Month: September 2024

Enlarge / Cows being milked in Wisconsin on May 8, 2024. (credit: Getty | Matthew Ludak)

The H5N1 bird flu appears to be stampeding through dairy farms in California, the country's largest milk producer. Over the weekend, the total number of confirmed infected cow herds stunningly doubled, going from 17 last Thursday to 34 Monday morning, according to state and federal officials.

With the new tally, California now ranks second among all affected states for having the most herds with avian influenza. Only Colorado, which has adopted bulk milk-tank surveillance, has more, with 64 herds confirmed. California's high ranking is despite the fact that it only reported its first three infected herds on August 30, while the dairy outbreak was first confirmed on March 25 and thought to have begun late last year.

To date, 232 herds in 14 states have been infected with the bird flu.

Enlarge (credit: andresr via Getty Images)

On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlined his vision for an AI-driven future of tech progress and global prosperity in a new personal blog post titled "The Intelligence Age." The essay paints a picture of human advancement accelerated by AI, with Altman suggesting that superintelligent AI could emerge within the next decade.

"It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there," he wrote.

OpenAI's current goal is to create AGI (artificial general intelligence), which is a term for hypothetical technology that could match human intelligence in performing many tasks without the need for specific training. In contrast, superintelligence surpasses AGI, and it could be seen as a hypothetical level of machine intelligence that can dramatically outperform humans at any intellectual task, perhaps even to an unfathomable degree.

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  The Sarmat missile silo seen before last week's launch attempt. [credit: Maxar Technologies ]

Late last week, Russia's military planned to launch a Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on a test flight from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. Imagery from commercial satellites captured over the weekend suggest the missile exploded before or during launch.

This is at least the second time an RS-28 Sarmat missile has failed in less than two years, dealing a blow to the country's nuclear forces days after the head of the Russian legislature issued a veiled threat to use the missile against Europe if Western allies approved Ukraine's use of long-range weapons against Russia.

Commercial satellite imagery collected by Maxar and Planet show before-and-after views of the Sarmat missile silo at Plesetsk, a military base about 500 miles (800 kilometers) north of Moscow. The view from one of Maxar's imaging satellites Saturday revealed unmistakable damage at the launch site, with a large crater centered on the opening to the underground silo.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Five years ago, researchers made a grim discovery—a legitimate Android app in the Google Play market that was surreptitiously made malicious by a library the developers used to earn advertising revenue. With that, the app was infected with code that caused 100 million infected devices to connect to attacker-controlled servers and download secret payloads.

Now, history is repeating itself. Researchers from the same Moscow, Russia-based security firm reported Monday that they found two new apps, downloaded from Play 11 million times, that were infected with the same malware family. The researchers, from Kaspersky, believe a malicious software developer kit for integrating advertising capabilities is once again responsible.

Clever tradecraft

Software developer kits, better known as SDKs, are apps that provide developers with frameworks that can greatly speed up the app-creation process by streamlining repetitive tasks. An unverified SDK module incorporated into the apps ostensibly supported the display of ads. Behind the scenes, it provided a host of advanced methods for stealthy communication with malicious servers, where the apps would upload user data and download malicious code that could be executed and updated at any time.

Enlarge (credit: Moor Studio | DigitalVision Vectors)

Cloudflare announced new tools Monday that it claims will help end the era of endless AI scraping by giving all sites on its network the power to block bots in one click.

That will help stop the firehose of unrestricted AI scraping, but, perhaps even more intriguing to content creators everywhere, Cloudflare says it will also make it easier to identify which content that bots scan most, so that sites can eventually wall off access and charge bots to scrape their most valuable content. To pave the way for that future, Cloudflare is also creating a marketplace for all sites to negotiate content deals based on more granular AI audits of their sites.

These tools, Cloudflare's blog said, give content creators "for the first time" ways "to quickly and easily understand how AI model providers are using their content, and then take control of whether and how the models are able to access it."

Enlarge / The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, the first iteration of a very, very long-lived phone design. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

This past weekend, I said goodbye to Apple’s 4.7-inch iPhone 6 design, after 10 long years.

It started with the iPhone 6 itself in 2014, a long-awaited screen size upgrade for the iPhone (some of the 2011-era Apple punditry insisting that 3.5 inches was the functionally perfect size for a phone screen and that Apple would never, ever change it, is an interesting time capsule). It ends with my wife’s third-generation iPhone SE, its battery capacity already collapsing, which I replaced with an iPhone 16 on Friday.

There are huge differences between those two phones—eight years’ worth of spec upgrades and water resistance being the most significant—but they look and feel almost the same, and things that were fine or forgivable in 2014 have become harder to live with now.

Enlarge / This is Thor and Harbinger's test bed for a new Class A hybrid RV. (credit: Thor)

Electrification is moving through different parts of the automotive industry at different speeds. And soon, it will be time for the recreational vehicle segment to start adding batteries and electric motors. Today, Thor Industries revealed a new hybrid class A motorhome that demos a new hybrid electric powertrain from Harbinger.

"Electrification will play a central role in the future of mobility, including RVing," said Thor Industries President and CEO Bob Martin. "This first-of-its-kind hybrid platform and our ongoing collaboration with Harbinger are reinforcing Thor's leadership in this segment and creating major points of product differentiation for our family of companies."

Thor and Harbinger have been working together for a while now—in March Thor took delivery of a medium-duty EV chassis from Harbinger. But the battery EV RV will only have a range of about 250 miles on a single charge. By comparison, the two companies say that the hybrid RV should have a range of twice that—500 miles—courtesy of a 140 kWh lithium-ion traction battery and a gasoline-powered range extender.