mrpg writes:Backdoored firmware lets China state hackers control routers with "magic packets"https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/09/china-state-hackers-are-camping-out-in-cisco-routers-us-and-japan-warn/
"dalek" writes:If Congress does not pass a measure to fund the government by Sunday, October 1, a partial shutdown of the United States government will begin. Much of the federal government is funded each fiscal year by 12 appropriations bills. None of the appropriations bills for the 2024 fiscal year have been signed into law, which is not especially uncommon at the start of a new fiscal year. Instead, Congress authorizes funding at the levels from the previous fiscal year through a continuing resolution (CR), and then the appropriations bills are signed into law when they are ready. The Senate is scheduled to vote on such a CR on Saturday, though any Senator can refuse the expedited process for debating the bill, and delay the vote until Monday. Although the CR is expected to pass the Senate with bipartisan support, the House is highly unlikely to pass any funding bills before the government shutdown begins.The impending government shutdown is likely to have significant effects on scientific research, as noted in a Nature article:
Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Today: Friday, September 29th, 2023 at 20:30 UTC (1:30pm PDT, 4:30pm EDT) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.The agenda for the upcoming meeting will also be published when available. Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/GovernanceThe community is always welcome to observe and participate, and is warmly invited to the meeting.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
Frosty Piss writes:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/20/amazon-restricts-authors-from-self-publishing-more-than-three-books-a-day-after-ai-concernsAmazon is limiting the number of books that authors can self-publish on its site to three a day, after an influx of suspected AI-generated material was listed for sale in recent months.
looorg writes:https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/26/23889956/microsoft-next-generation-nuclear-energy-smr-job-hiringMicrosoft wants to become a nuclear power. Their need for power to power their AI and other things is now so great that they want to run their own nuclear reactors.
An Anonymous Coward writes:The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a new term for it: 'Noctalgia', a feature of the modern age.Most of our light pollution comes from sources on the ground, but satellites don't just spoil deep-space astronomical observations when they cross a telescope's field of view; they also scatter and reflect sunlight from their solar arrays. The abundance of satellites is causing the overall brightness of the sky to increase all around the globe. Some researchers have estimated that, on average, our darkest night skies, located in the most remote regions of the world, are 10% brighter than they were a half century ago.Humans are ineffably impacted. How can someone who has never seen a clear night sky know what they are missing? It's like someone without gonads or genital nerves trying to understand orgasm.Many animal species are suffering as well. What good are night-adapted senses in nocturnal species if the night sky isn't much darker than the daytime sky? Researchers have identified several species whose circadian rhythms are getting thrown off, making them vulnerable to predation (or, the reverse: the inability to effectively locate prey).Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
The BBC reports that Lego won't be making blocks from recycled drink bottles after all, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66910573 It appears they did a full depth study over the last two years,
looorg writes:https://neuralink.com/blog/first-clinical-trial-open-for-recruitment/Neuralink are looking for a few test subjects that have either ALS or are quadriplegics to test their wireless brain human interface. A device that will control a computer keyboard with only the users mind. Also they want to test out how good their robot is at surgery but that is perhaps less appealing.
Alex "Sandy" Pentland[1] is somewhere near the top of the AI pantheon these days, here's his most recent talk, "Engineering Ecosystems with AI", given online on Friday 15 Sept., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m8EsEmZPYQ at the MIT Mobility Forum. In the intro it is mentioned that this was a dry run for Pentland's upcoming keynote to the U. S. National Academy of Sciences. From the YT summary,
Signal Preps its Encryption Engine for the Quantum Doomsday Inevitabilityupstart writes:Signal preps its encryption engine for the quantum doomsday inevitability:
sweettea writes:The All Systems Go! conference happened last week in Berlin, devoted to systemd / container / image-building topics. Several cool talks focused on immutable distributions: their usages and virtues, particularly NixOS. NixOS is the foremost immutable, reproducable, and atomically upgradable Linux distribution, and a powerful building block for building easily deployable services.Andreas Herrmann, the first Bazel community expert, talked about the value of a reproducible build of your software and the merits of using an immutable distribution like Nix to make your builds better. Xe Iaso's talk on writing your own NixOS modules for your own build dependencies to ensure your software is reproducable. Lots more talks, but mostly systemd-related: check out the list of talks and the recordings!