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Submission + - Bing AI Can't Be Trusted (dkb.blog)

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Bing AI got some answers completely wrong during their demo. But no one noticed. Instead, everyone jumped on the Bing hype train. Google’s Bard got an answer wrong during an ad, which everyone noticed. Now the narrative is “Google is rushing to catch up to Bing and making mistakes!”. That would be a fine narrative if Bing didn’t make even worse mistakes during its own demo. The reality is Bing AI did a great job of creating media hype, but their product is no better than Google’s Bard. At least as far as we can tell from the limited information we have about both.

Submission + - The reports of X.Org's death are greatly exaggerated (phoronix.com)

Submitted by AntisocialNetworker
AntisocialNetworker writes: I see in Phoronix today that "X.Org Developers Conference 2023 Returning To Spain". I thought the Wayland people kept saying X.Org was dangerously unsupported cruft or something. Am I missing something? Who are these "developers"?
(And can anyone tell me how to get Wayland to work properly with SDDM? Have you got "Switch User" to work?)

Submission + - UK governmennt orders extraditionn of Julian Assange to the US

Submitted by Bu11etmagnet
Bu11etmagnet writes: The UK government has ordered the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to face spying charges. He has 14 days to appeal.
Home Secretary Priti Patel signed the extradition order on Friday, and it follows a British court ruling in April that Assange could be sent to the US.

The Home Office said in a statement that "the UK courts have not found that it would be oppressive, unjust or an abuse of process to extradite Mr Assange."

https://www.euronews.com/2022/...

Submission + - China Built a 246-Foot Tower To Test An Emerging Solar Power System (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: [T]he world is now one step closer to seeing operational space-based solar energy as scientists from China's Xidian University completed testing and inspection on a ground array built to collect space-based solar power. They conducted a successful test of the "world's first full-link and full-system solar power plant" on June 5, according to a press statement from the university. The space-based solar power plant is a 246-feet-tall (75 meters) steel tower built on Xidian University's southern campus.

In theory, the Xidian University power plant will connect to orbital satellites that will harvest solar power 24/7 due to their geostationary orbits, before beaming that energy down to Earth via high-frequency microwave beams. The power plant will feature five different subsystems aimed at developing space-based solar power arrays. Space-based solar power has great potential as it can collect energy continuously while sidestepping common problems such as bad weather and waiting for daybreak. However, hurdles do remain, such as assessing the effects of a high-frequency energy beam on communications, air traffic, and the well-being of nearby residents.

Xidian University's new ground station is part of a space-based solar power proposal called OMEGA, which stands for Orb-Shape Membrane Energy Gathering Array. The project was first proposed in 2014 by Duan Baoyan from the Xidian University School of Electromechanical Engineering and his colleagues. [...] China's OMEGA project, meanwhile, has successfully transmitted energy wirelessly as microwaves over a distance of approximately 180 feet (55 meters). This capability puts the project three years ahead of its original schedule, the university says in its press release. Still, Baoyan concedes that a lot of work is still required, and fully operational space-based solar power could still be years away.

Submission + - Apple Hit With Yet Another 'Batterygate' Lawsuit (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The memory of "Batterygate" continues to be a thorn in Apple's side. In case you need a reminder, "Batterygate" refers to a 2016/17 scandal where Apple added an undocumented battery throttling capabilities to iOS 10.2.1 designed to slow the performance of the iPhone if the battery was deemed to be worn. It also came with unexpected side effects, causing handsets to reboot in cold weather or when the battery's charge level was low. The feature was initially rolled out to iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, and iPhone SE and later expanded to include the iPhone 7, 7 Plus, 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X models.

This latest UK-based multimillion-pound legal claim has been launched by Justin Gutmann, a consumer rights campaigner, and alleges that Apple deliberately misled users, and rather than roll out a battery recall or replacement program; the company instead pushed out this feature to cover up the fact that older iPhone batteries were not able to cope with the new power demands put on them.

Apple did eventually roll out a $29 battery replacement program, a program that saw the company carry out 11 million battery replacements in 2018, compared to the 1 to 2 million that would normally be carried out in a year. This resulted in Apple issuing a profit warning in January 2019, the company's first since 2002. If Apple loses, the company could be forced to pay damages of more than $950m to the 25 million people who purchased affected iPhones. Following the US settlement in March 2020, Apple agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over the same issue, paying out $25 per iPhone, with the total capped at $310m.

Submission + - SPAM: Europe's major new rocket, the Ariane 6, is delayed again

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: First SLS and now this ...

Europe's much-anticipated next-generation rocket, which has a roughly comparable lift capacity to SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, was originally due to launch before the end of 2020.

The Ariane 6 rocket has subsequently been delayed a few times, but before this week the European Space Agency had been holding to a debut launch date before the end of this year. However, during a BBC interview on Monday, European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher said the rocket would not fly until sometime in 2023.

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket aces record 13th flight in Starlink satellite launch
Link to Original Source

Submission + - The Cult in Google (medium.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I first joined Google in 2017 as part of Google Developer Studio (GDS), a production company within the heart of Google, making advertisements, instructional content, and produced events, all for different teams within Google itself.

I was fired from my team there in February of 2021 because I raised alarm about a cult within Google, a group called the Fellowship of Friends. The group is well-documented: There are allegations of child abuse, human trafficking, forced abortions, and rape within the group, which has some 1,500 members worldwide and makes frequent prophecies of an imminent apocalypse.

The cult’s members dominate my former team at Google through favoritism and cronyism, not to mention direct payments back to the cult (thus funding its activities). I believe that as a result of my complaints about the Fellowship, I lost my job at Google. I have filed a lawsuit and my story is out today in the New York Times. But I also wanted to tell my story in my own words, so here it goes.

Submission + - KDE Plasma 5.25 released (kde.org)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop environment, which is also powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck portable gaming console. The KDE Community announced release of KDE Plasma 5.25 . This new version brings many improvements: the accent colour can now be set based on the prominent colour from the current desktop background image (it updates if you use slide-show wallpapers) and it applies to more graphical elements, Floating Panels add a margin all around the panel to make it float while no window is maximised. Touch-screen mode can now be activated by detaching the screen, rotating it 360, or enabling it manually. The Overview effect can be activated by gestures on touchpad or touchscreen. The Global Theme settings page lets you pick and choose which parts to apply. The Application page for Discover has been redesigned and gives you links to the application’s documentation and website, and shows what system resources it has access to. Panels can now be navigated with the keyboard, and you can assign custom shortcuts to focus individual panels.

Submission + - Apple faces anti-trust probe into App Tracking Transparency (macrumors.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Germany's Federal Cartel Office, the Bundeskartellamt, is investigating to see if Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature is anti-competitive and self-serving. The primary complaint is that they want a fair marketplace with business models that allow fair use of data, but Apple must ensure the rules of its marketplace are pro-competitive.

App Tracking Transparency is a feature that allows users to block access to the tracking ID of the phone, which is unique per app and per installation of the app.

Submission + - Ten years after the Higgs, physicists face the nightmare of finding nothing else (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A decade ago, particle physicists thrilled the world. On 4 July 2012, 6000 researchers working with the world’s biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, announced they had discovered the Higgs boson, a massive, fleeting particle key to their abstruse explanation of how other fundamental particles get their mass. The discovery fulfilled a 45-year-old prediction, completed a theory called the standard model, and thrust physicists into the spotlight.

Then came a long hangover. Before the 27-kilometer-long ring-shaped LHC started to take data in 2010, physicists fretted that it might produce the Higgs and nothing else, leaving no clue to what lies beyond the standard model. So far, that nightmare scenario is coming true. “It’s a bit disappointing,” allows Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “I thought we would discover supersymmetry,” the leading extension of the standard model.

It’s too early to despair, many physicists say. After 3 years of upgrades, the LHC is now powering up for the third of six planned runs, and some new particle could emerge in the billions of proton-proton collisions it will produce every second. In fact, the LHC should run for another 15 years, and with further upgrades should collect 17 times as much data as it already has. All those data could reveal subtle signs of novel particles and phenomena.

Still, some researchers say the writing is on the wall for collider physics. “If they don’t find anything, this field is dead,” says Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago who hunts dark matter in smaller experiments. John Ellis, a theorist at King’s College London, says hopes of a sudden breakthrough have given way to the prospect of a long, uncertain grind toward discovery. “It’s going to be like pulling teeth, not like teeth falling out.”

Submission + - MIT researchers uncover 'unpatchable' flaw in Apple M1 chips (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by waspleg
waspleg writes: The vulnerability lies in a hardware-level security mechanism utilized in Apple M1 chips called pointer authentication codes, or PAC. This feature makes it much harder for an attacker to inject malicious code into a device’s memory and provides a level of defense against buffer overflow exploits, a type of attack that forces memory to spill out to other locations on the chip.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, however, have created a novel hardware attack, which combines memory corruption and speculative execution attacks to sidestep the security feature. The attack shows that pointer authentication can be defeated without leaving a trace, and as it utilizes a hardware mechanism, no software patch can fix it.

The attack, appropriately called “Pacman,” works by “guessing” a pointer authentication code (PAC), a cryptographic signature that confirms that an app hasn’t been maliciously altered. This is done using speculative execution — a technique used by modern computer processors to speed up performance by speculatively guessing various lines of computation — to leak PAC verification results, while a hardware side-channel reveals whether or not the guess was correct.

Submission + - AMD Details RDNA 3 Graphics, Zen 4 Performance And Phoenix Point Laptop Products (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD unveiled new details of its technology roadmap yesterday at its 2022 Financial Analyst Day. Chief among them were disclosures on the company's next-gen RDNA 3 GPU architecture, Zen 4 CPU architecture and Phoenix Point laptop SoC. AMD's new RDNA 3 GPU architecture for Radeon graphic cards and mobile will be a chiplet-based design, much like the company's Ryzen CPU offering. AMD also confirmed that RDNA 3 GPUs would be fabricated on a 5nm process, likely TSMC N5. The company continued to note that an "optimized graphics pipeline" will enable yet higher clock rates, while the GPU's "rearchitected compute unit" will have ray-tracing performance improvements over RDNA 2 as well. AMD says that RDNA 3 GPUs are coming later this year, with RDNA 4 arriving likely in late 2023. Meanwhile, AMD's Zen 4 is set to be the "world's first 5nm CPU," arriving later this year with a 10 percent IPC lift and greater than 15 percent single-threaded performance gain. Zen 4 will also support DDR5, AVX-512 extensions for AI workloads and a massive 125 percent increase in memory bandwidth. AMD is claiming a 35% multithreaded performance lift for Zen 4, and its Phoenix Point laptop platform SoC will be both Zen 4 and RNDA 3 infused. This is a first for AMD, since typically its laptop product's integrated graphics trail the company's current-gen GPU architecture by at least a generation. Phoenix point is set to arrive likely in the first half of 2023.

Submission + - 'I Love the Linux Desktop, But That Doesn't Mean I Don't See Its Problems' (theregister.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Recently, The Register's Liam Proven wrote tongue in cheek about the most annoying desktop Linux distros. He inspired me to do another take. Proven pointed out that Distrowatch currently lists 270 – count 'em – Linux distros. Of course, no one can look at all of those. But, having covered the Linux desktop since the big interface debate was between Bash and zsh rather than GNOME vs KDE, and being the editor-in-chief of a now-departed publication called Linux Desktop, I think I've used more of them than anyone else who also has a life beyond the PC. In short, I love the Linux desktop. Many Linux desktop distros are great. I've been a big Linux Mint fan for years now. I'm also fond, in no particular order, of Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and MX Linux. But you know what? That's a problem right there. We have many excellent Linux desktop distros, which means none of them can gain enough market share to make any real dent in the overall market.
[...]
Besides over 200 distros, there are 21 different desktop interfaces and over half-a-dozen different major ways to install software such as the Debian Package Management System (DPKG), Red Hat Package Manager (RPM), Pacman, Zypper, and all too many others. Then there are all the newer containerized ways to install programs including Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage. I can barely keep them all straight and that's part of my job! How can you expect ordinary users to make sense of it all? You can't. None of the major Linux distributors – Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE – really care about the Linux desktop. Sure, they have them. They're also major desktop influencers. But their cash comes from servers, containers, the cloud, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The desktop? Please. We should just be glad they spend as many resources as they do on them.

Now, all this said, I don't want you to get the impression that I don't think the conventional Linux desktop is important. I do. In fact, I think it's critical. Microsoft, you see, is abandoning the traditional PC-based desktop. In its crystal ball, Microsoft sees Azure-based Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) as its future. [...] That means that the future of a true desktop operating system will lie in the hands of Apple with macOS and us with Linux. As someone who remembers the transition from centrally controlled mainframes and minicomputers to individually empowered PCs, I do not want to return to a world where all power belongs to Microsoft or any other company.

Submission + - SPAM: Microplastics Found In Freshly Fallen Antarctic Snow For First Time

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microplastics have been found in freshly fallen snow in Antarctica for the first time, which could accelerate snow and ice melting and pose a threat to the health of the continent’s unique ecosystems. The tiny plastics — smaller than a grain of rice — have previously been found in Antarctic sea ice and surface water but this is the first time it has been reported in fresh snowfall, the researchers say. The research, conducted by University of Canterbury PhD student, Alex Aves, and supervised by Dr Laura Revell has been published in the scientific journal The Cryosphere.

Aves collected snow samples from the Ross Ice Shelf in late 2019 to determine whether microplastics had been transferred from the atmosphere into the snow. Up until then, there had been few studies on this in Antarctica. “We were optimistic that she wouldn’t find any microplastics in such a pristine and remote location,” Revell said. She instructed Aves to also collect samples from Scott Base and the McMurdo Station roadways – where microplastics had previously been detected — so “she’d have at least some microplastics to study,” Revell said. But that was an unnecessary precaution – plastic particles were found in every one of the 19 samples from the Ross Ice Shelf. “It’s incredibly sad but finding microplastics in fresh Antarctic snow highlights the extent of plastic pollution into even the most remote regions of the world,” Aves said.

Aves found an average of 29 microplastic particles per litre of melted snow, which is higher than marine concentrations reported previously from the surrounding Ross Sea and in Antarctic sea ice. Samples taken from immediately next to the scientific bases on Ross Island, Scott Base and McMurdo Station threw up larger concentrations – nearly three times that of remote areas. There were 13 different types of plastic found, with the most common being PET – the plastic commonly used to make soft drink bottles and clothing. Atmospheric modelling suggested they may have travelled thousands of kilometres through the air, however it is equally likely the presence of humans in Antarctica has established a microplastic ‘footprint’, Revell said.
Link to Original Source

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