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Submission + - The Onion buys Alex Jones's Infowars (bbc.com)

Submitted by skam240
skam240 writes: "Satirical news publication The Onion has bought Infowars, the media organisation headed by right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, for an undisclosed price at a court-ordered auction.

The Onion said that the bid was secured with the backing of families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who won a $1.5bn (£1.18bn) defamation lawsuit against Jones for spreading false rumours about the massacre."

Submission + - Ford's CEO has been driving the Xiaomi's SU7 EV for months (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The CEO of one of America's biggest car companies has been driving a Chinese vehicle for six months, and he’s loving it.

Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford Motor Company, said Monday on “The Fully Charged Podcast” that for the past six months he’s been driving the Xiaomi Speed Ultra 7, the Chinese company’s first electric vehicle. Although he said he doesn’t like to talk much about the competition, he praised both the car and its manufacturer, Xiaomi.

"We flew one from Shanghai to Chicago, and I've been driving it for six months now,” Farley said. “And I don't want to give it up."

"It's fantastic. They sell 10,000, 20,000 a month. They're sold out for six months," Farley said. “That is an industry juggernaut and a consumer brand that is much stronger than car companies.”

Submission + - Octopuses recorded hunting with fish — and punching those that don't coope (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by Hmmmmmm
Hmmmmmm writes: Octopuses don’t always hunt alone — but their partners aren’t who you’d expect.

A new study shows that some members of the species Octopus cyanea maraud around the seafloor in hunting groups with fish, which sometimes include several fish species at once.

The research, published in the journal Nature on Monday, even suggests that the famously intelligent animals organized the hunting groups’ decisions, including what they should prey upon.

What’s more, the researchers witnessed the cephalopod species — often called the big blue or day octopus — punching companion fish, apparently to keep them on task and contributing to the collective effort.

Octopuses have often been thought to avoid other members of their species and prowl solo using camouflage. But the study suggests that some octopuses have surprisingly rich social lives — a finding that opens a new window into the marvels of undersea life. It’s an indication that at least one octopus species has characteristics and markers of intelligence that scientists once considered common only in vertebrates.

These hunting groups typically included several species of reef fish, such as grouper and goatfish. The octopuses did not appear to lead the groups, but they did punch at fish to enforce social order — most often at blacktip groupers.

“The ones that get more punched are the main exploiters of the group. These are the ambush predators, the ones that don’t move, don’t look for prey,” Sampaio said.

Octopuses would also punch fish to keep the group moving.

“If the group is very still and everyone is around the octopus, it starts punching, but if the group is moving along the habitat, this means that they’re looking for prey, so the octopus is happy. It doesn’t punch anyone,” Sampaio said.

The researchers think fish benefit from such hunting groups because an octopus can reach into crevices where prey hides and root out lunch. The octopus benefits, they believe, because it can simply follow the fish to food, rather than perform what the researchers call speculative hunting.

“For the octopus, it’s also an advantage because it doesn’t need to sample or go around the environment,” Sampaio said. “You can just look at the fish.”

The researchers did not see evidence that the creatures shared prey. All the species involved are generalists that eat crustaceans, fish and mollusks, but whoever was able to catch the prey got a meal.

Questions remain, however, including whether certain octopuses recognize or prefer to hunt with a favorite fish companion.

Submission + - Microplastics discovered in human penises for the first time (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have found microplastics in human penises for the first time, as concerns over the tiny particles’ proliferation and potential health effects mount.

Seven different kinds of microplastics were found in four out of five samples of penis tissue taken from five different men as part of a study published in IJIR: Your Sexual Medicine Journal on Wednesday.

Microplastics are polymer fragments that can range from less than 0.2 inch (5 millimeters) down to 1/25,000th of an inch (1 micrometer). Anything smaller is a nanoplastic that must be measured in billionths of a meter. They form when larger plastics break down, either by chemically degrading or physically wearing down into smaller pieces.

  Seven different types of microplastics were detected, with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polypropylene (PP) the most prevalent, according to the study.

Now their presence has been confirmed, more research is needed to investigate potential links to conditions such as ED, Ramasamy said.

Prior research has found that one liter of bottled water — the equivalent of two standard-size bottled waters — contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles.

As we are trying to understand the potential health effects of plastics, this is another concerning paper,” said Campen, a regents’ professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who wasn’t involved in the research.

“Plastics are generally non-reactive with the cells and chemicals of our bodies, but they could be physically disruptive to the many processes our bodies undertake for normal function, including functions related to erection and sperm production.”

Campen coauthored a study published in May that found that human testicles contain microplastics and nanoplastics at levels three times higher than animal testes and human placentas.

The study tested 23 preserved testes from cadavers of males who were ages 16 to 88 at the time of their death, then compared the levels of 12 different types of plastics in those testicles with plastics found in 47 dog testes.

“The levels of microplastic shards and types of plastics in human testes were three times greater than those found in dogs, and the dogs are eating off the floor,” Campen said at the time the study was published. “So it really puts in perspective of what we’re putting in our own bodies.”

Comment Re:Unpopular opinion (Score 2) 95

Right. People don't realize that recording video on their phones make it almost impossible to not get jerky motion in video in daylight. The shutter speed isn't supposed to more than about 2x the frame rate to get proper motion blur so that you get smooth looking video footage.

The problem is that the phone's camera lens has a fixed aperture, and this means that it's almost impossible to get e.g. 1/50 shutter speed for 24fps shooting in the day time even at the lowest ISO, unless you attach a ND filter to the lens to drop it by at least 5-10 stops.

Submission + - Intel ditches hyperthreading for Lunar Lake CPUs (pcworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Intel’s fastest processors have included hyperthreading, a technique that lets more than one thread run on a single CPU core, for over 20 years — and it’s used by AMD (which calls it “simultaneous multi-threading”) as well. But you won’t see a little “HT” on the Intel sticker for any Lunar Lake laptops, because none of them use it. Hyperthreading will be disabled on all Lunar Lake CPU cores, including both performance and efficiency cores.

Why? The reason is complicated, but basically it’s no longer needed. The performance cores or P-Cores on the new Lunar Lake series are 14 percent faster than the same cores on the previous-gen Meteor Lake CPUs, even with the multi-thread-processing of hyperthreading disabled.

Turning on the feature would come at too high a power cost, and Lunar Lake is all about boosting performance while keeping laptops in this generation thin, light, and long-lasting. That means maximizing single-thread performance — the most relevant to users who are typically focusing on one task at a time, as is often the case for laptops — in terms of surface area, to improve overall performance per watt. Getting rid of the physical components necessary for hyperthreading just makes sense in that context.

Submission + - Israel Secretly Targets U.S. Lawmakers With Influence Campaign on Gaza War (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war with Gaza, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation.
The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world with the State of Israel, four Israeli officials said. The ministry allocated about $2 million to the operation and hired Stoic, a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv, to carry it out, according to the officials and the documents.
The campaign began in October and remains active on the platform X. At its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on X, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments. The accounts focused on U.S. lawmakers, particularly ones who are Black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with posts urging them to continue funding Israel’s military.
ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, was used to generate many of the posts. The campaign also created three fake English-language news sites featuring pro-Israel articles.
The Israeli government’s connection to the influence operation, which The New York Times verified with four current and former members of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and documents about the campaign, has not previously been reported. FakeReporter, an Israeli misinformation watchdog, identified the effort in March. Last week, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, said they had also found and disrupted the operation.
The secretive campaign signals the lengths Israel was willing to go to sway American opinion on the war in Gaza. The United States has long been one of Israel’s staunchest allies, with President Biden recently signing a $15 billion military aid package for the country. But the conflict has been unpopular with many Americans, who have called for Mr. Biden to withdraw support for Israel in the face of mounting civilian deaths in Gaza.

Submission + - Internet Addiction Alters Brain Chemistry In Young People, Study Finds (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Young people with internet addiction experience changes in their brain chemistry which could lead to more addictive behaviors, research suggests. The study, published in PLOS Mental Health, reviewed previous research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine how regions of the brain interact in people with internet addiction.

They found that the effects were evident throughout multiple neural networks in the brains of young people, and that there was increased activity in parts of the brain when participants were resting. At the same time, there was an overall decrease in the functional connectivity in parts of the brain involved in active thinking, which is the executive control network of the brain responsible for memory and decision-making. The research found that these changes resulted in addictive behaviors and tendencies in adolescents, as well as behavioral changes linked to mental health, development, intellectual ability and physical coordination.

Submission + - Systemd wants to expand to include a sudo replacement (fosspost.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has posted on Mastodon about their upcoming v256 release of Systemd, which is expected to include a sudo replacement called “run0”.

The developer talks about the weaknesses of sudo, and how it has a large possible attack surface. For example, sudo supports network access, LDAP configurations, other types of plugins, and much more. But most importantly, its SUID binary provides a large attack service according to Lennart:

"I personally think that the biggest problem with sudo is the fact it’s a SUID binary though – the big attack surface, the plugins, network access and so on that come after it it just make the key problem worse, but are not in themselves the main issue with sudo. SUID processes are weird concepts: they are invoked by unprivileged code and inherit the execution context intended for and controlled by unprivileged code. By execution context I mean the myriad of properties that a process has on Linux these days, from environment variables, process scheduling properties, cgroup assignments, security contexts, file descriptors passed, and so on and so on."

He’s saying that sudo is a Unix concept from many decades ago, and a better privilege escalation system should be in place for 2024 security standards:

  "So, in my ideal world, we’d have an OS entirely without SUID. Let’s throw out the concept of SUID on the dump of UNIX’ bad ideas. An execution context for privileged code that is half under the control of unprivileged code and that needs careful manual clean-up is just not how security engineering should be done in 2024 anymore."

Submission + - Plato's final hours recounted in scroll found in Vesuvius ash (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Newly deciphered passages from a papyrus scroll that was buried beneath layers of volcanic ash after the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius may have shed light on the final hours of Plato, a key figure in the history of western philosophy.

In a groundbreaking discovery, the ancient scroll was found to contain a previously unknown narrative detailing how the Greek philosopher spent his last evening, describing how he listened to music played on a flute by a Thracian slave girl.

Despite battling a fever and being on the brink of death, Plato – who was known as a disciple of Socrates and a mentor to Aristotle, and who died in Athens around 348BC – retained enough lucidity to critique the musician for her lack of rhythm, the account suggests.

The decoded words also suggest Plato’s burial site was in his designated garden in the Academy of Athens, the world’s first university, which he founded, adjacent to the Mouseion. Previously, it was only known in general terms that he was buried within the academy.

The text also reveals that Plato was sold into slavery on the island of Aegina, possibly as early as 404BC when the Spartans conquered the island, or alternatively in 399BC, shortly after Socrates’ passing.

“Until now it was believed that Plato was sold into slavery in 387BC during his sojourn in Sicily at the court of Dionysius I of Syracuse,” Ranocchia said. “For the first time, we have been able to read sequences of hidden letters from the papyri that were enfolded within multiple layers, stuck to each other over the centuries, through an unrolling process using a mechanical technique that disrupted whole fragments of text.”

Ranocchia said the ability to identify these layers and virtually realign them to their original positions to restore textual continuity represented a significant advance in terms of gathering vast amounts of information.

Submission + - Boeing whistleblower raises new concerns about the 787, and the FAA investigates (npr.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Federal regulators are investigating a whistleblower's claims about flaws in the assembly of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner.

Longtime Boeing engineer Sam Salehpour went public Tuesday with claims that he observed problems with how parts of the plane's fuselage were fastened together. Salehpour warns that production "shortcuts" could significantly shorten the lifespan of the plane, eventually causing the fuselage to fall apart in mid-flight.

"It can cause a catastrophic failure," Salehpour said Tuesday during a press briefing to discuss his claims.

A spokesman for the FAA confirmed that the agency is investigating those allegations, which were first reported by the New York Times, but declined to comment further on them.

Boeing immediately pushed back.

"These claims about the structural integrity of the 787 are inaccurate and do not represent the comprehensive work Boeing has done to ensure the quality and long-term safety of the aircraft," Boeing spokeswoman Jessica Kowal said in a statement. "We are fully confident in the 787 Dreamliner."

Submission + - US $7.5 billion investment in EV charging produced only 7 stations in 2 years (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: President Biden has long vowed to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations in the United States by 2030. Those stations, the White House said, would help Americans feel confident purchasing and driving electric cars, and help the country cut carbon pollution.

But now, more than two years after Congress allocated $7.5 billion to help build out those stations, only 7 EV charging stations are operational across four states. And as the Biden administration rolls out its new rules for emissions from cars and trucks — which will require a lot more electric cars and hybrids on the road — the sluggish build-out could slow the transition to electric cars.

“I think a lot of people who are watching this are getting concerned about the timeline,” said Alexander Laska, deputy director for transportation and innovation at the center-left think tank Third Way.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Biden signed in November 2021, included $7.5 billion for EV charging. Of that, $5 billion was allocated to individual states in so-called “formula funding” to build a network of fast chargers along major highways in the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI, program.

But after two years, that program has only delivered seven open charging stations with a total of 38 spots where drivers can charge their vehicles, according to a spokesperson for the Federal Highway Administration. (The funding should be enough to build up to 20,000 charging spots or around 5,000 stations, according to analysis from the EV policy analyst group Atlas Public Policy.) Stations are open in Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania and under construction in four other states.

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