Agreguesi i feed

The U.S. Department of Commerce is ignoring Kaspersky's latest proposal to address cybersecurity concerns, despite the Russian firm's efforts to prove its products are free from Kremlin influence. Kaspersky's new framework includes localizing data processing in the U.S. and allowing third-party reviews. However, the Commerce Department hasn't responded to the security firm, which was recently banned by the U.S. Kaspersky told The Register it's pursuing legal options.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UN: The UN Secretary-General's Call to Action on Extreme Heat brings together the diverse expertise and perspectives of ten specialized UN entities (FAO, ILO, OCHA, UNDRR, UNEP, UNESCO, UN-Habitat, UNICEF, WHO, WMO) in a first-of-its-kind joint product, underscoring the multi-sectoral impacts of extreme heat. Earth is becoming hotter and more dangerous for everyone, everywhere. Billions of people around the world are wilting under increasingly severe heatwaves driven largely by a fossil-fuel charged, human-induced climate crisis. Extreme heat is tearing through economies, widening inequalities, undermining the Sustainable Development Goals, and killing people. The Call for Action calls for an urgent and concerted effort to enhance international cooperation to address extreme heat in four critical areas: Caring for the vulnerable - Protecting workers - Boosting resilience of economies and societies using data and science - Limiting temperature rise to 1.5C by phasing out fossil fuels and scaling up investment in renewable energy. From earlier today: Monday Was Hottest Recorded Day on Earth: 'Uncharted Territory'.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Minnesota has become the second state to pass what it's calling a "Jetsons law," establishing rules for cars that can take to the sky. New Hampshire was the first to enact a "Jetsons" law. From a report: The new road rules in Minnesota address "roadable aircraft," which is basically any aircraft that can take off and land at an airfield but is also designed to be operated on a public highway. The law will let owners of these vehicles register them as cars and trucks, but they won't have to obtain a license plate. The tail number will suffice instead. As for operation, flying cars won't be allowed to take off or land on public roadways, Minnesota officials declared (an exception is made in the case of emergency). Those shenanigans are restricted to airports. While the idea of a Jetsons-like sky full of flying cars is still firmly rooted in the world of science fiction, the concept of flying cars isn't quite as distant as it might seem (though it has some high-profile skeptics). United Airlines, two years ago, made a $10 million bet on the technology, putting down a deposit for 200 four-passenger flying taxis from Archer Aviation, a San Francisco-based startup working on the aircraft/auto hybrid.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S. appeals court has ruled that the Federal Communications Commission's Universal Service Fund, which collects fees on phone bills to support telecom network expansion and affordability programs, is unconstitutional, potentially upending the $8 billion-a-year system. The 5th Circuit Court's 9-7 decision, which creates a circuit split with previous rulings in the 6th and 11th circuits, found that the combination of Congress's delegation to the FCC and the FCC's subsequent delegation to a private entity violates the Constitution's Legislative Vesting Clause. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel criticized the ruling as "misguided and wrong," vowing to pursue all available avenues for review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is launching an online search tool in a direct challenge to Google, opening up a new front in the tech industry's race to commercialise advances in generative artificial intelligence. From a report: The experimental product, known as SearchGPT [non-paywalled], will initially only be available to a small group of users, with the San Francisco-based company opening a 10,000-person waiting list to test the service on Thursday. The product is visually distinct from ChatGPT as it goes beyond generating a single answer by offering a rail of links -- similar to a search engine -- that allows users to click through to external websites. [...] SearchGPT will "provide up-to-date information from the web while giving you clear links to relevant sources," according to OpenAI. The new search tool will be able to access sites even if they have opted out of training OpenAI's generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

North Korean hackers have conducted a global cyber espionage campaign to try to steal classified military secrets to support Pyongyang's banned nuclear weapons programme, the United States, Britain and South Korea said in a joint advisory on Thursday. From a report: The hackers, dubbed Anadriel or APT45 by cybersecurity researchers, have targeted or breached computer systems at a broad variety of defence or engineering firms, including manufacturers of tanks, submarines, naval vessels, fighter aircraft, and missile and radar systems, the advisory said. "The authoring agencies believe the group and the cyber techniques remain an ongoing threat to various industry sectors worldwide, including but not limited to entities in their respective countries, as well as in Japan and India," the advisory said. It was co-authored by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and cyber agencies, Britain's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS). "The global cyber espionage operation that we have exposed today shows the lengths that DPRK state-sponsored actors are willing to go to pursue their military and nuclear programmes," said Paul Chichester at the NCSC, a part of Britain's GCHQ spy agency. The FBI also issued an arrest warrant for one of the alleged North Korean hackers, and offered a reward of up to $10 million for information that would lead to his arrest. He was charged with hacking and money laundering, according to a poster uploaded to the FBI's Most Wanted website on Thursday.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Southwest Airlines announced Thursday that it will get rid of open seating in a sweeping change from its decades-long practice. Instead, it will begin assigning seats and offer premium seating with extra leg room. From a report: Southwest CEO Bob Jordan said, "Our implementation of assigned and premium seating is part of an ongoing and comprehensive upgrade to the Customer Experience, one that research shows Customers overwhelmingly prefer." The low-fare airline has had a tradition of open seating for more than 50 years. Customers taking longer flights preferred assigned seats, according to Southwest. Airlines can also charge more for assigned and premium seating, enabling them to boost profits.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google DeepMind has announced that its AI systems, AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2, have achieved silver medal performance at the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), solving four out of six problems and scoring 28 out of 42 possible points in a significant breakthrough for AI in mathematical reasoning. This marks the first time an AI system has reached such a high level of performance in this prestigious competition, which has long been considered a benchmark for advanced mathematical reasoning capabilities in machine learning. AlphaProof, a system that combines a pre-trained language model with reinforcement learning techniques, demonstrated its new capability by solving two algebra problems and one number theory problem, including the competition's most challenging question. Meanwhile, AlphaGeometry 2 successfully tackled a complex geometry problem, Google wrote in a blog post. The systems' solutions were formally verified and scored by prominent mathematicians, including Fields Medal winner Prof Sir Timothy Gowers and IMO Problem Selection Committee Chair Dr Joseph Myers, lending credibility to the achievement. The development of these AI systems represents a significant step forward in bridging the gap between natural language processing and formal mathematical reasoning, the company argued. By fine-tuning a version of Google's Gemini model to translate natural language problem statements into formal mathematical language, the researchers created a vast library of formalized problems, enabling AlphaProof to train on millions of mathematical challenges across various difficulty levels and topic areas. While the systems' performance is impressive, challenges remain, particularly in the field of combinatorics where both AI models were unable to solve the given problems. Researchers at Google DeepMind continue to investigate these limitations, the company said, aiming to further improve the systems' capabilities across all areas of mathematics.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Early termination fees are "a bit like heroin for Adobe," according to an Adobe executive quoted in the FTC's newly unredacted complaint against the company for allegedly hiding fees and making it too hard to cancel Creative Cloud. The Verge: "There is absolutely no way to kill off ETF or talk about it more obviously" in the order flow without "taking a big business hit," this executive said. That's the big reveal in the unredacted complaint, which also contains previously unseen allegations that Adobe was internally aware of studies showing its order and cancellation flows were too complicated and customers were unhappy with surprise early termination fees. In a short interview, Adobe's general counsel and chief trust officer, Dana Rao, pushed back on both the specific quote and the FTC's complaint more generally, telling me that he was "disappointed in the way they're continuing to take comments out of context from non-executive employees from years ago to make their case."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

samleecole writes: A leaked document obtained by 404 Media shows company-wide effort at generative AI company Runway, where employees collected thousands of YouTube videos and pirated content for training data for its Gen-3 Alpha model. The model -- initially codenamed Jupiter and released officially as Gen-3 -- drew widespread praise from the AI development community and technology outlets covering its launch when Runway released it in June. Last year, Runway raised $141 million from investors including Google and Nvidia, at a $1.5 billion valuation. The spreadsheet of training data viewed by 404 Media and our testing of the model indicates that part of its training data is popular content from the YouTube channels of thousands of media and entertainment companies, including The New Yorker, VICE News, Pixar, Disney, Netflix, Sony, and many others. It also includes links to channels and individual videos belonging to popular influencers and content creators, including Casey Neistat, Sam Kolder, Benjamin Hardman, Marques Brownlee, and numerous others.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

World temperature reached the hottest levels ever measured on Monday, beating the record that was set just one day before, data suggests. From a report: Provisional data published on Wednesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which holds data that stretches back to 1940, shows that the global surface air temperature reached 62.87F (17.15C), compared with 62.76F (17.09C) on Sunday. Earlier this month, Copernicus found that global temperatures between July 2023 and July 2024 were the highest on record. The previous record before this week was set a year ago on 6 July. Before that, the previous recorded hottest day was in 2016, according to the Associated Press.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A little-known spyware maker based in Minnesota has been hacked, TechCrunch reports, revealing thousands of devices around the world under its stealthy remote surveillance. From the report: A person with knowledge of the breach provided TechCrunch with a cache of files taken from the company's servers containing detailed device activity logs from the phones, tablets, and computers that Spytech monitors, with some of the files dated as recently as early June. TechCrunch verified the data as authentic in part by analyzing some of the exfiltrated device activity logs that pertain to the company's chief executive, who installed the spyware on one of his own devices. The data shows that Spytech's spyware -- Realtime-Spy and SpyAgent, among others -- has been used to compromise more than 10,000 devices since the earliest-dated leaked records from 2013, including Android devices, Chromebooks, Macs, and Windows PCs worldwide. Spytech is the latest spyware maker in recent years to have itself been compromised, and the fourth spyware maker known to have been hacked this year alone, according to TechCrunch's running tally.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A NASA committee determined that the Chandra X-ray Observatory would have to cease operations under the proposed budget cuts in NASA's 2025 budget. The committee reviewed various options but found that only shutting down Chandra fit within the proposed budget, although alternatives could keep the observatory running with limited capabilities. SpaceNews reports: NASA established the Operations Paradigm Change Review (OPCR) committee this spring to look at ways of reducing the costs of operating Chandra and the Hubble Space Telescope as part of broader efforts to deal with a billion-dollar shortfall in agency science funding. The fiscal year 2025 budget proposal included a 40% cut in Chandra's budget, with further reductions through 2029, while cutting Hubble's budget by 10% in 2025. Astronomers strongly opposed the proposed cuts, particularly for Chandra. They argued that the reductions would effectively shut down the telescope, a conclusion backed by Patrick Slane, director of the Chandra X-Ray Center, in an open letter shortly after the release of the budget proposal. The OPCR concurred. "The committee agreed that the continuation of a scientifically viable Chandra mission is not possible within the funding guidance," said Rob Kennicutt, an astronomer from the University of Arizona and Texas A&M University who served on the review committee, in a July 23 presentation at a meeting of the Astrophysics Advisory Committee, or APAC. "This is a serious threat to the observatory." Shutting down Chandra was one of four options presented to the OPCR by the Chandra team and the only one, he said, that fit within NASA's proposed budget profile. Three others would keep Chandra going with reduced capabilities and with budgets higher than what NASA proposed but below current levels. "We think it's possible to run Chandra for less money" than today, he said, "but more than what they were given."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:6.9.11 (stable) Released:2024-07-25 Source:linux-6.9.11.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.9.11.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.9.11

Version:6.6.42 (longterm) Released:2024-07-25 Source:linux-6.6.42.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.6.42.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.6.42

Version:6.1.101 (longterm) Released:2024-07-25 Source:linux-6.1.101.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.1.101.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.1.101

"Despite its domestic space program faltering even before sanctions due to its invasion of Ukraine, and at least one very public failure on a less ambitious project, Russia has announced it will begin construction of a Russian-only replacement for the ISS and place it in a more difficult-to-access polar orbit," writes longtime Slashdot reader Baron_Yam. "Russia is motivated by military and political demands to achieve this, but whether it has the means or not seems uncertain at best." Reuters reports: Russia is aiming to create the four-module core of its planned new orbital space station by 2030, its Roscosmos space agency said on Tuesday. The head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, signed off on the timetable with the directors of 19 enterprises involved in creating the new station. The agency confirmed plans to launch an initial scientific and energy module in 2027. It said three more modules would be added by 2030 and a further two between 2031 and 2033. [...] Apart from the design and manufacture of the modules, Roscomos said the schedule approved by Borisov includes flight-testing a new-generation crewed spacecraft and building rockets and ground-based infrastructure. The new station will enable Russia to "solve problems of scientific and technological development, national economy and national security that are not available on the Russian segment of the ISS due to technological limitations and the terms of international agreements," it said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A team of Australian scientists is genetically engineering a common fly species so that it can eat more of humanity's organic waste while producing ingredients for making everything from lubricants and biofuels to high-grade animal feeds. Black soldier flies are already being used commercially to consume organic waste, including food waste, but tweaking their genetics could widen the range of waste their larvae consume while, in the process, producing fatty compounds and enzymes. In a scientific paper, the team based at Sydney's Macquarie University outlined their hopes for the flies and how they could also cut the amount of planet-warming methane produced when organic waste breaks down. "We are heading towards a climate disaster, and landfill waste releases methane. We need to get that to zero," Dr Kate Tepper, a lead author of the paper, said. Dr Maciej Maselko runs an animal synthetic biology lab at Macquarie University where Tepper has already started engineering the flies. Maselko said insects would be the "next frontier" in dealing with the planet's waste management problem, which weighs in at about 1 billion tons a year in food waste alone. Black soldier flies are found in all continents except Antarctica. "If you've got a compost bin, then you've probably got some," Maselko said. The fly larvae can eat double their body weight a day and, like other insects, their larvae are used for animal feed. Maselko said the flies could already do the job of consuming waste faster than microbes. The university team has created a spin-off company, EntoZyme, to commercialize their work and hopes to have the first genetically engineered flies for use in waste facilities by the end of the year. [...] Creating a suite of genetically engineered flies would see them also produce enzymes used in animal feeds, textiles and pharmaceuticals, and fatty compounds that can be used to make biofuels and lubricants. Another proposed use is for some flies to be able to consume contaminated waste, which would then leave behind their poo that could be used as fertilizer. Tepper said flies can be engineered to deal with pollutants in several ways, including by breaking pollutants down into less toxic or inorganic compounds, evaporating them into the air or accumulating some pollutants into their bodies that can then be separated, leaving clean organic waste behind. The research has been published in the journal Communications Biology.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:next-20240725 (linux-next) Released:2024-07-25

The Debian Project mourns the sudden passing of our fellow developer and friend, Peter De Schrijver.