BleepingComputer reports on "a new denial-of-service attack dubbed 'Loop DoS' targeting application layer protocols."

According to their article, the attack "can pair network services into an indefinite communication loop that creates large volumes of traffic." Devised by researchers at the CISPA Helmholtz-Center for Information Security, the attack uses the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and impacts an estimated 300,000 host and their networks. The attack is possible due to a vulnerability, currently tracked as CVE-2024-2169, in the implementation of the UDP protocol, which is susceptible to IP spoofing and does not provide sufficient packet verification. An attacker exploiting the vulnerability creates a self-perpetuating mechanism that generates excessive traffic without limits and without a way to stop it, leading to a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on the target system or even an entire network. Loop DoS relies on IP spoofing and can be triggered from a single host that sends one message to start the communication.

According to the Carnegie Mellon CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) there are three potential outcomes when an attacker leverages the vulnerability:

— Overloading of a vulnerable service and causing it to become unstable or unusable.
— DoS attack on the network backbone, causing network outages to other services.
— Amplification attacks that involve network loops causing amplified DOS or DDOS attacks.

CISPA researchers Yepeng Pan and Professor Dr. Christian Rossow say the potential impact is notable, spanning both outdated (QOTD, Chargen, Echo) and modern protocols (DNS, NTP, TFTP) that are crucial for basic internet-based functions like time synchronization, domain name resolution, and file transfer without authentication... The researchers warned that the attack is easy to exploit, noting that there is no evidence indicating active exploitation at this time. Rossow and Pan shared their findings with affected vendors and notified CERT/CC for coordinated disclosure. So far, vendors who confirmed their implementations are affected by CVE-2024-2169 are Broadcom, Cisco, Honeywell, Microsoft, and MikroTik.

To avoid the risk of denial of service via Loop DoS, CERT/CC recommends installing the latest patches from vendors that address the vulnerability and replace products that no longer receive security updates. Using firewall rules and access-control lists for UDP applications, turning off unnecessary UDP services, and implementing TCP or request validation are also measures that can mitigate the risk of an attack. Furthermore, the organization recommends deploying anti-spoofing solutions like BCP38 and Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF), and using Quality-of-Service (QoS) measures to limit network traffic and protect against abuse from network loops and DoS amplifications.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schneidafunk for sharing the article.

Jessica Lyons reports via The Register: Vulnerabilities in common Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs) required in US commercial trucks could be present in over 14 million medium- and heavy-duty rigs, according to boffins at Colorado State University. In a paper presented at the 2024 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, associate professor Jeremy Daily and systems engineering graduate students Jake Jepson and Rik Chatterjee demonstrated how ELDs can be accessed over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connections to take control of a truck, manipulate data, and spread malware between vehicles. "These findings highlight an urgent need to improve the security posture in ELD systems," the trio wrote [PDF].

The authors did not specify brands or models of ELDs that are vulnerable to the security flaws they highlight in the paper. But they do note there's not too much diversity of products on the market. While there are some 880 devices registered, "only a few tens of distinct ELD models" have hit the road in commercial trucks. A federal mandate requires most heavy-duty trucks to be equipped with ELDs, which track driving hours. These systems also log data on engine operation, vehicle movement and distances driven -- but they aren't required to have tested safety controls built in. And according to the researchers, they can be wirelessly manipulated by another car on the road to, for example, force a truck to pull over.

The academics pointed out three vulnerabilities in ELDs. They used bench level testing systems for the demo, as well as additional testing on a moving 2014 Kenworth T270 Class 6 research truck equipped with a vulnerable ELD. [...] For one of the attacks, the boffins showed how anyone within wireless range could use the device's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios to send an arbitrary CAN message that could disrupt of some of the vehicle's systems. A second attack scenario, which also required the attacker to be within wireless range, involved connecting to the device and uploading malicious firmware to manipulate data and vehicle operations. Finally, in what the authors described as the "most concerning" scenario, they uploaded a truck-to-truck worm. The worm uses the compromised device's Wi-Fi capabilities to search for other vulnerable ELDs nearby. After finding the right ELDs, the worm uses default credentials to establish a connection, drops its malicious code on the next ELD, overwrites existing firmware, and then starts the process over again, scanning for additional devices. "Such an attack could lead to widespread disruptions in commercial fleets, with severe safety and operational implications," the researchers warned.

An Internet service provider that admitted lying to the FCC about where it offers broadband will pay a $10,000 fine and implement a compliance plan to prevent future violations. ArsTechnica: Jefferson County Cable (JCC), a small ISP in Toronto, Ohio, admitted that it falsely claimed to offer fiber service in an area that it hadn't expanded to yet. A company executive also admitted that the firm submitted false coverage data to prevent other ISPs from obtaining government grants to serve the area. Ars helped expose the incident in a February 2023 article.

The FCC announced the outcome of its investigation on March 15, saying that Jefferson County Cable violated the Broadband Data Collection program requirements and the Broadband DATA Act, a US law, "in connection with reporting inaccurate information or data with respect to the Company's ability to provide broadband Internet access service." The FCC said: "To settle this matter, Jefferson County Cable agrees to pay a $10,000 civil penalty to the United States Treasury. Jefferson County Cable also agrees to implement enhanced compliance measures. This action will help further the Commission's efforts to bridge the digital divide by having accurate data of locations where broadband service is available."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just sued two more porn sites, xHamster and Chaturbate, alleging they aren't complying with age verification laws. As first reported by local news outlet KXAN, the Office of the Attorney General filed two civil lawsuits on Tuesday afternoon against Hammy Media, which owns xHamster, and Multi Media, which owns Chaturbate. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed HB 1181 into law in June, which requires porn sites to verify the ages of users through a driver's license or passport. If porn sites don't force consenting adults to hand over a government-issued ID in order to watch other consenting adults have sex on camera, they face heavy fines.

Paxton's lawsuit against xHamster asks the court to force the site to pay a civil penalty of up to $1.67 million, with an additional $10,000 a day since filing. For Chaturbate, it's $1.78 million plus $10,000 per day. Last week, Pornhub's parent company Aylo blocked anyone accessing its network of sites from a Texas IP address, and replaced its network of sites -- which include Pornhub, Brazzers, YouPorn and many more -- with a message about its rejection of age verification legislation that requires adults to show government-issued ID to access porn. [...] As of writing, xHamster and Chaturbate are still accessible in Texas and don't have requirements to verify users' ages with a government ID.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: UnitedHealth Group said Monday that it's paid out more than $2 billion to help health-care providers who have been affected by the cyberattack on subsidiary Change Healthcare. "We continue to make significant progress in restoring the services impacted by this cyberattack," UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty said in a press release. "We know this has been an enormous challenge for health care providers and we encourage any in need to contact us."

UnitedHealth disclosed nearly a month ago that a cyber threat actor breached part of Change Healthcare's information technology network. The fallout has wreaked havoc across the U.S. health-care system. Change Healthcare offers e-prescription software and tools for payment management, so the interruptions left many providers temporarily unable to fill medications or get reimbursed for their services by insurers. UnitedHealth, which provides care for 152 million people, said on Monday that it began releasing medical claims preparation software, which will be available to thousands of customers in the next several days. The company called it "an important step in the resumption of services."

On Friday, UnitedHealth said it restored Change Healthcare's electronic payments platform, after rebooting 99% of its pharmacy network services earlier this month. It also introduced a temporary funding assistance program to help health-care providers experiencing cash flow trouble because of the attack. UnitedHealth said the advances will not need to be repaid until claims flows return to normal. Federal agencies like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have introduced additional options to ensure that states and other stakeholders can make interim payments to providers, according to a release.

CoinDesk: The Ethereum Foundation -- the Swiss non-profit organization at the heart of the Ethereum ecosystem -- is under investigation by an unnamed "state authority," according to the group's website's GitHub repository. The scope of the investigation and its focus was unknown at press time. According to the GitHub commit dated Feb. 26, 2024, "we have received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality."

The investigation comes during a time of change for Ethereum's technology. Ethereum is the second-largest blockchain by market cap after Bitcoin, launching in 2015 following an initial coin offering for the chain's native ETH token. Earlier this month, the chain underwent a major technical upgrade, dubbed Dencun, designed to bring down transaction costs for users of Ethereum-based layer-2 platforms.

Sean Hollister reports via The Verge: Nvidia's must-have H100 AI chip made it a multitrillion-dollar company, one that may be worth more than Alphabet and Amazon, and competitors have been fighting to catch up. But perhaps Nvidia is about to extend its lead -- with the new Blackwell B200 GPU and GB200 "superchip." Nvidia says the new B200 GPU offers up to 20 petaflops of FP4 horsepower from its 208 billion transistors and that a GB200 that combines two of those GPUs with a single Grace CPU can offer 30 times the performance for LLM inference workloads while also potentially being substantially more efficient. It "reduces cost and energy consumption by up to 25x" over an H100, says Nvidia.

Training a 1.8 trillion parameter model would have previously taken 8,000 Hopper GPUs and 15 megawatts of power, Nvidia claims. Today, Nvidia's CEO says 2,000 Blackwell GPUs can do it while consuming just four megawatts. On a GPT-3 LLM benchmark with 175 billion parameters, Nvidia says the GB200 has a somewhat more modest seven times the performance of an H100, and Nvidia says it offers 4x the training speed. Nvidia told journalists one of the key improvements is a second-gen transformer engine that doubles the compute, bandwidth, and model size by using four bits for each neuron instead of eight (thus, the 20 petaflops of FP4 I mentioned earlier). A second key difference only comes when you link up huge numbers of these GPUs: a next-gen NVLink switch that lets 576 GPUs talk to each other, with 1.8 terabytes per second of bidirectional bandwidth. That required Nvidia to build an entire new network switch chip, one with 50 billion transistors and some of its own onboard compute: 3.6 teraflops of FP8, says Nvidia. Further reading: Nvidia in Talks To Acquire AI Infrastructure Platform Run:ai

According to Bloomberg, Sony has paused production of its PlayStation VR 2 virtual reality headset, as sales have "slowed progressively" since its February 2023 launch. Road to VR reports: Citing people familiar with the company's plans, Sony has produced "well over 2 million units" since launch, noting that stocks of the $550 headset are building up. The report alleges the surplus is "throughout Sony's supply chain," indicating the issue isn't confined to a single location, but is spread across different stages of Sony's production and distribution network. This follows news that Sony Interactive Entertainment laid off eight percent of the company, which affected a number of its first-party game studios also involved in VR game production. Sony entirely shuttered its London Studio, which created VR action-adventure game Blood & Truth (2019), and reduced headcount at Firesprite, the studio behind PSVR 2 exclusive Horizon Call of the Mountain.

Meanwhile, Sony is making PSVR 2 officially compatible with PC VR games, as the company hopes to release some sort of PC support for the headset later this year. How and when Sony will do that is still unknown, although the move underlines just how little confidence the company has in its future lineup of exclusive content just one year after launch of PSVR 2.

Multinational technology giant Fujitsu confirmed a cyberattack in a statement Friday, and warned that hackers may have stolen personal data and customer information. From a report: "We confirmed the presence of malware on multiple work computers at our company, and as a result of an internal investigation, we discovered that files containing personal information and customer information could be illegally taken out," said Fujitsu in its statement on its website, translated from Japanese.

Fujitsu said it disconnected the affected systems from its network, and is investigating how its network was compromised by malware and "whether information has been leaked." The tech conglomerate did not specify what kind of malware was used, or the nature of the cyberattack. Fujitsu also did not say what kind of personal information may have been stolen, or who the personal information pertains to -- such as its employees, corporate customers, or citizens whose governments use the company's technologies.

xAI has opened sourced its large language model Grok. From a report: The move, which Musk had previously proclaimed would happen this week, now enables any other entrepreneur, programmer, company, or individual to take Grok's weights -- the strength of connections between the model's artificial "neurons," or software modules that allow the model to make decisions and accept inputs and provide outputs in the form of text -- and other associated documentation and use a copy of the model for whatever they'd like, including for commercial applications.

"We are releasing the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, our large language model," the company announced in a blog post. "Grok-1 is a 314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained from scratch by xAI." Those interested can download the code for Grok on its Github page or via a torrent link. Parameters refers to the weights and biases that govern the model -- the more parameters, generally the more advanced, complex and performant the model is. At 314 billion parameters, Grok is well ahead of open source competitors such as Meta's Llama 2 (70 billion parameters) and Mistral 8x7B (12 billion parameters). Grok was open sourced under an Apache License 2.0, which enables commercial use, modifications, and distribution, though it cannot be trademarked and there is no liability or warranty that users receive with it. In addition, they must reproduce the original license and copyright notice, and state the changes they've made.

The Street interviewed Chad Anderson, founder/managing partner of the "space economy" investment firm Space Capital, who calls SpaceX's progress "unprecedented," and believes their next launch could carry "operational" payloads like Starlink satellites. Anderson added that Starship reaching orbital velocity and reentering the atmosphere at those speeds (roughly 16,000 miles per hour) was "a really big deal," though it's specifically important for the reusability of the vehicle, which would further cheapen the cost of launch.

"The fact that they did all those things and they can now move into operations as an investor is hugely important and significant," Anderson said. "Having an operational Starship vehicle is really important because, at the moment, they just can't launch Starlink satellites fast enough. Starship is going to be able to launch 10 times more than Falcon 9 can, and that's really important...."

The ship is so big that, according to Anderson, Starship could conceivably serve as a space station, or a hotel, or a manufacturing facility. There is also the potential of Starship actually competing with commercial airlines, flying, for example, from New York to Shanghai in 45 minutes.
Clayton Swope, senior fellow at CSIS, also believes Starship could be used for "last-mile delivery... where you could move something in less than an hour, anywhere from a point on Earth to another point on Earth, and you're just kind of using space as that transit point."

There's also defense applications. Defense One notes the U.S. Defense Department uses SpaceX to launch most of its satellites. "With a payload capacity of 100 to 150 tons, Starship could carry a bunch of satellites simultaneously and increase the Space Force's launch rate as it builds out a network of hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit." Once Starship is operational, it will be able to put things into higher orbits, which is key for the Pentagon's push to operate in the cislunar environment, the area between the geosynchronous orbit and the moon. "The Chinese have already begun cislunar operations and have put vehicles on the far side of the moon, which is something the U.S. doesn't really have the ability to do right now," said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

However, the advantage the U.S. will get with Starship "won't last forever," and it will take years to build satellites specifically designed to take advantage of the rocket's payload capacity, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "At this rate, they will have Starship operational this year. We need payloads to go on that, if we're actually going to take advantage of it during this window of opportunity when it's a capability only we have. If you want those payloads available next year, you needed to start building them five years ago," Harrison said.

Starship could be used to put very large objects into space, such as fuel barges or energy stations, at a reasonable cost. "You could use this to put up an orbital bus that you can then put on and remove payloads from, so you can have a satellite on orbit that's basically a large docking station," Clark said... "[I]t could be a way to do that kind of thing where you establish essentially an unmanned, little space station that can carry various payloads."

"Engineers have sent a 'poke' to the Voyager 1 probe," reports CNN, "and received a potentially encouraging response..."

"A new signal recently received from the spacecraft suggests that the NASA mission team may be making progress in its quest to understand what Voyager 1 is experiencing..." [T]hey hope to fix a communication issue with the aging spacecraft that has persisted for five months. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, are venturing through uncharted cosmic territory along the outer reaches of the solar system. While Voyager 1 has continued to relay a steady radio signal to its mission control team on Earth, that signal has not carried any usable data since November, which has pointed to an issue with one of the spacecraft's three onboard computers...

On March 3, the team noticed that activity from one part of the flight data system stood out from the rest of the garbled data. While the signal wasn't in the format the Voyager team is used to when the flight data system is functioning as expected, an engineer with NASA's Deep Space Network was able to decode it... The decoded signal included a readout of the entire flight data system's memory, according to an update NASA shared.

"The (flight data system) memory includes its code, or instructions for what to do, as well as variables, or values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft's status," according to a NASA blog post. "It also contains science or engineering data for downlink. The team will compare this readout to the one that came down before the issue arose and look for discrepancies in the code and the variables to potentially find the source of the ongoing issue."
"The source of the issue appears to be with one of three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth," according to NASA's statement.

CNN reminds readers that Voyager 1 "is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth at about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away." Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are now in interstellar space.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Thelasko for sharing the news.

Sheraz Sadiq reports via Oregon Public Broadcasting: An area that's nearly half the size of New Jersey in southern Oregon was recently named the world's largest dark sky sanctuary by DarkSky International. The nonprofit works to combat light pollution through advocacy and conservation, including a program that has certified more than 200 places around the world to protect the night sky. The Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary spans 2.5 million acres of mostly public land in eastern Lake County, and could eventually grow to more than four times that size to include parts of Harney and Malheur Counties. To win certification as a Dark Sky Sanctuary, the applicants had to work with numerous stakeholders to draw the site's boundaries, monitor night sky quality, inventory outdoor lights and replace more than 60 lights on public and private lands. With the inclusion of parts of Harney and Malheur Counties, the sanctuary would surpass 11 million acres, notes KLCC. More than half of the area is under the control of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Last month, the only known surviving copy of 32-bit OS/2 from Microsoft was purchased for $650. "Now, two of the internet's experts in getting early PC operating systems running today have managed to fire it up, and you can see the results," reports The Register. From the report: Why such interest in this nearly third-of-a-century old, unreleased OS? Because this is the way the PC industry very nearly went. This SDK came out in June 1990, just one month after Windows 3.0. If 32-bit OS/2 had launched as planned, Windows 3 would have been the last version before it was absorbed into OS/2 and disappeared. There would never have been any 32-bit versions: no Windows NT, no Windows 95; no Explorer, no Start menu or taskbars. That, in turn, might well have killed off Apple as well. No iPod, no iPhone, no fondleslabs. Twenty-first century computers would be unimaginably different. The surprise here is that we can see a glimpse of this world that never happened. The discovery of this pre-release OS shows how very nearly ready it was in 1990. IBM didn't release its solo version until April 1992, the same month as Windows 3.1 -- but now, we can see it was nearly ready two years earlier.

That's why Michal Necasek of the OS/2 Museum called his look The Future That Never Was. He uncovered a couple of significant bugs, but more impressively, he found workarounds for both, and got both features working fine. OS/2 2 could run multiple DOS VMs at once, but in the preview, they wouldn't open -- due to use of an undocumented instruction which Intel did implement in the Pentium MMX and later processors. Secondly, the bundled network client wouldn't install -- but removing a single file got that working fine. That alone is a significant difference between Microsoft's OS/2 2.0 and IBM's version: Big Blue didn't include networking until Warp Connect 3 in 1995.

His verdict: "The 6.78 build of OS/2 2.0 feels surprisingly stable and complete. The cover letter that came with the SDK stressed that Microsoft developers had been using the OS/2 pre-release for day-to-day work." Over at Virtually Fun, Neozeed also took an actual look at Microsoft OS/2 2.0, carefully recreating that screenshot from PC Magazine in May 1990. He even managed to get some Windows 2 programs running, although this preview release did not yet have a Windows subsystem. On his Internet Archive page, he has disk images and downloadable virtual machines so that you can run this yourself under VMware or 86Box.

Connor Jones reports via The Register: Stanford University says the cybersecurity incident it dealt with last year was indeed ransomware, which it failed to spot for more than four months. Keen readers of El Reg may remember the story breaking toward the end of October 2023 after Akira posted Stanford to its shame site, with the university subsequently issuing a statement simply explaining that it was investigating an incident, avoiding the dreaded R word. Well, surprise, surprise, ransomware was involved, according to a data breach notice sent out to the 27,000 people affected by the attack.

Akira targeted the university's Department of Public Safety (DPS) and this week's filing with the Office of the Maine Attorney General indicates that Stanford became aware of the incident on September 27, more than four months after the initial breach took place. According to Monday's filing, the data breach occurred on May 12 2023 but was only discovered on September 27 of last year, raising questions about whether the attacker(s) was inside the network the entire time and why it took so long to spot the intrusion.

It's not fully clear what information was compromised, but the draft letters include placeholders for three different variables. However, the filing with Maine's AG suggests names and social security numbers are among the data types to have been stolen. All affected individuals have been offered 24 months of free credit monitoring, including access to a $1 million insurance reimbursement policy and ID theft recovery services. Akira's post dedicated to Stanford on its leak site claims it stole 430 GB worth of data, including personal information and confidential documents. It's all available to download via a torrent file and the fact it remains available for download suggests the research university didn't pay whatever ransom the attackers demanded.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Wired article: The U.S. economy is showing remarkable health, but in the tech industry, layoffs keep coming. For those out of work, finding a new position can become a full-time job. And in tech -- a sector notoriously always looking for the next hot, new thing -- some people whose days as fresh-faced coders are long gone say that having decades of experience can feel like a disadvantage. Ageism is a longtime problem in the tech industry. Database startup RelevantDB went viral in 2021 after it posted a job listing bragging, "We hire old people," which played off industry stereotypes. In 2020, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that IBMhad engaged in age discrimination, pushing out older workers to make room for younger ones. (The company has denied engaging in "systemic age discrimination.") A recent LinkedIn ad that shows an older woman unfamiliar with tech jargon saying her son sells invisible clouds triggered a backlash from people who say it unfairly portrayed older people as out of touch. In response, Jim Habig, LinkedIn's vice president of marketing, says: "This ad didn't meet our goal to create experiences where all professionals feel welcomed and valued, and we are working to replace the spot." [...]

Tech companies have laid off more than 400,000 workers over the past two years, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts in the industry. To older workers, the purge is both a reminder of the dotcom bust, and a new frontier. The industry's generally consistent growth in recent decades as the economy has become more tech-centric means that many more senior workers -- which in tech can sometimes be considered to mean over 35 but includes people in their late forties, fifties, or sixties -- may have less experience with job hunting. For decades, tech workers could easily hop between jobs in their networks, often poached by recruiters. And as tech companies boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic's early days, increased demand for skills gave workers leverage. Now the power has shifted to the employers as companies seek to become efficient and correct that over hiring phase, and applicants are hitting walls. Workers have to network, stay active on LinkedIn, join message boards, and stand out. With four generations now clocking in to work, things can feel crowded.

Ethereum has successfully completed a major software upgrade that should make using the blockchain network ecosystem cheaper. The update enables transactions that previously cost $1 on linked Layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum, Polygon, and Coinbase's Base to be executed for just a cent.

The Dencun upgrade, a combination of the "Deneb" and "Cancun" portions of the update, introduces a new data storage system for Ethereum. Currently, most Layer 2 blockchains store data on Ethereum, and because this data is stored permanently on every Ethereum node, storage costs often account for around 90% of Layer 2 expenses. These costs are typically passed on to applications, which in turn charge consumers. With Dencun, Layer 2s can now store data in a new type of repository called blobs, which will be cheaper as the data will only be stored for approximately 18 days.

China is using AI in the operation of its 45,000km (28,000-mile) high-speed rail network, with the technology achieving several milestones, according to engineers involved in the project. From a report: An AI system in Beijing is processing vast amounts of real-time data from across the country and can alert maintenance teams of abnormal situations within 40 minutes, with an accuracy as high as 95 per cent, they said in a peer-reviewed paper. "This helps on-site teams conduct reinspections and repairs as quickly as possible," wrote Niu Daoan, a senior engineer at the China State Railway Group's infrastructure inspection centre, in the paper published by the academic journal China Railway.

In the past year, none of China's operational high-speed railway lines received a single warning that required speed reduction due to major track irregularity issues, while the number of minor track faults decreased by 80 per cent compared to the previous year. According to the paper, the amplitude of rail movement caused by strong winds also decreased -- even on massive valley-spanning bridges -- with the application of AI technology. [...] According to the paper, after years of effort Chinese railway scientists and engineers have "solved challenges" in comprehensive risk perception, equipment evaluation, and precise trend predictions in engineering, power supply and telecommunications. The result was "scientific support for achieving proactive safety prevention and precise infrastructure maintenance for high-speed railways," the engineers said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're confused about what makes a PC an "AI PC," you're not alone. But finally have something of an answer: if it packs a GPU, a processor that boasts a neural processing unit and can handle VNNI and Dp4a instructions, it qualifies -- at least according to Robert Hallock, Intel's senior director of technical marketing. As luck would have it, that combo is present in Intel's current-generation desktop processors -- 14th-gen Core, aka Core Ultra, aka "Meteor Lake." All models feature a GPU, NPU, and can handle Vector Neural Network Instructions (VNNI) that speed some -- surprise! -- neural networking tasks, and the DP4a instructions that help GPUs to process video.

Because AI PCs are therefore just PCs with current processors, Intel doesn't consider "AI PC" to be a brand that denotes conformity with a spec or a particular capability not present in other PCs. Intel used the "Centrino" brand to distinguish Wi-Fi-enabled PCs, and did likewise by giving home entertainment PCs the "Viiv" moniker. Chipzilla still uses the tactic with "vPro" -- a brand that denotes processors that include manageability and security for business users. But AI PCs are neither a brand nor a spec. "The reason we have not created a category for it like Centrino is we believe this is simply what a PC will be like in four or five years time," Hallock told The Register, adding that Intel's recipe for an AI PC doesn't include specific requirements for memory, storage, or I/O speeds. "There are cases where a very large LLM might require 32GB of RAM," he noted. "Everything else will fit comfortably in a 16GB system."

An anonymous reader shared this story from the New York Times: Into the depleted field of journalism in America, a handful of websites have appeared in recent weeks with names suggesting a focus on news close to home: D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle. In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.

While Russia has long sought ways to influence public discourse in the United States, the fake news organizations — at least five, so far — represent a technological leap in its efforts to find new platforms to dupe unsuspecting American readers. The sites, the researchers and officials said, could well be the foundations of an online network primed to surface disinformation ahead of the American presidential election in November...

The Miami Chronicle's website first appeared on Feb. 26. Its tagline falsely claims to have delivered "the Florida News since 1937."

Amid some true reports, the site published a story last week about a "leaked audio recording" of Victoria Nuland, the U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs, discussing a shift in American support for Russia's beleaguered opposition after the death of the Russian dissident Aleksei A. Navalny. The recording is a crude fake, according to administration officials who would speak only anonymously to discuss intelligence matters.
From the Raw Story: The network was discovered by Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub by researchers Patrick Warren and Darren Linvill, who tell the Times that its websites are designed to lend journalistic credibility to slickly produced propaganda. "The page is just there to look realistic enough to fool a casual reader into thinking they're reading a genuine, U.S.-branded article," Linvill told the Times.