Isaac-Lew (Slashdot reader #623) writes: The Lego scene in "Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse" was animated by a 14-year-old high school student after the producers saw the trailer he made that was animated Lego-style.
The teenager had used his father's old computers to recreate the trailer "shot for shot to look as if it belonged in a Lego world," reports the New York Times: By that point, he had been honing his skills for several years making short computer-generated Lego videos. "My dad showed me this 3-D software called Blender and I instantly got hooked on it," he said. "I watched a lot of YouTube videos to teach myself certain stuff..."

[A]fter finding the movie's Toronto-based production designer, Patrick O'Keefe, on LinkedIn, and confirming that Sony Pictures Animation's offer was legitimate, Theodore Mutanga, a medical physicist, built his son a new computer and bought him a state-of-the-art graphics card so he could render his work much faster... Over several weeks, first during spring break and then after finishing his homework on school nights, Mutanga worked on the Lego sequence... Christophre Miller [a director of "The Lego Movie" and one of the writer-producers of "Spider-Verse."] saw Mutanga's contribution to "Across the Spider-Verse" not only as a testament to the democratization of filmmaking, but also to the artist's perseverance: he dedicated intensive time and effort to animation, which is "not ever fast or easy to make," Miller said.

'The Lego Movie' is inspired by people making films with Lego bricks at home," Lord said by video. "That's what made us want to make the movie. Then the idea in 'Spider Verse' is that a hero can come from anywhere. And here comes this heroic young person who's inspired by the movie that was inspired by people like him."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The world got a first glimpse into the US government's far-reaching surveillance of American citizens' communications -- namely, their Verizon telephone calls -- 10 years ago this week when Edward Snowden's initial leaks hit the press. [...] In the decade since then, "reformers have made real progress advancing the bipartisan notion that Americans' liberty and security are not mutually exclusive," [US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR)] said. "That has delivered tangible results: in 2015 Congress ended bulk collection of Americans' phone records by passing the USA Freedom Act." This bill sought to end the daily snooping into American's phone calls by forcing telcos to collect the records and make the Feds apply for the information.

That same month, a federal appeals court unanimously ruled that the NSA's phone-records surveillance program was unlawful. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the New York Civil Liberties Union sued to end the secret phone spying program, which had been approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, just days after Snowden disclosed its existence. "Once it was pushed out into open court, and the court was able to hear from two sides and not just one, the court held that the program was illegal," Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology project, told The Register. The Freedom Act also required the federal government to declassify and release "significant" opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and authorized the appointment of independent amici -- friends of the court intended to provide an outside perspective. The FISC was established in 1978 under the FISA -- the legislative instrument that allows warrantless snooping. And prior to the Freedom Act, this top-secret court only heard the government's perspective on things, like why the FBI and NSA should be allowed to scoop up private communications.

"To its credit, the government has engaged in reforms, and there's more transparency now that, on the one hand, has helped build back some trust that was lost, but also has made it easier to shine a light on surveillance misconduct that has happened since then," Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology's Security and Surveillance Project, told The Register. Wyden also pointed to the sunsetting of the "deeply flawed surveillance law," Section 215 of the Patriot Act, as another win for privacy and civil liberties. That law expired in March 2020 after Congress did not reauthorize it. "For years, the government relied on Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act to conduct a dragnet surveillance program that collected billions of phone records (Call Detail Records or CDR) documenting who a person called and for how long they called them -- more than enough information for analysts to infer very personal details about a person, including who they have relationships with, and the private nature of those relationships," Electronic Frontier Foundation's Matthew Guariglia, Cindy Cohn and Andrew Crocker said. James Clapper, the former US Director of National Intelligence, "stated publicly that the Snowden disclosures accelerated by seven years the adoption of commercial encryption," Wizner said. "At the individual level, and at the corporate level, we are more secure."

"And at the corporate level, what the Snowden revelations taught big tech was that even as the government was knocking on the front door, with legal orders to turn over customer data, it was breaking in the backdoor," Wizner added. "Government was hacking those companies, finding the few points in their global networks where data passed unencrypted, and siphoning it off." "If you ask the government -- if you caught them in a room, and they were talking off the record -- they would say the biggest impact for us from the Snowden disclosures is that it made big tech companies less cooperative," he continued. "I regard that as a feature, not a bug."

The real issue that the Snowden leaks revealed is that America's "ordinary system of checks and balances doesn't work very well for secret national security programs," Wizner said. "Ten years have gone by," since the first Snowden disclosures, "and we don't know what other kinds of rights-violating activities have been taking place in secret, and I don't trust our traditional oversight systems, courts and the Congress, to ferret those out," Wizner said. "When you're dealing with secret programs in a democracy, it almost always requires insiders who are willing to risk their livelihoods and their freedom to bring the information to the public."

The Atomic Wallet app has suffered a large-scale attack resulting in the potential theft of up to $35 million worth of cryptocurrency, with losses possibly exceeding $50 million. The Register reports: The Atomic Wallet app's makers first reported June 3 that some folks were complaining some crypto had been taken from their wallets and deposited in strangers' accounts, with others saying their wallets had been emptied completely. The biz tweeted Monday that less than one percent of their monthly active users had reported they were affected, though that number could grow with more reports coming in.

"Security investigation is ongoing. We report victim addresses to major exchanges and [use] blockchain analytics to trace and block the stolen funds," the company wrote, adding that the "last drained transaction was confirmed over 40h ago." A Twitter user with the handle ZachXBT, who describes themselves as an "on-chain sleuth," suggested over the weekend that the losses traced have added up to more than $35 million, with the largest victim having $7.95 million swiped. The five largest losses seen by ZachXBT added up to $17 million, almost half of the known total. "Think it could surpass $50 million. Keep finding more and more victims sadly," was the message.

Crypto security researcher Tay tweeted that the first report of stolen funds came in late on June 2. Since then reports of the stolen assets began rolling in, with some users reporting that their entire crypto portfolios were hijacked. [...] Atomic Wallet is collecting information from victims to try to get a better gauge on how the cyber-theft happened. In a Google Docs form, the company is asking users for such information as the operating system on their devices, the online app store they used to buy the Atomic Wallet app, the amount of lost funds coins and when the coins were withdrawn, where they stored the backup phrase, and when the last time was that they used their wallet before they saw that the coins were stolen.

It's unclear how the miscreants were able to steal the funds from users' wallets and Atomic Wallet said it is working with third-party security vendors to investigate. If there really is a low number of users affected, it may be some kind of credential stuffing, phishing, or brute-force attack, or a malware infection on the victims' devices. As if the stolen funds weren't enough of a problem, users also have to deal with the scams that typically crop up in the wake of such heists. ZachXBT tweeted that phishing scammers are already spamming fake Atomic Wallet refund efforts on Twitter in hopes of roping in some victims whose money was stolen.

"A little brain stimulation at night appears to help people remember what they learned the previous day," reports NPR — a finding that could one day help people with memory problems, sleeps issues, or depression: A study of 18 people with severe epilepsy found that they scored higher on a memory test if they got deep brain stimulation while they slept, a team reports in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The stimulation was delivered during non-REM sleep, when the brain is thought to strengthen memories it expects to use in the future. It was designed to synchronize the activity in two brain areas involved in memory consolidation: the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.

"Some improved by 10% or 20%, some improved by 80%," depending on the level of synchrony, says Dr. Itzhak Fried, an author of the study and a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The truth may be out there about UFOs, or what the government currently calls "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAPs). But finding it will require collecting data that are more rigorous than the anecdotal reports that typically fuel the controversial sightings, according to a panel of scientists, appointed by NASA to advise the agency on the topic, that held its first public meeting [on Wednesday].

The 16-person panel, created last year at the behest of NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, is not itself evaluating UFO claims. Instead, it is advising NASA on how the agency can contribute to federal investigations that have been led by the Department of Defense (DOD) and intelligence agencies, says panel chair David Spergel, an astrophysicist and president of the Simons Foundation, who spoke to Science ahead of the meeting. "NASA is a public agency, an open agency, that encourages the use of the scientific method for looking at results." But science can only be done when there are data to work on, he adds. "You're not going to learn much from fuzzy pictures from the 1950s." So far, most "unidentified" phenomena flagged by the military have ended up being weather balloons, drones, camera glitches, or undisclosed military aircraft, Spergel says. "It's very unlikely there are space aliens that travel through space and use technology that looks remarkably like what we have right now." [...]

It remains to be seen whether NASA will devote any further funding to study UAPs beyond the $100,000 allocated for the panel, which will issue a report this summer. Many scientists would be reluctant to have existing funds steered away from more conventional lines of research in the search for signatures of life or extraterrestrial intelligence. As the panel meeting wound down, Spergel said no UAP so far demands the existence of extraterrestrials. "We have not seen the extraordinary yet." Most incidents end up being more mundane. Panel member Scott Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and naval aviator, recounted flying in an F-14 off the coast of Virginia, when his co-pilot swore that he saw a UAP. "We turned around," he said. "We went to go look at it. It turns out it was Bart Simpson, a balloon."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A Virginia jury held Cox liable for pirating subscribers because it failed to terminate accounts after repeated accusations, ordering the company to pay $1 billion in damages to the labels. This landmark ruling is currently under appeal. As part of the appeal, Cox informed the court of a supplemental authority that could support its position. The case in question is Twitter vs. Taamneh, in which the U.S. Supreme Court recently held that the social media platform isn't liable for ISIS terrorists, who used Twitter to recruit and raise funds. The Supreme Court rejected (PDF) the claim that Twitter aided-and-abetted terrorist activity, because it didn't "consciously and culpably" participate in the illegal activity. According to Cox, the same logic applies in its case, where the ISP was held liable for the piracy activities of subscribers.

"These same aiding-and-abetting principles animate copyright law's contributory liability doctrine, and they likewise foreclose liability here," an attorney for Cox informed the court. Cox argues that the Supreme Court ruling confirms that aiding-and-abetting liability only applies when parties knowingly took part in the activity. That runs contrary to the finding in its own dispute with the record labels, where "culpable expression and conduct" or "intent" were not required. "Though Twitter arises in a different context, its reasoning applies with full force and supports reversal of the contributory infringement verdict," Cox added. The two cases are indeed quite different, but ultimately they are about imposing liability on third-party services.

According to Cox, the Twitter terrorist ruling clearly shows that it isn't liable for pirating subscribers, but the music companies see things differently. Earlier this week, the music labels responded in court (PDF), countering Cox's arguments. They argue that the Twitter ruling doesn't apply to their piracy dispute with Cox, as the cases are grounded in different laws. While the music industry certainly isn't happy with pirates, the Cox case is a copyright matter while the Twitter lawsuit fell under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. And for now, pirates are not categorized as terrorists. After establishing the difference between pirates and terrorists, the music companies point out that Twitter wasn't directly connected to the misconduct. The platform's role was more passive and its connection to ISIS was more distant than Cox's connection to its subscribers. Cox took a more active role and materially contributed to the pirating activities, which stands no comparison to the Twitter case, plaintiffs argue.

An anonymous reader shares a report: During the pandemic, when many workers saw their teams only via videoconference, Mark Zuckerberg's embrace of virtual reality seemed somewhat reasonable. The company renamed itself Meta Platforms and prioritized bringing about the "metaverse," a digital immersive world where people could meet up and do things together -- including their jobs -- while wearing VR headsets at home. Meta is still selling this vision to corporate customers, as well as consumers. The company debuted its Quest 3 headset on Thursday. Apple is expected to unveil an ambitious version that will compete with Meta on Monday.

But so far, Meta isn't practicing what it preaches. Employees across the organization generally aren't using the headsets -- especially not for work meetings, according to 11 current and former employees. Even those in the VR part of the organization don't use it regularly for work, said one former employee, who, like the others, declined to be named discussing internal culture. Meta only provides headsets to employees if they've signed up for an internal program to test new features before the public. Otherwise, they get a discount, the people said. Some teams -- including policy head Nick Clegg's -- tried experimental VR meetings, only to abandon the practice after finding it uncomfortable and glitchy, one of the people said. Some of the glitches may be attributed to the testing program.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Smithsonian: With a new technique, scientists have essentially figured out how to create power from thin air. Their tiny device generates electricity from the air's humidity, and it can be made from nearly any substance, scientists reported this month in the journal Advanced Materials. The invention involves two electrodes and a thin layer of material, which must be covered with tiny holes less than 100 nanometers in diameter -- thinner than one-thousandth the width of a human hair, according to a statement from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where the researchers work.

As water molecules pass through the device, from an upper chamber to a lower chamber, they knock against the tiny holes' edges, creating an electric charge imbalance between the layered chambers. In effect, it makes the device run like a battery. The whole process resembles the way clouds make electricity, which we see in the form of lightning bolts, according to Inverse's Molly Glick. [...] Currently, the fingernail-sized device can only create continuous electricity equivalent to a fraction of a volt, writes Vice's Becky Ferreira. But the researchers hope it can someday become a practical, sustainable source of power.

Scientists have previously tried harnessing humidity to generate electricity, but their attempts have often only worked for a short amount of time or relied on expensive materials, per Vice. In 2020, Yao and other researchers found a way to continuously collect electricity from humidity using a material grown from bacteria. But now, the new paper shows that such a specific material isn't necessary -- just about any material works, such as wood or silicon, as long as it can be punctured with the ultra-small holes. This finding makes the device much more practical; it "turns an initially narrow window to a wide-open door for broad potential," Yao tells Vice.

The United States Supreme Court has released its opinion on The Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith case, finding in favor of Lynn Goldsmith and stating that Warhol's use of her photo was not fair use. From a report: For those unfamiliar, the Warhol v. Goldsmith case has been ongoing for several years and involves photographer Lynn Goldsmith's photo of Prince and Andy Warhol's use of that photo which his Foundation argues was fair use. The details of the case to this point can be read in prior coverage, but in summary, Goldsmith had been victorious in the most recent court's decision leading up to this point. The Andy Warhol Foundation had appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, who has affirmed the lower court's decision and sealed Goldsmith's win.

In an 87-page [PDF], seven-to-two opinion written by Justice Sotomayor, the Supreme Court has ruled that Warhol's use of Goldsmith's Prince photo was not transformative enough to warrant fair use and was instead a violation of her copyright. Justices Roberts and Kagan dissented. "Although new expression, meaning, or message may be relevant to whether a copying use has a sufficiently distinct purpose or character, it is not, without more, dispositive of the first factor," the court holds. "The 'purpose and character' of Andy Warhol Foundation's (AWF) use of Goldsmith's photograph in commercially licensing Orange Prince to Conde Nast does not favor AWF's fair use defense to copyright infringement."

Researchers in the Hybrid Quantum Systems Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have put a sapphire crystal weighing 16 micrograms in a quantum-mechanical superposition of two vibrational states. The researchers "excited the crystal into vibrations such that its atoms oscillated back and forth simultaneously and in two opposite directions -- putting the entire crystal in what is known as a state of quantum superposition," reports Scientific American. From the report: As the research group reports in Science, this condition is much like that of the cat in the famous thought experiment of physicist Erwin Schrodinger. In Schrodinger's quantum-mechanical scenario, a cat is simultaneously alive and dead, depending on the decay of an atom that releases a vial of poison. The sapphire crystal in the new experiment has been put in the macroscopic equivalent of that "cat state." Such states can help scientists fathom how and why the laws of the quantum world transition into the rules of classical physics for larger objects.

To get the sapphire, which consists of about 10^17 atoms, to behave like a quantum-mechanical object, the research group set it to oscillate and coupled it to a superconducting circuit. (In the terms of the original thought experiment, the sapphire was the cat, and the superconducting circuit was the decaying atom.) The circuit was used as a qubit, or bit of quantum information that is simultaneously in the states "0" and "1." The circuit's superposition was then transferred to the oscillation of the crystal. Thus, the atoms in the crystal could move in two directions at the same time -- for example, up and down -- just as Schrodinger's cat is dead and alive at the same time. Importantly, the distance between these two states (alive and dead or up and down) had to be greater than the distance ascribed to the quantum uncertainty principle, which the ETH Zurich scientists confirmed. Using the superconducting qubit, the researchers succeeded in determining the distance between the crystal's two vibrational states. At about two billionths of a nanometer, it's tiny -- but still large enough to distinguish those two states from each other beyond doubt.

These findings have "pushed the envelope on what can be considered quantum mechanical in an actual lab experiment," says Shlomi Kotler, a physicist who studies quantum mechanical circuits at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kotler did not participate in the study. [...] Kotler notes that finding larger cat states is a way of "stretching the limit" of observed quantum-mechanical objects -- in this case, by demonstrating that something as massive as 16 micrograms can exist in this state. (Though, to be clear, 16 micrograms is still microscopic.)

Environmental DNA research has aided conservation, but scientists say its ability to glean information about human populations and individuals poses dangers. From a report: David Duffy, a wildlife geneticist at the University of Florida, just wanted a better way to track disease in sea turtles. Then he started finding human DNA everywhere he looked. Over the last decade, wildlife researchers have refined techniques for recovering environmental DNA, or eDNA -- trace amounts of genetic material that all living things leave behind. A powerful and inexpensive tool for ecologists, eDNA is all over -- floating in the air, or lingering in water, snow, honey and even your cup of tea. Researchers have used the method to detect invasive species before they take over, to track vulnerable or secretive wildlife populations and even to rediscover species thought to be extinct. The eDNA technology is also used in wastewater surveillance systems to monitor Covid and other pathogens. But all along, scientists using eDNA were quietly recovering gobs and gobs of human DNA. To them, it's pollution, a sort of human genomic bycatch muddying their data. But what if someone set out to collect human eDNA on purpose?

New DNA collecting techniques are "like catnip" for law enforcement officials, says Erin Murphy, a law professor at the New York University School of Law who specializes in the use of new technologies in the criminal legal system. The police have been quick to embrace unproven tools, like using DNA to create probability-based sketches of a suspect. That could pose dilemmas for the preservation of privacy and civil liberties, especially as technological advancement allows more information to be gathered from ever smaller eDNA samples. Dr. Duffy and his colleagues used a readily available and affordable technology to see how much information they could glean from human DNA gathered from the environment in a variety of circumstances, such as from outdoor waterways and the air inside a building. The results of their research, published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, demonstrate that scientists can recover medical and ancestry information from minute fragments of human DNA lingering in the environment. Forensic ethicists and legal scholars say the Florida team's findings increase the urgency for comprehensive genetic privacy regulations.

Researchers have discovered that a man with a gene mutation that causes early-onset Alzheimer's disease was protected from developing the disease until the age of 67 due to another mutation in a different gene that blocked the disease from affecting his entorhinal cortex, a brain region associated with memory and cognition. This finding could pave the way for new treatments that delay the onset of Alzheimer's and transform the approach to therapeutics for the disease. The New York Times reports: "This really holds the secret to the next generation of therapeutics," said Dr. Joseph F. Arboleda-Velasquez, a cell biologist at Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston and a member of the research team. Dr. Arboleda-Velasquez is a co-founder of a biotechnology company looking to produce drugs that could act on this research. A drug that delays the disease by two decades is not out of the question, said Dr. Diego Sepulveda-Falla, a neuropathologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany and a member of the research team. The mutation results in a potent version of a protein, Reelin, in the entorhinal cortex. That super-potent Reelin ultimately prevents tangled strands of tau proteins from sticking together and forming the structures that are a characteristic of Alzheimer's. The idea is to "go in with a syringe and treat only one area" of the brain, he said.

The man with what the researchers are calling "resilience" to Alzheimer's was part of a decades-long study of 6,000 people living in Colombia who have a gene mutation that causes Alzheimer's in middle age. Many have agreed to genetic testing, brain scans and, after they die, brain autopsies. A few years ago, the same research group in the current study identified a woman who also was protected from Alzheimer's. But in her case, resilience was caused by a mutation in a different gene, APOE. Instead of lacking clumps of tau in one small region of her brain, they were missing in her entire brain. But, the researchers say, they think the two patients are revealing a new pathway to treat Alzheimer's. The two genes that are mutated interrupt a molecular cascade of events needed for tau to aggregate in the brain. The findings were published in the journal Nature Medicine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After the release of Apple's AirTags, Google suddenly has interest in the Bluetooth tracker market. The company has already quietly rolled out what must be the world's largest Bluetooth tracking network via Android's 3 billion active devices, and now trackers are starting to plug in to that network. Google is taking the ecosystem approach and letting various companies plug in to the Android Bluetooth tracking network, which has the very derivative name of "Find My Device." While these Bluetooth trackers are great for finding your lost car keys on a messy desk, they can also work as worldwide GPS trackers and locate items much farther away, even though they don't have GPS. The IDs of Bluetooth devices are public, so Tile started this whole idea of crowdsourced Bluetooth tracker location, called the "Tile Network." Every phone with the Tile app installed scans Bluetooth devices in the background and, using the phone GPS, uploads their last seen location to the cloud. This location data is only available to the person who owns the Tile, but every Tile user works to scan the environment and upload any Tiles the app can see. [...]

Now, third-party Bluetooth trackers for Android's network are starting to arrive. The two companies that have announced products are Chipolo and Pebblebee, both of which seem to be cloning the Tile line of products. Both offer normal keychain tracker tags and slim credit card format trackers. The worst habits of Tile include making completely disposable products because the batteries can't be changed, but it looks like our clones have mostly avoided that. All of Pebblebee's Find My Device products are rechargeable, which is great, while the Chipolo keychain tracker has a replaceable CR2032 battery. Only the Chipolo wallet tracker is disposable (boo!). All these tags will show up in the Find My Device app, right alongside your Android phones, headphones, and whatever else you have that plugs in to the network. They also have a speaker, like normal, so you can make them ring when you're near them. Both sets of products are up for preorder now.

When the Ethereum blockchain moved away from using a technique for verifying transactions known as proof of work last September, crypto market demand for the specialized processors that performed these calculations disappeared virtually overnight. Companies that used and hosted GPUs, or graphics processing units, saw a key part of their once-booming business vanish against an increasingly difficult backdrop for crypto. But now mining infrastructure companies like Hive Blockchain and Hut 8 Mining are finding opportunities to repurpose their GPU-based equipment for another industry on the precipice of a possible boom: artificial intelligence. From a report: "If you can reapply some of that investment in the GPU mining infrastructure and convert it to new cards and workloads, it makes sense," Hut 8 Chief Executive Officer Jaime Leverton said in an interview. GPUs -- designed to accelerate graphics rendering -- require constant maintenance and physical infrastructure not all users are prepared to provide. As such, Hut 8 and a few other miners have been using the chips to power high-performance computing, or HPC, services for clients across a range of industries. But inroads with the burgeoning and much-hyped AI sector -- which requires huge amounts of computing power -- represent the kind of transformational opportunity miners had been seeking when they originally bought the processors.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Motherboard article: Now, frustrated with a lack of transparency and trust around official accounts of UFO phenomena, a team of developers has decided to take matters into their own hands with an open source citizen science project called Sky360, which aims to blanket the earth in affordable monitoring stations to watch the skies 24/7, and even plans to use AI and machine learning to spot anomalous behavior. Unlike earlier 20th century efforts such as inventors proposing "geomagnetic detectors" to discover nearby UFOs, or more recent software like the short-lived UFO ID project, Sky360 hopes that it can establish a network of autonomously operating surveillance units to gather real-time data of our skies. Citizen-led UFO research is not new. Organizations like MUFON, founded in 1969, have long investigated sightings, while amateur groups like the American Flying Saucer Investigating Committee of Columbus even ran statistical analysis on sightings in the 1960s (finding that most of them happened on Wednesdays). However, Sky360 believes that the level of interest and the technology have now both reached an inflection point, where citizen researchers can actually generate large-scale actionable data for analysis all on their own.

The Sky360 stations consist of an AllSkyCam with a wide angle fish-eye lens and a pan-tilt-focus camera, with the fish-eye camera registering all movement. Underlying software performs an initial rough analysis of these events, and decides whether to activate other sensors -- and if so, the pan-tilt-focus camera zooms in on the object, tracks it, and further analyzes it. According to developer Nikola Galiot, the software is currently based on a computer vision "background subtraction" algorithm that detects any motion in the frame compared to previous frames captured; anything that moves is then tracked as long as possible and then automatically classified. The idea is that the more data these monitoring stations acquire, the better the classification will be. There are a combination of AI models under the hood, and the system is built using the open-source TensorFlow machine learning platform so it can be deployed on almost any computer. Next, the all-volunteer team wants to create a single algorithm capable of detection, tracking and classification all in one.

All the hardware components, from the cameras to passive radar and temperature gauges, can be bought cheaply and off-the-shelf worldwide -- with the ultimate goal of finding the most effective combinations for the lowest price. Schematics, blueprints, and suggested equipment are all available on the Sky360 site and interested parties are encouraged to join the project's Discord server. There are currently 20 stations set up across the world, from the USA to Canada to more remote regions like the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic [...] Once enough of the Sky360 stations have been deployed, the next step is to work towards real-time monitoring, drawing all the data together, and analyzing it. By striving to create a huge, open, transparent network, anyone would be free to examine the data themselves.

In June of this year, Sky360, which has a team of 30 volunteer developers working on the software, hopes to release its first developer-oriented open source build. At its heart is a component called 'SimpleTracker', which receives images frame by frame from the cameras, auto-adjusting parameters to get the best picture possible. The component determines whether something in the frame is moving, and if so, another analysis is performed, where a machine learning algorithm trained on the trajectories of normal flying objects like planes, birds, or insects, attempts to classify the object based on its movement. If it seems anomalous, it's flagged for further investigation.

Louise Lerner writes via Phys.Org: Inside a lab, scientists marvel at a strange state that forms when they cool down atoms to nearly absolute zero. Outside their window, trees gather sunlight and turn them into new leaves. The two seem unrelated -- but a new study from the University of Chicago suggests that these processes aren't so different as they might appear on the surface. The study, published in PRX Energy on April 28, found links at the atomic level between photosynthesis and exciton condensates -- a strange state of physics that allows energy to flow frictionlessly through a material. The finding is scientifically intriguing and may suggest new ways to think about designing electronics, the authors said.

When a photon from the sun strikes a leaf, it sparks a change in a specially designed molecule. The energy knocks loose an electron. The electron, and the "hole" where it once was, can now travel around the leaf, carrying the energy of the sun to another area where it triggers a chemical reaction to make sugars for the plant. Together, that traveling electron-and-hole-pair is referred to as an "exciton." When the team took a birds-eye view and modeled how multiple excitons move around, they noticed something odd. They saw patterns in the paths of the excitons that looked remarkably familiar. In fact, it looked very much like the behavior in a material that is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, sometimes known as "the fifth state of matter." In this material, excitons can link up into the same quantum state -- kind of like a set of bells all ringing perfectly in tune. This allows energy to move around the material with zero friction. (These sorts of strange behaviors intrigue scientists because they can be the seeds for remarkable technology -- for example, a similar state called superconductivity is the basis for MRI machines).

According to the models [...], the excitons in a leaf can sometimes link up in ways similar to exciton condensate behavior. This was a huge surprise. Exciton condensates have only been seen when the material is cooled down significantly below room temperature. It'd be kind of like seeing ice cubes forming in a cup of hot coffee. "Photosynthetic light harvesting is taking place in a system that is at room temperature and what's more, its structure is disordered -- very unlike the pristine crystallized materials and cold temperatures that you use to make exciton condensates," explained [study co-author Anna Schouten]. This effect isn't total -- it's more akin to "islands" of condensates forming, the scientists said. "But that's still enough to enhance energy transfer in the system," said Sager-Smith. In fact, their models suggest it can as much as double the efficiency. The findings open up some new possibilities for generating synthetic materials for future technology, said study co-author Prof. David Mazziotti. "A perfect ideal exciton condensate is sensitive and requires a lot of special conditions, but for realistic applications, it's exciting to see something that boosts efficiency but can happen in ambient conditions."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: This year's DEF CON AI Village has invited hackers to show up, dive in, and find bugs and biases in large language models (LLMs) built by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others. The collaborative event, which AI Village organizers describe as "the largest red teaming exercise ever for any group of AI models," will host "thousands" of people, including "hundreds of students from overlooked institutions and communities," all of whom will be tasked with finding flaws in LLMs that power today's chat bots and generative AI. Think: traditional bugs in code, but also problems more specific to machine learning, such as bias, hallucinations, and jailbreaks -- all of which ethical and security professionals are now having to grapple with as these technologies scale. DEF CON is set to run from August 10 to 13 this year in Las Vegas, USA.

For those participating in the red teaming this summer, the AI Village will provide laptops and timed access to LLMs from various vendors. Currently this includes models from Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Stability. The village people's announcement also mentions this is "with participation from Microsoft," so perhaps hackers will get a go at Bing. We're asked for clarification about this. Red teams will also have access to an evaluation platform developed by Scale AI. There will be a capture-the-flag-style point system to promote the testing of "a wide range of harms," according to the AI Village. Whoever gets the most points wins a high-end Nvidia GPU. The event is also supported by the White House Office of Science, Technology, and Policy; America's National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate; and the Congressional AI Caucus.

Apple failed to revive a long-running copyright lawsuit against cybersecurity firm Corellium over its software that simulates the iPhone's iOS operating systems, letting security researchers to identify flaws in the software. From a report: The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Monday ruled that Corellium's CORSEC simulator is protected by copyright law's fair use doctrine, which allows the duplication of copyrighted work under certain circumstances. Apple argued that Corellium's software was "wholesale copying and reproduction" of iOS and served as a market substitute for its own security research products. Corellium countered that its copying of Apple's computer code and app icons was only for the purposes of security research and was sufficiently "transformative" under the fair use standard. The three-judge panel largely agreed with Corellium, finding that CORSEC "furthers scientific progress by allowing security research into important operating systems" and that iOS "is functional operating software that falls outside copyright's core."

The mania for artificial intelligence is showing no sign of letting up in corporate America, with references to AI and related terms during calls with investors more than doubling from a year ago. From a report: Companies are scrambling to show they're at the forefront of finding ways to use algorithms that can parse enormous quantities of information based on simple prompts or images. AI promises to change the way business gets done, from hiring (or firing) staff to calming angry customers in an online chat. Growing alarm from industry leaders and governments at the potential dangers of the new technology hasn't deterred companies from voicing their commitment. The discussions build on the wave of interest following OpenAI's launch of the ChatGPT chatbot in November, which drove a 77% pickup in mentions of AI in earnings calls in the fourth quarter. The pace only intensified in the first-quarter calls -- there have been 1,072 mentions so far among companies in the S&P 500, from Meta Platforms to Alphabet and well beyond the tech industry.

Export controls imposed by the U.S. on microchips, aiming to hinder China's technological advancements, have had minimal effects on the country's tech sector. While the restrictions have slowed down variants of Nvidia's chips for the Chinese market, it has not halted China's progress in areas like AI, as the reduced performance is still an improvement for Chinese firms, and researchers are finding ways to overcome the limitations. Reuters reports: Nvidia has created variants of its chips for the Chinese market that are slowed down to meet U.S. rules. Industry experts told Reuters the newest one - the Nvidia H800, announced in March - will likely take 10% to 30% longer to carry out some AI tasks and could double some costs compared with Nvidia's fastest U.S. chips. Even the slowed Nvidia chips represent an improvement for Chinese firms. Tencent Holdings, one of China's largest tech companies, in April estimated that systems using Nvidia's H800 will cut the time it takes to train its largest AI system by more than half, from 11 days to four days. "The AI companies that we talk to seem to see the handicap as relatively small and manageable," said Charlie Chai, a Shanghai-based analyst with 86Research.

Part of the U.S. strategy in setting the rules was to avoid such a shock that the Chinese would ditch U.S. chips altogether and redouble their own chip-development efforts. "They had to draw the line somewhere, and wherever they drew it, they were going to run into the challenge of how to not be immediately disruptive, but how to also over time degrade China's capability," said one chip industry executive who requested anonymity to talk about private discussions with regulators. The export restrictions have two parts. The first puts a ceiling on a chip's ability to calculate extremely precise numbers, a measure designed to limit supercomputers that can be used in military research. Chip industry sources said that was an effective action. But calculating extremely precise numbers is less relevant in AI work like large language models where the amount of data the chip can chew through is more important. [...] The second U.S. limit is on chip-to-chip transfer speeds, which does affect AI. The models behind technologies such as ChatGPT are too large to fit onto a single chip. Instead, they must be spread over many chips - often thousands at a time -- which all need to communicate with one another.

Nvidia has not disclosed the China-only H800 chip's performance details, but a specification sheet seen by Reuters shows a chip-to-chip speed of 400 gigabytes per second, less than half the peak speed of 900 gigabytes per second for Nvidia's flagship H100 chip available outside China. Some in the AI industry believe that is still plenty of speed. Naveen Rao, chief executive of a startup called MosaicML that specializes in helping AI models to run better on limited hardware, estimated a 10-30% system slowdown. "There are ways to get around all this algorithmically," he said. "I don't see this being a boundary for a very long time -- like 10 years." Moreover, AI researchers are trying to slim down the massive systems they have built to cut the cost of training products similar to ChatGPT and other processes. Those will require fewer chips, reducing chip-to-chip communications and lessening the impact of the U.S. speed limits.