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Submission + - Linus Torvalds slams hardware security defects (phoronix.com)

Submitted by jd
jd writes: Linus Torvalds is not a happy camper and is condemning hardware vendors for poor security and the plethora of actual and theoretical attacks, especially as some of the new features being added impact the workarounds. These workarounds are now getting very expensive, CPU-wise.

TFA quotes Linus Torvalds:

"Honestly, I'm pretty damn fed up with buggy hardware and completely theoretical attacks that have never actually shown themselves to be used in practice.

So I think this time we push back on the hardware people and tell them it's *THEIR* damn problem, and if they can't even be bothered to say yay-or-nay, we just sit tight.

Because dammit, let's put the onus on where the blame lies, and not just take any random shit from bad hardware and say "oh, but it *might* be a problem".

Linus"

Submission + - Elon Musk's daily $1 million payouts at Trump rally draw legal scrutiny 1

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania, Oct 20 (Reuters) — Billionaire Elon Musk promised on Saturday to give away $1 million each day until November's election to someone who signs his online petition, with the first prize awarded at a PAC event supporting Republican Donald Trump, raising questions about the legality of the payments.

Musk gave a $1 million check to an attendee of his America PAC event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, aimed at rallying supporters behind presidential candidate Trump. The winner was a man named John Dreher, according to event staff.

"By the way, John had no idea. So anyway, you're welcome," the Tesla founder said as he handed Dreher the check.

Submission + - Windows update causes Windows 11 24H2 8.63 GB glitch (gmx.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Users updating to the latest version of the operating system, Windows 11 users who tried to delete the 8.63 GB of upgrade data using the Windows Disk Cleanup application found themselves confused as the "inaccurate" amount.

Microsoft said: "After using the Windows Disk Cleanup application, it may display an incorrect amount of disk space that can be freed up in the 'Windows Update Cleanup' category...some or all files in that category (for example, 15 GB) are cleaned up correctly and the related disk space is freed as expected.

Microsoft is aware of the issue and is "working on a resolution and will provide more information when it is available."

Submission + - Cheap AI 'Video Scraping' Can Now Extract Data From Any Screen Recording (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Recently, AI researcher Simon Willison wanted to add up his charges from using a cloud service, but the payment values and dates he needed were scattered among a dozen separate emails. Inputting them manually would have been tedious, so he turned to a technique he calls "video scraping," which involves feeding a screen recording video into an AI model, similar to ChatGPT, for data extraction purposes. What he discovered seems simple on its surface, but the quality of the result has deeper implications for the future of AI assistants, which may soon be able to see and interact with what we're doing on our computer screens.

"The other day I found myself needing to add up some numeric values that were scattered across twelve different emails," Willison wrote in a detailed post on his blog. He recorded a 35-second video scrolling through the relevant emails, then fed that video into google's AI Studio tool, which allows people to experiment with several versions of google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash AI models. Willison then asked Gemini to pull the price data from the video and arrange it into a special data format called JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) that included dates and dollar amounts. The AI model successfully extracted the data, which Willison then formatted as CSV (comma-separated values) table for spreadsheet use. After double-checking for errors as part of his experiment, the accuracy of the results—and what the video analysis cost to run—surprised him.

"The cost [of running the video model] is so low that I had to re-run my calculations three times to make sure I hadn’t made a mistake," he wrote. Willison says the entire video analysis process ostensibly cost less than one-tenth of a cent, using just 11,018 tokens on the Gemini 1.5 Flash 002 model. In the end, he actually paid nothing because google AI Studio is currently free for some types of use.

Submission + - NASA's $100 Billion Moon Mission To Nowhere (bloomberg.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: There are government boondoggles, and then there’s NASA’s Artemis program.

More than a half century after Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, Artemis was intended to land astronauts back on the moon. It has so far spent nearly $100 billion without anyone getting off the ground, yet its complexity and outrageous waste are still spiraling upward. The next US president should rethink the program in its entirety.

As someone who greatly respects science and strongly supports space exploration, the more I have learned about Artemis, the more it has become apparent that it is a colossal waste of taxpayer money.

A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary. A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon — no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required — at a small fraction of the cost. Its successful landing of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated how far beyond NASA it is moving.

Meanwhile, NASA is canceling or postponing promising scientific programs — including the Veritas mission to Venus; the Viper lunar rover; and the NEO Surveyor telescope, intended to scan the solar system for hazardous asteroids — as Artemis consumes ever more of its budget.

Taxpayers and Congress should be asking: What on Earth are we doing? And the next president should be held accountable for answers.

Submission + - NASA Artemis III mission to moon unveils new spacesuit designed by Prada (spacenews.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Axiom emphasized the advanced capabilities in the suit, particularly when compared to the suits worn by the Apollo astronauts on moonwalks more than a half-century ago. “Certainly there’s a lot more mobility in this suit design,” he said. There are also greater redundancy in the suit as well as healthy monitoring systems not available in the Apollo-era suits.

The design has also changed from earlier versions Axiom displayed. “Over the last two years we have really iterated the design quite quickly,” he said. “What’s underneath this layer is not the same as what was there a couple years ago.”

Submission + - Tesla's FSD software under investigation by federal safety regulator (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: The top U.S. automotive safety regulator has opened a new investigation into Tesla’s so-called “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” software after four reported crashes in low-visibility situations — including one where a pedestrian was killed. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Office of Defects Investigation announced Friday that it is probing the driver assistance system to find out whether it can “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions,” such as “sun glare, fog, or airborne dust.” The agency also wants to know if other crashes have occurred in these conditions beyond the ones that were reported.

Submission + - Startup Can Identify Deepfake Video In Real Time (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Real-time video deepfakes are a growing threat for governments, businesses, and individuals. Recently, the chairman of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations mistakenly took a video call with someone pretending to be a Ukrainian official. An international engineering company lost millions of dollars earlier in 2024 when one employee was tricked by a deepfake video call. Also, romance scams targeting everyday individuals have employed similar techniques. “It's probably only a matter of months before we're going to start seeing an explosion of deepfake video, face-to-face fraud,” says Ben Colman, CEO and cofounder at Reality Defender. When it comes to video calls, especially in high-stakes situations, seeing should not be believing.

The startup is laser-focused on partnering with business and government clients to help thwart AI-powered deepfakes. Even with this core mission, Colman doesn’t want his company to be seen as more broadly standing against artificial intelligence developments. “We're very pro-AI,” he says. “We think that 99.999 percent of use cases are transformational—for medicine, for productivity, for creativity—but in these kinds of very, very small edge cases the risks are disproportionately bad.” Reality Defender’s plan for the real-time detector is to start with a plug-in for Zoom that can make active predictions about whether others on a video call are real or AI-powered impersonations. The company is currently working on benchmarking the tool to determine how accurately it discerns real video participants from fake ones. Unfortunately, it’s not something you’ll likely be able to try out soon. The new software feature will only be available in beta for some of the startup’s clients.

As Reality Defender works to improve the detection accuracy of its models, Colman says that access to more data is a critical challenge to overcome—a common refrain from the current batch of AI-focused startups. He’s hopeful more partnerships will fill in these gaps, and without specifics, hints at multiple new deals likely coming next year. After ElevenLabs was tied to a deepfake voice call of US president Joe Biden, the AI-audio startup struck a deal with Reality Defender to mitigate potential misuse. [...] “We don't ask my 80-year-old mother to flag ransomware in an email,” says Colman. “Because she's not a computer science expert.” In the future, it’s possible real-time video authentication, if AI detection continues to improve and shows to be reliably accurate, will be as taken for granted as that malware scanner quietly humming along in the background of your email inbox.

Submission + - Tesla needs to come clean about HW3 before the word 'fraud' comes out (electrek.co)

Submitted by theweatherelectric
theweatherelectric writes: Fred Lambert of Electrek writes, "The walls are closing on Tesla’s claim that millions of its vehicles with Hardware 3 (HW3) computers will be capable of unsupervised self-driving. Tesla needs to come clean before the word 'fraud' comes out. Making a mistake is not a fraud. If Tesla really thought that it could deliver unsupervised self-driving to vehicles equipped with HW3 and, at one point, it figured out that it couldn’t, it’s not fraud even though it used that as a selling point for millions of vehicles for years. However, the moment Tesla figures out that it can’t, it needs to stop selling its Full Self-Driving package to HW3 vehicle owners and come clean to owners about what their vehicle will and will not be able to do, like a robotaxi service. Has the moment come?"

Submission + - SpaceX Requests Starlink Gen2 Modification, Previews Gigabit-Speeds (satellitetoday.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: For comparison, Starlink’s current statement on service speeds is that users typically experience download speeds between 25 and 220 Mbps, and a majority of users experience speeds over 100 Mbps.

In 2022, the FCC partially approved SpaceX to deploy a Gen2 Starlink constellation of up to 7,500 satellites for fixed satellite services (FSS) in the Ku- and Ka-bands, then later authorized Gen2 operations using additional frequencies in the E- and V-bands.

SpaceX reported that since then, it has deployed more than 3,000 satellites in the Gen2 system and the full Starlink constellation serves more than four million people.

Submission + - Open-sourcing of WinAmp goes badly as owners delete entire repo (theregister.com) 1

Submitted by king*jojo
king*jojo writes: The owners of WinAmp have just deleted their entire repo one month after uploading the source code to GitHub. Lots of source code, and quite possibly, not all of it theirs.

The deletion happened soon after The Register enquired about the seeming inclusion of Shoutcast DNAS code and some Microsoft and Intel codecs.

Submission + - Petroleum Drilling Technology Is Now Making Carbon-Free Power (npr.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: There’s a valley in rural southwest Utah that’s become a hub for renewable energy. Dozens of tall white wind turbines whoosh up in the sky. A sea of solar panels glistens in the distance. But the new kid on the block is mostly hidden underground. From the surface, Fervo Energy’s Cape Station looks more or less like an oil derrick, with a thin metal tower rising above the sagebrush steppe. But this $2 billion geothermal project, which broke ground last year, is not drilling for gas. It’s drilling for underground heat that CEO Tim Latimer believes holds the key to generating carbon-free power — lots of it.

“Just these three well pads alone will produce 100 megawatts of electricity. Around-the-clock, 24/7 electricity,” he said. Latimer stood overlooking the project, which is currently under construction, on one of the drill rig’s metal platforms 40 feet off the ground. This well is one of the 24 Fervo is in the process of completing at Cape Station to harness the Earth’s natural heat and generate electricity. This isn’t the type of geothermal that’s already active in volcanic hot spots like Iceland or The Geysers project in California. It’s called an enhanced geothermal system. Cold water goes down into a well that curves like a hockey stick as it reaches more than 13,000 feet underground. Then the water squeezes through cracks in 400-degree rock. The water heats up and returns to the surface through a second well that runs parallel to the first. That creates steam that turns turbines to produce electricity, and the water gets sent back underground in a closed loop.

This horizontal well technique has been pioneered at a $300 million federal research project called Utah FORGE located in this same valley, which has paved the way for private companies to take the tech and run with it. Recent innovations like better drill bits — made with synthetic diamonds to eat through hard subterranean granite — have helped Fervo drill its latest well in a quarter of the time that it took just a couple of years ago. That efficiency has meant an 80% drop in drilling costs, Latimer said. Last year, Fervo’s pilot project in Nevada used similar techniques to begin sending electricity to a google data center. And the company’s early tests at Cape Station in Utah show the new project can produce power at triple the rate of its Nevada pilot. “This is now a proven tech. That's not a statement you could have made two or three years ago,” Latimer said. “Now, it just comes down to how do we get more of these megawatts on the grid so we have a bigger impact?”

Submission + - Global EV Sales Up 30.5% In September (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Global sales of fully electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles rose by an annual 30.5% in September, as China surpassed its record numbers recorded in August and Europe resumed growth, market research firm Rho Motion said on Tuesday. Gains in the U.S. market have been slow and steady in anticipation of the Nov. 5 election, which makes it difficult to predict future trends in the country, data manager Charles Lester told Reuters. EVs — whether fully electric (BEV) or plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) — sold worldwide reached 1.69 million in September, Rho Motion data showed.

Sales in China jumped 47.9% in September and reached 1.12 million vehicles, while in the United States and Canada they were up 4.3% to 0.15 million. In Europe, EV sales rose 4.2% to 0.3 million units, thanks to a 24% jump in the United Kingdom and gains in Italy, Germany and Denmark, Lester said. In the Chinese market, the penetration rate of BEV and PHEV is growing faster than some expected and sales "could be a record every month until the end of the year", Lester said. He added that Germany's 7% year-on-year growth was "definitely positive news", and that intermediate carbon emission reduction goals set in the EU for next year will test the bloc's market.

Submission + - Cisco investigates breach after stolen data for sale on hacking forum (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by mprindle
mprindle writes: Per the article:
"Compromised data: Github projects, Gitlab Projects, SonarQube projects, Source code, hard coded credentials, Certificates, Customer SRCs, Cisco Confidential Documents, Jira tickets, API tokens, AWS Private buckets, Cisco Technology SRCs, Docker Builds, Azure Storage buckets, Private & Public keys, SSL Certificates, Cisco Premium Products & More!,"

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