In June 2024, a cyber-attack on a pathology services company caused chaos across London’s hospitals. More than 10,000 appointments were cancelled. Blood shortages followed and delays to blood tests led to a patient’s death.

Lethal cyber-attacks like this are thankfully rare. But a new AI release could change that – plunging us into a terrifying new world of chaos and disruption to the digital systems that we rely on.

This week Anthropic, a leading AI company in San Francisco, announced “Claude Mythos Preview”, an AI model that the startup says is too dangerous to publicly release, thanks to its exceptional cybersecurity – and cyber-attacking – capabilities. Mythos, the company claims, has found vulnerabilities in every major browser and operating system. In other words, this new AI model might be able to help hackers disrupt much of the world’s most important software.

“This is Y2K-level alarming,” one security expert said. Already, Mythos has found a 27-year-old bug in a critical piece of security infrastructure and multiple vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, essential for computer systems worldwide. These weak points could threaten almost everything on the internet from the streaming services you relax with to the banking systems you rely on.

The public freakout about blue light started with a study in 2014. Half of the 12 participants read on an iPad before bed. The rest read physical books. The iPad users took longer to fall asleep, felt groggier the next day and produced less melatonin. The researchers said the culprit was the glow emitted from the iPad's LED screen, which produces a disproportionate amount of light in the upper, bluer end of the spectrum. Under specific circumstances, blue-enriched light disrupts the daily circadian rhythm – our body's natural pacemaker – that uses daylight to help determine when we start to feel tired. Subsequent research seemed to support the findings. Sounds simple, right? It's not.

"This was an incredibly deceptive piece of work," says Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, who studies the effect of light on the circadian system. The science wasn't bad, he says, the problem is it brought people to bad conclusions.

After years warnings and millions of people flipping on the blue light filters built into their phones, the latest science suggests screens are not the main culprit here after all. For example, a recent review of 11 different studies and found that the light from screens only delayed sleep by about nine minutes, at worst. Not zero, but not life altering, either.

The amount of blue light emitted by the screens of phones, laptops and tablets has also been shown to be tiny compared to the blue light we receive from the Sun – 24 hours-worth of blue light from digital devices totted up to less than one minute spent outdoors, according to one study. Other studies have shown it's not enough to affect levels of the hormones that control our sleep.

So why am I so tired all the time? Zeitzer and others told me there are lots of other ways that light, blue and otherwise, could be ruining my bedtime. If I really wanted to tackle the blue monster, it was going to take a serious lifestyle change.

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/45863772

The Wi-Fi broke on my Kindle Paperwhite years ago, and I have only one micro-B cable left that will connect to it.

Amazon is to stop supporting older Kindle models leaving longtime ebook fans unable to access new content from the Kindle store.

Devices released during or before 2012 will no longer receive updates from 20 May, affecting owners of older Kindles, including the earliest models such as the Touch and some Fire tablets. It is thought that 2m e-readers could be affected.

Users will still be able to read ebooks they have downloaded, and their accounts and their Kindle library will remain accessible on mobile and desktop apps. Active users have been offered discounts to help “transition to newer devices”. Amazon said performing a factory reset on affected Kindles would make them unusable.

Disappointed users have vented their frustration online, including in comments on The Verge, accusing Amazon of “causing waste at a large scale” and saying their devices would be reduced to a paperweight despite still working.

One wonders whether these old devices just don't have enough telemetry built in for Amazon's liking.

From the "racism is totally within our rights under the First Amendment" dept.:

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has filed a lawsuit against the state of Colorado over a new AI law set to take effect in June.

The suit seeks to block the state from enforcing the law, which would impose new requirements on AI systems to protect state residents from “algorithmic discrimination” in sectors such as education, employment, healthcare, housing and financial services.

Colorado was the first state to pass a comprehensive bill to regulate AI.

The company claims the law infringes on its first amendment free-speech protections and would force xAI to “promote the state’s ideological views on various matters, racial justice in particular”, according to the Financial Times, which first reported the lawsuit. “Its provisions prohibit developers of AI systems from producing speech that the state of Colorado dislikes.”

OpenAI has put on hold plans for a landmark project to strengthen the UK’s AI capabilities, citing high energy costs and regulation.

Stargate UK was a part of the landmark UK-US AI deal announced last September, in which US companies appeared to commit £31bn to the UK’s tech sector, part of a larger series of investments intended to “mainline AI” into the British economy.

A Guardian investigation last month revealed many of these were “phantom investments” and a supercomputer scheduled to go live in 2026 was this March still a scaffolding yard in Essex. That supercomputer was to be built by Nscale, a UK firm that had never built a datacentre before but said it was aiming to deliver the project in 2027. Nscale was also to build key datacentres for Stargate UK.

The Stargate project was to support Britain in building out “sovereign compute” – infrastructure that would allow the government and other UK institutions to run AI models on datacentres in the country. This is in theory important to the security of British data, for institutions and individuals.

An OpenAI spokesperson said: “We see huge potential for the UK’s AI future. We continue to explore Stargate UK and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment.”

Or maybe it's as simple as "shit, we actually don't make any money, and people have caught onto the grift."

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/45755855

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/45770579

When the first M1 Apple Silicon systems sprouted at the end of 2020, we loved the tech but not the walled garden it grew in. Apple had complete control over all its platforms and could set its own rules, but only to become more Apple-y. There was a whole world outside that area where Apple Silicon would never tread, even if Cupertino could iterate fast enough to keep up. Plus, Apple's appliance sensibility limited its expansion options, especially with performance dependent on its own silicon.

More than five years on, that remains true. Yes, the architecture can iterate at least as fast as anything else in its class. It turns out that gigabit Wi-Fi, 10 Gb Ethernet, and high speed expansion is not such a problem anymore. Otherwise, if you ignore embedded niche cases that nobody cares about, Apple is still where it started, in desktops and laptops. It has even lost one form factor. And ironically, the most exciting new machine for years, the Macbook Neo, doesn't even have an M-type SoC in it.

And yet, that Macbook Neo has given the Windows world the fear, precisely because of the Apple Silicon walled garden strategy. A simple equation has reached a critical point, and it may be irreversible. Every year of Apple Silicon, the experience of using a Mac has gotten better. Every year of Windows 11, the experience of using a PC has gotten worse.

One point in favor of the sprawling Linux ecosystem is its broad hardware support—the kernel officially supports everything from ’90s-era PC hardware to Arm-based Apple Silicon chips, thanks to decades of combined effort from hardware manufacturers and motivated community members.

But nothing can last forever, and for a few years now, Linux maintainers (including Linus Torvalds) have been pushing to drop kernel support for Intel’s 80486 processor. This chip was originally introduced in 1989, was replaced by the first Intel Pentium in 1993, and was fully discontinued in 2007. Code commits suggest that Linux kernel version 7.1 will be the first to follow through, making it impossible to build a version of the kernel that will support the 486; Phoronix says that additional kernel changes to remove 486-related code will follow in subsequent kernel versions.

Although these chips haven’t changed in decades, maintaining support for them in modern software isn’t free.

“In the x86 architecture we have various complicated hardware emulation facilities on x86-32 to support ancient 32-bit CPUs that very, very few people are using with modern kernels,” writes Linux kernel contributor Ingo Molnar in his initial patch removing 486 support from the kernel. “This compatibility glue is sometimes even causing problems that people spend time to resolve, which time could be spent on other things.”

Too soon?

The Supreme Court yesterday overturned a 5th Circuit ruling that could have forced Internet service provider Grande Communications to terminate broadband subscribers accused of piracy.

Yesterday’s ruling follows a precedent-setting decision last month in which the Supreme Court threw out a 4th Circuit ruling against Cox Communications, another ISP accused by record labels of not doing enough to fight piracy. In the case involving Cox and Sony, the court said that “a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”

N.B.: This looks an awful lot like the litigation and resolution surrounding VCRs. (Ask your parents.)

Cox is one of several cases in which record labels sought financial damages from ISPs that continued to serve customers whose IP addresses were repeatedly traced to torrent downloads or uploads. In October 2024, record labels Universal, Warner, and Sony got a win over Grande when the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit decided the ISP was liable for contributory copyright infringement.

The conservative-leaning 5th Circuit court held in a 3-0 decision that “Grande knew (or was willfully blind to) the identities of its infringing subscribers” but “made the choice to continue providing services to them anyway, rather than taking simple measures to prevent infringement.” But the 5th Circuit now has to reconsider the Grande v. UMG case after a two-sentence ruling issued yesterday by the Supreme Court.

Grande’s petition “for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for further consideration in light of Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment,” the Supreme Court said.

In the realm of his other unrealistic plans and potentially broken promises, Elon Musk's Terafab stands out as one of the biggest pipedreams, promising to boost semiconductor production by 50x for the benefit of orbital datacenters. But hey, this idea must have legs, because now Intel has announced it is joining the aspiring Bond villain's initiative.

"If you add up all the fabs on earth combined, they're only about 2% of what we need for the… Terafab project," Musk said.

In case you were wondering, Musk has never built a wafer fab before. Neither have any of his companies. So when the world's richest man revealed a pie-in-the-sky plan to build a factory capable of churning out enough chips to make his dream a reality, folks were understandably skeptical.

Fabs are among the most complex and expensive facilities in the world. It can cost $30 billion and take as long as five years to bring a modestly-sized facility online, and that's if you already know what you're doing.

There is nothing modest about what Musk has proposed.

But at least it's "going to be happening" in a city with skyrocketing electrical costs and in a yearslong drought.

"We will have all of the equipment necessary to make a chip of any kind [including] logical memory," Musk said of the first Terafab facility, which will purportedly be located in Austin, Texas, which has become the fabulist hecto-billionaire's geographic center of gravity over the last few years. "So in a single building, we can create a lithography mask, make the chip, test the chip, make another mask, and have an incredibly fast recursive loop for improving the chip design."

Let's be reasonable. It's not going to be "in" Austin, because then the city has jurisdiction. Just look out for annexation, Elon.

Hundreds of thousands of tech workers are facing a harsh reality. Their well-paying jobs are no longer safe. Now that artificial intelligence (AI) is here, their futures don’t look as bright as they did a decade ago.

As US tech companies have ramped up investments in AI, they’ve slashed a staggering number of jobs. Microsoft cut 15,000 workers last year. Amazon laid off 30,000 employees in the last six months. Financial-services company Block eliminated more than 4,000 people, or 40% of its workforce, in February. Meta laid off more than 1,000 in the last six months, and, according to a Reuters report, may cut 20% of all employees in the near future. Just this week, the software giant Oracle laid off thousands of workers. Smaller players like Pinterest and Atlassian also made recent cuts, culling about 15% and 10% of their workforces, respectively. Estimates put the total number of tech layoffs in the past year at more than 165,000, according to the tracker Layoffs.fyi.

“At no point in my career have I ever been this pessimistic about the future of careers in tech,” said a tech employee, who has worked at big tech companies for decades and requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “And that’s really sad because I love tech.”

Iran is all over the news right now, but did you know they also made a 5G smartphone which runs Android? It is called the Daria Bond. In this video, the YouTuber "KHANISTEK" bought the Daria Bond 1 to see how a country under 40 years of sanctions builds consumer tech in 2026.

Sixteen miles north of Albuquerque, in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, an Intel chip plant sits on more than 200 acres of land. The site was established in the 1980s, part of it built on top of a sod farm. In 2007, as Intel’s business faltered, operations in one of the key fabs, Fab 9, came to a halt. Employees say families of raccoons and a badger took up residence in the space.

Then, in January 2024, the dormant fab was booted up again. Intel funneled billions into the facility, including $500 million it was granted from the US CHIPS Act. Now, Fab 9 and its neighbor, Fab 11X, are critical infrastructure for one of Intel’s quietly fast-growing businesses: advanced chip packaging.

Packaging involves combining multiple chiplets, or smaller components, onto a single, custom chip. Over the past six months, Intel has been signaling that its advanced packaging business, which operates within the Foundry chip-making arm of the company, is having a growth spurt. The company’s efforts around this have it going head-to-head with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, which far surpasses Intel’s production in terms of scale. But in an era where AI is driving demand for all kinds of computing power, and leading nearly every major tech company to consider making its own custom chips, Intel thinks this effort can help it grab a bigger slice of the AI pie.