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Submission + - Israel uses AI to target Hamas. (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Falconhell
Falconhell writes: The Israeli military’s bombing campaign in Gaza used a previously undisclosed AI-powered database that at one stage identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas, according to intelligence sources involved in the war.

In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict.

Their unusually candid testimony provides a rare glimpse into the first-hand experiences of Israeli intelligence officials who have been using machine-learning systems to help identify targets during the six-month war.

Israel’s use of powerful AI systems in its war on Hamas has entered uncharted territory for advanced warfare, raising a host of legal and moral questions, and transforming the relationship between military personnel and machines.

“This is unparalleled, in my memory,” said one intelligence officer who used Lavender, adding that they had more faith in a “statistical mechanism” than a grieving soldier. “Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”
Several of the sources described how, for certain categories of targets, the IDF applied pre-authorised allowances for the estimated number of civilians who could be killed before a strike was authorised.

Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants.

Submission + - FBI Agent Says He Hassles People 'Every Day, All Day Long' Over Facebook Posts (reason.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The FBI spends "every day, all day long" interrogating people over their Facebook posts. At least, that's what agents told Stillwater, Oklahoma, resident Rolla Abdeljawad when they showed up at her house to ask her about her social media activity.

Three FBI agents came to Abdeljawad's house and said that they had been given "screenshots" of her posts by Facebook. Her lawyer Hassan Shibly posted a video of the incident online on Wednesday.

Abdeljawad told agents that she didn't want to talk and asked them to show their badges on camera, which the agents refused to do. She wrote on Facebook that she later confirmed with local police that the FBI agents really were FBI agents.

"Facebook gave us a couple of screenshots of your account," one agent in a gray shirt said in the video.

"So we no longer live in a free country and we can't say what we want?" replied Abdeljawad.

"No, we totally do. That's why we're not here to arrest you or anything," a second agent in a red shirt added. "We do this every day, all day long. It's just an effort to keep everybody safe and make sure nobody has any ill will."

Submission + - Fire crews receive special training to handle EV fires (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: A BBC investigation reports on special training that UK Fire and Rescue Service staff are receiving to handle Electric Vehicle fires.

While [a hazardous materials specialist] stressed that EV fires are rare, they pose a challenge quite unlike a conventionally fuelled vehicle fire. [...] The batteries — the source of the fire — are often hard to reach, he says, and EV fires can create directional jet flames and vapour cloud explosions.

"Our preferred approach is to let them burn themselves out," says [the specialist].

Electric cars are also known to reignite "up to two or three weeks after the initial fire", says Mr Maher, meaning they have to be "quarantined" away from other vehicles even after the fire appears to have been put out.

The results of [Fire Service] searches show there were 59 electric vehicle fire references in 2022-23 across England — up from 30 the previous year.

[The UK Government's Home Office] recommended car parks increased the spacing between electric vehicles to reduce the risk of fires spreading between vehicles. Which will only increase the pressure to reduce all vehicle usage in town and city centres, as parking space is effectively reduced.

Submission + - AI hallucinates dependencies, cyber security research makes malware PoC (theregister.com)

Submitted by schneidafunk
schneidafunk writes: FTA:
According to Bar Lanyado, security researcher at Lasso Security, one of the businesses fooled by AI into incorporating the package is Alibaba, which at the time of writing still includes a pip command to download the Python package huggingface-cli in its GraphTranslator installation instructions.

There is a legit huggingface-cli, installed using pip install -U "huggingface_hub[cli]".

But the huggingface-cli distributed via the Python Package Index (PyPI) and required by Alibaba's GraphTranslator – installed using pip install huggingface-cli – is fake, imagined by AI and turned real by Lanyado as an experiment.

He created huggingface-cli in December after seeing it repeatedly hallucinated by generative AI; by February this year, Alibaba was referring to it in GraphTranslator's README instructions rather than the real Hugging Face CLI tool.

Submission + - WSJ: America Made a Huge Bet on Sports Gambling. The Backlash Is Here (archive.is)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: American sports spent more than a century keeping gambling as far away as possible, in the name of preserving competitive purity and repelling scandal and corruption.

Now, less than six years after the Supreme Court opened the door for states to embrace legal sports betting, major U.S. leagues are already confronting the darker sides of sports betting with alarming frequency. And at the heart of the problems is the population whose ability to bet on sports is the most severely curbed: the athletes themselves.

The past two weeks alone have seen players across the major professional and college leagues drawn into a building avalanche of gambling scandals that showed just how perilous the new landscape has become.

Earlier this month, the National Basketball Association fielded complaints from players and a head coach about betting’s growing influence and its potential dangers. Days later, Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter became the subject of a league investigation of alleged suspicious betting activity.

The National Football League, meanwhile, suspended 10 players for betting just last year.

The controversies have extended into the collegiate ranks as well. In the buildup to March Madness—the biggest sports-betting event in America—the Temple University men’s basketball team was flagged by prominent gambling watchdog firm U.S. Integrity for suspicious wagering activity on its games.

The situation has become worrisome enough that NCAA president Charlie Baker on Wednesday amped up his organization’s call for a nationwide ban on bets on the performance of individual college athletes. He added that “these last several days show there is more work to be done.”

Last week, a nightmare scenario in Major League Baseball also served as a reminder that, even as legal gambling proliferates, illegal gambling in the U.S. remains a potent force. Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, the highest paid athlete in American sports history, found himself embroiled in a betting scandal stemming from his longtime interpreter’s association with an alleged illegal bookmaker who is under federal investigation.

Submission + - Henrietta Leavitt, Cosmology Pioneer, Receives Belated Obituary (nytimes.com)

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: The NYTimes has an occasional series called "Overlooked", whereby notable people whose deaths were overlooked at the time receive the obituary they deserve.

Their latest installment eulogizes Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who passed away in 1921 at age 53.

In the early 20th century, when Henrietta Leavitt began studying photographs of distant stars at the Harvard College Observatory, astronomers had no idea how big the universe was....Leavitt, working as a poorly paid member of a team of mostly women [computers] who cataloged data for the scientists at the observatory, found a way to peer out into the great unknown and measure it.

Leavitt discovered the period-luminosity relationship for Cepheid variable stars. The relationship, now known as Leavitt's Law, is a crucial rung in the cosmic distance ladder, the methods for measuring the distance to stars, galaxies, and across the visible universe.

[Leavitt's Law] underpinned the research of other pioneering astronomers, including Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley, whose work in the years after World War I demolished long-held ideas about our solar system’s place in the cosmos. Leavitt’s Law has been used on the Hubble Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope in making new calculations about the rate of expansion of the universe and the proximity of stars billions of light years from earth.

“She cracked into something that was not only impressive scientifically but shifted an entire paradigm of thinking....”

Submission + - Antarctica, Earth's largest freezer, is defrosting (economist.com)

Submitted by SpzToid
SpzToid writes: The deadliest hurricane ever to hit America made landfall over Galveston, Texas, a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico, on September 8th 1900. Terrified inhabitants watched a 4.5-metre-high wall of water approach their shores and tear through their homes. More than 8,000 people died. In the aftermath, a massive concrete seawall was built to keep future storm surges at bay. The engineers thought making it 5 metres tall would be enough.

And it was, for 120 years. But even as the wall was being built, human-caused climate change was getting under way, piling new heat and energy into the global climate system which would push the seas up shorelines around the world. Today, the US Army Corps of Engineers has a $57bn plan to build a new barrier, dubbed “Ike Dike”, to protect Galveston as well as the Houston region and large petrochemical facilities that sit behind the island from ever bigger and more powerful storm surges. It could be the largest civil-engineering project in American history. Where will the water that it is designed to hold back come from? Much of it will hail from Earth’s southernmost continent more than 10,000km away, home to the world’s largest ice mass by a factor of ten: Antarctica.

When it comes to polar climate impacts, the Arctic receives most of the world’s attention. For years, scientists have warned of dramatic changes there being the canary in the climate coal mine. The blanket of summer ice that has persisted on the northernmost ocean for millennia steadily dwindled to almost nothing but it wasn’t until Siberia, land of permanently frozen soil, caught fire in 2019 that anyone outside the (alarmed) climate community and (delighted) shipping industry paid much attention.

The southern pole, by contrast, has been neglected in the climate narrative. That is due in part to its remoteness and in part to an early scientific miscalculation. While the Arctic was melting rapidly, Antarctica looked relatively stable. Not only that, climate models suggested it would see more snowfall in a warming world, causing its ice pack to grow, not shrink.

The models, it turns out, were wrong. A build-up of jaw-dropping events and extremes in recent years has shown that Antarctica is undergoing massive changes on land, sea and in the atmosphere above. As a result, a new portrait of the continent is emerging which has, so far, received little attention. Polar scientists are warning of a regime shift.

Submission + - Elon Musk Fought Government Surveillance While Profiting From It (theintercept.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: TEN YEARS AGO, the internet platform X, then known as Twitter, filed a lawsuit against the government it hoped would force transparency around abuse-prone surveillance of social media users. X’s court battle, though, clashes with an uncomfortable fact: The company is itself in the business of government surveillance of social media.

Under the new ownership of Elon Musk, X had continued the litigation, until its defeat in January. The suit was aimed at overturning a governmental ban on disclosing the receipt of requests, known as national security letters, that compel companies to turn over everything from user metadata to private direct messages. Companies that receive these requests are typically legally bound to keep the request secret and can usually only disclose the number they’ve received in a given year in vague numerical ranges.

In its petition to the Supreme Court last September, X’s attorneys took up the banner of communications privacy: “History demonstrates that the surveillance of electronic communications is both a fertile ground for government abuse and a lightning-rod political topic of intense concern to the public.” After the court declined to take up the case in January, Musk responded tweeting, “Disappointing that the Supreme Court declined to hear this matter.”

The court’s refusal to take the case on ended X’s legal bid, but the company and Musk had positioned themselves at the forefront of a battle on behalf of internet users for greater transparency about government surveillance.

However, emails between the U.S. Secret Service and the surveillance firm Dataminr, obtained by The Intercept from a Freedom of Information Act request, show X is in an awkward position, profiting from the sale of user data for government surveillance purposes at the same time as it was fighting secrecy around another flavor of state surveillance in court.

Submission + - Say Hello to Biodegradable Microplastics (ucsd.edu) 1

Submitted by HanzoSpam
HanzoSpam writes: Microplastics are tiny, nearly indestructible fragments shed from everyday plastic products. As we learn more about microplastics, the news keeps getting worse. Already well-documented in our oceans and soil, we’re now discovering them in the unlikeliest of places: our arteries, lungs and even placentas.

Microplastics can take anywhere from 100 to 1,000 years to break down and, in the meantime, our planet and bodies are becoming more polluted with these materials every day.

Finding viable alternatives to traditional petroleum-based plastics and microplastics has never been more important. New research from scientists at the University of California San Diego and materials-science company Algenesis shows that their plant-based polymers biodegrade — even at the microplastic level — in under seven months. The paper, whose authors are all UC San Diego professors, alumni or former research scientists, appears in Nature Scientific Reports.

Submission + - Tesla Hack Earns $200,000 at Pwn2Own 2024 (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: A team from cybersecurity firm Synacktiv earned $200,000 at Pwn2Own for an integer overflow exploit targeting Tesla's electronic control unit (ECU) with CAN bus control. In addition to the money, the researchers won a new Tesla Model 3.

Participants have earned more than $700,000 on the first day of the Pwn2Own Vancouver 2024 hacking competition, successfully demonstrating exploits against a Tesla car, Linux and Windows operating systems, and various pieces of widely used software.

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