Month: July 2023

Enlarge / OnLeak's OnePlus 12 render. (credit: OnLeaks x Smartprix)

The past week has seen a few leaks about OnePlus' upcoming flagship phone, the OnePlus 12, thanks to OnLeaks and Smartprix. If OnePlus sticks to the previous schedule, this phone will be released in China this year and early next year in the US, and it will be one of the first with a lot of new 2024 tech.

We have specs and pictures to go over, with the big news being the promise of a massive 5400 mAh battery packed into the usual 6.7-inch body size. Usually, devices of this size ship with 5000 mAh batteries. Given that the phone doesn't look noticeably thicker and that manufacturers have a phobia of thicker phones, we're going to assume this is from a sizable year-over-year increase in battery density.

This device is timed to coincide with the release of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, so this will be one of the first products with Qualcomm's 2024 chip. Not much is known about it, though. The company will pick from Arm's next-generation parts box, but with a report from Kamila Wojciechowska suggesting the chip has a "2+3+2+1" core configuration, it doesn't sound like Qualcomm will be following Arm's layout recommendations. The chip is also rumored to drop 32-bit support after Qualcomm delayed the 64-bit-only transition last year.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Organizations big and small are once again scrambling to patch critical vulnerabilities that are already under active exploitation and cause the kind of breaches coveted by ransomware actors and nation-state spies.

The exploited vulnerabilities—one in Adobe ColdFusion and the other in various Citrix NetScaler products—allow for the remote execution of malicious code. Citrix on Tuesday patched the vulnerabilities, but not before threat actors exploited them. The most critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-3519, lurks in Citrix’s NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway products. It carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10 because it allows hackers to execute code remotely with no authentication required.

“This product line is a popular target for attackers of all skill levels, and we expect that exploitation will increase quickly,” researchers from Rapid7, the security firm that detected the attacks, warned Tuesday.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a cybernetic llama. (credit: Midjourney)

On Tuesday, Meta announced Llama 2, a new open source family of AI language models notable for its commercial license, which means the models can be integrated into commercial products, unlike its predecessor. They range in size from 7 to 70 billion parameters and reportedly "outperform open source chat models on most benchmarks we tested," according to Meta.

"This is going to change the landscape of the LLM market," tweeted Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun. "Llama-v2 is available on Microsoft Azure and will be available on AWS, Hugging Face, and other providers."

According to Meta, its Llama 2 "pretrained" models (the bare-bones models) are trained on 2 trillion tokens and have a context window of 4,096 tokens (fragments of words). The context window determines the length of the content the model can process at once. Meta also says that the Llama 2 fine-tuned models, developed for chat applications similar to ChatGPT, have been trained on "over 1 million human annotations."

Enlarge / The cells that go on to form the armor on the flanks of the sturgeon start out as part of the nervous system. (credit: Jay Fleming)

Our skeleton is kind of strange. Most of it forms from the same tissue that makes things like our muscle and connective tissue. The exception is a big chunk of our face, like the jaws and nasal passages. Those come from a tissue that migrates out of the developing nervous system.

Having two different sources of the same tissue is unusual; I can't personally think of a second example of that happening in vertebrates. So it raises questions about why the system evolved in the first place. Now, researchers have provided a hint as to how this might have come about. It turns out that in early branches of the fish family tree, like the sturgeon, the neural crest forms the bony armor that covers them, suggesting an ancient role in bone formation that goes back to the armored fish of the Devonian.

Doing it all

The tissue at the center of the new work is called the neural crest. As its name implies, it starts off at the very top of the developing spinal cord and hindbrain. Shortly after the developing nervous system closes off into a tube, the neural crest cells leave it behind. Some of them retain their neural identity and go on to form most of the body's sensory nerves, as well as the nerves that manage the digestive system.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Duncan Hull / Getty)

Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and other current and former Tesla board members agreed to return over $735 million to settle a shareholder lawsuit that alleged Tesla directors "grossly" overpaid themselves. The Tesla directors, who also include Musk's brother Kimbal Musk, further agreed to forego stock options and other compensation for board service in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

"Musk has installed his family and friends on the Company's Board and through them he dominates and exercises control over Tesla and is able to avoid independent oversight of the way he runs the Company," the 2020 lawsuit alleged. "In return, with Musk's blessing and vote as a director, the Director Defendants have consistently paid themselves unfair and lavish compensation" that "grossly exceeds norms for corporate board compensation."

The settlement filed Friday in Delaware Court of Chancery provides for $458,649,785 in returned options and $276,616,720 in "returned cash and/or returned stock." The money will be returned to Tesla.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Meta's data privacy woes in Europe continue as Norway has announced an immediate ban on "behavioral advertising" on Facebook and Instagram. Until Meta makes some big changes, it will be fined $100,000 daily for Norwegian user privacy breaches, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, Datatilsynet, said yesterday.

"Meta tracks in detail the activity of users of its Facebook and Instagram platforms," Datatilsynet's press release said. "Users are profiled based on where they are, what type of content they show interest in, and what they publish, amongst others. These personal profiles are used for marketing purposes—so called behavioral advertising. The Norwegian Data Protection Authority considers that the practice of Meta is illegal and is therefore imposing a temporary ban of behavioral advertising on Facebook and Instagram."

Norway has not banned the apps. Its ban is focused on restricting data collection for behavioral advertising and starts August 4. The temporary ban could drag on for three months unless Meta takes remedial action sooner.