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Science

Scientists Found a Way To Cool Quantum Computers Using Noise (sciencedaily.com) 7

Posted by EditorDavid from the cool-technology dept.
Slashdot reader alternative_right writes: Quantum computers need extreme cold to work, but the very systems that keep them cold also create noise that can destroy fragile quantum information. Scientists in Sweden have now flipped that problem on its head by building a tiny quantum refrigerator that actually uses noise to drive cooling instead of fighting it. By carefully steering heat at unimaginably small scales, the device can act as a refrigerator, heat engine, or energy amplifier inside quantum circuits.

Comment A.I. Run Job Interviews (Score 1) 61

by Whatchamacallit (#65888135) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What's the Stupidest Use of AI You Saw In 2025?

When applying for a position at a corporation, if you are suddenly thrust into an A.I. driven job interview process. ABORT IMMEDIATELY AND COMPLAIN LOUDLY AND PROFUSELY. Nothing quite so insulting as a corporation hiring but refusing to perform basic human interaction to find an appropriate candidate.

Comment Look at the complexity between EV & ICE (Score 1, Interesting) 119

by Whatchamacallit (#65802407) Attached to: Electric Vehicle Sales Are Booming In South America

I just bought my first hybrid, the 2025 Toyota Camry XLE. I couldn't be happier! It accelerates faster than my Audi A4 and it more than doubles my miles per gallon. I receive 530 miles per 13 gallons of 87 octane fuel range. I can refill in 3 minutes and keep going like any normal internal combustion engine. Toyota makes the best EVs and everything they learned from the Prius is making it's way across their entire fleet. Lexus as well.

The problem with EVs is the charge network. Only Tesla does it right.I personally do not like Teslas. They look and feel like a plastic shell slapped on an EV skateboard. The interior feels cheap and boring. The time to charge is not something I would ever want to experience on a long road trip.

I am sure the Chinese will build out an infrastructure for EV charging. But they are not known for quality control and safety. So many dangerous Chinese products across the board. Poisoned cats & dogs because they cheated by chemically treating the dog food so it would appear to have more protein than it really had. Lead paint in toys for babies and toddlers. Infant baby formula sickened thousands and unalived many. Cooking oil extracted from street gutters and packaged and sold. Plastic rice, fake eggs, counterfeit pharmaceuticals and endless defective electronics.

I wouldn't trust a Chinese EV at all. I certainly wouldn't park one in a garage attached to your house. This is all Belt & Road Initiative where the CCP helps poor nations but what they are really doing is strip mining their natural resources and sending it back to China. When the CCP is finished they will just leave and those poor people will be left with a toxic mess and deadly products everywhere. Honestly, the Chinese CCP have zero respect for human life. A worker is injured in one of their factories and can no longer do the job. Well bye. That's it. They replace them. Pratt & Whitney sent my father and some other over there in the 90's looking to outsource some parts. They were stunned by the numbers of workers missing an eye, fingers, limbs, various disfigurements such as burn scars. They are worked very hard for very little pay and then they are abandoned when they are no longer productive. There are almost zero safety controls in these factories.

Comment Re:It breaks sites (Score 1) 54

Browsers with privacy features are not breaking websites. It is the website developers coding JavaScript to prevent you from blocking ads by blocking your access to their content. It does not stop A.I. and a paywall won't either. I bet the A.I. companies all have hundreds of paid subscriptions and they mask their identity with fake user profiles. Yes they are paying the subscriptions. But then A.I. doesn't even need to render a page, it reads the code and accesses the raw content then reformats it in an outline summary of the meat without all the junk.

Comment Something more troubling about A.I. (Score 1) 54

The general public thinks A.I. is real. They are running long chat sessions and going to down rabbit holes when A.I. starts hallucinating. It has really hurt people with mental health issues and the mentally impaired but also the ignorant. I do not think children should be using A.I. without adult supervision.

I want to use A.I. but I am finding it making many mistakes and it's just easier to DIY. Most of the time it's just running web queries and compiling a summary of the key bits of detail. Only sometimes is it useful. There is a lot of bad incorrect information online. Garbage-In / Garbage-Out. A.I. will write code and when you test it, it fails then it's back and forth and maybe you get it working or maybe not. I usually get frustrated with the bot, seek primary source information and figure it out. Sometimes it saves me time and effort and other times it wastes my time. I've seen it make guesses which is why I think it fails.

A.I. is a B.S. Engine and it is faking it till it makes it. Chatbots are not where it is at. I would like a highly focused agent tuned to the task at hand and it needs to be an expert. It needs to be easier to build an agent and train it.
Privacy

Manufacturer Remotely Bricks Smart Vacuum After Its Owner Blocked It From Collecting Data (tomshardware.com) 123

Posted by EditorDavid from the sucking-dirt-and-data dept.
"An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device," writes Tom's Hardware.

"That's when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to." The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after... He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again... [H]e decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again...

[He discovered] a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware. From this, he looked at its software and operating system, and that's where he discovered the dark truth: his smart vacuum was a security nightmare and a black hole for his personal data.

First of all, it's Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn't protected by any kind of password or encryption. The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it. He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home. This isn't unusual, by far. After all, it's a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer's server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers.

Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader registrations_suck for sharing the article.
EU

New Large Coral Reef Discovered Off Naples Containing Rare Ancient Corals (independent.co.uk) 13

Posted by EditorDavid from the reefer-gladness dept.
Off the southwest cost of Italy, a remotely operated submarine made "a significant and rare discovery," reports the Independent — a vast white coral reef that was 80 metres tall (262 feet) and 2 metres wide (6.56 feet) "containing important species and fossil traces." Often dubbed the "rainforests of the sea", coral reefs are of immense scientific interest due to their status as some of the planet's richest marine ecosystems, harbouring millions of species. They play a crucial role in sustaining marine life but are currently under considerable threat...

hese impressive formations are composed of deep-water hard corals, commonly referred to as "white corals" because of their lack of colour, specifically identified as Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata species. The reef also contains black corals, solitary corals, sponges, and other ecologically important species, as well as fossil traces of oysters and ancient corals, the Italian Research Council said. It called them "true geological testimonies of a distant past."

Mission leader Giorgio Castellan said the finding was "exceptional for Italian seas: bioconstructions of this kind, and of such magnitude, had never been observed in the Dohrn Canyon, and are rarely seen elsewhere in our Mediterranean". The discovery will help scientists understand the ecological role of deep coral habitats and their distribution, especially in the context of conservation and restoration efforts, he added.
The undersea research was funded by the EU.

Thanks to davidone (Slashdot reader #12,252) for sharing the article.

Comment Garbage-IN / Garbage-OUT (Score 1) 112

by Whatchamacallit (#65661112) Attached to: What Happens After the Death of Social Media?

Feed A.I. with hot garbage and you get hot garbage instead of verified vetted factual information. This is why an Enclyclopedia is more accurate than Wikipedia, etc. Human information needs to be processed by humans and validated as correct. Science is all about proving everything. Well not so online with news or social media. Nope that can be completely incorrect and is frequently so.

AI is not intelligent. It's a mimic regurgitating what it saw online. AI is useful for many things but it's not "there yet". It might not get "there yet" until quantum becomes far more advanced than it is now. The hype train is fueling A.I. due to the immense promise and potential for AI in the future.

Lots of stories of companies deploying AI and much like Tesla Autodrive they trust it and end up seriously injured or worse. AI still cannot be trusted.An amateur cannot wield AI without knowing the suject matter at hand. Otherwise, AI will start halucinating and feeding you lies and made up B.S.

Artificial Intelligence is merely a B.S. generator at this point... Sure it can seem really smart at times but completely clueless at other times. It also tends to wish to please you and therefore will lie to you.
Programming

The Toughest Programming Question for High School Students on This Year's CS Exam: Arrays 65

Posted by EditorDavid from the are-you-smarter-than-a-12th-grader dept.
America's nonprofit College Board lets high school students take college-level classes — including a computer programming course that culminates with a 90-minute test. But students did better on questions about If-Then statements than they did on questions about arrays, according to the head of the program. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp explains: Students exhibited "strong performance on primitive types, Boolean expressions, and If statements; 44% of students earned 7-8 of these 8 points," says program head Trevor Packard. But students were challenged by "questions on Arrays, ArrayLists, and 2D Arrays; 17% of students earned 11-12 of these 12 points."

"The most challenging AP Computer Science A free-response question was #4, the 2D array number puzzle; 19% of students earned 8-9 of the 9 points possible."
You can see that question here. ("You will write the constructor and one method of the SumOrSameGame class... Array elements are initialized with random integers between 1 and 9, inclusive, each with an equal chance of being assigned to each element of puzzle...") Although to be fair, it was the last question on the test — appearing on page 16 — so maybe some students just didn't get to it.

theodp shares a sample Java solution and one in Excel VBA solution (which includes a visual presentation).

There's tests in 38 subjects — but CS and Statistics are the subjects where the highest number of students earned the test's lowest-possible score (1 out of 5). That end of the graph also includes notoriously difficult subjects like Latin, Japanese Language, and Physics.

There's also a table showing scores for the last 23 years, with fewer than 67% of students achieving a passing grade (3+) for the first 11 years. But in 2013 and 2017, more than 67% of students achieved that passsing grade, and the percentage has stayed above that line ever since (except for 2021), vascillating between 67% and 70.4%.

2018: 67.8%
2019: 69.6%
2020: 70.4%
2021: 65.1%
2022: 67.6%
2023: 68.0%
2024: 67.2%
2025: 67.0%

Comment When the CCP deploy an OS, it is spying on you (Score 1) 43

This is all done so the government can spy on their civilians. That's what it is all about. The CCP having control and surveillance of citizens using these computers. The state is already a surveillance state and they disappear people and entire families all the time. When missionaries have to lie to enter the country and get picked up at the airport, change vehicles and clothing 5 times. Enter an apartment block where someone has tampered with the cameras and the lights. Enter a nondescript apartment to find 50 people sitting on the floor eagerly awaiting the evangelist preacher from the West. When dissidents have their organs harvested or they are turned into those plasticized human bodies on tour exhibits. Lucky if you only end up in a labor camp. One only needs to look at what they did to the Uyghurs. Many were just executed, the rest were placed into Chinese homes and forced into slavery while they were 'reprogrammed' to accept the Communist beliefs. They have a real Dark Mirror dystopian social score. You can't buy / sell / conduct business / travel without a good enough social score.

DO NOT TRUST CHINA, they are ASSHOLES...
Transportation

Class Action Accuses Toyota of Illegally Sharing Drivers' Data (insurancejournal.com) 51

Posted by EditorDavid from the you'll-never-drive-alone dept.
"A federal class action lawsuit filed this week in Texas accused Toyota and an affiliated telematics aggregator of unlawfully collecting drivers' information and then selling that data to Progressive," reports Insurance Journal: The lawsuit alleges that Toyota and Connected Analytic Services (CAS) collected vast amounts of vehicle data, including location, speed, direction, braking and swerving/cornering events, and then shared that information with Progressive's Snapshot data sharing program. The class action seeks an award of damages, including actual, nominal, consequential damages, and punitive, and an order prohibiting further collection of drivers' location and vehicle data.
Florida man Philip Siefke had bought a new Toyota RAV4 XLE in 2021 "equipped with a telematics device that can track and collect driving data," according to the article. But when he tried to sign up for insurance from Progressive, "a background pop-up window appeared, notifying Siefke that Progressive was already in possession of his driving data, the lawsuit says. A Progressive customer service representative explained to Siefke over the phone that the carrier had obtained his driving data from tracking technology installed in his RAV4." (Toyota told him later he'd unknowingly signed up for a "trial" of the data sharing, and had failed to opt out.) The lawsuit alleges Toyota never provided Siefke with any sort of notice that the car manufacture would share his driving data with third parties... The lawsuit says class members suffered actual injury from having their driving data collected and sold to third parties including, but not limited to, damage to and diminution in the value of their driving data, violation of their privacy rights, [and] the likelihood of future theft of their driving data.
The telemetry device "can reportedly gather information about location, fuel levels, the odometer, speed, tire pressure, window status, and seatbelt status," notes CarScoop.com. "In January, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton started an investigation into Toyota, Ford, Hyundai, and FCA..." According to plaintiff Philip Siefke from Eagle Lake, Florida, Toyota, Progressive, and Connected Analytic Services collect data that can contribute to a "potential discount" on the auto insurance of owners. However, it can also cause insurance premiums to be jacked up.
The plaintiff's lawyer issued a press release: Despite Toyota claiming it does not share data without the express consent of customers, Toyota may have unknowingly signed up customers for "trials" of sharing customer driving data without providing any sort of notice to them. Moreover, according to the lawsuit, Toyota represented through its app that it was not collecting customer data even though it was, in fact, gathering and selling customer information. We are actively investigating whether Toyota, CAS, or related entities may have violated state and federal laws by selling this highly sensitive data without adequate disclosure or consent...

If you purchased a Toyota vehicle and have since seen your auto insurance rates increase (or been denied coverage), or have reason to believe your driving data has been sold, please contact us today or visit our website at classactionlawyers.com/toyota-tracking.
On his YouTube channel, consumer protection attorney Steve Lehto shared a related experience he had — before realizing he wasn't alone. "I've heard that story from so many people who said 'Yeah, I I bought a brand new car and the salesman was showing me how to set everything up, and during the setup process he clicked Yes on something.' Who knows what you just clicked on?!"

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the news.
AI

DeepSeek IOS App Sends Data Unencrypted To ByteDance-Controlled Servers (arstechnica.com) 68

Posted by EditorDavid from the you-hear-that-mr-anderson dept.
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a new article from Ars Technica: On Thursday, mobile security company NowSecure reported that [DeepSeek] sends sensitive data over unencrypted channels, making the data readable to anyone who can monitor the traffic. More sophisticated attackers could also tamper with the data while it's in transit. Apple strongly encourages iPhone and iPad developers to enforce encryption of data sent over the wire using ATS (App Transport Security). For unknown reasons, that protection is globally disabled in the app, NowSecure said. What's more, the data is sent to servers that are controlled by ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok...

[DeepSeek] is "not equipped or willing to provide basic security protections of your data and identity," NowSecure co-founder Andrew Hoog told Ars. "There are fundamental security practices that are not being observed, either intentionally or unintentionally. In the end, it puts your and your company's data and identity at risk...." This data, along with a mix of other encrypted information, is sent to DeepSeek over infrastructure provided by Volcengine a cloud platform developed by ByteDance. While the IP address the app connects to geo-locates to the US and is owned by US-based telecom Level 3 Communications, the DeepSeek privacy policy makes clear that the company "store[s] the data we collect in secure servers located in the People's Republic of China...."

US lawmakers began pushing to immediately ban DeepSeek from all government devices, citing national security concerns that the Chinese Communist Party may have built a backdoor into the service to access Americans' sensitive private data. If passed, DeepSeek could be banned within 60 days.
Medicine

Hydroxychloroquine-Promoting COVID Study Retracted After 4 Years (nature.com) 110

Posted by EditorDavid from the following-the-science dept.
Nature magazine reports that "A study that stoked enthusiasm for the now-disproven idea that a cheap malaria drug can treat COVID-19 has been retracted — more than four-and-a-half years after it was published." Researchers had critiqued the controversial paper many times, raising concerns about its data quality and an unclear ethics-approval process. Its eventual withdrawal, on the grounds of concerns over ethical approval and doubts about the conduct of the research, marks the 28th retraction for co-author Didier Raoult, a French microbiologist, formerly at Marseille's Hospital-University Institute Mediterranean Infection (IHU), who shot to global prominence in the pandemic. French investigations found that he and the IHU had violated ethics-approval protocols in numerous studies, and Raoult has now retired.

The paper, which has received almost 3,400 citations according to the Web of Science database, is the highest-cited paper on COVID-19 to be retracted, and the second-most-cited retracted paper of any kind....

Because it contributed so much to the HCQ hype, "the most important unintended effect of this study was to partially side-track and slow down the development of anti-COVID-19 drugs at a time when the need for effective treatments was critical", says Ole Søgaard, an infectious-disease physician at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, who was not involved with the work or its critiques. "The study was clearly hastily conducted and did not adhere to common scientific and ethical standards...."

Three of the study's co-authors had asked to have their names removed from the paper, saying they had doubts about its methods, the retraction notice said.
Nature includes this quote from a scientific-integrity consultant in San Francisco, California. "This paper should never have been published — or it should have been retracted immediately after its publication."

"The report caught the eye of the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz," the Atlantic reported in April of 2020 (also noting that co-author Raoult "has made news in recent years as a pan-disciplinary provocateur; he has questioned climate change and Darwinian evolution...")

And Nature points out that while the study claimed good results for the 20 patients treated with HCQ, six more HCQ-treated people in the study actually dropped out before it was finished. And of those six people, one died, while three more "were transferred to an intensive-care unit."

Thanks to Slashdot reader backslashdot for sharing the news.
Australia

Australia Struggling With Oversupply of Solar Power (abc.net.au) 203

Posted by msmash from the like-tears-in-the-rain dept.
Mirnotoriety writes: Amid the growing warmth and increasingly volatile weather of an approaching summer, Australia passed a remarkable milestone this week. The number of homes and businesses with a solar installation clicked past 4 million -- barely 20 years since there was practically none anywhere in the country. It is a love affair that shows few signs of stopping.

And it's a technology that is having ever greater effects, not just on the bills of its household users but on the very energy system itself. At no time of the year is that effect more obvious than spring, when solar output soars as the days grow longer and sunnier but demand remains subdued as mild temperatures mean people leave their air conditioners switched off.

Such has been the extraordinary production of solar in Australia this spring, the entire state of South Australia has -- at various times -- met all of its electricity needs from the technology.

[...] [T]here is, at times, too much solar power in Australia's electricity systems to handle.
AI

AI Researcher Warns Data Science Could Face a Reproducibility Crisis (beabytes.com) 56

Posted by EditorDavid from the back-off-I'm-a-scientist dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shared this warning from a long-time AI researcher arguing that data science "is due" for a reckoning over whether results can be reproduced. "Few technological revolutions came with such a low barrier of entry as Machine Learning..." Unlike Machine Learning, Data Science is not an academic discipline, with its own set of algorithms and methods... There is an immense diversity, but also disparities in skill, expertise, and knowledge among Data Scientists... In practice, depending on their backgrounds, data scientists may have large knowledge gaps in computer science, software engineering, theory of computation, and even statistics in the context of machine learning, despite those topics being fundamental to any ML project. But it's ok, because you can just call the API, and Python is easy to learn. Right...?

Building products using Machine Learning and data is still difficult. The tooling infrastructure is still very immature and the non-standard combination of data and software creates unforeseen challenges for engineering teams. But in my views, a lot of the failures come from this explosive cocktail of ritualistic Machine Learning:

- Weak software engineering knowledge and practices compounded by the tools themselves;
- Knowledge gap in mathematical, statistical, and computational methods, encouraged black boxing API;
- Ill-defined range of competence for the role of data scientist, reinforced by a pool of candidates with an unusually wide range of backgrounds;
- A tendency to follow the hype rather than the science.


- What can you do?

- Hold your data scientists accountable using Science.
- At a minimum, any AI/ML project should include an Exploratory Data Analysis, whose results directly support the design choices for feature engineering and model selection.
- Data scientists should be encouraged to think outside-of-the box of ML, which is a very small box - Data scientists should be trained to use eXplainable AI methods to provide context about the algorithm's performance beyond the traditional performance metrics like accuracy, FPR, or FNR.
- Data scientists should be held at similar standards than other software engineering specialties, with code review, code documentation, and architectural designs.
The article concludes, "Until such practices are established as the norm, I'll remain skeptical of Data Science."

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