Emma Roth reports via The Verge: Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet, and Snap must proceed with a lawsuit alleging their social platforms have adverse mental health effects on children, a federal court ruled on Tuesday. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected the social media giants’ motion to dismiss the dozens of lawsuits accusing the companies of running platforms “addictive” to kids. School districts across the US have filed suit against Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet, and Snap, alleging the companies cause physical and emotional harm to children. Meanwhile, 42 states sued Meta last month over claims Facebook and Instagram “profoundly altered the psychological and social realities of a generation of young Americans.” This order addresses the individual suits and “over 140 actions” taken against the companies.

Tuesday’s ruling states that the First Amendment and Section 230, which says online platforms shouldn’t be treated as the publishers of third-party content, don’t shield Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat from all liability in this case. Judge Gonzalez Rogers notes many of the claims laid out by the plaintiffs don’t “constitute free speech or expression,” as they have to do with alleged “defects” on the platforms themselves. That includes having insufficient parental controls, no “robust” age verification systems, and a difficult account deletion process.

“Addressing these defects would not require that defendants change how or what speech they disseminate,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers writes. “For example, parental notifications could plausibly empower parents to limit their children’s access to the platform or discuss platform use with them.” However, Judge Gonzalez Rogers still threw out some of the other “defects” identified by the plaintiffs because they’re protected under Section 230, such as offering a beginning and end to a feed, recommending children’s accounts to adults, the use of “addictive” algorithms, and not putting limits on the amount of time spent on the platforms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Social Media Giants Must Face Child Safety Lawsuits, Judge Rules

Fitbit is active in only 23 countries after leaving Mexico, South Africa, and all Latin American countries. “We communicated that we will stop selling Fitbit products in select countries in order to align our hardware portfolio to map closer to Pixel’s regional availability,” a Google spokesperson confirmed to Cord Cutters News via email. From the report: The move marks a phasing out of Fitbit products after the Big Tech company acquired wearable company in 2021. Last month, Fitbit said it would remove itself from Asian markets Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, along with European markets Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Slovakia. It’s possible Google is removing Fitbit and Nest from the European markets because they don’t have a Google Store support. If that changes, Fitbit products and Nest Aware subscriptions could return. New products like the Pixel Watch could also arrive for the first time. “We remain committed to our customers and have not made any changes that impact the existing Fitbit devices they already own. Existing Fitbit customers will continue to have access to the same customer support, warranties will still be honored, and products will continue to receive software and security updates,” the Google spokesperson said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Google Stopped Selling Its Fitbit Products In Almost 30 Countries

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Intel on Tuesday pushed microcode updates to fix a high-severity CPU bug that has the potential to be maliciously exploited against cloud-based hosts. The flaw, affecting virtually all modern Intel CPUs, causes them to “enter a glitch state where the normal rules don’t apply,” Tavis Ormandy, one of several security researchers inside Google who discovered the bug, reported. Once triggered, the glitch state results in unexpected and potentially serious behavior, most notably system crashes that occur even when untrusted code is executed within a guest account of a virtual machine, which, under most cloud security models, is assumed to be safe from such faults. Escalation of privileges is also a possibility.

The bug, tracked under the common name Reptar and the designation CVE-2023-23583, is related to how affected CPUs manage prefixes, which change the behavior of instructions sent by running software. Intel x64 decoding generally allows redundant prefixes — meaning those that don’t make sense in a given context — to be ignored without consequence. During testing in August, Ormandy noticed that the REX prefix was generating “unexpected results” when running on Intel CPUs that support a newer feature known as fast short repeat move, which was introduced in the Ice Lake architecture to fix microcoding bottlenecks. The unexpected behavior occurred when adding the redundant rex.r prefixes to the FSRM-optimized rep mov operation. […]

Intel’s official bulletin lists two classes of affected products: those that were already fixed and those that are fixed using microcode updates released Tuesday. An exhaustive list of affected CPUs is available here. As usual, the microcode updates will be available from device or motherboard manufacturers. While individuals aren’t likely to face any immediate threat from this vulnerability, they should check with the manufacturer for a fix. People with expertise in x86 instruction and decoding should read Ormandy’s post in its entirety. For everyone else, the most important takeaway is this: “However, we simply don’t know if we can control the corruption precisely enough to achieve privilege escalation.” That means it’s not possible for people outside of Intel to know the true extent of the vulnerability severity. That said, anytime code running inside a virtual machine can crash the hypervisor the VM runs on, cloud providers like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others are going to immediately take notice.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Intel Fixes High-Severity CPU Bug That Causes ‘Very Strange Behavior’

A bloc of 48 nations have developed the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), aimed at standardizing reporting requirements for crypto assets to address concerns related to money laundering and tax evasion. It’s set to be implemented by 2027. The Register reports: Developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the CARF was developed under the 168-member Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes, with the G20 and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development looking on approvingly and lending a hand. As the name implies, that Forum is all about sharing data so that each nation’s tax authorities have the information they need to understand money movements and make sure they can see what they’re allowed to tax. The Forum and the legislative instruments it has fostered include reporting requirements that ensure relevant information is collected by those who facilitate transactions and will be shared.

CARF brings similar reporting requirements to crypto assets. Note the term “crypto assets.” That’s important, because cryptocurrency is not the only blockchain-based instrument that worries authorities. Some, like non-fungible tokens, rely on the same “greater fool” theory that pumped up cryptocurrency prices, and can attract – ahem – interesting investors. But others are far less contentious or speculative, and instead aim to speed transaction processing. Stablecoins, for example, are often suggested as a means for faster and cheaper cross-border transactions than is possible with dominant transaction processing services. Tokenized assets can also be more easily integrated into applications to ease automated money movements.

That speed and flexibility is increasingly appreciated. But unless transactions made with those instruments can be observed, the potential for their use to evade tax authorities is high. CARF’s use of the term “crypto assets” therefore signals an effort to cover the weird world of cryptocurrencies and the emerging classes of classier tokenized assets. The Framework was signed off in March 2023, and in the time since OECD members and other interested nations have been dotting the Is and crossing the Ts to prepare for its implementation. The Framework can be found here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – 48-Nation Bloc To Crack Down On Using Crypto Assets To Avoid Tax

Sarah Perez reports via TechCrunch: YouTube today announced how it will approach handling AI-created content on its platform with a range of new policies surrounding responsible disclosure as well as new tools for requesting the removal of deepfakes, among other things. The company says that, although it already has policies that prohibit manipulated media, AI necessitated the creation of new policies because of its potential to mislead viewers if they don’t know the video has been “altered or synthetically created.” One of the changes that will roll out involves the creation of new disclosure requirements for YouTube creators. Now, they’ll have to disclose when they’ve created altered or synthetic content that appears realistic, including videos made with AI tools. For instance, this disclosure would be used if a creator uploads a video that appears to depict a real-world event that never happened, or shows someone saying something they never said or doing something they never did.

It’s worth pointing out that this disclosure is limited to content that “appears realistic,” and is not a blanket disclosure requirement on all synthetic video made via AI. “We want viewers to have context when they’re viewing realistic content, including when AI tools or other synthetic alterations have been used to generate it,” YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon told TechCrunch. “This is especially important when content discusses sensitive topics, like elections or ongoing conflicts,” he noted. […] The company also warns that creators who don’t properly disclose their use of AI consistently will be subject to “content removal, suspension from the YouTube Partner Program, or other penalties.” YouTube says it will work with creators to make sure they understand the requirements before they go live. But it notes that some AI content, even if labeled, may be removed if it’s used to show “realistic violence” if the goal is to shock or disgust viewers. […]

Other changes include the ability for any YouTube user to request the removal of AI-generated or other synthetic or altered content that simulates an identifiable individual — aka a deepfake — including their face or voice. But, the company clarifies that not all flagged content will be removed, making room for parody or satire. It also says that it will consider whether or not the person requesting the removal can be uniquely identified or whether the video features a public official or other well-known individual, in which case “there may be a higher bar,” YouTube says. Alongside the deepfake request removal tool, the company is introducing a new ability that will allow music partners to request the removal of AI-generated music that mimics an artist’s singing or rapping voice.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – YouTube Adapts Its Policies For the Coming Surge of AI Videos

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: On Monday, Rivian released an incremental software update 2023.42, which bricked the infotainment system in R1Ses and R1Ts. The company is frantically working on a fix, but it might not be an OTA. […] The vehicles are drivable, but software and displays go black. It appears that the 2023.42 software update hangs at 90% on the vehicle screen or 50% on the app screen, and then the vehicle screens black out. All systems appear to still work except for the displays. At the moment, it appears that Amazon vans are not impacted. Update: The company has acknowledged the issue with affected customers but has yet to issue a fix or plan to fix. Rivian’s vice president of software engineering, Wassim Bensaid, took to Reddit to update users on the situation, writing: “Hi All, We made an error with the 2023.42 OTA update — a fat finger where the wrong build with the wrong security certificates was sent out. We cancelled the campaign and we will restart it with the proper software that went through the different campaigns of beta testing. Service will be contacting impacted customers and will go through the resolution options. That may require physical repair in some cases. This is on us — we messed up. Thanks for your support and your patience as we go through this.

*Update 1 (11/13, 10:45 PM PT): The issue impacts the infotainment system. In most cases, the rest of the vehicle systems are still operational. A vehicle reset or sleep cycle will not solve the issue. We are validating the best options to address the issue for the impacted vehicles. Our customer support team is prioritizing support for our customers related to this issue. Thank you.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Rivian Software Update Bricks Infotainment System, Fix Not Obvious

India’s capital, New Delhi, is preparing a new weapon in the fight against deadly air pollution: cloud seeding. From a report: The experiment, which could take place as early as next week, would introduce chemicals like silver iodide into a cloudy sky to create rain and, it’s hoped, wash away the fine particulate matter hovering over one of the world’s largest cities. The need is desperate. Delhi has already tried traffic restriction measures, multimillion-dollar air filtration towers, and the use of fleets of water-spraying trucks to dissolve the particulate matter in the air — but to no avail.

The use of cloud seeding, if it goes ahead, would be controversial. “It’s not at all a good use of resources because it’s not a solution, it’s like a temporary relief,” says Avikal Somvanshi, a researcher at the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi. Environmentalists and scientists worry that most of the government’s response is focused on mitigating the pollution rather than trying to cut off its source. “There is just no political intent to solve this, that is one of the biggest problems,” says Bhavreen Kandhari, an activist and cofounder of Warrior Moms, a network of mothers demanding clean air.

[…] Now, Delhi officials are seeking permission from federal agencies in India to try cloud seeding. The technique involves flying an aircraft to spray clouds with salts like silver or potassium iodide or solid carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, to induce precipitation. The chemical molecules attach to moisture already in the clouds to form bigger droplets that then fall as rain. China has used artificial rain to tackle air pollution in the past — but for cloud seeding to work properly, you need significant cloud cover with reasonable moisture content, which Delhi generally lacks during the winter. If weather conditions are favorable, scientists leading the project at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur plan to carry out cloud seeding around November 20.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Delhi Plans To Unleash Cloud Seeding in Its Battle Against Deadly Smog

Some of the United States’ largest civil liberties groups are urging Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer not to pursue a short-term extension of the Section 702 surveillance program slated to sunset on December 31. From a report: The more than 20 groups — Demand Progress, the Brennan Center for Justice, American Civil Liberties Union, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice among them — oppose plans that would allow the program to continue temporarily by amending “must-pass” legislation, such as the bill needed now to avert a government shutdown by Friday, or the National Defense Authorization Act, annual legislation set to dictate $886 billion in national security spending across the Pentagon and US Department of Energy in 2024.

“In its current form, [Section 702] is dangerous to our liberties and our democracy, and it should not be renewed for any length of time without robust debate, an opportunity for amendment, and — ultimately — far-reaching reforms,” a letter from the groups to Schumer says. It adds that any attempt to prolong the program by rushed amendment “would demonstrate blatant disregard for the civil liberties and civil rights of the American people.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – US Privacy Groups Urge Senate Not To Ram Through NSA Spying Powers

The Top500 organization released its semi-annual list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, with the AMD-powered Frontier supercomputer retaining its spot at the top of the list with 1.194 Exaflop/s (EFlop/s) of performance, fending off a half-scale 585.34 Petaflop/s (PFlop/s) submission from the Argonne National Laboratory’s Intel-powered Aurora supercomputer. From a report: Argonne’s submission, which only employs half of the Aurora system, lands at the second spot on the Top500, unseating Japan’s Fugaku as the second-fastest supercomputer in the world. Intel also made inroads with 20 new supercomputers based on its Sapphire Rapids CPUs entering the list, but AMD’s EPYC continues to take over the Top500 as it now powers 140 systems on the list — a 39% year-over-year increase.

Intel and Argonne are currently still working to bring Arora fully online for users in 2024. As such, the Aurora submission represented 10,624 Intel CPUs and 31,874 Intel GPUs working in concert to deliver 585.34 PFlop/s at a total of 24.69 megawatts (MW) of energy. In contrast, AMD’s Frontier holds the performance title at 1.194 EFlop/s, which is more than twice the performance of Aurora, while consuming a comparably miserly 22.70 MW of energy (yes, that’s less power for the full Frontier supercomputer than half of the Aurora system). Aurora did not land on the Green500, a list of the most power-efficient supercomputers, with this submission, but Frontier continues to hold eighth place on that list. However, Aurora is expected to eventually reach up to 2 EFlop/s of performance when it comes fully online. When complete, Auroroa will have 21,248 Xeon Max CPUs and 63,744 Max Series ‘Ponte Vecchio’ GPUs spread across 166 racks and 10,624 compute blades, making it the largest known single deployment of GPUs in the world. The system leverages HPE Cray EX â” Intel Exascale Compute Blades and uses HPE’s Slingshot-11 networking interconnect.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – AMD-Powered Frontier Remains Fastest Supercomputer in the World

After a tech entrepreneur and investor lost his password for retrieving $100,000 in bitcoin and hired experts to break open the wallet where he kept it, they failed to help him. But in the process, they discovered a way to crack enough other software wallets to steal $1 billion or more. From a report: On Tuesday, the team is releasing information about how they did it. They hope it’s enough data that the owners of millions of wallets will realize they are at risk and move their money, but not so much data that criminals can figure out how to pull off what would be one of the largest heists of all time.

Their start-up, Unciphered, has worked for months to alert more than a million people that their wallets are at risk. Millions more haven’t been told, often because their wallets were created at cryptocurrency websites that have gone out of business. The story of those wallets’ vulnerabilities underscores the enormous risk in experimental currencies, beyond their wild fluctuations in value and fast-changing regulations. Many wallets were created with code containing profound flaws, and the companies that used that code can disappear. Beyond that, it is a sobering reminder that underneath software infrastructure of all kinds, even ones explicitly dedicated to securing funds, are open-source programs that few or no people oversee. “Open-source ages like milk. It will eventually go bad,” said Chris Wysopal, a co-founder of security company Veracode who advised Unciphered as it sorted through the problem.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – A Lost Bitcoin Wallet Passcode Helped Uncover a Major Security Flaw

In research published in Science today, Google DeepMind’s model, GraphCast, was able to predict weather conditions up to 10 days in advance, more accurately and much faster than the current gold standard. From a report: GraphCast outperformed the model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in more than 90% of over 1,300 test areas. And on predictions for Earth’s troposphere — the lowest part of the atmosphere, where most weather happens — GraphCast outperformed the ECMWF’s model on more than 99% of weather variables, such as rain and air temperature. Crucially, GraphCast can also offer meteorologists accurate warnings, much earlier than standard models, of conditions such as extreme temperatures and the paths of cyclones. In September, GraphCast accurately predicted that Hurricane Lee would make landfall in Nova Scotia nine days in advance, says Remi Lam, a staff research scientist at Google DeepMind. Traditional weather forecasting models pinpointed the hurricane to Nova Scotia only six days in advance.

[…] Traditionally, meteorologists use massive computer simulations to make weather predictions. They are very energy intensive and time consuming to run, because the simulations take into account many physics-based equations and different weather variables such as temperature, precipitation, pressure, wind, humidity, and cloudiness, one by one. GraphCast uses machine learning to do these calculations in under a minute. Instead of using the physics-based equations, it bases its predictions on four decades of historical weather data. GraphCast uses graph neural networks, which map Earth’s surface into more than a million grid points. At each grid point, the model predicts the temperature, wind speed and direction, and mean sea-level pressure, as well as other conditions like humidity. The neural network is then able to find patterns and draw conclusions about what will happen next for each of these data points.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Google DeepMind’s Weather AI Can Forecast Extreme Weather Faster and More Accurately

Nothing Phone 2 owners get blue bubbles now. The company shared it has added iMessage to its newest phone through a new “Nothing Chats” app powered by the messaging platform Sunbird. From a report: The feature will be available to users in North America, the EU, and other European countries starting this Friday, November 17th. Nothing writes on its page that it’s doing this because “messaging services are dividing phone users,” and it wants “to break those barriers down.” But doing so here requires you to trust Sunbird. Nothing’s FAQ says Sunbird’s “architecture provides a system to deliver a message from one user to another without ever storing it at any point in its journey,” and that messages aren’t stored on its servers.

Marques Brownlee has also had a preview of Nothing Chats. He confirmed with Nothing that, similar to how other iMessage-to-Android bridge services have worked before, “…it’s literally signing in on some Mac Mini in a server farm somewhere, and that Mac Mini will then do all of the routing for you to make this happen.” Nothing’s US head of PR, Jane Nho, told The Verge in an email that Sunbird stores user iCloud credentials as a token “in an encrypted database” and associated with one of its Mac Minis in the US or Europe, depending on the user’s location, that then act as a relay for iMessages sent via the app. She added that, after two weeks of inactivity, Sunbird deletes the account information.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Nothing is Bringing iMessage To Its Android Phone

An anonymous reader writes: Videos collected by 404 Media over months give a peek into the world of spoofing numbers, automated call scripts, and a specific seller of the phones. From the report: “Alright lads,” a man sitting in the passenger seat of a moving car says in a heavy British accent. In his left hand he holds a special phone he is showing off to his clients, while with the other he films his demonstration which was later uploaded to Telegram. “I’m only going to say it once, yeah. You swipe, and it’s gone,” he continues, demonstrating one app installed that can instantly destroy data stored on the device. The phone in question is one from “Russiancoms,” an underground outfit that sells the devices for just under $2,000 each. For that price, customers get a laundry list of features: the ability to spoof phone numbers, play hold music, and have a computerized voice read pre-determined scripts. While Russiancoms does not acknowledge in its Telegram channel what the phones might really be for, those are features well suited to committing fraud.

The Russiancoms Telegram channel periodically deletes its videos and other messages, but 404 Media has been archiving many of them for months. They provide insight into a little known industry of fraud phones, ones that make it easy for anyone to enter the world of robocalling or other scams. While much of the underground phone industry has been focused on providing secure communications to criminals — companies like Phantom Secure, Encrochat, and Sky for example — Russiancoms and similar companies appear to cater to a different use case: enabling people to make calls that fraudulently appear to come from someone else. A common tool in the underground is also so-called Russian SIMs, which can spoof numbers in some cases. Russiancoms’ phones, however, are more fully featured.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – The ,000 Phones That Let Anyone Make Robocalls

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has struggled to stop a hyper-aggressive cybercrime gang that’s been tormenting corporate America over the last two years, according to nine cybersecurity responders, digital crime experts and victims. Reuters: For more than six months, the FBI has known the identities of at least a dozen members tied to the hacking group responsible for the devastating September break-ins at casino operators MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment, according to four people familiar with the investigation. Industry executives have told Reuters they were baffled by an apparent lack of arrests despite many of the hackers being based in America. “I would love for somebody to explain it to me,” said Michael Sentonas, president of CrowdStrike, one of the firms leading the response effort to the hacks.

“For such a small group, they are absolutely causing havoc,” Sentonas told Reuters in an interview last month. Sentonas said the hackers were “known” but didn’t provide specifics. He did say, “I think there is a failure here.” Asked who was responsible for the failure, Sentonas said, “law enforcement.” […] Dubbed by some security professionals as “Scattered Spider,” the hacking group has been active since 2021 but it grabbed headlines following a series of intrusions at several high profile American companies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – FBI Struggled To Disrupt Dangerous Casino Hacking Gang, Cyber Responders Say

AI could be used to predict if a person is at risk of having a heart attack up to 10 years in the future, a study has found. From a report: The technology could save thousands of lives while improving treatment for almost half of patients, researchers at the University of Oxford said. The study, funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), looked at how AI might improve the accuracy of cardiac CT scans, which are used to detect blockages or narrowing in the arteries.

Prof Charalambos Antoniades, chair of cardiovascular medicine at the BHF and director of the acute multidisciplinary imaging and interventional centre at Oxford, said: “Our study found that some patients presenting in hospital with chest pain — who are often reassured and sent back home — are at high risk of having a heart attack in the next decade, even in the absence of any sign of disease in their heart arteries. Here we demonstrated that providing an accurate picture of risk to clinicians can alter, and potentially improve, the course of treatment for many heart patients.”

About 350,000 people in the UK have a CT scan each year but, according to the BHF, many patients later die of heart attacks due to their failure in picking up small, undetectable narrowings. Researchers analysed the data of more than 40,000 patients undergoing routine cardiac CT scans at eight UK hospitals, with a median follow-up time of 2.7 years. The AI tool was tested on a further 3,393 patients over almost eight years and was able to accurately predict the risk of a heart attack. AI-generated risk scores were then presented to medics for 744 patients, with 45% having their treatment plans altered by medics as a result.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – AI Could Predict Heart Attack Risk Up To 10 Years in the Future, Finds Oxford Study

An anonymous reader writes: Two men who allegedly used 65 Google accounts to bombard Google with fraudulent DMCA takedown notices targeting up to 620,000 URLs, have been named in a Google lawsuit filed in California on Monday. Google says the men weaponized copyright law’s notice-and-takedown system to sabotage competitors’ trade, while damaging the search engine’s business and those of its customers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Google Sues Men Who Weaponized DMCA Notices To Crush Competition

A person linked to a scam that tricked an elderly victim into transferring more than $100,000 formally requested the FBI give back his seized cryptocurrency, claiming in a petition to the agency that he is a part-time crypto investor and not doing anything illegal, according to a recently filed court record. From a report: 404 Media also reached the person by email and they largely repeated the same story. The request is an unusual sight, and, to be frank, probably not going to work. In the court record, authorities allege that the frozen funds are linked to a scam of a victim in the U.S. The document says authorities seized just under 18,500 Tether, valued at around $18,500, in July with a federal search warrant.

“Hello Sir/Ma’am, My name is Vishal Gautam,” the request starts. “The funds which you have on hold that is a very big amount of money for me and my family, I request you to please release it from your custody. Thank You & Regards.” The message says that Gautam lives in India and as well as investing in cryptocurrency, he is a “full-time Health Insurance” worker. “In the month of July 2023 suddenly my crypto from Binance got disappeared, I don’t know how it happened but then I got to know that the FBI has put hold on my assets,” the message continues. “I am not into something illegal and never will be, I will not do any such thing that can harm your country or your people in any manner.” U.S. authorities, meanwhile, allege that the seized cash is connected to a fraud scheme that targeted a senior citizen in Knoxville, Iowa. In February, this victim opened an email on her iPad that claimed it had been compromised, and that she needed to contact the sender for assistance, according to the court record.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Person Linked To Scam Asks FBI for His Seized Cryptocurrency Back

US inflation fell to 3.2 per cent in October, lower than economists had expected and the first decline for four months. From a report: Consumer prices rose 3.2 per cent year on year in October, down from an annual rate of 3.7 per cent in September. The annual rise was slightly less than economists had forecast, and prices were flat month on month. The central bank held its benchmark interest rate steady at a 22-year high earlier this month, and investors have become increasingly confident that rates have peaked. Futures markets on Monday afternoon were pricing in a 13 per cent chance of a further rate rise at the Fed’s next rate-setting meeting in mid-December.

Core inflation — which strips out volatile food and energy prices — was also slightly weaker than economists had predicted, dipping from 4.1 per cent to 4.0 per cent on a year on year basis. Core inflation rose by 0.2 per cent month on month. Fed chair Jay Powell stressed last week that policymakers would not be “misled by a few good months of data,” and that the central bank could tighten monetary policy further if necessary, although officials have shown little intention of immediately raising rates beyond the current range of 5.25-5.5 per cent. Stronger-than-expected gross domestic product growth has fanned fears that the slowdown in inflation could stall, but Powell said last week that he and his colleagues expected the pace of economic expansion to slow. Instead of another rate rise, the Fed is increasingly expected to push back the timing of rate cuts deeper into 2024 if consumer prices remain stubbornly high.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – US Inflation Falls To 3.2% in October

An anonymous reader writes: Joby Aviation and Volocopter gave the public a vivid glimpse of what the future of aviation might look like this weekend, with both companies performing brief demonstration flights of their electric aircraft in New York City. The demonstration flights were conducted during a press conference on Sunday, during which New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city would electrify two of the three heliports located in Manhattan — Downtown Manhattan Heliport and East 34th Street. (The third heliport is privately owned.) Beta Technologies, which is also developing an electric aircraft, showed off its interoperable aircraft charging technology at the event. You can watch a demo of the Joby Aviation flight here. Additional assets are available via Joby’s press release.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Joby, Volocopter Fly Electric Air Taxis Over New York City

Press2ToContinue writes: “An undergraduate student used an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 and AI to decipher a word in one of the Herculaneum scrolls to win a $40,000 prize (via Nvidia),” reports Tom’s Hardware. “Herculaneum was covered in ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and the over 1,800 Herculaneum scrolls are one of the site’s most famous artifacts.”

The scrolls have been notoriously hard to decipher because they cannot be unwrapped because they’re basically like a stick of charcoal. Instead they must be virtually unwrapped, using a 3D scan dataset of it in its wrapped state. So, the task is to find the tiny bits of ink, assemble them into letters, and try to decipher what they say. Machine learning is now becoming the key that picks the lock. A student deciphered one of the words using a GTX 1070, which doesn’t even have any tensor cores. Imagine what he could do with a RTX 4090!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Student Uses AI To Decipher Ancient Greco-Roman Scroll, Wins K Prize