Month: July 2023

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Reddit is publicly extending an olive branch to the moderator community that it largely enraged over recent weeks. In a post on Wednesday, a Reddit employee detailed outreach efforts from the company, including new weekly feedback sessions, that it hopes can help repair ties with the social media platform and over 50,000 volunteer mods that it relies on. But as you might expect, mods remain skeptical.

Extending an olive branch

A Reddit admin going by Go_JasonWaterfalls on the site and claiming the title of Reddit VP of community (Ars attempted to confirm the identity of /u/Go_JasonWaterfalls, but Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt declined to confirm the employee's identity by name) acknowledged the shattered relationship between mods—who spend thousands of hours providing free labor and have recently engaged in variously disruptive forms of protest over API pricing on the site—and Reddit—which has responded to said protests by ousting some protesting moderators from their posts. The company has also offered contentious interviews with CEO Steve Huffman. Reddit also reportedly forced some subreddits that moderators labeled "not safe for work" as a form of protest (claiming to have taken member polls beforehand) to revert back to "safe for work" and threatened to forcibly reopen subreddits that had gone private in protest.

"So, we’ve all had a... time on Reddit lately," Go_JasonWaterfalls wrote. "And I’m here to recognize it, acknowledge that our relationship has been tested, and begin the 'now what?' conversation."

Enlarge / Bottles of MMS, the bleach product that Genesis II Church of Health and Healing was ordered to stop selling. (credit: Genesis II Church of Health and Healing)

A Florida father and his three adult sons have been found guilty on all counts after falsely claiming a toxic, industrial-strength bleaching agent they sold as a "miracle" solution through their fake church could cure HIV, autism, cancer, COVID-19, and other serious illnesses.

On Wednesday, a Miami jury took just 30 minutes to return the guilty verdicts for the so-called "Church of Bleach" family, according to the Miami Herald. The trial began on Monday.

The 12-person jury found Mark Grenon, 65, and his sons Jonathan, 37, Joseph, 35, and Jordan, 29, all guilty of conspiring to defraud the United States by distributing an unapproved and misbranded drug. The drug in question is the "Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS)," which is consumed as chlorine dioxide, an industrial bleaching agent used for bleaching paper products. The conviction carries up to five years in prison.

Enlarge / The dusty debris from the DART collision dominates this image, but there are boulders present, too. (credit: NASA, ESA, David Jewitt (UCLA))

NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission was a success from the perspective of planetary defense, as it successfully shifted the orbit of an asteroid. But the mission had a scientific element to it, and we're still sifting through the debris of the collision to determine what the impact tells us about the asteroid. That's difficult due to the distance to the asteroid and the low amounts of light that reflect off the debris.

Today, a paper was released by a team that analyzed images of the aftermath using the Hubble Space Telescope. They've spotted dozens of boulders that collectively would have originally made up 0.1 percent of the mass of Dimorphos, DART's target. And while they're all moving very slowly from the site of the collision, some of them should be able to escape the gravity of the double asteroid system.

Knocking rocks

The images taken by DART immediately prior to its demise suggest that Dimorphos was a rubble pile, a mixture of boulders, small rocks, and dust barely held together by their mutual gravitational pull. So what happens when a relatively solid object, like the DART spacecraft, hammers an asteroid at high speed?

Enlarge / Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) during a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing on Thursday, May 18, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Elon Musk's X Corp. is serving a subpoena on Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), days after Warren urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to launch an investigation into Musk's dual role running Tesla and Twitter.

Musk's subpoena demands documents and communications related to Warren's letter to the SEC, as well as Warren's communications with the SEC and Federal Trade Commission. Musk is seeking documents going back to October 27, 2022, the day he completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter.

Warren's July 17 letter urged the SEC to investigate Tesla "regarding the actions of its Board of Directors in managing the apparent conflicts of its Chief Executive Officer, Elon Musk." She wrote that Musk's actions while running Twitter and Tesla simultaneously "have raised concerns about conflicts of interest, misappropriation of corporate assets, and other negative impacts to Tesla shareholders. Despite recent and repeated calls from investors to address these actions, the Board appears to have failed to uphold its legal duty to ensure that Mr. Musk act in the best interest of Tesla."

Enlarge / Apple's current AI assistant, Siri, is far less capable—but also less error-prone—than tools like Bard or ChatGPT. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple has built its own large language model (LLM) AI framework and associated chatbot service similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, and Microsoft's ChatGPT-based Bing Chat, according to a new report.

The project is codenamed "Ajax" internally, the sources say, though some engineers within the company colloquially refer to it as "Apple GPT." It is built on top of Google machine learning framework Jax and runs on Google Cloud.

The news comes via an article from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who cites "people with knowledge of the efforts." Gurman has generally been accurate in his reports citing sources like these in the past, though he has seemingly misinterpreted what he was told on rare occasions.

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Two years ago, ransomware crooks breached hardware-maker Gigabyte and dumped more than 112 gigabytes of data that included information from some of its most important supply-chain partners, including Intel and AMD. Now researchers are warning that the leaked booty revealed what could amount to critical zeroday vulnerabilities that could imperil huge swaths of the computing world.

The vulnerabilities reside inside firmware that Duluth, Georgia-based AMI makes for BMCs, or baseband management controllers. These tiny computers soldered into the motherboard of servers allow cloud centers, and sometimes their customers, to streamline the remote management of vast fleets of computers. They enable administrators to remotely reinstall OSes, install and uninstall apps, and control just about every other aspect of the system—even when it's turned off. BMCs provide what’s known in the industry as “lights-out” system management.

Lights out forever

Researchers from security firm Eclypsium analyzed AMI firmware leaked in the 2021 ransomware attack and identified vulnerabilities that had lurked for years. They can be exploited by any local or remote attacker with access to an industry-standard remote-management interface known as Redfish to execute malicious code that will run on every server inside a data center.