Month: March 2024

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The ransomware group responsible for hamstringing the prescription drug market for two weeks has suddenly gone dark, just days after receiving a $22 million payment and standing accused of scamming an affiliate out of its share of the loot.

The events involve AlphV, a ransomware group also known as BlackCat. Two weeks ago, it took down Change Healthcare, the biggest US health care payment processor, leaving pharmacies, health care providers, and patients scrambling to fill prescriptions for medicines. On Friday, the bitcoin ledger shows, the group received nearly $22 million in cryptocurrency, stoking suspicions the deposit was payment by Change Healthcare in exchange for AlphV decrypting its data and promising to delete it.

Representatives of Optum, the parent company, declined to say if the company has paid AlphV.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The ransomware group responsible for hamstringing the prescription drug market for two weeks has suddenly gone dark, just days after receiving a $22 million payment and standing accused of scamming an affiliate out of its share of the loot.

The events involve AlphV, a ransomware group also known as BlackCat. Two weeks ago, it took down Change Healthcare, the biggest US health care payment processor, leaving pharmacies, health care providers, and patients scrambling to fill prescriptions for medicines. On Friday, the bitcoin ledger shows, the group received nearly $22 million in cryptocurrency, stoking suspicions the deposit was payment by Change Healthcare in exchange for AlphV decrypting its data and promising to delete it.

Representatives of Optum, the parent company, declined to say if the company has paid AlphV.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aliaksandr Litviniuk)

Microsoft urged a federal court to dismiss part of The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against itself and OpenAI, claiming that the NYT lawsuit is similar to the movie industry's attempts to kill the VCR in the 1980s.

Microsoft's filing in US District Court for the Southern District of New York begins with a well-known 1982 quote from Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) President Jack Valenti, who told Congress that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

"The analogy was part of an all-out effort by television and movie producers to stop a groundbreaking new technology," Microsoft wrote yesterday, comparing the movie industry's claims of copyright infringement to the NYT lawsuit in which both OpenAI and Microsoft are defendants. Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aliaksandr Litviniuk)

Microsoft urged a federal court to dismiss part of The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against itself and OpenAI, claiming that the NYT lawsuit is similar to the movie industry's attempts to kill the VCR in the 1980s.

Microsoft's filing in US District Court for the Southern District of New York begins with a well-known 1982 quote from Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) President Jack Valenti, who told Congress that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

"The analogy was part of an all-out effort by television and movie producers to stop a groundbreaking new technology," Microsoft wrote yesterday, comparing the movie industry's claims of copyright infringement to the NYT lawsuit in which both OpenAI and Microsoft are defendants. Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

In the continual cat-and-mouse game of Google Search versus search engine optimization (SEO) firms, Google seems to be losing lately. Search feels less useful with every passing day as the ChatGPT era has unleashed a tsunami of AI junk that quickly fills up search results. Google played a big part in creating all this with its invention of transformers, and now it's finally doing something about it. A new blog post details efforts to reduce "spammy, low-quality content on Search."

Google's post describes a "March 2024 core update" to the ranking algorithms that it says will show fewer results that "are unhelpful, have a poor user experience or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people." Google says this "could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries" and people that are "producing content at scale to boost search ranking." The company says "based on our evaluations, we expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40."

Google's post is incredibly worded not to mention AI. Google says it wants to "address emerging tactics" like "using automation to generate low-quality or unoriginal content at scale." Google also notes that "Today, scaled content creation methods are more sophisticated," but which new "content creation methods" spammers are using is left as a mystery. Google wants to style itself as an AI-first company now. Apparently, that means never directly mentioning any of the downsides of the AI-powered internet Google played a role in creating.

Enlarge / Japanese artist Akiko Nakayama manipulates alcohol and inks to create tree-like dendritic patterns during a live painting session. (credit: Akiko Nakayama/CC BY)

Dendritic painting is an artistic technique that involves depositing mixtures of ink and rubbing alcohol onto paint spread on a substrate, producing branching, tree-like patterns. Two physicists have now analyzed the underlying fluid dynamics at work to create those intricate shapes and patterns, describing their findings in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus.

“Painters have often employed fluid mechanics to craft unique compositions," said co-author Eliot Fried of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan. "We have seen it with [Mexican muralist] David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jackson Pollock, and Naoko Tosa, just to name a few. In our laboratory, we reproduce and study artistic techniques, to understand how the characteristics of the fluids influence the final outcome."

Fried is one of several scientists intrigued by how artists exploit fluid dynamics in their work. For instance, Roberto Zenit, a physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has been studying the physics of fluids at work in those techniques for several years, concluding that the artists were "intuitive physicists," using science to create timeless art—including Siqueiros' "accidental painting" technique.

Enlarge / Little Android guy, how did you get in there? (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Microsoft is pulling support for the Windows Subsystem for Android, a Windows 11 feature first released in October of 2021 that allowed Windows PCs to run Android apps alongside native Windows apps. The company says that PCs currently running Android apps will still be able to run them but that the feature will be deprecated and all support will end after March 5, 2025.

Microsoft's notice also implies that the Amazon Appstore and all Android apps will disappear from the Microsoft Store sometime between now and March 2025, though as of this writing, it is still available to install, albeit with a warning message about the 2025 end-of-support date.

The Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) was a follow-up of sorts to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), a Windows 10-era feature that allowed users to run Linux command-line tools and scripts and Linux apps from within Windows without setting up a virtual machine, dual-booting, or connecting to a remote PC running a separate OS. Both subsystems relied on virtualization capabilities built into modern hardware and software to blur the lines between Windows and the alternate operating system.

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A 62-year-old man in Germany decided to get 217 COVID-19 vaccinations over the course of 29 months —for "private reasons." But, somewhat surprisingly, he doesn't seem to have suffered any ill effects from the excessive immunization, particularly weaker immune responses, according to a newly published case study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

The case is just one person, of course, so the findings can't be extrapolated to the general population. But, they conflict with a widely held concern among researchers that such overexposure to vaccination could lead to weaker immune responses. Some experts have raised this concern in discussions over how frequently people should get COVID-19 booster doses.

In cases of chronic exposure to a disease-causing germ, "there is an indication that certain types of immune cells, known as T-cells, then become fatigued, leading to them releasing fewer pro-inflammatory messenger substances," according to co-lead study author Kilian Schober from the Institute of Microbiology – Clinical Microbiology, Immunology and Hygiene. This, along with other effects, can lead to "immune tolerance" that leads to weaker responses that are less effective at fighting off a pathogen, Schober explained in a news release.