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Meta Employees Launch Protest Against Mouse-Tracking Tech At US Offices (reuters.com) 39

Posted by BeauHD from the always-watching dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta employees distributed flyers at multiple U.S. offices on Tuesday to protest the company's recent installation of mouse-tracking software on their computers, according to photos of the pamphlets seen by Reuters. The flyers, which appeared in meeting rooms, on vending machines and atop toilet paper dispensers at the Facebook owner's offices, encouraged staffers to sign an online petition against the move. "Don't want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?" they asked, according to the photos seen by Reuters. [...]

The pamphlets and the petition both cite the U.S. National Labor Relations Act, saying "workers are legally protected when they choose to organize for the improvement of working conditions." In the UK, a group of Meta employees has started organizing a drive for unionization with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW), a branch of the Communication Workers Union. The employees set up a website to recruit members using the URL "Leanin.uk," a reference to former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's best-selling book encouraging women to seek equal footing in the workplace. "Meta's workers are paying the price for management's reckless and expensive bets. While executives chase speculative AI strategies, staff are facing devastating job cuts, draconian surveillance, and the cruel reality of being forced to train the inefficient systems being positioned to replace them," said Eleanor Payne, an organizer with UTAW. "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them -- things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus," said a statement Meta issued earlier.
Science

Why Are Some People Mosquito Magnets? (phys.org) 46

Posted by BeauHD from the age-old-questions dept.
fjo3 shares a report from Phys.org: Ever felt like mosquitoes bite you while ignoring everyone else? Scientists are now making progress in deciphering the complex chemical cocktail that makes particular people more enticing to these disease-spreading bloodsuckers. "It's not a misconception -- mosquitoes are attracted to some people more than others," Frederic Simard of France's Institute of Research for Development told AFP. "But we are not all magnets all the time," the medical entomologist added.

A range of sensory cues can cause mosquitoes to pick one human over another -- mainly the smell and heat our bodies give off, and the carbon dioxide we exhale. Female mosquitoes -- which are the only ones that bite -- detect these signals with finely tuned receptors, then choose their target accordingly. "We have known for over 100 years that mosquitoes are attracted by the carbon dioxide that we exhale -- this is the first signal that triggers their behavior" when they are dozens of meters away, Swedish scientist Rickard Ignell told AFP. Within around 10 meters, "mosquitoes will start detecting our odor, and in combination with carbon dioxide," this attracts them even more, said the senior author of a recent study on the subject. As they get closer, body temperature and humidity make particular humans even more enticing.

[...] For Ignell's recent study, the researchers released Aedes aegypti mosquitoes -- known for spreading yellow fever and dengue -- on 42 women in a lab, to see which ones they preferred. "We have shown that mosquitoes use a blend of odorous compounds (we identified 27 that the mosquitoes will detect, out of the possible 1,000) for their attraction to us," Ignell said. The woman the mosquitoes most liked to bite -- which included pregnant women in their second trimester -- produced a large amount of a particular compound made by a breakdown of the skin oil sebum. That even a small increase of this compound -- called "1-octen-3-ol", or mushroom alcohol -- made a difference came as a surprise, Ignell emphasized.
AI

South Korea Floats 'Citizen Dividend' Using AI Profits 70

Posted by BeauHD from the universal-basic-ai-income dept.
South Korea's presidential policy chief is calling for a "citizen dividend" that would return some AI-driven profits and tax revenue to the public. The Straits Times. From the report: Presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom said in a Facebook post that a portion of the profits and tax revenue derived from the artificial intelligence boom "should be structurally returned to all citizens." That is because, Mr Kim argued, the economic gains from AI are based at least partly on industrial infrastructure built by the country over five decades. Mr Kim's comments come after tens of thousands of people gathered outside Samsung's main chip hub in April to demand employees get a greater share of AI profits. The company's labour union wants 15 per cent of operating profit handed to chip-division employees.

The union has threatened an 18-day strike starting May 21. Workers have pointed to rising payouts at SK Hynix, which in 2025 agreed to allocate 10 per cent of its annual operating profit to a performance bonus pool, as evidence they deserve more pay. "Excess profits in the AI era are, by nature, concentrated," Mr Kim wrote. Memory companies, core engineers and asset holders are highly likely to receive substantial benefits, while much of the middle class may experience only indirect effects.

Submission + - Sysadmin Creates "ModuleJail" to Automatically Blacklist Unused Kernel Modules

Submitted by internet-redstar
internet-redstar writes: After the recent wave of Linux kernel privilege escalation vulnerabilities like “Copy Fail” and “Dirty Frag”, Belgian Linux sysadmin and Tesla Hacker "Jasper Nuyens" got tired of the idea of manually blacklisting dozens or even hundreds of obscure kernel modules across large fleets of Linux systems in the near future. So he wrote ModuleJail, a GPLv3 shell script that scans a running Linux system and automatically blacklists currently unused kernel modules, reducing kernel attack surface without requiring a reboot. The idea is simple: many modern Linux privilege escalation bugs target obscure or rarely used kernel functionality that is still enabled by default on servers that do not actually need it. ModuleJail works across major distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, AlmaLinux and Arch Linux, generating 1 modprobe blacklist rules file while preserving commonly used modules. Nuyens argues that the increasing speed of AI-assisted vulnerability discovery will likely turn kernel hardening and attack surface reduction into a much bigger operational priority for sysadmins over the next few weeks and months.
Medicine

First Real-Time Brain-Controlled Hearing Device 29

Posted by BeauHD from the next-gen-hearing-aids dept.
Researchers at Columbia demonstrated the first real-time brain-controlled hearing system that can identify which speaker a listener is focusing on in a noisy environment and automatically amplify that voice while suppressing others. "This breakthrough addresses the 'cocktail party effect,' a major limitation of conventional hearing aids, which often struggle to distinguish between overlapping conversations in noisy settings," reports Neuroscience News. From the report: In the new study, Columbia researchers teamed up with surgeons and their epilepsy patients who were undergoing brain surgery to better pinpoint the sources of their seizures. The hospital patients, who volunteered to be part of this study, already had electrodes implanted in their brains. [senior author Nima Mesgarani's] system used the electrodes to measure the brain activity of the patients as they focused on one of two overlapping conversations played simultaneously. The system then automatically detected which conversation a patient was paying attention to and adjusted the volume in real time, turning up that conversation while quieting the other. For one volunteer, the experience of controlling the system with her brain was literally unbelievable. She accused the researchers of secretly adjusting the volumes. Others told stories about friends and family with hearing impairments who could benefit from such a technology. One person said: "It seems like science fiction."

[...] The scientists developed real-time machine-learning algorithms that could examine the brainwaves and identify which conversation the patients were paying attention to. Once deployed, their system could rapidly deduce which conversation each listener was paying attention to and make it easier for them to hear it. This happened both when the researchers guided the subjects toward a particular conversation, and when the subjects chose freely, as would be necessary in a real-world conversation. "For this to work in real time, the system has to be very fast, accurate and stable for the experience to feel pleasant for the listener," Dr. Mesgarani said. The scientists found their new system correctly identified which conversation the volunteers paid attention to. This dramatically improved the intelligibility of the speech the volunteers focused on, reduced listening effort, and was consistently preferred by the volunteers when compared to conversations the system did not provide assistance with. One volunteer recalled her uncle, who had hearing problems. "Can you imagine if this technology existed in a world [where] ... he could access it? He might actually live a much more peaceful... life." The research has been published in Nature Neuroscience.
AI

Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the 'Next Industrial Revolution' (404media.co) 179

Posted by BeauHD from the striking-a-chord dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Speaking to graduates of University of Central Florida's College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media on May 8, commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group, told graduating humanities students that AI is the "next industrial revolution," and was met with thousands of booing graduates. "And let's face it, change can be daunting. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution," Caulfield said. At that point, murmurs rippled through the crowd. Caulfield paused, and the crowd erupted into boos. "Oh, what happened?" Caulfield said, turning around with her hands out. "Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish?" Someone in the crowd yelled, "AI SUCKS!"

Her speech begins around the hour and 15 minute mark in the UCF livestream. [...] Before the industrial revolution comment, Caulfield praised Jeff Bezos for his passion and use of Amazon as a "stepping stone" to his real dream: spaceflight. Rattled after the crowd's reaction, she continued her speech: "Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives." The crowd cheered. "Okay. We've got a bipolar topic here I see," Caulfield said. "And now AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands." The crowd booed again. "I love it, passion, let's go," she said. "AI is beginning to challenge all major sectors to find their highest and best use," she continued. "Okay, I don't want any giggles when I say this. We have been through this before, these industrial revolutions. In my graduation era, we were faced with the launch of the internet."

She goes on to talk about how cellphones used to be the size of briefcases. "At that time we had no idea how any of these technologies would impact the world and our lives. [...] These were some of the same trepidations and concerns we are now facing. But ultimately it was a game changer for global economic development and the proliferation of new businesses that never existed like Apple and Google and Meta and so many others, and not to mention countless job opportunities. So being an optimist here, AI alongside human intelligence has the potential to help us solve some of humanity's greatest problems. Many of you in this graduating class will play a role in making this happen."

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