Month: January 2025

Aktuelle Cyber-Bedrohungen erfordern moderne Lösungen, um Sicherheitslücken zu identifizieren und IT-Infrastrukturen gezielt zu schützen. Diese Intensivworkshops vermitteln das nötige Wissen zur Gefahrenabwehr. (Applikationen, Sicherheitslücke)

It's a truism at this point to say that Americans own a lot of guns. Case in point: This week, a fire chief in rural Alabama stopped to help a driver who had just hit a deer. The two men walked up the driveway of a nearby home. For reasons that remain unclear, a man came out of the house with a gun and started shooting. This was a bad idea on many levels, but most practically because both the fire chief and the driver were also armed. Between the three of them, everyone got shot, the fire chief died, and the man who lived in the home was charged with murder.

But despite the ease of acquiring legal weapons, a robust black market still exists to traffic in things like "ghost guns" (no serial numbers) and machine gun converters (which make a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic). According to a major new report released this month by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, there was a 1,600 percent increase in the use of privately made "ghost guns" during crimes between 2017 and 2023. Between 2019 and 2023, the seizure of machine gun converters also increased by 784 percent.

Ars Technica has covered these issues for years, since both "ghost guns" and machine gun converters can be produced using 3D-printed parts, the schematics for which are now widely available online. But you can know about an issue and still be surprised when local prosecutors start talking about black market trafficking rings, inept burglary schemes, murder—and 3D printing operations being run out of a local apartment.

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The World Health Organization has begun cost-cutting measures in preparation for a US withdrawal next year, according to reporting by Reuters.

On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the United Nation's health agency. The country was a founding member of the WHO in 1948 and has since been a key member of the organization, which has 193 other member states. The executive order cited Trump's long-standing complaints about the agency's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, dues payments, and alleged protection of China as the reasons for the withdrawal.

In a statement on Tuesday, the WHO said it "regrets" the announcement and hopes the US will reconsider.

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Nvidia is launching the first volley of RTX 50-series GPUs based on its new Blackwell architecture, starting with the RTX 5090 and working downward from there. The company also appears to be winding down support for a few of its older GPU architectures, according to these CUDA release notes spotted by Tom's Hardware.

The release notes say that CUDA support for the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPU architectures "is considered feature-complete and will be frozen in an upcoming release." While all of these architectures—which collectively cover GeForce GPUs from the old GTX 700 series all the way up through 2016's GTX 1000 series, plus a couple of Quadro and Titan workstation cards—are still currently supported by Nvidia's December Game Ready driver package, the end of new CUDA feature support suggests that these GPUs will eventually be dropped from these driver packages soon.

It's common for Nvidia and AMD to drop support for another batch of architectures all at once every few years; Nvidia last dropped support for older cards in 2021, and AMD dropped support for several prominent GPUs in 2023. Both companies maintain a separate driver branch for some of their older cards but releases usually only happen every few months, and they focus on security updates, not on providing new features or performance optimizations for new games.

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Shortly after the EU forced Apple to allow third-party app stores on iOS (in the European Union, at least), Epic announced it was bringing its Epic Games Store to iPhones and Android. Up until recently it’s mostly been a place for installing Epic games like Fortnite, Fall Guides, and Rocket League Sideswipe. But now Epic […]

The post Lilbits: Epic Games Store brings free games to mobile, Volla Phone Quintus now available, and Samsung finally embraces Seamless Updates appeared first on Liliputing.

On Thursday, Anthropic announced Citations, a new API feature that helps Claude models avoid confabulations (also called hallucinations) by linking their responses directly to source documents. The feature lets developers add documents to Claude's context window, enabling the model to automatically cite specific passages it uses to generate answers.

"When Citations is enabled, the API processes user-provided source documents (PDF documents and plaintext files) by chunking them into sentences," Anthropic says. "These chunked sentences, along with user-provided context, are then passed to the model with the user's query."

The company describes several potential uses for Citations, including summarizing case files with source-linked key points, answering questions across financial documents with traced references, and powering support systems that cite specific product documentation.

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Asus launched the ROG Phone 9 and ROG Phone 9 Pro late last year. Now it looks like the company could be planning to expand its gaming smartphone family with a new ROG Phone 9 FE model that could be a slightly cheaper alternative to the flagship models. While the company hasn’t officially announced plans to […]

The post Asus ROG Phone 9 FE could be a cheaper gaming phone appeared first on Liliputing.

The founder of an AI startup in San Francisco was indicted this week for allegedly conspiring with his wife for six years to defraud investors out of $60 million.

According to a press release from the US Attorney's Office in the Northern District of California, Alexander Beckman—founder of GameOn Technology (now known as ON Platform)—and Valerie Lau Beckman—an attorney hired by GameOn who later became his wife—were charged with 25 counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, securities fraud, identity theft, and other offenses. Lau also faces one charge of obstruction of justice after allegedly deleting evidence.

If convicted, the maximum penalties for Beckman, 41, could exceed 60 years and for Lau, 38, potentially 80 years.

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The ACEMAGIC F3A is a small desktop computer with an RGB light strip just under the lid, support for up to 96GB of DDR5-5600 dual-channel memory, and up to 4TB of PCIe NVMe storage. It’s also one of a growing number of mini PCs powered by an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Strix Point 12-core, […]

The post ACEMAGIC F3A is a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 mini PC with dual 2.5 GbE LAN and up to 96GB RAM appeared first on Liliputing.

The game of chess has long been central to computer science and AI-related research, most notably in IBM's Deep Blue in the 1990s and, more recently, AlphaZero. But the game is about more than algorithms, according to Marc Barthelemy, a physicist at the Paris-Saclay University in France, with layers of depth arising from the psychological complexity conferred by player strategies.

Now, Barthelmey has taken things one step further by publishing a new paper in the journal Physical Review E that treats chess as a complex system, producing a handy metric that can help predict the proverbial "tipping points" in chess matches.

In his paper, Barthelemy cites Richard Reti, an early 20th-century chess master who gave a series of lectures in the 1920s on developing a scientific understanding of chess. It was an ambitious program involving collecting empirical data, constructing typologies, and devising laws based on those typologies, but Reti's insights fell by the wayside as advances in computer science came to dominate the field. That's understandable. "With its simple rules yet vast strategic depth, chess provides an ideal platform for developing and testing algorithms in AI, machine learning, and decision theory," Barthelemy writes.

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