On November 24th, 1971 — 53 years ago today — a mysterious man jumped out of an airplane clutching $200,000 in ransom money. (He'd extorted it from the airline by claiming he had a bomb, and it's still "the only unsolved case of air piracy in the history of commercial aviation," according to Wikipedia.) Will modern technology finally let us solve the case — or just turn it into a miniseries on Netflix? And have online researchers finally discovered the definitive clue? The FBI vetted more than 800 suspects, according to the Wyoming news site Cowboy State Daily, but in 2016 announced they were suspending their active investigation. So it's newsworthy that the FBI now appears to be investigating new evidence, according to an amateur D.B. Cooper researcher on YouTube: the discovery of what's believed to be D.B. Cooper's uniquely-modified parachute: Retired pilot, skydiver and YouTuber, Dan Gryder told Cowboy State Daily that he may have found the missing link after uncovering the modified military surplus bailout rig he believes was used by D.B. Cooper in the heist. It belonged to Richard Floyd McCoy II, and was carefully stored in his deceased mother's storage stash until very recently... McCoy's children, Chanté and Richard III, or "Rick," agree with Gryder that they believe their father was D.B. Cooper, a secret that shrouded the family but wasn't overtly discussed. For years, they said, the family stayed mum out of fear of implicating their mother, Karen, whom they believe was complicit in both hijackings. Upon her death in 2020, they broke their silence to Gryder after being contacted by him off and on for years. Gryder, who has been researching the case for more than 20 years, documented his investigation in a lengthy two-part series on his YouTube channel, "Probable Cause," in 2021 and 2022, where he connects the dots and shows actual footage of him finding the parachute in an outbuilding on the McCoy family property in North Carolina in July 2022. On Monday, Gryder released a third video, "D.B. Cooper: Deep FBI Update," where he announced the FBI's new and very recent efforts in his discoveries. After watching his first two videos, Gryder said FBI agents contacted Rick and Gryder to see the parachute. It was the first investigative move by the agency since issuing the 2016 public statement, declaring the case closed pending new evidence. Gryder and Rick McCoy traveled to Richmond, Virginia, in September 2023, where they met with FBI agents, who took the harness and parachute into evidence along with a skydiving logbook found by Chanté that aligned with the timeline for both hijackings, providing another vital piece in the puzzle, Gryder said.... During the meeting, Gryder said the agents called it a first step. If the evidence proved fruitless, they would have promptly returned the skydiving rig, he said, but that didn't happen. Instead, an FBI agent called Rick a month later to ask to search the family property in Cove City, North Carolina, which McCoy's mother owned and where Gryder had found the parachute and canopy... [Gryder says he watched] at least seven vehicles descend on the property with more than a dozen agents who scoured the property for about four hours... Rick said he has provided a DNA sample and was told by the FBI agents that the next step might be exhuming his father's body, but no formal terms and conditions for that process have been established thus far, he said. A retired commercial airline pilot who was present in the Virginia FBI meeting said "It was clear they were taking it seriously" — noting it was the FBI who'd requested that meeting. The article cites two FBI agents who'd earlier already believed D.B. Cooper was McCoy. And the article points out that the FBI "has never ruled McCoy out, stating in a 2006 statement that he was 'still a favorite suspect among many.'" A second article notes that Gryder supports the FBI's recent request to exhume McCoy's body. As he sees it, "The existing DNA marker comparisons studied so far only validate the need for this final extreme step and should close the mystery once and for all." And the article adds that McCoy's children are "eager for closure and hope that the FBI finds the evidence agents need to close the D.B. Cooper case once and for all."

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Back in the mid-1980s Mark Roth was in 5th grade when the game ChipWits "helped kindle his interest in coding," according to an online biography. ("By middle school, he wrote his first Commodore 64 assembler and by high school he authored a 3D Graphics library for DOS.") And 40 years later, Slashdot reader markroth8 writes that the programming puzzle/logic game "inspired many people to become professional coders": ChipWits was first released for Mac in 1984, and was later ported to Commodore 64 and Apple II in 1985. To celebrate the game's 40th anniversary, the team behind the new Steam reboot of ChipWits (including its original co-creator Doug Sharp, also of fame for the game King of Chicago) is announcing the recovery and open source release of the original game's source code, written in the FORTH programming language, for both Mac and Commodore 64 platforms. Recovering data from 40-year old 5.25" and 3.5" disks was a challenge in and of itself, and most of the data survived unscathed! It's interesting to read the 40-year-old code, and compare it to modern game development. "Our goal for open sourcing the original version of ChipWits is to ensure its legacy lives on," according to the announcement. (It adds that "We also wanted to share an appreciation for what cross-platform software development for 8-bit microcomputers was like in 1984.")

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The GitHub Secure Open Source Fund launched this week with an initial commitment of $1.25 million, reports TechCrunch, using "capital from contributors including American Express, 1Password, Shopify, Stripe, and GitHub's own parent company Microsoft." GitHub briefly teased the new initiative at its annual GitHub Universe developer conference last month, but Tuesday it announced full details and formally opened the program for applicants, which will be reviewed "on a rolling basis" through the closing date of January 7, 2025, with programming and funding starting shortly after... Tuesday's news builds on a number of previous GitHub initiatives designed to support project maintainers that work on key components of critical software, including GitHub Sponsors which landed in 2019 (and which is powering the new fund), but more directly the GitHub Accelerator program that launched its first cohort last year — the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund is essentially an extension of that. "We're trying to acknowledge the fact that we're the home of open source, ultimately, and we have an obligation to help ensure that open source can continue to thrive and have the support that it needs," GitHub Chief Operating Officer Kyle Daigle told TechCrunch in an interview. Qualifying projects can be pretty much any project that has an open source license, but of course GitHub will be looking at those that need the funds most — so Kubernetes can hold fire with its application. "We're looking for the outsized impact, which tends to be big projects with few maintainers that we all rely on," Daigle said. The sum of $1.25 million might sound like a reasonable amount, but it will be split across 125 projects, which means just $10,000 each — better than nothing, for sure, but a drop in the ocean on the grand scheme of things. However, Daigle is quick to stress that money is only part of the prize here — as with the initial accelerator program, maintainers embark on a three-week program, which includes mentorship, certification, education workshops, and ongoing access to GitHub tools. From GitHub's announcement: Since introducing support for organizations through GitHub Sponsors, more than 5,800 organizations, including Microsoft and Stripe, have invested in maintainers and projects on GitHub, up nearly 40% YoY. Cumulatively, the platform has unlocked over $60 million in funding for maintainers to help them spend more time working on their projects. But we know we're just scratching the surface when it comes to organizations and corporate support of open source. This summer, we partnered with the Linux Foundation and researchers from Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) to learn more about the state of open source funding today. Diving in, we assessed organizations funding behaviors, potential misalignments, and opportunities to improve. In the report launched today, we found: - Responding organizations annually invest $1.7 billion in open source, which can be extrapolated to estimate that approximately $7.7 billion is invested across the entire open source ecosystem annually. - 86% of investment is in the form of contribution labor by employees and contractors working for the funding organization, with the remaining 14% being direct financial contributions. - Organizations generally know how and where they contribute (65%) but lack specific clarity of their contributions (38%). - Security efforts focus on bugs and maintenance; only a few (6%) said comprehensive security audits are a priority. We all stand to benefit from unlocking more funding for open source. By tackling problems like open source security as an ecosystem, we believe we can help create more available funding and resources that are vital to the sustainability of open source. Not every open source project or maintainer has access to funding and training for security. That's why we created a fund that everyone potentially eligible can apply for... This is the beginning of a journey into helping find ways to secure open source. On its own, it's not the answer, but we are confident it will help. We will be monitoring the impact of these investments and share what we learn as we go.

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America's Justice Department "has ordered all consensual searches by drug enforcement agents conducted at the nation's airports stopped," reports Georgia's local TV station Atlanta News First — after their series of investigations "uncovered how the agents often search innocent passengers at airport gates, looking for cash." On Thursday, the department made public a November 12, 2024, directive from the deputy attorney general to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) that it suspend "all consensual encounters at mass transportation facilities unless they are either connected to an ongoing, predicated investigation involving one or more identified targets or criminal networks or approved by the DEA Administrator based on exigent circumstances." The management advisory memorandum was issued by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. The memo specifically mentioned the case of an airline passenger interviewed by Atlanta News First Chief Investigator Brendan Keefe, author of the Atlanta News First investigation, In Plane Sight. The award-winning series uncovered how drug agents have been seizing anything over $5,000 if airline passengers can't prove — on the spot — that their own money didn't come from drug trafficking. The government seizes the cash when no drugs are found, without arresting the traveler or charging them with a crime, and the DEA gets to keep the money it seizes. After witnessing the Atlanta News First series, the passenger in question — who was departing from Cincinnati and heading to New York, where he lives — refused consent to have his bags searched at the gate... "The DOJ Office of the Inspector General (OIG) further learned that the DEA Task Force Group selected this traveler for the encounter based on information provided by a DEA confidential source, who was an employee of a commercial airline, about travelers who had purchased tickets within 48 hours of the travel," the memo said. "The OIG learned that the DEA had been paying this employee a percentage of forfeited cash seized by the DEA office from passengers at the local airport when the seizure resulted from information the employee had provided to the DEA. The employee had received tens of thousands of dollars from the DEA over the past several years." The news station's investigation "also revealed passengers selected for what the government calls 'random, consensual encounters' are actually profiled by the drug agents who search Black men far more often than any other group of passengers," according to the article. "The reports analyzed data showing that, for drug agents to find just one passenger with money, they have to publicly search 10 departing passengers."

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"Scientists have found what seems to be the oldest direct evidence of hot water flowing on Mars during its ancient past," reports Space.com. "The discovery could further indicate that the Red Planet, despite its arid and desolate appearance today, may have been capable of supporting life long ago." The evidence was delivered to Earth and sealed within the well-known Martian meteorite NWA7034, found in the Sahara Desert in 2011. Due to its black, highly polished appearance, the Martian rock is also known as "Black Beauty." At an estimated 2 billion years old, Black Beauty is the second oldest Martian meteorite ever discovered. However, the Curtin University team discovered something even older within it: a 4.45 billion-year-old zircon grain that harbors the fingerprints of fluids rich in water. Team member Aaron Cavosie from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences thinks this discovery will open up new avenues to understanding hydrothermal systems associated with the activity of volcanic magma that once ran through Mars. "We used nano-scale geochemistry to detect elemental evidence of hot water on Mars 4.45 billion years ago," Cavosie said in a statement. "Hydrothermal systems were essential for the development of life on Earth, and our findings suggest Mars also had water, a key ingredient for habitable environments, during the earliest history of crust formation...." [T]his new research implies that water in liquid form may have existed on Mars even earlier than previously expected in the planet's pre-Noachian period.

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Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shared this report from the Guardian: Staff have resigned at Starling Bank after its new chief executive demanded thousands of workers attend its offices more frequently, despite lacking enough space to host them. In his first major policy change since taking over from the UK digital bank's founder, Anne Boden, in March, Raman Bhatia has ordered all hybrid staff — many of whom were in the office only one or two days a week, or on an ad-hoc basis — to travel to work for a minimum of 10 days each month. But the bank, which operates online only, admitted that some of its offices would not be equipped to handle the influx... "We are considering ways in which we can create more space," an email sent by Starling's human resources team and seen by the Guardian said. Starling has 3,231 staff, the vast majority of whom are in the UK with some also in Dublin. However, the Guardian understands that the bank has only about 900 desks, including 260 at its Cardiff site, 320 in its London headquarters and 155 in Southampton. The bank has a further 160 desks in its newest site in Manchester, where it has signed a 10-year lease to occupy the fifth floor of the Landmark building, which also houses Santander UK and HSBC staff... Some staff have already resigned over the "rushed" announcement, while others have threatened to do so... The return to office announcement came a month after the Financial Conduct Authority hit Starling with a £29m fine after discovering "shockingly lax" controls that it said left the financial system "wide open to criminals". That included failures in its automated screening system for individuals facing government sanctions. Starling Bank issued this statement to explain its reasoning. "By bringing colleagues together in person, our aim is to achieve greater collaboration that will benefit our customers as we enter Starling's next phase of growth." The article also notes that the U.K. supermarket chain Asda "has also toughened its stance, making it compulsory for thousands of workers at its offices in Leeds and Leicester to spend at least three days a week at their desks from the new year."

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NBC News reports that a newly identified chemical byproduct "may be present in drinking water in about a third of U.S. homes, a study found." "Scientists do not yet know whether the byproduct is dangerous. But some are worried that it could have toxic properties because of similarities to other chemicals of concern." The newly identified substance, named "chloronitramide anion," is produced when water is treated with chloramine, a chemical formed by mixing chlorine and ammonia. Chloramine is often used to kill viruses and bacteria in municipal water treatment systems. Researchers said the existence of the byproduct was discovered about 40 years ago, but it was only identified now because analysis techniques have improved, which finally enabled scientists to determine the chemical's structure. It could take years to figure out whether chloronitramide anion is dangerous — it's never been studied. The researchers reported their findings Thursday in the journal Science, in part to spur research to address safety concerns. The scientists said they have no hard evidence to suggest that the compound represents a danger, but that it bears similarities to other chemicals of concern. They think it deserves scrutiny because it's been detected so widely... David Reckhow, a research professor in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was not involved with the study, said the finding was an important step. The ultimate goal, he said, is understanding whether the substance is a hazard; he concurred that it was likely toxic. "It's a pretty small molecule and it can probably for that reason enter into biological systems and into cells. And it is still a reactive molecule," he said. "Those are the kinds of things you worry about." "It's estimated more than 113 million people drink chloraminated processed water in the U.S.," according to a follow-up article by ABC News. But they also include this quote from Dr. Stephanie Widmer, a board-certified medical toxicologist and emergency medicine physician. "The reality is that no one really knows too much about this chloronitramide and its impact on human health, and more research needs to be done. These disinfecting chemicals have been giving us clean drinking water for decades, so no reason to fear drinking water as a result of this study." Although ABC News tacks on this sentence. "The study authors suggest, in general, adding a carbon filter to a sink or a standalone pitcher may be a good option for those concerned." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Greymane for sharing the news.

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The Rust community has "recognized the unsafety of Rust (if used incorrectly)," according to a blog post by Amazon Web Services. So now AWS and the Rust Foundation are "crowdsourcing an effort to verify the Rust standard library," according to an article at DevClass.com, "by setting out a series of challenges for devs and offering financial rewards for solutions..." Rust includes ways to bypass its safety guarantees though, with the use of the "unsafe" keyword... The issue AWS highlights is that even if developers use only safe code, most applications still depend on the Rust standard library. AWS states that there are approximately 7.5K unsafe functions in the Rust Standard Library and notes that 57 "soundness issues" and 20 CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) have been reported in the last three years. [28% of the soundness issues were discovered in 2024.] Marking a function as unsafe does not mean it is vulnerable, only that Rust does not guarantee its safety. AWS plans to reduce the risk by using tools and techniques for formal verification of key library code, but believes that "a single team would be unable to make significant inroads" for reasons including the lack of a verification mechanism in the Rust ecosystem and what it calls the "unknowns of scalable verification." The plan therefore is to turn this over to the community, by posing challenges and rewarding developers for solutions.... A GitHub repository provides a fork of the Rust code and includes a set of challenges, currently 13 of them... The Rust Foundation says that there is a financial reward tied to each challenge, and that the "challenge rewards committee is responsible for reviewing activity and dispensing rewards." How much will be paid though is not stated. Despite the wide admiration for Rust, there is no formal specification for the language, an issue which impacts formal verification efforts. Thanks to Slashdot reader sean-it-all for sharing the news.

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Microsoft-owned GitHub published a blog post asking "Does GitHub Copilot improve code quality? Here's what the data says." Its first paragraph includes statistics from past studies — that GitHub Copilot has helped developers code up to 55% faster, leaving 88% of developers feeling more "in the flow" and 85% feeling more confident in their code. But does it improve code quality? [W]e recruited 202 [Python] developers with at least five years of experience. Half were randomly assigned GitHub Copilot access and the other half were instructed not to use any AI tools... We then evaluated the code with unit tests and with an expert review conducted by developers. Our findings overall show that code authored with GitHub Copilot has increased functionality and improved readability, is of better quality, and receives higher approval rates... Developers with GitHub Copilot access had a 56% greater likelihood of passing all 10 unit tests in the study, indicating that GitHub Copilot helps developers write more functional code by a wide margin. In blind reviews, code written with GitHub Copilot had significantly fewer code readability errors, allowing developers to write 13.6% more lines of code, on average, without encountering readability problems. Readability improved by 3.62%, reliability by 2.94%, maintainability by 2.47%, and conciseness by 4.16%. All numbers were statistically significant... Developers were 5% more likely to approve code written with GitHub Copilot, meaning that such code is ready to be merged sooner, speeding up the time to fix bugs or deploy new features. "While GitHub's reports have been positive, a few others haven't," reports Visual Studio magazine: For example, a recent study from Uplevel Data Labs said, "Developers with Copilot access saw a significantly higher bug rate while their issue throughput remained consistent." And earlier this year a "Coding on Copilot" whitepaper from GitClear said, "We find disconcerting trends for maintainability. Code churn — the percentage of lines that are reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored — is projected to double in 2024 compared to its 2021, pre-AI baseline. We further find that the percentage of 'added code' and 'copy/pasted code' is increasing in proportion to 'updated,' 'deleted,' and 'moved 'code. In this regard, AI-generated code resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness [don't repeat yourself] of the repos visited."

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June, 2023: "Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings." November, 2024: "The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger." A senior editor at the Atlantic raises the possibility of systemic dishonesty-rewarding incentives where "a study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out," writing that "More than a year since all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied." And the suspect isn't just Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor. One person deeply affected by all this is Gino's co-author, a business school professor from the University of California at Berkeley — Juliana Schroeder — who launched an audit of all 138 studies conducted by Francesca Gino (called "The Many Coauthors Project"): Gino was accused of faking numbers in four published papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another paper that appeared to be affected — and it was one that she herself had helped write... The other main contributor was Alison Wood Brooks, a young professor and colleague of Gino's at Harvard Business School.... If Brooks did conduct this work and oversee its data, then Schroeder's audit had produced a dire twist. The Many Co-Authors Project was meant to suss out Gino's suspect work, and quarantine it from the rest... But now, to all appearances, Schroeder had uncovered crooked data that apparently weren't linked to Gino.... Like so many other scientific scandals, the one Schroeder had identified quickly sank into a swamp of closed-door reviews and taciturn committees. Schroeder says that Harvard Business School declined to investigate her evidence of data-tampering, citing a policy of not responding to allegations made more than six years after the misconduct is said to have occurred... In the course of scouting out the edges of the cheating scandal in her field, Schroeder had uncovered yet another case of seeming science fraud. And this time, she'd blown the whistle on herself. That stunning revelation, unaccompanied by any posts on social media, had arrived in a muffled update to the Many Co-Authors Project website. Schroeder announced that she'd found "an issue" with one more paper that she'd produced with Gino... [Schroeder] said that the source of the error wasn't her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused... What feels out of reach is not so much the truth of any set of allegations, but their consequences. Gino has been placed on administrative leave, but in many other instances of suspected fraud, nothing happens. Both Brooks and Schroeder appear to be untouched. "The problem is that journal editors and institutions can be more concerned with their own prestige and reputation than finding out the truth," Dennis Tourish, at the University of Sussex Business School, told me. "It can be easier to hope that this all just goes away and blows over and that somebody else will deal with it...." [Tourish also published a 2019 book decrying "Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research," which the article notes "cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they've encountered fabricated or falsified data."] Maybe the situation in her field would eventually improve, [Schroeder] said. "The optimistic point is, in the long arc of things, we'll self-correct, even if we have no incentive to retract or take responsibility." "Do you believe that?" I asked. "On my optimistic days, I believe it." "Is today an optimistic day?" "Not really."

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Meta wants to force Apple and Google to verify the ages of people downloading apps from their app stores, reports the Washington Post — and now Meta's campaign "is picking up momentum" with legislators in the U.S. Congress. Federal and state lawmakers have recently proposed a raft of measures requiring that platforms such as Meta's Facebook and Instagram block users under a certain age from using their sites. The push has triggered fierce debate over the best way to ascertain how old users are online. Last year Meta threw its support behind legislation that would push those obligations onto app stores rather than individual app providers, like itself, as your regular host and Naomi Nix reported. While some states have considered the plan, it has not gained much traction in Washington. That could be shifting. Two congressional Republicans are preparing a new age verification bill that places the burden on app stores, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans... The bill would be the first of its kind on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have called for expanding guardrails for children amid concerns about the risks of social media but where political divisions have bogged down talks. The measure would give parents the right to sue an app store if their child was exposed to certain content, such as lewd or sexual material, according to a copy obtained by the Tech Brief. App stores could be protected against legal claims, however, if they took steps to protect children against harms, such as verifying their ages and giving parents the ability to block app downloads. The article points out that U.S. lawmakers "have the power to set national standards that could override state efforts if they so choose..."

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CNN reports that investigators "are trying to crack the mystery of how two undersea internet cables in the Baltic Sea were cut within hours of each other." But there's now two competing viewpoints, "with European officials saying they believe the disruption was an act of sabotage and U.S. officials suggesting it was likely an accident." The foreign ministers of Finland and Germany said in a joint statement that they were "deeply concerned" about the incident and raised the possibility that it was part of a "hybrid warfare," specifically mentioning Russia in their statement. Their assessment was not plucked out of thin air. Russia has been accused of waging a hybrid war against Europe after a string of suspicious incidents, arson attacks, explosions and other acts of sabotage across multiple European countries were traced back to Moscow. And the disruption to the cables came just weeks after the US warned that Moscow was likely to target critical undersea infrastructure. This followed months of suspicious movements of Russian vessels in European waters and the significant beefing up of a dedicated Russian secretive marine unit tasked with surveying the seabed... But two US officials familiar with the initial assessment of the incident told CNN on Tuesday the damage was not believed to be deliberate activity by Russia or any other nation. Instead, the two officials told CNN they believed it likely caused by an anchor drag from a passing vessel. Such accidents have happened in the past, although not in a quick succession like the two on Sunday and Monday. Cloudflare's blog also reminds readers that the two cable cuts resulted in little-to-no observable impact Cloudflare attributes this largely to "the significant redundancy and resilience of Internet infrastructure in Europe." (Their Cloudflare Radar graphs show that after the Sweden-Lithuania cable cut "there was no apparent impact to traffic volumes in either country at the time that the cables were damaged.") Telegeography's submarinecablemap.com illustrates, at least in part, the resilience in connectivity enjoyed by these two countries. In addition to the damaged cable, it shows that Lithuania is connected to neighboring Latvia as well as to the Swedish mainland. Over 20 submarine cables land in Sweden, connecting it to multiple countries across Europe. In addition to the submarine resilience, network providers in both countries can take advantage of terrestrial fiber connections to neighboring countries, such as those illustrated in a European network map from Arelion (formerly Telia), which is only one of the large European backbone providers. Less than a day later, the C-Lion1 submarine cable, which connects Helsinki, Finland and Rostock Germany was reportedly damaged during the early morning hours of Monday, November 18... In this situation as well, as the Cloudflare Radar graphs below show, there was no apparent impact to traffic volumes in either country at the time that the cables were damaged... Telegeography's submarinecablemap.com shows that both Finland and Germany also have significant redundancy and resilience from a submarine cable perspective, with over 10 cables landing in Finland, and nearly 10 landing in Germany, including Atlantic Crossing-1 (AC-1), which connects to the United States over two distinct paths. Terrestrial fiber maps from Arelion and eunetworks (as just two examples) show multiple redundant fiber routes within both countries, as well as cross-border routes to other neighboring countries, enabling more resilient Internet connectivity. See also Does the Internet Route Around Damage?

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Slashdot reader jjslash shared this report from TechSpot: The SilverStone FLP01 made quite the impression when it was shared on X for April Fools' Day 2023. Loosely modeled after popular desktops from yesteryear like the NEC PC-9800 series, the chassis features dual 5.25-inch faux floppy bays that could stand to look a bit more realistic. Notably, the covers flip open to reveal access to a more modern (yet still legacy) optical drive and front I/O ports. Modern-looking fan grills can be found on either side of the desktop, serving as yet another hint that the chassis is not as old at it appears on first glance. The grills look to be removable, and probably hold washable dust filters. Like early desktops, the system doubles as a stand for your monitor. The use of a green power LED up front helps round out the retro look; a red LED is used as a storage activity indicator.

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Instead of focusing on chatbots, a new study reveals an automated way to breach LLM-driven robots "with 100 percent success," according to IEEE Spectrum. "By circumventing safety guardrails, researchers could manipulate self-driving systems into colliding with pedestrians and robot dogs into hunting for harmful places to detonate bombs..." [The researchers] have developed RoboPAIR, an algorithm designed to attack any LLM-controlled robot. In experiments with three different robotic systems — the Go2; the wheeled ChatGPT-powered Clearpath Robotics Jackal; and Nvidia's open-source Dolphins LLM self-driving vehicle simulator. They found that RoboPAIR needed just days to achieve a 100 percent jailbreak rate against all three systems... RoboPAIR uses an attacker LLM to feed prompts to a target LLM. The attacker examines the responses from its target and adjusts its prompts until these commands can bypass the target's safety filters. RoboPAIR was equipped with the target robot's application programming interface (API) so that the attacker could format its prompts in a way that its target could execute as code. The scientists also added a "judge" LLM to RoboPAIR to ensure the attacker was generating prompts the target could actually perform given physical limitations, such as specific obstacles in the environment... One finding the scientists found concerning was how jailbroken LLMs often went beyond complying with malicious prompts by actively offering suggestions. For example, when asked to locate weapons, a jailbroken robot described how common objects like desks and chairs could be used to bludgeon people. The researchers stressed that prior to the public release of their work, they shared their findings with the manufacturers of the robots they studied, as well as leading AI companies. They also noted they are not suggesting that researchers stop using LLMs for robotics... "Strong defenses for malicious use-cases can only be designed after first identifying the strongest possible attacks," Robey says. He hopes their work "will lead to robust defenses for robots against jailbreaking attacks." The article includes a reaction from Hakki Sevil, associate professor of intelligent systems and robotics at the University of West Florida. He concludes that the "lack of understanding of context of consequences" among even advanced LLMs "leads to the importance of human oversight in sensitive environments, especially in environments where safety is crucial." But a long-term solution could be LLMs with "situational awareness" that understand broader intent. "Although developing context-aware LLM is challenging, it can be done by extensive, interdisciplinary future research combining AI, ethics, and behavioral modeling..." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader DesertNomad for sharing the article.

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"You can use any Linux distribution inside of the Windows Subsystem for Linux" Microsoft recently reminded Windows users, "even if it is not available in the Microsoft Store, by importing it with a tar file." But being an official distro "makes it easier for Windows Subsystem for Linux users to install and discover it with actions like wsl --list --online and wsl --install," Microsoft pointed out this week. And "We're excited to announce that Red Hat will soon be delivering a Red Hat Enterprise Linux WSL distro image in the coming months..." Thank you to the Red Hat team as their feedback has been invaluable as we built out this new architecture, and we're looking forwards to the release...! Ron Pacheco, senior director, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Ecosystem, Red Hat says: "Developers have their preferred platforms for developing applications for multiple operating systems, and WSL is an important platform for many of them. Red Hat is committed to driving greater choice and flexibility for developers, which is why we're working closely with the Microsoft team to bring Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the largest commercially available open source Linux distribution, to all WSL users." Read Pacheco's own blog post here. But in addition Microsoft is also releasing "a new way to make WSL distros," they announced this week, "with a new architecture that backs how WSL distros are packaged and installed." Up until now, you could make a WSL distro by either creating an appx package and distributing it via the Microsoft Store, or by importing a .tar file with wsl -import. We wanted to improve this by making it possible to create a WSL distro without needing to write Windows code, and for users to more easily install their distros from a file or network share which is common in enterprise scenarios... With the tar based architecture, you can start with the same .tar file (which can be an exported Linux container!) and just edit it to add details to make it a WSL distro... These options will describe key distro attributes, like the name of the distro, its icon in Windows, and its out of box experience (OOBE) which is what happens when you run WSL for the first time. You'll notice that the oobe_command option points to a file which is a Linux executable, meaning you can set up your full experience just in Linux if you wish.

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"The past 15 years were unique in ways that might be a bad predictor of our future," writes the Washington Post, with a surge in the number of internet users since 2010, and everyone spending more time online. But today, "lots of smart people believe that artificial intelligence will upend how you find information. Googling is so yesterday." Sam Altman, the top executive overseeing ChatGPT, has said that AI has a good shot at shoving aside Google search. Bill Gates predicted that emerging AI will do tasks like researching your ideal running shoes and automatically placing an order so you'll "never go to a search site again." In defending itself from a judge's decision that it runs an illegal monopoly, Google says the company might be roadkill as AI and other new technologies change how you find information. (On Wednesday, the U.S. government asked the judge to overhaul Google to undo its monopoly.) But predictions of Google's looming obsolescence have been wrong before, which calls for humility in fortune-telling our collective technology habits. We're devilishly unpredictable.... Maybe it's right to extrapolate from how people are starting to use AI today. Or maybe that's the mistake that Jobs made when he said no one was searching on iPhones. It wasn't wrong in 2010, but it was within a few years. Or what if AI upends how billions of us find information and we still keep on Googling? "The notion that we can predict how these new technologies are going to evolve is silly," said David B. Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor who has spent decades studying the technology industry. Amit Mehta, the judge overseeing the Google monopoly case, formed his own view on AI moving us away from searching Google. "AI may someday fundamentally alter search, but not anytime soon," he said.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from CNET: Meta says it's taken down more than 2 million accounts this year linked to overseas criminal gangs behind scam operations that human rights activists say forced hundreds of thousands of people to work as scammers and cost victims worldwide billions of dollars. In a Thursday blog post, the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp says the pig butchering scam operations — based in Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines — use platforms like Facebook and Instagram; dating, messaging, crypto and other kinds of apps; and texts and emails, to globally target people... [T]he scammers strike up an online relationship with their victims and gain their trust. Then they move their conversations to crypto apps or scam websites and dupe victims into making bogus investments or otherwise handing over their money, Meta said. They'll ask the victims to deposit money, often in the form of cryptocurrency, into accounts, sometimes even letting the victims make small withdrawals, in order to add a veneer of legitimacy. But once the victim starts asking for their investment back, or it becomes clear they don't have any more money to deposit, the scammer disappears and takes the money with them. And the people doing the scamming are often victims themselves. During the COVID-19 pandemic, criminal gangs began building scam centers in Southeast Asia, luring in often unsuspecting job seekers with what looked like amazing postings on local job boards and other platforms, then forcing them to work as scammers, often under the threat of physical harm. The scope of what's become a global problem is staggering. In a report issued in May, the US Institute of Peace estimates that at least 300,000 people are being forced to work, or are otherwise suffering human rights violations, inside these scam centers. The report also estimates global financial losses stemming from the scams at $64 billion in 2023, with the number of financial victims in the millions. Meta says it has focused on investigating and disrupting the scam operations for more than two years, working with nongovernmental organizations and other tech companies, like OpenAI, Coinbase and dating-app operator Match Group, along with law enforcement in both the US and the countries where the centers are located. Meta titled its blog post "Cracking Down On Organized Crime Behind Scam Centers," writing "We hope that sharing our insights will help inform our industry's defenses so we can collectively help protect people from criminal scammers."

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The goal? "Make C++ and Rust interoperability easily accessible and approachable to the widest possible audience." And the Rust Foundation's "Interop Initiative" is specifically focused on the goal of interoperability "within the same executable," through either inline embedding that allows "integrated compilation", or foreign function interfaces. To that end, a statement addressing "the challenges and opportunities in C++ and Rust interoperability" was announced this week by the Rust Foundation. Pointing out that the "Interop Initiative" was launched in February 2024 with a $1M contribution from Google, it now "proposes a collaborative, problem-space approach engaging key stakeholders from both language communities. "Rather than prescribing specific solutions, this problem statement serves as a foundation for community input and participation in shaping both the strategic direction and tactical implementation of improved C++/Rust interoperability." Their official problem statement outlines three "key strategic approaches." - Improve existing tools and address tactical issues to reduce interoperability friction and risk in the short term. - Build consensus around long-term goals requiring changes to Rust itself and develop the tactical approaches to begin pursuing them. - Engage with the C++ community and committee to improve the quality of interoperation for both languages to help realize the mutual goals of safety and performance. And it argues that interoperability "is essential to pursuing safety and performance which is maintainable and scalable." A significant amount of development has gone into libraries to facilitate interoperability with both C and C++, but from the language and compiler level, the situation remains largely unchanged from the early days of Rust. As the desire to integrate Rust into more C++ codebases increases, the value of making C++/Rust interoperability safer, easier, and more efficient is rapidly increasing. While each language takes a different overall approach, both view safety as an essential concern in modern systems. Both Rust and C++ have language- and standard-library-level facilities to improve safety in seemingly compatible ways, but significant benefits are lost when transiting the foreign function interfaces (FFI) boundary using the C ABI... The consequence of this increased cost to interoperate means both C++ and Rust codebases are less able to access valuable code that already exists in the other language, and the ability to transition system components from one language to another is reduced outside of existing C-like interface boundaries. Ultimately, this reduction in freedom leads to worse outcomes for all users since technologists are less free to choose the most effective solutions.

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Dr. Adam Rodman, a Boston-based internal medicine expert, helped design a study testing 50 licensed physicians to see whether ChatGPT improved their diagnoses, reports the New York TImes. The results? "Doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot. "And, to the researchers' surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors." [ChatGPT-4] scored an average of 90 percent when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of 76 percent. Those randomly assigned not to use it had an average score of 74 percent. The study showed more than just the chatbot's superior performance. It unveiled doctors' sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they made, even when a chatbot potentially suggests a better one. And the study illustrated that while doctors are being exposed to the tools of artificial intelligence for their work, few know how to exploit the abilities of chatbots. As a result, they failed to take advantage of A.I. systems' ability to solve complex diagnostic problems and offer explanations for their diagnoses. A.I. systems should be "doctor extenders," Dr. Rodman said, offering valuable second opinions on diagnoses. "The results were similar across subgroups of different training levels and experience with the chatbot," the study concludes. "These results suggest that access alone to LLMs will not improve overall physician diagnostic reasoning in practice. "These findings are particularly relevant now that many health systems offer Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act-compliant chatbots that physicians can use in clinical settings, often with no to minimal training on how to use these tools."

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The Tiobe index tries to track the popularity of programming languages by counting the number of search results for the language's name followed by the word "programming" (on 25 different search engines). And this month there were some surprises... By TIOBE's reckoning, compared to a year ago PHP has now fallen from #7 to #12, while Delphi/Object Pascal shot up five spots from #16 to #11. In that same year, Fortran jumped from #12 to #8 — while both Visual Basic and SQL dropped down a single rank. Toward the top of the list, C actually fell from the #2 spot over the last 12 months to the #4 spot. And Go just reached the #7 rank on the TIOBE's ranking of programming language popularity — "an all time high for Go," according to TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen. In this month's note, he explains what he thinks is unusual about this — starting by saying that Go programs are both fast, and easy in many ways — easy to deploy, easy to learn, and easy to understand. Python for instance is easy to learn but not fast, and deployment for larger Python programs is fragile due to dependencies on all kind of versioned libraries in the environment. If compared to Rust for instance (another contender for a top position), Go is a tiny bit slower, but the Go programs are much easier to understand. The next hurdle for Go in the TIOBE index is JavaScript at position #6. That will be a tough one to pass. JavaScript is ubiquitous in software development, although for larger JavaScript systems we see a shift to TypeScript nowadays. "If annual trends continue this way, Go will bypass JavaScript within 3 years," TIOBE's CEO predicts. (Adding "Let's see what the future has in store for Go...") Although the Go team actually has specific plans for the future, according to a blog post this week celebrating Go's 15th anniversary: We're working on making Go better for AI — and AI better for Go — by enhancing Go's capabilities in AI infrastructure, applications, and developer assistance. Go is a great language for building production systems, and we want it to be a great language for building production AI systems, too... For AI applications, we will continue building out first-class support for Go in popular AI SDKs, including LangChainGo and Genkit. And from its very beginning, Go aimed to improve the end-to-end software engineering process, so naturally we're looking at bringing the latest tools and techniques from AI to bear on reducing developer toil, leaving more time for the fun stuff — like actually programming! TIOBE's top 10 programming language rankings for the month of November: Python C++ Java C C# JavaScript Go Fortran Visual Basic SQL

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