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Submission + - Secret Service Raids Malicious SIM Server Setup (apnews.com)

Submitted by Gilmoure
Gilmoure writes: The US Secret Service is in the process of taking down a massive network of SIM Server systems, designed to function "like banks of mock cellphones, able to generate mass calls and texts, overwhelm local networks and mask encrypted communications criminals. When agents entered the sites, they found rows of servers and shelves stacked with SIM cards. More than 100,000 were already active, investigators said, but there were also large numbers waiting to be deployed, evidence that operators were preparing to double or even triple the network’s capacity, McCool said. He described it as a well-funded, highly organized enterprise, one that cost millions of dollars in hardware and SIM cards alone."

Submission + - In love with a Luigi Mangione chatbot (thespectator.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In this short clip, an unnamed woman proudly declares both her infatuation with – and ability to create an artificial construction of – Luigi Mangione outside of a Manhattan courthouse, where he has recently been absolved of various terrorism-related charges. Wearing an “I Italian Boys” T-shirt with an illustration of his face, the woman lists the many reasons why an AI chatbot, presumably trained on Luigi Mangione-related trivia, offers her the perfect romantic companionship. She gets to talk to him every day, she says, as a best friend and partner with whom she can plan a future and name their children. And, the woman adds, although she is aware that this might make her something of an imposter, the fact that Luigi studied AI at Stanford meant that this was an all-round reasonable thing to do.

It’s easy to write off this case as simply a harmless, albeit quite eccentric, example of the many ways in which young people are using AI today. But to do so would be to miss something much more provocative about how society has changed in the past decade. It’s the future of romance, she added in her clip. But it’s not. It’s the future of everything.

Something she notes in her monologue is that her Mangione AI-bot “fights her battles for her.” This seemingly innocuous statement is particularly interesting if you remember that a low locus of control – the term psychologists refer to when discussing whether people feel in control of their own lives or not – correlates quite strongly with support for political violence today.

I’m pretty sure that The Matrix and Her were intended to be viewed as warnings, not how-to guides for life in the 21st century.

Submission + - When facial recognition goes wrong (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'A man who is bringing a High Court challenge against the Metropolitan Police after live facial recognition technology wrongly identified him as a suspect has described it as "stop and search on steroids".

'Shaun Thompson, 39, was stopped by police in February last year outside London Bridge Tube station.

'Privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch said the judicial review, due to be heard in January, was the first legal case of its kind against the "intrusive technology".

'The Met, which announced last week that it would double its live facial recognition technology (LFR) deployments, said it was removing hundreds of dangerous offenders and remained confident its use is lawful.

'LFR maps a person's unique facial features, and matches them against faces on watch-lists.'

I suspect a payout of £10,000 for each false match that is acted on would probably encourage more careful use, perhaps with a second payout of £100,000 if the same person is victimised again.

Submission + - The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "The job of the future might already be past its prime," writes The Atlantic's Rose Horowitch in The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting. "For years, young people seeking a lucrative career were urged to go all in on computer science. From 2005 to 2023, the number of comp-sci majors in the United States quadrupled. All of which makes the latest batch of numbers so startling. This year, enrollment grew by only 0.2 percent nationally, and at many programs, it appears to already be in decline, according to interviews with professors and department chairs. At Stanford, widely considered one of the country’s top programs, the number of comp-sci majors has stalled after years of blistering growth. Szymon Rusinkiewicz, the chair of Princeton’s computer-science department, told me that, if current trends hold, the cohort of graduating comp-sci majors at Princeton is set to be 25 percent smaller in two years than it is today. The number of Duke students enrolled in introductory computer-science courses has dropped about 20 percent over the past year."

"But if the decline is surprising, the reason for it is fairly straightforward: Young people are responding to a grim job outlook for entry-level coders. In recent years, the tech industry has been roiled by layoffs and hiring freezes. The leading culprit for the slowdown is technology itself. Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words. This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it. A recent Pew study found that Americans think software engineers will be most affected by generative AI. Many young people aren’t waiting to find out whether that’s true."

Meanwhile, writing in the Communications of the ACM, Orit Hazzan and Avi Salmon ask: Should Universities Raise or Lower Admission Requirements for CS Programs in the Age of GenAI? "This debate raises a key dilemma: should universities raise admission standards for computer science programs to ensure that only highly skilled problem-solvers enter the field, lower them to fill the gaps left by those who now see computer science as obsolete due to GenAI, or restructure them to attract excellent candidates with diverse skill sets who may not have considered computer science prior to the rise of GenAI, but who now, with the intensive GenAI and vibe coding tools supporting programming tasks, may consider entering the field?"

Submission + - Bluesky suspends JD Vance for mentioning SCOTUS case (nypost.com)

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

"To that end, I found Justice [Clarence] Thomas's concurrence on medical care for transgender youth quite illuminating," Vance wrote, including a screenshot of the conservative justice’s statement agreeing with the 6-3 ruling.

Posting this got JD banned from Bluesky.

Submission + - Solid Rock Caught Flowing 1,700 Miles Beneath Surface in Experimental First (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: They found something else, too: that the solid rock above the D" layer can flow in a convection pattern. This type of movement, which varies across different parts of Earth's layers, determines the alignment of post-perovskite crystals.

It's driven by a combination of cooler material, which is sinking, and hotter material, which is rising. It's the first experimental evidence we have of such movement in this region of Earth's insides – though of course direct observations are impossible.

Submission + - Warship blocks New Zealand wireless internet and radio services

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: HMAS Canberra accidentally blocks wireless internet and radio services in New Zealand

“The Department of Defence has acknowledged that HMAS Canberra, the Royal Australian Navy's largest warship, accidentally took out a number of wireless internet and radio services across New Zealand earlier this week during a visit intended to celebrate the sister city relationship between Canberra and Wellington.”

“According to local internet service providers (ISPs), HMAS Canberra's navigation radar began interfering with 5GHz wireless access points — devices that bridge wired and wireless networks -

Submission + - Google Chrome smashes Speedometer 3 record with massive performance gains (betanews.com)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Google is flexing its engineering muscles today by announcing a record-breaking score on the Speedometer 3 benchmark with its Chrome browser. If youâ(TM)ve felt like the web got snappier lately, this could be why.

According to the search giant, Chromeâ(TM)s latest performance improvements translate to real-world time savings. Believe it or not, that could potentially add up to 58 million hours saved annually for users. Thatâ(TM)s the equivalent of about 83 human lifetimes not wasted waiting for web pages to load!
Apple

Tim Sweeney Didn't Expect a Five-Year Fortnite Ban (theverge.com) 32

Posted by msmash from the game-theory dept.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney anticipated his company's battle with Apple would create "fireworks," but he never expected Fortnite to disappear from the iOS App Store for nearly five years. When Epic deliberately violated App Store rules in 2020 by inserting its own payment system into Fortnite, Sweeney thought the resulting legal clash would be brief. "I had actually hoped that we would get an injunction against Apple blocking Fortnite and that we'd only be off for a few weeks," Sweeney told The Verge. "But the court process dragged out, and we were off for five years."

Fortnite returned to iOS last month and has quickly reclaimed its position as the top free game in the App Store, accumulating roughly 10 million downloads since May 20th. The game now offers players a choice between Epic's payment system, which provides 20% back in Epic Rewards, and Apple's traditional in-app purchase system. About 60% of users have chosen Apple's system while 40% have opted for Epic's alternative, according to Sweeney. He expects that ratio to shift toward Epic's system as more players associate payment methods with their Epic accounts.

Submission + - Vendors Vote to Radically Slash Website Certificate Duration (computerworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: In a move that will further overburden IT staff, members of the CA/Browser Forum voted to cut the lifespan of the web certificates to just 47 days by 2029. The changes, which have been debated over a year, were expected and will be phased in gradually. But Jon Nelson, a principal advisory director at Info-Tech Research Group, questioned the motives of the group: "They are doing this under the auspices of reducing risk, but I question if that is the real reason. Do the people making up this group have a conflict of interest in that this move could generate additional revenue for their companies?”

Submission + - A Stellar-Mass Black Hole (arxiv.org)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: Given the recent work on galaxy-centre Super-Massive Black Holes (SMBHs), you may be surprised to learn that the only Stellar-Mass Black Holes (SMBHs ... uh, "BHs") identified to-date have been by their gravitational waves, as they merge with another BH or a neutron star. But the long-running OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) project (1992 — present) has recently confirmed that it has detected an isolated BH not orbiting another bright object, or "swallowing" much of anything.

As the name suggests, black holes are black, which makes them difficult to see against a black sky. So ... you search for them against a non-black sky, using their effects on the light of "background" stars. As Einstein's general relativity requires (and Newton's physics allows), light passing near a concentrated mass is focussed, and if we happen to be near the focus of that "gravitational lens", we will see that brightening. If this "lens" object moves across the line of sight between us and the background star, then the apparent position of the source star on the sky will change compared to the position of the surrounding stars that are less affected by the lensing event. (See Eddington's 1919 solar eclipse experiment.) OGLE has been looking for such events for 33 years now, and has found (so far) 17 planets. And now, a black hole.

Most of the signal detected by OGLE is in the brightness variation of a surveyed star, but when a candidate is detected follow-up observations with higher-resolution telescopes can determine the change in position as the transit proceeds. In this case, 16 other telescopes performed sensitive astrometry (position measurement) over 11 years including the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). These multiple measurements plot an ellipse on the sky, mirroring the movement of the Earth around it's orbit — parallax. Which means this is a relatively close object (1520 parsecs / ~5000 light years).

The early brightness variations in the star are dominated by the mass of the lensing object. This star was seen in 2011 to brighten by a factor of nearly 400-fold compared to it's baseline, which revealed the lensing object to be so massive (between 4 and 8 times the Sun's mass) that it could not be anything other than a black hole. The continuing observation campaign has revised that to 7.15 +/-0.83 Solar masses — comfortably in the black-holes-only mass range (not even exotic "pentaquark" or "strange" neutron stars could get so massive without collapsing). And there is no sign of a third light emitting body nearby, which means this is an isolated black hole, not orbiting any other body (or, indeed, with any other [small] star orbiting it).

The question is raised, almost every time that a black hole is discussed — could one be "near the Earth", about to "swallow the Sun", etc? Well, one has now been detected. It's relatively close-by (one fifth the distance to the galactic centre), and it's got no stellar signpost making it easier to spot. And it was indeed difficult to spot. Exactly as expected. We can be reasonably sure that it's not going to "swallow the sun" any time soon.

The speed of changes in the starlight focussing, with the range, allows it's movement to be measured : it's moving at about 51 km/s across our line of sight. Which is rather high for a Galactic-disc object, which at this distance (from us) should be about 45km/s relative to us (remember Kepler and Newton? : things orbiting closer to the centre-of-mass travel faster). Which suggests that the supernova (probably) that produced this black hole also had an asymmetric explosion which gave the black hole — all 7~8 solar masses of it — a "kick" of about 6 km/s. That is a really big kick as a side effect of a really big bang.

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