Frankreich hat ein Sperrverfahren gegen Shein eingeleitet – ausgerechnet am Tag der Eröffnung des ersten physischen Stores in Paris. (Shein, Politik)
Google wird in der kommenden Woche eine wichtige Ankündigung zu Infrastruktur und Rechenzentren machen. Zuvor scheiterten zwei Projekte in Deutschland. (Google, Wirtschaft)
Google wird in der kommenden Woche eine wichtige Ankündigung zu Infrastruktur und Rechenzentren machen. Zuvor scheiterten zwei Projekte in Deutschland. (Google, Wirtschaft) Social engineering strikes again.
The University of Pennsylvania has a somewhat unusual distinction: It is the alma mater of two of the planet’s most polarizing figures, Elon Musk and Donald Trump. As the political power of both men rose over the last year, the US government began to pressure Penn, first by pulling its research funding and then by targeting the school for past actions related to a transgender swimmer.
After the “sticks” were deployed, a “carrot” was offered. Penn became one of just nine schools nationally to be offered a special “compact” with the federal government, which would give the feds broad control over the school and its speech in return for preferential access to federal funds. Penn declined to sign the deal. (Making the whole surreal situation stranger was the fact that one of Penn’s own wealthy boosters apparently helped the Trump administration write the compact.)
In other words, Penn has become an obvious target of the Trump administration; now it has been targeted by a hacker claiming to share Trump and Musk’s grievances over affirmative action and “wokeness.”
Man said he was in a monogamous 50-year marriage, but doctors aren’t so sure now.
Syphilis can be a tricky disease to diagnose—especially when a patient may not be sharing the whole story.
Doctors in Belgium met with a real head-scratcher when an 83-year-old married man came in with a rare form of secondary syphilis—the second of four stages of the sexually transmitted bacterial infection that has been called a “master of disguise.”
The man told doctors up front that he was in a monogamous 50-year-long marriage and had been sexually inactive in recent years following treatment for cancer. In a Clinical Problem-Solving report published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors laid out the step-by-step tests and reasoning they used to get to the right diagnosis, which still didn’t answer all their questions.
You wouldn’t know it from the hype, but the results fail to impress.
Google on Wednesday revealed five recent malware samples that were built using generative AI. The end results of each one were far below par with professional malware development, a finding that shows that vibe coding of malicious wares lags behind more traditional forms of development, which means it still has a long way to go before it poses a real-world threat.
One of the samples, for instance, tracked under the name PromptLock, was part of an academic study analyzing how effective the use of large language models can be “to autonomously plan, adapt, and execute the ransomware attack lifecycle.” The researchers, however, reported the malware had “clear limitations: it omits persistence, lateral movement, and advanced evasion tactics” and served as little more than a demonstration of the feasibility of AI for such purposes. Prior to the paper’s release, security firm ESET said it had discovered the sample and hailed it as “the first AI-powered ransomware.”
Like the other four samples Google analyzed—FruitShell, PromptFlux, PromptSteal, and QuietVault—PromptLock was easy to detect, even by less-sophisticated endpoint protections that rely on static signatures. All samples also employed previously seen methods in malware samples, making them easy to counteract. They also had no operational impact, meaning they didn’t require defenders to adopt new defenses.
Sweeping DHS power grab would collect face, iris, voice scans of all immigrants.
Civil and digital rights experts are horrified by a proposed rule change that would allow the Department of Homeland Security to collect a wide range of sensitive biometric data on all immigrants, without age restrictions, and store that data throughout each person’s “lifecycle” in the immigration system.
If adopted, the rule change would allow DHS agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to broadly collect facial imagery, finger and palm prints, iris scans, and voice prints. They may also request DNA, which DHS claimed “would only be collected in limited circumstances,” like to verify family relations. These updates would cost taxpayers $288.7 million annually, DHS estimated, including $57.1 million for DNA collection alone. Annual individual charges to immigrants submitting data will likely be similarly high, estimated at around $231.5 million.
Costs could be higher, DHS admitted, especially if DNA testing is conducted more widely than projected.
Fairphone has been making smartphones from ethically-sourced materials for over a decade. In recent years the company has also leaned into repairable, sustainable hardware that’s even occasionally upgradeable. But up until now the company has onl…
Fairphone has been making smartphones from ethically-sourced materials for over a decade. In recent years the company has also leaned into repairable, sustainable hardware that’s even occasionally upgradeable. But up until now the company has only sold its phones in Europe. While the /e/ Foundation has made some Fairphone models available to customers in the US, […]
The post Lilbits: PlayStation Portal gains cloud gaming, Vectrex Mini hits Kickstarter, and Fairphone is coming to the US (eventually) appeared first on Liliputing.
The AMD Strix Halo line of processors are mobile chips that combine high-performance Zen 5 CPU cores with enough RDNA 3.5 GPU compute units to offer integrated graphics with discrete-class performance. When combined with high-bandwidth onboard memory, …
The AMD Strix Halo line of processors are mobile chips that combine high-performance Zen 5 CPU cores with enough RDNA 3.5 GPU compute units to offer integrated graphics with discrete-class performance. When combined with high-bandwidth onboard memory, this makes these chips ideal for compact AI workstations, but they’ve also shown up in a few gaming […]
The post AMD Strix Halo lineup expands with cheaper chips sporting Radeon 40-core Radeon 8060S graphics appeared first on Liliputing.
As a test case, the machine was used to test a model of superconductivity.
Quantum computers based on ions or atoms have one major advantage: The hardware itself isn’t manufactured, so there’s no device-to-device variability. Every atom is the same and should perform similarly every time. And since the qubits themselves can be moved around, it’s theoretically possible to entangle any atom or ion with any other in the system, allowing for a lot of flexibility in how algorithms and error correction are performed.
This combination of consistent, high-fidelity performance with all-to-all connectivity has led many key demonstrations of quantum computing to be done on trapped-ion hardware. Unfortunately, the hardware has been held back a bit by relatively low qubit counts—a few dozen compared to the hundred or more seen in other technologies. But on Wednesday, a company called Quantinuum announced a new version of its trapped-ion hardware that significantly boosts the qubit count and uses some interesting technology to manage their operation.
Both neutral atom and trapped-ion computers store their qubits in the spin of the nucleus. That spin is somewhat shielded from the environment by the cloud of electrons around the nucleus, giving these qubits a relatively long coherence time. While neutral atoms are held in place by a network of lasers, trapped ions are manipulated via electromagnetic control based on the ion’s charge. This means that key components of the hardware can be built using standard electronic manufacturing, although lasers are still needed for manipulations and readout.
“This is a hard lesson for us all.”
Google and Disney have been in a contract dispute since October 30 that has resulted in YouTube TV subscribers losing access to 21 Disney-owned TV channels, including ABC, ESPN, and The Disney Channel.
In addition to reducing access to popular live content, the corporate conflict is highlighting another frustration in the streaming era. As Google and Disney continue duking it out, their customers have lost some access to content they thought was permanent: DVR files and digital movie purchases.
A perk of subscribing to YouTube TV, per Google’s marketing, is the ability to “record it all with unlimited DVR space.” A footnote on the YouTube TV homepage notes that unlimited DVR is subject to “device, regional, and Internet restrictions” but overlooks an additional restriction in the form of multi-conglomerate spats.
Frankreich hat ein Sperrverfahren gegen Shein eingeleitet - ausgerechnet am Tag der Eröffnung des ersten physischen Stores in Paris. (