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  1. Comment on Curious George shows us the stars in ~space

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    One of my family's favorite children's book characters is Curious George, the friendly little monkey invented by husband-and-wife team H.A. and Margret Rey. We all know George's famous curiosity--but did you know that H.A. Rey is also the author of a groundbreaking book on astronomy?

    [...]

    Rey's 1952 astronomy guide, The Stars: A New Way to See Them, revolutionized amateur astronomy by depicting the constellations in easy-to-understand diagrams. Before, most star charts and astronomy manuals were stuffed with complex data like Greek symbols and the alphanumeric codes that scientists use for official star names. This kind of information is meaningful mostly to specialists, and no help for beginning stargazers just trying to find shapes in the sky. Rey, however, along with his wife ran a successful advertising business, so he was adept at making visual information intuitive and memorable. Redrawing existing star charts for accessibility, Rey devised new ways to find and identify the constellations. Gemini, for example, sometimes looks in older astronomy manuals more like a horseshoe than the "twins" for which it's named, if you just connect the dots between the main stars. But Rey's new Gemini diagram includes additional stars to flesh out arms, legs and torsos, so that the horseshoe becomes recognizable as two human figures, holding hands.

    [...]

    In 1954 Rey also adapted his star charts for Find the Constellations, an astronomy guide specifically targeted for children, but if you know Curious George it's easy to see his similarities with Rey's book about stars. Both start with wonder, and use simple scenes to share discovery. They also both were born from adventure. H.A. Rey grew up in Hamburg and learned to read the stars while serving in the first World War. He and Margret fell in love in Rio, where they kept two monkeys as pets, and the couple started writing Curious George when their Parisian honeymoon stretched into a four-year stay.

  3. Comment on Two Amazon Web Services Middle East availability zones down after datacentre fires in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Two of Amazon’s three AWS Middle East cloud availability zones remain disrupted after a fire at a datacentre in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Sunday.

    [...]

    On its health status dashboard, Amazon says a facility in one zone was “impacted by objects that struck the datacentre, creating sparks and fire” at around 4:30 am PST (12.30 pm GMT) on Sunday. Later it said that two availability zones had been affected by power outages.

    [...]

    The company continues: “We strongly advise customers to update their applications to ingest S3 data to an alternate AWS Region. As soon as practically possible, we will begin the restoration of our two availability zones which will include a careful assessment of data health and any repair of storage if necessary.”

    [...]

    Amazon says it working to route requests away from the affected availability zones, recommending customers use alternative zones or AWS regions while it seeks to restore power.

    [...]

    Amazon does not mention the underlying cause of the fire, but it coincides with an attack on Iran by the US and Israel and retaliatory missile and drone barrages by Iran against their allies, including UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Lebanon, Kuwait, Iraq and Jordan.

    4 votes

  5. Comment on Gas prices soar as QatarEnergy halts LNG production after Iran attacks in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Israel killed thr leadership of their historic enemy. That's kinda what they do. (Previous examples: Hamas and Hezbollah.) They seem to think it works for them. Maybe they they hope the new...

    Israel killed thr leadership of their historic enemy. That's kinda what they do. (Previous examples: Hamas and Hezbollah.) They seem to think it works for them. Maybe they they hope the new government won't fund proxy wars so much.

    6 votes

  6. Comment on Gas prices soar as QatarEnergy halts LNG production after Iran attacks in ~finance

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I wouldn't focus too much on any one reason. Another reason is that Iran is the enemy of Israel and Saudi Arabia and they reportedly talked Trump into it. And Iran has been an enemy of the US for...

    I wouldn't focus too much on any one reason. Another reason is that Iran is the enemy of Israel and Saudi Arabia and they reportedly talked Trump into it. And Iran has been an enemy of the US for a long time, too. (For example, W. Bush famously made a speech about the "axis of evil.")

    High gas prices aren't in the Republicans’ favor. But maybe Trump doesn't care about that.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on Banks are becoming bulwarks for vulnerable American seniors in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Because victims’ sense of shame often leaves them reluctant to report such crimes, the extent of elder financial exploitation is hard to calculate. The Federal Trade Commission put reported losses at $2.4 billion in 2024, largely driven by investment and romance scams and impersonations, with total losses much higher.

    Americans over 60 lose more than $28 billion annually to financial exploitation, AARP estimated in 2023.

    As those numbers rise, because the population is aging and predators are growing increasingly resourceful, banks and investment firms are becoming the first line of defense.

    [...]

    Until recent years, financial institutions placed “more of an emphasis on the autonomy of the client,” said Pamela Teaster, director of the Virginia Tech Center for Gerontology and an elder abuse researcher. Their approach was, “an adult has the capacity to make poor choices, and we’re going to let them make them,” she added.

    But changes in government and industry policies and practices have encouraged greater vigilance. Congress passed the Senior Safe Act in 2018, protecting banks and financial firms from liability if they reported suspected exploitation to authorities.

    That year the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority began requiring member firms to ask for a trusted contact person when investors open or update accounts. (The account holder isn’t obliged to provide one, however.) And since 2022, it has allowed firms to place holds on older investors’ transactions if they suspected exploitation was involved.

    About half of states have enacted laws that permit financial institutions to deny suspicious transactions or impose holds for specified periods to allow investigations, said Jilenne Gunther, the director of BankSafe.

    [...]

    Dr. Teaster’s analysis of data from BankSafe, during a six-month pilot in 82 financial institutions, found that participants were much more likely to report suspected cases and save customers money than a control group was.

    [...]

    A 2024 study by the New York Federal Reserve, for instance, found an increased probability of delinquent payments and deteriorating credit ratings in the five years before a dementia diagnosis. Those errors can reduce seniors’ access to credit and raise their interest rates on loans at the very point when caregiving expenses are likely to soar.

    [...]

    Several related bills with bipartisan support are also working their way through Congress. The National Strategy for Combating Scams Act would require the F.B.I. to take the lead in coordinating efforts to protect seniors. A bill that restores an I.R.S. deduction would at least provide the consolation of excusing scam victims from paying taxes on money they no longer have.

    12 votes

  10. Comment on Inside Anthropic’s killer-robot dispute with the US Pentagon (gifted link) in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    According to a source familiar with the negotiations, on Friday morning, Anthropic received word that Hegseth’s team would make a major concession. The Pentagon had kept trying to leave itself little escape hatches in the agreements that it proposed to Anthropic. It would pledge not to use Anthropic’s AI for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous killing machines, but then qualify those pledges with loophole-y phrases like as appropriate—suggesting that the terms were subject to change, based on the administration’s interpretation of a given situation.

    [...]

    Anthropic’s team was relieved to hear that the government would be willing to remove those words, but one big problem remained: On Friday afternoon, Anthropic learned that the Pentagon still wanted to use the company’s AI to analyze bulk data collected from Americans. That could include information such as the questions you ask your favorite chatbot, your Google search history, your GPS-tracked movements, and your credit-card transactions, all of which could be cross-referenced with other details about your life. Anthropic’s leadership told Hegseth’s team that was a bridge too far, and the deal fell apart. Soon after, Hegseth directed the U.S. military’s contractors, suppliers, and partners to stop doing business with Anthropic. The list of companies that contract with the military is extensive, and includes Amazon, the company that supplies much of Anthropic’s computing infrastructure. The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Anthropic referred me to the company’s statement addressing Hegseth’s remarks.

    [...]

    According to my source, at one point during the negotiation, it was suggested that this impasse over autonomous weapons could be resolved if the Pentagon would simply promise to keep the company’s AI in the cloud, and out of the weapons themselves. The argument was that the models could be kept outside so-called edge systems, be they drones or other kinds of autonomous weapons. They might synthesize intelligence before an operation, but they wouldn’t actually be making kill decisions. The AI’s hands would be clean of any deadly errors that the drones made.

    But Anthropic wasn’t satisfied by this solution. The company reasoned that in modern military AI architectures, the distinction between the cloud and the edge is no longer all that defined. It’s less a wall and more of a gradient. Drones on the battlefield can now be orchestrated through mesh networks that include cloud data centers. And although they’re designed to survive on their own, the military’s impulse will always be to maintain as much connectivity between them and the most powerful models in the cloud; the better the connection, the more intelligent the machine.

    13 votes

  12. Comment on Google’s AI overviews can scam you. Here’s how to stay safe. in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I did see a news story about this: SF retiree loses $500K life savings to pig butcher scam despite warnings from family, friends I'm puzzled by how people can be taken in by obvious scams, but...

    I did see a news story about this:

    SF retiree loses $500K life savings to pig butcher scam despite warnings from family, friends

    I'm puzzled by how people can be taken in by obvious scams, but apparently it's a thing that happens. Still, we should be on the side of the victims, not the scammers. Even when the victims seem to have a screw loose, they don't deserve it.

    2 votes

  13. Comment on Microsoft is the carbon removal market in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    Microsoft is keeping the still-nascent carbon removal market afloat.

    The tech giant purchased 93% of all the carbon removal credits globally last year, according to new research by BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. The data, part of the organizations’ annual Sustainable Energy in America Factbook, marked the first time the groups tracked market demand for carbon removal.

    Microsoft’s near monopoly over the sector reflects its goal of removing all the carbon emissions that the company produced since its founding by Bill Gates in 1975. After making the pledge in 2020, Microsoft defined what it considered to be “high quality” CDR and struck long-term deals with startups like Climeworks and Heirloom, which each take distinct approaches to direct air capture.

    For now, the industry needs an anchor buyer like Microsoft that’s willing to pay high prices for every ton of carbon removed from the atmosphere. That funding, combined with long-term offtake agreements, is helping companies scale up their operations in order to eventually drive down prices.

    However, having one buyer dominate the market isn’t a sustainable strategy long-term, and industry advocates argue that governments need to procure CDR on a larger scale for the economics to work.

    [...]

    Microsoft in 2025 updated its criteria for high-quality CDR, specifying that they must be “additional,” meaning that the removal wouldn’t have happened if not for the purchase of the credits. The update also added that ideally they would store carbon for more than 1,000 years for “high durability.”

    5 votes

  15. Comment on Google’s AI overviews can scam you. Here’s how to stay safe. in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    It still seems like you're hoping that somehow the overconfident people you have little sympathy for will get scammed, instead of people you like? Occasionally it might happen, but as a general...

    It still seems like you're hoping that somehow the overconfident people you have little sympathy for will get scammed, instead of people you like? Occasionally it might happen, but as a general rule, the world doesn't work that way. Scammers don't care about that. They go after whoever happens to be vulnerable.

    Justice doesn't happen as a side effect of criminals doing crime. It won't happen unless people build the systems to make it happen.

    3 votes

  16. Comment on Google quantum-proofs HTTPS by squeezing 15kB of data into 700-byte space in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Google on Friday unveiled its plan for its Chrome browser to secure HTTPS certificates against quantum computer attacks without breaking the Internet.

    The objective is a tall order. The quantum-resistant cryptographic data needed to transparently publish TLS certificates is roughly 40 times bigger than the classical cryptographic material used today. A typical X.509 certificate chain used today comprises six elliptic curve signatures and two EC public keys, each of them only 64 bytes. This material can be cracked through the quantum-enabled Shor’s algorithm. The full chain is roughly 4 kilobytes. All this data must be transmitted when a browser connects to a site.

    [...]

    “The bigger you make the certificate, the slower the handshake and the more people you leave behind,” said Bas Westerbaan, principal research engineer at Cloudflare, which is partnering with Google on the transition. “Our problem is we don’t want to leave people behind in this transition.” Speaking to Ars, he said that people will likely disable the new encryption if it slows their browsing. He added that the massive size increase can also degrade “middle boxes,” which sit between browsers and the final site.

    [...]

    Merkle Tree Certificates, “replace the heavy, serialized chain of signatures found in traditional PKI with compact Merkle Tree proofs,” members of Google’s Chrome Secure Web and Networking Team wrote Friday. “In this model, a Certification Authority (CA) signs a single ‘Tree Head’ representing potentially millions of certificates, and the ‘certificate’ sent to the browser is merely a lightweight proof of inclusion in that tree.”

    [...]

    The new system has already been implemented in Chrome. For the time being, Cloudflare is enrolling roughly 1,000 TLS certificates to test how well the MTCs work. For now, Cloudflare is generating the distributed ledger. The plan is for CAs to eventually fill that role. The Internet Engineering Task Force standards body has recently formed a working group called the PKI, Logs, And Tree Signatures, which is coordinating with other key players to develop a long-term solution.

    9 votes

  18. Comment on Google’s AI overviews can scam you. Here’s how to stay safe. in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I'm in favor of educating people about risks too. The Internet is not safe. But it seems like you've gone past that to blaming the victim for making an understandable mistake. Learning things the...

    I'm in favor of educating people about risks too. The Internet is not safe. But it seems like you've gone past that to blaming the victim for making an understandable mistake. Learning things the hard way is not justice.

    10 votes

  19. Comment on Google’s AI overviews can scam you. Here’s how to stay safe. in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    https://archive.is/21iHN From the article: [...] [...]

    https://archive.is/21iHN

    From the article:

    Both The Washington Post and Digital Trends have spotted instances of scam support numbers showing up in Google AI Overviews, reports of which appeared on Facebook and Reddit respectively. Credit unions and banks are also warning their customers about these scams.

    [...]

    It doesn't seem to be a completely new problem, but the way Google Search works now, it's been given a new twist.

    Here's what happens: The unfortunate victim Googles a company name looking for a contact number, then calls the number thrown up by AI. This doesn't actually lead to the company in question, but rather to someone pretending to be that company, who then tries to take payment information or other sensitive details from the caller.

    It's not clear exactly how these fake numbers are being planted, but the best guess is that they're being published in multiple low-profile places online, alongside the names of major companies. AI Overviews then comes along and scoops them up, without running the proper checks to verify the information.

    [...]

    Google says it's actively fighting these scammers and that it’s continuing to roll out updates that make its spam-detection systems stronger. “Our anti-spam protections are highly effective at keeping scams out of AI Overviews and showing official customer support numbers where possible,” the company said in a statement to WIRED.

    Of course, it's not just happening on Google Search. Security researchers have shown how malicious text can be hidden in emails—and presumably documents as well—which is then scraped and summarized by the AI, and served up to the user who takes it as accurate and authentic. The issue is also showing up in other AI search engines.

    8 votes