| 'De-Extinction' Company Will Try To Bring Back the Dodo Feb 1st 2023, 03:30, by BeauHD An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences said Tuesday that it will try to resurrect the extinct dodo bird, and it's received $150 million in new funding to support its "de-extinction" activities. The dodo was already part of Colossal's plans by September 2022, but now the company has announced it with all the pomp, circumstance, and seed funding that suggests it will actually go after that goal. The $150 million, the company's second round of funding, was led by several venture capital firms, including United States Innovative Technology Fund and In-Q-Tel, a VC firm funded by the CIA that first put money into the company in September. Adding the dodo to its official docket brings Colossal's total de-extinction targets to three: the woolly mammoth (the company's first target species, announced in September 2021), and the thylacine, a.k.a. the Tasmanian tiger, the largest carnivorous marsupial. Adding the dodo to its official docket brings Colossal's total de-extinction targets to three: the woolly mammoth (the company's first target species, announced in September 2021), and the thylacine, a.k.a. the Tasmanian tiger, the largest carnivorous marsupial. Colossal's stated goal is not to simply bring these creatures back for vibes; its contention is that reintroducing the species to their respective habitats would help restore a certain amount of normalcy to those environments. Mammoths died out about 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island, off the northeastern coast of Russia. The dodo, a species of flightless bird native to the island of Mauritius, was gone by 1681. The last known thylacine died at a zoo in Tasmania in 1936. Scientists have sequenced the genomes of all three species -- the mammoth's in 2015, the dodo's in 2016, and the thylacine's in 2018. The latter species were driven to extinction by humankind; humans hunted the dodo, introduced predators and pests to its environment, and contributed to its habitat loss. Humans may have played a role in mammoth extinction as well, but the dodo and the thylacine are classic examples of our ability to wipe out species at extraordinary speed. [...] If the company's work pans out -- and that's a big if -- proxy species of those extinct animals will be brought to bear. That's because the genetically engineered animals produced by Colossal would not be a bonafide mammoth, dodo, or thylacine. In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission published a report (PDF) denoting ground rules for creating proxy species. "Proxy is used here to mean a substitute that would represent in some sense (e.g. phenotypically, behaviorally, ecologically) another entity -- the extinct form," the commission stated, adding that "Proxy is preferred to facsimile, which implies creation of an exact copy." De-extinction is something of a misnomer, as this process, if successful, will yield science's best analogue for an extinct creature, not the creature itself as it existed in the past. De-extinction methods generally rely on using a living creature's genetics in the resurrection process. That means any 21st-century mammoth will have at least some modern elephant DNA imbued in it, and any nascent thylacine would be produced from the genome and egg of a related species.   Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Microsoft Upgrades Defender To Lock Down Linux Devices For Their Own Good Feb 1st 2023, 02:02, by BeauHD Organizations using Microsoft's Defender for Endpoint will now be able to isolate Linux devices from their networks to stop miscreants from remotely connecting to them. The Register reports: The device isolation capability is in public preview and mirrors what the product already does for Windows systems. "Some attack scenarios may require you to isolate a device from the network," Microsoft wrote in a blog post. "This action can help prevent the attacker from controlling the compromised device and performing further activities such as data exfiltration and lateral movement. Just like in Windows devices, this device isolation feature." Intruders won't be able to connect to the device or run operations like assuming unauthorized control of the system or stealing sensitive data, Microsoft claims. According to the vendor, when the device is isolated, it is limited in the processes and web destinations that are allowed. That means if they're behind a full VPN tunnel, they won't be able to reach Microsoft's Defender for Endpoint cloud services. Microsoft recommends that enterprises use a split-tunneling VPN for cloud-based traffic for both Defender for Endpoint and Defender Antivirus. Once the situation that caused the isolation is cleared up, organizations will be able to reconnect the device to the network. Isolating the system is done via APIs. Users can get to the device page of the Linux systems through the Microsoft 365 Defender portal, where they will see an "Isolate Device" tab in the upper right among other response actions. Microsoft has outlined the APIs for both isolating the device and releasing it from lock down. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Sony Halves Reported Sales Expectations For Coming PSVR2 Headset Feb 1st 2023, 01:25, by BeauHD Sony is drastically scaling back its sales expectations for next month's launch of the PlayStation VR2 headset, according to a Bloomberg report citing "people familiar with [Sony's] deliberations." Ars Technica reports: The PlayStation 5 maker now expects to sell just 1 million PSVR2 units by the end of March, down from sales expectations of 2 million units in that period, as reported last October. Sony expects to sell about 1.5 million more headsets in the following fiscal year, which ends in March 2024, according to the report. The scaled-back sales expectations would put the PSVR2 slightly ahead of the pace set by the original PSVR headset, which sold just under a million units in its first four months and 2 million units in just over a year. But that kind of sales pace looks less impressive today, when a headset like the Meta Quest 2 can sell a reported 2.8 million units in its first quarter, on its way to total sales of over 15 million, according to market analysis firm IDC. The Quest 2 has a few key advantages in the competition with Sony's upcoming headset, including an asking price that's $150 less, even after a recent price hike. The self-contained Quest 2 also doesn't need to be tethered to any external hardware, contrasting with the PSVR2's reliance on a hookup to a $499 PlayStation 5. Despite the Quest 2's success at its relatively low price, though, the VR industry at large seems to be moving toward the higher end of the pricing spectrum these days. Meta's Quest Pro launched last October at a bafflingly high $1,499, though a one-week sale has slashed that price by $400 for the moment. And next month's standalone Vive XR Elite will cost $1,099. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | PayPal, HubSpot Announce Layoffs Feb 1st 2023, 00:45, by BeauHD PayPal unveiled plans Tuesday to cut 2,000 employees, becoming the latest U.S. company to reduce its headcount, just hours after software company HubSpot announced it would lay off 500 positions in an effort to reduce costs as the company struggles from a "perfect storm" of inflation, tight customer budgets and "volatile foreign exchange." Forbes reports: In a statement on Tuesday, online payment company PayPal announced it would cut 7% of its global workforce (2,000 full-time positions) amid a "competitive landscape" and a "challenging macro-economic environment," CEO Dan Schulman said. HubSpot, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based software company, said it would cut 7% of its workforce by the end of the first quarter of 2023 in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, as part of a restructuring plan, with CEO Yamini Rangan telling staff it follows a "downward trend" after the company "bloomed" in the Covid-19 pandemic, with HubSpot facing a "faster deceleration than we expected." Yesterday, Philips said it would cut 3,000 jobs worldwide in 2023 and 6,000 total by 2025 after announcing $1.7 billion in losses for 2022. Spotify, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and a slew of other tech companies announced layoffs in recent days/weeks as well. Further reading: PagerDuty CEO Quotes MLK Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | OpenAI Releases Tool To Detect Machine-Written Text Feb 1st 2023, 00:02, by BeauHD An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: ChatGPT creator OpenAI today released a free web-based tool designed to help educators and others figure out if a particular chunk of text was written by a human or a machine. OpenAI cautions the tool is imperfect and performance varies based on how similar the text being analyzed is to the types of writing OpenAI's tool was trained on. "It has both false positives and false negatives," OpenAI head of alignment Jan Leike told Axios, cautioning the new tool should not be relied on alone to determine authorship of a document. Users copy a chunk of text into a box and the system will rate how likely the text is to have been generated by an AI system. It offers a five-point scale of results: Very unlikely to have been AI-generated, unlikely, unclear, possible or likely. It works best on text samples greater than 1,000 words and in English, with performance significantly worse in other languages. And it doesn't work to distinguish computer code written by humans vs. AI. That said, OpenAI says the new tool is significantly better than a previous one it had released. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Celsius Used New Customer Funds To Pay For Withdrawals Jan 31st 2023, 23:20, by BeauHD Celsius Network misled its investors -- and on occasion used new customer funds to pay for other customers' withdrawals, the usual definition of a Ponzi scheme, an independent examiner (PDF) for the U.S. bankruptcy court in New York said in a Tuesday filing. CoinDesk reports: In September, Shoba Pillay was asked by the court to offer an outside view of goings-on at the crypto lender, has now published an account of the firm's operations in the runup to bankruptcy being declared in July. "In every key respect -- from how Celsius described its contract with its customers to the risks it took with their crypto assets -- how Celsius ran its business differed significantly from what Celsius told its customers," Pillay wrote, after interviewing staffers, including former Chief Executive Officer Alex Mashinsky, as well as customers of and vendors to the company. [...] Despite repeatedly saying he was not selling CEL, and despite employees internally saying the token's true value was zero, Mashinsky sold 25 million tokens to the value of at least $68.7 million between 2018 and bankruptcy, Pillay said. Co-founders Nuke Goldstein and S. Daniel Leon are cited as making CEL sales valued at $2.8 million and $9.74 million respectively. Pillay said Mashinsky's claims to the media and on social media to "always have 200% collateral" were "far off the mark," with 14% of Celsius' institutional loans wholly unsecured in December 2020. That figure rose to nearly 36% by mid-2021 -- and even then some of the collateral was in unstable assets such as FTX's FTT token, Pillay said. "What Celsius and Mr. Mashinsky never did was correct the record after the fact for the thousands of live audience members who heard these misstatements or for those who watched the recorded videos on YouTube before they were edited," Pillay said. Pillay also uncovered "significant tax compliance deficiencies" in the company, saying that its mining arm may owe over $23.1 million in use taxes, and has reserved $3.7 million in liability in U.K. value-added tax. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | A Welsh Brand of McDonald's Plays Classical Music, Rations Wi-Fi To Deter Anti-Social Behavior Jan 31st 2023, 22:40, by BeauHD A Welsh branch of McDonald's has started playing classical music and rationing wi-fi in a bid to deter anti-social behavior. The BBC reports: The fast-food restaurant has taken action after incidents at its Wrexham branch and elsewhere in the city which led to police issuing dispersal orders. North Wales Police said a group of 20 to 30 youngsters had caused "upset" but progress had been made recently. McDonald's said it was committed to being a good neighbor in the area. [...] McDonald's said: "We are aware of anti-social behavior affecting the wider area, and have introduced a number of measures in our Wrexham restaurant to support the police in tackling this issue. These include playing classical music from 17:00 GMT and turning off the wi-fi at certain points in the evening." Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | 'Nothing, Forever' Is an Endless 'Seinfeld' Episode Generated By AI Jan 31st 2023, 22:00, by BeauHD An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Four pixelated cartoon characters talk to each other about coffee, Amazon deliveries, and veganism as they stand apart in a decorated NYC apartment. There is one woman and three men who seem to be the animated versions of Seinfeld's main characters, Elaine, Jerry, George, and Kramer. But unlike Seinfeld, these characters are set in a modern-era NYC, and their voices and bodies look and sound robotic. That's because "Nothing, Forever" is a live-streaming show that's almost entirely generated by algorithms. It's been streaming non-stop on Twitch since December 14. [...] Skyler Hartle, the co-creator of "Nothing, Forever," told Motherboard that the show was created as a parody to Seinfeld. "The actual impetus for this was it originally started its life as this weird, very, off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project," Hartle said. "But then we kind of worked over the years to bring it to this new place. And then, of course, generative media and generative AI just kind of took off in a crazy way over the past couple of years." Hartle and his co-creator, Brian Habersberger, used a combination of machine learning, generative algorithms, and cloud services to build the show. Hartle told Motherboard that the dialogue is powered by OpenAI's GPT-3 language model and that there is very little human moderation of the stream, outside of GPT-3's built-in moderation filters. "Aside from the artwork and the laugh track you'll hear, everything else is generative, including: dialogue, speech, direction (camera cuts, character focus, shot length, scene length, etc), character movement, and music," one of the creators wrote in a Reddit comment. [...] Hartle also said that unlike most television shows, "Nothing, Forever" is able to change based on people's feedback that is received through the Twitch stream chat. "The show can effectively change and the narrative actually evolves based on the audience. One of the major factors that we're thinking about is how do we get people involved in crafting the narrative so it becomes their own," he said. "As generative media gets better, we have this notion that at any point, you're gonna be able to turn on the future equivalent of Netflix and watch a show perpetually, nonstop as much as you want. You don't just have seven seasons of a show, you have seven hundred, or infinite seasons of a show that has fresh content whenever you want it. And so that became one of our grounding pillars," Hartle said. "Our grounding principle was, can we create a show that can generate entertaining content forever? Because that's truly where we see the future emerging towards. Our goal with the next iterations or next shows that we release is to actually trade a show that is like Netflix-level quality." Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Google Fi Says Hackers Accessed Customers' Information Jan 31st 2023, 21:22, by msmash Google's cell network provider Google Fi has confirmed a data breach, likely related to the recent security incident at T-Mobile, which allowed hackers to steal millions of customers' information. From a report: In an email sent to customers on Monday, obtained by TechCrunch, Google said that the primary network provider for Google Fi recently informed the company that there had been suspicious activity relating to a third party support system containing a "limited amount" of Google Fi customer data. The timing of the notice -- and the fact that Google Fi uses a combination of T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular for network connectivity -- suggests the breach is linked to the most recent T-Mobile hack. This breach, disclosed on January 19, allowed intruders access to a trove of personal data belonging to 37 million customers, including billing addresses, dates of birth and T-Mobile account details. The incident marked the eighth time T-Mobile has been hacked since 2018. In the case of the Google Fi's breach, Google says the hackers accessed limited customer information, including phone numbers, account status, SIM card serial numbers, and information related to details about customers' mobile service plan, such as whether they have selected unlimited SMS or international roaming. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Mobile Phone, PC Shipments To Fall Again in 2023, Gartner Says Jan 31st 2023, 20:41, by msmash Shipments of personal computers and mobile phones are expected to fall for the second straight year in 2023, with phone shipments slumping to a decade low, IT research firm Gartner said on Tuesday. From a report: Mobile phone shipments are projected to fall 4% to 1.34 billion units in 2023, down from 1.40 billion units in 2022, Gartner said. They totaled 1.43 billion in 2021. That was close to the 2009 shipments level when Blackberry and Nokia phones were the market leaders as Apple tried to dent their dominance. The mobile phone market peaked in 2015 when shipments touched 1.9 billion units. The pandemic led to a fundamental change where people working from home didn't feel the need to change phones frequently, Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, said in an interview. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | EPA Blocks Long-Disputed Mine Project in Alaska Jan 31st 2023, 20:00, by msmash The Biden administration on Tuesday moved to protect one of the world's most valuable wild salmon fisheries, at Bristol Bay in Alaska, by effectively blocking the development of a gold and copper mine there. From a report: The Environmental Protection Agency issued a final determination under the Clean Water Act that bans the disposal of mine waste in part of the bay's watershed, about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage. Streams in the watershed are crucial breeding grounds for salmon, but the area also contains deposits of precious-metal ores thought to be worth several hundred billion dollars. A two-decades old proposal to mine those ores, called the Pebble project, has been supported by some Alaskan lawmakers and Native groups for the economic benefits it would bring, but opposed by others, including tribes around the bay and environmentalists who say it would do irreparable harm to the salmon population. Alannah Hurley, executive director of United Tribes of Bristol Bay, which has long opposed the mine, said the decision "was a real moment of justice for us." She said the tribes had long been told that "we just need to fall in line" and that the mine was inevitable. "Thank goodness our tribal leaders did not accept that," Ms. Hurley said. "We'll be celebrating this decision for decades to come." Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Huge Capacity HDDs Shine In Latest Storage Reliability Report But There's A Caveat Jan 31st 2023, 19:20, by msmash Hot Hardware reports: When it comes to mechanical hard disk drive (HDDs), you'd be very hard pressed to find any data on failure rates reported by any of the major players, such as Western Digital, Seagate, and the rest. Fortunately for us stat nerds and anyone else who is curious, the folks at cloud backup firm Backblaze frequently issue reliability reports that give insight into the how often various models and capacities give up the ghost. At a glance, Backblaze's latest report highlights that bigger capacity drives -- 12TB, 14TB, and 16TB -- fail less often than smaller capacity models. A closer examination, however, reveals that it's not so cut and dry. [...] In a nutshell, Backblaze noted an overall rise in the annual failure rates (AFRs) for 2022. The cumulative AFR of all drives deployed rose to 1.37 percent, up from 1.01 percent in 2021. By the end of 2022, Backblaze had 236,608 HDDs in service, including 231,309 data drives and 4,299 boot drives. Its latest report focuses on the data drives. [...] Bigger drives are more reliable than smaller drives, case close, right? Not so fast. There's an important caveat to this data -- while the smaller drives failed more often last year, they are also older, as can be seen in the graph above. "The aging of our fleet of hard drives does appear to be the most logical reason for the increased AFR in 2022. We could dig in further, but that is probably moot at this point. You see, we spent 2022 building out our presence in two new data centers, the Nautilus facility in Stockton, California and the CoreSite facility in Reston, Virginia. In 2023, our focus is expected to be on replacing our older drives with 16TB and larger hard drives," Backblaze says. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Biden To End US COVID-19 Emergency Declarations on May 11 Jan 31st 2023, 18:40, by msmash President Joe Biden plans to end two national emergency declarations over the COVID-19 pandemic on May 11, which will trigger a restructuring of the federal response to the deadly coronavirus and will end most federal support for COVID-19 vaccinations, testing, and hospital care. From a report: The plan was revealed in a statement to Congress opposing House Republicans' efforts to end the emergency declarations immediately. "An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system -- for states, for hospitals and doctors' offices, and, most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans," the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Statement of Administration Policy. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | India Says Its Path To Net Zero Must Pass Through Fossil Fuels Jan 31st 2023, 18:00, by msmash India defended its use of fossil fuels citing energy security priorities, even as the country vowed to remain committed to decarbonization. Bloomberg News: The country, one of the world's largest producers of coal, has often countered demands to curb use of the dirtiest fossil fuel, arguing it is key to its energy security and economic development. The war in Ukraine saw energy rise to the fore of the agenda for developed nations, many of which revived use of coal after supplies of Russian oil and natural gas shrank. "The behaviour of European nations in 2022, eminently understandable, demonstrates the return of energy security as a prime requirement for countries," according to India's Economic Survey, tabled in parliament Tuesday. "Therefore, it stands to reason that it would be no different for developing economies too." Developing economies are being asked to shoulder the burden of a global transition to green fuels, despite their lower contribution to accumulated emissions compared with developed nations that prospered on the back of "unrestricted use of fossil fuels," the Economic Survey said. The document, presented a day before the annual budget, is an account of the government's performance and ambitions for various sectors of the economy. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | W3C Re-launched as a Public-Interest Non-Profit Organization Jan 31st 2023, 17:20, by msmash The World Wide Web Consortium: The World Wide Web Consortium began the year 2023 by forming a new public-interest non-profit organization. The new entity preserves our member-driven approach, existing worldwide outreach and cooperation while allowing for additional partners around the world beyond Europe and Asia. The new organization also preserves the core process and mission of the Consortium to shepherd the web, by developing open web standards as a single global organization with contributions from W3C Members, staff, and the international community. Our Director, Tim Berners-Lee, noted: "Today, I am proud of the profound impact W3C has had, its many achievements accomplished with our Members and the public, and I look forward to the continued empowering enhancements W3C enables as it launches its own public-interest non-profit organization, building on 28 years of experience." Our vision for the future is a web that is truly a force for good. A World Wide Web that is truly international and more inclusive, more respectful of its users. A web that supports truth better than falsehood, people more than profits, humanity rather than hate. A web that works for everyone, because of everyone. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | |
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