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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 50 US lawmakers are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to join dozens of other countries in banning a widely used weedkiller linked to Parkinson's disease and other health dangers. In a October 31 letter (PDF) to the agency, seven US senators said that paraquat, a weedkiller commonly applied on US farms, was a "highly toxic pesticide whose continued use cannot be justified given its harms to farmworkers and rural communities". The call for a ban from the senators came after 47 members of the US House of Representatives sent a similar letter (PDF) to the EPA calling for a ban earlier in October. The lawmakers cite scientific links between paraquat use and development of Parkinson's and other "life threatening diseases" as well as "grave impacts on the environment". "Health risks include a higher risk of Parkinson's disease, with some studies finding a 64% increase in the likelihood of developing Parkinson's, non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, thyroid cancer, and other thyroid issues," they wrote. The New Jersey senator Cory Booker, organizer of the Senate letter, said the risks of paraquat exposure were "well documented" and that it was "irresponsible" for the EPA to continue to allow its use. "I hope the EPA will follow the science and ban paraquat," Booker said. The EPA has long maintained that there is no "clear link" between paraquat exposure and Parkinson's disease, though the agency does have a number of restrictions on use of the chemical due to its acute toxicity. The agency issued a draft report earlier this year affirming its position. Still, the agency said at that time that it would be reviewing more scientific studies and would issue a final report by January 17, 2025.

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Starlink has launched home Internet service to 99.5% of residents in the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) after a multi-year collaboration with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory to minimize interference with radio telescopes. "The vast majority of people within the areas of Virginia and West Virginia collectively known as the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) can now receive high speed satellite Internet service," the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Green Bank Observatory announced said. "The newly available service is the result of a nearly three-year collaborative engineering effort between the US National Science Foundation (NSF), SpaceX, and the NSF National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO), which operates the NSF Green Bank Observatory (NSF GBO) in West Virginia within the NRQZ." Ars Technica reports: There's a controversy over the 0.5 percent of residents who aren't included and are said to be newly blocked from using the Starlink Roam service. Starlink markets Roam as a service for people to use while traveling, not as a fixed home Internet service. The Pendleton County Office of Emergency Management last week issued a press release (PDF) saying that "customers with the RV/Roam packages had been using Starlink for approximately two years throughout 100% of the NRQZ. Now, the 0.5% have lost coverage after having it for two years. This means that a large section of southeastern Pendleton County and an even larger section of northern Pocahontas will NOT be able to utilize Starlink." PCMag wrote that "Starlink is now live in 42 of the 46 cell areas around the Green Bank Observatory's telescopes." Pendleton County Emergency Services Coordinator Rick Gillespie told Ars today that Roam coverage was cut off in the remaining four cell areas. "After the agreement, we all lost effective use within the four cells," Gillespie told Ars in an email. Gillespie's press release said that, "in many cases, Starlink was the only Internet provider option residents and emergency responders had. This is unacceptable."

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Jay Newman, who made billions for Elliott Management pursuing Argentina's defaulted debt, wrote a 2022 thriller about corrupt spies and hedge funds. Now federal prosecutors are examining parallels between his novel "Undermoney" and real-world events. The investigation centers on Amit Forlit, an Israeli private investigator facing U.S. extradition charges for alleged email theft from Argentine officials during Elliott's sovereign debt battle. Prosecutors are probing whether Forlit's alleged $20 million hacking operation aided Elliott's eventual $2.2 billion settlement with Argentina. "There's not that much fiction in 'Undermoney,'" Newman told interviewers while promoting the book, which features Israeli operatives and hedge fund intrigue. Newman and Elliott deny any wrongdoing, with Newman calling suggestions of illegal activity "categorically false." The probe is examining $20 million paid to a Forlit-controlled company via a consulting firm that worked for Elliott, according to court statements and people familiar with the matter. Forlit denied involvement in hacking during a 2022 deposition. Prosecutors are also investigating Forlit's work for ExxonMobil regarding climate change critics. Neither Elliott nor ExxonMobil has been accused of wrongdoing. Newman, who left Elliott in 2016 with a $70 million bonus after the Argentina settlement, met regularly with Forlit to discuss the Argentine case, WSJ has reported. His novel follows dark money trails through Washington power corridors and Wall Street trading floors, featuring Israeli operatives described as "expensive, but consistent."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A new global inventory has catalogued air pollution from space activities from 2020 to 2022. The inventory includes time, position and pollution from 446 launchers as they ascended and the tracks of re-entries as objects are heated to extreme temperatures and break up or burn up in the upper atmosphere. It catalogues the pollution from 63,000 tons of rocket propellants used in 2022 and from 3,622 objects, including rocket parts and satellites, that re-entered the atmosphere between 2020 and 2023, amounting to about 12,000 tons. [...] Types of launch pollutants depend on the propellent but can include particles of soot and aluminum oxides as well as nitrogen oxides, chlorine and water vapour and carbon dioxide. Extreme heat on re-entry causes atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen to combine to form more nitrogen oxides and also produces tiny metal-oxide particles as the objects break and burn up. Soot emitted high in the atmosphere can persist for several years, with a resulting climate warming impact that is up to 500 times greater than the same amount of soot from aviation or ground-level sources. Aluminum oxide particles, nitrogen oxides and chloride can consume the ozone in the stratosphere that protects us from the sun's ultraviolet radiation. These can remain in the atmosphere for decades. Dr Connor Barker, of the UCL team, said: "Many rocket manufacturers and space agencies keep this information tightly controlled. We had to be creative about the different sources we consulted, from launch live streams on YouTube to online databases maintained by space enthusiasts in their spare time."

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Identity management firm Okta said Friday it has patched a critical authentication bypass vulnerability that affected customers using usernames longer than 52 characters in its AD/LDAP delegated authentication service. The flaw, introduced on July 23 and fixed October 30, allowed attackers to authenticate using only a username if they had access to a previously cached key. The bug stemmed from Okta's use of the Bcrypt algorithm to generate cache keys from combined user credentials. The company switched to PBKDF2 to resolve the issue and urged affected customers to audit system logs.

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California signed an agreement with major airlines to increase the use of sustainable aviation fuels, aiming to reach 200 million gallons by 2035 or about 40% of the state's air travel demand. The Hill reports: The California Air Resources Board (CARB) and Airlines for America (A4A) -- an industry trade group representing almost a dozen airlines -- pledged to increase the availability of sustainable aviation fuels statewide. Sustainable aviation fuels -- lower-carbon alternatives to petroleum-based jet fuels -- are typically made from nonpetroleum feedstocks, such as biomass or waste. At a San Francisco International Airport ceremony Wednesday, the partners committed (PDF) to using 200 million gallons of such fuels by 2035 -- an amount estimated to meet about 40 percent of travel demand within the state at that point, according to CARB. That quantity also represents a more than tenfold increase from current usage levels of these fuels, the agency added. Among A4A member airlines are Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Atlas Air Worldwide, Delta Air Lines, FedEx, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and UPS, while Air Canada is an associate member. To achieve the 2035 goals, CARB and A4A said they plan to work together to identify, assess and prioritize necessary policy measures, such as incentivizing relevant investments and streamlining the permitting processes. A Sustainable Aviation Fuel Working Group, which will include government and industry stakeholders, will meet annually to both discuss progress and address barriers toward meeting these goals, the partners added. A public website will display updated information about the availability and use of conventional and sustainable fuels across California, while also providing details about state policies, according to the agreement.

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Waymo is advancing autonomous driving with a new training model for its robotaxis built on Google's multimodal large language model (MLLM) Gemini. The Verge reports: Waymo released a new research paper today that introduces an "End-to-End Multimodal Model for Autonomous Driving," also known as EMMA. This new end-to-end training model processes sensor data to generate "future trajectories for autonomous vehicles," helping Waymo's driverless vehicles make decisions about where to go and how to avoid obstacles. But more importantly, this is one of the first indications that the leader in autonomous driving has designs to use MLLMs in its operations. And it's a sign that these LLMs could break free of their current use as chatbots, email organizers, and image generators and find application in an entirely new environment on the road. In its research paper, Waymo is proposing "to develop an autonomous driving system in which the MLLM is a first class citizen." The paper outlines how, historically, autonomous driving systems have developed specific "modules" for the various functions, including perception, mapping, prediction, and planning. This approach has proven useful for many years but has problems scaling "due to the accumulated errors among modules and limited inter-module communication." Moreover, these modules could struggle to respond to "novel environments" because, by nature, they are "pre-defined," which can make it hard to adapt. Waymo says that MLLMs like Gemini present an interesting solution to some of these challenges for two reasons: the chat is a "generalist" trained on vast sets of scraped data from the internet "that provide rich 'world knowledge' beyond what is contained in common driving logs"; and they demonstrate "superior" reasoning capabilities through techniques like "chain-of-thought reasoning," which mimics human reasoning by breaking down complex tasks into a series of logical steps. Waymo developed EMMA as a tool to help its robotaxis navigate complex environments. The company identified several situations in which the model helped its driverless cars find the right route, including encountering various animals or construction in the road. [...] But EMMA also has its limitations, and Waymo acknowledges that there will need to be future research before the model is put into practice. For example, EMMA couldn't incorporate 3D sensor inputs from lidar or radar, which Waymo said was "computationally expensive." And it could only process a small amount of image frames at a time. There are also risks to using MLLMs to train robotaxis that go unmentioned in the research paper. Chatbots like Gemini often hallucinate or fail at simple tasks like reading clocks or counting objects.

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The feds have indicted Aleksei Andriunin, a 26-year-old Russian national and founder of Gotbit, on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation. Crypto News reports: According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, the indictment alleges that Andriunin and his firm participated in a long-running scheme to artificially boost trading volumes for various cryptocurrency companies, including some based in the United States, to make them appear more popular and increase their trading value. Andriunin allegedly led these activities between 2018 and 2024 as Gotbit's CEO. He could face up to 20 years in prison, additional fines, and asset forfeiture if convicted, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Prosecutors say the scheme involved "wash trading," where the firm used its software to make fake trades that inflated a cryptocurrency's trading volume. This practice, called market manipulation, can mislead investors by giving the impression that demand for a particular cryptocurrency is higher than it actually is. Wash trades are illegal in traditional finance and are considered fraudulent because they deceive investors and manipulate market behavior. Court documents also identify Gotbit's two directors, Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili, as co-conspirators. The indictment claims Gotbit documented these activities in detailed records, tracking differences between genuine and artificial trading volumes. The firm allegedly pitched these services to prospective clients, explaining how Gotbit's tactics would bypass detection on public blockchains, where transactions are recorded transparently. The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that it seized over $25 million worth of cryptocurrency assets connected to these schemes and made four arrests across multiple firms. If you've been following the crypto industry, you're probably familiar with "pump-and-dump" schemes that have popped up throughout the years. Although it's a form of market manipulation, it's not quite the same as "wash trading." In a pump-and-dump scheme, the perpetrator artificially inflates the price of a security (often a low-priced or thinly traded stock) by spreading misleading or exaggerated information to attract other buyers, who then drive up the price. Once the price has risen due to increased demand, the manipulators "dump" their shares at the inflated price, selling to the new buyers and pocketing the profits. The price typically crashes after the dump, leaving unsuspecting investors with overvalued shares and significant losses. Wash trading, on the other hand, involves simultaneously buying and selling of the same asset to create the illusion of higher trading volume and activity. The purpose is to mislead other investors about the asset's liquidity and demand, often giving the impression that it is more popular or actively traded than it actually is. Wash trades usually occur without real changes in ownership or price movement, as the buyer and seller may even be the same person or entity. This tactic can manipulate prices indirectly by creating a perception of interest, but it does not involve a direct inflation followed by a sell-off, like a pump-and-dump scheme.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Royal Navy: The Royal Navy has successfully demonstrated the capabilities of ground-breaking cold atom technology. P2000 vessel HMS Pursuer hosted the trial, which unlocks new possibilities in areas such as covert monitoring, which require precise signals for accurate positioning, navigation and timing. The Office of the Chief of Technology Officer (OCTO) for the RN worked with UK quantum technology company Aquark Technologies. The trial involved the company's miniature cold atom systems, founded on Aquark's unique laser-cooling method, known as supemolasses. This method to generate cold atoms does not need an applied magnetic field, therefore reducing the size, weight, power consumption and cost of sensors. A cold atom is an atom that has been laser-cooled to extremely low temperatures, typically near absolute zero (-273.15C). At these temperatures, the thermal motion of atoms is very slow, allowing their quantum mechanical properties to be precisely controlled. Quantum Sensing is an advanced sensor technology that detects changes in motion, and electric and magnetic fields, by collecting data at the atomic level. Commander Matthew Steele, who heads up Future Technology for OCTO, said: "Quantum technologies being developed in the UK will offer an alternative Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) capability necessary to operate effectively in GPS denied or degraded environments." "Over the next three years, the Navy seeks to accelerate the development of quantum technologies -- such as Aquarks -- through funding and sea trials, to secure the Royal Navy an opportunity to invest in a non-GPS-based PNT capability and to maintain its global operating advantage."

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Disney's recently formed Office of Technology Enablement will coordinate the company's exploration, adoption and use of artificial intelligence, AR and VR tech. Engadget reports: It has tapped Jamie Voris, previously the CTO of its Studios Technology division, to oversee the effort. Before joining Disney in 2010, Voris was the chief technology officer at the National Football League. More recently, he led the development of the company's Apple Vision Pro app. Voris will report to Alan Bergman, the co-chairman of Disney Entertainment. Reuters reports the company eventually plans to grow the group to about 100 employees. "The pace and scope of advances in AI and XR are profound and will continue to impact consumer experiences, creative endeavors, and our business for years to come -- making it critical that Disney explore the exciting opportunities and navigate the potential risks," Bergman wrote in an email Disney shared with Engadget. "The creation of this new group underscores our dedication to doing that and to being a positive force in shaping responsible use and best practices." A Disney spokesperson told Engadget the Office of Technology Enablement won't take over any existing AI and XR projects at the company. Instead, it will support Disney's other teams, many of which are already working on products that involve those technologies, to ensure their work fits into the company's broader strategic goals. "It is about bringing added focus, alignment, and velocity to those efforts, and about reinforcing our commitment being a positive force in shaping responsible use and best practices," the spokesperson said.

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The Biden administration is investing $825 million in a new semiconductor research and development facility in Albany, New York. Reuters reports: The New York facility will be expected to drive innovation in EUV technology, a complex process necessary to make semiconductors, the U.S. Department of Commerce and Natcast, operator of the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NTSC) said. The launch of the facility "represents a key milestone in ensuring the United States remains a global leader in innovation and semiconductor research and development," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said. From the U.S. Department of Commerce press release: EUV Lithography is essential for manufacturing smaller, faster, and more efficient microchips. As the semiconductor industry pushes the limits of Moore's Law, EUV lithography has emerged as a critical technology to enable the high-volume production of transistors beyond 7nm, previously unattainable. As the NSTC develops capabilities and programs, access to EUV lithography R&D is essential to meet its three primary goals 1) extend U.S. technology leadership, 2) reduce the time and cost to prototype, and 3) build and sustain a semiconductor workforce ecosystem.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The trend of big touchscreens in cars has left many yearning for the not-so-distant days when most user interactions happened with physical buttons. But Rivian's chief software officer Wassym Bensaid believes using buttons in a car is an "anomaly." "It's a bug. It's not a feature," Bensaid said Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. "Ideally, you would want to interact with your car through voice. The problem today is that most voice assistants are just broken." To that end, Bensaid said that "every week" he's driving around an engineering vehicle that has an AI-powered voice assistant, though he did not specify which one. He mentioned earlier in his interview with TechCrunch's transportation editor Kirsten Korosec that Rivian has "partnerships that I cannot yet talk about." "I think the car is actually a fantastic environment for AI," he said, while noting that latency and hallucinations are still very big problems that need to be solved. "The final north star I have is having voice [controls] become the primary means of interaction with the vehicle. The reality is that the vehicle is so feature-rich, that even if we do a fantastic job in the UI, there will always be prioritization that we need to do in terms of having things one or two menus behind," Bensaid told TechCrunch after he got off stage. Bensaid also said he's a big believer in the ability of AI-powered voice controls to handle complex requests. For instance, he said if a driver says "I'm hungry" the in-car assistant should be able to quickly direct them to a nearby restaurant that they might prefer. Bensaid said the company is committed to creating a unique, integrated user experienced tailored for Rivian owners -- one that won't include CarPlay. CarPlay "takes over all the pixels in the screen, and it's a replacement of the entire experience, and we truly believe that with the technology capabilities that we have, we can offer a much more refined, integrated experience," he said.

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An enormous fine levied by a Russian court on Google caught the attention of the Kremlin -- which hopes Google will notice in turn. From a report: President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, commented on the sum on Thursday. It came after a court demanded payment equivalent of $20.6 decillion -- an almost incomprehensible figure that exceeds the world's GDP. The sum came from a penalty for suspending the YouTube accounts of various Russian outlets. It has been regularly doubling for years, with no limit, leading it into realms of the absurd, which Peskov seemed to acknowledge. "Although it is a specific amount, I cannot even pronounce this number, it is rather filled with symbolism," said Peskov in response to a question from NBC News.

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Intel is rolling back one of the biggest changes to its laptop chips in years. The Verge: Remember how this fall's Lunar Lake laptops ditched the idea of memory sticks, putting a fixed amount of RAM on the processor package instead? Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger now says that turned out to be a financial mistake, and Intel won't do it again. Oh, and he may be axing desktop GPUs, too. Future Intel generations of chips, including Panther Lake and Nova Lake, won't have baked-on memory. "It's not a good way to run the business, so it really is for us a one-off with Lunar Lake," said Gelsinger on Intel's Q3 2024 earnings call, as spotted by VideoCardz.

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Corporate resistance to AI tools is costing employees six hours per week in manual tasks that could be automated, according to research by recruitment firm SThree. Sixty-three percent of workers blame management's "digital illiteracy" for slow AI adoption, despite major companies rushing to tout AI initiatives since ChatGPT's launch. A 2023 tech.io study found two-thirds of business leaders barely use AI tools due to limited understanding.

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Apple is taking a 20 percent stake in its iPhone satellite connectivity partner GlobalStar -- a stake worth $400 million -- as part of an expansion of its deal with the company. From a report: GlobalStar will also receive a prepayment of $1.1 billion from Apple that is intended to improve satellite infrastructure. Apple relies on GlobalStar's satellites to enable to send emergency text messages, iMessage reactions, and more through the skies in areas with no cell signal. GlobalStar disclosed the details of the deal expansion in an SEC filing, which includes "a new satellite constellation, expanded ground infrastructure, and increased global [mobile satellite services] licensing."

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Members of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board sat down for a 45-minute "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) session at All Things Open in Raleigh, NC on October 29. Though the floor was open to any topic the audience might want to ask of the OSI board. Many of the questions were focused on the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID), which was announced the day before. The new definition has been somewhat controversial, and the board spent a lot of time addressing concerns about it during the session, as well as questions on open washing, and a need for more education about open source in general.

Three months ago, Wall Street punished the world's largest technology firms for spending enormous amounts to develop artificial intelligence, only to deliver results that failed to justify the costs. Silicon Valley's response this quarter? Plans to invest even more. Bloomberg: The capital expenditures of the four largest internet and software companies -- Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet -- are set to total well over $200 billion this year, a record sum for the profligate collective. Executives from each company warned investors this week that their splurge will continue next year, or even ramp up. The spree underscores the extreme costs and resources consumed from the worldwide boom in AI ignited by the arrival of ChatGPT. Tech giants are racing to secure the scarce high-end chips and build the sprawling data centers the technology demands. To do so, the companies have cut deals with energy providers to power these facilities, even reviving a notorious nuclear plant.

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Apple has reached an agreement to acquire Pixelmator, the maker of popular photo and image editing apps Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator. Financial terms of the deal wasn't disclosed.

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British cybersecurity firm Sophos revealed this week that it waged a five-year battle against Chinese hackers who repeatedly targeted its firewall products to breach organizations worldwide, including nuclear facilities, military sites and critical infrastructure. The company told Wired that it traced the attacks to researchers in Chengdu, China, linked to Sichuan Silence Information Technology and the University of Electronic Science and Technology. Sophos planted surveillance code on its own devices used by the hackers, allowing it to monitor their development of sophisticated intrusion tools, including previously unseen "bootkit" malware designed to hide in the firewalls' boot code. The hackers' campaigns evolved from mass exploitation in 2020 to precise attacks on government agencies and infrastructure across Asia, Europe and the United States. Wired story adds: Sophos' report also warns, however, that in the most recent phase of its long-running conflict with the Chinese hackers, they appear more than ever before to have shifted from finding new vulnerabilities in firewalls to exploiting outdated, years-old installations of its products that are no longer receiving updates. That means, company CEO Joe Levy writes in an accompanying document, that device owners need to get rid of unsupported "end-of-life" devices, and security vendors need to be clear with customers about the end-of-life dates of those machines to avoid letting them become unpatched points of entry onto their network. Sophos says it's seen more than a thousand end-of-life devices targeted in just the past 18 months. "The only problem now isn't the zero-day vulnerability," says Levy, using the term "zero-day" to mean a newly discovered hackable flaw in software that has no patch. "The problem is the 365-day vulnerability, or the 1,500-day vulnerability, where you've got devices that are on the internet that have lapsed into a state of neglect."

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