Technology

Scientists have created a blazing-fast scientific camera that shoots images at an encoding rate of 156.3 terahertz (THz) to individual pixels — equivalent to 156.3 trillion frames per second. Dubbed SCARF (swept-coded aperture real-time femtophotography), the research-grade camera could lead to breakthroughs in fields studying micro-events that come and go too quickly for today’s most expensive scientific sensors.

SCARF has successfully captured ultrafast events like absorption in a semiconductor and the demagnetization of a metal alloy. The research could open new frontiers in areas as diverse as shock wave mechanics or developing more effective medicine.

Thus, Project Ghostbusters was born. It’s Meta’s in-house wiretapping tool to spy on data analytics from Snapchat starting in 2016, later used on YouTube and Amazon. This involved creating “kits” that can be installed on iOS and Android devices, to intercept traffic for certain apps, according to the filings. This was described as a “man-in-the-middle” approach to get data on Facebook’s rivals, but users of Onavo were the “men in the middle.”

In the study, the UC Berkeley researchers used a video game called Overcooked, where two chefs divvy up tasks to prepare and serve meals, in this case soup, which earns them points. It’s a 2-D world, seen from above, filled with onions, tomatoes, dishes and a stove with pots. At each time step, each virtual chef can stand still, interact with whatever is in front of it, or move up, down, left or right.

The researchers first collected data from pairs of people playing the game. Then they trained AIs using offline RL or one of three other methods for comparison. (In all methods, the AIs were built on a neural network, a software architecture intended to roughly mimic how the brain works.) In one method, the AI just imitated the humans. In another, it imitated the best human performances. The third method ignored the human data and had AIs practice with each other. And the fourth was the offline RL, in which AI does more than just imitate; it pieces together the best bits of what it sees, allowing it to perform better than the behavior it observes. It uses a kind of counterfactual reasoning, where it predicts what score it would have gotten if it had followed different paths in certain situations, then adapts.

X owner Elon Musk blamed the watchdog group for an exodus of advertisers.

Today, the Commission has opened non-compliance investigations under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) into Alphabet's rules on steering in Google Play and self-preferencing on Google Search, Apple's rules on steering in the App Store and the choice screen for Safari and Meta's “pay or consent model”.

The Commission suspects that the measures put in place by these gatekeepers fall short of effective compliance of their obligations under the DMA.

In addition, the Commission has launched investigatory steps relating to Apple's new fee structure for alternative app stores and Amazon's ranking practices on its marketplace. Finally, the Commission has ordered gatekeepers to retain certain documents to monitor the effective implementation and compliance with their obligations.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/27670808

RocketStar Announces Successful Demonstration of Fusion-Enhanced Pulsed Plasma Electric Propulsion

The foundational tenet of "the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:

Call it "Apple exceptionalism" – the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple's sins are made manifest.

Take the claim that Apple is "privacy respecting," which is attributed to Apple's business model of financing its services though cash transactions, rather than by selling it customers to advertisers. This is the (widely misunderstood) crux of the "surveillance capitalism" hypothesis: that capitalism is just fine, but once surveillance is in the mix, capitalism fails.

Now Windows' only built-in text editor, there's more room for Notepad to grow.

The lawsuit caps years of regulatory scrutiny of Apple’s wildly popular suite of devices and services, which have fueled its growth into a nearly $3 trillion public company.

It turns out that the “Internet of Things” is full of automated snoops and spies. Data collection, now integrated into new car designs, is more pervasive than ever and is ushering in a brave new world of surveillance and corporate collusion.

X has locked and suspended the accounts of journalists and researchers who shared the alleged identity of a neo-Nazi cartoonist known as Stonetoss after the cartoonist appealed to site owner Elon Musk.

The incident, critics say, highlights once again how Musk has not only welcomed extremists onto his platform but has repeatedly boosted their conspiracies, engaged with their accounts, and seems to have protected them from scrutiny.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13412490

Alibaba's research arm promises server-class RISC-V processor due this year