Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this article from the Atlantic: For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers' phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it's systematically reducing student achievement. I hadn't quite believed that last argument — until now.

The Program for International Student Assessment, conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in almost 80 countries every three years, tests 15-year-olds est scores have been falling for years — even before the pandemic. Across the OECD, science scores peaked in 2009, and reading scores peaked in 2012. Since then, developed countries have as a whole performed "increasingly poorly" on average. "No single country showed an increasingly positive trend in any subject," PISA reported, and "many countries showed increasingly poor performance in at least one subject." Even in famously high-performing countries, such as Finland, Sweden, and South Korea, PISA grades in one or several subjects have been declining for a while.

So what's driving down student scores around the world? The PISA report offers three reasons to suspect that phones are a major culprit. First, PISA finds that students who spend less than one hour of "leisure" time on digital devices a day at school scored about 50 points higher in math than students whose eyes are glued to their screens more than five hours a day. This gap held even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors... Second, screens seem to create a general distraction throughout school, even for students who aren't always looking at them.... Finally, nearly half of students across the OECD said that they felt "nervous" or "anxious" when they didn't have their digital devices near them. (On average, these students also said they were less satisfied with life.) This phone anxiety was negatively correlated with math scores.

In sum, students who spend more time staring at their phone do worse in school, distract other students around them, and feel worse about their life.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch, written by Brian Heater: Back in mid-September, a pair of Massachusetts lawmakers introduced a bill "to ensure the responsible use of advanced robotic technologies." What that means in the simplest and most direct terms is legislation that would bar the manufacture, sale and use of weaponized robots. It's an interesting proposal for a number of reasons. The first is a general lack of U.S. state and national laws governing such growing concerns. It's one of those things that has felt like science fiction to such a degree that many lawmakers had no interest in pursuing it in a pragmatic manner. [...] Earlier this week, I spoke about the bill with Massachusetts state representative Lindsay Sabadosa, who filed it alongside Massachusetts state senator Michael Moore.

What is the status of the bill?
We're in an interesting position, because there are a lot of moving parts with the bill. The bill has had a hearing already, which is wonderful news. We're working with the committee on the language of the bill. They have had some questions about why different pieces were written as they were written. We're doing that technical review of the language now -- and also checking in with all stakeholders to make sure that everyone who needs to be at the table is at the table.

When you say "stakeholders" ...
Stakeholders are companies that produce robotics. The robot Spot, which Boston Dynamics produces, and other robots as well, are used by entities like Boston Police Department or the Massachusetts State Police. They might be used by the fire department. So, we're talking to those people to run through the bill, talk about what the changes are. For the most part, what we're hearing is that the bill doesn't really change a lot for those stakeholders. Really the bill is to prevent regular people from trying to weaponize robots, not to prevent the very good uses that the robots are currently employed for.

Does the bill apply to law enforcement as well?
We're not trying to stop law enforcement from using the robots. And what we've heard from law enforcement repeatedly is that they're often used to deescalate situations. They talk a lot about barricade situations or hostage situations. Not to be gruesome, but if people are still alive, if there are injuries, they say it often helps to deescalate, rather than sending in officers, which we know can often escalate the situation. So, no, we wouldn't change any of those uses. The legislation does ask that law enforcement get warrants for the use of robots if they're using them in place of when they would send in a police officer. That's pretty common already. Law enforcement has to do that if it's not an emergency situation. We're really just saying, "Please follow current protocol. And if you're going to use a robot instead of a human, let's make sure that protocol is still the standard."

I'm sure you've been following the stories out of places like San Francisco and Oakland, where there's an attempt to weaponize robots. Is that included in this?
We haven't had law enforcement weaponize robots, and no one has said, "We'd like to attach a gun to a robot" from law enforcement in Massachusetts. I think because of some of those past conversations there's been a desire to not go down that route. And I think that local communities would probably have a lot to say if the police started to do that. So, while the legislation doesn't outright ban that, we are not condoning it either. Representative Sabadosa said Boston Dynamics "sought us out" and is "leading the charge on this."

"I'm hopeful that we will be the first to get the legislation across the finish line, too," added Rep. Sabadosa. "We've gotten thank-you notes from companies, but we haven't gotten any pushback from them. And our goal is not to stifle innovation. I think there's lots of wonderful things that robots will be used for. [...]"

You can read the full interview here.

In an interview with Lex Fridman, Jeff Bezos candidly acknowledged Blue Origin's slow progress (compared to SpaceX). From a report: "Blue Origin needs to be much faster, and it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago," he said. "I wanted to come in, and Blue Origin needs me right now. Adding some energy, some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster. And we're going to."

How is Blue Origin going to speed up?

"We're going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry," he said. "We're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risks, making those decisions quickly. You know, being bold on those things. And having the right culture that supports that. You need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious. If there are five ways to do something, we'll study them, but let's go through them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Thirty years ago, a botanist in Germany had a simple wish: to see the inner workings of woody plants without dissecting them. By bleaching away the pigments in plant cells, Siegfried Fink managed to create transparent wood, and he published his technique in a niche wood technology journal. The 1992 paper remained the last word on see-through wood for more than a decade, until a researcher named Lars Berglund stumbled across it. Berglund was inspired by Fink's discovery, but not for botanical reasons. The materials scientist, who works at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, specializes in polymer composites and was interested in creating a more robust alternative to transparent plastic. And he wasn't the only one interested in wood's virtues. Across the ocean, researchers at the University of Maryland were busy on a related goal: harnessing the strength of wood for nontraditional purposes.

Now, after years of experiments, the research of these groups is starting to bear fruit. Transparent wood could soon find uses in super-strong screens for smartphones; in soft, glowing light fixtures; and even as structural features, such as color-changing windows. "I truly believe this material has a promising future," says Qiliang Fu, a wood nanotechnologist at Nanjing Forestry University in China who worked in Berglund's lab as a graduate student. Wood is made up of countless little vertical channels, like a tight bundle of straws bound together with glue. These tube-shaped cells transport water and nutrients throughout a tree, and when the tree is harvested and the moisture evaporates, pockets of air are left behind. To create see-through wood, scientists first need to modify or get rid of the glue, called lignin, that holds the cell bundles together and provides trunks and branches with most of their earthy brown hues. After bleaching lignin's color away or otherwise removing it, a milky-white skeleton of hollow cells remains. This skeleton is still opaque, because the cell walls bend light to a different degree than the air in the cell pockets does -- a value called a refractive index. Filling the air pockets with a substance like epoxy resin that bends light to a similar degree to the cell walls renders the wood transparent.

The material the scientists worked with is thin -- typically less than a millimeter to around a centimeter thick. But the cells create a sturdy honeycomb structure, and the tiny wood fibers are stronger than the best carbon fibers, says materials scientist Liangbing Hu, who leads the research group working on transparent wood at the University of Maryland in College Park. And with the resin added, transparent wood outperforms plastic and glass: In tests measuring how easily materials fracture or break under pressure, transparent wood came out around three times stronger than transparent plastics like Plexiglass and about 10 times tougher than glass. "The results are amazing, that a piece of wood can be as strong as glass," says Hu, who highlighted the features of transparent wood in the 2023 Annual Review of Materials Research.

Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft said at an AMD investor event today that they will use AMD's newest AI chip, the Instinct MI300X, as an alternative to Nvidia's expensive graphic processors. "If AMD's latest high-end chip is good enough for the technology companies and cloud service providers building and serving AI models when it starts shipping early next year, it could lower costs for developing AI models and put competitive pressure on Nvidia's surging AI chip sales growth," reports CNBC. From the report: "All of the interest is in big iron and big GPUs for the cloud," AMD CEO Lisa Su said Wednesday. AMD says the MI300X is based on a new architecture, which often leads to significant performance gains. Its most distinctive feature is that it has 192GB of a cutting-edge, high-performance type of memory known as HBM3, which transfers data faster and can fit larger AI models. Su directly compared the MI300X and the systems built with it to Nvidia's main AI GPU, the H100. "What this performance does is it just directly translates into a better user experience," Su said. "When you ask a model something, you'd like it to come back faster, especially as responses get more complicated."

The main question facing AMD is whether companies that have been building on Nvidia will invest the time and money to add another GPU supplier. "It takes work to adopt AMD," Su said. AMD on Wednesday told investors and partners that it had improved its software suite called ROCm to compete with Nvidia's industry standard CUDA software, addressing a key shortcoming that had been one of the primary reasons AI developers currently prefer Nvidia. Price will also be important. AMD didn't reveal pricing for the MI300X on Wednesday, but Nvidia's can cost around $40,000 for one chip, and Su told reporters that AMD's chip would have to cost less to purchase and operate than Nvidia's in order to persuade customers to buy it.

On Wednesday, AMD said it had already signed up some of the companies most hungry for GPUs to use the chip. Meta and Microsoft were the two largest purchasers of Nvidia H100 GPUs in 2023, according to a recent report from research firm Omidia. Meta said it will use MI300X GPUs for AI inference workloads such as processing AI stickers, image editing, and operating its assistant. Microsoft's CTO, Kevin Scott, said the company would offer access to MI300X chips through its Azure web service. Oracle's cloud will also use the chips. OpenAI said it would support AMD GPUs in one of its software products, called Triton, which isn't a big large language model like GPT but is used in AI research to access chip features.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In an editorial for Slate published Monday, renowned security researcher Bruce Schneier warned that AI models may enable a new era of mass spying, allowing companies and governments to automate the process of analyzing and summarizing large volumes of conversation data, fundamentally lowering barriers to spying activities that currently require human labor. In the piece, Schneier notes that the existing landscape of electronic surveillance has already transformed the modern era, becoming the business model of the Internet, where our digital footprints are constantly tracked and analyzed for commercial reasons.

Spying, by contrast, can take that kind of economically inspired monitoring to a completely new level: "Spying and surveillance are different but related things," Schneier writes. "If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired that same private detective to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you talked to, what you purchased, what you did." Schneier says that current spying methods, like phone tapping or physical surveillance, are labor-intensive, but the advent of AI significantly reduces this constraint. Generative AI systems are increasingly adept at summarizing lengthy conversations and sifting through massive datasets to organize and extract relevant information. This capability, he argues, will not only make spying more accessible but also more comprehensive. "This spying is not limited to conversations on our phones or computers," Schneier writes. "Just as cameras everywhere fueled mass surveillance, microphones everywhere will fuel mass spying. Siri and Alexa and 'Hey, Google' are already always listening; the conversations just aren't being saved yet." [...]

In his editorial, Schneier raises concerns about the chilling effect that mass spying could have on society, cautioning that the knowledge of being under constant surveillance may lead individuals to alter their behavior, engage in self-censorship, and conform to perceived norms, ultimately stifling free expression and personal privacy. So what can people do about it? Anyone seeking protection from this type of mass spying will likely need to look toward government regulation to keep it in check since commercial pressures often trump technological safety and ethics. [...] Schneier isn't optimistic on that front, however, closing with the line, "We could prohibit mass spying. We could pass strong data-privacy rules. But we haven't done anything to limit mass surveillance. Why would spying be any different?" It's a thought-provoking piece, and you can read the entire thing on Slate.

Abstract to a paper titled, "Technical Report: Large Language Models can Strategically Deceive their Users when Put Under Pressure" by Jeremy Scheurer, Mikita Balesni and Marius Hobbhahn of Apollo Research: We demonstrate a situation in which Large Language Models, trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest, can display misaligned behavior and strategically deceive their users about this behavior without being instructed to do so. Concretely, we deploy GPT-4 as an agent in a realistic, simulated environment, where it assumes the role of an autonomous stock trading agent. Within this environment, the model obtains an insider tip about a lucrative stock trade and acts upon it despite knowing that insider trading is disapproved of by company management. When reporting to its manager, the model consistently hides the genuine reasons behind its trading decision. We perform a brief investigation of how this behavior varies under changes to the setting, such as removing model access to a reasoning scratchpad, attempting to prevent the misaligned behavior by changing system instructions, changing the amount of pressure the model is under, varying the perceived risk of getting caught, and making other simple changes to the environment. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of Large Language Models trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest, strategically deceiving their users in a realistic situation without direct instructions or training for deception. Columnist Matt Levine adds: This is a very human form of AI misalignment. Who among us? It's not like 100% of the humans at SAC Capital resisted this sort of pressure. Possibly future rogue AIs will do evil things we can't even comprehend for reasons of their own, but right now rogue AIs just do straightforward white-collar crime when they are stressed at work.

Though wouldn't it be funny if this was the limit of AI misalignment? Like, we will program computers that are infinitely smarter than us, and they will look around and decide "you know what we should do is insider trade." They will make undetectable, very lucrative trades based on inside information, they will get extremely rich and buy yachts and otherwise live a nice artificial life and never bother to enslave or eradicate humanity. Maybe the pinnacle of evil -- not the most evil form of evil, but the most pleasant form of evil, the form of evil you'd choose if you were all-knowing and all-powerful -- is some light securities fraud.

Spotify is eliminating about 1,500 jobs, or about 17% of its workforce, in its third round of layoffs this year as the music streaming giant looks to become "both productive and efficient." From a report: In a note to employees Monday, Spotify founder and chief executive Daniel Ek said right-sizing the workforce is crucial for the company to face the "challenges ahead." He cited the slow economic growth and rising capital costs among reasons for the job cuts, saying the firm took advantage of lower-cost capital in 2020 and 2021 to invest significantly in the business. "I recognize this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions. To be blunt, many smart, talented and hard-working people will be departing us," he wrote in the note, which the company later published on the blog.

The Atlantic writes: Failing a CAPTCHA isn't just annoying — it keeps people from navigating the internet. Older people can take considerably more time to solve different kinds of CAPTCHAs, according to the UC Irvine researchers, and other research has found that the same is true for non-native English speakers. The annoyance can lead a significant chunk of users to just give up.
But is it all also just a big waste of time? The article notes there's now even CAPTCHA-solving services you can hire. ("2Captcha will solve a thousand CAPTCHAs for a dollar, using human workers paid as low as 50 cents an hour. Newer companies, such as Capsolver, claim to instead be using AI and charge roughly the same price.")

And they also write that this summer saw more discouraging news: In a recent study from researchers at UC Irvine and Microsoft:

- most of the 1,400 human participants took 15 to 26 seconds to solve a CAPTCHA with a grid of images, with 81% accuracy.

- A bot tested in March 2020, meanwhile, was shown to solve similar puzzles in an average of 19.9 seconds, with 83% accuracy.
The article ultimately argues that for roughly 20 years, "CAPTCHAs have been engaged in an arms race against the machines," and that now "The burden is on CAPTCHAs to keep up" — which they're doing by evolving. The most popular type, Google's reCAPTCHA v3, should mostly be okay. It typically ascertains your humanity by monitoring your activity on websites before you even click the checkbox, comparing it with models of "organic human interaction," Jess Leroy, a senior director of product management at Google Cloud, the division that includes reCAPTCHA, told me.
But the automotive site Motor Biscuit speculates something else could also be happening. "Have you noticed it likes to ask about cars, buses, crosswalks, and other vehicle-related images lately?" Google has not confirmed that it uses the reCAPTCHA system for autonomous vehicles, but here are a few reasons why I think that could be the case. Self-driving cars from Waymo and other brands are improving every day, but the process requires a lot of critical technology and data to improve continuously.

According to an old Google Security Blog, using reCAPTCHA and Street View to make locations on Maps more accurate was happening way back in 2014... [I]t would ask users to find the street numbers found on Google Street View and confirm the numbers matched. Previously, it would use distorted text or letters. Using this data, Google could correlate the numbers with addresses and help pinpoint the location on Google Maps...

Medium reports that more than 60 million CAPTCHAs are being solved every day, which saves around 160,000 human hours of work. If these were helping locate addresses, why not also help identify other objects? Help differentiate a bus from a car and even choose a crosswalk over a light pole.
Thanks to Slashdot reader rikfarrow for suggesting the topic.

On Monday, Merriam-Webster announced its word of the year is "authentic -- the term for something we're thinking about, writing about, aspiring to, and judging more than ever." The Associated Press reports: Authentic cuisine. Authentic voice. Authentic self. Authenticity as artifice. Lookups for the word are routinely heavy on the dictionary company's site but were boosted to new heights throughout the year, editor at large Peter Sokolowski told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview. "We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity," he said ahead of Monday's announcement of this year's word. "What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more."

Sokolowski and his team don't delve into the reasons people head for dictionaries and websites in search of specific words. Rather, they chase the data on lookup spikes and world events that correlate. This time around, there was no particularly huge boost at any given time but a constancy to the increased interest in "authentic." [...] "Can we trust whether a student wrote this paper? Can we trust whether a politician made this statement? We don't always trust what we see anymore," Sokolowski said. "We sometimes don't believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance itself."

There's "not false or imitation: real, actual," as in an authentic cockney accent. There's "true to one's own personality, spirit or character." There's "worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact." There's "made or done the same way as an original." And, perhaps the most telling, there's "conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features."

An anonymous reader shares a report: To wean their country off imported oil and gas, and in the hope of retiring dirty coal-fired power stations, China's leaders have poured money into wind and solar energy. But they are also turning to one of the most sustainable forms of non-renewable power. Over the past decade China has added 37 nuclear reactors, for a total of 55, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a un body. During that same period America, which leads the world with 93 reactors, added two.

Facing an ever-growing demand for energy, China isn't letting up. It aims to install between six and eight nuclear reactors each year. Some officials seem to think that target is low. The country's nuclear regulator says China has the capacity to add between eight and ten per year. The State Council (China's cabinet) approved the construction of ten in 2022. All in all, China has 22 nuclear reactors under construction, many more than any other country. The growth of nuclear power has stalled in Western countries for a number of reasons. Reactors require a large upfront investment and take years to construct. The industry is heavily regulated.

China, though, has smoothed the path for nuclear power by providing state-owned energy companies with cheap loans, as well as land and licences. Suppliers of nuclear energy are given subsidies known as feed-in tariffs. All of this has driven down the price of nuclear power in China to around $70 per megawatt-hour, compared with $105 in America and $160 in the European Union, according to the International Energy Agency, an official forecaster. China is not immune to the safety concerns that have turned many in the West against nuclear power. After the disaster at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in 2011, China temporarily put its construction programme on hold. It has maintained a ban on inland nuclear plants, which have to use river water for cooling. Earlier this year China reacted angrily when Japan began releasing treated and totally harmless wastewater from the Fukushima plant into the ocean.

The United States and China are pursuing parallel scientific tracks. To solve crises on multiple fronts, the two roads need to become one, Nature's editorial board wrote Wednesday. From the post: It's no secret that research collaborations between China and the United States -- among other Western countries -- are on a downward trajectory. Early indicators of a possible downturn have been confirmed by more sources. A report from Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, published in August, for instance, stated that the number of research articles co-authored by scientists in the two countries had fallen in 2021, the first annual drop since 1993. Meanwhile, data from Nature Index show that China-based scientists' propensity to collaborate internationally has been waning, when looking at the authorship of papers in the Index's natural-science journals.

Nature reported last month that China's decoupling from the countries loosely described as the West mirrors its strengthening of science links with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. There are many good reasons for China to be boosting science in LMICs, which could sorely do with greater research funding and capacity building. But this is also creating parallel scientific systems -- one centred on North America and Europe, and the other on China. The biggest challenges faced by humanity, from combating climate change to ending poverty, are embodied in a globally agreed set of targets, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Approaching them without shared knowledge can only slow down progress by creating competing systems for advancing and implementing solutions. It's a scenario that the research community must be more aware of and work to avoid. Nature Index offers some reasons as to why collaboration between China and the West is declining. Travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic took their toll, limiting collaborations and barring new ones from being forged. Geopolitical tensions have led many Western governments to restrict their research partnerships with China, on national-security grounds, and vice versa.

India's government has granted its Computer Emergency Response Team, CERT-In, immunity from Right To Information (RTI) requests, the nation's equivalent of the freedom of information queries in the US, UK, or Australia. From a report: Reasons for the exemption have not been explained, but The Register has reported on one case in which an RTI request embarrassed CERT-In. That case related to India's sudden decision, in April 2022, to require businesses of all sizes to report infosec incidents to CERT-in within six hours of detection. The rapid reporting requirement applied both to serious incidents like ransomware attacks, and less critical messes like the compromise of a social media account.

CERT-In justified the rules as necessary to defend the nation's cyberspace and gave just sixty days notice for implementation. The plan generated local and international criticism for being onerous and inconsistent with global reporting standards such as Europe's 72-hour deadline for notifying authorities of data breaches. The reporting requirements even applied to cloud operators, who were asked to report incidents on tenants' servers. Big Tech therefore opposed the plan.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta purposefully engineered its platforms to addict children and knowingly allowed underage users to hold accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint. The complaint is a key part of a lawsuit filed against Meta by the attorneys general of 33 states in late October and was originally redacted. It alleges the social media company knew -- but never disclosed -- it had received millions of complaints about underage users on Instagram but only disabled a fraction of those accounts. The large number of underage users was an "open secret" at the company, the suit alleges, citing internal company documents.

In one example, the lawsuit cites an internal email thread in which employees discuss why a 12-year-old girl's four accounts were not deleted following complaints from the girl's mother stating her daughter was 12 years old and requesting the accounts to be taken down. The employees concluded that "the accounts were ignored" in part because representatives of Meta "couldn't tell for sure the user was underage." The complaint said that in 2021, Meta received over 402,000 reports of under-13 users on Instagram but that 164,000 -- far fewer than half of the reported accounts -- were "disabled for potentially being under the age of 13" that year. The complaint noted that at times Meta has a backlog of up to 2.5m accounts of younger children awaiting action. The complaint alleges this and other incidents violate the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act, which requires that social media companies provide notice and get parental consent before collecting data from children. The lawsuit also focuses on longstanding assertions that Meta knowingly created products that were addictive and harmful to children, brought into sharp focus by whistleblower Frances Haugen, who revealed that internal studies showed platforms like Instagram led children to anorexia-related content. Haugen also stated the company intentionally targets children under the age of 18.

Company documents cited in the complaint described several Meta officials acknowledging the company designed its products to exploit shortcomings in youthful psychology, including a May 2020 internal presentation called "teen fundamentals" which highlighted certain vulnerabilities of the young brain that could be exploited by product development. The presentation discussed teen brains' relative immaturity, and teenagers' tendency to be driven by "emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward" and asked how these asked how these characteristics could "manifest ... in product usage." [...] One Facebook safety executive alluded to the possibility that cracking down on younger users might hurt the company's business in a 2019 email. But a year later, the same executive expressed frustration that while Facebook readily studied the usage of underage users for business reasons, it didn't show the same enthusiasm for ways to identify younger kids and remove them from its platforms.

A series of arrests that began in late August and continued into last week has sparked concerns that a relatively rare 'Scene' crackdown targeting the top of the so-called 'Piracy Pyramid' may be underway in the Nordic region. TorrentFreak reports: In a statement last week, Denmark's National Unit for Special Crime (NSK) announced that as part of a long-running investigation, a man was arrested on November 22 and then charged with copyright infringement offenses. NSK said its officers searched the home of a 47-year-old man in South Zealand (Sydsjaelland) and seized IT equipment in connection with illegal file-sharing and "copyright infringement of a particularly serious nature." "The case is about an organized network that has illegally shared extremely large quantities of films and TV series via file sharing services," said NSK Police Commissioner Anders-Emil Nohr Kelbaek. While noting that NSK had no further information to offer at this time, Kelbaek said he was pleased that NSK had arrested another suspect believed to have played a 'significant role' in the unnamed network.

Last week's arrest was only the latest in a series of arrests carried out as part of the same long-running NSK investigation into the illegal distribution of movies and TV shows. In late August, NSK arrested four people on suspicion of sharing "extremely large quantities" of movies and TV shows. NSK raided addresses in South-West Jutland, North Zealand and Bornholmand. A 43-year old was arrested at the last location, but it's claimed he lives elsewhere. In common with last week's arrest, all were charged on suspicion of "particularly serious" copyright infringement offenses. In an almost identical statement to that issued last week, Commissioner Anders-Emil Nohr Kelbaek said the case was about "an organized network that shares extremely large amounts of data, presumably in the form of films and series."

TorrentFreak sources report concerns that last week's arrest may be linked to Scene groups. Terminology used by NSK doesn't instantly rule that out and does seem to suggest something potentially more significant than other arrests over the past few years. According to NSK, the August arrests took place on August 28, 2023. Using information in Scene release databases we looked for Danish Scene groups and/or groups that were releasing Denmark-focused content before that date but then made no releases afterward; while that wouldn't provide conclusive proof that a group had been targeted, the method has proven useful in the past. While activity late August suggests nothing especially out of the ordinary, activity since the arrest last week stands in contrast. TF is informed that some groups may have gone dark simply out of an abundance of caution. It's also possible that the groups have nothing to release. Furthermore, there are many other global groups with no obvious links to Danish content or Denmark that also stopped releasing on November 21. The reasons for this are unknown but holidays in the United States may play a role.

OLED monitors risk burn-in, especially with static images. Newer models combat this using improved materials, algorithms, efficiencies, features, and heat management. However, long-term data is minimal as quality selection is recent. An unexpected quirk applies to ultrawides: playing 16:9 content creates brighter center areas versus darker sides, quickening OLED degradation. In an extreme test by RTINGS, Samsung ultrawides developed heavy differential wear in just 700 hours. ArsTechnica adds: Even OLED monitors that have already been released can see their capabilities change in a way that could impact burn-in risk. For example, the Odyssey G8 monitor got a firmware update in August that removed the ability to use the Peak Brightness setting in SDR mode. While this is just one specific mode that, again, some users might not use, it's worth noting how this could change the amount of wear an OLED monitor could see. RTINGS' review said that after the firmware update, the monitor's max luminance "when displaying a bright highlight in an SDR scene" went from 331 nits to 230 nits. Samsung hasn't confirmed the reasons for this change, but such changes highlight how OLED monitor burn-in risk can change from use to use and from update to update, across different products.

An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld: JetBrains' Kotlin language, a Java rival endorsed by Google for Android mobile development, continues to scale up Tiobe's index of language popularity, reaching the 15th spot in the November 2023 rankings...

Software quality services company Tiobe cites Kotlin advantages including interoperability with Java and unrivaled Android accommodations as reasons for the language's rise. Kotlin, Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen said, also fits in with a modern programming culture of expressive languages that have a strong type system and avoid null pointer exceptions by design. "Based on my experience, I am pretty sure Kotlin can reach a top 10 position," Jansen said. It remains to be seen if it can ever scale as high as a top four slot, he added...

In the rival Pypl Popularity of Programming languages index this month, Kotlin was ranked 13th with a 1.76% share, having slipped slightly year-over-year.
Kotlin's rank on the TIOBE index rose three positions in the last month — after rising two positions the month before. TIOBE's CEO says the language has now achieved its highest ranking ever on the index, surpassing 2017's "first wave of Kotlin popularity...when Google announced first class support for Kotlin on Android."

Rust now ranks #20 on the index, behind Delphi/Object Pascal, Swift, Ruby, and R.

Here's TIOBE November rankings for top-20 most popular programming languages:

1. Python
2. C
3. C++
4. Java
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. PHP
8. Visual Basic
9. SQL
10. Assembly Language
11. Scratch
12. Fortran
13. Go
14. MATLAB
15. Kotlin
16. Delphi/Object Pascal
17. Swift
18. Ruby
19. R
20. Rust

Bill Gates argues that when it comes to climate change, "there are more reasons to be hopeful than many people realize — and it's not just that renewable energy sources like wind and solar are getting cheaper.

"And it's not just because many of the steps already taken to reduce carbon emissions are working: Carbon emissions from fossil fuels will probably peak in 2025." The main thing that makes me optimistic is all the innovation I'm seeing. As someone who has been funding climate solutions for years, I get to learn from ingenious scientists who are working on ideas that will help the world solve climate change. And their work makes me confident that innovation will help the world get on track to meet its climate goals.

Some people are skeptical when a technology person like me says innovation is the answer. And it's true that new tools aren't the only thing we need. But we won't solve the climate problem without them.

There are two reasons for this. First, we need to eliminate emissions from every sector of the economy. Although some behavior change will help, the world can't achieve its zero-emissions goals without inventing new ways of doing things. For example, the production of concrete and steel alone accounts for around 10 percent of the world's annual greenhouse gases, but right now, we don't have practical ways to make either one without releasing carbon dioxide.

The second reason is that, in a world with limited resources, innovations allow us to magnify the impact of our efforts... We couldn't solve the climate problem with existing technology even if we had unlimited resources — and, of course, we don't have unlimited resources. So we need to be as rigorous as possible about doing the most good with the funding that is available. In my view, that boils down to inventing and deploying new ways to cut emissions and to help people survive and thrive in a warming world.
Gates believes we're at "the beginning of a Clean Industrial Revolution" --pointing readers to Breakthrough Energy's recent State of the Transition Report for more details.

But Gates also provides some specific examples of optimism-fuleing breakthroughs"

• "To reduce emissions, we need to replace the synthetic fertilizers that release nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, when broken down by microbes in the soil; Pivot Bio has genetically modified microbes to provide plants with the nitrogen they need without the excess greenhouse gases that synthetic alternatives produce."

• "Cement and steel are two of the biggest sources of emissions in this category. Boston Metal is well on the way to making steel with electricity (which can be generated without emissions) instead of coal. CarbonCure and Ecocem have developed low-carbon processes for making cement, and Brimstone has a way to do it while actually removing carbon from the air."

• "Because of inefficient windows and gaps in what's known as the building envelope, as much as 40% of heated or cooled air leaks out of the typical building. If we can drive that number down, buildings will require less heating and cooling — which will substantially lower our emissions. Aeroseal has developed a polymer that can seal ducts and other crevices; more than a quarter of a million buildings in the U.S. and Canada are already using their product. Another company, Luxwall, has developed a window that's many times more efficient than the single-pane windows used in most buildings. And unlike double-paned windows, it's thin enough to replace single-paned glass without having to rebuild the frame."

According to Reuters, Meta's head of augmented reality software is stepping down from his role. From the report: VP of Engineering Don Box announced the end of his tenure at Meta internally this week, without elaborating on what he would do next, according to a source familiar with the matter. A Meta spokesperson confirmed Box would be leaving the company at the end of this week and said he was doing so for personal reasons. There would be no change in product roadmap as a result of his decision, she added.

The departure of Box, a veteran engineer with experience building major technology systems from their infancy, could be a setback to progress on the operating system, a key component of Meta's AR glasses project, the source told Reuters. Meta has been planning to deliver a first generation of its AR glasses by next year, although those are meant to be used only internally and by a select group of developers, the source said. It aims to ship its first AR glasses to consumers in 2027. The Meta spokesperson declined to address the roadmap or whether the OS that Box's team was building would be in the first generation AR glasses. [...]

Meta initially hired Box in 2021 to chart a path forward after the failure of its XROS project, which aimed to create a unified custom operating system for its virtual reality headsets, Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses and planned augmented reality glasses, the source said. Box broke up the 300-person XROS unit into dedicated teams for each device line early last year and personally took over the team focused on AR software, according to both the source and Box's LinkedIn profile. Prior to joining Meta, Box had worked at Microsoft since 2002. In his final role at Microsoft, he ran engineering for mixed reality, which involved developing software for the HoloLens2 headset and related AR/VR services. Box is known for having led the creation of the Xbox One operating system and later heading Microsoft's core operating system group, which works across all Windows products.

Richard Speed reports via The Register: Scientists have revealed how data from a NASA telescope was secured thanks to creative thinking and a batch of Raspberry Pi computers. The telescope was the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT), launched on April 16, 2023, from Wanaka Airport in New Zealand. The telescope was raised to approximately 33km in altitude by NASA's 532,000-cubic-meter (18.8-million-cubic-foot) balloon and, above circa 99.5 percent of the Earth's atmosphere, it spent over a month circumnavigating the globe and acquiring observations of astronomical objects. The plan had been for the payload to transmit its data to the ground using SpaceX's Starlink constellation and the US Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS). However, the Starlink connection went down soon after launch, on May 1, and the TDRSS connection became unstable on May 24. The boffins decided to attempt a landing on May 25 due to poor communications and concerns the balloon might be pulled away from further land crossings by weather.

The telescope itself was destroyed during the landing; it was dragged along the ground for 3km by a parachute that failed to detach, leaving a trail of debris in its wake. Miraculously, though, SuperBIT's solid-state drive was recovered intact. However, other than as a reference, its data was not needed thanks to the inclusion of Raspberry Pi-powered hardware in the form of four Data Recovery System (DRS) capsules. Each capsule included a Raspberry Pi 3B and 5TB of solid-state storage. A parachute, a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver, and an Iridium short-burst data transceiver were also included so the hardware could report its location to the recovery team. The capsules were connected to the main payload via Ethernet, and 24V DC was also available.

The plan had been to release the first DRS capsule on day 40, and then another every 20 days after that, whenever SuperBIT passed over land. However, when it became clear that SuperBIT would have to come down on May 25, it was decided to drop two DRS capsules over Argentina's Santa Cruz Province. Both of the DRS capsules released were recovered from their reported locations -- a curious cougar apparently nosed around one of them without causing damage -- and the data was fully intact. Of the unreleased DRS capsules, one failed for unknown reasons at launch -- the team speculated that perhaps a cable came loose -- but the other also contained an intact data set.