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canopic jug writes:

Smithsonian Magazine has a retrospective on the 70th anniversary of the Fender Stratocaster. That very popular model of electric guitar has been manufactured since 1954.

The Stratocaster also had timing on its side. It came out amid two other transformative innovations: television and rock 'n' roll. Sales picked up once Buddy Holly showcased a Strat on the "Ed Sullivan Show" in 1957. For the American and English kids who came of age in the '60s—Hendrix, Eric Clapton, David Gilmour, the electrified Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival—the guitar's look was as groundbreaking as its sound. "Cool" depends more on appearance than on wiring, and the Strat's double-cut profile (producing two "wings" at the top) and sensuous body lines were mind-blowing. It looked, one early '60s British pop musician recalled, like "the equivalent of a bullet-finned '59 Cadillac."

Not to be confused with air guitar.

Previously:
(2016) Don't Give Up on the Guitar. Fender is Begging You
(2015) Our Musical Instruments May Become Obsolete

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

(FAI - Fully Automatic Installation)
https://fai-project.org/FAIme/live/

-= Custom Live Media, also for Newer Hardware
-= A web service for building your own customized Debian live image

"At this years Debian conference in South Korea I've presented[1] the new feature of the FAIme web service. You can now build your own Debian live media/ISO.

The web interface provides various settings, for e.g. adding a user name and its password, selecting the Debian release (stable or testing), the desktop environment and the language. Additionally you can add your own list of packages, that will be installed into the live environment. It's possible to define a custom script that gets executed during the boot process. For remote access to the live system, you can easily sepcify a github, gitlab or salsa account, whose public ssh key will be used for passwordless root access. If your hardware needs special grub settings, you may also add those. I'm thinking about adding an autologin checkbox, so the live media could be used for a kiosk system.

And finally newer hardware is supported with the help of the backports kernel for the Debian stable release (aka bookworm). This combination is not available from the official Debian live images or the netinst media because the later has some complicated dependencies which are not that easy to resolve2[2]. At DebConf24 I've talked to Alper who has some ideas[3] how to improve the Debian installer environment which then may support a backports kernel."

- Thomas Lange,
- https://blog.fai-project.org/
- https://blog.fai-project.org/posts/faime-live/

[Editor's Comment: OK, I've downloaded a Debian build featuring software that I have chosen. It boots OK and looks fine. Do I trust it? No, not yet. I have no idea who FAI are although I can see who they claim to be. Nor do I know if they are using the correct packages. But I will run it on a spare machine and wireshark it to death when I have some spare time. If any of you know Thomas Lange (Thomas Lange is the main author of FAI. He's a Debian Developer since 2000 and a sysadmin since 1992. He started the FAI project in 1999.) or know more about the project then please leave a comment.]

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/fbi-busts-musicians-elaborate-ai-powered-10m-streaming-royalty-heist/

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors charged a North Carolina musician with defrauding streaming services of $10 million through an elaborate scheme involving AI, as reported by The New York Times. Michael Smith, 52, allegedly used AI to create hundreds of thousands of fake songs by nonexistent bands, then streamed them using bots to collect royalties from platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.

While the AI-generated element of this story is novel, Smith allegedly broke the law by setting up an elaborate fake listener scheme. The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, announced the charges, which include wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. If convicted, Smith could face up to 20 years in prison for each charge.

To avoid detection, Smith spread his streaming activity across numerous fake songs, never playing a single track too many times. He also generated unique names for the AI-created artists and songs, trying to blend in with the quirky names of legitimate musical acts. Smith used artist names like "Callous Post" and "Calorie Screams," while their songs included titles such as "Zygotic Washstands" and "Zymotechnical."

[...] Initially, Smith uploaded his own original compositions to streaming platforms but found that his small catalog failed to generate significant income. In an attempt to scale up, he briefly collaborated with other musicians, reportedly offering to play their songs for royalties, though these efforts failed. This led Smith to pivot to AI-generated music in 2018 when he partnered with an as-yet-unnamed AI music company CEO and a music promoter to create a large library of computer-generated songs. The district attorney announcement did not specify precisely what method Smith used to generate the songs.

[...] When confronted by a music distribution company about "multiple reports of streaming abuse" in 2018, The New York Times says that Smith acted shocked and strongly denied any wrongdoing, insisting there was "absolutely no fraud going on whatsoever."

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

City of Columbus sues man after he discloses severity of ransomware attack

Mayor said data was unusable to criminals; researcher proved otherwise.

A judge in Ohio has issued a temporary restraining order against a security researcher who presented evidence that a recent ransomware attack on the city of Columbus scooped up reams of sensitive personal information, contradicting claims made by city officials.

[....] after the city of Columbus fell victim to a ransomware attack on July 18 that siphoned 6.5 terabytes of the city's data.

[....] Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther said on August 13 that a "breakthrough" in the city's forensic investigation of the breach found that the sensitive files Rhysida obtained were either encrypted or corrupted, making them "unusable" to the thieves.

[....] Shortly after Ginther made his remarks, security researcher David Leroy Ross contacted local news outlets and presented evidence that showed the data Rhysida published was fully intact and contained highly sensitive information regarding city employees and residents.

[....] On Thursday, the city of Columbus sued Ross for alleged damages for criminal acts, invasion of privacy, negligence, and civil conversion. The lawsuit claimed that downloading documents from a dark web site run by ransomware attackers amounted to him "interacting" with them and required special expertise and tools. The suit went on to challenge Ross alerting reporters to the information, which it claimed would not be easily obtained by others.

[....] In a press conference Thursday, Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein defended his decision to sue Ross and obtain the restraining order.

[....] the screenshot of the Rhysida dark web site on Friday morning, the sensitive data remains available to anyone who looks for it. Friday's order may bar Ross from accessing the data or disseminating it to reporters, but it has no effect on those who plan to use the data for malicious purposes.

Whew! I feel safer already!

Original Submission

coolgopher writes:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/sep/05/common-food-dye-found-to-make-skin-and-muscle-temporarily-transparent

"Researchers have peered into the brains and bodies of living animals after discovering that a common food dye can make skin, muscle and connective tissues temporarily transparent.

Applying the dye to the belly of a mouse made its liver, intestines and bladder clearly visible through the abdominal skin, while smearing it on the rodent's scalp allowed scientists to see blood vessels in the animal's brain.

Treated skin regained its normal colour when the dye was washed off, according to researchers at Stanford University, who believe the procedure opens up a host of applications in humans, from locating injuries and finding veins for drawing blood to monitoring digestive disorders and spotting tumours.

"Instead of relying on invasive biopsies, doctors might be able to diagnose deep-seated tumours by simply examining a person's tissue without the need for invasive surgical removal," said Dr Guosong Hong, a senior researcher on the project. "This technique could potentially make blood draws less painful by helping phlebotomists easily locate veins under the skin."

[...] "The most surprising part of this study is that we usually expect dye molecules to make things less transparent. For example, if you mix blue pen ink in water, the more ink you add, the less light can pass through the water," Hong said. "In our experiment, when we dissolve tartrazine in an opaque material like muscle or skin, which normally scatters light, the more tartrazine we add, the clearer the material becomes. But only in the red part of the light spectrum. This goes against what we typically expect with dyes."

The researchers describe the process as "reversible and repeatable", with skin reverting to its natural colour once the dye is washed away. At the moment, transparency is limited to the depth the dye penetrates, but Hong said microneedle patches or injections could deliver the dye more deeply.

The procedure has not yet been tested on humans and researchers will need to show it is safe to use, particularly if the dye is injected beneath the skin.

More Information:

Turning tissues temporarily transparent

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

Losing ground in the race to produce electric vehicles, German and French carmakers are heading toward a disruptive wave of factory closures:

Volkswagen AG is considering factory closures in Germany for the first time in its 87-year history, parting with tradition and risking a feud with unions in a step that reflects the deep woes roiling Europe's auto industry.

After years of ignoring overcapacity and slumping competitiveness, the German auto giant's moves are likely to kick off a broader reckoning in the industry. The reasons are clear: Europe's efforts to compete with Chinese rivals and Tesla Inc. in electric cars are faltering. (full article is paywalled)

"If even VW mulls closing factories in Germany, given how hard that process will be, it means the seas have gotten very rough," Pierre-Olivier Essig, a London-based equities analyst at AIR Capital, told Bloomberg. "The situation is very alarming."

[...] Car sales in Europe are down nearly one-fifth from prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and EV demand has slackened as Germany and Sweden have removed and reduced incentives to purchase the vehicles, Bloomberg reported. As a result, Chinese EV manufacturer BYD has jumped into the European market, pricing its Seagull model at just $9,700 before tax, a far cry from the European's average EV cost of $48,000 in 2022.

VW began downsizing in July, with its Audi subsidiary cutting 90% of its 3,000 person workforce at its manufacturing plant in Brussels, Belgium, according to Bloomberg.

The company's share price is now approaching the lows of its 2015 "diesel crisis," when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency accused the company of installing illegal software in its cars in order to artificially improve its results on diesel emission tests, BBC News reported. The company also posted a €100 million net cash flow loss on its automotive business in the first half of 2024.

Related:

• South Korean EV Battery Makers Reporting Big Losses as EV Demand Slows
• General Motors Lays Off Hundreds Of US Workers
• Auto Woes
• Why are All the EVs so Expensive?

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/sailors-hid-an-unauthorized-starlink-on-the-deck-of-a-us-warship-and-lied-about-it/

It's no secret that government IT can be a huge bummer. The records retention! The security! So government workers occasionally take IT into their own hands with creative but, err, unauthorized solutions.

For instance, a former US Ambassador to Kenya in 2015 got in trouble after working out of an embassy compound bathroom—the only place where he could use his personal computer (!) to access an unsecured network (!!) that let him log in to Gmail (!!!), where he did much of his official business—rules and security policies be damned.

Still, the ambassador had nothing on senior enlisted crew members of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester, who didn't like the Navy's restriction of onboard Internet access. In 2023, they decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to secretly bolt a Starlink terminal to the "O-5 level weatherdeck" of a US warship.
[...]
The Navy Times has all the new and gory details, and you should read their account, because they went to the trouble of using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to uncover the background of this strange story.
[...]
the chiefs don't appear to have taken amazing security precautions once everything was installed. For one thing, they called the network "STINKY." For another, they were soon adding more gear around the ship, which was bound to raise further questions. The chiefs found that the Wi-Fi signal coming off the Starlink satellite transceiver couldn't cover the entire ship, so during a stop in Pearl Harbor, they bought "signal repeaters and cable" to extend coverage.

Sailors on the ship then began finding the STINKY network and asking questions about it.
[...]
Ship officers heard the scuttlebutt about STINKY, of course, and they began asking questions and doing inspections, but they never found the concealed device. On August 18, though, a civilian worker from the Naval Information Warfare Center was installing an authorized SpaceX "Starshield" device and came across the unauthorized SpaceX device hidden on the weatherdeck.
[...]
All of the chiefs who used, paid for, or even knew about the system without disclosing it were given "administrative nonjudicial punishment at commodore's mast," said Navy Times.

[Command Senior Chief Grisel] Marrero herself was relieved of her post last year, and she pled guilty during a court-martial this spring.

So there you go, kids: two object lessons in poor decision-making. Whether working from an embassy bathroom or the deck of a littoral combat ship, if you're a government employee, think twice before giving in to the sweet temptation of unsecured, unauthorized wireless Internet access.

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Cops Are Starting To Tow Away Teslas To 'Secure' Recordings Captured By The Cars' Cameras

Well, here's a not-so-fun new twist in the search-and-seizure narrative. Car owners are being deprived of their vehicles just because cops think footage of a crime may have been captured by the car's on-board cameras.

[....] But being in the wrong place at the wrong time might mean drivers going without cars because cops have decided the best way to secure this potential evidence is to take cars away from their drivers. Here's Rachel Swan, reporting for the San Francisco Chronicle. (h/t Bluesky user Hypervisible)

A Canadian tourist was visiting Oakland recently when he had to talk someone out of taking his Tesla from a hotel parking lot.

This was no thief. It was the Oakland Police Department. Turns out, the Tesla may have witnessed a homicide.

In Oakland and beyond, police called to crime scenes are increasingly looking for more than shell casings and fingerprints. They're scanning for Teslas parked nearby, hoping their unique outward-facing cameras captured key evidence. And, the Chronicle has found, they're even resorting to obtaining warrants to tow the cars to ensure they don't lose the video.

[....] At least warrants appear to be involved at this point, which means there's a paper trail documenting law enforcement's seizure of the inanimate "witness." Unfortunately, that's not going to mean much to car owners who may walk out of their houses, businesses, or places of worship to discover their vehicle missing.

Even though this is handled about as well as it can be at this point in time, this kind of thing is only going to become more common. And, inevitably, some cops are going to decide they don't have time to get a warrant, much less make a good faith effort to secure the recordings from the vehicle's owner before initiating a seizure.

Coming soon! Owners of cars without cameras considered to be obstructing justice.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

In the hunt for alien life, is man truly 'the measure of all things?':

Enrico Fermi's lunchtime question at wartime Los Alamos, "Where is everybody?" has been both a gift and a problem to scientists ever since. Known as "Fermi's Paradox," it simply asks, why, since life on Earth is ubiquitous and developed very early in Earth's history, and the galaxy is very old and not overly large, aren't there intelligent, advanced extraterrestrials everywhere? In particular, why can't we detect any, and why haven't any (obvious) aliens visited us?

There have been a few dozen proposed explanations of Fermi's Paradox, in which, as is the human way, mankind is placed at the center of the picture. It's about what we see, how we evolved to this technological state, what we have or haven't heard from space.

Vojin Rakić, a Serbian philosopher, calls these anthropocentric solutions, because they put humans at the center of the picture. In a paper that studies the existing proposals for solving the paradox, he puts forth a new, possible explanation: Alien life might be unobservable to the senses humans have developed, or even live in part of the wider universe we don't know of or can' t yet detect and observe.

His epistemological approach discards the role of man in the nature of the universe and the search for life. A scholar from the Center for the Study of Bioethics at the University of Belgrade, Rakić's work has been published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

[...] Rakić begins by classifying the many proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox as exceptionality solutions, annihilation solutions and communication barrier solutions. The first posits that life is extremely unlikely to develop and we might be the only life in the Milky Way galaxy, if not the universe, and there may be nobody out there. The development of intelligent life might be even rarer, much rarer, requiring a series of crucial but exceedingly rare jumps in its path.

Annihilation solutions hold that planet-wide catastrophes happen from time to time, like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, or that intelligent species cause their own extinctions with war, weapons or environmental damage, or destroy intelligent life elsewhere either as a means of protection or to grab resources.

Communication barrier solutions question whether alien civilizations are too far away, are incomprehensible to humans, or if they (or we) only exist for a relatively short period of time, or whether intelligent extraterrestrials chose to hide themselves, a scenario discussed in Liu Cixin's sci-fi trilogy "Remembrance of Earth's Past."

The zoo hypothesis proposes that extraterrestrials leave Earth alone to let it develop naturally, a kind of Prime Directive, as was self-imposed by human space explorers in the "Star Trek" universe.

canopic jug writes:

Coreboot 24.08 has been released, as announced on the project's blog. coreboot is a fast, flexible, and secure extended firmware platform to help boot modern computers and embedded systems. Some hardware comes with coreboot these days as vendors increasingly offer it as an option. In other cases, if you have a supported chip set, it can be used to replace the slower, less secure, proprietary UEFI ("BIOS") firmware which came with the hardware.

We are pleased to announce the release of coreboot 24.08, another significant milestone in our ongoing commitment to delivering open-source firmware solutions. This release includes over 900 commits, contributed by more than 130 dedicated individuals from our global community. The updates in 24.08 bring various enhancements, optimizations, and new features that further improve the reliability and performance of coreboot across supported platforms.

The next release is planned for mid-November. It has been a while since SN has addressed firmware. Libreboot is a variant of Coreboot but with more of the proprietary blobs removed.

Previously:
(2021) Libreboot Sees First New Release In Nearly 5 Years, Supports More Old Motherboards
(2020) "Project X" - Pure Open-Source Coreboot Support On AMD Zen
(2019) NSA Contributing Low-Level Code to Coreboot UEFI BIOS Alternative
(2014) Replace your Proprietary BIOS with Libreboot

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Seven months after its first lunar lander fell short of reaching the Moon, Astrobotic announced Tuesday that the spacecraft was stricken by a valve failure that caused a propellant tank to burst in orbit. The company's next landing attempt, using a much larger spacecraft, will include fixes to prevent a similar failure.

Astrobotic's first Peregrine lander, which the company called Peregrine Mission One, launched on January 8 aboard United Launch Alliance's first Vulcan rocket. But soon after separating from the rocket in space, the lander ran into trouble as it stepped through an activation sequence to begin priming its propulsion system.

A review board determined "the most likely cause of the malfunction was a failure of a single helium pressure control valve called a PCV—pressure control valve 2, within the propulsion system," said John Horack, a space industry veteran and professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at Ohio State University.

Helium was supposed to pressurize Peregrine's propulsion system and force fuel and oxidizer from the lander's onboard storage tanks into the spacecraft's small rocket engines to combust and generate thrust.

"PCV2 suffered a loss of seal capability that was most likely due to a mechanical failure in the valve caused by vibration-induced relaxation between some threaded components that are inside the valve, so a failure deep inside the valve itself," said Horack, who chaired Astrobotic's investigation into the failure of the Peregrine lander.

It didn't take long for the valve malfunction to have catastrophic consequences for Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander, which was attempting to become the first US spacecraft since 1972 to achieve a soft landing on the Moon.

upstart writes:

The LZ experiment reports no signs of dark matter in their latest search:

Scientists have just slashed the potential hiding spaces for dark matter particles.

The LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ, experiment has searched for and ruled out the existence of dark matter particles with a wide swath of properties, researchers report August 26 at two conferences. Dark matter is a substance whose influence can be seen on the scale of galaxies and galaxy clusters, but which has never been directly detected.

LZ searches for a hypothetical type of dark matter particle called a weakly interacting massive particle, specifically WIMPs with masses above 9 billion electron volts. (For comparison, a proton has a mass of around 1 billion electron volts). The LZ detector, filled with 10 metric tons of liquid xenon, monitors for atomic nuclei recoiling when WIMPs plow into the liquid (SN: 7/7/22).

The researchers characterize WIMPs by their cross section — the probability that a particle will interact. The result shrinks the maximum possible cross section to about a fifth that allowed by previous results, LZ researchers report at the TeV Particle Astrophysics meeting in Chicago and at the Light Detection in Noble Elements meeting in São Paulo.

"We are making massive strides into new territory," says physicist Chamkaur Ghag of University College London, spokesperson of LZ.

The study was performed with 280 days' worth of data. LZ's final results will be based on 1,000 days of data, and it's expected to further carve away at the dark matter's possibilities — or find evidence of it.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

The Register

After an initial euphoric rush to the cloud, administrators are questioning the value and promise of the tech giant's services.

According to a report published by UK cloud outfit Civo, more than a third of organizations surveyed reckoned that their move to the cloud had failed to live up to promises of cost-effectiveness. Over half reported a rise in their cloud bill.

Although the survey, unsurprisingly, paints Civo in a flattering light, some of its figures may make uncomfortable reading for customers sold on the promises from hyperscalers.

[...] In the IT world, there is an expectation that bang for buck increases as time goes by, but in this example, prices are rising faster than the rate of inflation, and what customers receive for their money remains unchanged.

[...] The giddy enthusiasm might have waned in favor of some hard-nosed ROI calculations, and some workloads might jump away from cloud vendors, "but this will not constitute a change in direction – just a ripple in the stream of dollars flowing to the cloud."

So, are prices increasing? The answer has to be yes. How much of those rises are down to the major vendors opportunistically adding of a few percentage points versus an increase in fixed costs, such as electricity, is pretty much irrelevant. The advice remains the same: the cloud is here to stay although its luster has dulled over time.

Time, then, to wheel out the ROI calculator and ensure there's been no stealthy vendor lock-in. All clouds and all workloads are, after all, not created equal.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

"We know what you're thinking. Is this even legal?":

In a pitch deck to prospective customers, one of Facebook's alleged marketing partners explained how it listens to users' smartphone microphones and advertises to them accordingly.

As 404 Media reports based on documents leaked to its reporters, the TV and radio news giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims that its so-called "Active Listening" software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to "capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations."

"Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers," the deck continues.

In the same slideshow, CMG counted Facebook, Google, and Amazon as clients of its "Active Listening" service. After 404 reached out to Google about its partnership, the tech giant removed the media group from the site for its "Partners Program," which prompted Meta, the owner of Facebook, to admit that it is reviewing CMG to see if it violates any of its terms of service.

An Amazon spokesperson, meanwhile, told 404 that its Ads arm "has never worked with CMG on this program and has no plans to do so. The spox added, confusingly, that if one of its marketing partners violates its rules, the company will take action.

This latest leak marks the third time in a year that 404 has reported on CMG's shady voice targeting service. Last December, the independent news site not only put a marketing company on blast for boasting about such creepy tech on its podcast, but also revealed the existence of CMG's Active Listening feature.

Together with this latest update to the CMG saga, these stories bolster longstanding suspicions about advertisers using our phones to listen to us.

"We know what you're thinking. Is this even legal?" a since-deleted Cox blog post from November 2023 noted. "It is legal for phones and devices to listen to you. When a new app download or update prompts consumers with a multi-page term of use agreement somewhere in the fine print, Active Listening is often included."

Also see: Pitch Deck Gives New Details on Company's Plan to Listen to Your Devices for Ad Targeting

Original Submission

owl writes:

http://cityinfrastructure.com/single.php?d=RuralOutsidePlant&t=Rural%20Outside%20Plant

Another section of this web site talked about outside plant, which is the telephone company's term for the cabling and other equipment which connects your home telephone to their Central Office.

This diagram shows an overview, and below are some pictures and descriptions of how outside plant is different for rural areas.

The main differences are that the Central Offices are typically smaller, and the cable distances are much greater.

[Editor's Note: A few weeks ago we ran a story about a cold war hardened shelter which generated a reasonable discussion. This is another one of those submissions which show how regular everyday systems are actually put together and maintained; in this case part of the standard telephone system. It is informative and I discovered several things about a standard US telephone cabling that I did not know before e.g. some cable is pressurized with air to help prevent water ingress, but it provides additional benefits to the engineers who have to maintain the system.]

Original Submission