VirtualBox 6.1.32 has arrived with several bug fixes from VirtualBox 6.1.30. Learn more about the new release here.
The post VirtualBox 6.1.32 Fixes Access to Some USB Devices on Linux Hosts appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – VirtualBox 6.1.32 Fixes Access to Some USB Devices on Linux Hosts
Quoter is a small command-line tool to fetch stock prices. It’s written in Java and published under an open source license.
Source: LXer – Quoter – The Console Based Stock Quote Tool
Slow-motion video of boiling ice, a research project of the Nature-Inspired Fluids and Interfaces Lab at Virginia Tech.
Dash a few drops of water onto a very hot, sizzling skillet and they’ll levitate, sliding around the pan with wild abandon. Physicists at Virginia Tech have discovered that this can also be achieved by placing a thin, flat disk of ice on a heated aluminum surface, according to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids. The catch: there’s a much higher critical temperature that must be achieved before the ice disk will levitate.
As we’ve reported previously, in 1756, a German scientist named Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost reported his observation of the unusual phenomenon. Normally, he noted, water splashed onto a very hot pan sizzles and evaporates very quickly. But if the pan’s temperature is well above water’s boiling point, “gleaming drops resembling quicksilver” will form and will skitter across the surface. It’s called the “Leidenfrost effect” in his honor.
In the ensuing 250 years, physicists came up with a viable explanation for why this occurs. If the surface is at least 400 degrees Fahrenheit (well above the boiling point of water), cushions of water vapor, or steam, form underneath them, keeping them levitated. The Leidenfrost effect also works with other liquids, including oils and alcohol, but the temperature at which it manifests will be different.
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Source: Ars Technica – Study: Leidenfrost effect occurs in all three water phases: Solid, liquid, and vapor
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Meta (AKA Facebook) researchers are working on […] an AI that can learn capably on its own whether it does so in spoken, written or visual materials. The traditional way of training an AI model to correctly interpret something is to give it lots and lots (like millions) of labeled examples. A picture of a cat with the cat part labeled, a conversation with the speakers and words transcribed, etc. But that approach is no longer in vogue as researchers found that it was no longer feasible to manually create databases of the sizes needed to train next-gen AIs. Who wants to label 50 million cat pictures? Okay, a few people probably — but who wants to label 50 million pictures of common fruits and vegetables?
Currently some of the most promising AI systems are what are called self-supervised: models that can work from large quantities of unlabeled data, like books or video of people interacting, and build their own structured understanding of what the rules are of the system. For instance, by reading a thousand books it will learn the relative positions of words and ideas about grammatical structure without anyone telling it what objects or articles or commas are — it got it by drawing inferences from lots of examples. This feels intuitively more like how people learn, which is part of why researchers like it. But the models still tend to be single-modal, and all the work you do to set up a semi-supervised learning system for speech recognition won’t apply at all to image analysis — they’re simply too different. That’s where Facebook/Meta’s latest research, the catchily named data2vec, comes in.
The idea for data2vec was to build an AI framework that would learn in a more abstract way, meaning that starting from scratch, you could give it books to read or images to scan or speech to sound out, and after a bit of training it would learn any of those things. It’s a bit like starting with a single seed, but depending on what plant food you give it, it grows into an daffodil, pansy or tulip. Testing data2vec after letting it train on various data corpi showed that it was competitive with and even outperformed similarly sized dedicated models for that modality. (That is to say, if the models are all limited to being 100 megabytes, data2vec did better — specialized models would probably still outperform it as they grow.)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Meta Researchers Build an AI That Learns Equally Well From Visual, Written or Spoken Materials
Ubuntu MATE 21.10 has been released for the GPD Pocket 3 tiny computer. Learn more here.
The post Ubuntu MATE 21.10 Released for the GPD Pocket 3 Tiny Computer appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – Ubuntu MATE 21.10 Released for the GPD Pocket 3 Tiny Computer
Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9’s regular round up of the latest and greatest in merchandise from across the internet. This week, Bandai’s Gundam Universe figures go beyond the time, Aliens gets an unconventional model kit, and making the perfect Death Star shot might be harder than hitting an exhaust port with an…
Source: Gizmodo – Big Mechs, Small Mechs, and Mechanized Moons Are the Toys of the Week
Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a sanitized, hypercapitalist metaverse will likely never be as compelling or idiosyncratic as VRChat, the virtual reality community that’s been home to anime fans, Furries and a slew of other sub-cultures since 2014. That’s my main takeaway from We Met in Virtual Reality, the first documentary filmed entirely in VRChat, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival today.
There’s no chance Zuck’s metaverse would let people wear trademarked avatars without paying a ton, attend exotic clubs to receive (or give) virtual lapdances, or allow users to build whatever the hell they want. VRChat, as portrayed by director Joe Hunting, is basically a proto-metaverse where anything is possible. And for many, it has served as a crucial social hub during the pandemic, a place where they can forget about the world, relax with friends and maybe find love.
But of course, that’s been the nature of practically every online community. We’re social animals — people have always been able to connect with each other over BBS, IRC, Usenet and the plethora of forums and chat services that populated the early internet. I spent most of the ’90s hanging out in anime and gaming chat rooms, the sorts of places that today’s connected youth would probably find quaint. Still, the people I met there helped me survive the worst parts of middle and high school. Those relationships, and the internet itself, shaped me into who I am (for better or worse).
We Met in Virtual Reality proves that the unbridled, experimental sense of online community is still alive and well today, despite relentless consolidation from Big Tech. But now, instead of staring at tiny CRT monitors, people are slapping on VR headsets to explore fully realized environments. Hardcore VRChat users are also investing in powerful computing rigs as well as upgrades like finger and whole-body tracking. In the ’90s, I was grateful to get another 16MB of RAM so that I could have more than one browser window open. Today, VRChat devotees can communicate using American Sign Language, or have their anime avatars show off their belly dancing skills.
Hunting approaches his subjects with the eye of an anthropologist, without any judgment towards their sometimes ridiculous avatars (do all the anime ladies need to have jiggly, Dead or Alive-level boob physics?). We Met in Virtual Reality begins as a chill hangout flick — we follow a group of friends as they have virtual drinks and go on joyrides in crudely-built VR cars — but it quickly moves beyond the novelty of its setting. One person credits their VRChat girlfriend for helping them to “unmute” after being silent for two years. An exotic performer explains that being able to dance for people in VRChat helped her grieve with a family tragedy and manage a bout of alcoholism.
The film chronicles how that exotic dancer, a young woman based in the UK, formed a romantic relationship with another VRChat user in Miami. These sorts of cyber relationships aren’t anything new, but the VR platform allowed them to do much more than trade links and memes over IM. They could exist in a space together, go on dates to new environments every night. I won’t spoil where things end up for the couple, but I can say that it wouldn’t have been nearly as effective outside of VR.
We Met in Virtual Reality effectively conveys why people would gravitate towards VRChat, especially during a pandemic. But it doesn’t fully capture the wonder of exploring these environments yourself. Seeing people hop on a virtual rollercoaster isn’t nearly as thrilling as doing it, where your entire field of vision is covered and you can easily get vertigo. But I don’t blame Hunting too much for that; his job was to boil down the VR experience so people can enjoy it on a 2D screen, and the film is mostly successful in that respect. The film was shot using a virtual camera that could mimic all of the functionality of a typical shooter, from focus points to aperture levels. So even though it’s produced in an alien environment most people aren’t familiar with, it still feels like a traditional documentary.
Hunting has spent the past few years making VR documentaries, starting with a few short films, as well as the series Virtually Speaking. It’s clear from We Met in Virtual Reality that he’s not just dropping into the community for a quick story. Instead, he sees the humanity behind the avatars and virtual connections. These people aren’t just escaping from their lives with VR — their lives are being made richer because of it.
Source: Engadget – ‘We Met in Virtual Reality’ finds love in the metaverse
Rumors surrounding Google’s forthcoming Pixel smartwatch have been circulating for more than a year, and while we know some details about the product, a specific release date hasn’t even been speculated.
Source: Gizmodo – Google Pixel Watch Launch Tipped for May
Two days after Ozzy Osbourne’s NFT collection were minted, supporters were being targeted by a phishing scam that drained cryptocurrency from their wallets, “playing off a bad link shared by the project’s official Twitter account,” reports The Verge. From the report: Like the majority of NFT projects, CryptoBatz uses Discord as a place to organize its community. The official CryptoBatz Discord is now accessed through the short link discord.gg/cryptobatz. But previously, the project used a slightly different vanity URL at discord.gg/cryptobatznft. When the project switched to the new URL, scammers set up a fake Discord server at the old one. But neither CryptoBatz nor Ozzy Osbourne took the precaution of deleting tweets referencing the previous URL, meaning that old tweets from Osbourne himself were left directing followers to a server now controlled by scammers.
One tweet from CryptoBatz, posted on December 31st, 2021, received more than 4,000 retweets and hundreds of replies. The tweet was only removed on January 21st after CryptoBatz was contacted by The Verge. On clicking the scam link, the invite panel for the fake Discord showed the total number of members as 1,330, an indication of the number of people who could potentially have been fooled by the scam. Inside the server, a bot spoofing community management service Collab Land asked users to verify their crypto assets to participate in the server — but directed users to a phishing site where they were prompted to connect their cryptocurrency wallets.
Tim Silman, a nonprofit employee, is one person who lost money through the scam. Silman estimates that around $300â”400 in ETH was drained from his wallet after he visited the fake Discord server through a link posted on the CryptoBatz website. […] An Ethereum wallet address Silman indicated was linked to the scammers had received a series of incoming transactions totaling 14.6 ETH ($40,895) on January 20th and sent it onwards to a wallet containing more than $150,000. The project had been slow to remove the bad links, even when informed, Silman said. Even as the fake link remained present in a prominent tweet, the CryptoBatz project continued to hype the public token mint. As of January 21st, CryptoBatz NFTs were being resold on OpenSea for around 1.8 ETH ($5,046). Sutter Systems, developers of the CryptoBatz NFT, laid blame for the scam squarely with Discord. “In our opinion this situation and hundreds of others that have taken place across other projects in the NFT space could have easily been prevented if Discord just had a better response/support/fraud team in place to help big projects like ours.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Ozzy Osbourne’s NFT Project Shared a Scam Link, and Followers Lost Thousands of Dollars
The second season of Star Trek: Picard premieres March 3, 2022 on Paramount+.
It has been a long, pandemic-fueled wait, but the second season of Star Trek: Picard is almost here, and we now have an official trailer. In addition to seeing Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) encounter his mischievous former frenemy, Q (John de Lancie), fans’ hearts will warm to see the retired Starfleet captain reunite with Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg), the El-Aurian bar hostess from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
As I wrote in my review last year, the series is set 20 years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis. The first season opened with Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) having retired to the family vineyard. His bucolic existence was interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious woman named Dahj (Isa Briones) who pleaded for his help. Alas, Picard failed to save her. She was killed in front of him by Romulan assassins belonging to a radical sect known as the Zhat Vash, who is dedicated to eradicating all artificial life forms. Picard discovered that Dahj was actually a synthetic—technically Data’s “daughter”—and she had a twin sister, Soji, who was also in danger.
Resolved to save Soji, Picard asked Starfleet for a ship, but he had been gone a long time, and his entreaties were rebuffed. Never one to admit defeat, Picard amassed his own scrappy crew over the next few episodes for his unauthorized rescue mission. The crew included Cristobal Rios (Santiago Cabrera), a skilled thief and pilot of the ship La Sirena; Raffi (Michelle Hurd), a former Starfleet intelligence officer and recovering addict; Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill); and a Romulan refugee, Elnor (Evan Evagora).
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Source: Ars Technica – Picard and Guinan have a warm reunion in S2 trailer for Star Trek: Picard
Enlarge / A tray of prepared syringes for booster vaccinations with Moderna’s vaccine. (credit: Getty | Picture alliance)
Amid the stratospheric rise of the omicron variant, real-world data on the effectiveness of COVID-19 booster doses is now rolling in—and it is only looking up for boosters.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported three studies Friday, two published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) and another, appearing in JAMA, by CDC scientists.
One of the MMWR studies looked at the vaccination status of nearly 10 million COVID-19 cases from 25 state and local health departments. CDC scientists and health officials compared weekly rates of COVID-19 infections between unvaccinated people, fully vaccinated people, and fully vaccinated people who were also boosted. In the month of December, as cases of the ultra-transmissible omicron variant skyrocketed, unvaccinated people were nearly three times more likely to report a case of COVID-19 than people fully vaccinated. Compared with fully vaccinated and boosted people, the unvaccinated were five times more likely to report a case.
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Source: Ars Technica – Unvaccinated 5X more likely to get omicron than those boosted, CDC reports
An open source cloud data lake platform, Apache Hudi, is powering data lake efforts at large corporations. Learn more here.
The post Apache Hudi Powering Data Lakes at Walmart and Disney appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – Apache Hudi Powering Data Lakes at Walmart and Disney
It’s been nearly one year since NVIDIA’s last update to Quake II RTX as their port of Quake II to using Vulkan ray-tracing extensions for RTX path-traced global illumination. Fortunately, that changed today as they are out with a big update in the form of Quake II RTX v1.6…
Source: Phoronix – NVIDIA Releases Quake II RTX 1.6 With Support For AMD FidelityFX FSR
Back in September, Robinhood announced plans to test a cryptocurrency wallet within its app. At the time, the company said it would open the beta to a small number of people before expanding availability ahead of a full-scale release. If you joined the waiting list Robinhood create, you can now test the wallet for yourself – provided you were one of the first 1,000 people to sign up for the beta.
In a blog post the company published today, Robinhood said it would invite 10,000 individuals to the beta by March, with more to follow later. In addition to storing cryptocurrencies, the company’s wallet allows you to move them off the app to other external wallets. During the testing period, the company will limit daily withdrawals to a total of $2,999. It will also limit users to 10 transactions per day, and, to take part in the beta, you’ll need to enable two-factor authentication. With today’s rollout, the wallet supports Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin.
As it works to polish the wallet, Robinhood says it will add “delightful” QR scanning experiences and an improved transaction history interface, among other features. When Robinhood first announced the wallet beta, it told The Verge it planned to make the feature available to everyone sometime in 2022.
Source: Engadget – Robinhood opens cryptocurrency wallet to beta testers
When Ahsoka Tano appeared on The Mandalorian, fans went nuts. When it was announced the Jedi Apprentice to Anakin Skywalker was getting her own show, they got even more excited. And now that show is gearing up for production and is continuing to add to its awesome cast.
Source: Gizmodo – The Ahsoka Star Wars Show Adds Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Enlarge / Don’t try this at home. Seriously. We mean it. (credit: Anna Efetova)
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have tested a wide range of drugs to see if they inhibit the virus. Most of these tests didn’t end up going anywhere; even the few drugs that did work typically required concentrations that would be impossible to achieve inside human cells. And a few (looking at you, ivermectin and chloroquine) took off with the public despite iffy evidence for effectiveness, seemingly causing nearly as many problems as they would have solved if they actually worked.
Nevertheless, two years on, word of yet another one of these drug experiments caused a bit of a stir, as the drug in question was a cannabinoid. Now, the full data has gone through peer review, and it looks better than you might expect. But the number of caveats is pretty staggering: the effect is small, it hasn’t been tested in patients, the quality assurance of commercial cannabidiol (CBD) products is nearly nonexistent, and—probably most importantly—another cannabinoid blocks the effect entirely.
With that out of the way, on to the data.
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Source: Ars Technica – Two cannabinoids have opposing effects on SARS-CoV-2 in culture
Alphabet’s Google asked a federal judge on Friday to dismiss the majority of an antitrust lawsuit filed by Texas and other states that accused the search giant of abusing its dominance of the online advertising market. Reuters reports: Google said in its court filing that the states failed to show that it illegally worked with Facebook, now Meta, to counter “header bidding,” a technology that publishers developed to make more money from advertising placed on their websites. Facebook is not a defendant in the lawsuit. The states had also alleged that Google used at least three programs to manipulate ad auctions to coerce advertisers and publishers into using Google’s tools. Google responded that the states had a “collection of grievances” but no proof of wrongdoing. On some allegations, Google argued the states waited too long to file its lawsuit.
“They criticize Google for not designing its products to better suit its rivals’ needs and for making improvements to those products that leave its competitors too far behind. They see the ‘solution’ to Google’s success as holding Google back,” the company said in its filing. Google asked for four of the six counts to be dismissed with prejudice, which means that it could not be brought back to the same court.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said they would press on with the fight. “The company whose motto was once ‘Don’t Be Evil’ now asks the world to examine their egregious monopoly abuses and see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil,” he said in a statement. The Texas lawsuit had two other claims based on state law and made against Google which were stayed in September. The search giant did not ask for them to be dismissed on Friday but may in the future.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Google Asks Judge To Dismiss Most of Texas Antitrust Lawsuit
For the second time in as many years, American fascist organization Patriot Front is facing a humiliating leak of internal communications, messages revealing a trove of evidence pointing to coordinated criminal activities in multiple states, including New York, Washington, Indiana, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Oregon.
Source: Gizmodo – Leaked Chats Reveal Evidence of Hate Crimes by U.S. Fascists
Nobody Saves the World is a game about filling up meters, leveling up, and watching the numbers get bigger. At first I didn’t think it was quite working for me, but like the video game equivalent of an earworm wriggling its way into my grey matter, it wasn’t long before the hours started flying by without me even…
Source: Kotaku – Nobody Saves The World Turns Zelda Into A Super Satisfying Dungeon Grind
Steven Soderbergh is even worse at retiring than Hayao Miyazaki. Despite his stated intent to stop making films and try his hand at painting way back in 2013 (when he said “movies don’t matter anymore”) he’s about to drop his third film in two years (after Let Them All Talk and No Sudden Move), direct to HBO Max.
Source: LifeHacker – What’s New on HBO Max in February 2022
