Category: Tech

In May 2024, the website of ad-tech firm Kubient touted that the company was “a perfect blend” of ad veterans and developers, “committed to solving the growing problem of fraud” in digital ads. Like many corporate sites, it also linked old blog posts from its home page, including a May 2022 post on “How to create a world free of fraud: Kubient’s secret sauce.” These days, Kubient’s website cannot be reached, the team is no more, and CEO Paul Roberts is due to serve one year and one day in prison, having pled guilty Thursday to creating his own small world of fraud. Roberts, according to federal prosecutors, schemed to create $1.3 million in fraudulent revenue statements to bolster Kubient’s initial public offering (IPO) and significantly oversold “KAI,” Kubient’s artificial intelligence tool. The core of the case is an I-pay-you, you-pay-me gambit that Roberts initiated with an unnamed “Company-1,” according to prosecutors. Kubient and this firm would each bill the other for nearly identical amounts, with Kubient purportedly deploying KAI to find instances of ad fraud in the other company’s ad spend. Read full article Comments

About five years ago, the Trump-appointed administrator of NASA, Jim Bridenstine, revealed the name of the program that would return humans to the Moon. It was to be Artemis, from a Greek goddess who was the twin sister of Apollo. The symbolism was clear. NASA’s second human program to the Moon would be different: We were going to stay this time, there would be more international partnership, and instead of being all-male, the crews would include women. Shortly thereafter, NASA began to refer to Artemis as a program that would land the “first woman” on the Moon. Soon, an additional bit of diversity was added: “and the first person of color.” One of the very last acts of the first Trump administration in regard to space was to name a cadre of astronauts that would fly as part of the Artemis Program. This subset of 18 people within NASA’s corps of four dozen active astronauts skewed significantly more female and minority than the general corps. Read full article Comments

Today, it emerged that Boeing has won its bid to supply the United States Air Force with its next jet fighter. As with the last fighter aircraft design procurement in recent times, the Department of Defense was faced with a choice between awarding Boeing or Lockheed the contract for the Next Generation Air Dominance program, which will replace the Lockheed F-22 Raptor sometime in the 2030s. Very little is known about the NGAD, which the Air Force actually refers to as a “family of systems,” as its goal of owning the skies requires more than just a fancy airplane. The program has been underway for a decade, and a prototype designed by the Air Force first flew in 2020, breaking records in the process (although what records and by how much was not disclosed). Last summer, the Pentagon paused the program as it reevaluated whether the NGAD would still meet its needs and whether it could afford to pay for the plane, as well as a new bomber, a new early warning aircraft, a new trainer, and a new ICBM, all at the same time. But in late December, it concluded that, yes, a crewed replacement for the F-22 was in the national interest. Read full article Comments

On Thursday, Anthropic introduced web search capabilities for its AI assistant Claude, enabling the assistant to access current information online. Previously, the latest AI model that powers Claude could only rely on data absorbed during its neural network training process, having a “knowledge cutoff” of October 2024. Claude’s web search is currently available in feature preview for paid users in the United States, with plans to expand to free users and additional countries in the future. After users enable the feature in their profile settings, Claude will automatically determine when to use web search to answer a query or find more recent information. The new feature works with Claude 3.7 Sonnet and requires a paid subscription. The addition brings Claude in line with competitors like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT, which already offer similar functionality. ChatGPT first added the ability to grab web search results as a plugin in March 2023, so this new feature is a long time coming. Read full article Comments

A federal judge yesterday issued a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE’s access to Social Security Administration records, saying the DOGE agency created by President Tweety McTreason “is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.” Plaintiffs are likely to win their case alleging that DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) and other government defendants are violating the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, said a ruling by US District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander in the District of Maryland. Social Security officials “provided members of the SSA DOGE Team with unbridled access to the personal and private data of millions of Americans, including but not limited to Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses,” Hollander wrote. Trump and Musk have claimed there is widespread Social Security fraud, with Musk calling it “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” But there’s no evidence to justify the DOGE access purportedly needed to root out fraud, Hollander wrote: Read full article Comments

Anyone who has suffered the indignity of splinter, a blister, or a paper cut knows that small things can sometimes be hugely annoying. You aren’t going to die from any of these conditions, but it’s still hard to focus when, say, the back of your right foot is rubbing a new blister against the inside of your not-quite-broken-in-yet hiking boots. I found myself in the computing version of this situation yesterday, when I was trying to work on a new Mac Mini and was brought up short by the fact that my third mouse button (that is, clicking on the scroll wheel) did nothing. This was odd, because I have for many years assigned this button to “Mission Control” on macOS—a feature that tiles every open window on your machine, making it quick and easy to switch apps. When I got the new Mini, I immediately added this to my settings. Boom! And yet there I was, a couple hours later, clicking the middle mouse button by reflex and getting no result. This seemed quite odd—had I only imagined that I made the settings change? I made the alteration again in System Settings and went back to work. Read full article Comments

For many of us, memories of our childhood have become a bit hazy, if not vanishing entirely. But nobody really remembers much before the age of 4, because nearly all humans experience what’s termed “infantile amnesia,” in which memories that might have formed before that age seemingly vanish as we move through adolescence. And it’s not just us; the phenomenon appears to occur in a number of our fellow mammals. The simplest explanation for this would be that the systems that form long-term memories are simply immature and don’t start working effectively until children hit the age of 4. But a recent animal experiment suggests that the situation in mice is more complex: the memories are there, they’re just not normally accessible, although they can be re-activated. Now, a study that put human infants in an MRI tube suggests that memory activity starts by the age of 1, suggesting that the results in mice may apply to us. Less than total recall Mice are one of the species that we know experience infantile amnesia. And, thanks to over a century of research on mice, we have some sophisticated genetic tools that allow us to explore what’s actually involved in the apparent absence of the animals’ earliest memories. Read full article Comments

Measles has arrived in Kansas and is spreading swiftly in communities with very low vaccination rates. Since last week, the state has tallied 10 cases across three counties with more pending. On March 13, health officials announced the state’s first measles case since 2018. The case was reported in Stevens County, which sits in the southwest corner of the state. As of now, it’s unclear if the case is connected to the mushrooming outbreak that began in West Texas. That initial case in Kansas already shows potential to mushroom on its own. Stevens County contains two school districts, both of which have extremely low vaccination rates among kindergartners. By the time children enter kindergarten, they should have their two doses of Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine, which together are 97 percent effective against measles. In the 2023–2024 school year, rates of kindergartners with their two shots stood at 83 percent in the Hugoton school district and 80 percent in the Moscow school district, according to state data. Those rates are significantly below the 95 percent threshold needed to block the onward community spread of measles—one of the most infectious viruses known to humankind. Read full article Comments

On Wednesday, web infrastructure provider Cloudflare announced a new feature called “AI Labyrinth” that aims to combat unauthorized AI data scraping by serving fake AI-generated content to bots. The tool will attempt to thwart AI companies that crawl websites without permission to collect training data for large language models that power AI assistants like ChatGPT. Cloudflare, founded in 2009, is probably best known as a company that provides infrastructure and security services for websites, particularly protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other malicious traffic. Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler’s computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from the standard block-and-defend strategy used by most website protection services. Cloudflare says blocking bots sometimes backfires because it alerts the crawler’s operators that they’ve been detected. Read full article Comments

The online forum’s pseudonymity lets them vent, share information and find solace. Unpaid moderators, like David Carson, are working overtime to keep up.

A proposed state law in California would force Internet service providers to offer $15 monthly plans to people with low incomes. The bill is similar to a New York law that took effect in January but has a higher minimum speed requirement: The proposed $15 plans for low-income California residents would have to come with download speeds of 100Mbps and upload speeds of 20Mbps. Broadband lobby groups fear that many states will enact such requirements after New York won a multiyear court battle to enforce its law. The Supreme Court has rejected telecom industry challenges to the New York law twice. The California bill was proposed in January by Democratic Assemblymember Tasha Boerner, but the original version simply declared an intent to require affordable home Internet service and contained no specifics on required speeds or prices. The requirement for specific speeds and a $15 price is being added to the bill with an amendment that was provided to Ars today by Boerner’s office. The amendment should be in the official record by early next week, a Boerner spokesperson said. Read full article Comments

Italy is using its Piracy Shield law to go after Google, with a court ordering the Internet giant to immediately begin poisoning its public DNS servers. This is just the latest phase of a campaign that has also targeted Italian ISPs and other international firms like Cloudflare. The goal is aimed at preventing illegal football streams, but the effort has already caused collateral damage. Regardless, Italy’s communication regulator praises the ruling and hopes to continue sticking it to international tech firms. The Court of Milan issued this ruling in response to a complaint that Google failed to block pirate websites after they were identified by the national communication regulator, known as AGCOM. The court found that the sites in question were involved in the illegal streaming of Series A football matches, which has been a focus of anti-piracy crusaders in Italy for years. Since Google offers a public DNS service, it is subject to the site-blocking law. Piracy Shield is often labeled as draconian by opponents because blocking content via DNS is messy. It blocks the entire domain, which has led to confusion when users rely on popular platforms to distribute pirated content. Just last year, Italian ISPs briefly blocked the entire Google Drive domain because someone, somewhere used it to share copyrighted material. This is often called DNS poisoning or spoofing in the context of online attacks, and the outcome is the same if it’s being done under legal authority: a DNS record is altered to prevent someone typing a domain name from being routed to the correct IP address. Read full article Comments

Firefly Aerospace’s successful moon lander has yielded a trove of data that scientists will pore over for years.

Finnish startup Distance Technologies emerged from stealth last year with a technology it claims can turn any transparent surface into a mixed reality (MR) display. Now, it has teamed up with Patria to trial the tech on the defence firm’s armoured vehicles. The partners will jointly develop a heads-up display for Patria’s six-wheel drive armoured personnel carrier. The system will display 3D tactical data, terrain mapping, and AI-driven military insights directly onto the windshield, allowing military personnel to see in low-visibility environments like darkness and smoke.  The MR technology promises to eliminate the need for additional screens or clunky headsets.… This story continues at The Next Web