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Organisational Structures | Technology and Science | Military, IT and Lifestyle consultancy | Social, Broadcast & Cross Media | Flying aircraft

US House reps, staff health data stolen in cyberattack

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Health data and other personal information of members of Congress and staff were stolen during a breach of servers run by DC Health Care Link and are now up for sale on the dark web.

The FBI is investigating the intrusion, which came to light Wednesday after Catherine Szpindor, the House of Representatives’ chief administrative officer, sent a letter to House members telling them of the incident. Szpindor wrote that she was alerted to the hack by the FBI and US Capitol Police.

DC Health Link is the online marketplace for the Affordable Care Act that administers the healthcare plans for members of Congress as well as their family and staff.

Szpindor called the incident “a significant data breach” that exposed the personal identifiable information (PII) of thousands of DC Health Link employees and warned the Representatives that their data may have been compromised.

“Currently, I do not know the size and scope of the breach,” she wrote, adding the FBI informed her that account information and PII of “hundreds” of House and staff members were stolen. Once Szpindor has a list of the data taken, she will directly contact those people affected.

[…]

Thousands of House Members and employees from across the United States have enrolled in health insurance through DC Health Link for themselves and their families since 2014,” McCarthy and Jeffries wrote. “The size and scope of impacted House customers could be extraordinary.”

Szpindor in her letter recommended House members consider freezing their credit at Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion until the breadth of the breach is known, particularly which representatives and staff members had their data compromised.

According to CNBC, the Senate may also have been impacted by the breach, with an email sent to offices in that side of Congress saying the Senate at Arms was told of the breach from law enforcement and the “data included the full names, date of enrollment, relationship (self, spouse, child), and email address, but no other Personally Identifiable Information (PII).”

The FBI in a terse statement to the media said it was “aware of this incident and is assisting. This is an ongoing investigation.” Capitol Police said they were working with the FBI.

[…]

At least some of the PII taken during the breach found its way onto a dark web marketplace. In their letter, McCarthy and Jeffries noted the FBI was able to buy the PII and other enrollee information that was breached. The information included names of spouses and dependent children, Social Security numbers, and home addresses.

CNBC said a post on a dark web site put up for sale the data of 170,000 Health Link members and posted data from 11 users as a sample.

[…]

Organizations in the healthcare field have come under increasing attacks in recent years, which is unsurprising given the vast amounts of PII and health data – from medical records to Social Security numbers – they hold on doctors, staff, and patients.

Cybersecurity firm Check Point in a report said the number of cyberattacks around the world jumped 38 percent year-over-year in 2022 and that healthcare, education and research, and government were the top three targeted sectors

Source: US House reps, staff health data stolen in cyberattack • The Register

Women in trouble now: Scientists create mice with two fathers after making eggs from male cells

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Scientists have created mice with two biological fathers by generating eggs from male cells, a development that opens up radical new possibilities for reproduction.

The advance could ultimately pave the way for treatments for severe forms of infertility, as well as raising the tantalising prospect of same-sex couples being able to have a biological child together in the future.

“This is the first case of making robust mammal oocytes from male cells,” said Katsuhiko Hayashi, who led the work at Kyushu University in Japan and is internationally renowned as a pioneer in the field of lab-grown eggs and sperm.

[…]

The technique could also be applied to treat severe forms of infertility, including women with Turner’s syndrome, in whom one copy of the X chromosome is missing or partly missing, and Hayashi said this application was the primary motivation for the research.

[…]

The study, which has been submitted for publication in a leading journal, relied on a sequence of intricate steps to transform a skin cell, carrying the male XY chromosome combination, into an egg, with the female XX version.

Male skin cells were reprogrammed into a stem cell-like state to create so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The Y-chromosome of these cells was then deleted and replaced by an X chromosome “borrowed” from another cell to produce iPS cells with two identical X chromosomes.

“The trick of this, the biggest trick, is the duplication of the X chromosome,” said Hayashi. “We really tried to establish a system to duplicate the X chromosome.”

Finally, the cells were cultivated in an ovary organoid, a culture system designed to replicate the conditions inside a mouse ovary. When the eggs were fertilised with normal sperm, the scientists obtained about 600 embryos, which were implanted into surrogate mice, resulting in the birth of seven mouse pups. The efficiency of about 1% was lower than the efficiency achieved with normal female-derived eggs, where about 5% of embryos went on to produce a live birth.

The baby mice appeared healthy, had a normal lifespan, and went on to have offspring as adults. “They look OK, they look to be growing normally, they become fathers,” said Hayashi.

He and colleagues are now attempting to replicate the creation of lab-grown eggs using human cells.

[…]

Source: Scientists create mice with two fathers after making eggs from male cells | Genetics | The Guardian

Holy shit: German Courts saying DNS Service (Quad9) Is Implicated In Any Copyright Infringement At The Domains It Resolves

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Back in September 2021 Techdirt covered an outrageous legal attack by Sony Music on Quad9, a free, recursive, anycast DNS platform. Quad9 is part of the Internet’s plumbing: it converts domain names to numerical IP addresses. It is operated by the Quad9 Foundation, a Swiss public-benefit, not-for-profit organization. Sony Music says that Quad9 is implicated in alleged copyright infringement on the sites it resolves. That’s clearly ridiculous, but unfortunately the Regional Court of Hamburg agreed with Sony Music’s argument, and issued an interim injunction against Quad9. The German Society for Civil Rights (Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte e.V. or “GFF”) summarizes the court’s thinking:

In its interim injunction the Regional Court of Hamburg asserts a claim against Quad9 based on the principles of the German legal concept of “Stoererhaftung” (interferer liability), on the grounds that Quad9 makes a contribution to a copyright infringement that gives rise to liability, in that Quad9 resolves the domain name of website A into the associated IP address. The German interferer liability has been criticized for years because of its excessive application to Internet cases. German lawmakers explicitly abolished interferer liability for access providers with the 2017 amendment to the German Telemedia Act (TMG), primarily to protect WIFI operators from being held liable for costs as interferers.

As that indicates, this is a case of a law that is a poor fit for modern technology. Just as the liability no longer applies to WIFI operators, who are simply providing Internet access, so the German law should also not catch DNS resolvers like Quad9. The GFF post notes that Quad9 has appealed to the Hamburg Higher Regional Court against the lower court’s decision. Unfortunately, another regional court has just handed down a similar ruling against the company, reported here by Heise Online (translation by DeepL):

the Leipzig Regional Court has sentenced the Zurich-based DNS service Quad9. On pain of an administrative fine of up to 250,000 euros or up to 2 years’ imprisonment, the small resolver operator was prohibited from translating two related domains into the corresponding IP addresses. Via these domains, users can find the tracks of a Sony music album offered via Shareplace.org.

The GFF has already announced that it will be appealing along with Quad9 to the Dresden Higher Regional Court against this new ruling. It says that the Leipzig Regional Court has made “a glaring error of judgment”, and explains:

If one follows this reasoning, the copyright liability of completely neutral infrastructure services like Quad9 would be even stricter than that of social networks, which fall under the infamous Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive,” criticizes Felix Reda, head of the Control © project of the Society for Civil Rights. “The [EU] Digital Services Act makes it unequivocally clear that the liability rules for Internet access providers apply to DNS services. We are confident that this misinterpretation of European and German legal principles will be overturned by the Court of Appeals.”

Let’s hope so. If it isn’t, we can expect companies providing the Internet’s basic infrastructure in the EU to be bombarded with demands from the copyright industry and others for domains to be excluded from DNS resolution. The likely result is that perfectly legal sites and their holdings will be ghosted by DNS companies, which will prefer to err on the side of caution rather than risk becoming the next Quad9.

Source: Another German Court Says The DNS Service Quad9 Is Implicated In Any Copyright Infringement At The Domains It Resolves | Techdirt

There are some incredibly stupid judges and lawyers out there

YouTube Chills the Darned Hell Out On Its Cursing Policy, but you still can’t fucking say fuck

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Google’s finally rolling back its unpopular decree against any kinds of profanity in videos, making it harder for any creators used to offering colorful sailor’s speech in videos from monetizing content on behalf of its beloved ad partners. The only thing is, Google still seems to think the “f-word” is excessively harsh language, so sorry Samuel L. Jackson, those motha-[redacted] snakes are still liable for less ad dollars on this motha-[redacted] plane.

On Tuesday, Google updated its support page to offer up an olive branch to crass creators upset that their potty mouths were resulting in their videos being demonetized. Now, the company clarified that use of “moderate” profanity at any time in a video is now eligible for ad revenue.

However, the company seemed to be antagonistic to “stronger profanity” like “the f-word,” AKA “fuck.” You can’t say “fuck” in the first seven seconds or repeatedly throughout a video or else you will receive “limited ads.” Putting words like “fuck” into a title or thumbnail will result in no ad content.

What is allowed are words like “hell” or “damn” in a title or thumbnail. Words like “bitch,” “douchebag,” “asshole,” and “shit” are considered “moderate profanity, so that’s fine to use frequently in a video. But “fuck,” dear god, will hurt advertiser’s poor virgin ears. YouTube has been extremely sensitive to what its advertisers are saying. For instance the platform came close to pulling big money-making ads over creepy pasta content during the “Elsagate” scandal.

The changes also impacted videos which used music tracks in the background. YouTube is now saying any use of “moderate” or “strong” profanity in background music is eligible for full ad revenue.

Back in November, YouTube changed its creator monetization policy, calling it guidelines for “advertiser-friendly content.” The company decreed that any video with a thumbnail or title containing obscene language or “adult material” wouldn’t receive any ad revenue. YouTube also said it would demonetize violent content such as dead bodies without context, or virtual violence directed at a “real, named person.” Fair enough, but then YouTube said it would demonetize any video which used profanity “in the first eight seconds of the video.”

[…]

Source: YouTube Chills the Hell Out On Its Cursing Policy

What the shitting fuck, Google. Americans. I thought it was the land of the free, once?

How this UK newspaper publisher uses AI to generate articles

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Reach, the owner of the UK’s Daily Mirror and Daily Express tabloids among other newspapers, has started publishing articles with the help of AI software on one of its regional websites as it scrambles to cut costs amid slipping advertising revenues.

Three stories written with the help of machine-learning tools were published on InYourArea.co.uk, which produces feeds of nearby goings-on in Blighty. One piece, titled Seven Things to do in Newport, is a listicle pulling together information on places and activities available in the eponymous sunny Welsh resort city.

Reach CEO Jim Mullen said the machine-written articles are checked and approved by human editors before they’re published online.

“We produced our first AI content in the last ten days, but this is led by editorial,” he said, according to The Guardian. “It was all AI-produced, but the data was obviously put together by a journalist, and whether it was good enough to publish was decided by an editor.”

“There are loads of ethics [issues] around AI and journalistic content,” Mullen admitted. “The way I look at it, we produce lots of content based on actual data. It can be put together in a well-read [piece] that I think AI can do. We are trying to apply it to areas we already get traffic to allow journalists to focus on content that editors want written.”

Mullen’s comments have been questioned by journalists, however, given that Reach announced plans to slash hundreds of jobs in January. The National Union of Journalists said 102 editorial positions would be cut, putting 253 journalists at risk, whilst 180 vacancies would be withdrawn.

Reach’s latest financial results, released on Tuesday, show total revenues for 2022 were £601.4 million ($711.6 million) – a decrease of 2.3 percent compared to the year before. Operating profit plunged 27.4 percent to £106.1 million ($125 million). In a bid to make up for losses, the publicly traded company is focused on cutting operating costs by up to six percent this year.

“The current trading environment remains challenging and we expect this to continue in 2023, with sustained inflation and suppressed market demand for digital advertising. Although input costs remain elevated, we are confident that our cost action plan will enable us to deliver a 5–6 percent like for like reduction in our operating cost base for FY23,” Reach’s full-year report read [PDF].

The Register has asked London-based Reach for further comment. (A few of us vultures once worked for what is now Reach, previously known as Trinity Mirror, an empire built from absorbing hundreds of titles around Britain.)

Reach isn’t the only publisher rolling out AI-generated articles while reducing its count of human reporters. CNET owner Red Ventures laid off scribes last week and has promised to double down on machine-written content despite complaints that those articles contained errors and plagiarism.

Meanwhile, BuzzFeed has produced quizzes with the help of ChatGPT, and Arena Group published botched health-related articles for Men’s Health. Both publishers have also axed employees – in December 2022 and February 2023, respectively.

Source: How this UK newspaper publisher uses AI to generate articles • The Register

Yup, the march of progress

Diving: how to prevent water in your ears and improve your equalizing

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Recently I went on a liveaboard with some extremely experienced divers, most of which had 400 or more dives logged. One of my problems with diving is that I am an extremely slow equalizer, which means that I have to descend extremely slowly, especially at around 5m and again at 10m depth. Another problem I have is that my ears tend to fill up with water after the dive and it takes some time to get rid of the water.

Getting rid of water

To get rid of the water, most sites will tell you to use ear drops (an alcohol / vinegar mix), pull on your earlobe, use a warm compress, inhale steam to open the sinusses, use a hot air dryer at least 10cm from your ears.

Methods to equalize

Most sites will tell you about the valsalva maneuver – which many people tend to do wrong because they blow too hard – or to swallow in order to clear your ears and equalize. For more and better ways to equalise, read this DAN article with 6 methods to equalize. Divebuddies4life has this article as well:

VOLUNTARY TUBAL OPENING | Tense Your Throat and Push Your Jaw Forward 

Tense the muscles of the soft palate and the throat while pushing the jaw forward and down as if starting to yawn. These muscles pull the Eustachian tubes open. This requires a lot of practice, but some divers can learn to control those muscles and hold their tubes open for continuous equalization.

TOYNBEE MANEUVER | Pinch Your Nose and Swallow

With your nostrils pinched or blocked against your mask skirt, swallow. Swallowing pulls open your Eustachian tubes while the movement of your tongue, with your nose closed, compresses air against them.

FRENZEL MANEUVER | Pinch Your Nose and Make the Sound of the Letter “K”

Close your nostrils, and close the back of your throat as if straining to lift a weight. Then make the sound of the letter “K.” This forces the back of your tongue upward, compressing air against the openings of your Eustachian tubes.

LOWRY TECHNIQUE | Pinch Your Nose, Blow and Swallow

A combination of Valsalva and Toynbee: while closing your nostrils, blow and swallow at the same time.

EDMONDS TECHNIQUE | Pinch Your Nose and Blow and Push Your Jaw Forward

While tensing the soft palate (the soft tissue at the back of the roof of your mouth) and throat muscles and pushing the jaw forward and down, do a Valsalva maneuver.

Methods without names

An extra way to equalize is to close one nostril by pressing your finger on the side of the nose and then blowing out through the other one. Do this to the other nostril and after this equalising through any of the outlined techniques becomes much easier.

Before the dive itself there is a freediving method to empty your sinusses: pretend there is a mosquito on the tip of your nose and try to blow it off by blowing through your nose (softly!) for a minute. After a minute, pause for a minute. Repeat so that you have blown out three times. Keep some toilet paper handy, you may be surprised how much snot comes out! After having done this my descent times inproved incredibly rapidly.

Prevention

This is the best form of action and this collection of divers had extremely good tips to help.

Headgear

First is headgear – wear a (2mm if warm water, 7mm if cold water) hoodie or even just a buff scarf: cover your ears. This means a lot less water enters your ears and make equalising much easier. Or you can get an IST Sports dive mask with over ear protection – also saving you from ear infections! The IST Sports Pro Ear Mask ME80 is surprisingly affordable.

Surfears also has Diving ear plugs which are connected by a cable so you can pull them out – don’t just put earplugs in when diving as the pressure will put them into your head and when you ascend you won’t be able to pull them out!

Medication / Drugs

Second is Sudofed. This comes in tablets (Sudafed Sinus Max Strength capsules with paracetamol, caffeine and phenylephrine) and a nose spray (blocked nose, Xylometazoline and hydrochloride). Take the tablets daily and spray 2 shots of nose spray into each nostril before the dive (yes, this is a lot more than the daily recommended intake if you dive four times on a day, but it’s over a short period of time and prevention here is worth it).Sudafed tabletsBlocked Nose Spray | Nasal Spray | SUDAFED®

Third also helps is to suck on a few SMINTS – this exercises the jaw muscles and prepares your jaw for equalzing during the dive. It also helps against dry mouth and improves the taste due to the rubber of the regulator. Exercising the jaw muscles by chewing, sucking and moving your jaw around before the dive helps to equalise.

Wax buildup in your ears

To get rid of wax buildup in your ear, which may hinder equalization, take a syringe, fill it with slightly warm water and spray it directly into your ear at full force. You will very probably have to repeat this several (many!) times. Do it over a sink, as wax will come out first in tiny bits and then potentially as a clump. It’s messy. It sounds scary, but it works wonders. NB should a large piece come out, then it’s probably a good idea to wait a good while before diving as the tubes will need to settle back into their original position first.

Start your first equalization just before you get into the water.

Finally, you need to equalize much more often than you think you need to – don’t wait until you feel pressure on your eardrums, but continuously equalize as you are going down.

Hopefully you will enjoy diving a lot more with these tips!

When Given The Choice, Most Authors Reject Excessively Long Copyright Terms

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Recently, Walled Culture mentioned the problem of orphan works. These are creations, typically books, that are still covered by copyright, but unavailable because the original publisher or distributor has gone out of business, or simply isn’t interested in keeping them in circulation. The problem is that without any obvious point of contact, it’s not possible to ask permission to re-publish or re-use it in some way.

It turns out that there is another serious issue, related to that of orphan works. It has been revealed by the New York Public Library, drawing on work carried out as a collaboration between the Internet Archive and the US Copyright Office. According to a report on the Vice Web site:

the New York Public Library (NYPL) has been reviewing the U.S. Copyright Office’s official registration and renewals records for creative works whose copyrights haven’t been renewed, and have thus been overlooked as part of the public domain.

The books in question were published between 1923 and 1964, before changes to U.S. copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew their copyrights. According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights.

Since most people today will naturally assume that a book published between 1923 and 1964 is still in copyright, it is unlikely anyone has ever tried to re-publish or re-use material from this period. But this new research shows that the majority of these works are, in fact, already in the public domain, and therefore freely available for anyone to use as they wish.

That’s a good demonstration of how the dead hand of copyright stifles fresh creativity from today’s writers, artists, musicians and film-makers. They might have drawn on all these works as a stimulus for their own creativity, but held back because they have been brainwashed by the copyright industry into thinking that everything is in copyright for inordinate lengths of time. As a result, huge numbers of books that are freely available according to the law remain locked up with a kind of phantom copyright that exists only in people’s minds, infected as they are with copyright maximalist propaganda.

The other important lesson to be drawn from this work by the NYPL is that given the choice, the majority of authors didn’t bother renewing their copyrights, presumably because they didn’t feel they needed to. That makes today’s automatic imposition of exaggeratedly-long copyright terms not just unnecessary but also harmful in terms of the potential new works, based on public domain materials, that have been lost as a result of this continuing over-protection.

Source: When Given The Choice, Most Authors Reject Excessively Long Copyright Terms | Techdirt

Texas Bill Would Make ISPs censor any abortion information

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Last week, Texas introduced a bill that would make it illegal for internet service providers to let users access information about how to get abortion pills. The bill, called the Women and Child Safety Act, would also criminalize creating, editing, or hosting a website that helps people seek abortions.

If the bill passes, internet service providers (ISPs) will be forced to block websites “operated by or on behalf of an abortion provider or abortion fund.” ISPs would also have to filter any website that helps people who “provide or aid or abet elective abortions” in almost any way, including raising money.

[…]

Five years ago, a bill like this would violate federal law. Remember Net Neutrality? Net Neutrality forced ISPs to act like phone companies, treating all traffic the same with almost no ability to limit or filter the content traveling on their networks. But Net Neutrality was repealed in 2018, essentially reclassifying internet service as a luxury with little regulator oversight, and upending consumers’ right to free access of the web.

[…]

Source: Texas Bill Would Bar ISPs From Hosting Abortion Websites, Info

Florida bill would make bloggers who are paid to write about elected officials register with ethics commission

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A proposed law in Florida would force bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis and other elected officials to register with a state office and file monthly reports or face fines of $25 per day. The bill was filed in the Florida Senate Tuesday by Senator Jason Brodeur, a Republican.

If enacted, the proposed law would likely be challenged in court on grounds that it violates First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and the press. Defending his bill, Brodeur said, “Paid bloggers are lobbyists who write instead of talk. They both are professional electioneers. If lobbyists have to register and report, why shouldn’t paid bloggers?” according to the Florida Politics news website.

The bill text defines bloggers as people who write for websites or webpages that are “frequently updated with opinion, commentary, or business content.” Websites run by newspapers or “similar publications” are excluded from the definition.

The proposed registration requirements apply to bloggers who receive payment in exchange for writing about elected state officers, including “the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, a Cabinet officer, or any member of the Legislature.” Bloggers who write about a member of the legislature would have to register with the state Office of Legislative Services, while bloggers who write about the governor or other members of the executive branch would have to register with the Commission on Ethics.

“If a blogger posts to a blog about an elected state officer and receives, or will receive, compensation for that post, the blogger must register with the appropriate office… within 5 days after the first post by the blogger which mentions an elected state officer,” the bill said. “Upon registering with the appropriate office, a blogger must file monthly reports on the 10th day following the end of each calendar month from the time a blog post is added to the blog.”

[…]

The Florida Legislature is separately considering proposals that would make it easier for people to sue media organizations for defamation; these proposals have also been criticized for harming freedom of speech. Brodeur filed one of the defamation proposals on Monday.

The defamation proposals were spurred by DeSantis, who last month held a roundtable discussion on media defamation and called on the legislature “to protect Floridians from the life-altering ramifications that defamation from the media can cause for a person who does not have the means or the platform to defend himself.”

“We’ve seen over the last generation legacy media outlets increasingly divorce themselves from the truth and instead try to elevate preferred narratives and partisan activism over reporting the facts,” DeSantis said. “When the media attacks me, I have a platform to fight back. When they attack everyday citizens, these individuals don’t have the adequate recourses to fight back. In Florida, we want to stand up for the little guy against these massive media conglomerates.”

Source: Florida bill would make bloggers who write about governor register with state | Ars Technica

If you read the headline in the source it sounds dreadful, but it turns out this makes absolute sense – if you’re being paid and are influencing public opinion then yep, register with ethics.

JPMorgan Chase ‘requires workers give 6 months notice’

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A veteran JPMorgan Chase banker fumed over the financial giant’s policy requiring certain staffers to give six months’ notice before being allowed to leave for another job.

The Wall Street worker, who claims to earn around $400,000 annually in total compensation after accumulating 15 years of experience, griped that the lengthy notice period likely means a lucrative job offer from another company will be rescinded.

[…]

“When I looked into the resignation process, I see that my notice period is 6 bloody months!!”

“I was in disbelief, I checked my offer letter and ‘Whoops there it is,’” the post continued.

[…]

A spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase told The Post: “In line with other e-trading organizations, some of our algo trading technology employees have an extended notice period. This affects a very small portion – less than 100 – of our 57,000 technologists.”

[…]

Workers at its India corporate offices said last year that the Wall Street giant was raising its notice period from 30 days for vice president and below to 60 days, according to eFinancialCareer.com.

Meanwhile, bankers at the executive director level saw their notice period bumped up to 90 days.

Source: JPMorgan Chase ‘requires workers give 6 months notice’

On the other side, I’m betting that JPMorgan Chase can just fire you with 0 days notice period.

40-passenger hydrogen electric plane completes maiden flight

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Mere weeks after achieving experimental airworthiness certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Universal Hydrogen has successfully taken its 40-passenger regional hydrogen electric plane to the skies. The aircraft took off from Washington state this morning and ascended to an altitude of 3,500 mean sea level (MSL) before safely landing, as you can see in the video below.

Universal Hydrogen Co. is a Southern California-based aviation company founded in 2020 by engineers with the mission of bringing zero-emission hydrogen electric-powered aviation to fruition.

In early February, we covered new milestones achieved using its Dash-300 flying test bed. The aircraft has the capability to eventually transport over 40 passengers using hydrogen fuel cells and electric powertrains and is promised to eventually become the largest of its kind to ever take to the skies.

The runway to today’s latest milestone began with the FAA experimental certification of the Dash-300, giving Universal Hydrogen permission to take off.

Universal Hydrogen
The Dash-300 flying test bed / Credit: Universal Hydrogen

Check out the largest hydrogen electric plane to ever fly

Universal Hydrogen is celebrating today following the first successful flight of the hydrogen electric plane this morning, which took off in Grant County, Washington, at 8:41 a.m. PST and flew for 15 minutes.

For this initial flight, one of the airplane’s engines was replaced with Universal Hydrogen’s fuel cell-electric powertrain. The other standard engine remained to ensure the safety of the plane and its pilot, former US Air Force test pilot Alex Kroll. Kroll spoke to the confidence achieved during flight:

During the second circuit over the airport, we were comfortable with the performance of the hydrogen powertrain, so we were able to throttle back the fossil fuel turbine engine to demonstrate cruise principally on hydrogen power. The airplane handled beautifully, and the noise and vibrations from the fuel cell powertrain are significantly lower than from the conventional turbine engine.

[…]

Source: 40-passenger hydrogen electric plane completes maiden flight

Guy Embezzles Cool $9 Million From Poop-to-Energy Ponzi Scheme

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A guy embezzled nearly $9 million by convincing investors he was turning cow poop into green energy—and then not building any of the machines at all.

On Monday, 66-year-old Raymond Brewer of Porterville, California pled guilty to charges that he’d defrauded investors. Court records show that Brewer stole $8,750,000 from investors between 2014 and 2019 with promises to build anaerobic digesters, or machines that can convert cow manure to methane gas that can then be sold as energy, on dairies in various counties in California and Idaho. But instead of actually building any of those digesters, Brewer spent it on stuff like a new house and new Dodge Ram pickup trucks.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Eastern District of California, Brewer was a prolific scammer. He took potential investors on tours of dairies where he said he was going to build the digesters and sent faked documents where he’d signed agreements with those dairies. When investors asked how things were going or for updates on the construction of the digesters or how the digesters were running, Brewer sent over “fake construction schedules, fake invoices for project-related costs, fake power generation reports, fake RECs, and fake pictures,” as well as forged contracts with banks and fake international investors. He must have been great at Photoshop!

Part of the appeal of the scam was in what’s known as Renewable Energy Credits (REC), which are credits issued by the federal government signifying that renewable energy has been produced on a site; those credits can then be sold to companies looking to offset their fossil fuel emissions. Brewer told his investors that he’d get them 66% of all the profits from those credits.

Five years is a hell of a long time to promise folks money and not deliver—which is why the U.S. Attorney’s office has described Brewer’s setup as a “Ponzi” scheme, because he began repaying old investors with money he was scamming off of new ones. When investors began to get suspicious, the U.S. Attorneys’ office said, Brewer moved to Montana and assumed a new identity. He was finally arrested in 2020.

Some profiles for Brewer’s company, CH4 Energy, are still active on business directories like PitchBook and food waste resource site ReFED. The company was even the subject of a profile on its “work” in local paper Visalia Times-Delta in 2016 and was part of a story in the LA Times in 2013 on dairy farmers and renewable energy.

In the LA Times story, Brewer is quoted as talking about the reluctance of dairy farmers to install the digesters.

“Brewer said he tested his system in other states, such as Wisconsin and Idaho, before shopping it around with California dairy farmers, whom he said were very skeptical,” the LA Times wrote. “He eventually signed his first contract with [a farmer]—‘Talk about apprehensive,’ Brewer recalled. ‘That was a little bit of an understatement.’”

Our buddy Ray wasn’t totally bullshitting—pardon the pun—in peddling his ideas. Anaerobic digesters are real machines that do convert animal waste into energy, and millions of dollars in federal and state money have been spent on the technology. However, questions remain around just how “green” this energy is and whether it’s worth the investment.

Brewer will be sentenced in June and faces up to 20 years in prison.

Source: Guy Embezzles Cool $9 Million From Poop-to-Energy Ponzi Scheme

Mt. Gox creditors now have until March to register for payouts

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obuaki Kobayashi, the trustee for the Mt. Gox bankruptcy, has announced that the deadline for repayment selection and registration of payee information for its creditors has been moved from Jan. 10 to Mar. 10.

According to Kobayashi, the change was made due to “various circumstances such as the progress by rehabilitation creditors in respect of the Selection and Registration.”

Mt. Gox was one of the leading Bitcoin exchanges in the early days of crypto but was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2014 after a supposed hack that led to the theft of 850,000 Bitcoin. Roughly 200,000 BTC has been recovered since the hack, and the repayment of Mt. Gox creditors has been a slow-motion development since the Civil Rehabilitation Plan was accepted by 99% of them on Oct. 20, 2021. As of July 6, 2022, the Mt. Gox trustee held close to 142,000 Bitcoins.

This latest announcement from Kobayashi means that the repayment to creditors will take even more time as the trustee looks to ensure that everyone who is owed funds can properly submit their claims.

Those who have yet to complete the necessary registration were encouraged to do so as soon as possible as rehabilitation creditors who do not complete their selection and registration by the new deadline will not be able to receive their repayment, the announcement said.

Some creditors may be required to bring the required documents to the head office of MtGox or a location designated by the Rehabilitation Trustee to receive repayment in Japanese yen.

According to the announcement, “The Rehabilitation Trustee will begin confirming the contents of your Selection and Registration, etc., after this point in time in order to make repayment as promptly as possible after March 10, 2023 (Japan time).”Creditors have the choice of receiving an early lump sum repayment, repayment for a portion of cryptocurrency rehabilitation claims in cryptocurrency, repayment by bank remittance, or repayment by remittance through a fund transfer service provider.

The new deadline is meant for those who have yet to complete the process while those that have already done so do not need to do anything further at this time. The update also requested that those who already completed the process abstain from making any revisions to their registration unless absolutely necessary to help make the confirmation process go as smoothly as possible.

The change in registration date also means that the repayment dates have been moved from their originally scheduled deadline of July 31 to Sept. 30 of this year. The release of the Mt. Gox Bitcoin remains a primary concern for many crypto traders, as some fear the release of a large number of tokens into the market will lead to a collapse in the price of Bitcoin.

Source: Mt. Gox creditors now have until March to register for payouts | Kitco News

You don’t own what you buy: Roald Dahl eBooks Censored Remotely after you bought them

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“Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race,” reports the British newspaper the Times. Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.

Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated the electronic novels, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs Twit as fearfully ugly, on devices such as the Amazon Kindle. Dahl’s biographer Matthew Dennison last night accused the publisher of “strong-arming readers into accepting a new orthodoxy in which Dahl himself has played no part.”
Meanwhile…

  • Children’s book author Frank Cottrell-Boyce admits in the Guardian that “as a child I disliked Dahl intensely. I felt that his snobbery was directed at people like me and that his addiction to revenge was not good. But that was fine — I just moved along.”

But Cottrell-Boyce’s larger point is “The key to reading for pleasure is having a choice about what you read” — and that childhood readers faces greater threats. “The outgoing children’s laureate Cressida Cowell has spent the last few years fighting for her Life-changing Libraries campaign. It’s making a huge difference but it would have a been a lot easier if our media showed a fraction of the interest they showed in Roald Dahl’s vocabulary in our children.”

Source: Roald Dahl eBooks Reportedly Censored Remotely – Slashdot

It’s official: BlackLotus malware can bypass UEFI secure boot

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BlackLotus, a UEFI bootkit that’s sold on hacking forums for about $5,000, can now bypass Secure Boot, making it the first known malware to run on Windows systems even with the firmware security feature enabled.

Secure Boot is supposed to prevent devices from running unauthorized software on Microsoft machines. But by targeting UEFI the BlackLotus malware loads before anything else in the booting process, including the operating system and any security tools that could stop it.

Kaspersky’s lead security researcher Sergey Lozhkin first saw BlackLotus being sold on cybercrime marketplaces back in October 2022 and security specialists have been taking apart piece by piece ever since.

[…]

BlackLotus exploits a more than one-year-old vulnerability, CVE-2022-21894, to bypass the secure boot process and establish persistence. Microsoft fixed this CVE in January 2022, but miscreants can still exploit it because the affected signed binaries have not been added to the UEFI revocation list, Smolár noted.

“BlackLotus takes advantage of this, bringing its own copies of legitimate – but vulnerable – binaries to the system in order to exploit the vulnerability,” he wrote.

Plus, a proof-of-concept exploit for this vulnerability has been publicly available since August 2022, so expect to see more cybercriminals using this issue for illicit purposes soon.

Making it even more difficult to detect: BlackLotus can disable several OS security tools including BitLocker, Hypervisor-protected Code Integrity (HVCI) and Windows Defender, and bypass User Account Control (UAC), according to the security shop.

[…]

Once BlackLotus exploits CVE-2022-21894 and turns off the system’s security tools, it deploys a kernel driver and an HTTP downloader. The kernel driver, among other things, protects the bootkit files from removal, while the HTTP downloader communicates with the command-and-control server and executes payloads.

The bootkit research follows UEFI vulnerabilities in Lenovo laptops that ESET discovered last spring, which, among other things, allow attackers to disable secure boot.

[…]

Source: It’s official: BlackLotus malware can bypass secure boot • The Register

OpenAI will let developers build ChatGPT into their apps, control own data

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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, announced several significant changes today. First, it’s launching developer APIs for ChatGPT and the Whisper speech-transcription model. It also changed its terms of service to let developers opt out of using their data for improvements while adding a 30-day data retention policy.

The new ChatGPT API will use the same AI model (“gpt-3.5-turbo”) as the popular chatbot, allowing developers to add either unchanged or flavored versions of ChatGPT to their apps. Snap’s My AI is an early example, along with a new virtual tutor feature for the online study tool Quizlet and an upcoming Ask Instacart tool in the popular local-shopping app. However, the API won’t be limited to brand-specific bots mimicking ChatGPT; it can also power “non-chat” software experiences that could benefit from AI brains.

The ChatGPT API is priced at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens (about 750 words). Additionally, it’s offering a dedicated-capacity option for deep-pocketed developers who expect to use more tokens than the standard API allows. The new developer options join the consumer-facing ChatGPT Plus, a $20-per-month service launched in February.

 

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Whisper API is a hosted version of the open-source Whisper speech-to-text model it launched in September. “We released a model, but that actually was not enough to cause the whole developer ecosystem to build around it,” OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman told TechCrunch on Tuesday. “The Whisper API is the same large model that you can get open source, but we’ve optimized to the extreme. It’s much, much faster and extremely convenient.” The transcription API will cost developers $0.006 per minute, enabling “robust” transcription in multiple languages and providing translation to English.

Finally, OpenAI revealed changes to its developer terms based on customer feedback about privacy and security concerns. Unless a developer opts in, the company will no longer use data submitted through the API for “service improvements” to train its AI models. Additionally, it’s adding a 30-day data retention policy while providing stricter retention options “depending on user needs” (likely meaning high-usage companies with budgets to match). Finally, it’s simplifying its terms surrounding data ownership, clarifying that users own the models’ input and output.

The company will also replace its pre-launch review process for developers with a mostly automated system. OpenAI justified the change by pointing out that “the overwhelming majority of apps were approved during the vetting process,” claiming its monitoring has “significantly improved.” “One of our biggest focuses has been figuring out, how do we become super friendly to developers?” Brockman said to TechCrunch. “Our mission is to really build a platform that others are able to build businesses on top of.”

Source: OpenAI will let developers build ChatGPT into their apps | Engadget

John Dodd Rolls Royce 27-Liter Merlin V12-Powered, Street-Legal Fiberglass Legend From the ’70s for sale

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Many cars claim to be a beast although just a few have a resume to back it up. This 1972 Rolls-Royce-ish plants its flag as “The Beast” so hard it’s right there on the name. This beige-on-beige-on-beige masterpiece is heading to auction to find a new home, and hopefully, one with a very long garage to contain its very long snout.

The Beast was the creation of John Dodd, who died last December at 90 years old. The automotive engineer and transmission maker constructed the car using a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine plucked from a military application [Note: from a Spitfire airplane] to power his Beast, all 27 liters and 12 cylinders of glory. The result was an “estimated” 750 horsepower, although the Beast hasn’t ever set foot on a dyno. What you see here isn’t the first Beast, either. Dodd bought the first Beast after he helped to craft a transmission for it, which burned on the way home from a trip in Sweden. The rebodied version is what you see here, and it’s longer than its predecessor if that’s at all possible.

This Beast once famously and litigiously wore a Rolls-Royce snout, which you can see has been removed and replaced with John Dodd’s initials after courts ruled against him. (It still says “Rolls-Royce” on the registration, so checkmate.) The interior is no less resplendent than Rollers of the time, although it’s far smaller than a car with a football-field-sized footprint should have. There are two doors, two seats—in beige no less—with a long cargo area. (So, technically a shooting brake?) There’s a sculpted dash that looks like 1971 vacuformed. It’d be hard to imagine airbags anywhere in the car—they may not be needed if the hood is technically one county ahead of the passengers—but it appears there’s some padding on the dash and a bank of switches with no clear indication of what any of them do.

The internals are absurd, albeit interesting. Behind the vainglorious Meteor V12 is a GM three-speed automatic that shifts through a heavy-duty Currie rear axle. A staggered wheel setup covers four-wheel disc brakes, which is good because the Beast managed 183 mph in a top-speed run in 1977. Just an observation: The five-lug wheels don’t inspire a lot of confidence for the power and speed, but I’m no expert.

But I can confidently spot a winner when I see one, and the Beast is one such winner. It was certifiably the most powerful car on the planet in 1977 and it can also be yours.

Source: Buy This 27-Liter Merlin V12-Powered, Street-Legal Fiberglass Legend From the ’70s

Experiments with paper airplanes reveal surprisingly complex aerodynamics

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Drop a flat piece of paper and it will flutter and tumble through the air as it falls, but a well-fashioned paper airplane will glide smoothly. Although these structures look simple, their aerodynamics are surprisingly complex. Researchers at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences conducted a series of experiments involving paper airplanes to explore this transition and develop a mathematical model to predict flight stability, according to a March paper published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

“The study started with simple curiosity about what makes a good paper airplane and specifically what is needed for smooth gliding,” said co-author Leif Ristroph. “Answering such basic questions ended up being far from child’s play. We discovered that the aerodynamics of how paper airplanes keep level flight is really very different from the stability of conventional airplanes.”

Nobody knows who invented the first paper airplane, but China began making paper on a large scale around 500 BCE, with the emergence of origami and paper-folding as a popular art form between 460 and 390 BCE. Paper airplanes have long been studied as a means of learning more about the aerodynamics of flight. For instance, Leonardo da Vinci famously built a model plane out of parchment while dreaming up flying machines and used paper models to test his design for an ornithopter. In the 19th century, British engineer and inventor Sir George Cayley—sometimes called the “father of aviation”—studied the gliding performance of paper airplanes to design a glider capable of carrying a human.

An amusing “scientist playing with paper planes” anecdote comes from physicist Theodore von Kármán. In his 1967 memoir The Wind and Beyond, he recalled a formal 1924 banquet in Delft, The Netherlands, where fellow physicist Ludwig Prandtl constructed a paper airplane out of a menu to demonstrate the mechanics of flight to von Kármán’s sister, who was seated next to him. When he threw the paper plane, “It landed on the shirtfront of the French minister of education, much to the embarrassment of my sister and others at the banquet,” von Kármán wrote.

Flight motions of paper airplanes with different center of mass locations.
Enlarge / Flight motions of paper airplanes with different center of mass locations.
NYU Applied Mathematics Laboratory

While scientists have clearly made great strides in aerodynamics—particularly about aircraft—Ristroph et al. noted that there was not a good mathematical model for predicting the simpler, subtler gliding flight of paper airplanes. It was already well-known that displacing the center of mass results in various flight trajectories, some more stable than others. “The key criterion of a successful glider is that the center of mass must be in the ‘just right’ place,” said Ristroph. “Good paper airplanes achieve this with the front edge folded over several times or by an added paper clip, which requires a little trial and error.”

He and his team verified this by test-flying various rectangular sheets of paper, changing the front weight by adding thin metallic tape to one edge. They found that an unweighted sheet tumbled end over end while descending left to right under the force of gravity. Adding a small weight to shift the center of mass slightly forward also produced a tumbling trajectory. Overall, they found that flyers with greater front-loading produced erratic trajectories full of swoops, climbs, flips, and dives.

The next step was to conduct more controlled and systematic experiments. Ristroph et al. decided to work with thin plastic plates “flying” through a large glass tank of water. The plates were laser-cut from an acrylic plastic sheet, along with two smaller “fins” embedded with lead weights to displace the center of mass, and they also serve as aerodynamic stabilizers. There were 17 plastic plates, each with a different center of mass. Each was released into the tank by sliding it down a short ramp, and the team recorded its free-flight motion through the water.

Trajectories of plates falling through water, where the different colors represent different degrees of front weighting. Only the "just right" weight distribution leads to the smooth gliding shown in blue.
Enlarge / Trajectories of plates falling through water, where the different colors represent different degrees of front weighting. Only the “just right” weight distribution leads to the smooth gliding shown in blue.
NYU Applied Mathematics Laboratory

They found the same dynamics played out. If the weight was centered, or nearly so, at the center of the wing, the plate would flutter and tumble erratically. Displace the center of mass too far toward one edge, and the plate would rapidly nosedive and crash. The proverbial “sweet spot” was placing the weight between those extremes. In that case, the aerodynamic force on the plane’s wing will push the wing back down if it moves upward, and push the wing back up if it moves downward. In other words, the center of pressure will vary with the angle of flight, thereby ensuring stability.

This differs substantially from conventional aircraft, which rely on airfoils—structures designed to generate lift. “The effect we found in paper airplanes does not happen for the traditional airfoils used as aircraft wings, whose center of pressure stays fixed in place across the angles that occur in flight,” said Ristroph. “The shifting of the center of pressure thus seems to be a unique property of thin, flat wings, and this ends up being the secret to the stable flight of paper airplanes. This is why airplanes need a separate tail wing as a stabilizer while a paper plane can get away with just a main wing that gives both lift and stability.”

The team also developed a mathematical model as a “flight simulator” to reproduce those motions. Ristroph et al. think their findings will prove useful in small-scale flight applications like drones or flying robots, which often require a more minimal design with no need for many extra flight surfaces, sensors, and controllers. The authors also note that the same strategy might be at work in winged plant seeds, some of which also exhibit stable gliding, with the seed serving as the payload to displace the center of mass. In fact, a 1987 study of the flying seeds of the gourd Alsomitra macrocarpa showed a center of mass and glide ratios consistent with the Ristroph group’s optimal gliding requirements.

DOI: Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2022. 10.1017/jfm.2022.89  (About DOIs).

Source: Experiments with paper airplanes reveal surprisingly complex aerodynamics | Ars Technica

Reaserchers propose Organoid intelligence (OI): the new frontier in biocomputing and intelligence-in-a-dish

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[…] Human brains are slower than machines at processing simple information, such as arithmetic, but they far surpass machines in processing complex information as brains deal better with few and/or uncertain data. Brains can perform both sequential and parallel processing (whereas computers can do only the former), and they outperform computers in decision-making on large, highly heterogeneous, and incomplete datasets and other challenging forms of processing

[…]

fundamental differences between biological and machine learning in the mechanisms of implementation and their goals result in two drastically different efficiencies. First, biological learning uses far less power to solve computational problems. For example, a larval zebrafish navigates the world to successfully hunt prey and avoid predators (4) using only 0.1 microwatts (5), while a human adult consumes 100 watts, of which brain consumption constitutes 20% (6, 7). In contrast, clusters used to master state-of-the-art machine learning models typically operate at around 106 watts.

[…]

biological learning uses fewer observations to learn how to solve problems. For example, humans learn a simple “same-versus-different” task using around 10 training samples (12); simpler organisms, such as honeybees, also need remarkably few samples (~102) (13). In contrast, in 2011, machines could not learn these distinctions even with 106 samples (14) and in 2018, 107 samples remained insufficient (15). Thus, in this sense, at least, humans operate at a >106 times better data efficiency than modern machines

[…]

The power and efficiency advantages of biological computing over machine learning are multiplicative. If it takes the same amount of time per sample in a human or machine, then the total energy spent to learn a new task requires 1010 times more energy for the machine.

[…]

We have coined the term “organoid intelligence” (OI) to describe an emerging field aiming to expand the definition of biocomputing toward brain-directed OI computing, i.e. to leverage the self-assembled machinery of 3D human brain cell cultures (brain organoids) to memorize and compute inputs.

[…]

In this article, we present an architecture (Figure 1) and blueprint for an OI development and implementation program designed to:

● Determine the biofeedback characteristics of existing human brain organoids caged in microelectrode shells, potentially using AI to analyze recorded response patterns to electrical and chemical (neurotransmitters and their corresponding receptor agonists and antagonists) stimuli.

● Empirically test, refine, and, where needed, develop neurocomputational theories that elucidate the basis of in vivo biological intelligence and allow us to interact with and harness an OI system.

● Further scale up the brain organoid model to increase the quantity of biological matter, the complexity of brain organoids, the number of electrodes, algorithms for real-time interactions with brain organoids, and the connected input sources and output devices; and to develop big-data warehousing and machine learning methods to accommodate the resulting brain-directed computing capacity.

● Explore how this program could improve our understanding of the pathophysiology of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders toward innovative approaches to treatment or prevention.

● Establish a community and a large-scale project to realize OI computing, taking full account of its ethical implications and developing a common ontology.

FIGURE 1
www.frontiersin.orgFigure 1 Architecture of an OI system for biological computing. At the core of OI is the 3D brain cell culture (organoid) that performs the computation. The learning potential of the organoid is optimized by culture conditions and enrichment by cells and genes critical for learning (including IEGs). The scalability, viability, and durability of the organoid are supported by integrated microfluidic systems. Various types of input can be provided to the organoid, including electrical and chemical signals, synthetic signals from machine sensors, and natural signals from connected sensory organoids (e.g. retinal). We anticipate high-resolution output measurement both by electrophysiological recordings obtained via specially designed 2D or 3D (shell) MEA, and potentially from implantable probes, and imaging of organoid structural and functional properties. These outputs can be used directly for computation purposes and as biofeedback to promote organoid learning. AI and machine learning are used throughout to encode and decode signals and to develop hybrid biocomputing solutions, in conjunction with a suitable big-data management system.

To the latter point, a community-forming workshop was held in February 2022 (51), which gave rise to the Baltimore Declaration Toward OI (52). It provides a statement of vision for an OI community that has led to the development of the program outlined here.

[…]

The past decade has seen a revolution in brain cell cultures, moving from traditional monolayer cultures to more organ-like, organized 3D cultures – i.e. brain organoids (Figure 2A). These can be generated either from embryonic stem cells or from the less ethically problematic iPSC typically derived from skin samples (54). The Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, among others, has produced such brain organoids with high levels of standardization and scalability (32) (Figure 2B). Having a diameter below 500 μm, and comprising fewer than 100,000 cells, each organoid is roughly one 3-millionth the size of the human brain (theoretically equating to 800 MB of memory storage). Other groups have reported brain organoids with average diameters of 3–5 mm and prolonged culture times exceeding 1 year (34–36, 55–59).

FIGURE 2
www.frontiersin.orgFigure 2 Advances in 3D cell culturing provide the foundation for systems to explore organoid intelligence. (A) 3D neural cell cultures have important advantages for biological learning, compared with conventional 2D monolayers – namely a far greater density of cells, enhanced synaptogenesis, high levels of myelination, and enrichment by cell types essential to learning. (B) Brain organoid differentiation over time from 4 to 15 weeks, showing neurons (microtubule associated protein 2 [MAP2]; pink), oligodendrocytes (oligodendrocyte transcription factor [OLIG2]; red), and astrocytes (glial fibrillary acidic protein [GFAP]; green). Nuclei are stained with Hoechst 33342 (blue). Images were taken with an LCM 880 confocal microscope with 20x and 63x magnification. Scale bars are 100 μm and 20 μm, respectively. The images show the presence of MAP2-positive neurons as early as 4 weeks, while glial cells emerge at 8 weeks and there is a continuous increase in the number of astrocytes over time.

These organoids show various attributes that should improve their potential for biocomputing (Figure 2).

[…]

axons in these organoids show extensive myelination. Pamies et al. were the first to develop a 3D human brain model showing significant myelination of axons (32). About 40% of axons in the brain organoids were myelinated (30, 31), which approaches the 50% found in the human brain (60, 61). Myelination has since been reproduced in other brain organoids (47, 62). Myelin reduces the capacitance of the axonal membrane and enables saltatory conduction from one node of Ranvier to the next. As myelination increases electrical conductivity approximately 100-fold, this promises to boost biological computing performance, though its functional impact in this model remains to be demonstrated.

Finally, these organoid cultures can be enriched with various cell types involved in biological learning, namely oligodendrocytes, microglia, and astrocytes. Glia cells are integrally important for the pruning of synapses in biological learning (63–65) but have not yet been reported at physiologically relevant levels in brain organoid models. Preliminary work in our organoid model has shown the potential for astroglia cell expansion to physiologically relevant levels (47). Furthermore, recent evidence that oligodendrocytes and astrocytes significantly contribute to learning plasticity and memory suggests that these processes should be studied from a neuron-to-glia perspective, rather than the neuron-to-neuron paradigm generally used (63–65). In addition, optimizing the cell culture conditions to allow the expression of immediate early genes (IEGs) is expected to further boost the learning and memory capacities of brain organoids since these are key to learning processes and are expressed only in neurons involved in memory formation

[…]

Source: Frontiers | Organoid intelligence (OI): the new frontier in biocomputing and intelligence-in-a-dish

ChatGPT allowed in International Baccalaureate essays

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Schoolchildren are allowed to quote from content created by ChatGPT in their essays, the International Baccalaureate has said.

The IB, which offers an alternative qualification to A-Levels and Highers, said students can use the chatbot but must be clear when they are quoting its responses.

[…]

Matt Glanville, the IB’s head of assessment principles and practice, said the chatbot should be embraced as “an extraordinary opportunity”.

However, Glanville told the Times, the responses must be treated as any other source in essays.

“The clear line between using ChatGPT and providing original work is exactly the same as using ideas taken from other people or the internet. As with any quote or material adapted from another source, it must be credited in the body of the text and appropriately referenced in the bibliography,” he said.

[…]

He added: “When AI can essentially write an essay at the touch of a button, we need our pupils to master different skills, such as understanding if the essay is any good or if it has missed context, has used biased data or if it is lacking in creativity. These will be far more important skills than writing an essay, so the assessment tasks we set will need to reflect this.”

[…]

Source: ChatGPT allowed in International Baccalaureate essays | ChatGPT | The Guardian

So many of these articles include fearmongering about ChatGPT, it’s good to see that the actual educators in charge are embracing the new technology and working with it – instead of ‘alarming teachers’ (which I doubt it really does)

Dow said it was recycling Singaporean shoes. Reuters found them in Indonesia

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At a rundown market on the Indonesian island of Batam, a small location tracker was beeping from the back of a crumbling second-hand shoe store. A Reuters reporter followed the high-pitched ping to a mound of old sneakers and began digging through the pile.

There they were: a pair of blue Nike running shoes with a tracking device hidden in one of the soles.

These familiar shoes had traveled by land, then sea and crossed an international border to end up in this heap. They weren’t supposed to be here.

Five months earlier, in July 2022, Reuters had given the shoes to a recycling program spearheaded by the Singapore government and U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc. In media releases and a promotional video posted online, that effort promised to harvest the rubberized soles and midsoles of donated shoes, then grind down the material for use in building new playgrounds and running tracks in Singapore.

[…]

None of the 11 pairs of footwear donated by Reuters were turned into exercise paths or kids’ parks in Singapore.

Instead, nearly all the tagged shoes ended up in the hands of Yok Impex Pte Ltd, a Singaporean second-hand goods exporter, according to the trackers and that exporter’s logistics manager. The manager said his firm had been hired by a waste management company involved in the recycling program to retrieve shoes from the donation bins for delivery to that company’s local warehouse.

But that’s not what happened to the shoes donated by Reuters. Ten pairs moved first from the donation bins to the exporter’s facility, then on to neighboring Indonesia, in some cases traveling hundreds of miles to different corners of the vast archipelago, the location trackers showed.

[…]

Source: Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them in Indonesia

But I guess they are being recycled after all then? So that’s good, right?

Does the Earth’s core have an innermost core?

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Geology textbooks almost inevitably include a cutaway diagram of the Earth showing four neatly delineated layers: a thin outer shell of rock that we live on known as the crust; the mantle, where rocks flow like an extremely viscous liquid, driving the movement of continents and the lifting of mountains; a liquid outer core of iron and nickel that generates the planet’s magnetic field; and a solid inner core. Analyzing the crisscrossing of seismic waves from large earthquakes, two Australian scientists say there is a distinctly different layer at the very center of the Earth. “We have now confirmed the existence of the innermost inner core,” said one of the scientists, Hrvoje Tkalcic, a professor of geophysics at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Dr. Tkalcic and Thanh-Son Pham, a postdoctoral researcher, estimate that the innermost inner core is about 800 miles wide; the entire inner core is about 1,500 miles wide. Their findings were published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. While the cutaway diagram appears to depict clear-cut divisions, knowledge about the deep interior of Earth is unavoidably fuzzy. It is nearly 4,000 miles to the center of Earth, and it is impossible to drill more than a few miles into the crust. Most of what is known about what lies beneath comes from seismic waves — the vibrations of earthquakes traveling through and around the planet. Think of them as a giant sonogram of Earth.

Two Harvard seismologists, Miaki Ishii and Adam Dziewonski, first proposed the idea of the innermost inner core in 2002 based on peculiarities in the speed of seismic waves passing through the inner core. Scientists already knew that the speed of seismic waves traveling through this part of the Earth varied depending on the direction. The waves traveled fastest when going from pole to pole along the Earth’s axis and slowest when traveling perpendicular to the axis. The difference in speeds — a few percent faster along polar paths — arises from the alignment of iron crystals in the inner core, geophysicists believe. But in a small region at the center, the slowest waves were those traveling at a 45-degree angle to the axis instead of 90 degrees, the Harvard seismologists said. The data available then were too sparse to convince everyone.

Source: What’s Inside the Earth’s Core? – Slashdot

Sneaky Clock Displays Wrong Time If It Catches You Looking at it

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We have a soft spot for devices that subvert purpose and expectation, and that definitely sums up [Guy Dupont]’s Clock That Is Wrong. It knows the correct time, but whether or not it displays the correct time is another story. That’s because nestled just above the 7-segment display is a person sensor module, and when it detects that a person is looking towards it, the clock will display an incorrect time, therefore self-defeating both the purpose and primary use case of a clock in one stroke.

[…]

You can watch a brief video of it in action in this Twitter thread.

One interesting bit is that [Guy] uses an ESP32-based board to drive everything, but had some reservations about making a clock without an RTC. However, he found that simply syncing time over the network every 10 minutes or so using the board’s built-in WiFi was perfectly serviceable, at least for a device like this.

This reminds us a little of other clocks with subtly subversive elements, like the Vetinari Clock which keeps overall accurate time despite irregularly drifting in and out of sync. Intrigued by such ideas? You’re not alone, because there are even DIY hobby options for non-standard clock movements.

[…]

Source: Sneaky Clock Displays Wrong Time If It Catches You Looking | Hackaday

Stanford Faculty Say Anonymous Student Bias Reports Threaten Free Speech – who’d have thought that anonymous tipping off leads to abuse?!

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“A group of Stanford University professors is pushing to end a system that allows students to anonymously report classmates for exhibiting discrimination or bias, saying it threatens free speech on campus (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source),” reports the Wall Street Journal. The Daily Beast reports: Last month, a screenshot of a student reading Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf was reported in the system, according to the Stanford Daily. Faculty members leading the charge to shut the system down say they didn’t know it even existed until they read the student newspaper, one comparing the system to “McCarthyism.”

Launched in 2021, students are encouraged to report incidents in which they felt harmed, which triggers a voluntary inquiry of both the student who filed the report and the alleged perpetrator. Seventy-seven faculty members have signed a petition calling on the school to investigate in hopes they toss the system out. This comes as a larger movement by Speech First, a group who claim colleges are rampant with censorship, has filed suit against several universities for their bias reporting systems.

Source: Stanford Faculty Say Anonymous Student Bias Reports Threaten Free Speech – Slashdot

Amazing that people at a place like Stanford didn’t get that this was going to be abused and used to scare the shit out of people – a bit like how these systems were scary in Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and China, North Korea, etc etc.

How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice

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On Wednesday, I phoned my bank’s automated service line. To start, the bank asked me to say in my own words why I was calling. Rather than speak out loud, I clicked a file on my nearby laptop to play a sound clip: “check my balance,” my voice said. But this wasn’t actually my voice. It was a synthetic clone I had made using readily available artificial intelligence technology.

“Okay,” the bank replied. It then asked me to enter or say my date of birth as the first piece of authentication. After typing that in, the bank said “please say, ‘my voice is my password.’”

Again, I played a sound file from my computer. “My voice is my password,” the voice said. The bank’s security system spent a few seconds authenticating the voice.

“Thank you,” the bank said. I was in.

I couldn’t believe it—it had worked. I had used an AI-powered replica of a voice to break into a bank account. After that, I had access to the account information, including balances and a list of recent transactions and transfers.

Banks across the U.S. and Europe use this sort of voice verification to let customers log into their account over the phone. Some banks tout voice identification as equivalent to a fingerprint, a secure and convenient way for users to interact with their bank. But this experiment shatters the idea that voice-based biometric security provides foolproof protection in a world where anyone can now generate synthetic voices for cheap or sometimes at no cost. I used a free voice creation service from ElevenLabs, an AI-voice company.

Now, abuse of AI-voices can extend to fraud and hacking. Some experts I spoke to after doing this experiment are now calling for banks to ditch voice authentication altogether, although real-world abuse at this time could be rare.

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Source: How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice