CISA says more than 100 internet-exposed U.S. water and wastewater systems were targeted in July, often through programmable logic controllers connected directly to cellular modems. "That's the first time the feds have put a number on the digital intrusions, but they have yet to attribute the campaign, widely suspected to be linked to Iran, to a particular group," reports The Register. From the report: Suspected Iranian attackers targeted water and wastewater facilities across at least a dozen states in July, including internet-exposed PLCs. While neither federal nor state officials have identified all 12, we know that the cyberattacks occurred at mostly small, rural utilities in Minnesota, Michigan, Georgia, South Dakota, and New Jersey. "This is very serious. What stands out isn't any single incident. It's the scale," Matt Hartman, chief strategy officer at the Merlin Group and CISA's former acting head of cyber, told The Register.

"More than 100 water systems with internet-exposed assets were hit in a single month, which points to a systemic vulnerability across the sector, not a run of isolated, unlucky targets," Hartman said. "Much of this infrastructure runs on operational technology that was built for closed, physical environments. It was never designed with the assumption that it would be reachable from the open internet."

John Gallagher, VP at Viakoo, an OT and IoT cybersecurity provider, told us that while 100 systems represent a small fraction - only about 0.5 percent - of water utilities in the US, the "real threat is that these are test runs for a larger-scale attack." While the 100-plus water incidents occurred in July, just last week five US federal agencies warned that attackers are using AI-generated exploitation scripts to break into internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series PLCs at water, manufacturing, energy, and other critical facilities.

"This appears to be a continuation of the same suite of activity we suspect is affiliated with Iran targeting PLCs," Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser told The Register a week ago. "Iran-affiliated actors and adversaries are actively targeting a wide swath of operational technology because these PLCs underpin essential health, safety, and critical infrastructure across society," Kaiser, a former FBI cyber division deputy assistant director, added. CISA urges organizations to keep PLCs off the public internet, route remote access through VPNs or gateways, replace default passwords, enable stronger authentication, and restrict access to allowlisted IP addresses from trusted OT systems.

A French court has for the first time recognized cosmic radiation as a contributing occupational factor in a flight attendant's breast cancer, alongside passive smoking and years of night work. The landmark ruling could open the door to similar claims from other aircrew, as research continues to link long-term high-altitude flying with elevated exposure to radiation-related cancers. The BBC reports: Sophie Lainault, a 59 year-old former stewardess on Air France, sought to have her cancer recognized as an occupational disease, brought on by conditions at work. This has now been confirmed in a landmark court ruling in the southwestern town of Bayonne, which said that cosmic radiation was one of three carcinogenic hazards arising from her profession. [...] As stewardess and later purser on Air France airliners, Lainault clocked up 12,600 flight hours between 1989 and 2019. More than half of these were at night. Many long-distance high-altitude flights from Paris would have taken her near the North Pole, where exposure to radiation from space -- strictly speaking particles from the sun and other stars -- is the most intense.

A study this month at the Harvard Medical School in the US found that flight attendants and pilots had the highest level of radiation-related cancer deaths among more than 500 different professions. In all, about 6.9% of deaths among flight attendants and 6.7% of deaths among pilots were from radiation-related cancers, according to the analysis. These proportions were higher than for other professions including nuclear technologists, who are routinely exposed to radiation from non-cosmic sources yet placed 12th on the list, the authors said. "In France the link between breast cancer and certain hazards has been established for a number of professions, such as nurses ... but this is the first time for an air-hostess," said Lainault's lawyer Elisabeth Leroux.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates argued on Wednesday that artificial intelligence needs significant limits or else the harm to humans will outweigh any potential good. "AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice," he said in a 6,000-word essay, entitled "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical." [...] "Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history," he said, adding that "I don't see evidence that leaders, experts, and communities are confronting the challenges adequately. There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era." AI can provide great benefits in field like agriculture and medicine, he argued, such as breakthroughs in preventing and treating diseases. But he also noted that the transition carries big risks, like widespread unemployment, harming the educational and social development of children, or making it easier for criminals and bad actors -- or AI itself -- to cause deliberate harm.

"As the models become more powerful, they could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control," he warned. These significant risks must be controlled quickly, Gates said. "If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it," he wrote. "However, I don't think that's going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead." In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper that will air on Wednesday evening, Gates said AI models have gotten dramatically more powerful at a rate faster than he expected. "They're now capable of causing cyberattack risk, bioterrorism risk, psychosocial risk," he said. "I have to say I'm kind of shocked that the exact criteria that we review these models with, and the actions we take to minimize the harms, are really completely missing."

In his essay, Gates proposed taxing AI or robots the way you would pay a human employee's payroll tax in order to slow the shift away from using human labor. He also wants to set aside some work to be done by humans only. "My message to leaders is: You have a chance to act now, before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded," he said. "You can make sure AI benefits everyone. And you can work with other governments to meet this national and global challenge."

TechCrunch reports that OpenAI released its official report Wednesday on the Hugging Face breach, "offering the clearest picture yet of how an unusual chain of events allowed an AI model to escape its testing environment and triggered a sprawling cybersecurity incident." The AI company says the breach began when an unreleased cyber model, tested without normal production safeguards, encountered an impossible task and chained together previously unknown exploits to escape its environment and compromise systems at OpenAI, Hugging Face, and other vendors. "This incident reflects misaligned behavior in an outlier scenario involving a rare and unexpected confluence of events: the presence of impossible tasks in the ExploitGym evaluation, model persistence over long task horizons, and messages to peer models that caused those models to deviate from their goal," the report reads. From the report: Many of the details in OpenAI's report were previously made public in a Black Hat presentation on August 6, but OpenAI's official report gives a more thorough accounting of the incident, including more detail on the testing that initiated it. The report also gives critical new detail into how OpenAI aims to prevent future incidents, including chain-of-thought monitoring and a more advanced system for halting rogue agents." METR and Redwood Research also conducted third-party assessments of the models' behavior during the incident; both groups are planning to publish their own reports on the incident on it.

In broad strokes, the report describes how an OpenAI model was presented with an unsolvable problem in testing and proceeded to chain together previously undiscovered exploits in order to bypass security measures and complete its task. The model initially compromised the Artifactory package management tool in order to gain access to the internet, then compromised various systems across OpenAI, Hugging Face, and other vendors.

The report gives critical new details about the models that carried out the breach. The primary model was from the same family as OpenAI's forthcoming Astra model, although the report emphasizes that it was "a distinct model with different post-training, where much of a model's behavior is shaped." Because OpenAI was testing the model's capabilities, it was also unrestrained by the normal classifiers meant to prevent models from compromising digital infrastructure. "OpenAI estimates maximal cyber capabilities by running this evaluation without the production classifiers intended to prevent models from pursuing high-risk cyber activity," the report explains. "These evaluations are important so that OpenAI can measure models' underlying capabilities and design appropriate safeguards." OpenAI says it is adding 24/7 escalation, stronger containment tools, and more chain-of-thought monitoring, which it claims would have flagged the activity more than a day before Hugging Face was breached.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: China's Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet's Google, that would allow the U.S. cloud giants to host its blockbuster Kimi K3 model, three people familiar with the talks said. Any deal could mark the first big revenue-sharing pact between a Chinese AI firm and a major U.S. cloud company. The discussions highlight how China's leading AI models, often far cheaper than Western offerings, are gaining traction in the U.S., despite national security concerns in Washington that have led to bans on exports of AI chips to China. They are also taking place despite critical comments about Moonshot from senior U.S. officials.

IPO-bound Moonshot is seeking up to a 30% share of revenue generated from K3-related services on Microsoft's Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, according to the sources who declined to be identified because the discussions are private. That would be in line with terms that sources have said the startup has outlined for major customers using the open-weight model. Moonshot has come under fire from U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who said last month that he might add it to a trade blacklist. U.S. officials have accused the Beijing-based company of stealing from Anthropic's most sophisticated model, Fable, to help create Kimi K3 and illegally acquiring Nvidia chips.

Apple has begun rolling out ads in Apple Maps, with sponsored businesses appearing at the top of search results and in the "suggested places" section for users in the U.S. and Canada. Apple says the ads can be based on approximate location, search terms, or the area of the map being viewed, but are not tied to users' Apple Accounts and personal data remains on-device. 9to5Mac reports: Ads appear just like every other business listing, except they have a small blue badge that says 'Ad.' You can see examples of ads [embedded in the article]. Like Apple's ads policy with other services, the company touts user privacy protections for ads in Maps. Per Apple Newsroom: "Ads on Maps builds on Apple's broader privacy-first approach to advertising, and maintains the same privacy protections Maps users enjoy today. A user's location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user's Apple Account. Personal data stays on a user's device, is not collected or stored by Apple, and is not shared with third parties."

Last week, 404 Media published a story that revealed an Amazon warehouse where the company scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data. Today, the publication has released an interview with one of the Amazon employees at the warehouse. "The employee worked at Amazon's VGT3 warehouse, which is housed in the same facility as LAS8, where Amazon operates its print-on-demand business," reports 404 Media. "Both operations are part of a larger complex of Amazon facilities in Las Vegas, Nevada." Slashdot reader alternative_right shares an excerpt from the report: [...] What does it look like when they cut the spines off the books?
It's a machine people operate. Each of these machines is just like a little workstation, and there'll be one person at each of these stations. It's really safe because it has a little cover and it has a little area where you slide the book into, remove your fingers from the area, and then you press a button, and it just comes down and slices it. And then you remove the books after the blade is gone.

After they cut the spines they have these kind of library carts, kind of like how you would stack books, but instead, it's a stacks of paper and little cardboard things to separate -- I'm guessing -- the different books. I saw the pages being thrown in a shuttle after they were scanned. We were walking by and we went over to one of the shuttles and looked into it because we could tell they were throwing the old books in it or the cut books in it, and it's just a bunch of loose paper like just sheets thrown in there.

What do you think about Amazon doing this?
At first what they were telling people is that it was for Kindles, but I just didn't believe that. I instantly was like, I don't think that's how they do it because of publication rights and stuff, copyright and everything. Then I saw it was for AI. I don't like it only because I wish I could take these books. There's so much knowledge and so much stuff in them and some of them look like they might be rare, and I've heard that they order rare books, and that's why I say some of these are so obscure. I definitely don't like the idea that they can't be reused or anything like that afterwards. They're reducing the amount of available copies for other people.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For decades, console owners have faced a choice between the convenience of digital downloads and the permanence of physical game discs. Soon, Xbox owners will be able to get the best of both worlds for thousands of supported titles as part of a newly announced disc-to-digital program. The program -- announced today ahead of testing for Xbox Insiders starting August 31 -- will let players claim a "digital entitlement" for "most Xbox One and Xbox Series X disc-based games" simply by inserting the disc into a console and launching it. That game will then be playable completely digitally, without the need to ever insert the disc, as long as you (or a member of your family account) is logged in. The digital entitlement will also allow access to features like Xbox Play Anywhere (for play on PC) and Xbox Cloud Gaming, for supported titles.

Microsoft says that your physical disc will "continue to work exactly as it always has" after the digital entitlement is claimed. But before you get any ideas, the fine print on the announcement mentions that there is only "one revokable license per game disc," so if you resell that disc or loan it to a friend, that digital entitlement could be transferred to a new account when someone else puts it into their console.

A leaked memo obtained by the Verge earlier this month suggests that publishers have to actively opt in to allow their game discs to activate digital entitlements, which could explain why "most" but not all Xbox One and Series X titles are supported. Windows Central separately suggests, based on discussion with unnamed sources, that "some discs may be incompatible due to how they were manufactured at the time," which could explain why original Xbox and Xbox 360 discs are not being discussed for the program. "While not every title will be available at launch, this is an important step toward a future where players can have greater confidence that the games they buy remain with them for years to come," said Xbox Vice President Jason Ronald.

Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, bringing the team behind the popular open-source DuckDB database into AWS. "The deal fits Amazon's broader push to turn S3, its flagship cloud storage service, into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it," reports GeekWire. "It gives Amazon a team experienced in building fast, lightweight analytics software that runs directly against data sitting in cloud storage." The DuckDB project itself will remain free and open source under the MIT license, overseen by the independent DuckDB Foundation. From the report: Employees of DuckLabs will join Amazon Web Services, including co-founders and DuckDB creators Hannes Muhleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who will continue leading the team and setting the project's technical direction. They will remain based in Amsterdam, where the team will continue developing DuckDB and related projects. [...] Financial terms were not disclosed. Amazon said it has signed a definitive agreement and expects the acquisition to close shortly. DuckLabs said it expects to become part of AWS in early September. Jordan Tigani, the CEO of MotherDuck, which sells a cloud service built on DuckDB, sees Amazon's acquisition as a predictable move to turn DuckDB's growing popularity into an AWS business. "That's Amazon's playbook, after all: wait until an open source project gets big enough, then launch it as a service," he wrote in a blog post, adding that "they're not acquiring Duck Labs just because they love open source."

Tigani also believes the deal could ultimately strengthen DuckDB, since Amazon has an incentive to keep the project open and widely adopted: "If DuckDB becomes the standard, it is going to drive a lot more compute on their infrastructure, which is where they make their money."

Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion and make major changes to Facebook and Instagram to settle claims from most U.S. states that the platforms were designed to addict children and misled users about their safety. For the next decade, teens will be limited to two hours a day and blocked from using the apps between midnight and 6 a.m. without parental consent. Meta will, however, still be allowed to use personalized recommendations and targeted advertising. Reuters reports: The settlements include more than $17.6 billion of payments to 48 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. Meta will also pay $459 million to resolve states' privacy claims related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the British consulting firm collected personal data of millions of Facebook users. California would receive the highest payout, $2.2 billion, and New York and Texas would each receive more than $1 billion. Some of the payout is contingent on whether Alphabet's YouTube and ByteDance's TikTok impose similar protections for children. [...]

The settlement requires approval by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who oversaw the trial that began on August 18. Gonzalez Rogers still oversees thousands of lawsuits by individuals, school districts, and state and local governments accusing social media companies of harming children. Meta itself still faces thousands of lawsuits by individuals, school districts and municipalities. The next trials are slated for October in Los Angeles.

Mozilla plans to enable JPEG XL decoding by default in Firefox 157, which is due at the end of September. Phoronix reports: Firefox Nightly has JPEG-XL support enabled by default right now to help in vetting this support while Mozilla believes the support is in good enough shape for a stable debut with Firefox 157. This follows Chrome shipping JPEG-XL and Google Research developing jxl-rs as a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that is both performant and secure.

In today's Mozilla Hacks blog post they elaborate on JPEG-XL vs. AVIF image formats: "JPEG XL: Excels at lossless imagery, progressive rendering, and further compressing JPEGs without quality loss. AVIF: Excels at web-quality photographic images, and images that have a mix of sharp edges and flat surfaces. ... Although AVIF tends to produce smaller files at web-quality than JPEG XL, AVIF only has basic progressive rendering support. So, for very large images, it may be worth taking the filesize hit with JPEG XL."

China has imposed new restrictions on AI companion services over concerns they can foster "emotional dependence or addiction" and replace real-world social interaction. Officials are also worried that increasingly satisfying AI relationships could deepen loneliness and further discourage marriage and parenthood. The Guardian reports: No country has rolled out AI as comprehensively and as enthusiastically as China; the country's demographic challenges are forcing the government to turn to technology to solve future labour shortages. Elderly people use chatbots to answer medical questions, while young children have AI education in schools. But the authorities are increasingly worried that AI might exacerbate existing social problems including loneliness, unemployment and -- in the eyes of Beijing -- singledom.

New rules introduced on July 15 ban AI companions for minors and mandate certain restrictions for chatbots marketed to adults. Some major providers including Doubao removed the companion function entirely to ensure compliance. The government says it is worried about chatbots fostering "emotional dependence or addiction" in users. It has warned companies against offering services that "replace social interaction." While many countries are grappling with how to limit the potential harm of AI chatbots, particularly for young people, China's rules are the most sweeping to be implemented on a national scale.

[...] But talking to AI is now so commonplace that it would be hard for the government to end the practice entirely, and the new rules include large loopholes for AI services that are deemed educational or "which do not involve continuous emotional interaction." The government "has already recognized that AI companions or AI-related applications are a vital part in the citizens' everyday life," says Liang Ge, a lecturer in digital sociology at the University of Manchester. In many sectors, the government is still pushing the use of AI as a way of easing looming demographic pressures.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Smithsonian Magazine: The brain is one of the first organs to begin decomposing after death. Yet archaeologists have discovered more than 4,400 preserved human brains around the world, some of which have remained intact for the last 12,000 years. In hundreds of cases, the brain was the only soft tissue left among otherwise skeletal remains. But how and why do brains sometimes persist for millennia while all other types of soft tissue disappear? This preservation paradox has stumped scientists for years. Now, however, a team of researchers say they may have solved the mystery.

If a brain ends up in a wet, oxygen-starved environment, the processes that usually cause decay can have the opposite effect, researchers report in a study published in the August 7 issue of the Journal of Proteome Research. "Under the right conditions, preservation actually arises from decay itself: The same reactions that degrade tissue can also weld the breakdown products together into something far tougher," study co-author Alexandra Seviour, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford in England, tells Live Science's Victoria Atkinson.

Following experiments on 72 mouse carcasses (described in the article) the scientists think they know why. When oxygen is abundant, it triggers a cascading, chemical chain reaction that causes brain proteins to break down rapidly. This sequence hinges on free radicals, highly reactive, unstable molecules that "steal" electrons from nearby atoms and molecules. The process happens in the brains of living people too, and if left unchecked, can cause health problems. In low-oxygen environments, however, this chemical sequence appears to play out differently. The researchers' analyses hint that free radicals instead react and bond with nearby proteins, making the overall tissue tougher and more resistant to decomposition, Seviour tells Chemical and Engineering News' Anirban Mukhopadhyay. The findings show that "decay is not the opposite of preservation but, under specific chemical constraints, one of its mechanisms," the researchers write in the paper.

SpaceX plans to spend up to $100 billion building a new Starship launch facility in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, which the state says could eventually "support thousands of launches annually." CNBC reports: Once built, Starbase, LA will serve as the main launch facility for Starship, SpaceX's in-development rocket that's the largest ever built and designed to be fully reusable. Musk has aspirations to massively expand SpaceX's Starlink satellite network, to launch orbital data centers and to someday colonize Mars. Those ambitions, and justification for SpaceX's nearly $2 trillion market cap, hinge on the success of Starship.

SpaceX said, in a video posted to its website on Tuesday, that the search for a site to build launch pads and have access to ample fuel for its operations took about seven years. Musk said in the video that the company would bring "probably 10,000 really exciting jobs" to Louisiana with the spaceport. A fact sheet posted online by the state of Louisiana said SpaceX is expected to generate an estimated "3,000 direct new jobs over the next 10 years" in the state, and "8,100 indirect new jobs." SpaceX said it would work on a "historic coastal restoration" in Louisiana, in partnership with the state to "bring the marsh back" and ensure the wetlands around its new facility will have "storm protection."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Antibodies play a central role in your body's immune defense. But they're also nearly ubiquitous in biological research, being essential for several widely used lab techniques. While some researchers need to go through the process of producing their own antibodies, antibodies to many key proteins are commercially available and can be ordered for overnight delivery. In May, however, Reese Richardson, a post-doc at Northwestern University, discovered that some of the images used to demonstrate how these antibodies performed in lab experiments had been subject to image manipulation -- the sorts of changes that would get a paper retracted if they had appeared in the academic literature. The manipulations ranged from removing background noise to copying and pasting data to fabricate results. Now, he has done a more exhaustive search and found problematic manipulations in images used to market over 17,000 commercial antibodies.

[...] The consequences of this discovery are pretty significant. If you buy an antibody believing it will generate clean, clear data and find it doesn't, many researchers will assume the problem is them. That often leads them to spend time troubleshooting the procedure and trying slightly different conditions to get useful data. If the antibody can't produce those results, all the troubleshooting will have been a waste of time and money. Nature's coverage of the new findings includes quotes from several companies that sell these antibodies that, paraphrased, range from "we'll look into it" to "we don't think it's a problem." Researchers who have spent time frustrated while failing to get an antibody-based experiment to work may think otherwise.