Comment Re: Remove Encryption? (Score 1) 70
RFS is dead. Like his wife.
Comment Remove Encryption? (Score -1, Redundant) 70
What could possibly go wrong?
Apple is becoming more MS every day.
Comment Re:SCO and IBM (Score 1) 108
"Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time"
Comment Fingerprinting (Score 3, Interesting) 55
Its called fingerprinting, and it has been going on a very long time, using techniques that go back decades. This just makes it more persistent and spans attempts to obfuscate fingerprinting in easier ways.
If you want to avoid this, work from a non-persistent VM that is created and destroyed every online session, using no identifiable information (no-logins ever).
Security isn't convenient.
Submission + - Why have papers by one of history's most famous physicists been retracted? (science.org)
sciencehabit writes: The link was too juicy not to click.
In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?
After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews.
Gingras called up Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières. “There’s something fishy,” Gingras said. The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, originally appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by publishing giant Springer Nature. After some sleuthing, Khelfaoui determined one of the Planck pieces, a philosophical essay from 1942 titled “Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft” (“Meaning and Limits of Exact Science”), about how to achieve certainty in scientific knowledge, had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books. Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered “self-plagiarism” and frowned upon today—the practice produces copyright conflicts and inflates scholars’ publication records. The Naturwissenschaften site gives “copyright violation” as the reason for the retraction.
Yet publishing identical material in multiple journals was widespread before the internet. “Science was more fragmented” then, Khelfaoui says. “You wanted different audiences to have access to your work.” The practice was especially common for luminaries like Planck. Albert Einstein did the same (but escaped retractions).
Springer Nature’s “anachronistic” application of modern standards to a 1942 paper “distort[s] the historical record,” Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in a preprint posted last month on arXiv. Any concerns about copyright violations are largely moot anyway: Because Planck died in 1947, his works are in the public domain in most countries.
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Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?
After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews.
Gingras called up Mahdi Khelfaoui, a fellow historian of science at UQ Trois-Rivières. “There’s something fishy,” Gingras said. The papers, both quietly retracted in 2011, originally appeared in the early 1940s in Naturwissenschaften, a German journal now owned by publishing giant Springer Nature. After some sleuthing, Khelfaoui determined one of the Planck pieces, a philosophical essay from 1942 titled “Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft” (“Meaning and Limits of Exact Science”), about how to achieve certainty in scientific knowledge, had also appeared in two other journals and been reprinted twice in books. Repackaging the same work multiple times is considered “self-plagiarism” and frowned upon today—the practice produces copyright conflicts and inflates scholars’ publication records. The Naturwissenschaften site gives “copyright violation” as the reason for the retraction.
Yet publishing identical material in multiple journals was widespread before the internet. “Science was more fragmented” then, Khelfaoui says. “You wanted different audiences to have access to your work.” The practice was especially common for luminaries like Planck. Albert Einstein did the same (but escaped retractions).
Springer Nature’s “anachronistic” application of modern standards to a 1942 paper “distort[s] the historical record,” Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in a preprint posted last month on arXiv. Any concerns about copyright violations are largely moot anyway: Because Planck died in 1947, his works are in the public domain in most countries.
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Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95.
Submission + - 'Stringy' universe could unravel the theory of the cosmos (science.org)
sciencehabit writes: Like a vast bowl of spaghetti, the universe may be stringy on length scales far larger than cosmologists have long assumed. In a study published today in Nature, two researchers argue galaxies align in enormous filaments even on scales where the cosmos should appear smooth and uniform. If correct, the bold claim would upend the cosmological principle, the conceptual cornerstone of the standard cosmological model.
“This is serious,” says Subir Sarkar, a cosmologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the work. “If there is a real contradiction between what you expect and what you find, that would be progress, right?” Abandoning the cosmological principle could even eliminate the need for dark energy, the mysterious space-stretching stuff thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, some cosmologists say. But others are skeptical of the new claim.
“This is serious,” says Subir Sarkar, a cosmologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the work. “If there is a real contradiction between what you expect and what you find, that would be progress, right?” Abandoning the cosmological principle could even eliminate the need for dark energy, the mysterious space-stretching stuff thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, some cosmologists say. But others are skeptical of the new claim.
Comment Just Like T-Mobile Stores (Score 1) 39
Learned it from T-Mobile, and their T-Life setup.
Stores are all but useless now.
Comment VM spun up to browse (Score 1) 51
Spin up a LIVE based VM, with one of the more secure browsers. Then when you're done, all the cookies are poof
This bypasses almost all forms of tracking/fingerprinting browsing systems.
Also, why can't hackers figure out how to poison cookies?
Submission + - After empty promises, string theory finds new uses (science.org)
sciencehabit writes: For decades, string theory promised a “theory of everything” that described all particles and forces as tiny vibrating strings. Physicists hoped it could also solve one of the field’s deepest problems: reconciling quantum mechanics with gravity. But as string theory grew increasingly elaborate—and experimentally unreachable—many physicists lost hope.
Now, some researchers are revisiting the theory from first principles. In a paper in press at Physical Review Letters, Clifford Cheung, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and colleagues lay out a small set of assumptions about the universe and show that they inevitably give rise to string theory. The work is part of a broader revival of the “bootstrap” philosophy that inspired string theory in the first place: building up explanations from a small set of consistent, general principles rather than deriving laws from a particular mechanistic framework. “It’s a trend away from a specific model that someone came down from the mountain with on two tablets,” Cheung says. “People are kind of going back to the basics.”
The approach does not prove string theory is correct. But, “It’s quite remarkable that with fairly minimal assumptions you are led to string theory,” says Andrew Tolley, a physicist at Imperial College London who works on an alternative model of gravity. Clarifying what assumptions underlie the theory could help limit the range of possible versions of string theory and its competitors, he adds. “It’s tremendously interesting to know what is allowed or not.”
Now, some researchers are revisiting the theory from first principles. In a paper in press at Physical Review Letters, Clifford Cheung, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and colleagues lay out a small set of assumptions about the universe and show that they inevitably give rise to string theory. The work is part of a broader revival of the “bootstrap” philosophy that inspired string theory in the first place: building up explanations from a small set of consistent, general principles rather than deriving laws from a particular mechanistic framework. “It’s a trend away from a specific model that someone came down from the mountain with on two tablets,” Cheung says. “People are kind of going back to the basics.”
The approach does not prove string theory is correct. But, “It’s quite remarkable that with fairly minimal assumptions you are led to string theory,” says Andrew Tolley, a physicist at Imperial College London who works on an alternative model of gravity. Clarifying what assumptions underlie the theory could help limit the range of possible versions of string theory and its competitors, he adds. “It’s tremendously interesting to know what is allowed or not.”
Comment Person Of Interest (TV Show) (Score 2) 26
We are living out the TV show. Everything in that show is coming true (if it wasn't already).
If you haven't seen it, it is very entertaining, and now almost seemingly prophetic.
Submission + - Fiber optic cables can eavesdrop on nearby conversations (science.org)
sciencehabit writes: Cold War spies planted bugs in walls, lamps, and telephones. Now, scientists warn, the cables themselves could listen in. A fiber optic technique used to detect earthquakes can also pick up the faint vibrations of nearby speech, researchers reported this week here at the general assembly of the European Geosciences Union. Freely available artificial intelligence (AI) software turned the fiber optic data into intelligible, real-time transcripts.
“Not many people realize that [fiber optic cables] can detect acoustic waves,” says Jack Lee Smith, a geophysicist at the University of Edinburgh who presented the result. “We show that in almost every case where you use these fibers, this could be a privacy concern.”
Fiber optics can pick up on sound through a technique called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). Using a machine called an interrogator, researchers fire laser pulses down a cable and record the pattern of reflections coming back from tiny glass defects along the length of the fiber optic. When an earthquake’s seismic wave crosses a section of the fiber, it stretches and squeezes the defects, leading to shifts in the reflected light that researchers can use to build a picture of an earthquake.
DAS essentially turns a fiber cable into a long chain of seismometers that can detect not only earthquakes, but also the rumblings of volcanoes, cars, and college marching bands. And although scientists set up dedicated fiber lines specifically for research, DAS can also be performed on “dark fiber”—unused strands in the web of fiber optics that runs through cities and across oceans, carrying the world’s internet traffic.
DAS can also be used to eavesdrop, the work of Smith and his colleagues shows. They conducted a field test using an existing DAS setup used to study coastal erosion. They set a speaker next to the cable and played pure tones, music, and speech.
Human speech contains frequencies ranging from a few hundred to several thousand hertz. The low end of the range could be pulled out of the data “even without any preprocessing,” Smith says. “You can easily see acoustic waves.” Getting higher frequency speech took a bit of postprocessing, but it was possible. Dumping the data directly into Whisper, a free AI transcription tool, provided accurate real-time transcription.
“Not many people realize that [fiber optic cables] can detect acoustic waves,” says Jack Lee Smith, a geophysicist at the University of Edinburgh who presented the result. “We show that in almost every case where you use these fibers, this could be a privacy concern.”
Fiber optics can pick up on sound through a technique called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). Using a machine called an interrogator, researchers fire laser pulses down a cable and record the pattern of reflections coming back from tiny glass defects along the length of the fiber optic. When an earthquake’s seismic wave crosses a section of the fiber, it stretches and squeezes the defects, leading to shifts in the reflected light that researchers can use to build a picture of an earthquake.
DAS essentially turns a fiber cable into a long chain of seismometers that can detect not only earthquakes, but also the rumblings of volcanoes, cars, and college marching bands. And although scientists set up dedicated fiber lines specifically for research, DAS can also be performed on “dark fiber”—unused strands in the web of fiber optics that runs through cities and across oceans, carrying the world’s internet traffic.
DAS can also be used to eavesdrop, the work of Smith and his colleagues shows. They conducted a field test using an existing DAS setup used to study coastal erosion. They set a speaker next to the cable and played pure tones, music, and speech.
Human speech contains frequencies ranging from a few hundred to several thousand hertz. The low end of the range could be pulled out of the data “even without any preprocessing,” Smith says. “You can easily see acoustic waves.” Getting higher frequency speech took a bit of postprocessing, but it was possible. Dumping the data directly into Whisper, a free AI transcription tool, provided accurate real-time transcription.
Comment Re:I do not see the problem here (Score 1) 244
Ebiikes are a legal workaround loophole for motorcycles.
Submission + - Deepfakes are everywhere. The godfather of digital forensics is fighting back (science.org)
sciencehabit writes: Was it real? The clip showed a downward streak of black through a clear blue sky, the silhouette of a U.S. Tomahawk missile like a metallic bird of prey diving for the kill. Then the impact, a plume of black smoke rising over buildings, palm trees, and electrical wires. By the time the video arrived in Hany Farid’s inbox on a Sunday morning in March, experts had already confirmed the scene showed Minab, the city in southern Iran where a missile strike had killed more than 150 people at a girls’ elementary school a week earlier. The U.S. government had denied responsibility, claiming a rogue Iranian missile was to blame. But the video, released overnight by an Iranian news agency, told a different story. Journalists had emailed Farid’s company, GetReal Security, asking him to verify the footage.
Farid, a specialist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, is one of the world’s leading experts in determining whether a photo or video has been manipulated. Since helping to found the field of digital forensics more than 20 years ago, he has kept pace with massive technological change. “I would consider him to be sort of the dean of digital forensics, because he’s been at it for so long,” says Santiago Lyon, former director of photography at the Associated Press, who now works on online safety at Adobe. In artificial intelligence (AI), Farid is facing his biggest challenge yet.
That Sunday morning, settling in front of a computer with his wife, Emily Cooper, in their home in the hills over Berkeley, Farid went to work. His first impulse was to be suspicious. The war in Iran had already produced a firehose of AI-generated images. Why had it taken a week for this video to become public? The low resolution of the footage did not help his confidence either.
By analyzing it frame by frame, Hany Farid determined this March video of a U.S. attack on a school in Minab, Iran, was real.
Farid first examined the explosion. AI explosions tend to be overly dramatic, he says, with a lot of fire and very billowy smoke—but this one seemed realistic. (Just days earlier, he had finished writing a paper with his colleague Sarah Barrington about what AI gets wrong about explosions). The crucial question, however, was the Tomahawk missile. Flipping through the video frame by frame in his office in UC Berkeley’s South Hall 2 days later, Farid pointed out the shape visible in five consecutive frames. “One, two, three, four, five, boom. That’s all you have,” he said. Adding the small silhouette to real footage of the explosion would not have been hard. “You don’t need AI for that,” Farid says. “That’s 10 minutes in Photoshop.”
Getting the physics right, however, would be much trickier, even for AI. Tomahawks are self-propelled, but over the short distance seen in the video, the missile should be plummeting in a straight line, he says. When Farid laid the five frames on top of each other digitally and aligned them, the missile fell as expected. After about an hour of working on the problem that Sunday morning, Farid sent the journalists his first assessment: The video seemed likely to be real. But he wasn’t satisfied.
Farid and Cooper, a computer vision scientist also based at UC Berkeley, had recently studied how people judge whether videos are fake. They found that we’re better at identifying a video as AI-generated if we have more time to watch it, because we’re more likely to pick up on some small giveaway. But for a real video, more time doesn’t make us any better at making the right call. What’s more: Even if we make the right call, our confidence does not increase over time. “If something is real, you’re just looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, and you never see the artifact and so you never get up to the high confidence point,” Cooper says. She saw Farid go through this process that Sunday. “Analysis after analysis, he was looking for the artifact, but somehow the absence of the artifact never pushed his confidence up.”
Later that day, Farid decided to check one more thing: Was the missile the right size? A Tomahawk is about 5 or 6 meters long. In the video, it extended for 46 pixels. Assuming the video was shot on a standard phone camera, Farid calculated it would have been taken about 100 meters away from the missile, a realistic distance. He then measured the gap between the moment the viewer sees the missile strike and the crash of the explosion, caused by the sound’s travel time. It was one-third of a second—again giving a distance of about 100 meters. Getting the movement of a faked missile right on the shaky video and ensuring its size matched the distance would have required serious expertise. “I’ve seen lots of disinformation out of the Iranian news agency. They’re not that sophisticated.”
What stood out to Cooper from the investigation that day was just how long it took Farid to feel certain the footage was real. “This was the first time I had seen him really struggle,” Cooper said. It’s not just Farid. With deepfakes and other AI-generated images getting better and better, she says, “It’s really hard to convince yourself that something is real.”
Farid, a specialist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, is one of the world’s leading experts in determining whether a photo or video has been manipulated. Since helping to found the field of digital forensics more than 20 years ago, he has kept pace with massive technological change. “I would consider him to be sort of the dean of digital forensics, because he’s been at it for so long,” says Santiago Lyon, former director of photography at the Associated Press, who now works on online safety at Adobe. In artificial intelligence (AI), Farid is facing his biggest challenge yet.
That Sunday morning, settling in front of a computer with his wife, Emily Cooper, in their home in the hills over Berkeley, Farid went to work. His first impulse was to be suspicious. The war in Iran had already produced a firehose of AI-generated images. Why had it taken a week for this video to become public? The low resolution of the footage did not help his confidence either.
By analyzing it frame by frame, Hany Farid determined this March video of a U.S. attack on a school in Minab, Iran, was real.
Farid first examined the explosion. AI explosions tend to be overly dramatic, he says, with a lot of fire and very billowy smoke—but this one seemed realistic. (Just days earlier, he had finished writing a paper with his colleague Sarah Barrington about what AI gets wrong about explosions). The crucial question, however, was the Tomahawk missile. Flipping through the video frame by frame in his office in UC Berkeley’s South Hall 2 days later, Farid pointed out the shape visible in five consecutive frames. “One, two, three, four, five, boom. That’s all you have,” he said. Adding the small silhouette to real footage of the explosion would not have been hard. “You don’t need AI for that,” Farid says. “That’s 10 minutes in Photoshop.”
Getting the physics right, however, would be much trickier, even for AI. Tomahawks are self-propelled, but over the short distance seen in the video, the missile should be plummeting in a straight line, he says. When Farid laid the five frames on top of each other digitally and aligned them, the missile fell as expected. After about an hour of working on the problem that Sunday morning, Farid sent the journalists his first assessment: The video seemed likely to be real. But he wasn’t satisfied.
Farid and Cooper, a computer vision scientist also based at UC Berkeley, had recently studied how people judge whether videos are fake. They found that we’re better at identifying a video as AI-generated if we have more time to watch it, because we’re more likely to pick up on some small giveaway. But for a real video, more time doesn’t make us any better at making the right call. What’s more: Even if we make the right call, our confidence does not increase over time. “If something is real, you’re just looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, and you never see the artifact and so you never get up to the high confidence point,” Cooper says. She saw Farid go through this process that Sunday. “Analysis after analysis, he was looking for the artifact, but somehow the absence of the artifact never pushed his confidence up.”
Later that day, Farid decided to check one more thing: Was the missile the right size? A Tomahawk is about 5 or 6 meters long. In the video, it extended for 46 pixels. Assuming the video was shot on a standard phone camera, Farid calculated it would have been taken about 100 meters away from the missile, a realistic distance. He then measured the gap between the moment the viewer sees the missile strike and the crash of the explosion, caused by the sound’s travel time. It was one-third of a second—again giving a distance of about 100 meters. Getting the movement of a faked missile right on the shaky video and ensuring its size matched the distance would have required serious expertise. “I’ve seen lots of disinformation out of the Iranian news agency. They’re not that sophisticated.”
What stood out to Cooper from the investigation that day was just how long it took Farid to feel certain the footage was real. “This was the first time I had seen him really struggle,” Cooper said. It’s not just Farid. With deepfakes and other AI-generated images getting better and better, she says, “It’s really hard to convince yourself that something is real.”
Submission + - AI helps create bacterium that's partially missing a universal amino acid (science.org)
sciencehabit writes: Of the hundreds of types of amino acids found on Earth, it’s a mystery why life settled on 20 as the building blocks for all its proteins. Although certain species can use more—some microbes employ up to 22—no one’s ever found one using fewer.
But now scientists are closer to creating such an organism, after partially eliminating one of the 20 amino acids from the bacterium Escherichia coli. The research, published today in Science, used artificial intelligence (AI) to propose alternatives to the amino acid isoleucine in dozens of proteins making up bacterial ribosomes—the protein factories of the cell. The findings offer a glimpse into how earlier, simpler life forms might have lived and suggest new ways to synthesize proteins with bespoke functions in medicine and biotechnology.
Organisms with a reduced dependence on particular amino acids might better survive hostile environments or resist infections by viruses. Removing an amino acid entirely also “frees up” the specific DNA sequences that typically code for it—so those sequences could be reassigned to encode other, perhaps synthetic amino acids to create new drugs or other molecules.
But now scientists are closer to creating such an organism, after partially eliminating one of the 20 amino acids from the bacterium Escherichia coli. The research, published today in Science, used artificial intelligence (AI) to propose alternatives to the amino acid isoleucine in dozens of proteins making up bacterial ribosomes—the protein factories of the cell. The findings offer a glimpse into how earlier, simpler life forms might have lived and suggest new ways to synthesize proteins with bespoke functions in medicine and biotechnology.
Organisms with a reduced dependence on particular amino acids might better survive hostile environments or resist infections by viruses. Removing an amino acid entirely also “frees up” the specific DNA sequences that typically code for it—so those sequences could be reassigned to encode other, perhaps synthetic amino acids to create new drugs or other molecules.
Comment Re: Cue up (Score 1) 348
You realize there are a bunch of homes available for sale in all sorts of places for next to nothing. The problem isn't "housing", it is "housing where people want to live". Declining population in places like Italy have created housing collapse where nice houses aren't sold, and sit empty, and they'll pay you to move into one.
