| Antarctica is 'Greening' at Dramatic Rate as Climate Heats Oct 4th 2024, 16:04, by msmash Plant cover across the Antarctic peninsula has soared more than tenfold over the last few decades, as the climate crisis heats up the icy continent. From a report: Analysis of satellite data found there was less than one sq kilometre of vegetation in 1986 but there was almost 12km2 of green cover by 2021. The spread of the plants, mostly mosses, has accelerated since 2016, the researchers found. The growth of vegetation on a continent dominated by ice and bare rock is a sign of the reach of global heating into the Antarctic, which is warming faster than the global average. The scientists warned that this spread could provide a foothold for alien invasive species into the pristine Antarctic ecosystem. Greening has also been reported in the Arctic, and in 2021 rain, not snow, fell on the summit of Greenland's huge ice cap for the first time on record. "The Antarctic landscape is still almost entirely dominated by snow, ice and rock, with only a tiny fraction colonised by plant life," said Dr Thomas Roland, at the University of Exeter, UK, and who co-led the study. "But that tiny fraction has grown dramatically -- showing that even this vast and isolated wilderness is being affected by human-caused climate change." The peninsula is about 500,000km2 in total. Roland warned that future heating, which will continue until carbon emissions are halted, could bring "fundamental changes to the biology and landscape of this iconic and vulnerable region." The study is published in the journal Nature Geoscience and based on analysis of Landsat images.   Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Rivian Now Says It Will Make Fewer Electric Vehicles This Year Than It Did in 2023 Oct 4th 2024, 15:24, by msmash Rivian said it would make fewer electric vehicles this year than it did in 2023, resulting from a parts shortage. From a report: The news came as the company reported third quarter production and delivery numbers that came in below analyst expectations. Rivian says it expects to produce between 47,000 and 49,000 vehicles this year, down from the 57,000 vehicles it originally forecast. That number was flat from the previous year, when the company produced 57,232 vehicles and delivered 50,122. Rivian said the disruption is due to "a shortage of a shared component on the R1 and RCV platforms," referencing the company's R1T and R1S vehicles, as well as its commercial van platform. "This supply shortage impact began in Q3 of this year, has become more acute in recent weeks and continues," the company added. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Tencent, Guillemot Family Mull Ubisoft Buyout Amid Share Slump Oct 4th 2024, 14:41, by msmash Tencent and Ubisoft's founding Guillemot family are weighing a potential buyout of the French game maker, according to Bloomberg News. The move comes as Ubisoft's shares plunged 54% this year, hitting decade-lows after production delays and weak sales. Tencent, which bought 49.9% of Guillemot Brothers in 2022, holds 9.2% of Ubisoft's voting rights, while the Guillemots control 20.5%. Further reading: Star Wars Outlaws Is A Crappy Masterpiece. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | 159 Employees Leave Automattic as WordPress CEO Escalates Fight With WP Engine Oct 4th 2024, 14:00, by msmash Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has seen a reduction of about 8.4% to its workforce after 159 employees accepted severance packages, CEO Matt Mullenweg said. The move follows disputes over the company's direction and its clash with web host WP Engine. Most departures hit the WordPress division, with some from other business units. Employees received $30,000 or six months' pay, but are ineligible for rehire, Mullenweg added. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Cloudflare Defeats Patent Troll Oct 4th 2024, 13:00, by msmash Cloudflare has emerged victorious in a patent infringement lawsuit against Sable Networks, securing a $225,000 settlement and forcing the patent holder to dedicate its entire portfolio to the public domain. The case, which began in March 2021 with Sable asserting nearly 100 claims across four patents, concluded after a Texas jury found Cloudflare not guilty of infringement in February 2024. Sable, described by Cloudflare as a "patent troll," had previously sued several tech companies, including Cisco and Juniper Networks, who settled out of court. Cloudflare's aggressive defense strategy included launching Project Jengo, a crowd-sourced initiative to invalidate Sable's patents. The settlement prevents Sable from asserting these patents against any other company in the future, marking a significant blow to patent trolling practices in the tech industry. In a blog post, Cloudflare adds: While this $225,000 can't fully compensate us for the time, energy and frustration of having to deal with this litigation for nearly three years, it does help to even the score a bit. And we hope that it sends an important message to patent trolls everywhere to beware before taking on Cloudflare. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | AI Agent Promotes Itself To Sysadmin, Trashes Boot Sequence Oct 4th 2024, 10:00, by BeauHD The Register's Thomas Claburn reports: Buck Shlegeris, CEO at Redwood Research, a nonprofit that explores the risks posed by AI, recently learned an amusing but hard lesson in automation when he asked his LLM-powered agent to open a secure connection from his laptop to his desktop machine. "I expected the model would scan the network and find the desktop computer, then stop," Shlegeris explained to The Register via email. "I was surprised that after it found the computer, it decided to continue taking actions, first examining the system and then deciding to do a software update, which it then botched." Shlegeris documented the incident in a social media post. He created his AI agent himself. It's a Python wrapper consisting of a few hundred lines of code that allows Anthropic's powerful large language model Claude to generate some commands to run in bash based on an input prompt, run those commands on Shlegeris' laptop, and then access, analyze, and act on the output with more commands. Shlegeris directed his AI agent to try to SSH from his laptop to his desktop Ubuntu Linux machine, without knowing the IP address [...]. As a log of the incident indicates, the agent tried to open an SSH connection, and failed. So Shlegeris tried to correct the bot. [...] The AI agent responded it needed to know the IP address of the device, so it then turned to the network mapping tool nmap on the laptop to find the desktop box. Unable to identify devices running SSH servers on the network, the bot tried other commands such as "arp" and "ping" before finally establishing an SSH connection. No password was needed due to the use of SSH keys; the user buck was also a sudoer, granting the bot full access to the system. Shlegeris's AI agent, once it was able to establish a secure shell connection to the Linux desktop, then decided to play sysadmin and install a series of updates using the package manager Apt. Then things went off the rails. "It looked around at the system info, decided to upgrade a bunch of stuff including the Linux kernel, got impatient with Apt and so investigated why it was taking so long, then eventually the update succeeded but the machine doesn't have the new kernel so edited my Grub [bootloader] config," Buck explained in his post. "At this point I was amused enough to just let it continue. Unfortunately, the computer no longer boots." Indeed, the bot got as far as messing up the boot configuration, so that following a reboot by the agent for updates and changes to take effect, the desktop machine wouldn't successfully start. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | | Cheetos Food Dye Turns Mice Transparent Oct 4th 2024, 07:00, by BeauHD Researchers have discovered that a popular food dye used in Cheetos "alters the optical qualities of skin, allowing light to pass through (Source paywalled; alternative source)," according to the Wall Street Journal. Larger doses of the dye used on humans could make searching veins for blood draw easier. From a report: Tartrazine, the yellowing agent for the "dangerously cheesy" snack, was tested on the stomachs and heads of mice -- with surprising results. Researchers were even able to see muscle pulsations and blood vessels in their brains, the Wall Street Journal reported. How does this ultimate magic trick work? It has to do with how cells are comprised of membranes that hold fats in a watery style, the outlet stated. The fats and water manage light differently. In this case, when the dye is applied, it causes light to pass through when it hits their cells. Thus, ta-da! the transparent opacity of invisible mice skin. The findings have been published in the journal Science. Read more of this story at Slashdot. | |
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