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Last updated 14 Oct, 01:36 AM
BBC News
Drone attack kills four Israeli soldiers and injures more than 60 - Hezbollah claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was in response to Israeli strikes in Lebanon.
UN says Israeli tanks forced entry into base in south Lebanon - It comes as PM Netanyahu demands the peacekeeping force leave the area.
Elon Musk's Starship booster captured in world first - The SpaceX team successfully returned the booster part of the Starship rocket to the launchpad.
Man arrested near Trump rally had two guns and fake passports - This is the third time someone with firearms has been either arrested or shot after being spotted near Trump.
'Time stopped' after Salmond collapsed at conference - Organisers say the former first minister fell backwards in his chair after suffering a massive heart attack.
The Register
First time's the charm: SpaceX catches a descending Super Heavy Booster - Mechanical chopsticks on the launch tower grab a returning rocket and Starship splashes down on target SpaceX's engineers performed two significant feats on Saturday: catching Starship's Super Heavy Booster with mechanical arms on the rocket's launch tower, and achieving a pinpoint landing of Starship itself in the Indian Ocean.…
Indonesia orders Apple, Google to take down Chinese bargain app Temu - Plus: Infosys stops sending job offer emails; Singtel outage; Australia to require ransomware payment reveals Indonesia's government last week ordered Apple and Google to remove Chinese e-commerce app Temu from their app stores.…
Schools bombarded by nation-state attacks, ransomware gangs, and everyone in between - Reading, writing, and cyber mayhem, amirite? If we were to draw an infosec Venn diagram, with one circle representing "sensitive info that attackers would want to steal" and the other "limited resources plus difficult-to-secure IT environments," education would sit in the overlap. …
Top-secret X-37B space plane ready for daring new orbital maneuver - The Space Force craft will attempt aerobraking for the first time After nearly a year in orbit, the US Space Force's secretive X-37B is prepped to perform some fancy new maneuvers to alter its orbit and dump its service module before carrying on with more mysterious work.…
Anthropic's Claude vulnerable to 'emotional manipulation' - AI model safety only goes so far Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, despite its reputation as one of the better behaved generative AI models, can still be convinced to emit racist hate speech and malware.…
New Scientist - News
How the evolution of citrus is inextricably linked with our own - Millions of years ago, our ancestors lost a gene for producing vitamin C and got a taste for citrus. Since then, we've cultivated the tangy fruits into global staples like sweet oranges and sour lemons
Gravity may explain why Neanderthals failed to adopt advanced weaponry - Spear-throwing tools called atlatls allow humans to launch projectiles over great distances, but Neanderthals apparently never used them – and an experiment involving a 9-metre-tall platform may explain why
Hospital hit by Hurricane Milton gets system to grab water from air - Systems that can harvest water from moisture in the atmosphere could offer a valuable water source in the wake of disasters
Stool test could provide a simpler way to diagnose endometriosis - A chemical produced by gut bacteria could be the basis for a non-invasive test for endometriosis – and mouse experiments suggest it might also help treat the condition
France slashed bird flu outbreaks by vaccinating ducks - A vaccination campaign targeting ducks, the farm birds most at risk of getting and spreading bird flu, succeeded in greatly reducing outbreaks of the virus on poultry farms in France
Hacker News
Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video] - Comments
Notes on Zero-latency SQLite storage in every Durable Object - Comments
Refurb weekend: the Symbolics MacIvory Lisp machine I have hated - Comments
Making the Tibetan language a first-class citizen in the digital world - Comments
The quiet art of attention - Comments
Slashdot
Were America's Electric Car Subsidies Worth the Money? - America's electric vehicle subsidies brought a 2-to-1 return on investment, according to a paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research. "That includes environmental benefits, but mostly reflects a shift of profits to the United States," reports the New York Times. "Before the climate law, tax credits were mainly used to buy foreign-made cars." "What the [subsidy legislation] did was swing the pendulum the other way, and heavily subsidized American carmakers," said Felix Tintelnot, an associate professor of economics at Duke University who was a co-author of the paper. Those benefits were undermined, however, by a loophole allowing dealers to apply the subsidy to leases of foreign-made electric vehicles. The provision sends profits to non-American companies, and since those foreign-made vehicles are on average heavier and less efficient, they impose more environmental and road-safety costs. Also, the researchers estimated that for every additional electric vehicle the new tax credits put on the road, about three other electric vehicle buyers would have made the purchases even without a $7,500 credit. That dilutes the effectiveness of the subsidies, which are forecast to cost as much as $390 billion through 2031. The chief economist at Cox Automotive (which provided some of the data) tells the Times that "we could do better", but adds that the subsidies were "worth the money invested". But of course, that depends partly on how benefits were calculated: [U]ing the Environmental Protection Agency's "social cost of carbon" metric, they calculated the dollar cost of each model's lifetime carbon emissions from both manufacturing and driving. On average, emissions by gas-powered vehicles impose 57% greater costs than electric vehicles. The study then calculated harms from air pollution other than greenhouse gases — smog, for example. That's where electric vehicles start to perform relatively poorly, since generating the electricity for them still creates pollution. Those harms will probably fade as more wind and solar energy comes online, but they are significant. Finally, the authors added the road deaths associated with heavier cars. Batteries are heavy, so electric vehicles — especially the largest — are likelier to kill people in crashes. Totaling these costs and then subtracting fiscal benefits through gas taxes and electricity bills, electric vehicles impose $16,003 in net harms, the authors said, while gas vehicles impose $19,239. But the range is wide, with the largest electric vehicles far outpacing many internal combustion cars. By this methodology, a large electric pickup like the Rivian imposes three times the harms of a Prius, according to one of the study's co-authors (a Stanford professor of global environmental). And yet "we are subsidizing the Rivian and not the Prius..." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Can the UK Increase Green Energy with 'Zonal Energy Pricing'? - To avoid overloading local electric grids, Britain's most productive windfarm "is paid to turn off," reports the Guardian — and across the industry these so-called "constraint payments" amount to billions every year. "Government officials are hoping to correct the clear inefficiencies in the market by overhauling the market itself." Greg Jackson, the founder of Octopus Energy, told the Guardian: "It's grotesque that energy costs are rising again this winter, whilst we literally pay windfarms these extortionate prices not to generate. Locational pricing would instead mean that local people got cheap power when it's windy. Scotland would have the cheapest power in Europe, instead of among the most expensive, and every region would be cheaper than today. Companies would invest in infrastructure where we need it — not where they get the highest subsidies." The changes could catalyse an economic osmosis of high energy users — such as datacentres and factories — into areas of the country with low energy prices, creating new job opportunities beyond the south-east. It could also spur the development of new energy projects — particularly rooftop solar — across buildings in urban areas where energy demand is high. This rebalancing of the energy market could save the UK nearly £49bn in accumulated network costs by 2040, according to a study commissioned by the energy regulator from FTI Consulting. But others fear the changes could come at a deeper cost to Britain's climate goals — and bill payers too. The clean energy companies preparing to spend billions on building new wind and solar farms are concerned that a redrawing of the market boundaries could radically change the economics of new renewable energy projects — which would ultimately raise the costs, which would be passed on to consumers, or see the projects scrapped altogether... With stiff competition in the international markets for investment in clean energy, Renewable UK [the industry's trade group] fears that companies and their investors will simply choose to build new clean energy projects elsewhere. "The debate has driven deep rifts across the industry," the article concludes, "between modernisers who believe the new price signals would give rise to a new, rational market and those who fear the changes risk unravelling Britain's low-carbon agenda... "The government is expected to make a decision on how to proceed in the coming months, but the fierce debate between warring factions of the energy industry is likely to continue for far longer." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Study Done By Apple AI Scientists Proves LLMs Have No Ability to Reason - Slashdot reader Rick Schumann shared this report from the blog AppleInsider: A new paper from Apple's artificial intelligence scientists has found that engines based on large language models, such as those from Meta and OpenAI, still lack basic reasoning skills. The group has proposed a new benchmark, GSM-Symbolic, to help others measure the reasoning capabilities of various large language models (LLMs). Their initial testing reveals that slight changes in the wording of queries can result in significantly different answers, undermining the reliability of the models. The group investigated the "fragility" of mathematical reasoning by adding contextual information to their queries that a human could understand, but which should not affect the fundamental mathematics of the solution. This resulted in varying answers, which shouldn't happen... The study found that adding even a single sentence that appears to offer relevant information to a given math question can reduce the accuracy of the final answer by up to 65 percent. "There is just no way you can build reliable agents on this foundation, where changing a word or two in irrelevant ways or adding a few bit of irrelevant info can give you a different answer," the study concluded... "We found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models," the new study concluded. The behavior of LLMS "is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching" which the study found to be "so fragile, in fact, that [simply] changing names can alter results." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
$5,000 AI Pants: This Company Wants to Rent Hikers an Exoskeleton - "Technical outerwear brand Arc'teryx and wearable technology startup Skip have teamed up to create exoskeleton hiking pants, powered by AI..." reports CNN. After four years of collaboration and testing, the two companies plan to start selling the battery-powered pants in 2025 for $5,000 — but they're also "available to rent and try out now," according to CNN's video report: "You can think of it like an e-bike for walking..." says Skip's co-founder and chief product officer Anna Roumiantseva. "On the way up, it really kind of offloads some of those big muscle groups that are working their hardest. We like to say it gives you about 40% more power in your legs on the way up with every step." ("And then supports their knees on the way down," says Cam Stuart, Arc'Teryx's advanced concepts team manager for research and engineering.) Kathryn Zealand, Skip Co-founder and CEO adds, "There's a lot of artificial intelligence built into these pants," with Roumiantseva explaining that technology "understands how you move, predicts how you're going to want to move next — and then assists you in doing that, so that the assistant doesn't feel like you're walking to the beat of the robot or is moving independently..." Stuart: I think when people think of what an exoskeleton is, they think of this big bionic frame or they think it's like Avatar or something like that. The challenge for us really was how do we put that in a pair of pants...?" Co-founder Roumiantseva: We've done a lot of work to make a lot of the complicated and sophisticated technology that goes into it look and feel as approachable and as similar to a garment as possible. Co-founder Zealand: And so maybe you think about them like a pair of pants. CNN points out it isn't the only "recreational exoskeleton." (Companies like Dnsys and Hypershell have even "developed their own lightweight exoskeletons — through Kickstarter campaigns.") But beyond recreation, this also has applications for people with disabilities. "Movement and mobility, it's such a huge driver of quality of life, it's such a huge driver of joy," says Skip's co-founder and chief product officer. "It does become a luxury — and that's a huge part of why we're building what we're building. Is we don't think it should be." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mystery Drones Swarmed a US Military Base for 17 Days. Investigators are Stumped - The Wall Street Journal reports on a "suspicious fleet of unidentified aircraft... as many as a dozen or more" that appeared in Virginia 10 months ago "over an area that includes the home base for the Navy's SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world's largest naval port." The article notes this was just 10 months after the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon... After watching the drones — some "roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour" — there were weeks of meetings where "Officials from agencies including the Defense Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Pentagon's UFO office joined outside experts to throw out possible explanations as well as ideas about how to respond..." Federal law prohibits the military from shooting down drones near military bases in the U.S. unless they pose an imminent threat. Aerial snooping doesn't qualify, though some lawmakers hope to give the military greater leeway... Drone incursions into restricted airspace was already worrying national-security officials. Two months earlier, in October 2023, five drones flew over a government site used for nuclear-weapons experiments. The Energy Department's Nevada Nuclear Security Site outside Las Vegas detected four of the drones over three days. Employees spotted a fifth. U.S. officials said they didn't know who operated the drones in Nevada, a previously unreported incursion, or for what reason. A spokeswoman said the facility has since upgraded a system to detect and counter drones... Over 17 days, the [Virginia] drones arrived at dusk, flew off and circled back... They also were nearly impossible to track, vanishing each night despite a wealth of resources deployed to catch them. Gen. Glen VanHerck, at the time commander of the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said drones had for years been spotted flying around defense installations. But the nightly drone swarms over Langley [Air Force base], he said, were unlike any past incursion... Analysts learned that the smaller quadcopters didn't use the usual frequency band available for off-the-shelf commercial drones — more evidence that the drone operators weren't hobbyists. "Langley officials canceled nighttime training missions, worried about potential collisions with the drone swarm, and moved the F-22 jet fighters to another base... On December 23, the drones made their last visit." But toward the end of the article, it notes that "In January, authorities found a clue they hoped would crack the case." It was a student at the University of Minnesota named Fengyun Shi — who was reported flying a drone on a rainy morning near a Virginia shipyard that builds nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. Their drone got stuck in a tree, and ended up with federal investigators who found "Shi had photographed Navy vessels in dry dock, including shots taken around midnight. Some were under construction at the nearby shipyard." On Jan. 18, federal agents arrested Shi as he was about to board a flight to China on a one-way ticket. Shi told FBI agents he was a ship enthusiast and hadn't realized his drone crossed into restricted airspace. Investigators weren't convinced. but found no evidence linking him to the Chinese government. They learned he had bought the drone on sale at a Costco in San Francisco the day before he traveled to Norfolk. U.S. prosecutors charged Shi with unlawfully taking photos of classified naval installations, the first case involving a drone under a provision of U.S. espionage law. The 26-year-old Chinese national pleaded guilty and appeared in federal court in Norfolk on Oct. 2 for sentencing. Magistrate Judge Lawrence Leonard said he didn't believe Shi's story — that he had been on vacation and was flying drones in the middle of the night for fun. "There's significant holes," the judge said in court. "If he was a foreign agent, he would be the worst spy ever known," said Shi's attorney, Shaoming Cheng. "I'm sorry about what happened in Norfolk," Shi said before he was sentenced to six months in federal prison. But "U.S. officials have yet to determine who flew the Langley drones or why..." "U.S. officials confirmed this month that more unidentified drone swarms were spotted in recent months near Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles." Read more of this story at Slashdot.