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Submission + - Can you picture things in your mind? (theguardian.com)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: The Guardian has an interesting article on aphantasia, which is the inability to picture objects in your mind. People with this condition tend to go into STEM fields and remember different aspects of objects and people. Personally, I never realized before reading this article that people could create mental images.

Try the red apple test.

Submission + - Court decision is a win for public-access to posts of technical standards online (abajournal.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A nonprofit group isn’t liable for copyright infringement when it posts technical standards online that have been developed by private groups and then incorporated into government regulations, a federal appeals court has ruled.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in a Sept. 12 opinion posting the standards for free online viewing constitutes fair use of the material.

Submission + - New acoustic attack steals data from keystrokes with 95% accuracy (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: A team of researchers from British universities has trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keyboard keystrokes recorded using a microphone with an accuracy of 95%.

When Zoom was used for training the sound classification algorithm, the prediction accuracy dropped to 93%, which is still dangerously high, and a record for that medium.

Such an attack severely affects the target's data security, as it could leak people's passwords, discussions, messages, or other sensitive information to malicious third parties.

Moreover, contrary to other side-channel attacks that require special conditions and are subject to data rate and distance limitations, acoustic attacks have become much simpler due to the abundance of microphone-bearing devices that can achieve high-quality audio captures.

This, combined with the rapid advancements in machine learning, makes sound-based side-channel attacks feasible and a lot more dangerous than previously anticipated.

Submission + - LiON fires on aircraft (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by khb
khb writes: CBS contends that these are happening nearly weekly. There's a nice video, and they correctly observe the difficulties in putting out such fires. Unclear why aircraft aren't being upgraded with a "disposal chute". It seems that dumping small battery items (assuming not over a forest, chaparral, or an urban area) would be a better bet than trying to manage it onboard. Or perhaps a small amount of liquid nitrogen could manage such small item fires.

Submission + - AI machines arenâ(TM)t âhallucinatingâ(TM). But their makers are (theguardian.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.

Here is one hypothesis: they are the powerful and enticing cover stories for what may turn out to be the largest and most consequential theft in human history. Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon â¦) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside propriety products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent.

This should not be legal. In the case of copyrighted material that we now know trained the models (including this newspaper), various lawsuits have been filed that will argue this was clearly illegal. Why, for instance, should a for-profit company be permitted to feed the paintings, drawings and photographs of living artists into a program like Stable Diffusion or Dall-E 2 so it can then be used to generate doppelganger versions of those very artistsâ(TM) work, with the benefits flowing to everyone but the artists themselves?

Submission + - Cats Migrated with Humans All Over the World (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by guest reader
guest reader writes: Nearly 10,000 years ago, humans settling in the Fertile Crescent, the areas of the Middle East surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, made the first switch from hunter-gatherers to farmers. They developed close bonds with the rodent-eating cats that conveniently served as ancient pest-control in society’s first civilizations.

A new study at the University of Missouri found this lifestyle transition for humans was the catalyst that sparked the world’s first domestication of cats, and as humans began to travel the world, they brought their new feline friends along with them.

While horses and cattle have seen various domestication events caused by humans in different parts of the world at various times, her analysis of feline genetics in the study strongly supports the theory that cats were likely first domesticated only in the Fertile Crescent before migrating with humans all over the world. After feline genes are passed down to kittens throughout generations, the genetic makeup of cats in western Europe, for example, is now far different from cats in southeast Asia, a process known as 'isolation by distance.'

Lyons, who has researched feline genetics for more than 30 years, said studies like this also support her broader research goal of using cats as a biomedical model to study genetic diseases that impact both cats and people, such as polycystic kidney disease, blindness and dwarfism.

In a 2021 study, Lyons and colleagues found that the cat's genomic structure is more similar to humans than nearly any other non-primate mammal.

Submission + - Snowden receives Russian passport, takes citizenship oath (apnews.com)

Submitted by Beerismydad
Beerismydad writes: From the Associated Press: Former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who fled prosecution after revealing highly classified surveillance programs, has received a Russian passport and taken the citizenship oath, Russian news agencies quoted his lawyer as saying Friday.

Lawyer Anatoly Kucherena was reported as saying that Snowden got the passport and took the oath on Thursday, about three months after Russian President Vladimir Putin granted him citizenship.

The reports did not specify whether Snowden has renounced his U.S. citizenship. The United States revoked his passport in 2013, leading to Snowden being stranded in a Moscow airport for weeks after arriving from Hong Kong, aiming to reach Ecuador.

Submission + - Computer Program for Particle Physics at Risk of Obsolescence (quantamagazine.org)

Submitted by g01d4
g01d4 writes: (FTFA) Developed by the Dutch particle physicist Jos Vermaseren, FORM is a key part of the infrastructure of particle physics, necessary for the hardest calculations. However, as with surprisingly many essential pieces of digital infrastructure, FORM’s maintenance rests largely on one person: Vermaseren himself. And at 73, Vermaseren has begun to step back from FORM development. Due to the incentive structure of academia, which prizes published papers, not software tools, no successor has emerged. If the situation does not change, particle physics may be forced to slow down dramatically.

Submission + - China Erupting in Revolt 9

Submitted by LionKimbro
LionKimbro writes: When I first heard about the "wage dispute" story at FoxConn, I thought that was all there was to it. Nope.

Dramatic footage has come out from the China Show, and completely changed the picture for me. Now I believe that a massive revolt is underway in China — directed against Zero-Covid, and even in places against the CCP and Xi specifically.

Two days ago, the China Show reported: "This is not an uprising that's saying oh let's overthrow the central government. This is not an uprising that says oh everyone rise up let's stop the communist party of China. No one's doing that right. The problem is that the Chinese government knows how things can morph. So things can take shape."

That has changed. "This is why you don't see massive revolts in China that spread at the same time. Because it's impossible. The Chinese government shuts it down and disappears the people that organize everything so everyone's too scared to do it. Again, since 1989, this is the first time I've seen... ...this is unprecedented. You do not see people riseup against a central government — they're going to local government offices but their messaging is the central government. I've never heard that. CCP step down. Step down Xi Jingping. I've never heard that before. Ever."

CNN too is reporting the story. On the front page, "Protests erupt across China."

Comparisons are being drawn with Tiananmen square. Lei's Real Talk has outlined the response from Xi: Crackdown. On the ground, people are responding with: "Help people."
Linux

Asahi Linux Is Reverse-Engineering Support For Apple Silicon, Including M1 Ultra (arstechnica.com) 46

Posted by BeauHD from the work-in-progress dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For months, a small group of volunteers has worked to get this Arch Linux-based distribution up and running on Apple Silicon Macs, adapting existing drivers and (in the case of the GPU) painstakingly writing their own. And that work is paying off -- last week, the team released its first alpha installer to the general public, and as of yesterday, the software supports the new M1 Ultra in the Mac Studio. In the current alpha, an impressive list of hardware already works, including Wi-Fi, USB 2.0 over the Thunderbolt ports (USB 3.0 only works on Macs with USB-A ports, but USB 3.0 over Thunderbolt is "coming soon"), and the built-in display. But there are still big features missing, including DisplayPort and Thunderbolt, the webcam, Bluetooth, sleep mode, and GPU acceleration. That said, regarding GPU acceleration, the developers say that the M1 is fast enough that a software-rendered Linux desktop feels faster on the M1 than a GPU-accelerated desktop feels on many other ARM chips.

Asahi's developers don't think the software will be "done," with all basic M1-series hardware and functionality supported and working out of the box, "for another year, maybe two." By then, Apple will probably have introduced another generation or two of M-series chips. But the developers are optimistic that much of the work they're doing now will continue to work on future generations of Apple hardware with relatively minimal effort. [...] If you want to try Asahi Linux on an M1 Mac, the current installer is run from the command line and requires "at least 53GB of free space" for an install with a KDE Plasma desktop. Asahi only needs about 15GB, but the installer requires you to leave at least 38GB of free space to the macOS install so that macOS system updates don't break. From there, dual-booting should work similarly to the process on Intel Macs, with the alternate OS visible from within Startup Disk or the boot picker you can launch when your start your Mac. Future updates should be installable from within your new Asahi Linux installation and shouldn't require you to reinstall from scratch.

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