strangedays - Slashdot User

Submission + - Fucking Beautiful! Webb space scope spots "hourglass" star nursery (webbtelescope.org)

Submitted by Tablizer on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @08:58PM

Submission + - Thanks To Open Source, 5G Cracks 50% of the Telecom Market (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @08:37PM

Submission + - Iranian Hackers Breached Federal Agency Using Log4Shell Exploit (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @06:06PM

Submission + - Intel Unveils Real-Time Deepfake Detector, Claims 96% Accuracy Rate (venturebeat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @05:50PM

An anonymous reader writes: On Monday, Intel introduced FakeCatcher, which it says is the first real-time detector of deepfakes — that is, synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else’s likeness. Intel claims the product has a 96% accuracy rate and works by analyzing the subtle “blood flow” in video pixels to return results in milliseconds. Ilke Demir, senior staff research scientist in Intel Labs, designed FakeCatcher in collaboration with Umur Ciftci from the State University of New York at Binghamton. The product uses Intel hardware and software, runs on a server and interfaces through a web-based platform.

Unlike most deep learning-based deepfake detectors, which look at raw data to pinpoint inauthenticity, FakeCatcher is focused on clues within actual videos. It is based on photoplethysmography, or PPG, a method for measuring the amount of light that is absorbed or reflected by blood vessels in living tissue. When the heart pumps blood, it goes to the veins, which change color. With FakeCatcher, PPG signals are collected from 32 locations on the face, she explained, and then PPG maps are created from the temporal and spectral components. “We take those maps and train a convolutional neural network on top of the PPG maps to classify them as fake and real,” Demir said. “Then, thanks to Intel technologies like [the] Deep Learning Boost framework for inference and Advanced Vector Extensions 512, we can run it in real time and up to 72 concurrent detection streams.”

“FakeCatcher is a part of a bigger research team at Intel called Trusted Media, which is working on manipulated content detection — deepfakes — responsible generation and media provenance,” she said. “In the shorter term, detection is actually the solution to deepfakes — and we are developing many different detectors based on different authenticity clues, like gaze detection.” The next step after that will be source detection, or finding the GAN model that is behind each deepfake, she said: “The golden point of what we envision is having an ensemble of all of these AI models, so we can provide an algorithmic consensus about what is fake and what is real.”

Submission + - Facebook fact-checkers will stop checking Trump after presidential bid (cnn.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @09:42AM

Submission + - California First State To Ban Natural Gas Heaters and Furnaces (thehill.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25, 2022 @12:07AM

Submission + - Amazon Hires Unsafe Trucking Firms Twice As Often As Peers, WSJ Finds (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24, 2022 @07:02PM

An anonymous reader writes: For years, people in cars stuck behind blue delivery trucks in traffic have echoed media reports criticizing Amazon for clogging American roadways. It’s well-known that the Amazon drivers steering these fleets of trucks and vans don’t actually work for Amazon but are hired by companies contracted by Amazon, and Amazon has repeatedly denied liability for any dangerous driving reported, though. Because Amazon has contracts with more than 50,000 firms, just how dangerous Amazon’s contracted drivers really are remains a question that is hard to track. However, The Information reported last year that horrific car crashes are part and parcel of Amazon’s culture of convenience. And then more recently, The Wall Street Journal provided another window into how deadly America’s favorite speedy delivery service can be. Since 2015, WSJ reported this week, “Trucking companies hauling freight for Amazon have been involved in crashes that killed more than 75 people.”

To arrive at this number, WSJ partnered with Jason Miller—a Michigan State University professor who researches transportation safety—to analyze various sources of government data from “3,512 trucking companies that were inspected by authorities three or more times while hauling trailers for Amazon since February 2020.” The resulting report, WSJ said, “for the first time showed how the safety performance of Amazon’s trucking contractors compared with their peers.” And their results didn’t appear good for Amazon. For example, a review of Department of Transportation data on unsafe driving scores of more than 1,300 Amazon trucking contractors from February 2020 to early August 2022 found that contractors who worked the most with Amazon were “more than twice as likely as all other similar companies to receive bad unsafe driving scores.” WSJ also found evidence of dozens of companies that Amazon contracted that had “conditional” ratings, which is like DOT putting them on probation—a black mark that typically alienates most firms from contracting them. One Illinois-based company contracted by Amazon “scored worse than the level DOT officials consider problematic” every month of WSJ’s review period.

Submission + - Tech's K-12 CS Education Philanthropy: A Case of Corporate 'Hero Syndrome'? 1

Submitted by theodp on Saturday September 24, 2022 @04:34PM

theodp writes: "Ector County Independent School District is now part of Amazon Future Engineer's expansion to more than 500,000 elementary students nationwide," boasted Amazon this week in a press release. "Ector County ISD is grateful to the Amazon Future Engineer [AFE] program and BootUp, who will provide support for our teachers to implement computer science education into their classrooms and lessons." stated Superintendent, Dr. Scott Muri. "Our district strives to prepare Ector County’s future workforce to compete in a modern economy, and computer science knowledge is critical to that end. We are excited to see how this will inspire our students!"

AFE's expansion into elementary school education comes as the "Childhood to Career" CS program also seeks to expand its footprint in high school CS education, where AFE is spending $15 million to launch a new AP CS A curriculum and an undisclosed amount to launch a new space-themed AP CSP unit on Alexa skills app development using MIT App Inventor (AFE is an App Inventor Foundation patron). AFE partnered with College Board-endorsed AP CSP curricula provider Mobile CSP on its 'Alexa in Space' unit and has also partnered with other College Board-endorsed providers, including tech-bankrolled Code.org, AFE-tied ProjectSTEM, and AFE-backed CMU CS Academy to get CS into elementary, middle, and high schools. Tech giants Apple and Microsoft are College Board-endorsed AP CS A and AP CS Principles curricula providers in their own right, with additional K-12 CS offerings for younger kids. Google promotes its own CS First curricula, including block-based Scratch for CS First, a collaboration with MIT (Google is a Scratch Foundation sponsor). Google's Blockly technology now powers Scratch and App Inventor (which was invented at Google and moved to MIT) as well as other K-12 CS education software offerings from Code.org, Microsoft, and others.

Some may find it galling that the nation's tech giants are issuing press releases touting cash-strapped schools' reliance on their K-12 CS education philanthropy to educate students (at least those who attend schools deemed 'acceptable' enough to be given access to their benefactor's Cloud-based curriculum), especially considering the great lengths tech companies and their leaders have gone through for decades to aggressively avoid paying taxes that have contributed to schools' revenue shortfalls. That, coupled with Apple, Google, and Microsoft's role in making learning to program harder in the first place (by no longer shipping a software development environment ready for kids to use), makes it tempting to liken tech's K-12 CS education philanthropy to a case of corporate Hero Syndrome, a term used to describe the behavior of a person seeking heroism or recognition, usually by creating a harmful situation to objects or persons which they then can resolve.

Submission + - Cybersickness Could Spell an Early Death for the Metaverse (thedailybeast.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24, 2022 @02:02PM

An anonymous reader writes: Luis Eduardo Garrido couldn’t wait to test out his colleague’s newest creation. Garrido, a psychology and methodology researcher at Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic, drove two hours between his university’s campuses to try a virtual reality experience that was designed to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and different types of phobias. But a couple of minutes after he put on the headset, he could tell something was wrong. “I started feeling bad,” Garrido told The Daily Beast. He was experiencing an unsettling bout of dizziness and nausea. He tried to push through but ultimately had to abort the simulation almost as soon as he started. “Honestly, I don’t think I lasted five minutes trying out the application,” he said.

Garrido had contracted cybersickness, a form of motion sickness that can affect users of VR technology. It was so severe that he worried about his ability to drive home, and it took hours for him to recover from the five-minute simulation. Though motion sickness has afflicted humans for thousands of years, cybersickness is a much newer condition. While this means that many of its causes and symptoms are understood, other basic questions—like how common cybersickness is, and whether there are ways to fully prevent it—are only just starting to be studied. After Garrido’s experience, a colleague told him that only around 2 percent of people feel cybersickness. But at a presentation for prospective students, Garrido watched as volunteers from the audience walked to the front of an auditorium to demo a VR headset—only to return shakily to their seats. “I could see from afar that they were getting sweaty and kind of uncomfortable,” he recalled. “I said to myself, ‘Maybe I’m not the only one.’”

As companies like Meta (née Facebook) make big bets that augmented reality and virtual reality technology will go mainstream, the tech industry is still trying to figure out how to better recruit users to the metaverse, and get them to stay once there. But experts worry that cybersickness could derail these plans for good unless developers find some remedies soon.

Submission + - Controversial Artist Matches Influencer Photos With Surveillance Footage (smithsonianmag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24, 2022 @12:50PM

Submission + - Senators Introduce a Bill To Protect Open-Source Software (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23, 2022 @07:55PM

Submission + - Hunga Tonga Eruption Put Over 50 Billion Kilograms of Water Into Stratosphere (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23, 2022 @06:36PM

An anonymous reader writes: In January this year, an undersea volcano in Tonga produced a massive eruption, the largest so far this century. The mixing of hot volcanic material and cool ocean water created an explosion that sent an atmospheric shockwave across the planet and triggered a tsunami that devastated local communities and reached as far as Japan. The only part of the crater's rim that extended above water was reduced in size and separated into two islands. A plume of material was blasted straight through the stratosphere and into the mesosphere, over 50 km above the Earth's surface. We've taken a good look at a number of past volcanic eruptions and studied how they influence the climate. But those eruptions (most notably that of Mount Pinatubo) all came from volcanoes on land. Hunga Tonga may be the largest eruption we've ever documented that took place under water, and the eruption plume contained unusual amounts of water vapor—so much of it that it actually got in the way of satellite observations at some wavelengths. Now, researchers have used weather balloon data to reconstruct the plume and follow its progress during two circuits around the globe.

Your vocabulary word of the day is radiosonde, which is a small instrument package and transmitter that can be carried into the atmosphere by a weather balloon. There are networks of sites where radiosondes are launched as part of weather forecasting services; the most relevant ones for Hunga Tonga are in Fiji and Eastern Australia. A balloon from Fiji was the first to take instruments into the eruption plume, doing so less than 24 hours after Hunga Tonga exploded. That radiosonde saw increasing levels of water as it climbed through the stratosphere from 19 to 28 kilometers of altitude. The water levels had reached the highest yet measured at the top of that range when the balloon burst, bringing an end to the measurements. But shortly after, the plume started showing up along the east coast of Australia, which again registered very high levels of water vapor. Again, water reached to 28 km in altitude but gradually settled to lower heights over the next 24 hours.

The striking thing was how much of it there was. Compared to normal background levels of stratospheric water vapor, these radiosondes were registering 580 times as much water even two days after the eruption, after the plume had some time to spread out. There was so much there that it still stood out as the plume drifted over South America. The researchers were able to track it for a total of six weeks, following it as it spread out while circling the Earth twice. Using some of these readings, the researchers estimated the total volume of the water vapor plume and then used the levels of water present to come up with a total amount of water put into the stratosphere by the eruption. They came up with 50 billion kilograms. And that's a low estimate, because, as mentioned above, there was still water above the altitudes where some of the measurements stopped.

Submission + - Vultures Prevent Tens of Millions of Metric Tons of Carbon Emissions Each Year (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23, 2022 @05:21PM

An anonymous reader writes: Vultures are hard birds for humans to love. They are an obligate scavenger, meaning they get all their food from already dead prey—and that association has cast them as a harbinger of death since ancient times. But in reality, vultures are nature’s flying sanitation crew. And new research adds to that positive picture by detailing these birds’ role in a surprising process: mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. With their impressive vision and the range they can cover in their long, soaring flights, the 22 species of vultures found around the world are often the first scavengers to discover and feed on a carcass. This cleanup provides a vital service to both ecosystems and humans: it keeps nutrients cycling and controls pathogens that could otherwise spread from dead animals to living ones.

Decaying animal bodies release greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane. But most of these emissions can be prevented if vultures get to the remains first, a new study in Ecosystem Services shows. It calculates that an individual vulture eats between 0.2 and one kilogram (kg) of carcass per day, depending on the vulture species. Left uneaten, each kg of naturally decomposing carcass emits about 0.86 kg of CO2 equivalent. This estimate assumes that carcasses not eaten by vultures are left to decay. But many carcasses are composted or buried by humans, which result in more emissions than natural decay, so vulture consumption can avert even more emissions when replacing those methods. The avoided emissions may not sound like much, but multiply those estimates by the estimated 134 million to 140 million vultures around the world, and the number becomes more impressive: tens of millions of metric tons of emissions avoided per year.

But this ecosystem service is not evenly distributed around the world. It occurs mostly in the Americas, says the study’s lead author Pablo Plaza, a biologist at the National University of Comahue in Argentina. Three species found only in the Americas—the Black, Turkey and Yellow-headed vultures—are responsible for 96 percent of all vulture-related emissions mitigation worldwide, Plaza and his colleagues found. Collectively, vultures in the Americas keep about 12 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent out of the atmosphere annually. Using estimates from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, that is akin to taking 2.6 million cars off the road each year. The situation outside of the Americas stands in stark contrast. “The decline in vulture populations in many regions of the world, such as Africa and Asia, has produced a concomitant loss of the ecosystem services vultures produce,” Plaza says.

Submission + - Bosses Think Workers Do Less From Home, Says Microsoft (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23, 2022 @04:50PM

An anonymous reader writes: A major new survey from Microsoft shows that bosses and workers fundamentally disagree about productivity when working from home. Bosses worry about whether working from home is as productive as being in the office. While 87% of workers felt they worked as, or more, efficiently from home, 80% of managers disagreed. The survey questioned more than 20,000 staff across 11 countries. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told the BBC this tension needed to be resolved as workplaces were unlikely to ever return to pre-pandemic work habits. "We have to get past what we describe as 'productivity paranoia,' because all of the data we have that shows that 80% plus of the individual people feel they're very productive — except their management thinks that they're not productive. That means there is a real disconnect in terms of the expectations and what they feel."

Both Mr Nadella and Ryan Roslansky, the boss of Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, said employers were grappling with perhaps the biggest shift in working patterns in history. The number of fully-remote jobs advertised on LinkedIn soared during the pandemic but Mr Roslansky said data suggested that type of role might have peaked. He told the BBC that of some 14 or 15 million job listings that are typically live on LinkedIn, about 2% of those involved remote working before the pandemic. Some months ago, that stood at 20%, and it has since come down to 15% this month. At a time of acute labour shortages, employers are having to work harder to recruit, enthuse and retain staff. That even includes Microsoft itself, according to Mr Nadella. "We had 70,000 people who joined Microsoft during the pandemic, they sort of saw Microsoft through the lens of the pandemic. And now when we think about the next phase, you need to re-energize them, re-recruit them, help them form social connections."

An unprecedented number of people have also changed jobs since the start of the pandemic. A phenomenon Microsoft has dubbed "the great reshuffle", sees workers born after 1997 (so-called Generation Z) nearly twice as likely to switch jobs. "At the peak of our 'great reshuffle' we saw a year-on-year increase of 50% of LinkedIn members changing jobs. Gen Z was at 90%," the report said. By 2030, Generation Z will make up about 30% of the entire workforce so managers need to understand them, according to LinkedIn's boss.

Submission + - San Francisco Passes Controversial Surveillance Plan (sfgate.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23, 2022 @04:32PM

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