One of the Mac's built-in malware detection tools may not be working quite as well as you think. From a report: At the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas, longtime Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle presented findings today about vulnerabilities in Apple's macOS Background Task Management mechanism, which could be exploited to bypass and, therefore, defeat the company's recently added monitoring tool. There's no foolproof method for catching malware on computers with perfect accuracy because, at their core, malicious programs are just software, like your web browser or chat app. It can be difficult to tell the legitimate programs from the transgressors. So operating system makers like Microsoft and Apple, as well as third-party security companies, are always working to develop new detection mechanisms and tools that can spot potentially malicious software behavior in new ways.

Apple's Background Task Management tool focuses on watching for software "persistence." Malware can be designed to be ephemeral and operate only briefly on a device or until the computer restarts. But it can also be built to establish itself more deeply and "persist" on a target even when the computer is shut down and rebooted. Lots of legitimate software needs persistence so all of your apps and data and preferences will show up as you left them every time you turn on your device. But if software establishes persistence unexpectedly or out of the blue, it could be a sign of something malicious. With this in mind, Apple added Background Task Manager in macOS Ventura, which launched in October 2022, to send notifications both directly to users and to any third-party security tools running on a system if a "persistence event" occurs. This way, if you know you just downloaded and installed a new application, you can disregard the message. But if you didn't, you can investigate the possibility that you've been compromised.

"Earlier this year, after 15 years of searching, scientists finally heard the background hum of low-frequency gravitational waves that fill our universe," writes Space.com.

"Now, the hard work of searching for the source of these ripples in spacetime can begin." Currently, the primary suspects in this case are pairings of supermassive black holes with masses millions, or even billions, of times that of the sun. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't room for a few unusual suspects, which could potentially point us toward new physics....

[G]ravitational waves detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) express wavelengths that are thousands of miles (or km) in length and hold frequencies of milliseconds to seconds. The new gravitational waves detected by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), by contrast, have wavelengths on a scale of trillions of miles (or km). This is similar to the distance between the sun and its neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, a staggering 20 light-years in length. Plus, NANOGrav gravitational wavelengths have frequencies on scales of years instead of mere seconds. Practically, what this means is scientists need to build over 15 years of NANOGrav data to confirm a low-frequency gravitational wave detection.

But, when it happens, it's worth the wait. That's because these results have the capacity to point us toward new information about our universe... "The detection of low-frequency gravitational waves means they're from very different sources to the LIGO and Virgo sources, which are stellar mass black holes and neutron star mergers," Scott Ransom, a National Radio Astronomy Observatory astronomer and former chair of NANOGrav, told Space.com... Ransom is part of a collaboration of researchers that believe low-frequency gravitational waves, including those detected by NANOGrav, may originate from a pretty incredible source. They could come from, the team argues, hundreds of thousands of supermassive black hole pairings that, over the 13.8-billion-year course of cosmic history, came close enough together that they've merged...

"For many decades, theorists have hypothesized that supermassive black hole binaries should produce a signal with characteristics just like what NANOGrav and other pulsar timing arrays are seeing," Luke Zoltan Kelly, a Northwestern University theoretical astrophysicist and NANOGrav researcher, told Space.com. "For most of the community, supermassive black hole binaries are a natural best guess for what's producing the gravitational wave background...." Zoltan Kelley pointed out to Space.com that besides binaries, there are a number of new models in cosmology and in particle physics that, under the right circumstances, could also produce a similar gravitational wave background to that detected by NANOGrav. For example, axion or 'fuzzy' dark matter, cosmic strings, inflationary phase transitions, and many others," the Northwestern astrophysicist said.

"What's really exciting about these possibilities is that each of these models is an attempt to explain some of the biggest current mysteries of our universe."

Monday sees the release of "The Billion Dollar Heist," a documentary about the theft of $81 million from the Bangladesh Bank, considered the biggest cyber-heist of all time. The film's executive producer wrote the book Dark Market: How Hackers Became the New Mafia (and is also a rector at the Institute for Human Sciences).

But he's also written an article for the Financial Times outlining the complicated background of Russian-speaking hacker gangs responsible for malware and ransomware, starting with "one of the most remarkable if little-known events in post-cold war history: the first and, to my knowledge, the last publicly organised conference of avowed criminals" in May, 2002.

The First Worldwide Carders Conference was the brainchild of the administrators of a landmark website, carderplanet.com. Known as "the family", this was a mixed group of young men, both Ukrainians and Russians, who had spent the previous 10 years growing up in a lively atmosphere of gangster capitalism. During the 1990s, conventional law and order in the former Soviet Union had broken down. The collapse of the communist system had left a vacuum in which new forms of economic activity were emerging...

Founded a year before the conference, CarderPlanet revolutionised web-based criminal activity, especially the lucrative trade in stolen or cloned credit card data, by solving the conundrum that until then had faced every bad guy on the web: how can I do business with this person, as I know he's a criminal, so he must be untrustworthy by definition? To obviate the problem, the CarderPlanet administrators created an escrow system for criminals. They would act as guarantor of any criminal sale of credit and debit card data — a disinterested party mediating between the vendor and the purchaser... The escrow system led to an explosion of credit card crime around the world in which many criminal fortunes were made....

Roman Stepanenko Vega, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian national who was one of the founders and administrators of CarderPlanet, explained to me how "two days before the conference's opening, we received a visit from an FSB [Federal Security Service] officer in Moscow. He explained that Moscow had no objections to us cloning credit cards or defrauding banks in Europe and the United States but anywhere within the CIS was off limits." In addition, the FSB officer let CarderPlanet know that if the Russian state ever required assistance from criminal gangs, it would be expected to co-operate...

Members of criminal gangs were later recruited into notorious state-backed hacking teams such as Advanced Persistent Threat 28.
A 2021 ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline brought warnings of a U.S. counterattack, the article notes, after which "Russian police started arresting and imprisoning cyber criminal groups." Ransomware attacks now seem particularly focused on Europe, and "According to cyber-security experts, the Russian government is giving these criminal groups information on potential targets." But once more the hackers have been careful not to cross what the Americans consider red lines, as advised, presumably, by Russia's security services. Russia is probably confident that disrupting European businesses will be unlikely to provoke a cyber attack. But the U.S. — whether its government, municipalities or police — remains strictly off-limits.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the article.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a report from NBC News: A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the Biden administration to enforce regulations aimed at clamping down on so-called ghost guns -- firearm-making kits available online that people can assemble at home. The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, in a brief order (PDF) put on hold a July 5 ruling by a federal judge in Texas that blocked the regulations nationwide. The vote was 5-4, with conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberal justices in the majority.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, commonly known as ATF, issued the regulations last year to tackle what it claims has been an abrupt increase in the availability of ghost guns. The guns are difficult for law enforcement to trace, with the administration calling them a major threat to public safety. The rule clarified that ghost guns fit within the definition of 'firearm' under federal law, meaning that the government has the power to regulate them in the same way it regulates firearms manufactured and sold through the traditional process. The regulations require manufacturers and sellers of the kits to obtain licenses, mark the products with serial numbers, conduct background checks and maintain records.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Production companies are scanning the faces and bodies of actors and actresses, who fear their likeness will be used to create fake AI doubles for TV shows and films in the future. Some workers spoke to NPR last week about being subjected to the scans, and feeling like they couldn't say no. Alexandria Rubalcaba, who was working as a background actor, described being called into a trailer and asked to stand in front of cameras.

"Have your hands out. Have your hands in. Look this way. Look that way. Let us see your scared face. Let us see your surprised face," she said. What was most concerning, however, was that she didn't know what or how her images were going to be used. "My first thought leaving the trailer was, 'Oh this might just be the future," Lubsey said. "We might just lose our jobs," Dom Lubsey, an actor from Los Angeles, added. Studios already use computational techniques to create synthetic images of people to create fake crowds for backgrounds in films.

It's not too far-fetched to think that extras can also be generated too. Andrew Susskind, an associate professor at Drexel University's film and TV department, explained how AI-made background actors would slash production budgets. "Imagine ballroom scenes, party scenes, any scenes that need tons of extras," Susskind said. "Imagine the amounts of money they would be saving. Not paying $180 a day. Plus meals. Plus costuming," he said.

The Washington Post begins a recent article with the story of an 18-year-old drug dealer with mental health issues named Zachary Burkard, who shot two unarmed 17-year-olds with a "ghost gun" he built from a kit bought online.

The father of one of those 17-year-olds thinks "They've just made it entirely too easy to get these guns... A child can buy one. There's no background checks. You don't even need a bank account. You can go to 7-Eleven and get a debit card, put money on it and buy a gun." The families of the two teens, with the help of the anti-gun-violence group Everytown for Gun Safety, are now suing the distributor of the parts Burkard used to make his ghost gun, 80P Builder of Florida, and the manufacturer, Polymer80 of Nevada, for gross negligence in providing a teenager with a weapon when he was not legally able to buy a handgun from a federally licensed dealer. The case, those who track the weapons say, demonstrates a frightening phenomenon... Teenagers have discovered the ease with which they can acquire the parts for a ghost gun, and they have been buying, building and shooting the homemade guns with alarming frequency. Everytown for Gun Safety compiled a list of more than 50 incidents involving teens and ghost guns since 2019. Among them:

- In Brooklyn Park, Minn., police arrested two teens with ghost guns in December after authorities said one of them attempted to shoot someone outside their car but instead killed their friend inside it.
- In New Rochelle, N.Y., a 16-year-old created a "ghost gun factory" in his bedroom last year, police said, before killing another 16-year-old...

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) estimated that Polymer80 was responsible for more than 88 percent of the ghost guns recovered by police between 2017 and 2021, though there are nearly 100 manufacturers selling parts, or full kits, which can be made into unserialized guns, a list compiled by Everytown shows. Teens are hardly the only users. Last year, police departments seized at least 25,785 ghost guns nationwide, the Justice Department said recently, and those are just the weapons submitted by police to ATF for tracing, even though they don't have serial numbers and largely cannot be traced. In 2021, the number of guns recovered was 19,344, meaning seizures rose 33 percent the following year.

ATF has linked ghost guns to 692 homicides and nonfatal shootings through 2021, including mass killings and school shootings...

[This May] in Baltimore, authorities arrested three 14-year-olds after armed robberies and an armed carjacking. Police said one of them had a ghost gun. And in Valdosta, Ga., authorities said, a 16-year-old bought a ghost gun kit online in 2021 and assembled her own Glock-style pistol. One day while some friends were at her house, the teen accidentally shot a 14-year-old in the head, leaving him partially paralyzed, with severe brain damage and permanent physical and cognitive issues, his family's lawyer Melvin Hewitt said.
While some states have passed regulations, last year America's national firearm-regulating agency also declared parts of ghost guns to be firearms, according to the article, in an attempt to close a commonly-cited loophole. The parts makers challenged the new rule in court, lost twice, then won in a conservative federal court in Texas. The U.S. Justice Department may now appeal that decision to the higher Fifth Circuit court, and if it loses there "could appeal to the Supreme Court." Dudley Brown, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, said he is against all regulation of privately made firearms, calling the practice of building weapons a "long and storied tradition in America."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: During today's press conference in which Hollywood actors confirmed that they were going on strike, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA's chief negotiator, revealed a proposal from Hollywood studios that sounds ripped right out of a Black Mirror episode. In a statement about the strike, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) said that its proposal included "a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors' digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members."

When asked about the proposal during the press conference, Crabtree-Ireland said that "This 'groundbreaking' AI proposal that they gave us yesterday, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day's pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation. So if you think that's a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again."

The use of generative AI has been one of the major sticking points in negotiations between the two sides (it's also a major issue behind the writers strike), and in her opening statement of the press conference, SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said that "If we don't stand tall right now, we are all going to be in trouble, we are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines." The SAG-AFTRA strike will officially commence at midnight tonight.

We've just had the world's first press conference with AI-enabled, humanoid social robots. Click here to jump straight to Slashdot's transcript of all the robots' answers during the press conference, or watch the 40-minute video here.

It all happened as the United Nations held an "AI for Good" summit in Geneva, where the Guardian reports that the foyer was "humming with robotic voices, the whirring of automated wheels and limbs, and Desdemona, the 'rock star' humanoid, who is chanting 'the singularity will not be centralised' on stage backed by a human band, Jam Galaxy."

But the Associated Press describes how one UN agency had "assembled a group of robots that physically resembled humans at a news conference Friday, inviting reporters to ask them questions in an event meant to spark discussion about the future of artificial intelligence. "The nine robots were seated and posed upright along with some of the people who helped make them at a podium in a Geneva conference center... Among them: Sophia, the first robot innovation ambassador for the U.N. Development Program, or UNDP; Grace, described as a health care robot; and Desdemona, a rock star robot."

"I'm terrified by all of this," said one local newscaster, noting that the robots also said they "had no intention of rebelling against their creators."

But the Associated Press points out an important caveat: While the robots vocalized strong statements - that robots could be more efficient leaders than humans, but wouldn't take anyone's job away or stage a rebellion - organizers didn't specify to what extent the answers were scripted or programmed by people. The summit was meant to showcase "human-machine collaboration," and some of the robots are capable of producing preprogrammed responses, according to their documentation.
Two of the robots seemed to disagree on whether AI-powered robots should submit to stricter regulation. (Although since they're only synthesizing sentences from large-language models, can they really be said to "agree" or "disagree"?)

There were unintentionally humorous moments, starting right from the beginning. Click here to start reading Slashdot's transcript of the robots' answers:

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NewScientist: Netflix researchers have created a new type of AI-powered green-screen technology that can produce realistic visual effects for film and television in real time. Green-screen technology is routinely used to capture footage of actors that can then be inserted in the foreground of virtual or prerecorded scenes. To do this, actors are filmed against a bright green background, which is easily isolated and removed digitally. This process can be done automatically with reasonable accuracy, such as in television weather forecasts, but it can be thrown by items of green clothing or by transparent or fine objects, like wisps of hair. When greater accuracy is needed in films or television series, specialist operators tweak settings manually, sometimes requiring hours to perfect a shot.

In a bid to create a technique that is both fast and accurate, Netflix has come up with a method it calls Magenta Green Screen (MGS). Actors are filmed against a background of bright green LEDs while being lit from the front with red and blue ones, which together create a magenta glow (see video, [here]). Because digital cameras work by taking an individual red, green and blue value for each pixel, this technique has the effect of creating a green channel that records only the background, with the foreground appearing black, and red and blue channels that record only the foreground, leaving the background looking black. Together these create the magenta and green look. Film editors can replace the green channel in real time, realistically and instantly placing the actors in the foreground of another scene, with even potentially tricky areas, such as transparent bottles or the area around strands of hair, working without problems.

But there is a problem with the method. Because the foreground is only recorded in blue and red, it leaves the actors looking magenta-tinted. To solve this, Netflix uses artificial intelligence to put the full range of color back into the foreground, using a photograph of the actors lit normally as a reference to create a realistic-looking green channel. This AI works quickly, but not yet in real time, although fast techniques such as averaging the red and blue channels to create an approximation of a green channel work effectively enough for the director to monitor while filming.

Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua, New Guinea in 2014. CBS News reports: Loeb and his team just brought the materials back to Harvard for analysis. The U.S. Space Command confirmed with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that the material came from another solar system. The government gave Loeb a 10 km (6.2 mile) radius of where it may have landed. "That is where the fireball took place, and the government detected it from the Department of Defense. It's a very big area, the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down," said Loeb. "We figured the distance of the fireball based off the time delay between the arrival of blast wave, the boom of explosion, and the light that arrived quickly."

Their calculations allowed them to chart the potential path of the meteor. Those calculations happened to carve a path right through the same projected 10 km range that came from the U.S. government. Loeb and his crew took a boat called the Silver Star out to the area. The ship took numerous passes along and around the meteor's projected path. Researchers combed the ocean floor by attaching a sled full of magnets to their boat. "We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background," explained Loeb, "They have colors of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth."

An analysis of the composition showed that the spherules are made of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, and 2% titanium, plus trace elements. They are sub-millimeter in size. The crew found 50 of them in total. "It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before, and catalogued by NASA," added Loeb, "We calculated its speed outside the solar system. It was 60 km per second, faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun. The fact that it was made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun, suggested potentially it could be a spacecraft from another civilization or some technological gadget." He likens the situation to any of the Voyager spacecrafts launched by NASA.

CNBC has created a 15-minute video titled "The Rise and Fall of Skype," telling the story of how Skype was developed in just nine months in 2003 by a six-person group of childhood friends in Estonia. "We were smart engineers," says Skype's former chief technical architect Ahti Heinla. "We learned on the go. None of us had any telecoms background." But at the end of the interview, he concedes "I myself use Skype right now fairly little. I still have it installed on my phone, but my primary communication methods now are elsewhere."

GigaOm founder Om Malik tells CNBC it was Skype's missteps that enabled the massive growth of WhatsApp, and shared this succinct diagnosis of what's happening to Skype. "Microsoft is where consumer brands go to die." From an accompanying article on CNBC's web site: In 2005 eBay bought it. That deal didn't work out as planned, and an investor group led by Silver Lake purchased a majority stake. Microsoft then stepped in, shelling out $8.5 billion for the company in 2011. Even backed by the world's largest software company, Skype is falling by the wayside. During the pandemic, consumers and business workers turned to tools like Zoom and Meta's WhatsApp, and now there are any number of options to quickly connect with groups of friends and colleagues over smartphones... Microsoft has promoted Skype in Outlook and Windows and even enriched the app with its Bing generative artificial intelligence chatbot. But the numbers still don't look great.

In March 2020, Microsoft said Skype had 40 million daily active users, a number that's since slipped to 36 million, according to a spokesperson. Microsoft's newer Teams communication app, by contrast, is growing in popularity, rising from nearly 250 million monthly users in July 2021 to a record of over 300 million in the first quarter.
Microsoft Teams reached an all-time high of 300 million active users in the second quarter of 2023, according to CNBC's video report. But a research VP at International Data Corp says Microsoft Teams was successful — in taking users away from Skype.

GigaOm's Malik says Microsoft "failed to capitalize on Skype, 100%. Steve Balmer was the king of buying things and not knowing what to do with them... What happened with Skype is the story of every large company with a lot of middle management: they didn't innovate on the product for a very long time."

Jordan Novet from CNBC Business News calls Skype "a product with an uncertain future," arguing that Microsoft "is pouring a lot of engineering resources into making Teams a big destination for communication. It's not doing the same thing with Skype." Could Skype make a comeback? "Anything is possible," Novet concedes. "Microsoft is trying to make Skype happen in a bigger way now." He points out that Skype is now equipped with Bing's AI-powered chatbot, so "You can talk to Bing in Skype. Will that make Skype explode in popularity, or make a comeback? I don't think so."

Microsoft's current head of Skype was not available for CNBC's video. But as a kind of epilogue, they report that Jaan Tallinn, one of Skype's original programmers, now "spends most of his time discussing the dangers of unchecked AI development."

"I don't know what the future holds for Skype..." he tells CNBC. "I'm concerned about humans being wiped out, so it's unlikely that we'll need Skype if that happens."

"In a 2022 survey of 1,200 people, language learning company Preply determined that 50% of Americans used subtitles and closed captions the vast majority of the time they watch content," writes IndieWire.

They delve into the reasons why so many people want to read dialogue: The first is that, for a lot of people, it's become a lot harder to understand dialogue on the TV. That's the top reason cited in the Preply survey, with nearly 72% of respondents who use closed captions marking that as one of the main reasons why.

The causes behind muddled dialogue are many, multifaceted, and might vary between person to person. For some, the problem is the design of modern televisions; the majority of which place internal speakers at the bottom of the set instead of facing towards the audience, causing significantly worse audio quality. Other issues are caused by sound designs optimized for theatrical experiences, which can result in compressed audio when translated to home. Whatever the reason, a lot of people struggle to hear dialogue now, so turning on closed captioning to decipher what people are saying has become a no brainer move...

Gen Z is, overwhelmingly, the generation most likely to be turning on subtitles according to Preply's numbers, with 70% of respondents in the generation saying they use closed captions "most of the time" compared to 53% of Millennials, 38% of Gen X, and 35% of Baby Boomers. As to why Gen Z likes to turn on text while watching their shows, part of it is that people in the generation grew up watching videos on social media, where subtitles are the algorithmically encouraged default.

Another reason is that Gen Z displays starkly different viewing habits than Baby Boomers in terms of where they're watching their movies and shows. According to Preply, 57% of all Americans watch shows or movies or videos in public on their mobile devices, but a very significant 74% of Gen Z do the same. Even if you're (hopefully) using headphones while in public, it's likely you're getting poor audio quality and hearing background noise if you're watching "The Irishman" on public transit.
The article also cites a three-month study in 2020 by Parrot Analytics (which studies trends in entertainment) which discovered non-U.S. shows accounted for nearly 30% of the demand from U.S. audiences. (And even English-language shows may still have characters speaking with difficult-to-understand accents...)

Supermassive black holes all over the universe are merging, a fate that will eventually come for the black hole at the center of our galaxy. From a report: These mysterious cosmic structures at the heart of nearly every galaxy consume light and matter and are impossible to glimpse with traditional telescopes. But now, for the first time, astrophysicists have gathered knowledge directly from these titans, in the form of gravitational waves that ripple through space and time. What they learned suggests that the population of massive black hole pairs that are merging numbers in the hundreds of thousands -- perhaps even millions.

The gravitational waves from these mergers are all contributing to an underlying background hum of the universe that researchers can detect from Earth. The findings, from a collaboration of more than 100 scientists, help confirm what will one day happen to the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center, known as Sagittarius A*, as it crashes into the black hole at the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. "The Milky Way galaxy is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy, and in about 4.5 billion years, the two galaxies are set to merge," said Joseph Simon, a University of Colorado, Boulder, astrophysicist and a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or Nanograv, which helped lead the new work with support from the National Science Foundation.

That merger, he said, will eventually result in the black hole at the center of Andromeda and Sagittarius A* sinking into the center of the newly combined galaxy and forming what is known as a binary system. The results were announced in a series of papers published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Before now, we didn't even know if supermassive black holes merged, and now we have evidence that hundreds of thousands of them are merging," said Chiara Mingarelli, a Yale University astrophysicist and a member of Nanograv. The new work could answer questions such as how these black holes grow, and how often their host galaxies merge, the researchers said. Further reading: The Cosmos Is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves, Astronomers Find.

Motherboard reports: Scientists are currently searching for the submerged remains of an interstellar object that crashed into the skies near Papua New Guinea in January 2014 and probably sprinkled material from another star system into the Pacific Ocean, according to an onboard diary by Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer who is leading the expedition. The effort, which kicked off on June 14, aims to recover what is left of the otherworldly fireball using a deep-sea magnetic sled.

The team has already turned up "anomalous" magnetic spherules, steel shards, curious wires, and heaps of volcanic ash, but has not identified anything that is unambiguously extraterrestrial — or interstellar — at this point. However, Loeb is optimistic that the crew will identify pieces of Interstellar Meteor 1 (IM1), the mysterious half-ton object that struck Earth nearly a decade ago, which he thinks could be an artifact, or "technosignature," from an alien civilization...

The fireball that sparked the hunt smashed into the atmosphere on January 8, 2014, and was detected by NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which keeps track of extraterrestrial impacts using a network of sensors around the world. Years later, Loeb and his student, Amir Siraj, concluded that the meteor's high velocity at impact suggested that it was interstellar in origin, a hypothesis that was ultimately supported by the United States Space Command using classified sensor data.
Today Loeb posted on Medium that "by now, we have 25 spherules from the site of the first recognized interstellar meteor," with a cumulative weight of about 30 milligrams — estimated to be one part in ten million of the original fireball's mass: The success of the Interstellar Expedition constitutes the first opportunity for astronomers to learn about interstellar space by using a microscope rather than a telescope. It opens the door for a new branch of observational astronomy.
Updates about the expedition are running on the Mega Screen in New York's Times Square, Motherboard reports. And Loeb writes that "If further analysis of the 50 milligrams retrieved from IM1's site will inform us that IM1's composition requires a technological origin, we will know that we are not alone."

He also shared an email that responded to his online diaries: I had a heart attack four weeks ago and am now in rehab. I read your IM1 diary every day and it always gives me new courage to face life. There are still so many things to discover and I want to live long enough to see some of them. I wish you and your team all the best.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The French recipient of Europe's largest ever seed round doesn't have a product and was founded four weeks ago. The few employees it has only started work in the last few days. All the same, Mistral AI hoovered up [$113 million] from lead investor Lightspeed Venture Partners with contributions from Eric Schmidt, French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel, and state-backed investment bank Bpifrance. The clue as to why the Paris-based startup is now valued at [$259 million] could be as simple as its name. New AI companies in the US inhaled as much as $25 billion from venture capitalists in the first three months of 2023, and with the artificial intelligence bubble centered on the States, Europe has yet to respond in kind.

There is also the small matter of personnel. Mistral AI chief exec Arthur Mensch used to be a researcher with Google DeepMind and founded the new company with Meta alumni Timothee Lacroix and Guillaume Lample. Presumably these credentials, combined with the promise of a homegrown European AI, are all it takes for investors to part with millions these days. Lightspeed partner Antoine Moyroud sure seems to think so. He told the Financial Times "There's a pool of 80 to 100 people globally who have the level of experience they have. Right now, for better or for worse, the capital requirements in compute and top-tier talent make [launching an AI startup] quite a capital-intensive game."

The promise of Mistral as it stands four weeks after it first emerged blinking in the daylight is another "large language model." That's it. This is the same type of technology that underpins OpenAI's ChatGPT -- a neural network of tens of million to billions of parameters trained on large quantities of unlabeled text using self-supervised learning or semi-supervised learning. That is all we know of the untold riches held in the minds of Mistral's power trio. Its website, a minimalist single-page affair, says little other than: "We're assembling a world-class team to develop the best generative AI models." It also provides an email address, asking for candidates with "a strong background as a researcher, software engineer or product developer in AI."

Mensch said: "There is a rising awareness of the fact that this technology is transformative and Europe needs to do something about it, both as a regulator, as a customer and an investor." Tech investment tracker Dealroom.co pegged the seed round as Europe's largest, which is indicative of the hope that AI will positively transform entire industries by taking humans out of the equation -- computer programs don't eat, sleep or unionize. So while venture capitalists are feeling FOMO and paying high prices to get a foot in the door of the latest tech gold rush, Europe is also pretty desperate, with only $4 billion stuffed into AI businesses this year compared to $25 billion in the United States. [...] Now you don't even need a product, or even the promise of something groundbreaking, just a handsome CV and "AI" in the company name. What we on the outside do know, however, is that at least one person on the Mistral team knows some HTML.

TechCrunch's Kyle Wiggers writes: Not to be outdone by Google, Meta has released its own AI-powered music generator -- and, unlike Google, open-sourced it. Called MusicGen, Meta's music-generating tool, a demo of which can be found here, can turn a text description (e.g. "An '80s driving pop song with heavy drums and synth pads in the background") into about 12 seconds of audio, give or take. MusicGen can optionally be "steered" with reference audio, like an existing song, in which case it'll try to follow both the description and melody.

Meta says that MusicGen was trained on 20,000 hours of music, including 10,000 "high-quality" licensed music tracks and 390,000 instrument-only tracks from ShutterStock and Pond5, a large stock media library. The company hasn't provided the code it used to train the model, but it has made available pre-trained models that anyone with the right hardware -- chiefly a GPU with around 16GB of memory -- can run.

So how does MusicGen perform? Well, I'd say -- though certainly not well enough to put human musicians out of a job. Its songs are reasonably melodic, at least for basic prompts like "ambient chiptunes music," and -- to my ears -- on par (if not slightly better) with the results from Google's AI music generator, MusicLM. But they won't win any awards.

Meta said on Tuesday that it would provide researchers with access to components of a new "human-like" artificial intelligence model that it said can analyze and complete unfinished images more accurately than existing models. From a report: The model, I-JEPA, uses background knowledge about the world to fill in missing pieces of images, rather than looking only at nearby pixels like other generative AI models, the company said. That approach incorporates the kind of human-like reasoning advocated by Meta's top AI scientist Yann LeCun and helps the technology to avoid errors that are common to AI-generated images, like hands with extra fingers, it said.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is a prolific publisher of open-sourced AI research via its in-house research lab. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that sharing models developed by Meta's researchers can help the company by spurring innovation, spotting safety gaps and lowering costs. "For us, it's way better if the industry standardizes on the basic tools that we're using and therefore we can benefit from the improvements that others make," he told investors in April.

The Washington Post writes that "Some economists predict artificial intelligence technology like ChatGPT could replace hundreds of millions of jobs, in a cataclysmic reorganization of the workforce mirroring the industrial revolution.

"For some workers, this impact is already here." Those that write marketing and social media content are in the first wave of people being replaced with tools like chatbots, which are seemingly able to produce plausible alternatives to their work.

Experts say that even advanced AI doesn't match the writing skills of a human: It lacks personal voice and style, and it often churns out wrong, nonsensical or biased answers. But for many companies, the cost-cutting is worth a drop in quality. "We're really in a crisis point," said Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at University of California in Los Angeles specializing in digital labor. "[AI] is coming for the jobs that were supposed to be automation-proof..."

The technology's ability to churn out human-sounding prose puts highly paid knowledge workers in the crosshairs for replacement, experts said. "In every previous automation threat, the automation was about automating the hard, dirty, repetitive jobs," said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. "This time, the automation threat is aimed squarely at the highest-earning, most creative jobs that ... require the most educational background." In March, Goldman Sachs predicted that 18 percent of work worldwide could be automated by AI, with white-collar workers such as lawyers at more risk than those in trades such as construction or maintenance. "Occupations for which a significant share of workers' time is spent outdoors or performing physical labor cannot be automated by AI," the report said...

Mollick said it's too early to gauge how disruptive AI will be to the workforce. He noted that jobs such as copywriting, document translation and transcription, and paralegal work are particularly at risk, since they have tasks that are easily done by chatbots. High-level legal analysis, creative writing or art may not be as easily replaceable, he said, because humans still outperform AI in those areas.
The article notes that one copywriter lost all 10 of his clients over the last four months — and though one later hired him back, he's now training to be a plumber.

Firefox users have been complaining about very intrusive full-screen advertisements promoting Mozilla VPN displayed in the web browser when navigating an unrelated page. From a report: The ads popping in Firefox disable the web browser's functionality, denying users access to the interface and graying out everything in the background until they close them. Some users reported on Reddit that the annoying full-screen ads even cause Firefox to become unresponsive for up to 30 seconds, forcing them to terminate the browser's process. [...] BleepingComputer has contacted Mozilla about the matter and received the following statement following the barrage of complaints from Firefox users: "We're continuously working to understand the best ways to communicate with people who use Firefox. Ultimately, we accomplished the exact opposite of what we intended in this experiment and quickly rolled the experience back. We apologize for any confusion or concern."

"Multiple lines of Android devices came with preinstalled malware," reports Ars Technica, "that couldn't be removed without users taking heroic measures."

Their article cites two reports released Thursday — one from Trend Micro and one from TechCrunch: Trend Micro researchers following up on a presentation delivered at the Black Hat security conference in Singapore reported that as many as 8.9 million phones comprising as many as 50 different brands were infected with malware... ["It's highly likely that more devices have been preinfected," the report clarified, "but have not exchanged communication with the Command & Control server, have not been used or activated by the threat actor, or have yet to be distributed to the targeted country or market... The threat actor has spread this malware over the last five years. "]

"Guerrilla" opens a backdoor that causes infected devices to regularly communicate with a remote command-and-control server to check if there are any new malicious updates for them to install. These malicious updates collect data about the users that the threat actor, which Trend Micro calls the Lemon Group, can sell to advertisers. Guerrilla then surreptitiously installs aggressive ad platforms that can deplete battery reserves and degrade the user experience... Guerrilla is a massive platform with nearly a dozen plugins that can hijack users' WhatsApp sessions to send unwanted messages, establish a reverse proxy from an infected phone to use the network resources of the affected mobile device, and inject ads into legitimate apps...

TechCrunch detailed several lines of Android-based TV boxes sold through Amazon that are laced with malware. The TV boxes, reported to be T95 models with an h616, report to a command-and-control server that, just like the Guerrilla servers, can install any application the malware creators want. The default malware preinstalled on the boxes is known as a clickbot. It generates advertising revenue by surreptitiously tapping on ads in the background...

Android devices that come with malware straight out of the factory box are, unfortunately, nothing new. Ars has reported on such incidents at least five times in recent years (here, here, here, here, and here). All the affected models were in the budget tier.

People in the market for an Android phone should steer toward known brands like Samsung, Asus, or OnePlus, which generally have much more reliable quality assurance controls on their inventory. To date, there have never been reports of higher-end Android devices coming with malware preinstalled. There are similarly no such reports for iPhones.