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Submission + - Microbe with bizarrely tiny genome may be evolving into a virus (science.org)

sciencehabit writes: The newly discovered microbe provisionally known as Sukunaarchaeum isn’t a virus. But like viruses, it seemingly has one purpose: to make more of itself.

As far as scientists can tell from its genome—the only evidence of its existence so far—it’s a parasite that provides nothing to the single-celled creature it calls home. Most of Sukunaarchaeum’s mere 189 protein-coding genes are focused on replicating its own genome; it must steal everything else it needs from its host Citharistes regius, a dinoflagellate that lives in ocean waters all over the world. Adding to the mystery of the microbe, some of its sequences identify it as archaeon, a lineage of simple cellular organisms more closely related to complex organisms like us than to bacteria like Escherichia coli.

The discovery of Sukunaarchaeum’s bizarrely viruslike way of living, reported last month in a bioRxiv preprint, “challenges the boundaries between cellular life and viruses,” says Kate Adamala, a synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities who was not involved in the work. “This organism might be a fascinating living fossil—an evolutionary waypoint that managed to hang on.”

Adamala adds that if Sukunaarchaeum really does represent a microbe on its way to becoming a virus, it could teach scientists about how viruses evolved in the first place. “Most of the greatest transitions in evolution didn’t leave a fossil record, making it very difficult to figure out what were the exact steps,” she says. “We can poke at existing biochemistry to try to reconstitute the ancestral forms—or sometimes we get a gift from nature, in the form of a surviving evolutionary intermediate.”

What’s already clear: Sukunaarchaeum is not alone. When team leader Takuro Nakayama, an evolutionary microbiologist at Tsukuba, and his colleagues sifted through publicly available DNA sequences extracted from seawater all over the world, they found many sequences similar to those of Sukunaarchaeum. “That’s when we realized that we had not just found a single strange organism, but had uncovered the first complete genome of a large, previously unknown archaeal lineage,” Nakayama says.

Submission + - Help wanted to build open source Advanced Data Protection for everyone

WaywardGeek writes: Recall that Apple was ordered to back-door Advanced Data Protection in the UK. We need to take action now to protect users.

I helped build Google's Advanced Data Protection (Google Cloud Key VaultService) in 2018, and Google is way ahead of Apple in this area. I know exactly how to build it an can have it done in spare time in a few weeks, at least server side. The whole world would be able to use it for free, protecting backups, passwords, message history, and more, if we can get existing applications to talk to the new data protection service.

However, I need help. I've got the algorithms and server-side covered. This would be a distributed trust based system, so I need folks willing to run the protection service. I'll run mine on a Raspberry PI. Areas where I need help include:

* Running protection servers. This is a T-of-N scheme, where users will need say 9 of 15 nodes to be available to recover their backups.
* Android client app, and preferably tight integration with the platform as an alternate backup service.
* Same with iOS
* Authentication. Users should register, and login before they can use any of their limited guesses to their phone unlock secret.

The scheme splits a secret among N protection servers, and when it is time to recover the secret, which is basically an encryption key, they must be able to get key shares from T of the original N servers. This uses a distributed oblivious pseudo random function algorithm, which is very simple.

In plain English, it provides nation-state resistance to secret back doors, and eliminates secret mass surveillance, at least when it comes to data backed up to the cloud. iOS and Android systems don't currently do that. The UK and similarly confused governments will need to negotiate with operators in multiple countries to get access to any given users's keys. There are cases where rational folks would agree to hand over that data, and I hope we can end the encryption wars and develop sane policies that protect user data while offering a compromise where lives can be saved.

So, nothing too serious :-)

Are you up for this challenge? Are you ready to plunge into this with me?

Comment iPhones are expensive in China⦠(Score 1) 56

Government taxes foreign phones in China making iPhones more expensive than those in other places, including Hong Kong. iPhones are not allowed to use the AI being sold with the phones elsewhere, plus a host of other restrictions. So basically, an iPhone purchased in China isnâ(TM)t the same as an iPhone purchased elsewhere. Many people buy them from third party distributors to get non-mainland SKUs or go elsewhere to buy iPhones to sidestep restrictions/tariffs/taxes/etc.

Submission + - China Halts Rare Earth Exports to U.S. (thegatewaypundit.com)

AmiMoJo writes: China has halted exports of seven critical rare earth elements to the United States, a move that threatens to disrupt supply chains across key American industries, including automotive, semiconductor, and aerospace sectors. China’s Ministry of Commerce recently added seven rare earth elements—including dysprosium, terbium, and lutetium—to its restricted export list. These elements are essential for manufacturing high-performance magnets used in electric vehicles, advanced weaponry, and consumer electronics.

Additionally: US chipmakers outsourcing manufacturing will escape China's tariffs

U.S. chipmakers that outsource manufacturing will be exempt from China's retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports, according to a notice by the main Chinese semiconductor association on Friday.
Given the highly specialized and multi-country nature of chip supply chains, there was uncertainty within the industry about how tariffs would be applied to chip imports.
"For all integrated circuits, whether packaged or unpackaged, the declared country of origin for import customs purchases is the location of the wafer fabrication plant," the state-backed China Semiconductor Industry Association (CSIA), which represents the country's largest chip companies, said in an "urgent notice" on its WeChat account.
For U.S. chip designers such as Qualcomm and AMD that outsource manufacturing to Taiwanese chipmaking giant TSMC 2330.TW, Chinese customs authorities will classify these chips' place of origin as Taiwan, according to EETop, an information platform and forum for Chinese chipmakers.
This means China-based companies importing such chips will not be forced to pay China's retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports, EETop said on its WeChat account.

https://www.reuters.com/techno...

Submission + - AI proves that fingerprints are not unique, upending the legal system (earth.com)

fjo3 writes: Fingerprint analysis has been a dependable tool in crime-solving for more than a century. Investigators lean on fingerprint evidence to identify suspects or connect them to specific crime scenes, believing that every print offers a distinctive code.

Yet, a team of researchers has found that prints from different fingers of the same person can sometimes appear more alike.

This insight came from an artificial intelligence model that revealed surprising connections between prints.

Submission + - DeepMind Details All the Ways AGI Could Wreck the World (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers at DeepMind have ... released a new technical paper (PDF) that explains how to develop AGI safely, which you can download at your convenience. It contains a huge amount of detail, clocking in at 108 pages before references. While some in the AI field believe AGI is a pipe dream, the authors of the DeepMind paper project that it could happen by 2030. With that in mind, they aimed to understand the risks of a human-like synthetic intelligence, which they acknowledge could lead to "severe harm." This work has identified four possible types of AGI risk, along with suggestions on how we might ameliorate said risks. The DeepMind team, led by company co-founder Shane Legg, categorized the negative AGI outcomes as misuse, misalignment, mistakes, and structural risks.

The first possible issue, misuse, is fundamentally similar to current AI risks. However, because AGI will be more powerful by definition, the damage it could do is much greater. A ne'er-do-well with access to AGI could misuse the system to do harm, for example, by asking the system to identify and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities or create a designer virus that could be used as a bioweapon. DeepMind says companies developing AGI will have to conduct extensive testing and create robust post-training safety protocols. Essentially, AI guardrails on steroids. They also suggest devising a method to suppress dangerous capabilities entirely, sometimes called "unlearning," but it's unclear if this is possible without substantially limiting models.

Misalignment is largely not something we have to worry about with generative AI as it currently exists. This type of AGI harm is envisioned as a rogue machine that has shaken off the limits imposed by its designers. Terminators, anyone? More specifically, the AI takes actions it knows the developer did not intend. DeepMind says its standard for misalignment here is more advanced than simple deception or scheming as seen in the current literature. To avoid that, DeepMind suggests developers use techniques like amplified oversight, in which two copies of an AI check each other's output, to create robust systems that aren't likely to go rogue. If that fails, DeepMind suggests intensive stress testing and monitoring to watch for any hint that an AI might be turning against us. Keeping AGIs in virtual sandboxes with strict security and direct human oversight could help mitigate issues arising from misalignment. Basically, make sure there's an "off" switch.

If, on the other hand, an AI didn't know that its output would be harmful and the human operator didn't intend for it to be, that's a mistake. We get plenty of those with current AI systems—remember when Google said to put glue on pizza? The "glue" for AGI could be much stickier, though. DeepMind notes that militaries may deploy AGI due to "competitive pressure," but such systems could make serious mistakes as they will be tasked with much more elaborate functions than today's AI. The paper doesn't have a great solution for mitigating mistakes. It boils down to not letting AGI get too powerful in the first place. DeepMind calls for deploying slowly and limiting AGI authority. The study also suggests passing AGI commands through a "shield" system that ensures they are safe before implementation.

Lastly, there are structural risks, which DeepMind defines as the unintended but real consequences of multi-agent systems contributing to our already complex human existence. For example, AGI could create false information that is so believable that we no longer know who or what to trust. The paper also raises the possibility that AGI could accumulate more and more control over economic and political systems, perhaps by devising heavy-handed tariff schemes. Then one day, we look up and realize the machines are in charge instead of us. This category of risk is also the hardest to guard against because it would depend on how people, infrastructure, and institutions operate in the future.

Submission + - Scientists may have discovered how to extract power from the Earth's rotation (scientificamerican.com)

Baron_Yam writes: No more burning fossil fuels, playing with fissile material, damming rivers, erecting wind mills, or making solar panels. All of our energy needs could potentially be supplied by the angular kinetic energy of the Earth — and because of the mass of the planet, doing so would slow its rotation down by a mere 7ms per century.

Normally this would be considered impossible as the Earth's large and uniform field does not induce a current in conductors, but researchers believe that a hollow cylinder of manganese, zinc and iron can alter the interaction with our planetary magnetic field and allow the extraction of energy from it. So far, the results are positive but still below the level where they cannot be explained by multiple possible causes of experimental error. Further research is required to confirm the effect.

Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)

RockDoctor writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.

Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.

This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)

The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.

This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")

Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.

As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.

Submission + - Surado, formerly Slashdot Japan, is closing at the end of the month. (srad.jp) 1

AmiMoJo writes: Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001. On 2025/03/31, it will finally close. Since starting the site separated from the main Slashdot one, and eventually rebranded as "Surado", which was it's Japanese nickname.

Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.

Submission + - WhatsApp being ditched for Signal in Dutch higher education (dub.uu.nl)

united_notions writes: Signal is rapidly gaining ground in the Netherlands. It is now at the top of the Dutch download charts. Employees of the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences (HU) were recently advised to switch to Signal. Avans University of Applied Sciences has also been discussing a switch. The National Student Union is concerned about privacy. The subject was raised at a general meeting, as reported by chair Abdelkader Karbache, who said: "Our local unions want to switch to Signal or other open-source software."

Submission + - Website Exposes Tesla Owners' Personal Data (newsweek.com)

hcs_$reboot writes: A website known as "Dogequest" has allegedly published personal details of Tesla owners across the United States, sparking concerns over privacy and security.

The site, which appears in the wake of anti-Elon Musk protests across the country, displays names, addresses, and phone numbers of Tesla owners on an interactive map and uses an image of a Molotov cocktail as its cursor.

The website's operators claim they will only remove Tesla owners' information if they provide proof that they have sold their vehicles.

The emergence of Dogequest coincides with a series of attacks on Tesla properties, including arson incidents at Tesla service centers and showrooms. These actions appear to be part of a broader protest movement against Musk's ties to President Donald Trump

Submission + - Google Introduces Debian Linux Terminal App For Android (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Today, Linux is only available on the latest Pixel devices running Android 15. When Android 16 arrives later this year, it's expected that all sufficiently robust Android phones will be able to run Linux. Besides a Linux terminal, beta tests have already shown that you should be able to run desktop Linux programs from your phone — games like Doom, for example. The Linux Terminal runs on top of a Debian Linux virtual machine. This enables you to access a shell interface directly on your Android device. And that just scratches the surface of Google's Linux Terminal. It's actually a do-it-all app that enables you to download, configure, and run Debian. Underneath Terminal runs the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF). These are the APIs that enable Android devices to run other operating systems.

To try the Linux Terminal app, you must activate Developer Mode by navigating to Settings > About Phone and tapping the build number seven times. I guess Google wants to make sure you want to do this. Once Developer Mode is enabled, the app can be activated via Settings > System > Developer options > Linux development environment. The initial setup may take a while because it needs to download Debian. Typically this is a 500MB download. Once in place, it allows you to adjust disk space allocation, set port controls for network communication, and recover the virtual machine's storage partition. However, it currently lacks support for graphical user interface (GUI) applications. For that, we'll need to wait for Android 16.

According to Android specialist Mishaal Rahman, "Google wants to turn Android into a proper desktop operating system, and in order to do that, it has to make it work better with traditional PC input methods and display options. Therefore, Google is now testing new external display management tools in Android 16 that bring Android closer to other desktop OSes."

Submission + - Users Report Emotional Bonds With Startlingly Realistic AI Voice Demo (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: In late 2013, the Spike Jonze film Her imagined a future where people would form emotional connections with AI voice assistants. Nearly 12 years later, that fictional premise has veered closer to reality with the release of a new conversational voice model from AI startup Sesame that has left many users both fascinated and unnerved. "I tried the demo, and it was genuinely startling how human it felt," wrote one Hacker News user who tested the system. "I'm almost a bit worried I will start feeling emotionally attached to a voice assistant with this level of human-like sound."

In late February, Sesame released a demo for the company's new Conversational Speech Model (CSM) that appears to cross over what many consider the "uncanny valley" of AI-generated speech, with some testers reporting emotional connections to the male or female voice assistant ("Miles" and "Maya"). In our own evaluation, we spoke with the male voice for about 28 minutes, talking about life in general and how it decides what is "right" or "wrong" based on its training data. The synthesized voice was expressive and dynamic, imitating breath sounds, chuckles, interruptions, and even sometimes stumbling over words and correcting itself. These imperfections are intentional.

"At Sesame, our goal is to achieve 'voice presence'—the magical quality that makes spoken interactions feel real, understood, and valued," writes the company in a blog post. "We are creating conversational partners that do not just process requests; they engage in genuine dialogue that builds confidence and trust over time. In doing so, we hope to realize the untapped potential of voice as the ultimate interface for instruction and understanding." [...] Sesame sparked a lively discussion on Hacker News about its potential uses and dangers. Some users reported having extended conversations with the two demo voices, with conversations lasting up to the 30-minute limit. In one case, a parent recounted how their 4-year-old daughter developed an emotional connection with the AI model, crying after not being allowed to talk to it again.

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