Comment Commercial Speaker's Own Name? (Score 1) 155
Did the teen admit to naming his bluetooth device "BOMB" or did he have a "BOMB" Model bluetooth speaker, like this one
https://www.galaxus.ch/en/s1/p...
that came prenamed at the factory?
Submission + - Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing (science.org) 1
schwit1 writes: By restoring some functions to intact brains from deceased donors, the startup Bexorg hopes to create a better drug development test bed for neurodegenerative diseases
Submission + - Wi-Fi Routers Can Scan Your Body to Identify Exactly Who You Are (futurism.com) 1
JoeyRox writes: New research out of Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology found that the types of Wi-Fi routers we all have in our homes come with a major privacy vulnerability that can be used to identify any human body that comes within their range.
The study, flagged by Gizmodo, used machine learning systems to identify individuals with an accuracy rate of 99.5 percent. To do so, the researchers exploited a vulnerability in a process known as beamforming feedback information (BFI), which was introduced to allow routers to focus Wi-Fi signals on connected devices, as opposed to the older approach, which is to blanket an entire area in coverage.
While BFI is great for network connectivity, it has a major downsides for privacy. For starters, devices connected to a router using beamforming need to send constant feedback in order to be found. As routers send out and receive network feedback, the signal is inevitably impacted by real world factors like pets, walls, and people.
Making matters worse is the fact that this data is basically wide open for anyone to grab — not only is that feedback data unencrypted, it can also be accessed without ever connecting directly to the router.
The study, flagged by Gizmodo, used machine learning systems to identify individuals with an accuracy rate of 99.5 percent. To do so, the researchers exploited a vulnerability in a process known as beamforming feedback information (BFI), which was introduced to allow routers to focus Wi-Fi signals on connected devices, as opposed to the older approach, which is to blanket an entire area in coverage.
While BFI is great for network connectivity, it has a major downsides for privacy. For starters, devices connected to a router using beamforming need to send constant feedback in order to be found. As routers send out and receive network feedback, the signal is inevitably impacted by real world factors like pets, walls, and people.
Making matters worse is the fact that this data is basically wide open for anyone to grab — not only is that feedback data unencrypted, it can also be accessed without ever connecting directly to the router.
Comment Re:MongoDB (Score 1) 57
well, at my current job they use NoSQL, in this case it's DynamoDB and it's been frustrating at times. So I asked the question: why are we dealing with these problems day in, day out, if the problems we're trying to solve have been solved half a century ago with SQL?
The answer is cost. The way we access data may be convenient to do with SQL, but it's also expensive. We have big (not webscale but large) volumes of data coming in every day. Having this on SQL would cost us tens of thousands a month. Keeping it in DynamoDB costs us a few hundred. And it's stupidly fast - if we wanted to get that kind of performance from SQL we'd have to pay for a supercharged overprovisioned server.
And honestly it's been fun. It's turned "boring business software development" back into more of an engineering problem.
Comment Re: A problem with GenAI... (Score 1) 57
I see the problem as a more "get off my lawn" types here. They have fully adopted "vibe coding" as "anything made with AI assistance" as much as older people call anyone younger than them "millennials".
There's a big difference between an experienced programmer providing the AI with clear, concise prompts and guidance; than having someone with zero knowledge trying to build an entire app from scratch.
One is "augmented capabilities", the other is vibe coding. But the haters here just refuse ANY sort of AI involvement.
Submission + - I found a second vote.gov -- and it's registered to the White House
As_I_Please writes: The Drey Dossier reports that the National Design Studio, an office created by executive order and which reports only to the White House, has been building copies of federal agency websites like vote.gov, passports.gov, login.gov and others.
What [the National Design Studio] is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote.gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login.gov belonged to GSA, and the studio’s guy runs it now.
Trump has said publicly that this infrastructure is for other presidents, and he is right about that. It is the one thing in this story I take him at his word on. The infrastructure outlasts him. Whoever wins in 2028 inherits the websites, the vendors, the data, and the hardware, sealed and waiting.
NDS Infrastructure Map — my live working github map of every National Design Studio subdomain I have found, filterable by status, registrant, and parent domain. If you want to retrace this investigation or watch new subdomains appear in real time, start here.
Submission + - POLLS: Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical Letter on AI
theodp writes: My knowledge of Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical letter comes from:
* A full reading of the 42,000-word letter
* News report summaries
* Social media (TikTok, Instagram, X)
* Search engine AI summaries
* "What you talkin' bout, Willis?"
* A full reading of the 42,000-word letter
* News report summaries
* Social media (TikTok, Instagram, X)
* Search engine AI summaries
* "What you talkin' bout, Willis?"
Comment Re:Cartel (Score 1) 70
I refuse to believe the claim that "this would require billions of dollars and at least five years to get a factory operational."
There is clearly enormous amounts of money circulating in the industry right now. If a company like Nvidia genuinely wanted to manufacture its own memory, it absolutely could. Even with initially poor yields, the economics could still work. A 50% yield rate is far less concerning when RAM prices have increased by 200%, especially for a company purchasing memory in massive volumes alongside its hardware partners.
From my perspective, this looks less like an unavoidable technical limitation and more like market consolidation and price coordination. Companies have become comfortable charging substantial premiums for RAM, and the current situation provides a convenient justification for it.
Comment Re:Do they really need to make a buck here? (Score 2) 69
I was never offered a free upgrade path and I only have 2 accounts: mine, and the admin one they force you to pay for. I was on the legacy plan and they forced me to pay.
Comment Re:Most requested feature...that you removed (Score 1) 98
they also remove drag-hover-drop . it's so infuriating to have to organize your windows in a specific way to drag a file over to another window, OR use ctrl-c/ctrl-v
it was as easy as drag the icon to the next window "through the taskbar" which made the other window come front, and drop the icon.
i guess they removed that option since they started forcing taskbar grouping by default. a feature i remove from every windows and KDE machine I set up. I don't see any benefit in "grouping" or "compacting into an icon". if i wanted that behavior i'd just get a mac.
Comment Re:It stops the development of new knowledge too (Score 1) 121
we have two options: live with a bug, or hope the fix doesn't introduce another bug.
Comment Re:Watched an Adam Savage video recently (Score 2) 69
what it does as a key stroke injector is open powershell then executes a bunch of commands, and exits quickly.
One solution for this is... disable command prompt and powershell for non-admin users
Comment Re:It stops the development of new knowledge too (Score 1) 121
i mean that's not a bad thing either. I sometimes DO NOT want to learn "new to me" things. I've been contributing to an ancient, but still used software called Xastir. It's VERY OLD spaghetti code, low level X11 with Motif. I DO NOT want to learn Motif. It's not a marketable skill or something I'll ever need. But I let the AI code a few contributions (one of them was replace some parts with Cairo fonts for antialias in high dpi scerens, and the other was fixing a very old screen drawing routine that took 2-3 minutes on a Raspberry Pi 2 and cut it down to 5 seconds). Could I have fixed this bug? Not even in my wildest dreams. Do I care how it was fixed? Oh no. No I don't. I just checked that the output of the LLM was reasonable.
Submission + - AI finds signs of pancreatic cancer before tumors develop (nbcnews.com)
fjo3 writes: An AI model developed at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, detected abnormalities on patients’ CT scans up to three years before they were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, according to research published this week in the journal Gut.
The scientists behind the model, which is now being evaluated in a clinical trial, trained it by feeding it CT scans from patients who had been screened for other medical conditions then were later diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The team then had radiologists review the scans and compared their ability to find early signs of cancer to that of the AI model. The model was found to be three times better at identifying the early signs.
The scientists behind the model, which is now being evaluated in a clinical trial, trained it by feeding it CT scans from patients who had been screened for other medical conditions then were later diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The team then had radiologists review the scans and compared their ability to find early signs of cancer to that of the AI model. The model was found to be three times better at identifying the early signs.
Submission + - Plant Seeds Do Something Incredible When The Sound of Rain Strikes (sciencealert.com)
alternative_right writes: Plant seeds can sense the vibrations generated by falling raindrops and
respond by waking from their state of dormancy to welcome the water,
new research shows.
respond by waking from their state of dormancy to welcome the water,
new research shows.
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