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Submission + - MIT physicists just found a way to see inside atoms (sciencedaily.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: MIT researchers have devised a new molecular technique that lets electrons probe inside atomic nuclei, replacing massive particle accelerators with a tabletop setup. By studying radium monofluoride, they detected energy shifts showing electrons interacting within the nucleus. This breakthrough could help reveal why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe.

Submission + - HAL 9000 (theguardian.com)

Submitted by mspohr
mspohr writes: After Palisade Research released a paper last month which found that certain advanced AI models appear resistant to being turned off, at times even sabotaging shutdown mechanisms, it wrote an update attempting to clarify why this is – and answer critics who argued that its initial work was flawed.

In an update this week, Palisade, which is part of a niche ecosystem of companies trying to evaluate the possibility of AI developing dangerous capabilities, described scenarios it ran in which leading AI models – including Google’s Gemini 2.5, xAI’s Grok 4, and OpenAI’s GPT-o3 and GPT-5 – were given a task, but afterwards given explicit instructions to shut themselves down.

Certain models, in particular Grok 4 and GPT-o3, still attempted to sabotage shutdown instructions in the updated setup. Concerningly, wrote Palisade, there was no clear reason why.

Submission + - Student handcuffed by police after AI 'mistakes bag of Doritos for gun' (independent.co.uk)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'Taki Allen was approached by armed officers at Kenwood High School following football practice, who ordered him to the ground and cuffed him before realising he had no weapon.

'The school's Omnilert AI gun detection system, which uses cameras to identify potential weapons, generated an alert that was then forwarded to the school resource officer and police.

'While the student's family and local officials have expressed concern and called for a review of the system, the school superintendent defended its operation, stating it "did what it was supposed to do".

'This incident follows a previous failure of the Omnilert system in January, where it did not detect a gun used in a fatal shooting at a Nashville high school due to camera proximity issues.'

A false positive follows a catastrophic false negative. The price we pay for safety? How big a price should we pay?

Comment Why XMPP (Score 1) 31

Why XMPP? It doesn't even support any modern form of SSO There are plenty of other interoperable messaging standards. There's Matrix, they could easily develop a federated revision of the Signal protocol, and if you really wanted to abstract it, you could represent an IM conversation as a series of emails (see Delta Chat for an encrypted email-based messenger).

Submission + - Madison Square Garden Bans Fan After Surveillance IDs Him as Critic of Its CEO (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A concert on Monday night at New York’s Radio City Music Hall was a special occasion for Frank Miller: his parents’ wedding anniversary. He didn’t end up seeing the show — and before he could even get past security, he was informed that he was in fact banned for life from the venue and all other properties owned by Madison Square Garden (MSG). After scanning his ticket and promptly being pulled aside by security, Miller was told by staff that he was barred from the MSG properties for an incident at the Garden in 2021. But Miller says he hasn’t been to the venue in nearly two decades.

“They hand me a piece of paper letting me know that I’ve been added to a ban list,” Miller says. “There’s a trespass notice if I ever show up on any MSG property ever again,” which includes venues like Radio City, the Beacon Theatre, the Sphere, and the Chicago Theatre. He was baffled at first. Then it dawned on him: this was probably about a T-shirt he designed years ago. MSG Entertainment won’t say what happened with Miller or how he was picked out of the crowd, but he suspects he was identified via controversial facial recognition systems that the company deploys at its venues.

In 2017, 1990s New York Knicks star Charles Oakley was forcibly removed from his seat near Knicks owner and Madison Square Garden CEO James Dolan. The high-profile incident later spiraled into an ongoing legal battle. For Miller, Oakley was an “integral” part of the ’90s Knicks, he says. With his background in graphic design, he made a shirt in the style of the old team logo that read, “Ban Dolan” — a reference to the infamous scuffle. A few years later, in 2021, a friend of Miller’s wore a Ban Dolan shirt to a Knicks game and was kicked out and banned from future events. That incident spawned ESPN segments and news articles and validated what many fans saw as a pettiness on Dolan and MSG’s part for going after individual fans who criticized team ownership.

Submission + - DOGE to replace SSA's entire COBOL codebase with JAVA "within months" (wired.com)

Submitted by SoCalChris
SoCalChris writes: Wired is reporting that DOGE is planning to try and replace the entire Social Security Administration's existing COBOL code base with a new JAVA implementation, and plan to have it completed "within a matter of months". As one of the experts that Wired talked to pointed out, simply identifying all of the edge cases that the software would need to test for would take several years.

Comment Re:Caching issue (Score 1) 39

by La Camiseta (#64450514) Attached to: Is Mastodon's Link-Previewing Overloading Servers?

Yeah. They stated in their article that they're behind Cloudflare as well, so this should be getting cached. I'm wondering if there's some setting in their server or in the Cloudflare page rules that's disabling the Cloudflare cache. Even if there's several MB of JavaScript files being downloaded, these *should* be static and cached, reducing the load.

It looks like their Cf-Cache-Status header on their page is showing as "DYNAMIC", not "STATIC". If that's the case, CloudFlare isn't doing anything and is passing through every request, even for logged out users.

Comment How hard is it really? (Score 1) 46

I use S3 in my daily work. I administer our AWS account. Blocking all public access without the option to override is an option right on the main S3 page.

In all reality, AWS should have this enabled by default for all new accounts with big warnings if you try to disable it.

Sure, if you do this to an existing system, there may be bugs, and people will need to get authorized to access files, but to to otherwise just seems foolish and asking to be the subject of one of these articles.

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