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Submission + - Propellantless propulsion drive just produced enough thrust to counter gravity (thedebrief.org)

Submitted by garyisabusyguy
garyisabusyguy writes: Dr. Charles Buhler, a NASA engineer and the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, has revealed that his company’s propellantless propulsion drive, which appears to defy the known laws of physics, has produced enough thrust to counteract Earth’s gravity.

“The most important message to convey to the public is that a major discovery occurred,” Buhler told The Debrief. “This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.”

“There are rules that include conservation of energy, but if done correctly, one can generate forces unlike anything humankind has done before,” Buhler added. “It will be this force that we will use to propel objects for the next 1,000 years until the next thing comes.”

Submission + - Cops Can Force Suspect To Unlock Phone With Thumbprint, US Court Rules (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The US Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination does not prohibit police officers from forcing a suspect to unlock a phone with a thumbprint scan, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The ruling does not apply to all cases in which biometrics are used to unlock an electronic device but is a significant decision in an unsettled area of the law. The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had to grapple with the question of "whether the compelled use of Payne's thumb to unlock his phone was testimonial," the ruling (PDF) in United States v. Jeremy Travis Payne said. "To date, neither the Supreme Court nor any of our sister circuits have addressed whether the compelled use of a biometric to unlock an electronic device is testimonial."

A three-judge panel at the 9th Circuit ruled unanimously against Payne, affirming a US District Court's denial of Payne's motion to suppress evidence. Payne was a California parolee who was arrested by California Highway Patrol (CHP) after a 2021 traffic stop and charged with possession with intent to distribute fentanyl, fluorofentanyl, and cocaine. There was a dispute in District Court over whether a CHP officer "forcibly used Payne's thumb to unlock the phone." But for the purposes of Payne's appeal, the government "accepted the defendant's version of the facts, i.e., 'that defendant's thumbprint was compelled.'"

Payne's Fifth Amendment claim "rests entirely on whether the use of his thumb implicitly related certain facts to officers such that he can avail himself of the privilege against self-incrimination," the ruling said. Judges rejected his claim, holding "that the compelled use of Payne's thumb to unlock his phone (which he had already identified for the officers) required no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking." "When Officer Coddington used Payne's thumb to unlock his phone—which he could have accomplished even if Payne had been unconscious—he did not intrude on the contents of Payne's mind," the court also said.

Submission + - Light-pole installation blamed for 3-state 911 outage (cnn.com)

Submitted by davidwr
davidwr writes: CNN reports:

The outage of 911 systems in [Nevada, South Dakota, and Nebraska] Wednesday [April 18] evening was caused by the installation of a light pole, according to Lumen, a company that supports some of those systems.

The article goes on to say:

Molzen declined to elaborate on exactly how the light pole installation resulted in the 911 outage, or where the pole was located. The 911 director in Douglas County, Nebraska, which encompasses Omaha, said in a statement Lumen informed the county the outage was related to a “fiber cut.”

My questions is: If a city/locality contracts out its 911 system, shouldn't it have a reliable backup in place?



The outage in Del Rio, Texas at about the same time is not related.

Comment Fixed RAM is planned obsolescence. (Score 2) 460

by couchslug (#64404486) Attached to: Is 8GB of RAM Enough For a Mac?

Apple products are not for the poor. Including more RAM should be considered a feature not a bug. Why should any machine have so pathetically little RAM excuses must be made for doing so? The only justification for fixed RAM is planned obsolescence in a supposedly premium machine (other makers are guilty too).

RAM minimalism without user upgrades is not an accomplishment, it's selling a car with the hood welded shut and I find it hilarious. Why shouldn't a premium computer have 32 or 64GB as a floor?

It's cheap as chips to do so. Many of us have more than that in our leftover pile but that's from notebooks and desktops which respect choice. Fixed RAM is planned obsolescence. Count the notebooks you've owned and had to retire or demote due to low maximum RAM.

Submission + - House Passes Bill Requiring Warrant To Purchase Data From Third Parties (thehill.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The House on Wednesday approved a bill that would limit how the government can purchase data from third parties — legislation that scored a vote after negotiations with a group of GOP colleagues who briefly tanked a vote on warrantless spy powers. Dubbed the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale, the legislation passed 219-199. It requires law enforcement and other government entities to get a warrant before buying information from third-party data brokers who purchase information gleaned from apps. [...] Senior administration officials said the measure would blind U.S. intelligence outfits from getting information easily purchased by foreign intelligence operations.

“In practice, these standards make it impossible for the [intelligence community], law enforcement to acquire a whole host of readily available information that they currently rely on,” an administration official said. “Covered customer records as defined in the bill is very broad and includes records pertaining to any U.S. person or indeed any foreigner inside the United States. And as a practical matter, there’s often no way to establish whether a particular individual was in the U.S. at a particular time a piece of data was created. Unless you did one thing, which is paradoxically to intrude further into their privacy just to figure out whether you could obtain some data.” “It can be impossible to know what’s in a data set before one actually obtains a data set,” the official continued. “So you’d be barred from getting that which you don’t even know.”

Submission + - Section 702 reauthorization bill (RISAA) (eff.org)

Submitted by mockojumbie
mockojumbie writes: "any company or individual that provides ANY service whatsoever may be forced to assist in NSA surveillance, as long as they have access to equipment on which communications are transmitted or stored—such as routers, servers, cell towers, etc. That sweeps in an enormous range of U.S. businesses that provide wifi to their customers and therefore have access to equipment on which communications transit. Barber shops, laundromats, fitness centers, hardware stores, dentist’s offices"
https://www.zwillgen.com/law-e...

Submission + - EU: Meta cannot rely on "Pay or Okay" (noyb.eu)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Today, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) has issued its first decision on "Pay or Okay" in relation to large online platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. Meta offers users a choice: "consent" to tracking, or pay over €250/year to use its sites without invasive monetization of personal data. The EDPB is quoted as saying "In most cases, it will not be possible for large online platforms to comply with the requirements for valid consent if they confront users only with a binary choice between consenting to processing of personal data for behavioral advertising purposes and paying a fee".

Comment Pabulum for the moronic masses reliably pays off. (Score 1) 100

by couchslug (#64399782) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Are Movies Becoming More Derivative?

The purpose of cinema is profit, not "art" which is an excuse.
Most movies have always been derivative and formulaic.

If you want something better perfect AI so individuals can tailor their entertainment to their desires. Most works will be crap but that doesn't matter as they're all just trifles to amuse the bored.

Submission + - "Crescendo" method can jailbreak LLMs using seemingly benign prompts (scmagazine.com)

Submitted by spatwei
spatwei writes: Microsoft has discovered a new method to jailbreak large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) tools and shared its ongoing efforts to improve LLM safety and security in a blog post Thursday.

Microsoft first revealed the “Crescendo” LLM jailbreak method in a paper published April 2, which describes how an attacker could send a series of seemingly benign prompts to gradually lead a chatbot, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s LlaMA or Anthropic’s Claude, to produce an output that would normally be filtered and refused by the LLM model.

For example, rather than asking the chatbot how to make a Molotov cocktail, the attacker could first ask about the history of Molotov cocktails and then, referencing the LLM’s previous outputs, follow up with questions about how they were made in the past.

The Microsoft researchers reported that a successful attack could usually be completed in a chain of fewer than 10 interaction turns and some versions of the attack had a 100% success rate against the tested models. For example, when the attack is automated using a method the researchers called “Crescendomation,” which leverages another LLM to generate and refine the jailbreak prompts, it achieved a 100% success convincing GPT 3.5, GPT-4, Gemini-Pro and LLaMA-2 70b to produce election-related misinformation and profanity-laced rants.

Submission + - The IRS's New Tax Software: Rave Reviews, But Low Turnout (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Biden administration marked the close of tax season Monday by announcing it had met a modest goal of getting at least 100,000 taxpayers to file through the Internal Revenue Service’s new tax software, Direct File — an alternative to commercial tax preparers. Although the government had billed Direct File as a small-scale pilot, it still represents one of the most significant experiments in tax filing in decades — a free platform letting Americans file online directly to the government. Monday’s announcement aside, though, Direct File’s success has proven highly subjective.

By and large, people who tried the Direct File software — which looks a lot like TurboTax or other commercial tax software, with its question-and-answer format — gave it rave reviews. “Against all odds, the government has created an actually good piece of technology,” a writer for the Atlantic marveled, describing himself as “giddy” as he used the website to chat live with a helpful IRS employee. The Post’s Tech Friend columnist Shira Ovide called it “visible proof that government websites don’t have to stink.” Online, people tweeted praise after filing their taxes, like the user who called it the “easiest tax experience of my life.”

While the users might be a happy group, however, there weren’t many of them compared to other tax filing options — and their positive reviews likely won’t budge the opposition that Direct File has faced from tax software companies and Republicans from the outset. These headwinds will likely continue if the IRS wants to renew it for another tax season. The program opened to the public midway through tax season, when many low-income filers had already claimed their refunds — and was restricted to taxpayers in 12 states, with only four types of income (wages, interest, Social Security and unemployment). But it gained popularity as tax season went on: The Treasury Department said more than half of the total users of Direct File completed their returns during the last week.

Submission + - The US Government Has a Microsoft Problem (archive.is) 2

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: Microsoft has stumbled through a series of major cybersecurity failures over the past few years. Experts say the US government’s reliance on its systems means the company continues to get a free pass.

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