Slashdot reader TranquilVoid writes: To better understand the battles between native and invasive ants, scientists at Australia’s national science agency have turned to Microsoft’s classic computer game to model ant warfare.

Across Australia, 50 different species of invasive ants have established themselves, including electric ants, fire ants and yellow crazy ants, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent attempting to eradicate them.

“Ants are one of the few groups of animal species in which warfare resembles human warfare, in terms of scale and mortality,” researcher Samuel Lymbery said. The research found small armies of strong soldiers did better in complex terrain-based battlefields and large armies of weaker soldiers fared better in simple open battlefields. In the ant world, a simple battlefield would be a footpath or park while a complex battlefield would be bushland with undergrowth and woody debris.

Dr Lymbery said his work could help develop new approaches to habitat management, like adding undergrowth or more environmental complexity back into urbanised environments, to tip the competitive balance back in favour of native ants.

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Source: Slashdot – Australian Scientists Use ‘Age of Empires’ To Simulate Ant Warfare

An announcement from MIT News:

One promising approach to treating Type 1 diabetes is implanting pancreatic islet cells that can produce insulin when needed, which can free patients from giving themselves frequent insulin injections. However, one major obstacle to this approach is that once the cells are implanted, they eventually run out of oxygen and stop producing insulin.

To overcome that hurdle, MIT engineers have designed a new implantable device that not only carries hundreds of thousands of insulin-producing islet cells, but also has its own on-board oxygen factory, which generates oxygen by splitting water vapor found in the body. The researchers showed that when implanted into diabetic mice, this device could keep the mice’s blood glucose levels stable for at least a month. The researchers now hope to create a larger version of the device, about the size of a stick of chewing gum, that could eventually be tested in people with Type 1 diabetes.

“You can think of this as a living medical device that is made from human cells that secrete insulin, along with an electronic life support-system,” says Daniel Anderson, a professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and the senior author of the study.

While the researchers’ main focus is on diabetes treatment, they say that this kind of device could also be adapted to treat other diseases that require repeated delivery of therapeutic proteins.
Thanks to Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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Source: Slashdot – MIT Creates an Implantable Device That Produces Insulin

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters:

In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden’s administration is facing pressure from some lawmakers to restrict American companies from working on a freely available chip technology widely used in China — a move that could upend how the global technology industry collaborates across borders…

RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for anything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for artificial intelligence… The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernize its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to put constraints on work by U.S. companies on RISC-V…

Executives from China’s Huawei Technologies have embraced RISC-V as a pillar of that nation’s progress in developing its own chips. But the United States and its allies also have jumped on the technology, with chip giant Qualcomm working with a group of European automotive firms on RISC-V chips and Alphabet’s Google saying it will make Android, the world’s most popular mobile operating system, work on RISC-V chips…

Jack Kang, vice president of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, California-based startup using RISC-V, said potential U.S. government restrictions on American companies regarding RISC-V would be a “tremendous tragedy.” “It would be like banning us from working on the internet,” Kang said. “It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created.”

One U.S. Representative said the Chinese Communist Party was “abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips.

“U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws.”

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Source: Slashdot – Some US Lawmakers Want to Restrict American Companies From Working on RISC-V Chip Technology

In downtown San Francisco two vehicles were stopped at a red light on Monday night, reports the Washington Post — a regular car and a Cruise robotaxi.
Both vehicles advanced when the light turned green, according to witness accounts and video recorded by the Cruise vehicle’s internal cameras and reviewed by The Post. As the cars moved forward, the pedestrian entered the traffic lanes in front of them, according to the video, and was struck by the regular car. The video shows the victim rolling onto that vehicle’s windshield and then being flung into the path of the driverless car, which stopped once it collided with the woman. According to Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow, the autonomous vehicle “braked aggressively to minimize the impact” but was unable to stop before rolling over the woman and coming to a halt. Photos published by the San Francisco Chronicle show the woman’s leg sticking out from underneath the car’s left rear wheel.

“According to Cruise, police had directed the company to keep the vehicle stationary, apparently with the pedestrian stuck beneath it,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

Also from the San Francisco Chronicle:
Austin Tutone, a bicycle delivery person, saw the woman trapped underneath the Cruise car and tried to reassure her as they waited for first-responders. “I told her, ‘The ambulance is coming’ and that she’d be okay. She was just screaming.” He shared a photo of the aftermath with The Chronicle that appears to show the car tire on the woman’s leg. San Francisco firefighters arrived and used the jaws of life to lift the car off the woman. She was transported to San Francisco General Hospital with “multiple traumatic injuries,” said SFFD Capt. Justin Schorr. The victim was in critical condition as of late Tuesday afternoon, according to the hospital.

It appears that once the Cruise car sensed something underneath its rear axle, it came to a halt and turned on its hazard lights, Schorr said. Firefighters obstructed the sensors of the driverless car to alert the Cruise control center. He said representatives from Cruise responded to firefighters and “immediately disabled the car remotely.”

More from the San Francisco Chronicle:
“When it comes to someone pinned beneath a vehicle, the most effective way to unpin them is to lift the vehicle,” Sgt. Kathryn Winters, a spokesperson for the department, said in an interview. Were a driver to move a vehicle with a person lying there, “you run the risk of causing more injury.” Once the person is freed, the car must stay in place as police gather evidence including “the location of the vehicle and/or vehicles before, during and after the collision,” said Officer Eve Laokwansathitaya, another spokesperson.
The human driver who struck the pedestrian immediately fled the scene, and has not yet been identified.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Freak Accident in San Francisco Traps Pedestrian Under Robotaxi

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Tens of thousands of Android devices have been shipped to end-users with backdoored firmware, according to a warning from cybersecurity vendor Human Security. As part of the global cybercriminal operation called BadBox (PDF), Human Security found a threat actor relied on supply chain compromise to infect the firmware of more than 70,000 Android smartphones, CTV boxes, and tablet devices with the Triada malware. The infected devices come from at least one Chinese manufacturer but, before they are delivered to resellers, physical retail stores, and e-commerce warehouses, a backdoor was injected into their firmware. “Products known to contain the backdoor have been found on public school networks throughout the United States,” Human says.

Discovered in 2016, Triada is a modular trojan residing in a device’s RAM, relying on the Zygote process to hook all applications on Android, actively using root privileges to substitute system files. Over time, the malware went through various iterations and was found pre-installed on low-cost Android devices on at least two occasions. As part of the BadBox operation that Human Security discovered, the infected low-cost Android devices allow threat actors to carry out various ad-fraud schemes, including one named PeachPit, which at its peak relied on 121,000 Android and 159,000 iOS devices infected with malware, and on 39 Android, iOS, and CTV-centric apps designed to connect to a fake supply-side platform (SSP).

One of the modules delivered to the infected devices from the command-and-control (C&C) server allows the creation of WebViews that are fully hidden from the user, but which “are used to request, render, and click on ads, spoofing the ad requests to look like they’re coming from certain apps, referred by certain websites, and rendered” on specific devices. BadBox, Human Security notes, also includes a residential proxy module that allows the threat actors to sell access to the victim’s network. Furthermore, they can create WhatsApp messaging accounts and Gmail accounts they can then use for other malicious activities. “Finally, because of the backdoor’s connection to C2 servers on BadBox-infected smartphones, tablets, and CTV boxes, new apps or code can be remotely installed by the threat actors without the device owner’s permission. The threat actors behind BadBox could develop entirely new schemes and deploy them on BadBox-infected devices without any interaction from the devices’ owners,” Human notes.

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Source: Slashdot – Android Devices With Backdoored Firmware Found In US Schools

Scientists using the H.E.S.S. observatory in Namibia have detected the highest energy gamma rays ever from a dead star called a pulsar. Phys.Org reports: The energy of these gamma rays clocked in at 20 tera-electronvolts, or about 10 trillion times the energy of visible light. This observation is hard to reconcile with the theory of the production of such pulsed gamma rays, as the international team reports in the journal Nature Astronomy. […] The Vela pulsar, located in the Southern sky in the constellation Vela (sail of the ship), is the brightest pulsar in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum and the brightest persistent source of cosmic gamma rays in the giga-electronvolts (GeV) range. It rotates about eleven times per second. However, above a few GeV, its radiation ends abruptly, presumably because the electrons reach the end of the pulsar’s magnetosphere and escape from it. But this is not the end of the story: using deep observations with H.E.S.S., a new radiation component at even higher energies has now been discovered, with energies of up to tens of tera-electronvolts (TeV).

“That is about 200 times more energetic than all radiation ever detected before from this object,” says co-author Christo Venter from the North-West University in South Africa. This very high-energy component appears at the same phase intervals as the one observed in the GeV range. However, to attain these energies, the electrons might have to travel even farther than the magnetosphere, yet the rotational emission pattern needs to remain intact. “This result challenges our previous knowledge of pulsars and requires a rethinking of how these natural accelerators work,” says Arache Djannati-Atai from the Astroparticle & Cosmology (APC) laboratory in France, who led the research. “The traditional scheme according to which particles are accelerated along magnetic field lines within or slightly outside the magnetosphere cannot sufficiently explain our observations. Perhaps we are witnessing the acceleration of particles through the so-called magnetic reconnection process beyond the light cylinder, which still somehow preserves the rotational pattern? But even this scenario faces difficulties to explain how such extreme radiation is produced.”

Whatever the explanation, next to its other superlatives, the Vela pulsar now officially holds the record as the pulsar with the highest-energy gamma rays discovered to date. “This discovery opens a new observation window for detection of other pulsars in the tens of teraelectronvolt range with current and upcoming more sensitive gamma-ray telescopes, hence paving the way for a better understanding of the extreme acceleration processes in highly magnetized astrophysical objects,” says Djannati-Atai.

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Source: Slashdot – Scientists Discover the Highest Energy Gamma-Rays Ever From a Pulsar

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the ozone hole above Antarctica reached approximately 10 million square miles in area on Sept. 16, 2023 — making it one of the largest seasonal holes ever observed. Space.com reports: One possible reason for the higher-than-normal growth is the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption in January 2022, which introduced massive quantities of water vapor into the air. “The water vapor could have led to the heightened formation of polar stratospheric clouds, where chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) can react and accelerate ozone depletion,” said Inness. Yet despite experiencing large seasonal growth this year, the ozone hole is still decreasing in size overall. “Based on the Montreal Protocol and the decrease of anthropogenic ozone-depleting substances, scientists currently predict that the global ozone layer will reach its normal state again by around 2050,” said Claus Zehner, ESA’s mission manager for Copernicus Sentinel-5P.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – The Ozone Hole Above Antarctica Has Grown To Three Times the Size of Brazil

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: Recently, several mammals have been reported to “glow” under ultraviolet (UV) light, including our beloved platypus. But no one knew how common it was among mammals until now. Our research, published in Royal Society Open Science today, found this glow — known as fluorescence — is extremely common. Almost every mammal we studied showed some form of fluorescence. […] We started with the platypus to see if we could replicate the previously reported fluorescence. We photographed preserved and frozen platypus specimens under UV light and observed a fluorescent (although rather faint) glow. […] We repeated this process for other mammals and found clear evidence of fluorescence in the white fur, spines and even skin and nails of koalas, Tasmanian devils, short-beaked echidnas, southern hairy-nosed wombats, quendas (bandicoots), greater bilbies and even cats. Both fresh-frozen and chemically treated museum specimens were fluorescent. This meant it wasn’t preservation chemicals such as borax or arsenic causing the fluorescence. So, we concluded this was a real biological phenomenon.

Using specimens from the Western Australian Museum’s collection, we took the experiment to the next stage. We recorded every species of mammal that was fluorescent when we exposed the specimens to UV light. As a result, we found 125 fluorescent species of mammal, representing all known orders. Fluorescence is clearly common and widely distributed among mammals. In particular, we noticed that white and light-colored fur is fluorescent, with dark pigmentation preventing fluorescence. For example, a zebra’s white stripes fluoresced while the dark stripes didn’t. We then used our dataset to test if fluorescence might be more common in nocturnal species. To do this, we correlated the total area of fluorescence with ecological traits such as nocturnality, diet and locomotion. Nocturnal mammals were indeed more fluorescent, while aquatic species were less fluorescent than those that burrowed, lived in trees, or on land.

Based on our results, we think fluorescence is very common in mammals. In fact, it is likely the default status of hair unless it is heavily pigmented. This doesn’t mean fluorescence has a biological function — it may just be an artifact of the structural properties of unpigmented hair. However, we suggest florescence may be important for brightening pale-colored parts of animals that are used as visual signals. This could improve their visibility, especially in poor light — just like the fluorescent optical brighteners that are added to white paper and clothing.

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Source: Slashdot – Fluorescent Mammals Are Much More Common Than You’d Think

Tom Perkins writes via The Guardian: Almost half of a federal government panel that helps develop US nutritional guidelines has significant ties to big agriculture, ultra-processed food companies, pharmaceutical companies and other corporate organizations with a significant stake in the process’s outcome. The revelation is part of a new report from US Right to Know, a government transparency group that looked for ties to corporate interests among the 20-member panel of food and nutrition experts that makes recommendations for updating the US government’s official dietary guidelines.

It found nine members had ties to Nestle, Pfizer, Coca-Cola, the National Egg Board and other prominent food lobby groups, among others. The findings raise questions about whether the panel is looking out for Americans’ health or corporate profits, and “erodes confidence in dietary guidelines,” said Gary Ruskin of US Right to Know. “Millions of Americans’ lives are affected by this report and it’s crucial that the report tell the truth to American people and it’s not degraded into another sales pitch for big food and big pharma,” he said. […]

“The guidelines affect the entire US food system quite strongly,” Ruskin said. US Right to Know scoured public records dating back five years for conflicts of interest among the 20 panel members. In addition to the nine it found with “high-risk conflicts of interest” and connections to the food and drug industry, it found four more members who have possible conflicts of interest. It applauded the agencies for appointing seven members who did not appear to have any conflicts. At least four panelists have connections to at least two companies each among Abbott, Novo Nordisk, the National Dairy Council, Eli Lilly and Weight Watchers International. One panel member has received about $240,000 in grant funding from Eli Lilly.

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Source: Slashdot – US Nutrition Panel’s Ties To Top Food Giants Revealed In New Report

Simon Sharwood writes via The Register: The Chinese manufacturer that took over IBM’s PC business announced on Thursday that it’s teamed with an outfit named Esper that specializes in custom cuts of Android, plus device management offerings. Android is most commonly used in handheld devices. Lenovo’s taking it in an entirely different direction by making the ThinkCentre M70a: a desktop all-in-one.

The first fruit of the collaboration with Esper, the ThinkCentre M70a boasts a 21 — inch touch screen and offers a choice of 12th-gen Intel core CPUs from the Core i3 to the almost workstation-grade Core i9, at prices from $889 to beyond $1250. What could you do with Android on a Corei9, plus the maximum 16GB DDR4 3200MHz and 512GB PCIe SSD Lenovo’s machines allow? Almost anything — but Lenovo thinks its Android effort will first be appreciated by customers in the retail, hospitality, and healthcare industries. Esper pitches its wares as ideal for point-of-sale systems, kiosks, and digital signage — environments where users don’t need to access diverse apps but do need a machine that reliably boots into custom environments.

Lenovo’s not just doing desktop PCs. The number one PC maker by market share has promised it will also ship Esper’s wares on the small form factor ThinkCentre M70q — a machine designed to be bolted to the back of monitors. The ThinkEdge SE30 — a ruggedized and fanless edge client — will also have an Android option. So will the ThinkCentre M90n-1 IoT [PDF] — another rugged client for edge applications.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Lenovo To Offer Android PCs, Starting With an All-In-One That Can Pack a Core i9

Jonathan Greig writes via The Record: Genetic testing giant 23andMe confirmed that a data scraping incident resulted in hackers gaining access to sensitive user information and selling it on the dark web. The information of nearly 7 million 23andMe users was offered for sale on a cybercriminal forum this week. The information included origin estimation, phenotype, health information, photos, identification data and more. 23andMe processes saliva samples submitted by customers to determine their ancestry.

When asked about the post, the company initially denied that the information was legitimate, calling it a “misleading claim” in a statement to Recorded Future News. The company later said it was aware that certain 23andMe customer profile information was compiled through unauthorized access to individual accounts that were signed up for the DNA Relative feature — which allows users to opt in for the company to show them potential matches for relatives. […] When pressed on how compromising a handful of user accounts would give someone access to millions of users, the spokesperson said the company does not believe the threat actor had access to all of the accounts but rather gained unauthorized entry to a much smaller number of 23andMe accounts and scraped data from their DNA Relative matches.

A researcher approached Recorded Future News after examining the leaked database and found that much of it looked real. […] The researcher downloaded two files from the BreachForums post and found that one had information on 1 million 23andMe users of Ashkenazi heritage. The other file included data on more than 300,000 users of Chinese heritage. The data included profile and account ID numbers, names, gender, birth year, maternal and paternal genetic markers, ancestral heritage results, and data on whether or not each user has opted into 23andme’s health data. The researcher added that he discovered another issue where someone could enter a 23andme profile ID, like the ones included in the leaked data set, into their URL and see someone’s profile. The data available through this only includes profile photos, names, birth years and location but does not include test results.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – 23andMe Scraping Incident Leaked Data On 1.3 Million Users

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A man who admitted attempting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II with a crossbow after discussing his plan with an AI-powered chatbot has been sentenced to 9 years in prison for treason. It’s the UK’s first treason conviction in more than 40 years. Jaswant Singh Chail, who was 19 at the time of his arrest on Christmas Day, 2021, scaled the walls of Windsor Castle’s grounds with a mask and a loaded high-power crossbow. He said his intent was, as a British Sikh, to assassinate the Queen in a Star Wars-inspired plan to avenge the 1919 Jallianwalla Bagh massacre, a colonial-era atrocity during British rule in India. Prosecutors said that Chail was encouraged to undertake this plot after discussing it at length with an AI-powered chatbot that egged him on and bolstered his resolve. […] Chail is currently being held at Broadmoor high-security hospital and will remain there until he is psychologically well enough to serve his sentence.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Man Jailed In UK’s First Treason Conviction In 40 Years Was Encouraged By AI Chatbot

Kylie Robison writes via Fortune: Beginning on Monday, Slack employees will be expected to set aside their regular work duties and to instead plug away at various modules on Salesforce’s Trailhead online learning platform, Fortune has learned. The goal is for Slack’s employees to reach Trailhead’s Ranger level, a feat that requires roughly 40 hours on the learning platform, whose modules include topics like “Learn about the Fourth Industrial Revolution” and “Healthy Eating.” A large percent of Slack’s roughly 3,000 staff have neglected to hit the target, according to sources inside the company. And since Salesforce provides Trailhead to other businesses as a way to “upskill” employees, some speculate that the slackers at Slack make for bad optics.

In a message to employees in mid-September, Slack CEO Lidiane Jones wrote that the one week shutdown, dubbed “Ranger Week,” is intended to give everyone “dedicated time to make a lot of progress towards the goal.” Jones wrote in her message that the product development engineering (PDE), customer experience (CE), Biz Ops, and communication departments are expected to participate in Ranger Week. “It’s important that we all reach Ranger status this year, and I want to ensure that everyone has focus time to upskill on Trailhead,” Jones wrote in the message to staff. “I know this will disrupt and slow V2MOM progress for many of us — we are making this a priority now so we can quickly get back to work on our roadmaps,” she said, referring to the company’s annual forward-looking strategy planning document which stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures. […]

“We really are canceling all meetings next week to facilitate this heads-down time, even 1:1s,” Slack’s chief of staff to the CTO wrote to employees on Wednesday. “We don’t know yet what will happen to people who haven’t hit Ranger by Jan. 31. At a minimum, it will make Slack look bad compared to the other clouds. Please do use the time next week to make as much progress as you can!” […] Still, the work stoppage is somewhat porous. Slack’s CTO noted that “deploys, on-call rotations, and interviews” will still happen as normal, and while no executive has used the word “mandatory,” it’s considered strongly encouraged. According to Insider, some workers at Slack are “gaming” the platform to speed through the sessions.

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Source: Slashdot – All Slack Employees Forced To Spend a Week Getting Salesforce Certifications

The National Security Agency (NSA), in partnership with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), have highlighted the ten most common cybersecurity misconfigurations in large organizations. In their join cybersecurity advisory (CSA), they also detail the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) actors use to exploit these misconfigurations. From the report: Through NSA and CISA Red and Blue team assessments, as well as through the activities of NSA and CISA Hunt and Incident Response teams, the agencies identified the following 10 most common network misconfigurations:
1. Default configurations of software and applications
2. Improper separation of user/administrator privilege
3. Insufficient internal network monitoring
4. Lack of network segmentation
5. Poor patch management
6. Bypass of system access controls
7. Weak or misconfigured multifactor authentication (MFA) methods
8. Insufficient access control lists (ACLs) on network shares and services
9. Poor credential hygiene
10. Unrestricted code execution

NSA and CISA encourage network defenders to implement the recommendations found within the Mitigations section of this advisory — including the following — to reduce the risk of malicious actors exploiting the identified misconfigurations: Remove default credentials and harden configurations; Disable unused services and implement access controls; Update regularly and automate patching, prioritizing patching of known exploited vulnerabilities; and Reduce, restrict, audit, and monitor administrative accounts and privileges.

NSA and CISA urge software manufacturers to take ownership of improving security outcomes of their customers by embracing secure-by-design and-default tactics, including: Embedding security controls into product architecture from the start of development and throughout the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC); Eliminating default passwords; Providing high-quality audit logs to customers at no extra charge; and Mandating MFA, ideally phishing-resistant, for privileged users and making MFA a default rather than opt-in feature. A PDF version of the report can be downloaded here (PDF).

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Source: Slashdot – NSA Shares Top Ten Cybersecurity Misconfigurations

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told the Verge that he has found a solution to one of AI’s biggest copyright problems: creators suing because AI models were trained on their original works without consent or compensation. To prove it’s possible for AI makers to respect artists’ copyrights, Getty built an AI tool using only licensed data that’s designed to reward creators more and more as the tool becomes more popular over time. “I think a world that doesn’t reward investment in intellectual property is a pretty sad world,” Peters told The Verge. The conversation happened at Vox Media’s Code Conference 2023, with Peters explaining why Getty Images — which manages “the world’s largest privately held visual archive” — has a unique perspective on this divisive issue.

In February, Getty Images sued Stability AI over copyright concerns regarding the AI company’s image generator, Stable Diffusion. Getty alleged that Stable Diffusion was trained on 12 million Getty images and even imitated Getty’s watermark — controversially seeming to add a layer of Getty’s authenticity to fake AI images. Now, Getty has rolled out its own AI image generator that has been trained in ways that are unlike most of the popular image generators out there. Peters told The Verge that because of Getty’s ongoing mission to capture the world’s most iconic images, “Generative AI by Getty Images” was intentionally designed to avoid major copyright concerns swirling around AI images — and compensate Getty creators fairly.

Rather than crawling the web for data to feed its AI model, Getty’s tool is trained exclusively on images that Getty owns the rights to, Peters said. The tool was created out of rising demand from Getty Images customers who want access to AI generators that don’t carry copyright risks. […] With that as the goal, Peters told Code Conference attendees that the tool is “entirely commercially safe” and “cannot produce third-party intellectual property” or deepfakes because the AI model would have no references from which to produce such risky content. Getty’s AI tool “doesn’t know what the Pope is,” Peters told The Verge. “It doesn’t know what [Balenciaga] is, and it can’t produce a merging of the two.” Peters also said that if there are any lawsuits over AI images generated by Getty, then Getty will cover any legal costs for customers. “We actually put our indemnification around that so that if there are any issues, which we’re confident there won’t be, we’ll stand behind that,” Peters said. When asked how Getty creators will be paid for AI training data, Peters said that there currently isn’t a tool for Getty to assess which artist deserves credit every time an AI image is generated. “Instead, Getty will rely on a fixed model that Peters said determines ‘what proportion of the training set does your content represent? And then, how has that content performed in our licensing world over time? It’s kind of a proxy for quality and quantity. So, it’s kind of a blend of the two,'” reports Ars.

“Importantly, Peters suggested that Getty isn’t married to using this rewards system and would adapt its methods for rewarding creators by continually monitoring how customers are using the AI tool.”

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Source: Slashdot – Getty Images Built a ‘Socially Responsible’ AI Tool That Rewards Artists

Atari just announced preorders for a physical cartridge for the company’s once-ubiquitous 2600 console. From a report: A gaming console that counts 1982 as its most successful year is releasing another new cartridge in the year 2023. The game-in-question is called Save Mary and was actually developed during the console’s golden years, before being shelved when the 2600 went the way of the dodo. Save Mary was in development for two whole years, which is a lifetime in the generation of gaming that preceded the NES. The normal timeframe to produce a game back then was six to nine months, with some notorious titles taking just five or six weeks. Save Mary was originally developed by veteran Atari staffer Tod Frye, the guy behind the 2600 version of Pac-Man and the Swordquest series.

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Source: Slashdot – Atari Releasing New Cartridge For Its 46-Year-Old 2600 Console

Lawmakers in the United States last year passed bipartisan legislation intended to maintain US competitiveness with countries such as China by boosting funding for science and innovation. But concerns are mounting that the US Congress will fail to deliver on its promises. From a report: The money allotted to a handful of major US science agencies that had been targeted for a budget boost is likely to fall short of the legislation’s goals by more than US$7 billion in 2024, according to a report. And overall funding for those agencies will continue to hover at a 25-year low.

“We’re leaving scientific opportunities on the table,” says Matt Hourihan, who led the analysis for the Federation of American Scientists, an advocacy group based in Washington DC. “If we drop this ball, others will be happy to pick it up.” It was precisely this fear that drove members of Congress to come together to pass the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. The legislation promised one of the largest increases in US science funding in a long time, totalling some $280 billion over five years. Much of the spending mandated by the bill was focused on semiconductor research and manufacturing — areas in which other countries, particularly China, have dominated. Lawmakers also authorized investments in other science and innovation programmes, but these were not mandated, and need to be approved by Congress during an appropriations process each year.

That process has become increasingly contentious as political polarization in the United States has risen over the past few decades. Disputes about overall spending levels and funding for various social programmes have led to repeated delays in crafting the annual budget, at times forcing the government to shut down. This year is a prime example: Republicans, who control the US House of Representatives, blocked legislation that would have allowed the government to increase the federal debt limit and pay its bills, until they were able to secure an agreement with the Democrats in May to limit spending. And last month, a handful of extreme right-wing Republicans sought to close the government down as they pushed for further spending cuts.

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Source: Slashdot – US Science Agencies on Track To Hit 25-Year Funding Low

Amazon has launched its first two satellites for its Project Kuiper, the tech giant’s initiative to build a massive constellation of satellites that can provide internet coverage to Earth. From a report: An Atlas V rocket, operated by United Launch Alliance, lofted the pair of satellites en route to orbit from Florida at 2:06 p.m. local time Friday. The mission is still ongoing, and it’s unclear when the satellites will be deployed from the rocket.

Project Kuiper’s goal is to eventually put 3,326 satellites into low Earth orbit, where they will beam broadband internet service to the ground below, similar to Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink. The two launched Friday, KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2, are test satellites that will allow Amazon to demonstrate the ability to send and receive broadband signals. This mission has been long delayed. Amazon originally hoped to launch these satellites a year ago on a different, experimental rocket. However, the company wound up switching the launch vehicle for these satellites multiple times, eventually landing on ULA’s workhorse Atlas V rocket, in order to get the satellites into space more quickly.

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Source: Slashdot – Amazon Launches First Satellites for Kuiper Space Internet System

PayPal has been hit with a class action lawsuit by consumers represented by law firm Hagens Berman alleging that the fintech giant’s anti-steering rules stifle competition against lower-cost payment platforms such as Stripe and Shopify. From a report: Specifically, according to an investigation conducted by the firm’s consumer rights attorneys, PayPal has subjected consumers to excess charges when purchasing from online merchants that accept PayPal or Venmo. The suit states that PayPal’s merchant agreements, which all merchants must sign to accept payments via its platform, leads to consumers paying more to make purchases. The attorneys charge that “if PayPal’s agreements were transparent, consumers would quickly see a price difference between PayPal and Venmo and its competitors.”

Specifically, per PayPal’s anti-steering rules, if a retailer accepts PayPal or Venmo payments, they agree not to offer any discounts or inducements to persuade consumers to use other payment options that have a lower cost. These discounts are treated as a “surcharge” on PayPal transactions and prohibited by PayPal’s anti-steering rules. Merchants also cannot tell customers that other payment methods are more cost-effective or preferred, according to the complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Merchants are also not allowed to present other forms of payment earlier in the checkout process.

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Source: Slashdot – PayPal Faces New Antitrust Lawsuit Claiming It Unfairly Stifles Competition With Stripe, Shopify

Microsoft has launched a new web version of its app store for Windows. From a report: It’s designed as a replacement for the existing way to find Windows apps on the web, with links from the site opening in the Microsoft Store client on Windows 10 or Windows 11. The software giant has ditched its old React codebase from its previous web version of the Microsoft Store and replaced it with a modern web version that uses Shoelace, Lit, Vite, and a C# ASPNET backend. “The old site was a React codebase built on an obsoleted UI framework,” explains Microsoft engineer Judah Gabriel in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “We created a fresh user experience with a thoughtfully designed interface, easier ways to discover new apps, modern web tech stack. I hope folks will find it useful.”

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Launches New Web App Store for Windows