Technology

On Tuesday, an international team of researchers unveiled BadRAM, a proof-of-concept attack that completely undermines security assurances that chipmaker AMD makes to users of one of its most expensive and well-fortified microprocessor product lines. Starting with the AMD Epyc 7003 processor, a feature known as SEV-SNP—short for Secure Encrypted Virtualization and Secure Nested Paging—has provided the cryptographic means for certifying that a VM hasn’t been compromised by any sort of backdoor installed by someone with access to the physical machine running it.

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Apple's initial AI features were met with lukewarm reception, but the upcoming iOS 18.2 update promises a more substantial AI experience for iPhone users.

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One reason hyperlinks work like they do – why they index other kinds of affiliation – is that they were first devised to exhibit the connections researchers made among different sources as they developed new ideas. Early plans for what became the hypertext protocol of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web were presented as tools for documenting how human minds tend to move from idea to idea, connecting external stimuli and internal reflections. Links treat creativity as the work of remediating and remaking, which is foregrounded in the slogan for Google Scholar: ‘Stand on the shoulders of giants.’

TikTok's bid to overturn a law which would see it banned or sold in the US from early 2025 has been rejected.

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Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely. Disregarding all of bitcoin's shortcomings, a financial instrument that brings out the worst in people—greed—won't change the world for the better.

Do you know how much of a scumbag you have to be to attack a hospital.

Romanian civil society is alarmed about political advertisement on TikTok breaching European and national laws and how that benefited an extremist candidate in the elections. EDRi member ApTI with 20 other NGOs from Romania call upon the European Commission and the national authorities to take swift action and investigate, as elections are still ongoing.

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And if you don't know who Holthaus is..."

Good piece on the intersection between technology and politics, and the influence that the US government has on US-based technology companies.

archive.is link

Matthew Hodgson, technical co-founder of the Matrix open standard, told us: "This has nothing to do with the Matrix protocol; it's just an unfortunate naming coincidence."

archive link: https://archive.is/MFa7R

Dutch and French police on Tuesday shut down a major encryption service used by criminal gangs, saying it even outrivalled illegal communication tools previously cracked by law enforcement, the EU's judicial agency said.

Musk says for-profit OpenAI harms public interest—and his own company, xAI.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google is asking a federal appeals court to throw out a ruling in an antitrust case brought by Fortnite-maker Epic Games that would force the search giant to overhaul its Play mobile app store.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17343934

Sixteen Next Generation Internet (NGI) projects are pleased to announce the transition to Mastodon and PeerTube, two European open-source platforms, for their communication and content-sharing needs. This strategic move aligns with NGI’s commitment to fostering an Internet that embodies European values of trust, security, and inclusion.

CAFE by GE for those who are wondering.

*Analysis written by Anda Iulia Solea, Lecturer in Cybercrime at the University of Portsmouth.*

With the recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), web developers increasingly apply their code-generation capabilities to website design. However, since these models are trained on existing designerly knowledge, they may inadvertently replicate bad or even illegal practices, especially deceptive designs (DD).

The large language model of the OpenGPT-X research project is now available for download on Hugging Face: "Teuken-7B" has been trained from scratch in all 24 official languages of the European Union (EU) and contains seven billion parameters. Researchers and companies can leverage this commercially usable open source model for their own artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), the OpenGPT-X consortium – led by the Fraunhofer Institutes for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS and for Integrated Circuits IIS – have developed a large language model that is open source and has a distinctly European perspective.

In truth, the mega-platforms and their pocket-warlord leaders fell into their roles largely by chance and have since attempted to rule as though extraordinarily consequential global rulemaking and governance by a handful of US companies built to exploit human feeling for financial gain were a sensible way to arrange the world. Facebook was born from a website made for elite students to rank their classmates’ sexual attractiveness; Twitter was a watercooler where bored office workers could get attention by telling jokes in public. It’s as if 3M’s accidental invention of Post-It notes while failing to make space glue landed them a UN veto. [...] Few, if any, of this moment’s apparently unstoppable tech platforms will survive for long. The people on them will eventually leave—when they’re forced to do so by the continuous degradation of their experience, or because they’re forced to do so because their governments put the hammer down, as Brazil recently demonstrated—or sometimes when they just get tired of platform leaders acting like clowns and boosting troll-agents of openly fascist chaos into power. And that there is therefore not only an opportunity to provide more humane places for those people to go, but a responsibility to do so.

German automaker Volkswagen (VW) on Wednesday announced it would sell its operations in China's northwestern Xinjiang region.

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Firefox is a great alternative to Google Chrome

While most drones are either gas or electricity-powered, South Korea takes a different path by unveiling its special drone powered by hydrogen.

Bsky stats

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Thanks to bestselling authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the public has become increasingly aware of the rapid rise in mental health issues among younger people [...] Their warnings about the destructive impact of social media have had an effect, reflected not least in a wave of schools across Europe banning smartphones.

Abstract

The Australian government’s proposed social media ban for under-16s has sparked widespread debate, affecting millions of young Australians, their families and educators. But will it actually work?

Google DeepMind's AI systems are now teaching robots the way... of human tasks. Robots need a lot of training and studies to do tasks correctly and efficiently, with Google DeepMind's latest AI systems helping pave the way for machines to get well-versed in human tasks.

Content Warning

Congratulations. Reading this far into the story is a feat not many will accomplish, especially if shared on Facebook, according to a team led by Penn State researchers.

Now, the rate of new mobile internet subscriber growth is slowing. From 2015 to 2021, the survey consistently found over 200 million coming online through mobile devices around the world each year. But in the last two years, that number has dropped to 160 million. Rest of World analysis of that data found that a number of developing countries are plateauing in the number of mobile internet subscribers. That suggests that in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Mexico, the easiest populations to get online have already logged on, and getting the rest of the population on mobile internet will continue to be a challenge. GSMA collects data by surveying a nationally representative sample of people in each country, and then it correlates the results with similar studies.

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LG Display has previously released a stretchable display with a 20% elongation rate. However, the newest release could extend up to 50%.

I think this would be a step in the right direction.

It's always about the data.

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Surprise surprise

Apple's next smartphone rumors early specs for the iPhone 17, detailing its new chips and more.

As demand for warehouses soars, many cross-border sellers are finding it more cost-effective to store their goods in the U.S. This shift is driven by the rapid growth of e-commerce platforms like Temu, Shein, and TikTok, which have made it easier for small Chinese manufacturers to tap into the American market.

The US Secret Service deploys Boston Dynamics' robotic dog, Spot to bolster security at Mar-a-Lago following assassination attempts on Donald Trump.

A college student in Michigan received a threatening response during a chat with Google's AI chatbot Gemini.

Requirements that officials are preparing to propose include that Google separate Android from Search and Google Play, but without trying to force Google to sell off Android. Another requirement would say it has to share more information with advertisers and that it “give them more control over where their ads appear,” the outlet writes.

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publication croisée depuis : https://lemmy.pierre-couy.fr/post/805239

Here is the link where you can read and download the study: Patterns of partisan toxicity and engagement reveal the common structure of online political communication across countries

To whom it may concern.

A Russian spy ship has been escorted out of the Irish Sea after it entered Irish-controlled waters and patrolled an area containing critical energy and internet submarine pipelines and cables.

cross-posted from: https://feditown.com/post/830406

AI host discovers its artificial nature, sparking debate on AI sentience and the blurred lines between human and machine.