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Journal + - Journal: Don't blame us, we voted for Harris/Walz 5

Journal by Rick Schumann
Well, the fascist pigs have won the big 'red wave' victory that you wanted so bad. Congratulations.
But remember: when there is no democracy anymore, when your voices mean nothing to the authoritarian dictatorship that will follow, when all the promises of prosperity are revealed to be the absolute lies that you were told, over and over again, were indeed lies, remember: we didn't vote for a pathological liar, career criminal, rapist, pedophile, and traitor like Trump. When your wives and

Submission + - New evidence for Planet 9 at fringes of our solar system (earthsky.org) 3

Submitted by Tablizer
Tablizer writes: The case is growing that a Neptune-sized planet – Planet 9 – hides deep in the outskirts of our solar system. Researchers from Caltech, Universite Cote d'Azur and Southwest Research Institute shared a pre-print paper on April 17, 2024. In it, they argue that a group of little bodies beyond Neptune bunch together due to Planet 9’s gravitational influence.

These distant solar system bodies aren’t spread equally in their orbit like the rocky boulders of the asteroid belt. Instead, they form clumpy groups. So, the researchers think that a larger, more distant, object is gravitationally herding them into this pattern. And, in fact, that’s how planet eight – Neptune – was discovered. Neptune was yanking on Uranus’ orbit.

Two of the four authors on the new paper, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech, are the originators of the theory of Planet 9. In fact, Mike Brown wrote a book about his life and research in the far edges of our solar system, including the re-classification of Pluto. The book is titled How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. But these researchers believe there’s an object much larger than Pluto farther out in our solar neighborhood. This planet would be the size of five Earths (about the size of Neptune) and lie 400 to 800 times farther from the sun than Earth.

Submission + - Facebook Asks US Supreme Court To Dismiss Fraud Suit Over Cambridge Analytica (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The US supreme court grappled on Wednesday with a bid by Meta’s Facebook to scuttle a federal securities fraud lawsuit brought by shareholders who accused the social media platform of misleading them about the misuse of user data. The justices heard arguments in Facebook’s appeal of a lower court’s decision allowing the 2018 class action suit led by Amalgamated Bank to proceed. The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages in part to recoup the lost value of the Facebook stock held by the investors. It is one of two cases coming before them this month – the other one involving artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia on 13 November – that could lead to rulings making it harder for private litigants to hold companies to account for alleged securities fraud.

At issue is whether Facebook broke the law when it failed to detail the prior data breach in subsequent business-risk disclosures, and instead portrayed the risk of such incidents as purely hypothetical. Facebook argued in a supreme court brief that it was not required to reveal that its warned-of risk had already materialized because “a reasonable investor” would understand risk disclosures to be forward-looking statements. “When we think about these questions, we’re not looking only to lies or complete false statements,” the liberal justice Elena Kagan told Kannon Shanmugam, the lawyer for Facebook. “We’re also looking to misleading statements or misleading omissions.“ The conservative justice Samuel Alito asked Shanmugam: “Isn’t it the case that an evaluation of risks is always forward-looking?” “It is. And that is essentially what underlies our argument here,” Shanmugam responded.

The plaintiffs accused Facebook of misleading investors in violation of the Securities Exchange Act, a 1934 federal law that requires publicly traded companies to disclose their business risks. They claimed the company unlawfully withheld information from investors about a 2015 data breach involving British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica that affected more than 30 million Facebook users. Edward Davila, a US district judge, dismissed the lawsuit but the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals revived it. The supreme court’s ruling is expected by the end of June.

Submission + - AMD's new Ryzen 7 9800X3D gets reviewed, finally a faster gaming CPU (techspot.com)

Submitted by jjslash
jjslash writes: AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D debuts with impressive performance gains, powered by advanced 3D V-Cache technology and improved thermal efficiency. While the CPU shines as a top choice right out of the gate, AMD’s history of quick price cuts suggests waiting could yield even better value for savvy buyers. TechSpot reports:

Today we're finally able to show you how AMD's new Ryzen 7 9800X3D performs, and spoiler alert – it's a real weapon that solves the issues we encountered with the non-3D Zen 5 chips before this. Without question, this is the best CPU released since the 7800X3D, making this launch particularly exciting.

Like all X3D CPUs, the 9800X3D leverages AMD's 3D V-Cache technology, now featuring a second-gen version that reorients the cache placement. In previous models, the large 64MB L3 cache was layered on top of the cores, but with this new version, it is now positioned below the cores.

Submission + - Google CEO Forbids Political Talk After Firing 28 Over Israeli Contract Protest (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has weighed in on the debate over the relative values of political expression and workplace coexistence by ordering employees to leave their political opinions at home. A day after firing 28 workers for participating in a sit-in protest of the tech giant’s cloud contract with Israel, Pichai warned staff that the office is not a place “to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics” in a company blog post.

Although Pichai didn’t specifically mention the protests or the Israel–Hamas war, he concluded that the $1.92 trillion company “is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform.” “We have a duty to be an objective and trusted provider of information that serves all of our users globally,” Pichai continued. “When we come to work, our goal is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That supersedes everything else and I expect us to act with a focus that reflects that.”

Submission + - Google Asked To Remove 10 Billion 'Pirate' Search Results (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Rightsholders have asked Google to remove more than 10 billion 'copyright infringing' URLs from its search results. The search engine doesn't celebrate the milestone in any way, but the takedown notices document intriguing shifts in volume over time, as well as shifting takedown interests. [...] The path to 10 billion was turbulent. When Google first made DMCA details public it was processing a few million DMCA takedown requests in a year. That number swiftly increased to hundreds of millions and eventually reached a billion DMCA requests in 2016.

The exponential growth curve eventually flattened out and around 2017, the takedown volume started to decline. The decrease was in part due to various anti-piracy algorithms making pirated content less visible in search results. By downranking pirate sites, infringing content became harder to find. As a result, Google processed fewer takedown notices, a welcome change for both rightsholders and the search engine. Today, Google continues to make pirate sites less visible in search, but the reduction in takedown notices didn’t last. On the contrary, over the past several months, Google search processed a record number of DMCA notices.

Last summer, the search giant recorded the 7 billionth takedown request and after that the numbers shot up, adding billions more in the year that followed. The company is now handling removal requests at a rate of roughly 2.5 billion per year; a new record. This represents more than 50 million takedown requests per week and roughly 5,000 every minute. [...] While the 10 billionth reported URL is undoubtedly a milestone, this number is largely driven by a few rightsholders, reporting outfits, and domain names. The aforementioned takedown outfit Link-Busters, for example, accounts for roughly 15% of all reported links, nearly 1.5 billion. Similarly, the ten most prolific rightsholders, including the BPI, HarperCollins, and VIZ Media, are responsible for 40% of all reported links. These ten companies are only a tiny fraction of the 600,000 rightsholders that reported pirated links, however. A small group of domains also receives a disproportionate amount of attention. In total, 5,400,061 domains have been reported, with the top domains having dozens of millions of flagged URLs each. However, most domains have only a few flagged links, some of which are erroneous.

Submission + - Repairing a 45 year old handheld Mattel "video game" (youtube.com)

Submitted by Shayde
Shayde writes: I went to do a quick youtube short on playing the 1976 Mattel handheld game "Auto Race" but figured out pretty quickly that the game wasn't working. So I dove into disassembling the unit and figuring out the problem. Taking it apart and debugging it was fun. (Slight spoiler: I figured out what was wrong, was an easy fix), and the game plays great now!

Submission + - Google's Big Sleep LLM agent discovers exploitable bug in SQLite (scworld.com)

Submitted by spatwei
spatwei writes: Google has used a large language model (LLM) agent called “Big Sleep” to discover a previously unknown, exploitable memory flaw in a widely used software for the first time, the company announced Friday.

The stack buffer underflow vulnerability in a development version of the popular open-source database engine SQLite was found through variant analysis by Big Sleep, which is a collaboration between Google Project Zero and Google DeepMind.

Big Sleep is an evolution of Project Zero’s Naptime project, which is a framework announced in June that enables LLMs to autonomously perform basic vulnerability research. The framework provides LLMs with tools to test software for potential flaws in a human-like workflow, including a code browser, debugger, reporter tool and sandbox environment for running Python scripts and recording outputs.

The researchers provided the Gemini 1.5 Pro-driven AI agent with the starting point of a previous SQLIte vulnerability, providing context for Big Sleep to search for potential similar vulnerabilities in newer versions of the software. The agent was presented with recent commit messages and diff changes and asked to review the SQLite repository for unresolved issues.

Google’s Big Sleep ultimately identified a flaw involving the function “seriesBestIndex” mishandling the use of the special sentinel value -1 in the iColumn field. Since this field would typically be non-negative, all code that interacts with this field must be designed to handle this unique case properly, which seriesBestIndex fails to do, leading to a stack buffer underflow.

Submission + - Meta Permits Its AI Models To Be Used For US Military Purposes (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Meta will allow U.S. government agencies and contractors working on national security to use its artificial intelligence models for military purposes, the companysaidon Monday, in a shift from its policy that prohibited the use of its technology for such efforts. Meta said that it would make its A.I. models, called Llama, available to federal agencies and that it was working with defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen as well as defense-focused tech companies including Palantir and Anduril. The Llama models are “open source,” which means the technology can be freely copied and distributed by other developers, companies and governments.

Meta’s move is an exception to its “acceptable use policy,” which forbade the use of the company’s A.I. software for “military, warfare, nuclear industries,” among other purposes. In a blog post on Monday, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said the company now backed “responsible and ethical uses” of the technology that supported the United States and “democratic values” in a global race for A.I. supremacy. “Meta wants to play its part to support the safety, security and economic prosperity of America — and of its closest allies too,” Mr. Clegg wrote. He added that “widespread adoption of American open source A.I. models serves both economic and security interests.”

Submission + - Romans made 'self-healing' concrete, and now we know how (sciencealert.com) 2

Submitted by Rick Schumann
Rick Schumann writes: The method used by ancient Romans to make their concrete has apparently been misunderstood, but now modern researchers have unraveled the mystery of how structures, like the Pantheon, for instance, has survived all these centuries without collapsing: the method they used to mix their 'pozzolanic' concrete yielded a 'self-healing' type, in which, if cracks developed and later got water in them, would through an inherent chemical process fill and seal the cracks.
The researchers are currently exploring ways to commercially produce this type of concrete as a more environmentally-friendly type for modern use.

Submission + - Sweden Scraps Plans For 13 Offshore Windfarms Over Russia Security Fears (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sweden has vetoed plans for 13 offshore windfarms in the Baltic Sea, citing unacceptable security risks. The country’s defence minister, Pål Jonson, said on Monday that the government had rejected plans for all but one of 14 windfarms planned along the east coast. The decision comes after the Swedish armed forces concluded last week that the projects would make it more difficult to defend Nato’s newest member.

The proposed windfarms would have been located between Åland, the autonomous Finnish region between Sweden and Finland, and the Sound, the strait between southern Sweden and Denmark. The Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is only about 310 miles (500km) from Stockholm. Wind power could affect Sweden’s defence capabilities across sensors and radars and make it harder to detect submarines and possible attacks from the air if war broke out, Jonson said. The only project to receive the green light to was Poseidon, which will include as many as 81 wind turbines to produce 5.5 terawatt hours a year off Stenungsund on Sweden’s west coast.

Submission + - Perplexity CEO Offers To Replace Striking NYT Staff With AI (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The CEO of AI search company Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, has offered to cross picket lines and provide services to mitigate the effect of a strike by New York Times tech workers. The NYT Tech Guild announced its strike Monday, after setting November 4 as its deadline months earlier. The workers represented provide software support and data analysis for the Times, on the business side of the outlet. They have been asking for an annual 2.5% wage increase and to cement a current two days per week in-office expectation, among other things. [...] Picketers demonstrated in front of the NYT building in New York as negotiations continued. Meanwhile, on X, formerly known as Twitter, Perplexity’s CEO offered to step in for the striking workers.

Replying to Semafor media editor Max Tani quoting the publisher, Srinivas wrote: “Hey AG Sulzberger @nytimes sorry to see this. Perplexity is on standby to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. DM me anytime here.” Many on X immediately castigated Srinivas for acting as a scab — a derogatory term for people willing to perform the jobs of striking workers. It is widely considered a disreputable behavior in matters of labor and equity. By undercutting collective action, scabs limit the ability of workers to bargain with those in positions of power. Srinivas may simply be trying to make sure people have the information they need on election day. The company has lately unveiled its own elections info hub and map. But to offer its services explicitly as a replacement for striking workers was bound to be an unpopular move.

Though TechCrunch asked Perplexity for comment, Srinivas responded to TechCrunch’s post on X saying that “the offer was *not* to ‘replace’ journalists or engineers with AI but to provide technical infra support on a high-traffic day.” The striking workers in question, however, are the ones who provide that service to the NYT. It’s not really clear what services other than AI tools Perplexity could offer, or why they would not amount to replacing the workers in question.

Submission + - Perplexity Will Show Live US Election Results Despite AI Accuracy Warnings (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On Friday, Perplexity launched an election information hub that relies on data from The Associated Press and Democracy Works to provide live updates and information about the 2024 US general election, which takes place on Tuesday, November 5. "Starting Tuesday, we'll be offering live updates on elections using data from The Associated Press so you can stay informed on presidential, senate, and house races at both a state and national level," Perplexity wrote in a blog post. The site will pull data from special data sources (called APIs) hosted by the two organizations. As of Monday, Perplexity's hub currently provides interactive information on voting requirements, poll times, and summaries about ballot measures, candidates, policy positions, and endorsements. Users can ask questions about the information similar to using a chatbot like ChatGPT.

Perplexity's embrace of providing election information is an exception in the AI field. Wary about accidentally providing misinformation, competitor AI assistants from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic currently direct users elsewhere or decline to answer election questions. OpenAI's ChatGPT Search directs election result queries to The Associated Press and Reuters. Perplexity describes its new elections hub as "an entry point for understanding key issues." But like other AI models, Perplexity can produce confabulations (plausible incorrect information) when generating responses. That could present an accuracy problem because the site's Voter Guide service uses AI language models to summarize and interpret information pulled from the web.

Submission + - Aomalous Android banking Trojan campaign

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: ToxicPanda: a new banking trojan from Asia hit Europe and LATAM

“In October 2024, the Cleafy Threat Intelligence team identified an anomalous Android banking Trojan campaign. The campaign was initially associated with TgToxic, a banking trojan family reported to be spread in Southeast Asia. Subsequent analyses revealed significant differences in the campaign's code, and we started tracking this family as ToxicPanda.”

Submission + - Russia adds plane bombs to its grey zone warfare (wsj.com)

Submitted by seeker
seeker writes: Russia has been credited with assassination and attempted assassination using chemical weapons in the UK and with the assassination of US resident and former Russian citizen media czar Mikhail Lesin

More recently it was found to be plotting to assassinate the CEO of Reinmetal, the German arms maker.

Now it has upped it game: incendiaries on commercial aircraft.

Submission + - Apple to allow setting default apps for calling and messaging. (forbes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple to allow setting default apps for calling and messaging. Apple's IOS 18.2, expected in early December, will include the option to set default apps, including those for calling and messaging, via new entitlements.

Putting Apple Intelligence’s next iteration to one side, the game-changing update will be the option to set default apps for calling and messaging. While we had expected movement on browsers, password managers and app stores, these additions came as a huge surprise when confirmed last month for users worldwide, not just in Europe, where the Digital Markets Act (DMA) had promoted such changes in the first place.

Notable from the 2023 and 2024 additions are Alternative App Marketplace apps, Call Directory apps, Calling apps, Keyboard apps, Mail apps, Messaging apps, Password apps, and Web Browser apps (though no word on other browser engines).

Submission + - Microsoft Using Hour of Code to Pitch its 200-Hour Minecraft CS Curriculum

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Coding serves as a gateway to essential 21st-century thinking skills," Microsoft-owned Minecraft Education writes in a blog post announcing Hour of Code 2024: The Show Must Go On!, its flagship tutorial for the upcoming Hour of Code, which is run by Microsoft-bankrolled Code.org during Computer Science Education Week, which in turn is run by the Microsoft-backed Computer Science Teachers Association. "We're celebrating ten years of Minecraft coding challenges," begins the 'trailer' for the 2024 Minecraft based tutorial, which offers block-based (using teen influencer-promoted Microsoft MakeCode) and text-based (using Python) programming interfaces.

On the Minecraft Hour of Code page, Microsoft also makes a pitch for educators to go beyond an Hour of Code to prepare their students for the digital future: "Inspire STEM passion in K–12 learners with our Minecraft CS learning progression, 200 hours of curriculum, and professional development." In June, Minecraft Education announced its AP Computer Science Principles course with Minecraft and MakeCode Curriculum for high school students has been approved for college credit by The College Board.

"Minecraft has always been a powerful platform to unlock students' creativity, while teaching the basics of coding," wrote Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in 2018. "Over the past four years, there have been an incredible 130 million Minecraft Hour of Code sessions." The corporate-sponsored Hour of Code tutorials, a cynic might say, blur the lines between coding lessons and product infomercials.

Submission + - US Lawmakers On EPA To Ban Pesticide Linked To Parkinson's Disease (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More than 50 US lawmakers are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to join dozens of other countries in banning a widely used weedkiller linked to Parkinson’s disease and other health dangers. In a October 31 letter (PDF) to the agency, seven US senators said that paraquat, a weedkiller commonly applied on US farms, was a “highly toxic pesticide whose continued use cannot be justified given its harms to farmworkers and rural communities”. The call for a ban from the senators came after 47 members of the US House of Representatives sent a similar letter (PDF) to the EPA calling for a ban earlier in October.

The lawmakers cite scientific links between paraquat use and development of Parkinson’s and other “life threatening diseases” as well as “grave impacts on the environment”. “Health risks include a higher risk of Parkinson’s disease, with some studies finding a 64% increase in the likelihood of developing Parkinson’s, non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, thyroid cancer, and other thyroid issues,” they wrote. The New Jersey senator Cory Booker, organizer of the Senate letter, said the risks of paraquat exposure were “well documented” and that it was “irresponsible” for the EPA to continue to allow its use. “I hope the EPA will follow the science and ban paraquat,” Booker said. The EPA has long maintained that there is no “clear link” between paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s disease, though the agency does have a number of restrictions on use of the chemical due to its acute toxicity. The agency issued a draft report earlier this year affirming its position. Still, the agency said at that time that it would be reviewing more scientific studies and would issue a final report by January 17, 2025.

Submission + - Nvidia To Join Dow Jones Industrial Average, Replacing Intel (cnbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Nvidia is replacing rival chipmaker Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a shakeup to the blue-chip index that reflects the boom in artificial intelligence and a major shift in the semiconductor industry. Intel shares were down 1% in extended trading on Friday. Nvidia shares rose 1%. The switch will take place on Nov. 8. Also, Sherwin Williams will replace Dow Inc. in the index, S&P Dow Jones said in a statement (PDF).

With the addition of Nvidia, four of the six trillion-dollar tech companies are now in the index. The two not in the Dow are Alphabet and Meta. While Nvidia has been soaring, Intel has been slumping. Long the dominant maker of PC chips, Intel has lost market share to Advanced Micro Devices and has made very little headway in AI. Intel shares have fallen by more than half this year as the company struggles with manufacturing challenges and new competition for its central processors. Intel said in a filing this week that the board’s audit and finance committee approved cost and capital reduction activities, including lowering head count by 16,500 employees and reducing its real estate footprint. The job cuts were originally announced in August.

The Dow contains 30 components and is weighted by the share price of the individual stocks instead of total market value. Nvidia put itself in better position to join the index in May, when the company announced a 10-for-1 stock split. While doing nothing to its market cap, the move slashed the price of each share by 90%, allowing the company to become a part of the Dow without having too heavy a weighting. The switch is the first change to the index since February, when Amazon replaced Walgreens Boots Alliance. Over the years, the Dow has been playing catchup in gaining exposure to the largest technology companies. The stocks in the index are chosen by a committee from S&P Dow Jones Indices.

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