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fliptop writes:

An undersea fiber optic cable between Latvia and Sweden was damaged on Sunday, likely as a result of external influence, Latvia said, triggering an investigation by local and NATO maritime forces in the Baltic Sea:

"We have determined that there is most likely external damage and that it is significant," Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina told reporters following an extraordinary government meeting.

Latvia is coordinating with NATO and the countries of the Baltic Sea region to clarify the circumstances, she said separately in a post on X.

Latvia's navy earlier on Sunday said it had dispatched a patrol boat to inspect a ship and that two other vessels were also subject to investigation.

From Zerohedge's coverage:

Over the past 18 months, three alarming incidents have been reported in which commercial ships traveling to or from Russian ports are suspected of severing undersea cables in the Baltic region.

Washington Post recently cited Western officials who said these cable incidents are likely maritime accidents - not sabotage by Russia and/or China.

Due to all the cable severing risks, intentional and unintentional, a report from late November via TechCrunch [linked by submitter] said Meta planned a new "W" formation undersea cable route around the world to "avoid areas of geopolitical tension."

Related:

• NATO Plans to Build Satellite Links as Backups to Undersea Cables
• Finnish Investigators Discover Anchor Drag Marks of "Almost a Hundred Kilometers" in Cable Case
• Undersea Power Cable Connecting Finland And Estonia Experiences Outage Capacity Reduced To 35%
• Two Undersea Internet Cables Connecting Finland and Sweden to Europe Have Been Cut

Original Submission

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/28/1110613/mice-with-two-dads-crispr/

Mice with two dads have been created using CRISPR

It's a new way to create "bi-paternal" mice that can survive to adulthood—but human applications are still a long way off.

Mice with two fathers have been born—and have survived to adulthood—following a complex set of experiments by a team in China.

Zhi-Kun Li at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues used CRISPR to create the mice, using a novel approach to target genes that normally need to be inherited from both male and female parents. They hope to use the same approach to create primates with two dads.

Scientists might soon be able to create eggs and sperm from skin and blood cells. What will that mean?

Humans are off limits for now, but the work does help us better understand a strange biological phenomenon known as imprinting, which causes certain genes to be expressed differently depending on which parent they came from. For these genes, animals inherit part of a "dose" from each parent, and the two must work in harmony to create a healthy embryo. Without both doses, gene expression can go awry, and the resulting embryos can end up with abnormalities.

This is what researchers have found in previous attempts to create mice with two dads. In the 1980s, scientists in the UK tried injecting the DNA-containing nucleus of a sperm cell into a fertilized egg cell. The resulting embryos had DNA from two males (as well as a small amount of DNA from a female, in the cytoplasm of the egg).

But when these embryos were transferred to the uteruses of surrogate mouse mothers, none of them resulted in a healthy birth, seemingly because imprinted genes from both paternal and maternal genomes are needed for development.

upstart writes:

Physicist used interaction graphs to show how pieces attack and defend to analyze 20,000 top matches:

The game of chess has long been central to computer science and AI-related research, most notably in IBM's Deep Blue in the 1990s and, more recently, AlphaZero. But the game is about more than algorithms, according to Marc Barthelemy, a physicist at the Paris-Saclay University in France, with layers of depth arising from the psychological complexity conferred by player strategies.

Now, Barthelmey has taken things one step further by publishing a new paper in the journal Physical Review E that treats chess as a complex system, producing a handy metric that can help predict the proverbial "tipping points" in chess matches.

In his paper, Barthelemy cites Richard Reti, an early 20th-century chess master who gave a series of lectures in the 1920s on developing a scientific understanding of chess. It was an ambitious program involving collecting empirical data, constructing typologies, and devising laws based on those typologies, but Reti's insights fell by the wayside as advances in computer science came to dominate the field. That's understandable. "With its simple rules yet vast strategic depth, chess provides an ideal platform for developing and testing algorithms in AI, machine learning, and decision theory," Barthelemy writes.

Barthelemy's own expertise is in the application of statistical physics to complex systems, as well as the emerging science of cities. He realized that the history of the scientific study of chess had overlooked certain key features, most notably how certain moves at key moments can drastically alter the game; the matches effectively undergo a kind of phase transition. The rise of online chess platforms means there are now very large datasets ripe for statistical analysis, and researchers have made use of that, studying power-law distributions, for example, as well as response time distribution in rapid chess and long-range memory effects in game sequences.

For his analysis, Barthelemy chose to represent chess as a decision tree in which each "branch" leads to a win, loss, or draw. Players face the challenge of finding the best move amid all this complexity, particularly midgame, in order to steer gameplay into favorable branches. That's where those crucial tipping points come into play. Such positions are inherently unstable, which is why even a small mistake can have a dramatic influence on a match's trajectory.

upstart writes:

Now-fixed web bugs allowed hackers to remotely unlock and start any of millions of Subarus. More disturbingly, they could also access at least a year of cars' location histories—and Subaru employees still can:

About a year ago, security researcher Sam Curry bought his mother a Subaru, on the condition that, at some point in the near future, she let him hack it.

It took Curry until last November, when he was home for Thanksgiving, to begin examining the 2023 Impreza's Internet-connected features and start looking for ways to exploit them. Sure enough, he and a researcher working with him online, Shubham Shah, soon discovered vulnerabilities in a Subaru web portal that let them hijack the ability to unlock the car, honk its horn, and start its ignition, reassigning control of those features to any phone or computer they chose.

Most disturbing for Curry, though, was that they found they could also track the Subaru's location—not merely where it was at the moment but also where it had been for the entire year that his mother had owned it. The map of the car's whereabouts was so accurate and detailed, Curry says, that he was able to see her doctor visits, the homes of the friends she visited, even which exact parking space his mother parked in every time she went to church.

"You can retrieve at least a year's worth of location history for the car, where it's pinged precisely, sometimes multiple times a day," Curry says. "Whether somebody's cheating on their wife or getting an abortion or part of some political group, there are a million scenarios where you could weaponize this against someone."

Curry and Shah today revealed in a blog post their method for hacking and tracking millions of Subarus, which they believe would have allowed hackers to target any of the company's vehicles equipped with its digital features known as Starlink in the US, Canada, or Japan. Vulnerabilities they found in a Subaru website intended for the company's staff allowed them to hijack an employee's account to both reassign control of cars' Starlink features and also access all the vehicle location data available to employees, including the car's location every time its engine started, as shown in their video below.

[...] Shah and Curry's research that led them to the discovery of Subaru's vulnerabilities began when they found that Curry's mother's Starlink app connected to the domain SubaruCS.com, which they realized was an administrative domain for employees. Scouring that site for security flaws, they found that they could reset employees' passwords simply by guessing their email address, which gave them the ability to take over any employee's account whose email they could find. The password reset functionality did ask for answers to two security questions, but they found that those answers were checked with code that ran locally in a user's browser, not on Subaru's server, allowing the safeguard to be easily bypassed. "There were really multiple systemic failures that led to this," Shah says.

Facebook's Internal Policy Makers Decided That Linux is Malware

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20250127#sitenews

Facebook ban

Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats". Any posts mentioning DistroWatch and multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed.

We've been hearing all week from readers who say they can no longer post about Linux on Facebook or share links to DistroWatch. Some people have reported their accounts have been locked or limited for posting about Linux.

The sad irony here is that Facebook runs much of its infrastructure on Linux and often posts job ads looking for Linux developers.

Unfortunately, there isn't anything we can do about this, apart from advising people to get their Linux-related information from sources other than Facebook. I've tried to appeal the ban and was told the next day that Linux-related material is staying on the cybersecurity filter. My Facebook account was also locked for my efforts.

We went through a similar experience when Twitter changed its name to X - suddenly accounts which had been re-posting news from our RSS feeds were no longer able to share links. This sort of censorship is an unpleasant side-effect of centralized communication platforms such as X, Facebook, Google+, and so on.

In an effort to continue to make it possible for people to talk about Linux (and DistroWatch), as well as share their views and links, we are providing two options. We have RSS news feeds which get updates whenever we post new announcements, stories, and our weekly newsletter. We also now have a Mastodon account where I will start to post updates - at least for new distributions and notice of our weekly newsletter. Over time we may also add news stories and updates about releases. Links for the feeds and the Mastodon account can be found on our contact page.

upstart writes:

Backdoor infecting VPNs used "magic packets" for stealth and security:

When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can't be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what's known in the business as a "magic packet." On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network's Junos OS has been doing just that.

J-Magic, the tracking name for the backdoor, goes one step further to prevent unauthorized access. After receiving a magic packet hidden in the normal flow of TCP traffic, it relays a challenge to the device that sent it. The challenge comes in the form of a string of text that's encrypted using the public portion of an RSA key. The initiating party must then respond with the corresponding plaintext, proving it has access to the secret key.

The lightweight backdoor is also notable because it resided only in memory, a trait that makes detection harder for defenders. The combination prompted researchers at Lumin Technology's Black Lotus Lab to sit up and take notice.

[...] The researchers found J-Magic on VirusTotal and determined that it had run inside the networks of 36 organizations. They still don't know how the backdoor got installed. Here's how the magic packet worked:

The passive agent is deployed to quietly observe all TCP traffic sent to the device. It discreetly analyzes the incoming packets and watches for one of five specific sets of data contained in them. The conditions are obscure enough to blend in with the normal flow of traffic that network defense products won't detect a threat. At the same time, they're unusual enough that they're not likely to be found in normal traffic.

Motor Trend reports on FSD in their long term test 2023 Model Y, https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/2024-tesla-model-y-long-range-yearlong-review-update-9-full-self-driving-fsd-version-13/ They weren't too impressed with the first software version that came with the car,

I'm not using FSD because it's bringing me much utility or, much less, enjoyment. I'm using it because we paid $15,000 for this software (it costs $8,000 today), and I'm going to do my job and report on how it works, dammit.

That's despite FSD giving me many, many reasons to forsake it, to decide that my safety and sanity are worth more than what it cost. Yet the Full Self Driving note I created in my phone to log the system's transgressions has an ever-increasing abundance of entries as we pile the miles onto our Model Y.

Dumb and Dangerous Decisions
      For example, there was the time it failed to recognize an increased speed limit sign and continued bumbling along at a 15-mph deficit. In stark contrast, later in that same drive, it detected a 55-mph speed limit sign specific to vehicles towing (which it wasn't), decelerating from 75 mph so rapidly that traffic behind had to swerve around the Model Y. Moments later, FSD decided to change lanes to follow the navigation route toward its next turn—still some 10 miles away—cutting someone off in the process.
[...]
On a different day, FSD deviated from my navigation route because it neglected to recognize that the lane it was occupying became right turn only. After making that turn, it wanted to correct its error and resume the route by making a U-turn at the next intersection, where a "No U-Turn" sign was clearly posted. It tried to make its illegal U-turn from the right side of that double-protected left turn, such that if I hadn't intervened it would've overlapped with the vehicle turning from the left-side lane.
[...]
FSD's errors aren't always dangerous. More often, they're just asinine. Like when our Model Y didn't react to a green arrow for a protected right turn, inconveniencing me and drivers behind. Or entered a packed intersection as a yellow light expired, coming to a stop inside a crosswalk. Or braked hard after it accelerated up a freeway on-ramp because it detected an inactive traffic control signal. Or when it encountered an unexpected road closure and drove around the same block three times because each time it arrived back at the closure it failed to recalculate its route. Who knows how long FSD might've kept circling had I not turned it off.

fliptop writes:

Technology is advancing at an exponential rate, but we have very little ability to control it if something goes horribly wrong. Many experts are warning that some of the new technologies that are being developed right now represent very serious existential threats to humanity. In other words, they believe that we could literally be creating technology that could wipe us out someday. Unfortunately, the scientific community is not showing any restraint at all. If something is possible, they want to try to do it. All over the globe, hordes of mad scientists are feverishly rushing into the unknown, and it is quite likely that the consequences will be horrific. The following are 5 super creepy new technologies that should chill all of us to the core:

#1 Scientists in China have been able to get AI models to create "functioning replicas of themselves"...

[...] #2 Do you remember Operation Warp Speed? That was a public-private partnership that was initiated during the first Trump administration, and we all know how that turned out.

Now another public-private partnership that has been dubbed "Stargate" is supposed to greatly accelerate the development of AI in the United States...

[...] #3 Does creating an "artificial sun" sound like a good idea? Unfortunately, the Chinese have actually created such a thing, and they just set a new record by running it for 1,066 seconds...

[...] #4 Anyone that has watched Jurassic Park knows that bringing back ancient species that have gone extinct is a really bad idea. But now a company called Colossal BioSciences plans to do exactly that...

[...] #5 A whistleblower has told Joe Rogan that the U.S. military has mastered anti-gravity propulsion that is based on recovered alien technology...

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/surviving-hollywood-industry-shifts-tv-writer-1236104216/

In 2022, the drought in the Czech Republic was so severe that the Elbe River receded to reveal a rock along the bank with an inscription chiseled in 1417. It read, Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine. If you see me, then weep. Such warnings, found throughout Europe, are known as Hunger Stones.

I tell you this for two reasons. One, it demonstrates great storytelling skills that would be useful to any corporation looking to explain its brand in a crowded marketplace. But also because I am a Hunger Stone.

My warning is much easier to understand than the one along the bottom of the Elbe River because, first, I'm a great storyteller, and second, it's not written in 15th century German. Though, if you're a multinational company in Berlin, I can do that, too: Ich bin ein Hungerstein und habe eine Botschaft für die Unterhaltungsindustrie.

Heed my words, Hollywood. Pain is coming. It will come slowly. In ways you will try to ignore but should not.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.downtowndougbrown.com/2025/01/the-invalid-68030-instruction-that-accidentally-allowed-the-mac-classic-ii-to-successfully-boot-up/

This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction.

I've been playing around with MAME a lot lately. If you haven't heard of MAME, it's an emulator that is known best for its support of many arcade games. It's so much more than that, though! It is also arguably the most complete emulator of 68000-based Mac models, thanks in large part to Arbee's incredible efforts. I will admit that I've used MAME to play a game or two of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, but my main use for it is Mac emulation.

Here's how this adventure begins. I had been fixing some issues in MAME with the command + power key combination that invokes the debugger, and decided to see if the keystroke also worked on the Classic II. Even though this Mac model has a physical interrupt button on the side, it also has an "Egret" 68HC05 microcontroller for handling the keyboard and mouse (among other things) that should be able to detect the keypress and signal a non-maskable interrupt to the main CPU. I believe the Egret disables this keystroke by default, but MacsBug contains code that sends the command to enable it.

I didn't get very far while testing the command+power shortcut in MAME's emulated Classic II, because I observed something very odd. It booted up totally fine in 24-bit addressing mode, but I could not get it to boot at all if I enabled 32-bit addressing, which I needed in order for MacsBug to load. It would just pop up a Sad Mac, complete with the Chimes of Death. On this machine, the death chime is a few notes from the Twilight Zone theme song.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Hua Hong Semiconductor, China's second-largest chip foundry, has made strategic leadership changes to prioritize logic chip production and develop more advanced process technologies. The company hired Bai Peng, a veteran in logic chip technology, and appointed him president on January 1, 2024, reports Nikkei. 

Bai Peng, who spent over three decades at Intel and led logic chip development from research to mass production, is expected to steer Hua Hong's shift toward advanced semiconductor production technologies. Hua Hong are one of China's few foundries to offer 40nm fabrication process along with SMIC. While 40nm is a fairly sophisticated technology, it cannot enable modern processors for AI, HPC, and client computing applications. The task for Bai Peng will be to advance Hua Hong's manufacturing processes. The report says that Bai's expertise aligns with the company's focus to develop fabrication nodes essential for AI and other high-end applications. 

Hua Hong has historically focused on power semiconductors, analog chips, and embedded memory products, with most of its offerings at 100nm or larger. Hua Hong's financial performance has declined since its 2022 peak due to falling legacy chip prices, which are particularly vulnerable to market fluctuations. As a result, declining prices has pushed the company to diversify into logic chips, a market currently dominated by a few Chinese companies, including SMIC.

To expand its production capabilities, Hua Hong acquired a former GlobalFoundries facility in Chengdu, China, in 2023 and began operations in 2024. Additionally, a new plant in Wuxi is now producing chips of 40nm and above. These expansions aim to position Hua Hong as a key player in both legacy and advanced chip markets. 

[...] These appointments have fueled speculation about a potential collaboration between Hua Hong and SMIC, China's largest and most advanced foundry. Such a partnership could bolster China's efforts to build a self-reliant semiconductor ecosystem, reducing dependency on foreign supply chains.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Florida-based startup Lonestar Data Holdings plans to launch the first Moon-based data center dubbed the "Freedom Data Center." The compact but fully operational information hub will piggyback on an upcoming lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in February. Lonestar says storing data on the Moon offers unique benefits.

First, it provides unmatched physical security and protection from natural disasters, cyber threats, and geopolitical conflicts that could put Earth-based data at risk. The solar-powered mini-facility is also much more environmentally friendly than energy-hungry data centers on our home planet, utilizing naturally cooled solid-state drives.

The company has already lined up some high-profile early customers for their lunar platform, including the state of Florida, the Isle of Man government, AI firm Valkyrie, and the pop rock band Imagine Dragons.

The company has been working towards this milestone for years, successfully testing data storage on the Moon in February last year and aboard the International Space Station in 2021. However, putting something as complex as a data center on the lunar surface is still an enormous technical challenge.

The harsh environment, maintenance difficulties, and astronomical costs could create some problematic issues. There are also inherent risks associated with space launch. There is no option for equipment recovery if something goes wrong. Thankfully, the data center will have a ground-based backup at a Flexential facility in Tampa.

Lonestar has yet to release specific operational details or hardware specs. It will be interesting to see the company's plans for communication between lunar and ground-based facilities.

Lonestar isn't the only venture planning to establish a lunar data center. Reuters reports that several other companies are eyeing similar space-based facilities, including Lumen Orbit, which recently raised $11 million at a $40 million valuation.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Association for Computing Machinery has a post by George Neville-Neil of FreeBSD fame comparing LLMs to drunken plagiarists:

Before trying to use these tools, you need to understand what they do, at least on the surface, since even their creators freely admit they do not understand how they work deep down in the bowels of all the statistics and text that have been scraped from the current Internet. The trick of an LLM is to use a little randomness and a lot of text to Gauss the next word in a sentence. Seems kind of trivial, really, and certainly not a measure of intelligence that anyone who understands the term might use. But it's a clever trick and does have some applications.

[...] While help with proper code syntax is a boon to productivity (consider IDEs that highlight syntactical errors before you find them via a compilation), it is a far cry from SEMANTIC knowledge of a piece of code. Note that it is semantic knowledge that allows you to create correct programs, where correctness means the code actually does what the developer originally intended. KV can show many examples of programs that are syntactically?but not semantically?correct. In fact, this is the root of nearly every security problem in deployed software. Semantics remains far beyond the abilities of the current AI fad, as is evidenced by the number of developers who are now turning down these technologies for their own work.

He continues by pointing out how LLMs are not only based on plagiarism, they are unable provide useful annotation in the comments or otherwise address the semantics of the code they swipe.

Previously:
(2024) Make Illegally Trained LLMs Public Domain as Punishment
(2024) The Open Secret Of Open Washing
(2023) A Jargon-Free Explanation of How AI Large Language Models Work
(2019) AI Training is *Very* Expensive
... and many more.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Schools are now notifying families their data has been stolen:

Parents, students, teachers, and administrators throughout North America are smarting from what could be the biggest data breach of 2025: an intrusion into the network of a cloud-based service storing detailed data of millions of pupils and school personnel.

The hack, which came to light earlier this month, hit PowerSchool, a Folsom, California, firm that provides cloud-based software to some 16,000 K–12 schools worldwide. The schools serve 60 million students and employ an unknown number of teachers. Besides providing software for administration, grades, and other functions, PowerSchool stores personal data for students and teachers, with much of that data including Social Security numbers, medical information, and home addresses.

On January 7, PowerSchool revealed that it had experienced a network intrusion two weeks earlier that resulted in the "unauthorized exportation of personal information" customers stored in PowerSchool's Student Information System (SIS) through PowerSource, a customer support portal. Information stolen included individuals' names, contact information, dates of birth, medical alert information, Social Security Numbers, and unspecified "other related information."

[...] Last week, California's Menlo Park City School District said stolen information belonged to all current students and staff, all students enrolled since the start of the 2009–2010 school year, and many staff members who worked at the school since the start of the 2009–2010 school year.

"This includes students who may have been enrolled only for a short while before transferring out and staff who worked for MPCSD only briefly before leaving for whatever reason," last week's notice stated. The total number of students affected is 10,662. The notice went on to say that California law requires public schools to store student data in perpetuity.

PowerSchool has said that it has been in contact with the attackers and received assurances they won't release it publicly. Bleeping Computer reported that the assurances were based on a video showing the threat actor deleting the data. PowerSchool has yet to confirm that account. Even if the account is true, there's no way a video can prove all copies of the data have been destroyed. Despite this, school districts have passed those assurances on in their disclosure notices.

Bleeping Computer on Wednesday also reported that an extortion note the attacker sent to PowerSchool claimed that the personal data of 62.4 million students and 9.5 million teachers was swept up in the breach. PowerSchool said it's offering two years of free credit monitoring to all those affected.

PowerSchool has yet to disclose the number of individuals affected or confirm whether it paid a ransom.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A specialized system sends pulses of pressure through the fluids in our brain:

Our bodies rely on their lymphatic system to drain excessive fluids and remove waste from tissues, feeding those back into the blood stream. It's a complex yet efficient cleaning mechanism that works in every organ except the brain. "When cells are active, they produce waste metabolites, and this also happens in the brain. Since there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain, the question was what was it that cleaned the brain," Natalie Hauglund, a neuroscientist at Oxford University who led a recent study on the brain-clearing mechanism, told Ars.

Earlier studies done mostly on mice discovered that the brain had a system that flushed its tissues with cerebrospinal fluid, which carried away waste products in a process called glymphatic clearance. "Scientists noticed that this only happened during sleep, but it was unknown what it was about sleep that initiated this cleaning process," Hauglund explains.

Her study found the glymphatic clearance was mediated by a hormone called norepinephrine and happened almost exclusively during the NREM sleep phase. But it only worked when sleep was natural. Anesthesia and sleeping pills shut this process down nearly completely.

The glymphatic system in the brain was discovered back in 2013 by Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish neuroscientist and a coauthor of Hauglund's paper. Since then, there have been numerous studies aimed at figuring out how it worked, but most of them had one problem: they were done on anesthetized mice.

"What makes anesthesia useful is that you can have a very controlled setting," Hauglund says.

[...] So, her team designed a study to see how the brain-clearing mechanism works in mice that could move freely in their cages and sleep naturally whenever they felt like it. "It turned out that with the glymphatic system, we didn't really see the full picture when we used anesthesia," Hauglund says.