Month: October 2023

Enlarge / A tiny fleck of paint, taken from the Mona Lisa, is revealing insights into previously unknown steps of Leonardo da Vinci's process. (credit: Public domain)

When Leonardo da Vinci was creating his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, he may have experimented with lead oxide in his base layer, resulting in trace amounts of a compound called plumbonacrite. It forms when lead oxides combine with oil, a common mixture to help paint dry, used by later artists like Rembrandt. But the presence of plumbonacrite in the Mona Lisa is the first time the compound has been detected in an Italian Renaissance painting, suggesting that da Vinci could have pioneered this technique, according to the authors of a recent paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Fewer than 20 of da Vinci's paintings have survived, and the Mona Lisa is by far the most famous, inspiring a 1950s hit song by Nat King Cole and featuring prominently in last year's Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery, among other pop culture mentions. The painting is in remarkably good condition given its age, but art conservationists and da Vinci scholars alike are eager to learn as much as possible about the materials the Renaissance master used to create his works.

There have been some recent scientific investigations of da Vinci's works, which revealed that he varied the materials used for his paintings, especially concerning the ground layers applied between the wooden panel surface and the subsequent paint layers. For instance, for his Virgin and Child with St. Anne (c. 1503–1519), he used a typical Italian Renaissance gesso for the ground layer, followed by a lead white priming layer. But for La Belle Ferronniere (c. 1495–1497), da Vinci used an oil-based ground layer made of white and red lead.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A relentless team of pro-Russia hackers has been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in widely used webmail software in attacks targeting governmental entities and a think tank, all in Europe, researchers from security firm ESET said on Wednesday.

The previously unknown vulnerability resulted from a critical cross-site scripting error in Roundcube, a server application used by more than 1,000 webmail services and millions of their end users. Members of a pro-Russia and Belarus hacking group tracked as Winter Vivern used the XSS bug to inject JavaScript into the Roundcube server application. The injection was triggered simply by viewing a malicious email, which caused the server to send emails from selected targets to a server controlled by the threat actor.

No manual interaction required

“In summary, by sending a specially crafted email message, attackers are able to load arbitrary JavaScript code in the context of the Roundcube user’s browser window,” ESET researcher Matthieu Faou wrote. “No manual interaction other than viewing the message in a web browser is required.”

Enlarge / The side view of the spider (on the left) in the ear canal with the exoskeleton in the background. (credit: The New England Journal of Medicine ©2023.)

While brain worms have made many horrifying headlines this year, the good folks at the New England Journal of Medicine offer some fresh nightmare fuel ahead of Halloween: an ear spider. And there's a video.

In a short clinical report published in this week's issue, doctors in Tainan City, Taiwan, detail the case of a 64-year-old woman who sought care at an otolaryngology (ENT) clinic. She came in complaining of having an incessant ruckus in her left ear for the previous four days. On the first day of symptoms, the woman said she was awoken by a feeling of a wee creature crawling in her ear canal. That feeling was then followed by days of clicking, beating, and rustling noises.

Enlarge / Apple TV's adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation. (credit: YouTube/Apple TV+)

Apple announced monthly price hikes for several online services on Wednesday, including its catchall Apple One subscription service.

Apple TV+ will jump from $6.99 to $9.99 per month, while Apple Arcade will go from $4.99 to $6.99 monthly. Apple News+ used to cost $9.99 per month, but now it's $12.99.

Those three services are bundled alongside iCloud and (in the Premier tier) Fitness+ in Apple One, the company's pseudo-Amazon Prime all-in-one offering. That service will also increase in price. Individual plans will go from $16.95 to $19.95 monthly, family plans will go from $22.95 to $25.95, and Premier plans will now cost $37.95 instead of $32.95.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago released a research paper outlining "Nightshade," a data poisoning technique aimed at disrupting the training process for AI models, reports MIT Technology Review and VentureBeat. The goal is to help visual artists and publishers protect their work from being used to train generative AI image synthesis models, such as Midjourney, DALL-E 3, and Stable Diffusion.

The open source "poison pill" tool (as the University of Chicago's press department calls it) alters images in ways invisible to the human eye that can corrupt an AI model's training process. Many image synthesis models, with notable exceptions of those from Adobe and Getty Images, largely use data sets of images scraped from the web without artist permission, which includes copyrighted material. (OpenAI licenses some of its DALL-E training images from Shutterstock.)

AI researchers' reliance on commandeered data scraped from the web, which is seen as ethically fraught by many, has also been key to the recent explosion in generative AI capability. It took an entire Internet of images with annotations (through captions, alt text, and metadata) created by millions of people to create a data set with enough variety to create Stable Diffusion, for example. It would be impractical to hire people to annotate hundreds of millions of images from the standpoint of both cost and time. Those with access to existing large image databases (such as Getty and Shutterstock) are at an advantage when using licensed training data.