a couple hundred vulnerabilities and malware packages and we’re rushing to report them as quick as we can.”

Socket’s scanner was designed to detect supply chain attacks. Available as a GitHub app or a command line tool, it scans JavaScript and Python projects in an effort to determine whether any of the many packages that may have been imported from the npm or PyPI registries contain malicious code.

Aboukhadijeh said Socket has confirmed 227 vulnerabilities, all using ChatGPT. The vulnerabilities fall into different categories and don’t share common characteristics.

The Register was provided with numerous examples of published packages that exhibited malicious behavior or unsafe practices, including: information exfiltration, SQL injection, hardcoded credentials, potential privilege escalation, and backdoors.

We were asked not to share several examples as they have yet to be removed, but here’s one that has already been dealt with.

  1. mathjs-min “Socket reported this to npm and it has been removed,” said Aboukhadijeh. “This was a pretty nasty one.”
    1. AI analysis: “The script contains a discord token grabber function which is a serious security risk. It steals user tokens and sends them to an external server. This is malicious behavior.”
    2. https://socket.dev/npm/package/mathjs-min/files/11.7.2/lib/cjs/plain/number/arithmetic.js#L28

“There are some interesting effects as well, such as things that a human might be persuaded of but the AI is marking as a risk,” Aboukhadijeh added.

“These decisions are somewhat subjective, but the AI is not dissuaded by comments claiming that a dangerous piece of code is not malicious in nature. The AI even includes a humorous comment indicating that it doesn’t trust the inline comment.”

  1. Example trello-enterprise
    1. AI analysis: “The script collects information like hostname, username, home directory, and current working directory and sends it to a remote server. While the author claims it is for bug bounty purposes, this behavior can still pose a privacy risk. The script also contains a blocking operation that can cause performance issues or unresponsiveness.”
    2. https://socket.dev/npm/package/trello-enterprises/files/1000.1000.1000/a.js

Aboukhadijeh explained that the software packages at these registries are vast and it’s difficult to craft rules that thoroughly plumb the nuances of every file, script, and bit of configuration data. Rules tend to be fragile and often produce too much detail or miss things a savvy human reviewer would catch.

Applying human analysis to the entire corpus of a package registry (~1.3 million for npm and ~450,000 for PyPI) just isn’t feasible, but machine learning models can pick up some of the slack by helping human reviewers focus on the more dubious code modules.

“Socket is analyzing every npm and PyPI package with AI-based source code analysis using ChatGPT,” said Aboukhadijeh.

“When it finds something problematic in a package, we flag it for review and ask ChatGPT to briefly explain its findings. Like all AI-based tooling, this may produce some false positives, and we are not enabling this as a blocking issue until we gather more feedback on the feature.”

Aboukhadijeh provided The Register with a sample report from its ChatGPT helper that identifies risky, though not conclusively malicious behavior. In this instance, the machine learning model offered this assessment, “This script collects sensitive information about the user’s system, including username, hostname, DNS servers, and package information, and sends it to an external server.”

Screenshot of ChatGPT report for Socket security scanner

Screenshot of ChatGPT report for Socket security scanner – Click to enlarge

Socket ChatGPT advisory screenshot

What a ChatGPT-based Socket advisory looks like … Click to enlarge

According to Aboukhadijeh, Socket was designed to help developers make informed decisions about risk in a way that doesn’t interfere with their work. So raising the alarm about every install script – a common attack vector – can create too much noise. Analysis of these scripts using a large language model dials the alarm bell down and helps developers recognize real problems. And these models are becoming more capable.

[…]

Source: Integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4: Socket’s story • The Register

Stressed plants emit airborne sounds that can be detected from more than a meter away

What does a stressed plant sound like? A bit like bubble-wrap being popped. Researchers in Israel report in the journal Cell on March 30 that tomato and tobacco plants that are stressed—from dehydration or having their stems severed—emit sounds that are comparable in volume to normal human conversation. The frequency of these noises is too high for our ears to detect, but they can probably be heard by insects, other mammals, and possibly other plants.

“Even in a quiet field, there are actually sounds that we don’t hear, and those sounds carry information,” says senior author Lilach Hadany, an and theoretician at Tel Aviv University. “There are animals that can hear these sounds, so there is the possibility that a lot of acoustic interaction is occurring.”

Although ultrasonic vibrations have been recorded from plants before, this is the first evidence that they are airborne, a fact that makes them more relevant for other organisms in the environment. “Plants interact with insects and other animals all the time, and many of these organisms use sound for communication, so it would be very suboptimal for plants to not use sound at all,” says Hadany.

The researchers used microphones to record healthy and stressed tomato and , first in a soundproofed acoustic chamber and then in a noisier greenhouse environment. They stressed the plants via two methods: by not watering them for several days and by cutting their stems. After recording the plants, the researchers trained a to differentiate between unstressed plants, thirsty plants, and cut plants.

The team found that stressed plants emit more sounds than unstressed plants. The plant sounds resemble pops or clicks, and a single stressed plant emits around 30–50 of these clicks per hour at seemingly random intervals, but unstressed plants emit far fewer sounds. “When tomatoes are not stressed at all, they are very quiet,” says Hadany.

00:00
00:36
An audio recording of plant sounds. The frequency was lowered so that it is audible to human ears. Credit: Khait et al.

Water-stressed plants began emitting noises before they were visibly dehydrated, and the frequency of sounds peaked after five days with no water before decreasing again as the plants dried up completely. The types of sound emitted differed with the cause of stress. The machine-learning algorithm was able to accurately differentiate between dehydration and stress from cutting and could also discern whether the sounds came from a tomato or tobacco plant.

Although the study focused on tomato and tobacco plants because of their ease to grow and standardize in the laboratory, the research team also recorded a variety of other plant species. “We found that many plants—corn, wheat, grape, and cactus plants, for example—emit sounds when they are stressed,” says Hadany.

A photo of a cactus being recorded. Credit: Itzhak Khait

The exact mechanism behind these noises is unclear, but the researchers suggest that it might be due to the formation and bursting of air bubbles in the plant’s vascular system, a process called cavitation.

Whether or not the plants are producing these sounds in order to communicate with other organisms is also unclear, but the fact that these sounds exist has big ecological and evolutionary implications. “It’s possible that other organisms could have evolved to hear and respond to these sounds,” says Hadany. “For example, a moth that intends to lay eggs on a plant or an animal that intends to eat a plant could use the sounds to help guide their decision.”

Other plants could also be listening in and benefiting from the sounds. We know from previous research that plants can respond to sounds and vibrations: Hadany and several other members of the team previously showed that plants increase the concentration of sugar in their nectar when they “hear” the sounds made by pollinators, and other studies have shown that plants change their in response to sounds. “If other plants have information about stress before it actually occurs, they could prepare,” says Hadany.

An illustration of a dehydrated tomato plant being recorded using a microphone. Credit: Liana Wait

Sound recordings of plants could be used in agricultural irrigation systems to monitor crop hydration status and help distribute water more efficiently, the authors say.

“We know that there’s a lot of ultrasound out there—every time you use a microphone, you find that a lot of stuff produces sounds that we humans cannot hear—but the fact that plants are making these sounds opens a whole new avenue of opportunities for communication, eavesdropping, and exploitation of these sounds,” says co-senior author Yossi Yovel, a neuro-ecologist at Tel Aviv University.

“So now that we know that plants do emit sounds, the next question is—’who might be listening?'” says Hadany. “We are currently investigating the responses of other organisms, both animals and , to these sounds, and we’re also exploring our ability to identify and interpret the sounds in completely natural environments.”

More information: Lilach Hadany, Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative, Cell (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2023.03.009. www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00262-3

Source: Stressed plants emit airborne sounds that can be detected from more than a meter away

This is not a newly discovered phenomenon, plants, grasses and trees are very good at detecting and warning, eg

Stressed plants show altered phenotypes, including changes in color, smell, and shape. Yet, the possibility that plants emit airborne sounds when stressed – similarly to many animals – has not been investigated. Here we show, to our knowledge for the first time, that stressed plants emit airborne sounds that can be recorded remotely, both in acoustic chambers and in greenhouses. We recorded ∼65 dBSPL ultrasonic sounds 10 cm from tomato and tobacco plants, implying that these sounds could be detected by some organisms from up to several meters away. We developed machine learning models that were capable of distinguishing between plant sounds and general noises, and identifying the condition of the plants – dry, cut, or intact – based solely on the emitted sounds. Our results suggest that animals, humans, and possibly even other plants, could use sounds emitted by a plant to gain information about the plant’s condition. More investigation on plant bioacoustics in general and on sound emission in plants in particular may open new avenues for understanding plants and their interactions with the environment, and it may also have a significant impact on agriculture.

Source: Plants emit informative airborne sounds under stress

The remarkable ability of plants to respond to their environment has led some scientists to believe it’s a sign of conscious awareness. A new opinion paper argues against this position, saying plants “neither possess nor require consciousness.”

Many of us take it for granted that plants, which lack a brain or central nervous system, wouldn’t have the capacity for conscious awareness. That’s not to suggest, however, that plants don’t exhibit intelligence. Plants seem to demonstrate a startling array of abilities, such as computation, communication, recognizing overcrowding, and mobilizing defenses, among other clever vegetative tricks.

To explain these apparent behaviors, a subset of scientists known as plant neurobiologists has argued that plants possess a form of consciousness. Most notably, evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano has performed experiments that allegedly hint at capacities such as habituation (learning from experience) and classical conditioning (like Pavlov’s salivating dogs). In these experiments, plants apparently “learned” to stop curling their leaves after being dropped repeatedly or to spread their leaves in anticipation of a light source. Armed with this experimental evidence, Gagliano and others have claimed, quite controversially, that because plants can learn and exhibit other forms of intelligence, they must be conscious.

Nonsense, argues a new paper published today in Trends in Plant Science. The lead author of the new paper, biologist Lincoln Taiz from the University of California at Santa Cruz, isn’t denying plant intelligence, but makes a strong case against their being conscious.

Source: Are Plants Conscious? Researchers Argue, but agree they are intelligent.

  • Ultrasonic acoustic emission (UAE) in trees is often related to collapsing water columns in the flow path as a result of tensions that are too strong (cavitation). However, in a decibel (dB) range below that associated with cavitation, a close relationship was found between UAE intensities and stem radius changes.
  • UAE was continuously recorded on the stems of mature field-grown trees of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) and pubescent oak (Quercus pubescens) at a dry inner-Alpine site in Switzerland over two seasons. The averaged 20-Hz records were related to microclimatic conditions in air and soil, sap-flow rates and stem-radius fluctuations de-trended for growth (ΔW).
  • Within a low-dB range (27 ± 1 dB), UAE regularly increased and decreased in a diurnal rhythm in parallel with ΔW on cloudy days and at night. These low-dB emissions were interrupted by UAE abruptly switching between the low-dB range and a high-dB range (36 ± 1 dB) on clear, sunny days, corresponding to the widely supported interpretation of UAE as sound from cavitations.
  • It is hypothesized that the low-dB signals in drought-stressed trees are caused by respiration and/or cambial growth as these physiological activities are tissue water-content dependent and have been shown to produce courses of CO2 efflux similar to our courses of ΔW and low-dB UAE.

Source: Ultrasonic acoustic emissions in drought-stressed trees – more than signals from cavitation? (2008)

And more on the controversy here

‘Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need To Shut It All Down’ say AI experts who struggling to keep up with the pace of development (and need some time to catch up with the leaders)

Earlier today, more than 1,100 artificial intelligence experts, industry leaders and researchers signed a petition calling on AI developers to stop training models more powerful than OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 for at least six months. Among those who refrained from signing it was Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist from the U.S. and lead researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He’s been working on aligning Artificial General Intelligence since 2001 and is widely regarded as a founder of the field.

“This 6-month moratorium would be better than no moratorium,” writes Yudkowsky in an opinion piece for Time Magazine. “I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.” Yudkowsky cranks up the rhetoric to 100, writing: “If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.” Here’s an excerpt from his piece: The key issue is not “human-competitive” intelligence (as the open letter puts it); it’s what happens after AI gets to smarter-than-human intelligence. Key thresholds there may not be obvious, we definitely can’t calculate in advance what happens when, and it currently seems imaginable that a research lab would cross critical lines without noticing. […] It’s not that you can’t, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it’s that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers. […]

It took more than 60 years between when the notion of Artificial Intelligence was first proposed and studied, and for us to reach today’s capabilities. Solving safety of superhuman intelligence — not perfect safety, safety in the sense of “not killing literally everyone” — could very reasonably take at least half that long. And the thing about trying this with superhuman intelligence is that if you get that wrong on the first try, you do not get to learn from your mistakes, because you are dead. Humanity does not learn from the mistake and dust itself off and try again, as in other challenges we’ve overcome in our history, because we are all gone.

Trying to get anything right on the first really critical try is an extraordinary ask, in science and in engineering. We are not coming in with anything like the approach that would be required to do it successfully. If we held anything in the nascent field of Artificial General Intelligence to the lesser standards of engineering rigor that apply to a bridge meant to carry a couple of thousand cars, the entire field would be shut down tomorrow. We are not prepared. We are not on course to be prepared in any reasonable time window. There is no plan. Progress in AI capabilities is running vastly, vastly ahead of progress in AI alignment or even progress in understanding what the hell is going on inside those systems. If we actually do this, we are all going to die. You can read the full letter signed by AI leaders here.

Source: ‘Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need To Shut It All Down’ – Slashdot

REKKIE AR / HUD ski goggles

The successor to the Recon Instruments Mod Live is here – the Rekkie AR ski goggles. They use a screen which reflects onto the plastic transparent goggle plate, so you can buy different types of lenses. The system shows maps, compass, speed, etc and is controlled by a large box on the strap which connects to the helmet, so in that respect not quite as elegant as the bluetooth remote of the Recon Mod system. The price is not bad at all at $349,-

Source: Rekkie – REKKIE

Microsoft’s new Security Copilot will help network admins respond to threats in minutes, not day

[…]

with Microsoft’s unveiling of the new Security Copilot AI at its inaugural Microsoft Secure event. The automated enterprise-grade security system is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, runs on the Azure infrastructure and promises admins the ability “to move at the speed and scale of AI.”

Security Copilot is similar to the large language model (LLM) that drives the Bing Copilot feature, but with a training geared heavily towards network security rather than general conversational knowledge and web search optimization. […]

“Just since the pandemic, we’ve seen an incredible proliferation [in corporate hacking incidents],”Jakkal told Bloomberg. For example, “it takes one hour and 12 minutes on average for an attacker to get full access to your inbox once a user has clicked on a phishing link. It used to be months or weeks for someone to get access.”

[…]

Jakkal anticipates these new capabilities enabling Copilot-assisted admins to respond within minutes to emerging security threats, rather than days or weeks after the exploit is discovered. Being a brand new, untested AI system, Security Copilot is not meant to operate fully autonomously, a human admin needs to remain in the loop. “This is going to be a learning system,” she said. “It’s also a paradigm shift: Now humans become the verifiers, and AI is giving us the data.”

To more fully protect the sensitive trade secrets and internal business documents Security Copilot is designed to protect, Microsoft has also committed to never use its customers data to train future Copilot iterations. Users will also be able to dictate their privacy settings and decide how much of their data (or the insights gleaned from it) will be shared. The company has not revealed if, or when, such security features will become available for individual users as well.

Source: Microsoft’s new Security Copilot will help network admins respond to threats in minutes, not days | Engadget

Inaudible ultrasound attack can stealthily control your phone, smart speaker

American university researchers have developed a novel attack called “Near-Ultrasound Inaudible Trojan” (NUIT) that can launch silent attacks against devices powered by voice assistants, like smartphones, smart speakers, and other IoTs.

The team of researchers consists of professor Guenevere Chen of the University of Texas in San Antonio (UTSA), her doctoral student Qi Xia, and professor Shouhuai Xu of the University of Colorado (UCCS).

The team demonstrated NUIT attacks against modern voice assistants found inside millions of devices, including Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa, showing the ability to send malicious commands to those devices.

Inaudible attacks

The main principle that makes NUIT effective and dangerous is that microphones in smart devices can respond to near-ultrasound waves that the human ear cannot, thus performing the attack with minimal risk of exposure while still using conventional speaker technology.

In a post on USTA’s site, Chen explained that NUIT could be incorporated into websites that play media or YouTube videos, so tricking targets into visiting these sites or playing malicious media on trustworthy sites is a relatively simple case of social engineering.

The researchers say the NUIT attacks can be conducted using two different methods.

The first method, NUIT-1, is when a device is both the source and target of the attack. For example, an attack can be launched on a smartphone by playing an audio file that causes the device to perform an action, such as opening a garage door or sending a text message.

The other method, NUIT-2, is when the attack is launched by a device with a speaker to another device with a microphone, such as a website to a smart speaker.

Source: Inaudible ultrasound attack can stealthily control your phone, smart speaker

This is like smart units like Amazon Echo / Alexa being controlled by TV commercials

Meatball from long-extinct mammoth created by food firm

A mammoth meatball has been created by a cultivated meat company, resurrecting the flesh of the long-extinct animals.

The project aims to demonstrate the potential of meat grown from cells, without the slaughter of animals, and to highlight the link between large-scale livestock production and the destruction of wildlife and the climate crisis.

The mammoth meatball was produced by Vow Food, an Australian company, which is taking a different approach to cultured meat.

There are scores of companies working on replacements for conventional meat, such as chicken, pork and beef. But Vow Foods is aiming to mix and match cells from unconventional species to create new kinds of meat.

The company has already investigated the potential of more than 50 species, including alpaca, buffalo, crocodile, kangaroo, peacocks and different types of fish.

The first cultivated meat to be sold to diners will be Japanese quail, which the company expects will be in restaurants in Singapore this year.

“We have a behaviour change problem when it comes to meat consumption,” said George Peppou, CEO of Vow Food.

“The goal is to transition a few billion meat eaters away from eating [conventional] animal protein to eating things that can be produced in electrified systems.

“And we believe the best way to do that is to invent meat. We look for cells that are easy to grow, really tasty and nutritious, and then mix and match those cells to create really tasty meat.”

Tim Noakesmith, who cofounded Vow Food with Peppou, said: “We chose the woolly mammoth because it’s a symbol of diversity loss and a symbol of climate change.” The creature is thought to have been driven to extinction by hunting by humans and the warming of the world after the last ice age.

[…]

Cultivated meat – chicken from Good Meat – is currently only sold to consumers in Singapore, but two companies have now passed an approval process in the US.

In 2018, another company used DNA from an extinct animal to create gummy bears made from gelatine from a mastodon, another elephant-like animal.

Vow Food worked with Prof Ernst Wolvetang, at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland, to create the mammoth muscle protein. His team took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein in giving meat its flavour, and filled in the few gaps using elephant DNA.

This sequence was placed in myoblast stem cells from a sheep, which replicated to grow to the 20bn cells subsequently used by the company to grow the mammoth meat.

“It was ridiculously easy and fast,” said Wolvetang. “We did this in a couple of weeks.” Initially, the idea was to produce dodo meat, he said, but the DNA sequences needed do not exist.

[…]

Seren Kell, at the Good Food Institute Europe, said: “I hope this fascinating project will open up new conversations about cultivated meat’s extraordinary potential to produce more sustainable food.

“However, as the most common sources of meat are farm animals such as cattle, pigs, and poultry, most of the sustainable protein sector is focused on realistically replicating meat from these species.

“By cultivating beef, pork, chicken and seafood we can have the most impact in terms of reducing emissions from conventional animal agriculture.”

[…]

Source: Meatball from long-extinct mammoth created by food firm | Meat industry | The Guardian

Italian art experts (and rest of world) astonished by David statue uproar in Florida

The Florence museum that houses Michelangelo’s statue of David has invited teachers and students from a Florida school to visit, after an uproar over an art lesson.

The school’s principal quit after a complaint about a sixth-grade art class that included an image of the statue.

A parent had complained the image was pornographic.

Cecilie Hollberg, director of Galleria dell’Accademia, has now issued the invitation to the class.

She said the principal should be “rewarded, not punished”.

“Talking about the Renaissance without showing the David, an undisputed icon of art and culture and of that historical period, would make no sense,” Ms Hollberg said.

The controversy began when the board of Tallahassee Classical School – a charter school in Florida’s state capital – pressured principal Hope Carrasquilla to resign after three parents complained about a lesson that included a photo of the 17ft nude marble statue.

The statue, one of the most famous in Western history, depicts the biblical David going to fight Goliath armed only with a sling and his faith in God.

[…]

The incident has left Florentines and experts on Renaissance art bewildered.

The David is considered a masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance and a symbol of humanist values. It has been displayed in the Galleria dell’Accademia since 1873.

Ms Hollberg said she was “astonished”, stating that to think that the David statue could be considered pornographic means not only failing to understand the Bible, but Western culture itself.

“I cannot believe that actually happened, at first I thought it was fake news, so improbable and absurd was it,” she said.

“A distinction must be made between nudity and pornography. There is nothing pornographic or aggressive about the David, he is a young boy, a shepherd, who even according to the Bible did not have ostentatious clothes but wanted to defend his people with what he had.”

[…]

According to Florentine art historian and dean of the University for Foreigners in Siena, Tomaso Montanari, such an attitude is “disconcerting”.

“First comes the dismay at the absence of educational freedom, as it should not be restricted or manipulated by families,” Mr Montanari said.

“On the other hand, from a cultural perspective, the Western world has a tendency to associate fundamentalism and censorship with other societies, believing it possesses the capability to spread democratic ideals worldwide.

“But this cultural backsliding clearly highlights the presence of fundamentalist views within the West as well.”

[…]

Back in Florence, Ms Hollberg remarked: “From majestic statues to charming fountains and paintings, Italy is overflowing with works of art, not just in its museums, but in all its cities, squares and streets, with some featuring naked figures.

“Does that make it pornography? Should entire cities be shut down because of the artistic depictions of the human form?”

Source: Italian art experts astonished by David statue uproar in Florida – BBC News

ChatGPT Retrieval plugin allows you to embed and store memory of your chats and other knowledge bases

This is a plugin for ChatGPT that enables semantic search and retrieval of personal or organizational documents. It allows users to obtain the most relevant document snippets from their data sources, such as files, notes, or emails, by asking questions or expressing needs in natural language. Enterprises can make their internal documents available to their employees through ChatGPT using this plugin.

[…]

Users can refine their search results by using metadata filters by source, date, author, or other criteria. The plugin can be hosted on any cloud platform that supports Docker containers, such as Fly.io, Heroku or Azure Container Apps. To keep the vector database updated with the latest documents, the plugin can process and store documents from various data sources continuously

[…]

A notable feature of the Retrieval Plugin is its capacity to provide ChatGPT with memory. By utilizing the plugin’s upsert endpoint, ChatGPT can save snippets from the conversation to the vector database for later reference (only when prompted to do so by the user). This functionality contributes to a more context-aware chat experience by allowing ChatGPT to remember and retrieve information from previous conversations. Learn how to configure the Retrieval Plugin with memory here.

[…]

Github openai/chatgpt-retreival-plugin

‘A Blow for Libraries’: Internet Archive Loses Copyright Infringement Lawsuit by money grubbing publishers

A judge ruled against Internet Archive, a free online digital library, on Friday in a lawsuit filed by four top publishers who claimed the company was in violation of copyright laws. The publishers, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House filed the lawsuit against Internet Archive in 2020, claiming the company had illegally scanned and uploaded 127 of their books for readers to download for free, detracting from their sales and the authors’ royalties.

U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl ruled in favor of the publishing houses in saying that Internet Archive was making “derivative” works by transforming printed books into e-books and distributing them.

[…]

Koeltl’s decision was in part based on the law that libraries are required to pay publishers for continued use of their digital book copies and are only permitted to lend these digital copies a specified number of times, called controlled digital lending, as agreed by the publisher [not the writer!] before paying to renew its license.

[…]

However, according to the court ruling, Hachette and Penguin provide one or two-year terms to libraries, in which the eBook can be rented an unlimited number of times before the library has to purchase a new license. HarperCollins allows the library to circulate a digital copy 26 times before the license has to be renewed, while Wiley has continued to experiment with several subscription models.

[…]

The judge ruled that because Internet Archive was purchasing the book only once before scanning it and lending each digital copy an unlimited number of times, it is an infringement of copyright and “concerns the way libraries lend eBooks.

[…]

Source: ‘A Blow for Libraries’: Internet Archive Loses Copyright Infringement Lawsuit

The decision was “a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve,” argued Chris Freeland, the director of Open Libraries at the Internet Archive. In a blog post he argued the decision “impacts libraries across the U.S. who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.
The Verge adds that the judge rejected “fair use” arguments which had previously protected a 2014 digital book preservation project by Google Books and HathiTrust:

Koetl wrote that any “alleged benefits” from the Internet Archive’s library “cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers,” declaring that “there is nothing transformative about [Internet Archive’s] copying and unauthorized lending,” and that copying these books doesn’t provide “criticism, commentary, or information about them.” He notes that the Google Books use was found “transformative” because it created a searchable database instead of simply publishing copies of books on the internet.

Their lending model works like this. They purchase a paper copy of the book, scan it to digital format, and then lend out the digital copy to one person at a time. Their argument is that this is no different than lending out the paper copy that they legally own to one person at a time. It is not as cut and dry as you make it out to be.

Source: Internet Archive Loses in Court. Judge Rules They Can’t Scan and Lend eBooks

Last Monday was the day of the oral arguments in the Big Publishers’ lawsuit against libraries in the form of the Internet Archive. As we noted mid-week, publishers won’t quit until libraries are dead. And they got one step closer to that goal on Friday, when Judge John Koetl wasted no time in rejecting every single one of the Internet Archive’s arguments.

The fact that the ruling came out on the Friday after the Monday oral arguments suggests pretty strongly that Judge Koetl had his mind made up pretty quickly and was ready to kill a library with little delay. Of course, as we noted just last Wednesday, whoever lost at this stage was going to appeal, and the really important stuff was absolutely going to happen at the 2nd Circuit appeals court. It’s just that now the Internet Archives, and a bunch of important copyright concepts, are already starting to be knocked down a few levels.

I’ve heard from multiple people claiming that of course the Internet Archive was going to lose, because it was scanning books (!!) and lending them out and how could that be legal? But, the answer, as we explained multiple times, is that every piece of this copyright puzzle had already been deemed legal.

And the Internet Archive didn’t just jump into this without any thought. Two of the most well known legal scholars regarding copyright and libraries, David Hansen and Kyle Courtney, had written a white paper detailing exactly how and why the approach the Internet Archive took with Controlled Digital Lending easily fit within the existing contours and precedents of copyright law.

But, as we and others have discussed for ages, in the copyright world, there’s a long history of courts ignoring what the law actually says and just coming up with some way to say something is infringement if it feels wrong to them. And that’s what happened here.

A key part of the ruling, as in a large percentage of cases that are about fair use, is looking at whether or not the use of the copy is “transformative.” Judge Koetl is 100% positive it is not transformative.

There is nothing transformative about IA’s copying and unauthorized lending of the Works in Suit.7 IA does not reproduce the Works in Suit to provide criticism, commentary, or information about them. See 17 U.S.C. § 107. IA’s ebooks do not “add[] something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the [originals] with new expression, meaning or message.” Campbell, 510 U.S. at 579. IA simply scans the Works in Suit to become ebooks and lends them to users of its Website for free. But a copyright holder holds the “exclusive[] right” to prepare, display, and distribute “derivative works based upon the copyrighted work.”

But… there’s a lot more to “transformative” use than simply adding something new or altering the meaning. In many cases, fair use is found in cases where you’re copying the exact same content, but for a different purpose, and the Internet Archive’s usage here seems pretty clearly transformative in that it’s changing the way the book can be consumed to make it easier for libraries to lend it out and patrons to read it. That is, the “transformation” is in the way the book can be lent, not the content of the book.

I know many people find this strange (and the judge did here as well) saying things like “but it’s the whole work.” Or “the use is the same because it’s still just reading the book.” But the Supreme Court already said, quite clearly, that such situations can be fair use, such as in the Sony v. Universal case that decided VCRs were legal, and that time shifting TV shows was clear fair use. In that ruling, they even cite Congress noting that “making a copy of a copyright work for… convenience” can be considered fair use.

Unfortunately, Judge Koetl effectively chops away a huge part of the Sony ruling in insisting that this is somehow different.

But Sony is plainly inapposite. IA is not comparable to the parties in Sony — either to Sony, the alleged contributory copyright infringer, or to the home viewers who used the Betamax machine for the noncommercial, nonprofit activity of watching television programs at home. Unlike Sony, which only sold the machines, IA scans a massive number of copies of books and makes them available to patrons rather than purchasing ebook licenses from the Publishers. IA is also unlike the home viewers in Sony, who engaged in the “noncommercial, nonprofit activity” of viewing at a more convenient time television programs that they had the right to view for free at the time they were originally broadcast. 464 U.S. at 449. The home viewers were not accused of making their television programs available to the general public. Although IA has the right to lend print books it lawfully acquired, it does not have the right to scan those books and lend the digital copies en masse.

But note what the Judge did here. Rather than rely on the text of what the Supreme Court actually said in Sony, he insists that he won’t apply the rules of Sony because the parties are different. But if the basic concepts and actions are covered by the Sony ruling, it seems silly to ignore them here as the judge did.

And the differences highlighted by the court here have no bearing on the actual issues and the specifics of fair use and the law. I mean, first of all, the fact that Koetl claims that the Internet Archive is not engaged in “noncommercial, nonprofit activity” is just weird. The Internet Archive is absolutely engaged in noncommerical, nonprofit activity.

The other distinctions are meaningless as well. No, IA is not building devices for people to buy, but in many ways IA’s position here should be seen as stronger than Sony’s because Sony actually was a commercial operation, and IA is literally acting as a library, increasing the convenience for its patrons, and doing so in a manner that is identical to lending out physical books. Sony created a machine, Betamax, that copied TV shows and allowed those who bought those machines to watch the show at a more convenient time. IA created a machine that copies books, and allows library patrons to access those books in a more convenient way.

Also, the Betamax (and VCR) were just as “available to the general public” as the Internet Archive is. The idea that they are substantially different is just… weird. And strikes me as pretty clearly wrong.

There’s another precedential oddity in the ruling. It relies pretty heavily on the somewhat terrible fair use ruling in the 2nd Circuit in the Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith case. That case was so terrible that we (at the Copia Institute) weighed in with the Supreme Court to let them know how problematic it was, and the Supreme Court is still sitting on a decision in that case.

Which means the Supreme Court is soon to rule on it, and that could very much change or obliterate the case that Judge Koetl leans on heavily for his ruling.

Here, Judge Koetl repeatedly goes back to the Warhol well to make various arguments, especially around the question of the fourth fair use factor: the effect on the market. To me, this clearly weighs towards fair use, because it’s no different than a regular library. Libraries are allowed to buy (or receive donated) books and lend them out. That’s all the Open Library does here. So to argue there’s a negative impact on the market, the publishers rely on the fact that they’ve been able to twist and bend copyright law so much that they’ve created a new, extortionate market in ebook “licenses,” and then play all sorts of games to force people to buy the books rather than check them out of the library.

Judge Koetl seems particularly worried about how much damage this could do this artificially inflated market:

It is equally clear that if IA’s conduct “becomes widespread, it will adversely affect the potential market for the” Works in Suit. Andy Warhol Found., 11 F.4th at 48. IA could expand the Open Libraries project far beyond the current contributing partners, allowing new partners to contribute many more concurrent copies of the Works in Suit to increase the loan count. New organizations like IA also could emerge to perform similar functions, further diverting potential readers and libraries from accessing authorized library ebooks from the Publishers. This plainly risks expanded future displacement of the Publishers’ potential revenues.

But go back and read that paragraph again, and replace the key words to read that if libraries become widespread, it will adversely affect the potential market for buying books in bookstores… because libraries would be “diverting potential readers” from purchasing physical books, which “plainly risks expanded future displacement of the Publishers’ potential revenues.”

Again, the argument here is effectively that libraries themselves shouldn’t be allowed. And that seems like a problem?

Koetl also falls into the ridiculous trap of saying that “you can’t compete with free” and that libraries will favor CDL-scanned books over licensed ones:

An accused infringer usurps an existing market “where the infringer’s target audience and the nature of the infringing content is the same as the original.” Cariou, 714 F.3d at 709; see also Andy Warhol Found., 11 F.4th at 50. That is the case here. For libraries that are entitled to partner with IA because they own print copies of books in IA’s collection, it is patently more desirable to offer IA’s bootleg ebooks than to pay for authorized ebook licenses. To state the obvious, “[i]t is difficult to compete with a product offered for free.” Sony BMG Music Ent. v. Tenenbaum, 672 F. Supp. 2d 217, 231 (D. Mass. 2009).

Except that’s literally wrong. The licensed ebooks have many features that the scanned ones don’t. And many people (myself included!) prefer to check out licensed ebooks from our local libraries rather than the CDL ones, because they’re more readable. My own library offers the ability to check out books from either one, and defaults to recommending the licensed ebooks, because they’re a better customer experience, which is how tons of products “compete with free” all the time.

I mean, not to be simplistic here, but the bottled water business in the US is an over $90 billion market for something most people can get for free (or effectively free) from the tap. That’s three times the size of the book publishing market. So, uh, maybe don’t say “it’s difficult to compete with free.” Other industries do it just fine. The publishers are just being lazy.

Besides, based on this interpretation of Warhol, basically anyone can destroy fair use by simply making up some new, crazy, ridiculously priced, highly restrictive license that covers the same space as the fair use alternative, and claim that the alternative destroys the “market” for this ridiculous license. That can’t be how fair use works.

Anyway, one hopes first that the Supreme Court rejects the terrible 2nd Circuit ruling in the Warhol Foundation case, and that this in turn forces Judge Koetl to reconsider his argument. But given the pretzel he twisted himself into to ignore the Betamax case, it seems likely he’d still find against libraries like the Internet Archive.

Given that, it’s going to be important that the 2nd Circuit get this one right. As the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle said in a statement on the ruling:

“Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products. For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society—owning, preserving, and lending books.

This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors and we plan to appeal it.”

What happens next is going to be critical to the future of copyright online. Already people have pointed out how some of the verbiage in this ruling could have wide reaching impact on questions about copyright in generative AI products or many other kinds of fair use cases.

One hopes that the panel on the 2nd Circuit doesn’t breezily dismiss these issues like Judge Koetl did.

Source: Publishers Get One Step Closer To Killing Libraries

This money grab by publishers is disgusting, for more information and articles I have referenced them here

Apple acquired a startup using AI to compress videos

Apple has quietly acquired a Mountain View-based startup, WaveOne, that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video.

Apple wouldn’t confirm the sale when asked for comment. But WaveOne’s website was shut down around January, and several former employees, including one of WaveOne’s co-founders, now work within Apple’s various machine learning groups.

WaveOne’s former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, announced the sale in a LinkedIn post published a month ago.

“After almost two years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple,” Stankosh wrote. “We started our journey at WaveOne, realizing that machine learning and deep learning video technology could potentially change the world. Apple saw this potential and took the opportunity to add it to their technology portfolio.”

[…]

WaveOne’s main innovation was a “content-aware” video compression and decompression algorithm that could run on the AI accelerators built into many phones and an increasing number of PCs. Leveraging AI-powered scene and object detection, the startup’s technology could essentially “understand” a video frame, allowing it to, for example, prioritize faces at the expense of other elements within a scene to save bandwidth.

WaveOne also claimed that its video compression tech was robust to sudden disruptions in connectivity. That is to say, it could make a “best guess” based on whatever bits it had available, so when bandwidth was suddenly restricted, the video wouldn’t freeze; it’d just show less detail for the duration.

WaveOne claimed its approach, which was hardware-agnostic, could reduce the size of video files by as much as half, with better gains in more complex scenes.

[…]

Even minor improvements in video compression could save on bandwidth costs, or enable services like Apple TV+ to deliver higher resolutions and framerates depending on the type of content being streamed.

YouTube’s already doing this. Last year, Alphabet’s DeepMind adapted a machine learning algorithm originally developed to play board games to the problem of compressing YouTube videos, leading to a 4% reduction in the amount of data the video-sharing service needs to stream to users.

[…]

Source: Apple acquired a startup using AI to compress videos | TechCrunch

Nike Blocks F1 Champ Max Verstappen’s ‘Max 1’ Clothing Brand because they can own words now

[…]

Nike’s argument is that Max 1 is too similar to its longtime “Air Max” shoe line, including other “Max Force 1” products and other variations that include similar keywords. Verstappen had named his line of products after himself and his current racing number but encountered legal trouble soon after launch.

The Benelux Office for Intellectual Property—essentially The Netherlands’ trademark office—issued a report that Verstappen’s Max 1 brand carried a “likelihood of confusion” and posed a risk of consumers believing Max 1 products were associated with Nike.

Nike went as far as claiming that some designs in the Max 1 catalog were too similar to the apparel giant’s, while also alleging that the word MAX was prominently used and likened to Nike apparel. For these reasons, Verstappen was reportedly fined approximately $1,100 according to Express.

[…]

Source: Nike Blocks F1 Champ Max Verstappen’s ‘Max 1’ Clothing Brand

1. What about Pepsi Max

2. What about the name Max being much much older than Nike (so prior use)

3. What about people going around using the word max as in eg ‘that’s the max speed’ or ‘that’s the max that will go in’?

3. What the actual fuck, copyright.

U.S. Political Party Preferences Shifted Greatly During 2021

[…]The general stability for the full-year average obscures a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter.

Line graph. Quarterly averages of U.S. party identification and leaning in 2021. In the first quarter of 2021, 49% of U.S. adults identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic, while 40% identified as Republicans or leaned Republican. In the second quarter, 49% were Democrats or Democratic leaners, and 43% were Republicans and Republican leaners. In the third quarter, 45% were Democrats and Democratic leaners, and were 44% Republicans and Republican leaners. In the fourth quarter, 42% were Democrats and Democratic leaners, and 47% were Republicans and Republican leaners.

These results are based on aggregated data from all U.S. Gallup telephone surveys in 2021, which included interviews with more than 12,000 randomly sampled U.S. adults.

[…]

Shifting party preferences in 2021 are likely tied to changes in popularity of the two men who served as president during the year.

[…]

With Trump’s approval rating at a low point and Biden relatively popular in the first quarter, 49% of Americans identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic, compared with 40% who were Republicans or Republican leaners.

In the second quarter, Democratic affiliation stayed high, while Republican affiliation began to recover, increasing to 43%.

The third quarter saw a decline in Democratic identification and leaning, from 49% to 45%, as Biden’s ratings began to falter, while there was no meaningful change in Republican affiliation.

In the fourth quarter, party support flipped as Republicans made gains, from 44% to 47%, and Democratic affiliation fell from 45% to 42%. These fourth-quarter shifts coincided with strong GOP performances in 2021 elections, including a Republican victory in the Virginia gubernatorial election and a near-upset of the Democratic incumbent governor in New Jersey. Biden won both states by double digits in the 2020 election.

[…]

The shifts in party affiliation in each quarter of 2021 were apparent in both the percentage identifying with each party and the percentage of independents leaning to each party, but with more changes among leaners than identifiers.

[…]

Republican identification increased by three points from the beginning to the end of 2021, while Republican leaners increased by four points.

Changes in Party Identification and Leaning, by Quarter, 2021
In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself — [a Republican, a Democrat] — or an independent? // As of today, do you lean more to the — [Democratic Party or the Republican Party]?
2021-I 2021-II 2021-III 2021-IV
% % % %
Democrat 30 31 28 28
Democratic-leaning independent 19 18 17 14
Non-leaning independent 10 5 8 9
Republican-leaning independent 15 17 16 19
Republican 25 26 28 28
Percentage with no opinion not shown
Gallup

[…]

Independents Are Still the Largest Political Group in the U.S.

Regardless of which party has an advantage in party affiliation, over the past three decades, presidential elections have generally been competitive, and party control of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate has changed hands numerous times. This is partly because neither party can claim a very high share of core supporters — those who identify with the party — as the largest proportion of Americans identify initially as political independents.

Overall in 2021, an average of 29% of Americans identified as Democrats, 27% as Republicans and 42% as independents. Roughly equal proportions of independents leaned to the Democratic Party (17%) and to the Republican Party (16%).

The percentage of independent identifiers is up from 39% in 2020, but similar to the 41% measured in 2019. Gallup has often seen a decrease in independents in a presidential election year and an increase in the year after.

[…]

[…]

Source: U.S. Political Party Preferences Shifted Greatly During 2021

Small subgroups of the population seem much larger to many Americans and they think Large groups are smaller than they really are

When it comes to estimating the size of demographic groups, Americans rarely get it right. In two recent YouGov polls, we asked respondents to guess the percentage (ranging from 0% to 100%) of American adults who are members of 43 different groups,[…] When people’s average perceptions of group sizes are compared to actual population estimates, an intriguing pattern emerges: Americans tend to vastly overestimate the size of minority groups.

[…]

A parallel pattern emerges when we look at estimates of majority groups: People tend to underestimate rather than overestimate their size relative to their actual share of the adult population.

[…]

The most accurate estimates involved groups whose real proportion fell right around 50%

[…]

Although there is some question-by-question variability, the results from our survey show that inaccurate perceptions of group size are not limited to the types of socially charged group divisions typically explored in similar studies: race, religion, sexuality, education, and income. Americans are equally likely to misestimate the size of less widely discussed groups, such as adults who are left-handed.

[…]

Similar misperceptions are found regarding the proportion of American adults who own a pet, have read a book in the past year, or reside in various cities or states. This suggests that errors in judgment are not due to the specific context surrounding a certain group.

[…]

Source: ​​From millionaires to Muslims, small subgroups of the population seem much larger to many Americans | YouGov

New Zealand’s Dawn Aerospace Mk-II Aurora Space drone Approved for Suborbital Test Flights

Dawn Aerospace CEO Stefan Powell announced today that the company’s Mk-II Aurora spaceplane has received approval from the Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand for rocket-powered flight. The company is now ready to test the vehicle’s rocket engines with flights beginning next month.

The Mk-II Aurora is a remotely piloted spaceplane that could eventually take two trips into space every day. During testing, the Mk-II will host research projects and collect scientific data with its onboard 3U payload capacity (i.e. 30 cubic centimeters in size) while serving as a proof of concept for a later model—the Mk-III—that could deliver 550-pound (250-kilogram) satellites into orbit with the help of a second stage rocket (the concept is somewhat similar to how Virgin Orbit uses piloted aircraft to deploy its LauncherOne rocket).

With approval from New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority, Dawn Aerospace is readying to begin rocket-powered flight tests of the Mk-II Aurora beginning in just a few weeks. The company has already fired the Aurora’s rocket engine—112 times according to Powell in a press release—but never has it conducted a flight test with the engine, opting to flight test 48 times with jet engines instead.

[…]

tests of the Mk-II Aurora will follow a “build-up approach,” as previous testing has, in which the plane will reach “modest” altitudes and speeds to demonstrate that rocket-powered flight is just as viable as commercial aircraft.

The Mk-II Aurora.
The Mk-II Aurora.
Photo: Dawn Aerospace

The altitude the Aurora will reach in these upcoming tests isn’t necessarily modest, as company plans to reach the internationally recognized boundary of space, better known as the Karman line. As SatNews reported last September, Dawn Aerospace is gearing up for Phase 2 of testing the Aurora, which according to its company’s website, will see the company push Aurora to higher and higher altitudes over a series of tests until it crosses the Karman line, which is about 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface.

Source: New Zealand’s Spaceplane Approved for Suborbital Test Flights

GitHub.com rotates its exposed private SSH key

GitHub has rotated its private SSH key for GitHub.com after the secret was was accidentally published in a public GitHub repository.

The software development and version control service says, the private RSA key was only “briefly” exposed, but that it took action out of “an abundance of caution.”

Unclear window of exposure

In a succinct blog post published today, GitHub acknowledged discovering this week that the RSA SSH private key for GitHub.com had been ephemerally exposed in a public GitHub repository.

“We immediately acted to contain the exposure and began investigating to understand the root cause and impact,” writes Mike Hanley, GitHub’s Chief Security Officer and SVP of Engineering.

“We have now completed the key replacement, and users will see the change propagate over the next thirty minutes. Some users may have noticed that the new key was briefly present beginning around 02:30 UTC during preparations for this change.”

The timing of the discovery is interesting—just weeks after GitHub rolled out secrets scanning for all public repos.

GitHub.com’s latest public key fingerprints are shown below. These can be used to validate that your SSH connection to GitHub’s servers is indeed secure.

As some may notice, only GitHub.com’s RSA SSH key has been impacted and replaced. No change is required for ECDSA or Ed25519 users.

SHA256:uNiVztksCsDhcc0u9e8BujQXVUpKZIDTMczCvj3tD2s (RSA)
SHA256:br9IjFspm1vxR3iA35FWE+4VTyz1hYVLIE2t1/CeyWQ (DSA – deprecated)
SHA256:p2QAMXNIC1TJYWeIOttrVc98/R1BUFWu3/LiyKgUfQM (ECDSA)
SHA256:+DiY3wvvV6TuJJhbpZisF/zLDA0zPMSvHdkr4UvCOqU (Ed25519)

“Please note that this issue was not the result of a compromise of any GitHub systems or customer information,” says GitHub.

“Instead, the exposure was the result of what we believe to be an inadvertent publishing of private information.”

The blog post, however, does not answer when exactly was the key exposed, and for how long, making the timeline of exposure a bit murky. Such timestamps can typically be ascertained from security logs—should these be available, and Git commit history.

[…]

Source: GitHub.com rotates its exposed private SSH key

Nordic Air Defense Pact Combines Forces Of Hundreds Of Fighter Aircraft

To better cope with threats emanating from Russia, the countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden have created a unified Nordic air defense alliance, pooling the resources of their air forces. They have upwards of 300 fighter jets between them as well as training, transport and surveillance fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.

Those four nations on Friday announced they signed the first Nordic Air Commanders’ Intent last week during a meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

“The declaration of intent strengthens Nordic cooperation and paves the way for further strengthening of the Nordic air forces,” the four nations said Friday in a joint statement. “The ultimate goal is to be able to operate seamlessly together as one force by developing a Nordic concept for joint air operations based on already-known NATO methodology.”

To achieve that goal, this intent directs the development of a “Nordic Warfighting Concept for Joint Air Operations,” pursuing four lines of effort:

  • integrated command and control, operational planning and execution
  • flexible and resilient deployment of our air forces
  • joint airspace surveillance
  • joint education, training and exercises.

The publicly released plan does not provide specific timelines for achieving any of the goals. However, a separate jointly released document gives an overview.

Finnish Air Force F-18 Hornet. (Finnish Air Force photo)

“In the medium term, efforts shall revolve around preparing for, conducting, and assessing Nordic Response 24 from an air perspective, putting emphasis on the Nordic digital and semi-distributed [Air Operations Center] AOC development steps,” according to that document. “On the horizon, long-term permanent solutions to fulfill this intent’s aim shall be determined and established.”

While none of the documents mention Russia, the move to integrate the air forces was triggered by Moscow’s full-on invasion of Ukraine, the commander of the Danish Air Force, Major General Jan Dam, told Reuters.

“Our combined fleet can be compared to a large European country,” Dam said.

Norway has at least 52 F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters, according to Janes. The Norwegian Air Force says it is phased out its F-16 fleet.

Norway flies F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters. (Norwegian Air Force photo)

Finland has 62 F/A-18C/D multirole fighter jets and 64 F-35s on order, according to Reuters.

Finland has more than 60 Hornets. (Finnish Air Force photo)

Finnish Defense Minister Antti Kaikkonen on Thursday expressed his opposition to a request by Ukraine for a portion of his country’s Hornet fleet.

“My view as Finland’s defense minister is that we need these Hornets to secure our own country,” Kaikkonen told a news conference in Helsinki, as reported by Reuters. “I view negatively the idea that they would be donated during the next few years. And if we look even further, my understanding is that they begin to be worn out and will have little use value left, he added.”

Denmark has 58 F-16s and 27 F-35s on order, according to Reuters.

Danish F-16 taxiing ready for a training mission alongside Allies in the Baltic Sea region, helping improve tactics and readiness. (Danish Air Force photo).

Sweden has around 70 JAS-39C/D Gripen jets and will be converting over to the enhanced Gipen-E in the coming years.

Swedish JAS-38 Gripen jets. (Swedish Air Force photo)

How soon this gets off the ground and exactly how it will works remains to be seen. And while all four nations have agreed to work within NATO frameworks, Finland and Sweden have yet to gain membership.

[…]

Source: Nordic Air Defense Pact Combines Forces Of Hundreds Of Fighter Aircraft

13-Sided Shape That never repeats discovered

Computer scientists found the holy grail of tiles. They call it the “einstein,” one shape that alone can cover a plane without ever repeating a pattern.

And all it takes for this special shape is 13 sides.

In the world of mathematics, an “aperiodic monotile”—also known as an einstein based off a German phrase for one stone—is a shape that can tile a plane, but never repeat.

“In this paper we present the first true aperiodic monotile, a shape that forces aperiodicity through geometry alone, with no additional constrains applied via matching conditions,” writes Craig Kaplan, a computer science professor from the University of Waterloo and one of the four authors of the paper. “We prove that this shape, a polykite that we call ‘the hat,’ must assemble into tilings based on a substitution system.”

[…]

The history of the aperiodic tile has never had a breakthrough like this one. The first aperiodic sets had over 20,000 tiles, Kaplan tweets. “Subsequent research lowered that number, to sets of size 92, then six, and then two in the form of the famous Penrose tiles.” But those Penrose tiles were from 1974.

[…]

The team proved the nature of the shape through computer coding, and in a fascinating aside, the shape doesn’t lose its aperiodic nature even when the length of sides changes.

“We finally,” Kaplan says, “got down to one!”

It’s time for that bathroom remodel.

Source: Researchers Discovered a New 13-Sided Shape

Gen-2 by Runway text to Video AI

No lights. No camera. All action.Realistically and consistently synthesize new videos. Either by applying the composition and style of an image or text prompt to the structure of a source video (Video to Video). Or, using nothing but words (Text to Video). It’s like filming something new, without filming anything at all.

Visit the page for examples

Source: Gen-2 by Runway

Runway also provided Stable Diffusion, the picture generator