Daily Archives: April 14, 2023

Disabling Intel and AMD’s Backdoors On Modern computers

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Despite some companies making strides with ARM, for the most part, the desktop and laptop space is still dominated by x86 machines. For all their advantages, they have a glaring flaw for anyone concerned with privacy or security in the form of a hardware backdoor that can access virtually any part of the computer even with the power off. AMD calls their system the Platform Security Processor (PSP) and Intel’s is known as the Intel Management Engine (IME).

To fully disable these co-processors a computer from before 2008 is required, but if you need more modern hardware than that which still respects your privacy and security concerns you’ll need to either buy an ARM device, or disable the IME like NovaCustom has managed to do with their NS51 series laptop.

NovaCustom specializes in building custom laptops with customizations for various components and specifications to fit their needs, including options for the CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, keyboard layout, and other considerations. They favor Coreboot as a bootloader which already goes a long way to eliminating proprietary closed-source software at a fundamental level, but not all Coreboot machines have the IME completely disabled. There are two ways to do this, the HECI method which is better than nothing but not fully trusted, and the HAP bit, which completely disables the IME. NovaCustom is using the HAP bit approach to disable the IME, meaning that although it’s not completely eliminated from the computer, it is turned off in a way that’s at least good enough for computers that the NSA uses.

There are a lot of new computer manufacturers building conscientious hardware nowadays, but (with the notable exception of System76) the IME and PSP seem to be largely ignored by most computing companies we’d otherwise expect to care about an option like this. It’s certainly still an area of concern considering how much power the IME and PSP are given over their host computers, and we have seen even mainline manufacturers sometimes offer systems with the IME disabled. The only other options to solve this problem are based around specific motherboards for 8th and 9th generation Intel desktops, or you can go way back to hardware from 2008 and install libreboot to eliminate, rather than disable, the IME.

Source: Disabling Intel’s Backdoors On Modern Laptops | Hackaday

Italy finds decently good out to really stupid ban: Demands OpenAI Allow ChatGPT User Corrections After Ban

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In a news announcement on Wednesday, the Italian Data Protection Authority, known as the Garante, stressed that OpenAI needed to be more transparent about its data collection processes and inform users about their data rights with regards to the generative AI. These rights include allowing users and non-users of ChatGPT to object to having their data processed by OpenAI and letting them correct false or inaccurate information about them generated by ChatGPT, similar to rights related to other technologies guaranteed by Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, laws.

Other measures required by the Garante include a public notice on OpenAI’s website “describing the arrangements and logic of the data processing required for the operation of ChatGPT along with the rights afforded to data subjects.” The regulator will also require OpenAI to immediately implement an age gating system for ChatGPT and submit a plan to implement an age verification system by May 31.

The Italian regulator said OpenAI had until April 30 to implement the measures it’s asking for.

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Source: Italy Demands OpenAI Allow ChatGPT User Corrections After Ban

Allowing users to correct is in principle a Good Idea, but then you get Wikipedia types of battles on who is the arbiter of truth. Of course, no one system will ever be 100% truthful or accurate, so banning it for this is just stupid. No age gate keeper works either and neither did the ban – people can circumvent these very very easily. So Italy needs some sort of concession to get out of the hole it’s dug itself and this is at least a promising start.

Scientists unveil new and improved ‘skinny donut’ black hole image using ML algorithm

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The 2019 release of the first image of a black hole was hailed as a significant scientific achievement. But truth be told, it was a bit blurry – or, as one astrophysicist involved in the effort called it, a “fuzzy orange donut.”

Scientists on Thursday unveiled a new and improved image of this black hole – a behemoth at the center of a nearby galaxy – mining the same data used for the earlier one but improving its resolution by employing image reconstruction algorithms to fill in gaps in the original telescope observations.

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The ring of light – that is, the material being sucked into the voracious object – seen in the new image is about half the width of how it looked in the previous picture. There is also a larger “brightness depression” at the center – basically the donut hole – caused by light and other matter disappearing into the black hole.

The image remains somewhat blurry due to the limitations of the data underpinning it – not quite ready for a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, but an advance from the 2019 version.

This supermassive black hole resides in a galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, about 54 million light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). This galaxy, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun, is larger and more luminous than our Milky Way.

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Lia Medeiros of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, lead author of the research published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The study’s four authors are members of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, the international collaboration begun in 2012 with the goal of directly observing a black hole’s immediate environment. A black hole’s event horizon is the point beyond which anything – stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation – gets swallowed into oblivion.

Medeiros said she and her colleagues plan to use the same technique to improve upon the image of the only other black hole ever pictured – released last year showing the one inhabiting the Milky Way’s center, called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*.

The M87 black hole image stems from data collected by seven radio telescopes at five locations on Earth that essentially create a planet-sized observational dish.

“The EHT is a very sparse array of telescopes. This is something we cannot do anything about because we need to put our telescopes on the tops of mountains and these mountains are few and far apart from each other. Most of the Earth is covered by oceans,” said Georgia Tech astrophysicist and study co-author Dimitrios Psaltis.

“As a result, our telescope array has a lot of ‘holes’ and we need to rely on algorithms that allow us to fill in the missing data,” Psaltis added. “The image we report in the new paper is the most accurate representation of the black hole image that we can obtain with our globe-wide telescope.”

The machine-learning technique they used is called PRIMO, short for “principal-component interferometric modeling.”

“This is the first time we have used machine learning to fill in the gaps where we don’t have data,” Medeiros said. “We use a large data set of high-fidelity simulations as a training set, and find an image that is consistent with the data and also is broadly consistent with our theoretical expectations. The fact that the previous EHT results robustly demonstrated that the image is a ring allows us to assume so in our analysis.”

Source: Scientists unveil new and improved ‘skinny donut’ black hole image | Reuters

Scientists create structural paint that stays cool underneath, doesn’t fade, extremely light and no toxins

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Debashis Chanda, a nanoscience researcher with the University of Central Florida, and his team have created a way to mimic nature’s ability to reflect light and create beautifully vivid color without absorbing any heat like traditional pigments do.

Chanda’s research, published in the journal Science Advances, explains and explores structural color and how people could use it to live cooler in a rapidly warming world.

Structural colors are created not from traditional pigmentation but from the arrangement of colorless materials to reflect light in certain ways. This process is how rainbows are made after it rains and how suncatchers bend light to create dazzling displays of color.

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One driver for the researchers: A desire to avoid toxic materials

To create these colors, synthetic materials like heavy metals are used to create vivid paints.

“We use a lot of artificially synthesized organic molecules, lots of metal,” Chanda told NPR. “Think about your deep blues, you need cobalt, a deep red needs cadmium. They are toxic. We are polluting our nature and our whole habitat by using this kind of paint. So one of the major motivations for us was to create a color based on non-toxic material.”

So why can’t we simply use ground-up peacock feathers to recreate its vivid greens, blues and golds? It’s because they have no pigment. Some of the brightest colors in nature aren’t pigmented at all, peacock feathers included.

These bright, beautiful colors are achieved by the bending and reflection of light. The way the structure of a wing, a feather or other material reflects light back at the viewer. It doesn’t absorb any light, it beams it back out in the form of a visible color, and this is where things get interesting.

Chanda’s research began here, with his fascination with natural colors and how they are achieved in nature.

Beyond just the beautiful arrays of color that structure can create, Chanda also found that unlike pigments, structural paint does not absorb any infrared light.

Infrared light is the reason black cars get hot on sunny days and asphalt is hot to the touch in summer. Infrared light is absorbed as heat energy into these surfaces — the darker the color, the more the surface colored with it can absorb. That’s why people are advised to wear lighter colors in hotter climates and why many buildings are painted bright whites and beiges.

Chanda found that structural color paint does not absorb any heat. It reflects all infrared light back out. This means that in a rapidly warming climate, this paint could help communities keep cool.

Chanda and his team tested the impact this paint had on the temperature of buildings covered in structural paint versus commercial paints and they found that structural paint kept surfaces 20 to 30 degrees cooler.

This, Chanda said, is a massive new tool that could be used to fight rising temperatures caused by global warming while still allowing us to have a bright and colorful world.

Unlike white and black cars, structural paint’s ability to reflect heat isn’t determined by how dark the color is. Blue, black or purple structural paints reflect just as much heat as bright whites or beige. This opens the door for more colorful, cooler architecture and design without having to worry about the heat.

A little paint goes a long way

It’s not just cleaner, Chanda said. Structural paint weighs much less than pigmented paint and doesn’t fade over time like traditional pigments.

“A raisin’s worth of structural paint is enough to cover the front and back of a door,” he said.

Unlike pigments which rely on layers of pigment to achieve depth of color, structural paint only requires one thin layer of particles to fully cover a surface in color. This means that structural paint could be a boon for aerospace engineers who rely on the lowest weight possible to achieve higher fuel efficiency.

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Source: Scientists create an eco-friendly paint : NPR