Computers & Linux News

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Electric vehicle drivers in Marshfield, Wisconsin, and Owosso, Michigan, are the first to benefit from General Motors' Dealer Community Charging Program. These deployments of new level 2 (AC) chargers are the first in a planned rollout of 40,000 new plug-in points, which GM says will nearly double the number of public charging stations in the US and Canada. GM announced the program in October 2021 and since then has had almost 1,000 of its Chevrolet dealerships sign on to the initiative, which is designed to increase charger access in underserved, rural, and urban locations. GM will supply dealerships with up to 10 19.2 kW chargers to be installed around the communities they serve, and the chargers are available to any EV driver, not just those who drive electric models from GM. Wheeler's Chevrolet in Wisconsin was the first dealership to sign on to the initiative and has installed chargers in two parks, a library, and a sports complex, among other locations in Marshfield. "We're excited to be the first dealership in the nation to have these chargers," said Mary Jo Wheeler-Schueller, owner of Wheelers Chevrolet GMC. "This will help put Marshfield on the map in terms of EV leadership. This is a great stop for commuters to check out our community and see all that Marshfield has to offer." Young Cadillac Chevrolet in Michigan followed and installed its first charger at a health care center in Owosso. GM says that the next installations should take place in Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, and Washington in the coming months. Separately, GM has another program that, together with EVgo, is in the midst of installing 5,250 DC fast chargers by 2025, including 2,000 fast chargers at Pilot and Flying J travel centers.

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The whole gang is here.

Another anime MMORPG to sink time into.

The game is scheduled to launch in the second half of 2023.

Hideo Kojima says he rewrote the game's story post-pandemic because he "didn't want to predict any more future."

Archie seems to have a British accent, Harry goes by "Haz," and Meghan's half-sister, Samantha, does not come off well at all.

CoinDesk's Daniel Kuhn writes in an opinion piece: Despite the focus on FTX following its catastrophic collapse, it's remarkable how little we know about how the crypto exchange and its in-house trading firm Alameda Research actually operated. New CEO John Jay Ray III has called Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto trading empire the "greatest failure of corporate controls" he's seen. Wednesday, Coffeezilla, a YouTuber with a rising star who has made a career of shining a light on sketchy projects in and out of crypto, pressed Bankman-Fried for information related to how different customer accounts were treated at the exchange. It turns out, there wasn't much differentiation -- at the very least during the final days the exchange was in business, Bankman-Fried admitted. "At the time, we wanted to treat customers equally," SBF said during a Twitter Spaces event. "That effectively meant that there was, you know, if you want to put it this way, like fungibility created" between the exchange's spot and derivatives business lines. For Coffeezilla, this looks like a smoking gun that fraud was committed. At the very least, this is a contradiction of what Bankman-Fried had said just minutes before when first asked about the exchange's terms of service (ToS). "I do think we're treating them differently," Bankman-Fried said, referring to customer assets used for "margin versus staking versus spot versus futures collateral." All of those services come with different levels of risk, different promises made to customers and different responsibilities for the exchange. According to FTX's ToS, everyday users just looking to buy or store their cryptocurrencies on the centralized exchange could trust they were doing just that, buying and storing cryptographically unique digital assets. But now, thanks to skillful questioning by Coffeezilla, we know there were instead "omnibus" wallets and that spot and derivatives traders were essentially assuming the same level of risk. We can also assume this was a longstanding practice at FTX. Bankman-Fried noted that during the "run on the exchange" (pardon the language), when people were attempting to get their assets off before withdrawals were shut down, FTX allowed "generalized withdrawals" from these omnibus wallets. But he also deflected, saying what, you wanted us to code up an entirely new process during a liquidity crisis? Before now, Bankman-Fried had been asked multiple times about the exchange's ToS and often managed to derail the conversation. He would often point to other sections of the document that stated clients using margin (taking out debt from FTX) could have their funds used by the exchange. Or he would bring up a vestigial wire process in place before FTX had banking relationships. Apparently, according to SBF, customers had sent money to Alameda to fund accounts on FTX and somewhere along the lines this capital ended up in a rarely seen subaccount. This also had the benefit of inflating Alameda's books, another dark corner of the empire. Further reading: FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Is Said To Face Market Manipulation Inquiry

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Thursday's Game Awards brought another look at the sequel to Jedi: Fallen Order.

The billionaire behind the dearMoon mission has chosen artists to fly around the moon.

DeepMind's new artificial intelligence system called AlphaCode was able to "achieve approximately human-level performance" in a programming competition. The findings have been published in the journal Science. Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: AlphaCode's creators focused on solving those difficult problems. Like the Codex researchers, they started by feeding a large language model many gigabytes of code from GitHub, just to familiarize it with coding syntax and conventions. Then, they trained it to translate problem descriptions into code, using thousands of problems collected from programming competitions. For example, a problem might ask for a program to determine the number of binary strings (sequences of zeroes and ones) of length n that don't have any consecutive zeroes. When presented with a fresh problem, AlphaCode generates candidate code solutions (in Python or C++) and filters out the bad ones. But whereas researchers had previously used models like Codex to generate tens or hundreds of candidates, DeepMind had AlphaCode generate up to more than 1 million. To filter them, AlphaCode first keeps only the 1% of programs that pass test cases that accompany problems. To further narrow the field, it clusters the keepers based on the similarity of their outputs to made-up inputs. Then, it submits programs from each cluster, one by one, starting with the largest cluster, until it alights on a successful one or reaches 10 submissions (about the maximum that humans submit in the competitions). Submitting from different clusters allows it to test a wide range of programming tactics. That's the most innovative step in AlphaCode's process, says Kevin Ellis, a computer scientist at Cornell University who works AI coding. After training, AlphaCode solved about 34% of assigned problems, DeepMind reports this week in Science. (On similar benchmarks, Codex achieved single-digit-percentage success.) To further test its prowess, DeepMind entered AlphaCode into online coding competitions. In contests with at least 5000 participants, the system outperformed 45.7% of programmers. The researchers also compared its programs with those in its training database and found it did not duplicate large sections of code or logic. It generated something new -- a creativity that surprised Ellis. The study notes the long-term risk of software that recursively improves itself. Some experts say such self-improvement could lead to a superintelligent AI that takes over the world. Although that scenario may seem remote, researchers still want the field of AI coding to institute guardrails, built-in checks and balances.

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The latest lawsuit against Twitter alleges the company's layoffs targeted women.

Microsoft is finally bringing a built-in screen recorder to Windows. The Verge reports: The Snipping Tool in Windows 11 will soon be updated to include screen recording, meaning Windows users won't have to rely on the Xbox Game Bar or third-party tools just to record their screens. Windows 11 testers will start getting access to the updated Snipping Tool today, and the new record option will allow you to record an entire screen or even a section that gets cropped. The update comes more than four years after Microsoft first introduced a new screenshot experience for Windows. [...] Microsoft has only just started testing this with Windows 11 testers in the Dev Channel, so it's likely some weeks or months before this Snipping Tool is released to everyone using Windows 11.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The leading hospital in India's capital limped back to normalcy on Wednesday after a cyberattack crippled its operations for nearly two weeks. Online registration of patients resumed Tuesday after the hospital was able to access its server and recover lost data. The hospital worked with federal authorities to restore the system and strengthen its defenses. It's unclear who conducted the Nov. 23 attack on the All India Institute of Medical Sciences or where it originated. The attack was followed by a series of failed attempts to hack India's top medical research organization, the Indian Council of Medical Research. This raised further concerns about the vulnerability of India's health system to attacks at a time when the government is pushing hospitals to digitize their records. More than 173,000 hospitals have registered with a federal program to digitize health records since its launch in September 2021. The program assigns patients numbers that are linked to medical information stored by hospitals on their own servers or in cloud-based storage. Experts fear that hospitals may not have the expertise to ensure digital security. "Digitizing an entire health care system without really safeguarding it can pretty much kill an entire hospital. It suddenly stops functioning," said Srinivas Kodali, a researcher with the Free Software Movement of India. That is what happened to the hospital in New Delhi. Healthcare workers couldn't access patient reports because the servers that store laboratory data and patient records had been hacked and corrupted. The hospital normally treats thousands of people a day, many of whom travel from distant places to access affordable care. Always crowded, queues at the hospital grew even longer and more chaotic. Sandeep Kumar, who accompanied his ill father, said the digital attack meant that appointments couldn't be booked online, and that doctors could do little when they saw patients because they couldn't access their medical history.

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The Southern Ring Nebula: brought to you by a star's messy, and explosive, demise.

Refresh your memory of the original 2009 film as Avatar 2 nears.

Vivaldi recently became the first browser to have its own Mastodon instance, Vivaldi Social. Now, the new version on the desktop is the first to integrate Mastodon into the browser itself, along with the ability to pin tab groups and other UI improvements. From a blog post: We believe in providing alternatives to Big Tech while putting your privacy first and launched Vivaldi Social, our Mastodon instance. And today we are integrating Vivaldi Social into the sidebar of our desktop browser becoming the first browser to offer this functionality. The new version -- Vivaldi 5.6 -- also allows you to pin your tab stacks. We've added a new private search engine You.com for select countries, helping to broaden your choices for searching the web. Vivaldi's sidebar of icons links to a number of utility functions. And now it integrates Vivaldi Social, our Mastodon instance.

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For those who qualify, Field Trip is offering one free month of ketamine-assisted therapy while services are available this December.

Please

Contestants hacked the Samsung Galaxy S22 again during the second day of the consumer-focused Pwn2Own 2022 competition in Toronto, Canada. They also demoed exploits targeting zero-day vulnerabilities in routers, printers, smart speakers, and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices from HP, NETGEAR, Synology, Sonos, TP-Link, Canon, Lexmark, and Western Digital. BleepingComputer reports: Security researchers representing the vulnerability research company Interrupt Labs were the ones to demonstrate a successful exploit against Samsung's flagship device on Wednesday. They executed an improper input validation attack and earned $25,000, 50% of the total cash award, because this was the third time the Galaxy S22 was hacked during the competition. On the first day of Pwn2Own Toronto, the STAR Labs team and a contestant known as Chim demoed two other zero-day exploits as part of successful improper input validation attacks against the Galaxy S22. In all three cases, according to the contest rules, the devices ran the latest version of the Android operating system with all available updates installed. The second day of Pwn2Own Toronto wrapped up with Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative awarding $281,500 for 17 unique bugs across multiple categories. This brings the first two days of Pwn2Own total to $681,250 awarded for 46 unique zero-days, as ZDI's Head of Threat Awareness Dustin Childs revealed. The full schedule for Pwn2Own Toronto 2022's second day and the results for each challenge are available here. You can also find the complete schedule of the competition here.

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A new video claims to show a rotating render of Google's answer to the Samsung Galaxy Fold.