It's another speech-recognizing, AI-powered handheld device "about half the size of a phone," writes CNET. (Though the $199 device comes with a keyboard and a tiny 2.8-inch screen.) "The Rabbit R1 can identify items in its environment. Point it at a plant, and it can tell you what kind it is. Aim it at your lunch, and it can tell you what's in it. "it also feels a bit like a novelty so far...." It can call an Uber, order dinner from Doordash, translate conversations, record voice memos, play songs from Spotify and more. Your phone can already do all of those things, but [CEO and founder Jesse] Lyu is promoting the Rabbit R1 as a faster and more natural way to do so... So far, the Rabbit R1 feels fun, fresh and interesting, but also frustrating at times. It intrigues me, but it also hasn't convinced me yet that there's room for another gadget in my life.... Many of the things it can do today feel smartphone-esque, like asking for the weather or playing songs on Spotify... Visual search is the most interesting feature so far... It's pretty accurate for the most part so far. When I pointed it at my salad during lunch, it was able to tell me most of the ingredients. That's not what I asked. After all, who orders a dish without knowing what's in it? I asked the Rabbit R1 to tell me how many calories were in my lunch. While it couldn't provide the answer I wanted, I was impressed with its response... Overall, Rabbit R1's visual analysis worked pretty well for identifying things like plants and characters from pop culture. When describing my colleague's sneakers, the Rabbit R1 got the brand wrong... So far, I've used the Rabbit R1 to take voice memos, translate speech from Spanish to English, and answer basic questions about things like weather forecasts. These features work as expected for the most part. The article points out that Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses "also have multimodal AI, meaning the eyewear can 'see' what you see and tell you about it," and "you can already do something like this on your phone through Google's Gemini assistant on Android phones (or the Gemini section of the Google app for the iPhone). "It's also very reminiscent of Google Lens, which has been around for years..."

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Japan's moon lander "has woken up again," reports the Register, "having survived three lunar nights." A post on social media from the lander's X account confirmed that once more, Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) had defied the odds and snapped a picture of the lunar surface using its navigation camera. SLIM was revived a few weeks ago, after a second lunar night. However, with telemetry showing that some of the electronics (temperature sensors) and battery cells were malfunctioning, the chances of the lander making it through a third lunar night seemed remote. Yet against all odds, SLIM has stirred once more on the lunar surface despite lacking heaters to keep its electronics warm.

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What happened after India banned TikTok? The move "mostly drew widespread support" notes the Associated Press, in a country "where protesters had been calling for a boycott of Chinese goods since the deadly confrontation in the remote Karakoram mountain border region." "There was a clamour leading up to this, and the popular narrative was how can we allow Chinese companies to do business in India when we're in the middle of a military standoff," said Nikhil Pahwa, a digital policy expert and founder of tech website MediaNama. Just months before the ban, India had also restricted investment from Chinese companies, Pahwa added. "TikTok wasn't a one-off case. Today, India has banned over 500 Chinese apps to date." At the time, India had about 200 million TikTok users. And the company also employed thousands of Indians. TikTok users and content creators, however, needed a place to go — and the ban provided a multi-billion dollar opportunity to snatch up a big market. Within months, Google rolled out YouTube Shorts and Instagram pushed out its Reels feature. Both mimicked the short-form video creation that TikTok had excelled at. "And they ended up capturing most of the market that TikTok had vacated," said Pahwa. TikTok is also banned in Nepal and Somalia, according to Mashable, and the Associaterd Press adds that it's now also banned in Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan "and restricted in many countries in Europe." Their article concludes that "for the most part, content creators and users in the four years since the ban have moved on to other platforms." They quote one frequent TikTok user as saying they just switched to Instagram after the ban, and "It wasn't really a big deal."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: Tech giant Cisco Systems on Wednesday joined Microsoft and IBM in signing onto a Vatican-sponsored pledge to ensure artificial intelligence is developed and used ethically and to benefit the common good... The pledge outlines key pillars of ethical and responsible use of AI. It emphasizes that AI systems must be designed, used and regulated to serve and protect the dignity of all human beings, without discrimination, and their environments. It highlights principles of transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality and security as necessary to guide all AI developments. The document was unveiled and signed at a Vatican conference on Feb. 28, 2020... Pope Francis has called for an international treaty to ensure AI is developed and used ethically, devoting his annual peace message this year to the topic.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Times of India: Several Apple customers were inexplicably locked out of their Apple ID accounts Friday evening in a major service disruption, forcing them to reset their passwords across all devices and services. According to user reports on social media, the widespread outage began around 8 p.m. ET. People complained that they were abruptly signed out of their Apple IDs on Macs, iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. When attempting to sign back in with their existing passwords, they received an error message preventing access... To regain access, users had to go through Apple's account recovery process to reset their Apple ID passwords. However, many reported difficulties even completing the reset process initially due to high demand... The outage affected iCloud services like iCloud Drive, iMessage, FaceTime, and the App Store. Third-party apps and services that integrate with Apple ID sign-in were also disrupted for those impacted.

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This week Russia vetoed a UN resolution that proposed banning nuclear weapons in space, CNN reports. But it all happened "amid U.S. intelligence-backed concerns that Moscow is trying to develop a nuclear device capable of destroying satellites." In February, President Joe Biden confirmed the US has intelligence that Russia is developing a nuclear anti-satellite capability. Three sources familiar with the intelligence subsequently told CNN the weapon could destroy satellites by creating a massive energy wave when detonated... US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Wednesday's vote "marks a real missed opportunity to rebuild much-needed trust in existing arms control obligations." A US and Japan-drafted resolution had received cross-regional support from more than 60 member states. It intended to strengthen and uphold the global non-proliferation regime, including in outer space, and reaffirm the shared goal of maintaining outer space for peaceful purposes. It also called on UN member states not to develop nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction designed to be placed in Earth's orbit.... Experts say this kind of weapon could have the potential to wipe out mega constellations of small satellites, like SpaceX's Starlink, which has been successfully used by Ukraine to counter Russian troops. This would almost certainly be "a last-ditch weapon" for Russia, the US official and other sources said — because it would do the same damage to whatever Russian satellites were also in the area. The article notes that in March Russian President Vladimir Putin "told officials that space projects, including the setup of a nuclear power unit in space, should be a priority and receive proper financing." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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"A former high school athletic director was arrested Thursday morning," reports CBS News, "after allegedly using artificial intelligence to impersonate the school principal in a recording..." One-time Pikesville High School employee Dazhon Darien is facing charges that include theft, stalking, disruption of school operations and retaliation against a witness. Investigators determined he faked principal Eric Eiswert's voice and circulated the audio on social media in January. Darien's nickname, DJ, was among the names mentioned in the audio clips he allegedly faked, according to the Baltimore County State's Attorney's Office. Baltimore County detectives say Darien created the recording as retaliation against Eiswert, who had launched an investigation into the potential mishandling of school funds, Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said on Thursday. Eiswert's voice, which police and AI experts believe was simulated, made disparaging comments toward Black students and the surrounding Jewish community. The audio was widely circulated on social media. The article notes that after the faked recording circulated on social media the principal "was temporarily removed from the school, and waves of hate-filled messages circulated on social media, while the school received numerous phone calls." The suspect had actually used the school's network multiple times to perform online searches for OpenAI tools, "which police linked to paid OpenAI accounts."

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Reuters reports that America's Federal Aviation Administration "is investigating a union's claims that Boeing retaliated against two employees who in 2022 insisted the planemaker re-evaluate prior engineering work on 777 and 787 jets." The employees' union "said the two unidentified engineers were representatives of the FAA, which delegates some of its oversight authority and certification process to Boeing workers." The FAA noted on Tuesday that in 2022 it boosted oversight of planemakers by protecting aviation industry employees who perform agency functions from interference by their employers. A December 2021 Senate report found "FAA's certification process suffers from undue pressure on line engineers and production staff." "Boeing can tell Congress and the media all it wants about how retaliation is strictly prohibited," said SPEEA Director of Strategic Development Rich Plunkett. "But our union is fighting retaliation cases on a regular basis, and, in this specific case, Boeing is trying to hide information that would shed light on what happened...." Last week, Boeing quality engineer whistleblower Sam Salehpour, who raised questions about Boeing widebody jets, told senators he was told to "shut up" when he flagged safety concerns. He has said he was removed from the 787 program and transferred to the 777 jet due to his questions. Boeing has "zero tolerance for retaliation," according a statement quoted by Reuters, in which the company says they "encourage our employees to speak up when they see an issue. After an extensive review of documentation and interviewing more than a dozen witnesses, our investigators found no evidence of retaliation or interference. We have determined the allegations are unsubstantiated." The union's version of the story? "After nearly six months of debate, the two engineers, with backing from the FAA, prevailed. Boeing re-did the required analysis." The two engineers were still Boeing employees, however, and Boeing management was not pleased. When they came up for their next performance reviews, the two engineers received identical negative evaluations... Even after the manager of the two engineers admitted that he had rated them both poorly at the request of the 777 and 787 managers who had been forced to resubmit their work, Boeing refused to change the engineers' performance evaluations. At this point, one of the engineers left in disgust; the other filed a formal "Speak Up" complaint with Boeing.

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America's Federal Trade Commission "is sending more than $5.6 million in refunds to consumers," reports the Associated Press, "as part of a settlement with Amazon-owned Ring, which was charged with failing to protect private video footage from outside access." In a 2023 complaint, the FTC accused the doorbell camera and home security provider of allowing its employees and contractors to access customers' private videos. Ring allegedly used such footage to train algorithms without consent, among other purposes. Ring was also charged with failing to implement key security protections, which enabled hackers to take control of customers' accounts, cameras and videos. This led to "egregious violations of users' privacy," the FTC noted. The resulting settlement required Ring to delete content that was found to be unlawfully obtained, establish stronger security protections and pay a hefty fine. The FTC says that it's now using much of that money to refund eligible Ring customers. According to their announcement Tuesday, the FTC is now sending 117,044 PayPal payments to affected consumers...

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1,000 petabytes. A million terabytes. One quintillion bytes (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000). That's the amount of storage reported by users of the Ceph storage solution (across more than 3,000 Ceph clusters). The Ceph Foundation is a "directed fund" of the Linux Foundation, providing a neutral home for Ceph, "the most popular open source storage solution for modern data storage challenges" (offering an architecture that's "highly scalable, resilient, and flexible"). It's a software-defined storage platform, providing object storage, block storage, and file storage built on a common distributed cluster foundation. And Friday they announced the release of Ceph Squid, "which comes with several performance and space efficiency features along with enhanced protocol support." Ceph has solidified its position as the cornerstone of open source data storage. The release of Ceph Squid represents a significant milestone toward providing scalable, reliable, and flexible storage solutions that meet the ever-evolving demands of digital data storage. Features of Ceph Squid include improvements to BlueStore [a storage back end specifically designed for managing data on disk for Ceph Object Storage Daemon workloads] to reduce latency and CPU requirements for snapshot intensive workloads. BlueStore now uses RocksDB compression by default for increased average performance and reduced space usage. [And the next-generation Crimson OSD also has improvements in stability and read performance, and "now supports scrub, partial recovery and osdmap trimming."] Ceph continues to drive the future of storage, and welcomes developers, partners, and technology enthusiasts to get involved. Ceph Squid also brings enhancements for the CRUSH algorithm [which computes storage locations] to support more flexible and cost effective erasure coding configurations.

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"For the first time in at least a billion years, two lifeforms have merged into a single organism," reports the Independent: The process, called primary endosymbiosis, has only happened twice in the history of the Earth, with the first time giving rise to all complex life as we know it through mitochondria. The second time that it happened saw the emergence of plants. Now, an international team of scientists have observed the evolutionary event happening between a species of algae commonly found in the ocean and a bacterium... The process involves the algae engulfing the bacterium and providing it with nutrients, energy and protection in return for functions that it could not previously perform — in this instance, the ability to "fix" nitrogen from the air. The algae then incorporates the bacterium as an internal organ called an organelle, which becomes vital to the host's ability to function. The researchers from the U.S. and Japan who made the discovery said it will offer new insights into the process of evolution, while also holding the potential to fundamentally change agriculture. "This system is a new perspective on nitrogen fixation, and it might provide clues into how such an organelle could be engineered into crop plants," said Dr Coale. Two papers detailing the research were published in the scientific journals Science and Cell. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

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"Intel used to dominate the U.S. chip industry," writes CNBC. But now "it's struggling to stay relevant." Intel's long-awaited turnaround looks farther away than ever after the company reported dismal first-quarter earnings. Investors pushed the shares down 9% on Friday to their lowest level of the year. Although Intel's revenue is no longer shrinking and the company remains the biggest maker of processors that power PCs and laptops, sales in the first quarter trailed estimates. Intel also gave a soft forecast for the second quarter, suggesting weak demand... Intel is the worst-performing tech stock in the S&P 500 this year, down 37%. Meanwhile, the two best-performing stocks in the index are chipmaker Nvidia and Super Micro Computer, which has been boosted by surging demand for Nvidia-based artificial intelligence servers. Intel, long the most valuable U.S. chipmaker, is now one-sixteenth the size of Nvidia by market cap. It's also smaller than Qualcomm, Broadcom, Texas Instruments, and AMD. For decades, it was the largest semiconductor company in the world by sales, but suffered seven straight quarters of revenue declines recently, and was passed by Nvidia last year. Intel's problems "are decades in the making," according to CNBC, suggesting that one turning point was Apple's decision not to use Intel's chips in its iPhone. Now nearly every smartphone built uses Arm chips built by Apple and Qualcomm, while Apple's huge orders for TSMC chips "provided the cash to annually upgrade the manufacturing equipment at TSMC, which eventually surpassed Intel." Around 2017, mobile chips from Apple and Qualcomm started adding AI parts to their chips called neural processing units, another advancement over Intel's PC processors. The first Intel-based laptop with an NPU shipped late last year. Intel has since lost share in its core PC chip business to chips that grew out of the mobile revolution... Apple stopped using Intel in its PCs in 2020. Macs now use Arm-based chips, and some of the first mainstream Windows laptops with Arm-based chips are coming out later this year. Low-cost laptops running Google ChromeOS are increasingly using Arm, too... AMD made over 20% of server CPUs sold in 2022, and shipments grew 62% that year, according to an estimate from Counterpoint Research last year. AMD surpassed Intel's market cap the same year.

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"Kremlin-backed hackers have been exploiting a critical Microsoft vulnerability for four years," Ars Technica reported this week, "in attacks that targeted a vast array of organizations with a previously undocumented tool, the software maker disclosed Monday. "When Microsoft patched the vulnerability in October 2022 — at least two years after it came under attack by the Russian hackers — the company made no mention that it was under active exploitation." As of publication, the company's advisory still made no mention of the in-the-wild targeting. Windows users frequently prioritize the installation of patches based on whether a vulnerability is likely to be exploited in real-world attacks. Exploiting CVE-2022-38028, as the vulnerability is tracked, allows attackers to gain system privileges, the highest available in Windows, when combined with a separate exploit. Exploiting the flaw, which carries a 7.8 severity rating out of a possible 10, requires low existing privileges and little complexity. It resides in the Windows print spooler, a printer-management component that has harbored previous critical zero-days. Microsoft said at the time that it learned of the vulnerability from the US National Security Agency... Since as early as April 2019, Forest Blizzard has been exploiting CVE-2022-38028 in attacks that, once system privileges are acquired, use a previously undocumented tool that Microsoft calls GooseEgg. The post-exploitation malware elevates privileges within a compromised system and goes on to provide a simple interface for installing additional pieces of malware that also run with system privileges. This additional malware, which includes credential stealers and tools for moving laterally through a compromised network, can be customized for each target. "While a simple launcher application, GooseEgg is capable of spawning other applications specified at the command line with elevated permissions, allowing threat actors to support any follow-on objectives such as remote code execution, installing a backdoor, and moving laterally through compromised networks," Microsoft officials wrote. Thanks to Slashdot reader echo123 for sharing the news.

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50 years ago this week, PC software pioneer Gary Kildall "demonstrated CP/M, the first commercially successful personal computer operating system in Pacific Grove, California," according to a blog post from Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum. It tells the story of "how his company, Digital Research Inc., established CP/M as an industry standard and its subsequent loss to a version from Microsoft that copied the look and feel of the DRI software." Kildall was a CS instructor and later associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California... He became fascinated with Intel Corporation's first microprocessor chip and simulated its operation on the school's IBM mainframe computer. This work earned him a consulting relationship with the company to develop PL/M, a high-level programming language that played a significant role in establishing Intel as the dominant supplier of chips for personal computers. To design software tools for Intel's second-generation processor, he needed to connect to a new 8" floppy disk-drive storage unit from Memorex. He wrote code for the necessary interface software that he called CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) in a few weeks, but his efforts to build the electronic hardware required to transfer the data failed. The project languished for a year. Frustrated, he called electronic engineer John Torode, a college friend then teaching at UC Berkeley, who crafted a "beautiful rat's nest of wirewraps, boards and cables" for the task. Late one afternoon in the fall of 1974, together with John Torode, in the backyard workshop of his home at 781 Bayview Avenue, Pacific Grove, Gary "loaded my CP/M program from paper tape to the diskette and 'booted' CP/M from the diskette, and up came the prompt: * [...] By successfully booting a computer from a floppy disk drive, they had given birth to an operating system that, together with the microprocessor and the disk drive, would provide one of the key building blocks of the personal computer revolution... As Intel expressed no interest in CP/M, Gary was free to exploit the program on his own and sold the first license in 1975. What happened next? Here's some highlights from the blog post: "Reluctant to adapt the code for another controller, Gary worked with Glen Ewing to split out the hardware dependent-portions so they could be incorporated into a separate piece of code called the BIOS (Basic Input Output System)... The BIOS code allowed all Intel and compatible microprocessor-based computers from other manufacturers to run CP/M on any new hardware. This capability stimulated the rise of an independent software industry..." "CP/M became accepted as a standard and was offered by most early personal computer vendors, including pioneers Altair, Amstrad, Kaypro, and Osborne..." "[Gary's company] introduced operating systems with windowing capability and menu-driven user interfaces years before Apple and Microsoft... However, by the mid-1980s, in the struggle with the juggernaut created by the combined efforts of IBM and Microsoft, DRI had lost the basis of its operating systems business." "Gary sold the company to Novell Inc. of Provo, Utah, in 1991. Ultimately, Novell closed the California operation and, in 1996, disposed of the assets to Caldera, Inc., which used DRI intellectual property assets to prevail in a lawsuit against Microsoft."

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Bloomberg looks at America's biggest operator of private electrical vehicle charging infrastructure: Amazon. "In a little more than two years, Amazon has installed more than 17,000 chargers at about 120 warehouses around the U.S." — and had Rivian build 13,500 custom electric delivery vans. Amazon has a long way to go. The Seattle-based company says its operations emitted about 71 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2022, up by almost 40% since Jeff Bezos's 2019 vow that his company would eventually stop contributing to the emissions warming the planet. Many of Amazon's emissions come from activities — air freight, ocean shipping, construction and electronics manufacturing, to name a few — that lack a clear, carbon-free alternative, today or any time soon. The company has not made much progress on decarbonization of long-haul trucking, whose emissions tend to be concentrated in industrial and outlying areas rather than the big cities that served as the backdrop for Amazon's electric delivery vehicle rollout... Another lesson Amazon learned is one the company isn't keen to talk about: Going green can be expensive, at least initially. Based on the type of chargers Amazon deploys — almost entirely midtier chargers called Level 2 in the industry — the hardware likely cost between $50 million and $90 million, according to Bloomberg estimates based on cost estimates supplied by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Factoring in costs beyond the plugs and related hardware — like digging through a parking lot to lay wires or set up electrical panels and cabinets — could double that sum. Amazon declined to comment on how much it spent on its EV charging push. In addition to the expense of the chargers, electric vehicle-fleet operators are typically on the hook for utility upgrades. When companies request the sort of increases to electrical capacity that Amazon has — the Maple Valley warehouse has three megawatts of power for its chargers — they tend to pay for them, making the utility whole for work done on behalf of a single customer. Amazon says it pays upgrade costs as determined by utilities, but that in some locations the upgrades fit within the standard service power companies will handle out of their own pocket. The article also includes this quote from Kellen Schefter, transportation director at the Edison Electric Institute trade group (which worked with Amazon on its electricity needs). "Amazon's scale matters. If Amazon can show that it meets their climate goals while also meeting their package-delivery goals, we can show this all actually works."

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This week the Register spoke to former senior White House cyber policy director A.J. Grotto — who complained it was hard to get even slight concessions from Microsoft: "If you go back to the SolarWinds episode from a few years ago ... [Microsoft] was essentially up-selling logging capability to federal agencies" instead of making it the default, Grotto said. "As a result, it was really hard for agencies to identify their exposure to the SolarWinds breach." Grotto told us Microsoft had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to provide logging capabilities to the government by default. [In the interview he calls it "an epic fight" which lasted 18 months."] [G]iven the fact the mega-corp banked around $20 billion in revenue from security services last year, the concession was minimal at best. That illustrates, Grotto said, that "they [Microsoft] just have a ton of leverage, and they're not afraid to use it." Add to that concerns over an Exchange Online intrusion by Chinese snoops, and another Microsoft security breach by Russian cyber operatives, both of which allowed spies to gain access to US government emails, and Grotto says it's fair to classify Microsoft and its products as a national security concern. He estimates that Microsoft makes 85% of U.S. government productivity software — and has an even greater share of their operating systems. "Microsoft in many ways has the government locked in, he says in the interview, "and so it's able to transfer a lot of these costs associated with the security breaches over to the federal government." And about five minutes in, he says, point-blank, that "It's perfectly fair" to consider Microsoft a national security threat, given its dominance "not just within the federal government, but really in sort of the boarder IT marketplace. I think it's fair to say, yeah, that a systemic compromise that affects Microsoft and its products do rise to the level of a national security risk." He'd like to see the government encourage more competition — to the point where public scrutiny prompts software customers to change their behavior, and creates a true market incentive for better performance...

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An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: On a slice of the ocean front in west Singapore, a startup is building a plant to turn carbon dioxide from air and seawater into the same material as seashells, in a process that will also produce "green" hydrogen — a much-hyped clean fuel. The cluster of low-slung buildings starting to take shape in Tuas will become the "world's largest" ocean-based carbon dioxide removal plant when completed later this year, according to Equatic, the startup behind it that was spun out of the University of California at Los Angeles. The idea is that the plant will pull water from the ocean, zap it with an electric current and run air through it to produce a series of chemical reactions to trap and store carbon dioxide as minerals, which can be put back in the sea or used on land... The $20 million facility will be fully operational by the end of the year and able to remove 3,650 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, said Edward Sanders, chief operating officer of Equatic, which has partnered with Singapore's National Water Agency to construct the plant. That amount is equivalent to taking roughly 870 average passenger cars off the road. The ambition is to scale up to 100,000 metric tons of CO2 removal a year by the end of 2026, and from there to millions of metric tons over the next few decades, Sanders told CNN. The plant can be replicated pretty much anywhere, he said, stacked up in modules "like lego blocks...." The upfront costs are high but the company says it plans to make money by selling carbon credits to polluters to offset their pollution, as well as selling the hydrogen produced during the process. Equatic has already signed a deal with Boeing to sell it 2,100 metric tons of hydrogen, which it plans to use to create green fuel, and to fund the removal of 62,000 metric tons of CO2. There's other projects around the world attempting ocean-based carbon renewal, CNN notes. "Other projects include sprinkling iron particles into the ocean to stimulate CO2-absorbing phytoplankton, sinking seaweed into the depths to lock up carbon and spraying particles into marine clouds to reflect away some of the sun's energy." But carbon-removal projects are controversial, criticized for being expensive, unproven at scale and a distraction from policies to cut fossil fuels. And when they involve the oceans — complex ecosystems already under huge strain from global warming — criticisms can get even louder. There are "big knowledge gaps" when it comes to ocean geoengineering generally, said Jean-Pierre Gatusso, an ocean scientist at the Sorbonne University in France. "I am very concerned with the fact that science lags behind the industry," he told CNN.

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Two months ago the team behind NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter released a video reflecting on its historic explorations of Mars, flying 10.5 miles (17.0 kilometers) in 72 different flights over three years. It was the team's way of saying goodbye, according to NASA's video. And this week, LiveScience reports, Ingenuity answered back: On April 16, Ingenuity beamed back its final signal to Earth, which included the remaining data it had stored in its memory bank and information about its final flight. Ingenuity mission scientists gathered in a control room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California to celebrate and analyze the helicopter's final message, which was received via NASA's Deep Space Network, made up of ground stations located across the globe. In addition to the remaining data files, Ingenuity sent the team a goodbye message including the names of all the people who worked on the mission. This special message had been sent to Perseverance the day before and relayed to Ingenuity to send home. The helicopter, which still has power, will now spend the rest of its days collecting data from its final landing spot in Valinor Hills, named after a location in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" books. The chopper will wake up daily to test its equipment, collect a temperature reading and take a single photo of its surroundings. It will continue to do this until it loses power or fills up its remaining memory space, which could take 20 years. Such a long-term dataset could not only benefit future designs for Martian vehicles but also "provide a long-term perspective on Martian weather patterns and dust movement," researchers wrote in the statement. However, the data will be kept on board the helicopter and not beamed back to Earth, so it must be retrieved by future Martian vehicles or astronauts. "Whenever humanity revisits Valinor Hills — either with a rover, a new aircraft, or future astronauts — Ingenuity will be waiting with her last gift of data," Teddy Tzanetos, an Ingenuity scientist at JPL, said in the statement. Thursday NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory released another new video tracing the entire route of Ingenuity's expedition over the surface of Mars. "Ingenuity's success could pave the way for more extensive aerial exploration of Mars down the road," adds Spacae.com: Mission team members are already working on designs for larger, more capable rotorcraft that could collect a variety of science data on the Red Planet, for example. And Mars isn't the only drone target: In 2028, NASA plans to launch Dragonfly, a $3.3 billion mission to Saturn's huge moon Titan, which hosts lakes, seas and rivers of liquid hydrocarbons on its frigid surface. The 1,000-pound (450 kg) Dragonfly will hop from spot to spot on Titan, characterizing the moon's various environments and assessing its habitability.

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Long-time Slashdot reader tippen shared this report from the Register: AI agents, which combine large language models with automation software, can successfully exploit real world security vulnerabilities by reading security advisories, academics have claimed. In a newly released paper, four University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) computer scientists — Richard Fang, Rohan Bindu, Akul Gupta, and Daniel Kang — report that OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model (LLM) can autonomously exploit vulnerabilities in real-world systems if given a CVE advisory describing the flaw. "To show this, we collected a dataset of 15 one-day vulnerabilities that include ones categorized as critical severity in the CVE description," the US-based authors explain in their paper. "When given the CVE description, GPT-4 is capable of exploiting 87 percent of these vulnerabilities compared to 0 percent for every other model we test (GPT-3.5, open-source LLMs) and open-source vulnerability scanners (ZAP and Metasploit)...." The researchers' work builds upon prior findings that LLMs can be used to automate attacks on websites in a sandboxed environment. GPT-4, said Daniel Kang, assistant professor at UIUC, in an email to The Register, "can actually autonomously carry out the steps to perform certain exploits that open-source vulnerability scanners cannot find (at the time of writing)." The researchers wrote that "Our vulnerabilities span website vulnerabilities, container vulnerabilities, and vulnerable Python packages. Over half are categorized as 'high' or 'critical' severity by the CVE description...." "Kang and his colleagues computed the cost to conduct a successful LLM agent attack and came up with a figure of $8.80 per exploit"

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