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Submission + - US Judge Orders Lawyers To Sign AI Pledge, Warning Chatbots 'Make Stuff Up' (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A federal judge in Texas is now requiring lawyers in cases before him to certify that they did not use artificial intelligence to draft their filings without a human checking their accuracy. U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr of the Northern District of Texas issued the requirement on Tuesday, in what appears to be a first for the federal courts. In an interview Wednesday, Starr said that he created the requirement to warn lawyers that AI tools can create fake cases and that he may sanction them if they rely on AI-generated information without verifying it themselves. "We're at least putting lawyers on notice, who might not otherwise be on notice, that they can't just trust those databases. They've got to actually verify it themselves through a traditional database," Starr said.

In the notice about the requirement on his Dallas court's website, Starr said generative AI tools like ChatGPT are "incredibly powerful" and can be used in the law in other ways, but they should not be used for legal briefing. "These platforms in their current states are prone to hallucinations and bias. On hallucinations, they make stuff up—even quotes and citations," the statement said. The judge also said that while attorneys swear an oath to uphold the law and represent their clients, the AI platforms do not. "Unbound by any sense of duty, honor, or justice, such programs act according to computer code rather than conviction, based on programming rather than principle," the notice said.

Starr said on Wednesday that he began drafting the mandate while attending a panel on artificial intelligence at a conference hosted by the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, where the panelists demonstrated how the platforms made up bogus cases. The judge said he considered banning the use of AI in his courtroom altogether, but he decided not to do so after conversations with Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the UCLA School of Law, and others. Volokh said Wednesday that lawyers who use other databases for legal research might assume they can also rely on AI platforms. "This is a way of reminding lawyers they can't assume that," Volokh said.

Submission + - US to stop giving Russia some New START nuclear arms data (reuters.com)

Submitted by terrorubic
terrorubic writes: WASHINGTON, June 1 (Reuters) — The United States said it will stop providing Russia some notifications required under the New START arms control treaty from Thursday, including updates on its missile and launcher locations, to retaliate for Moscow's "ongoing violations" of the accord.

Submission + - Meta Testing The Blocking of News Sites in Canada (ctvnews.ca)

Submitted by Peppercopia
Peppercopia writes: CTV news is reporting that Meta will begin testing the blocking of news sites in Canada. If the argument is that the social media giants are unfairly benefitting from content from Canadian news organizations, this move should be moot as the "stealing" would now be stopping. Unfortunately the opposite is likely the case, and the news organizations will find out how important the free traffic and promotion they are getting from social media giants really is. It feels a bit like killing the golden goose to get the eggs.

Submission + - Boeing delays Starliner launch ... again (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by xanthos
xanthos writes:

A Boeing official said Thursday that the company was "standing down" from an attempt to launch the Starliner spacecraft on July 21 to focus on recently discovered issues with the vehicle. Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager for Starliner, said two spacecraft problems were discovered before Memorial Day weekend and that the company spent the holiday investigating them. After internal discussions that included Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun, the company decided to delay the test flight that would carry NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the International Space Station.

TLDR; the parachute cords might not be strong enough and the tape that holds down all the wiring harnesses might go up in flames. Manned flight score: SpaceX 9 — Boeing 0

Submission + - Millions of PC Motherboards Were Sold With a Firmware Backdoor (eclypsium.com) 1

Submitted by rastos1
rastos1 writes: Wired reports: Researchers at firmware-focused cybersecurity company Eclypsium revealed today that they’ve discovered a hidden mechanism in the firmware of motherboards sold by the Taiwanese manufacturer Gigabyte, whose components are commonly used in gaming PCs and other high-performance computers. Whenever a computer with the affected Gigabyte motherboard restarts, Eclypsium found, code within the motherboard’s firmware invisibly initiates an updater program that runs on the computer and in turn downloads and executes another piece of software.

Eclypsium:
- Eclypsium automated heuristics detected firmware on Gigabyte systems that drops an executable Windows binary that is executed during the Windows startup process.
- This executable binary insecurely downloads and executes additional payloads from the Internet.

List of affected motherboards is here: https://eclypsium.com/wp-conte...

Submission + - Motorola Unveils Its 4th-Gen Foldable, the Moto Razr+ (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After endless leaks, Motorola made its fourth-generation lineup of foldables official today. The flagship is the Moto Razr+, which will launch in the US on June 23 for $999. There's also a cheaper phone called only the "Moto Razr" with a smaller outside screen, slower SoC, and no clear US price or release date. Internationally, these phones are called the Moto Razr 40 Ultra and Moto Razr 40.

The Ultra model's SoC is a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1—that's not the best you can get from Qualcomm, which would be the 8 Gen 2—this is a year-old mid-cycle upgrade chip. The phone has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 3800 mAh battery with 30 W quick charging. The leaked display specs have been all over the place, but officially, the interior display is a 6.9-inch, 2640×1080 OLED that runs at a smoking 165 Hz. The exterior display is super big on the Ultra model and is a 3.6-inch, 144 Hz OLED at a nearly square 1066×1056. Motorola has the phone's dust and water ingress protection rated at IP52, which typically only protects from "direct sprays of water up to 15 degrees from the vertical" and is far from qualifying the Razr as a water-resistant phone.

The design has been better. The original foldable Moto Razr reboot from 2020 had beautiful throwback looks that screamed "Moto Razr." It looked just like the old-school flip phone from the early 2000s but modernized. This fourth foldable generation tones things down a lot and is more of a generic rectangle. You could easily confuse it for Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip. This fourth generation seems more mature, though. Motorola will now let you run any app you want on the ultra's giant front screen, complete with the option of a super tiny Android navigation bar tucked away in the bottom left corner, to the left of the two front cameras. You can peruse the app drawer, use Google Pay, or play media on the front display. You can even type on the keyboard: Google GBoard has a special full-screen mode that will show a single line of input text.

Submission + - The first livestream of images from Mars (cnn.com)

Submitted by quonset
quonset writes: In what is considered to be a first, the European Space Agency (ESA) will, if everything goes to plan, stream live images of Mars from ESA's Mars Express orbiter on Friday, June 2nd.

The event is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the launch of the agency’s Mars Express — a mission to take three-dimensional images of the planet’s surface to see it in more complete detail.

You can watch the stream on ESA’s YouTube channel for an hour starting at 6 p.m. Central European Time, or noon ET Friday. While it won’t be truly live, there will be a new image about every 50 seconds of that hour, the agency said.

“Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before,” said James Godfrey, spacecraft operations manager at ESA’s mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, in a statement. “I’m excited to see Mars as it is now — as close to a martian ‘now’ as we can possibly get!”

Submission + - New Device Generates Electricity From Thin Air (smithsonianmag.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 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.

Submission + - NASA UFO team calls for higher quality data in first public meeting (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: 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 today.

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.”

Submission + - Ransomware Attack On US Dental Insurance Giant Exposes Data of 9 Million Patient (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An apparent ransomware attack on one of America’s largest dental health insurers has compromised the personal information of almost nine million individuals in the United States. The Atlanta-based Managed Care of North America (MCNA) Dental claims to be the largest dental insurer in the nation for governmentsponsored plans covering children and seniors. In a notice posted on Friday, the company said it became aware of “certain activity in our computer system that happened without our permission” on March 6 and later learned that a hacker “was able to see and take copies of some information in our computer system” between February 26 and March 7, 2023.

The information stolen includes a trove of patients’ personal data, including names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, Social Security numbers, and driver’s licenses or other government-issued ID numbers. Hackers also accessed patients’ health insurance data, including plan information and Medicaid ID numbers, along with bill and insurance claim information. In some cases, some of this data pertained to a patient’s “parent, guardian, or guarantor,” according to MCNA Dental, suggesting that children’s personal data was accessed during the breach. According to a data breach notification filed with Maine’s attorney general, the hack affected more than 8.9 million clients of MCNA Dental. That makes this incident the largest breach of health information of 2023 so far, after the PharMerica breach that saw hackers access the personal data of almost 6 million patients.

Submission + - Ubuntu Core as an Immutable OS (ubuntu.com) 1

Submitted by motang
motang writes: Canonical, the sponsor of widely popular Ubuntu Linux plans on shipping the next LTS in two versions. One traditional deb version and another immutable version based on snapd technology for enthusiasts to play with and give feedback. I for one am looking forward, as I am sure immutable is future of Linux distros.

Submission + - Apple's VR Headset is rumoured to pack super high end displays (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to a tweet from Ross Young , CEO of Display Supply Chain Consultants, Apple's rumored mixed reality headset could have extremely pixel-dense and bright displays. Young says that the headset will be equipped with two 1.41-inch Micro OLED screens, each with 4,000 pixels per inch (ppi). This would make the headset's displays more pixel-dense than any other VR headset on the market, including the Meta Quest Pro, which has a resolution of 2,160 x 2,160 per eye.

In addition to being extremely pixel-dense, Young also says that the headset's displays will be very bright, with a peak brightness of over 5,000 nits. This would make the headset displays brighter than high-end TVs.

The combination of high pixel density and high brightness would make the headset's displays ideal for VR applications that require a high level of detail and realism. For example, the headset's displays would be perfect for playing VR games or watching VR movies.

However, it's important to note that these are just rumors at this point. Apple has not yet officially announced a mixed-reality headset, so it's possible that the headset's specifications could change before it's released. We expect to see the "Reality Pro" headset at the WWDC Conference on June 5th, 2023.

Submission + - IAEA Team in Japan for Final Review of Fukushima Nuclear Plant Water Discharge (apnews.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An International Atomic Energy Agency team arrived in Tokyo on Monday for a final review before Japan begins releasing massive amounts of treated radioactive water into the sea from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, a plan that has been strongly opposed by local fishing communities and neighboring countries. The team, which includes experts from 11 countries, will meet with officials from the government and the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, and visit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant during their five-day visit, the economy and industry ministry said.

Japan announced plans in April 2021 to gradually release the wastewater following further treatment and dilution to what it says are safe levels. The release is expected to begin within a few months after safety checks by Japanese nuclear regulators of the newly constructed water discharge facility and a final report by IAEA expected in late June. Japan sought IAEA’s assistance in ensuring the release meets international safety standards and to gain the understanding of other countries.

Japanese officials say the water will be treated to legally releasable levels and further diluted with large amounts of seawater. It will be gradually released into the ocean over decades through an undersea tunnel, making it harmless to people and marine life, they say. Some scientists say the impact of long-term, low-dose exposure to radionuclides is unknown and the release should be delayed.

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