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Der EU-Parlamentarier Sonneborn durfte eine Minute über die EU und den Krieg gegen Armenien reden. Die Präsidentin der EU-Kommission kam nicht so gut weg. Eine Dokumentation.
Themen des Tages: Wie Verteidigungsministerium und Nato den Schulterschluss mit einem Aggressor suchen. Mit wem Venezuelas Präsident Nicolás Maduro demnächst Geschäfte macht. Und was Telepolis heute für Sie bereithält.
Threat actor has connections to hackers backed by North Korean government.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Researchers believe hackers with connections to the North Korean government have been pushing a Trojanized version of the PuTTY networking utility in an attempt to backdoor the network of organizations they want to spy on.
Researchers from security firm Mandiant said on Thursday that at least one customer it serves had an employee who installed the fake network utility by accident. The incident caused the employer to become infected with a backdoor tracked by researchers as Airdry.v2. The file was transmitted by a group Mandiant tracks as UNC4034.
"Mandiant identified several overlaps between UNC4034 and threat clusters we suspect have a North Korean nexus," company researchers wrote. "The AIRDRY.V2 C2 URLs belong to compromised website infrastructure previously leveraged by these groups and reported in several OSINT sources."
“I say we sit here and wait for death…. some combination of sitting and death.”
HBO's Avenue 5 returns next month for its second and final season.
We'd almost forgotten about HBO's dark comedy Avenue 5, which debuted right before the world shut down in response to a global pandemic. But the series, which stars Hugh Laurie as the captain of a luxury cruise spaceship touring the solar system, was renewed for a second and final season. And now we have an official trailer to give us an idea of what's in store for the beleaguered passengers and crew.
(Spoilers for the first season below.)
As I've written previously, the series is the brainchild of Armando Iannucci, best known for creating the stellar HBO comedy series Veep, which won multiple Emmy awards over its seven-season run. Avenue 5 is set roughly 40 years in the future, when private spaceflight, aka space tourism, is totally a thing. The titular space cruise ship is modeled after today's luxury ocean liners, complete with fine dining and regular exercise classes. But the ship experienced major technical difficulties, resulting in a course malfunction that meant it would take three years for the return trip, rather than the scheduled six months. The crew scrambled to solve the problem while keeping the passengers from panicking.
The meeting follows years of mounting data on inaccuracies and potential harms.
Enlarge / A nurse uses a pulse oximeter on a patient in Plainfield, New Jersey, on October 26, 2016. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)
For years, studies have found racial bias in common oxygen-measuring devices called pulse oximeters, as well as alarming dangers from inaccurate blood oxygen measurements in dark-skinned patients. Now, the US Food and Drug Administration is summoning its expert advisers to review the problematic devices and consider new recommendations and regulatory actions.
The FDA announced Thursday that its advisory committee—the Anesthesiology and Respiratory Therapy Devices Panel (ARTDP)—would convene on November 1 to discuss pulse oximeters. Until then, the agency renewed emphasis on the safety warning it issued in February 2021, which noted that the ubiquitous devices "may be less accurate in people with dark skin pigmentation."
That warning closely followed a study from December 2020 that highlighted the racial bias of pulse oximeters amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The global spread of a respiratory disease with a hallmark symptom of breathing difficulty sent pulse oximeter usage soaring—elevating the problem of racial disparities. The 2020 study—led by researchers in Michigan and published in the New England Journal of Medicine—found that pulse oximeters were nearly three times more likely to miss dangerously low blood oxygen levels (hypoxemia) in Black patients compared with white patients.
In-depth analysis has us wondering what is going on with Halo‘s stewardship.
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Bungie)
Last week, the Halo Infinite development team announced that it was walking back a years-old pledge to support split-screen co-op for the game's campaign mode. The feature had been delayed multiple times before being tossed into the bin, and the decision dashed the hopes of anyone who hoped to enjoy the game's campaign with at least one friend on a single screen.
Within days, fans suggested that the feature had been working on Xbox consoles all along, albeit via a glitch—which, as of press time, has yet to be patched on Halo Infinite's retail version on Xbox consoles. Following reports and videos of the exploit, a team of gaming analysts confirmed via hours of campaign testing that Halo Infinite's split-screen mode is functional—enough so that we're left scratching our heads as to what the heck is going on at Xbox.
Before I post any instructions, a warning: Using this exploit could affect or outright nuke your Xbox's Halo Infinite save files. This is due to a longstanding bug, reported in December, where Halo Infinite gets confused if two gamepads are signed into the same "gamertag" profile on one console. Assigning a separate gamertag to each connected controller before booting the game appears to solve the problem, but you have been warned.
Maya ritual enemas, constipated scorpions, and moose crash test dummies feature.
Enlarge / The Ig Nobel Prizes honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)
Would you give yourself an alcohol enema for science? Test the running speed of constipated scorpions in the lab? Build your very own moose crash test dummy? Or maybe you'd like to tackle the thorny question of why legal documents are so relentlessly incomprehensible. These and other unusual research endeavors were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2022 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it's that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science. You can watch the livestream of the awards ceremony here.
Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." The unapologetically campy award ceremony usually features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words. Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of scientific merit.
Viewers can tune in for the usual 24/7 lectures, as well as the premiere of a mini-opera, The Know-It-All Club, in which every member "makes clear their opinion that there is only one person in the Know-It-All Club who knows anything"—in keeping with the evening's theme of knowledge. The winners will also give free public talks in the weeks following the ceremony, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.
Kaum ein anderes Land hat in den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten soviel Wasser verloren wie die Bundesrepublik. Der Dürremonitor zeichnet ein erschreckendes Bild.
Most of the West Coast will need floating hardware to harvest offshore wind.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
On Thursday, the Biden administration announced the latest in its renewable energy efforts, this time focused on a technology that hasn't really arrived yet: floating offshore wind turbines. Compared to turbines directly anchored on the seafloor, floating versions are estimated to cost about 50 percent more, which has made energy development of large areas of the ocean cost-prohibitive. The program announced today will create a "wind shot" that aims to drop the costs by more than 70 percent over the next decade and position the US as a leader in this industry.
While offshore wind is booming in Europe and China (and poised for a belated takeoff in the US), existing hardware is built directly up from the seafloor, which requires sitting in shallow waters. This works out well for the US East Coast, where a broad continental shelf can host massive wind farms, many of which are in the permitting and planning stages. Most of those projects involve a partnership with European companies, as the US's long delay in adopting offshore wind has ceded the industry to the countries that pioneered the field.
Based on a newly released map of the potential for offshore wind in the US, many areas with good potential are too deep to be exploited by wind turbines affixed to the ocean floor. This includes nearly the entire West Coast, Hawaii, and the Great Lakes. Even along the East Coast, floating turbines could greatly expand the areas open to development.
New search engine combs through harvested images used to train Stable Diffusion, others.
Enlarge / An image of the "Have I Been Trained?" website featuring a search for one of its creators, Holly Herndon. (credit: Holly Herndon)
In response to controversy over image synthesis models learning from artists' images scraped from the Internet without consent—and potentially replicating their artistic styles—a group of artists has released a new website that allows anyone to see if their artwork has been used to train AI.
The website "Have I Been Trained?" taps into the LAION-5B training data used to train Stable Diffusion and Google's Imagen AI models, among others. To build LAION-5B, bots directed by a group of AI researchers crawled billions of websites, including large repositories of artwork at DeviantArt, ArtStation, Pinterest, Getty Images, and more. Along the way, LAION collected millions of images from artists and copyright holders without consultation, which irritated some artists.
When visiting the Have I Been Trained? website, which is run by a group of artists called Spawning, users can search the data set by text (such as an artist's name) or by an image they upload. They will see image results alongside caption data linked to each image. It is similar to an earlier LAION-5B search tool created by Romain Beaumont and a recent effort by Andy Baio and Simon Willison, but with a slick interface and the ability to do a reverse image search.
