Month: August 2023
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Amazon Now Punishes Merchants Who Ship Their Own Products – flexing monopoly!
Third-party merchants on Amazon who ship their own packages will see an additional fee for each product sold starting on Oct. 1st. Sellers could previously choose to ship their products without contributing to Amazon, but the new fee means members of Amazon’s Seller Fulfilled Prime program will be required to pay the company 2% on each…
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Scientists Recreate Pink Floyd Song By Reading Brain Signals of Listeners
Scientists have trained a computer to analyze the brain activity of someone listening to music and, based only on those neuronal patterns, recreate the song. The research, published on Tuesday, produced a recognizable, if muffled version of Pink Floyd’s 1979 song, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1).” […] To collect the data for the…
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Snapchat’s My AI Goes Rogue, Posts To Stories
On Tuesday, Snapchat’s My AI in-app chatbot posted its own Story to the app that appeared to be a photo of a wall and ceiling. It then stopped responding to users’ messages, which some Snapchat users found disconcerting. TechCrunch reports: Though the incident made for some great tweets (er, posts), we regret to inform you…
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Tesla’s New Range-Limited Model S, X Can Go Further, but are software locked
Tesla has added a new Standard Range trim for both its aging Model S and Model X luxury cars this week, effectively slashing the barrier to entry for the automaker’s flagship sedan and SUV by a staggering $10,000 each. The Model S SR now comes in at $78,490, and the Model X SR at $88,490—both…
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Blended Wing Body Demonstrator Jet Contract Awarded By Air Force
The U.S. Air Force says it has picked aviation startup JetZero to design and build a full-size demonstrator aircraft with a blended wing body, or BWB, configuration. The goal is for the aircraft, which has already received the informal moniker XBW-1, to be flying by 2027. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall made the…
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‘Flying Aliens’ Harassing Peruvian Village Are Actually Illegal Miners With Jetpacks
The mysterious attacks began on July 11. “Strange beings,” locals said, visiting an isolated Indigenous community in rural Peru at night, harassing its inhabitants and attempting to kidnap a 15-year-old girl. […] News of the alleged extraterrestrial attackers quickly spread online as believers, skeptics, and internet sleuths around the world analyzed grainy videos posted by…
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Study gets monkeys drunk for 12 months and doing 9 drinks a day. Injects dopamine inhibitors and discovers they don’t want to do much of anything any more.
[…] a new study published on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine. The gene therapy was tested on macaque monkeys over 12 months, revealing promising results. […] At the beginning of the study, the monkeys were gradually given alcohol until an addiction was established. Then, they began self-regulating their own intake at an amount equating…
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Apple 2017 Batterygate finally leads to $500m payout, no more courts (in the US, in the UK – tbc)
Apple’s “Batterygate” legal saga is finally swinging shut – in the US, at least – with a final appeal being voluntarily dismissed, clearing the way for payouts to class members. The US lawsuit, which combined 66 separate class actions into one big legal proceeding in California, was decided in 2020, with the outcome requiring Apple…
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Virgin Galactic successfully flies tourists to space for first time
Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, the reusable rocket-powered space plane carrying the company’s first crew of tourists to space, successfully launched and landed on Thursday. The mission, known as Galactic 02, took off shortly after 11am ET from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Aboard the spacecraft were six individuals total – the space plane’s commander and…
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Canon is getting away with printers that won’t scan without ink — but HP might pay
Were you hoping Canon might be held accountable for its all-in-one printers that mysteriously can’t scan when they’re low on ink, forcing you to buy more? Tough: the lawsuit we told you about last year quietly ended in a private settlement rather than becoming a big class-action. I just checked, and a judge already dismissed…
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CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search
Tech news website CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results, Gizmodo has learned. Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased.…
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Nearly every AMD CPU since 2017 vulnerable to Inception bug
AMD processor users, you have another data-leaking vulnerability to deal with: like Zenbleed, this latest hole can be to steal sensitive data from a running vulnerable machine. The flaw (CVE-2023-20569), dubbed Inception in reference to the Christopher Nolan flick about manipulating a person’s dreams to achieve a desired outcome in the real world, was disclosed…
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‘We’re changing the clouds.’ An unintended test of geoengineering is fueling record ocean warmth
[…] researchers are now waking up to another factor, one that could be filed under the category of unintended consequences: disappearing clouds known as ship tracks. Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships’ sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has…
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The Fear Of AI and Entitled Cancel Culture Just Killed A Very Useful Tool: Prosecraft
I do understand why so many people, especially creative folks, are worried about AI and how it’s used. The future is quite unknown, and things are changing very rapidly, at a pace that can feel out of control. However, when concern and worry about new technologies and how they may impact things morphs into mob-inspiring…
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Preservation Fail: Hasbro Wants Old ‘Transformers’ Games Re-Released, Except Activision Might Have Lost Them
And here we go again. we’ve been talking about how copyright has gotten in the way of cultural preservation generally for a while, and more specifically lately when it comes to the video game industry. The way this problem manifests itself is quite simple: video game publishers support the games they release for some period…
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Gravity Changes how it works at low acceleration shown by observations of widely seperated binary stars
A new study reports conclusive evidence for the breakdown of standard gravity in the low acceleration limit from a verifiable analysis of the orbital motions of long-period, widely separated, binary stars, usually referred to as wide binaries in astronomy and astrophysics. The study carried out by Kyu-Hyun Chae, professor of physics and astronomy at Sejong…
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China floats rules for facial recognition technology – they are good and be great if the govt was bound by them too!
China has released draft regulations to govern the country’s facial recognition technology that include prohibitions on its use to analyze race or ethnicity. According to the the Cyberspace Administration of China(CAC), the purpose is to “regulate the application of face recognition technology, protect the rights and interests of personal information and other personal and property…
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Nuclear Fusion Scientists Successfully Recreate Net Energy Gain
[…] Reuters reports that scientists with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in California repeated a fusion ignition reaction. The lab’s first breakthrough was announced by the U.S. Department of Energy in December. While the previous experiment produced net energy gain, a spokesperson from the lab told the outlet that this second experiment,…
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AI listens to keyboards on video conferences – decodes passwords
[…] a new paper from the UK that shows how researchers trained an AI to decode keystrokes from noise on conference calls. The researchers point out that people don’t expect sound-based exploits. The paper reads, “For example, when typing a password, people will regularly hide their screen but will do little to obfuscate their keyboard’s…
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North Korean hackers put backdoors in Russian hypersonic missile maker computers
Reuters found cyber-espionage teams linked to the North Korean government, which security researchers call ScarCruft and Lazarus, secretly installed stealthy digital backdoors into systems at NPO Mashinostroyeniya, a rocket design bureau based in Reutov, a small town on the outskirts of Moscow. Reuters could not determine whether any data was taken during the intrusion or…
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Scientists observe first evidence of ‘quantum superchemistry’ in the laboratory
A team from the University of Chicago has announced the first evidence for “quantum superchemistry”—a phenomenon where particles in the same quantum state undergo collective accelerated reactions. The effect had been predicted, but never observed in the laboratory. […] Chin’s group is experienced with herding atoms into quantum states, but molecules are larger and much…
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What? AI-Generated Art Banned from Future Dungeons & Dragons Books After “Fan Uproar” (Or ~1600 tweets about it)
A Dungeons & Dragons expansion book included AI-generated artwork. Fans on Twitter spotted it before the book was even released (noting, among other things, a wolf with human feet). An embarrassed representative for Wizards of the Coast then tweeted out an announcement about new guidelines stating explicitly that “artists must refrain from using AI art…
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MIT Boffins Build Battery Alternative Out of Cement, Carbon Black, and Water
Long-time Slashdot reader KindMind shares a report from The Register: Researchers at MIT claim to have found a novel new way to store energy using nothing but cement, a bit of water, and powdered carbon black — a crystalline form of the element. The materials can be cleverly combined to create supercapacitors, which could in…
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Will Browsers Be Required By Law To Stop You From Visiting Infringing Sites?
Mozilla’s Open Policy & Advocacy blog has news about a worrying proposal from the French government: In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create…
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Academic Book About Emojis Can’t Include The Emojis It Talks About Because Of Copyright
Jieun Kiaer, an Oxford professor of Korean linguistics, recently published an academic book called Emoji Speak: Communications and Behaviours on Social Media. As you can tell from the name, it’s a book about emoji, and about how people communicate with them: Exploring why and how emojis are born, and the different ways in which people…
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