Technology News

Enlarge / Farm cats drinking from a trough of milk from cows that were just milked. (credit: Getty | )

On March 16, cows on a Texas dairy farm began showing symptoms of a mysterious illness now known to be H5N1 bird flu. Their symptoms were nondescript, but their milk production dramatically dropped and turned thick and creamy yellow. The next day, cats on the farm that had consumed some of the raw milk from the sick cows also became ill. While the cows would go on to largely recover, the cats weren't so lucky. They developed depressed mental states, stiff body movements, loss of coordination, circling, copious discharge from their eyes and noses, and blindness. By March 20, over half of the farm's 24 or so cats died from the flu.

In a study published today in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, researchers in Iowa, Texas, and Kansas found that the cats had H5N1 not just in their lungs but also in their brains, hearts, and eyes. The findings are similar to those seen in cats that were experimentally infected with H5N1, aka highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAI). But, on the Texas dairy farm, they present an ominous warning of the potential for transmission of this dangerous and evolving virus.

The contaminated milk was the most likely source of the cat's fatal infections, the study authors concluded. Although it can't be entirely ruled out that the cats got sick from eating infected wild birds, the milk they drank from the sick cows was brimming with virus particles, and genetic data shows almost exact matches between the cows, their milk, and the cats. "Therefore, our findings suggest cross-species mammal-to-mammal transmission of HPAI H5N1 virus and raise new concerns regarding the potential for virus spread within mammal populations," wrote the authors, who are veterinary researchers from Iowa, Texas, and Kansas.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Britain’s former climate adviser says the country’s future plans are weak, climate protests are no longer helpful, and working closely with Big Oil is a jarring necessity.

Enlarge (credit: Roku)

Roku CEO Anthony Wood disclosed plans to introduce video ads to the Roku OS home screen. The news highlights Roku’s growing focus on advertising and an alarming trend in the streaming industry that sees ads increasingly forced on viewers.

As spotted by The Streamable, during Roku's Q1 2024 earnings call last week, Wood, also the company's founder and chairman, boasted about the Roku OS home screen showing users ads "before they select an app," avoiding the possibility that they don't see any ads during their TV-viewing session. (The user might only use Roku to access a video streaming app for which they have an ad-free subscription.)

Wood also noted future plans to make the Roku home screen even more ad-laden:

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Edwin (George Rexstrew) and Charles (Jayden Revri) are the Dead Boy Detectives, ghosts who solve paranormal mysteries. (credit: Netflix )

For those eagerly anticipating the second season of Netflix's stellar adaption of Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels, Dead Boy Detectives—the streaming plaform's new supernatural horror detective series—is a welcome return to that weird magical world. Co-showrunner Steve Yockey (Supernatural), who created the series, aptly describes it as "the Hardy Boys on acid." You've got vengeful witches, demons, psychic mediums, cursed masks, foul-mouthed parasitic sprites, talking cats—and, of course, the titular ghostly detectives, intent on spending their afterlife cracking all manner of mysterious paranormal cases.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Sandman fans first encountered the Dead Boys in the "Seasons of Mist" storyline, in which the ghost Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland meet for the first time in 1990. Edwin had been murdered at his boarding school in 1916 and spent decades in Hell. When Lucifer abandoned his domain, Hell was emptied, and Edwin was among the souls who returned to that boarding school. Charles was a living student whom Edwin tried to protect. Charles ultimately died and chose to join Edwin in his afterlife adventures. The characters reappeared in the Children's Crusade crossover series, in which they decided to become detectives.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards | Getty Images)

On Friday, the US Department of Homeland Security announced the formation of an Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board that consists of 22 members pulled from the tech industry, government, academia, and civil rights organizations. But given the nebulous nature of the term "AI," which can apply to a broad spectrum of computer technology, it's unclear if this group will even be able to agree on what exactly they are safeguarding us from.

President Biden directed DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to establish the board, which will meet for the first time in early May and subsequently on a quarterly basis.

The fundamental assumption posed by the board's existence, and reflected in Biden's AI executive order from October, is that AI is an inherently risky technology and that American citizens and businesses need to be protected from its misuse. Along those lines, the goal of the group is to help guard against foreign adversaries using AI to disrupt US infrastructure; develop recommendations to ensure the safe adoption of AI tech into transportation, energy, and Internet services; foster cross-sector collaboration between government and businesses; and create a forum where AI leaders to share information on AI security risks with the DHS.

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Starting in March with the release of iOS 17.4, iPhones in the European Union have been subject to the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), a batch of regulations that (among other things) forced Apple to support alternate app stores, app sideloading, and third-party browser engines in iOS for the first time. Today, EU regulators announced that they are also categorizing Apple's iPadOS as a "gatekeeper," meaning that the iPad will soon be subject to the same regulations as the iPhone.

The EU began investigating whether iPadOS would qualify as a gatekeeper in September 2023, the same day it decided that iOS, the Safari browser, and the App Store were all gatekeepers.

"Apple now has six months to ensure full compliance of iPadOS with the DMA obligations," reads the EU's blog post about the change.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images )

The Federal Communications Commission today said it fined T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon $196 million "for illegally sharing access to customers' location information without consent and without taking reasonable measures to protect that information against unauthorized disclosure."

The fines relate to sharing of real-time location data that was revealed in 2018. The FCC proposed the fines in 2020, when the commission had a Republican majority, and finalized them today.

All three major carriers vowed to appeal the fines after they were announced today. The three carriers also said they discontinued the data-sharing programs that the fines relate to.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Tesla’s deal with Baidu isn’t new, the mapping data Tesla will collect likely can’t leave China, and Full Self-Driving can’t compete with the more advanced Chinese alternatives.

Tesla’s deal with Baidu isn’t new, the mapping data Tesla will collect likely can’t leave China, and Full Self-Driving can’t compete with the more advanced Chinese alternatives.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

If you build a gadget that connects to the Internet and sell it in the United Kingdom, you can no longer make the default password "password." In fact, you're not supposed to have default passwords at all.

A new version of the 2022 Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act (PTSI) is now in effect, covering just about everything that a consumer can buy that connects to the web. Under the guidelines, even the tiniest Wi-Fi board must either have a randomized password or else generate a password upon initialization (through a smartphone app or other means). This password can't be incremental ("password1," "password54"), and it can't be "related in an obvious way to public information," such as MAC addresses or Wi-Fi network names. A device should be sufficiently strong against brute-force access attacks, including credential stuffing, and should have a "simple mechanism" for changing the password.

There's more, and it's just as head-noddingly obvious. Software components, where reasonable, "should be securely updateable," should actually check for updates, and should update either automatically or in a way "simple for the user to apply." Perhaps most importantly, device owners can report security issues and expect to hear back about how that report is being handled.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The latest update to OpenAI’s chatbot improves the AI’s ability to remember user details. It’s rolling out first to ChatGPT Plus subscribers.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Authentication service Okta is warning about the “unprecedented scale” of an ongoing campaign that routes fraudulent login requests through the mobile devices and browsers of everyday users in an attempt to conceal the malicious behavior.

The attack, Okta said, uses other means to camouflage the login attempts as well, including the TOR network and so-called proxy services from providers such as NSOCKS, Luminati, and DataImpulse, which can also harness users’ devices without their knowledge. In some cases, the affected mobile devices are running malicious apps. In other cases, users have enrolled their devices in proxy services in exchange for various incentives.

Unidentified adversaries then use these devices in credential-stuffing attacks, which use large lists of login credentials obtained from previous data breaches in an attempt to access online accounts. Because the requests come from IP addresses and devices with good reputations, network security devices don’t give them the same level of scrutiny as logins from virtual private servers (VPS) that come from hosting services threat actors have used for years.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / AI is here to terminate your bank account. (credit: Carolco Pictures)

Give the AI access to your credit card, they said. It'll be fine, they said. Users of Meta's ad platform who followed that advice have been getting burned by an AI-powered ad purchasing system, according to The Verge. The idea was to use a Meta-developed AI to automatically set up ads and spend your ad budget, saving you the hassle of making decisions about your ad campaign. Apparently, the AI funnels money to Meta a little too well: Customers say it burns, though, what should be daily ad budgets in a matter of hours, and costs are inflated as much as 10-fold.

The AI-powered software in question is the "Advantage+ Shopping Campaign." The system is supposed to automate a lot of ad setup for you, mixing and matching various creative elements and audience targets. The power of AI-powered advertising (Google has a similar product) is that the ad platform can get instant feedback on its generated ads via click-through rates. You give it a few guard rails, and it can try hundreds or thousands of combinations to find the most clickable ad at a speed and efficiency no human could match. That's the theory, anyway.

The Verge spoke to "several marketers and businesses" with similar stories of being hit by an AI-powered spending spree once they let Meta's system take over a campaign. The description of one account says the AI "had blown through roughly 75 percent of the daily ad budgets for both clients in under a couple of hours" and that "the ads’ CPMs, or cost per impressions, were roughly 10 times higher than normal." Meanwhile, the revenue earned from those AI-powered ads was "nearly zero." The report says, "Small businesses have seen their ad dollars get wiped out and wasted as a result, and some have said the bouts of overspending are driving them from Meta’s platforms."

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Intel's top-end i9-14900KS. (credit: Intel)

Earlier this month, we wrote that some of Intel's recent high-end Core i9 and Core i7 processors had been crashing and exhibiting other weird issues in some games and that Intel was investigating the cause.

An Intel statement obtained by Igor's Lab suggests that Intel's investigation is wrapping up, and the company is pointing squarely in the direction of enthusiast motherboard makers that are turning up power limits and disabling safeguards to try to wring a little more performance out of the processors.

"While the root cause has not yet been identified, Intel has observed the majority of reports of this issue are from users with unlocked/overclock capable motherboards," the statement reads. "Intel has observed 600/700 Series chipset boards often set BIOS defaults to disable thermal and power delivery safeguards designed to limit processor exposure to sustained periods of high voltage and frequency."

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks at the Satellite Conference and Exhibition on March 9, 2020 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Win McNamee )

The US Supreme Court today rejected Elon Musk's attempt to terminate his settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Musk appealed to the Supreme Court in December 2023, claiming the settlement he agreed to in 2018 forced him to "waive his First Amendment rights to speak on matters ranging far beyond the charged violations." The SEC settlement requires Musk to get pre-approval from a Tesla securities lawyer for tweets or other social media posts that may contain information material to the company or its shareholders.

The Supreme Court decided not to hear the case, leaving an appeals court ruling against Musk intact. The top court denied Musk's petition without comment Monday morning in a list of orders.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A mock-up posted by MobaPad provides one vision of how magnetically attached Switch 2 Joy-Cons might look (credit: MobaPad)

Thus far, Nintendo has offered only vague hints regarding whether or not the upcoming Switch 2 will run games and software designed for the current Switch. Now, an obscure Chinese peripheral maker is reporting that the new console will indeed work with existing physical Switch game cards and digital Switch game downloads.

The new report comes from MobaPad, a little-known creator of Switch controllers and carrying cases based in Shenzen, China. In a Sunday morning blog post, the company says it is "in the process of developing the next-generation console controller" for the Switch 2 and has "acquired a lot of first-hand information" about the console as a result (MobaPad shared similar insights days earlier on Chinese video site Bilibili and briefly on its English Facebook page).

Chief among MobaPad's purported revelations is that "the cartridge slot of the Switch 2 will support backward compatibility with physical Switch game cartridges, ensuring compatibility with players' existing game libraries, including digital versions." Game cards designed specifically for the Switch 2, on the other hand, "may not be compatible with the first-generation console," suggesting there may be a physical change preventing Switch 2 game cards from being accidentally inserted into an older Switch console.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

For National Small Business Week, we’re spotlighting Prados Beauty founder and CEO Cece Meadows.For National Small Business Week, we’re spotlighting Prados Beauty founder and CEO Cece Meadows.

Raising your computer screen is a simple fix for healthier posture. These stands, lap desks, mats, and risers may help.

Enlarge / BlueCruise allows drivers to take their hands off the wheel but not their eyes off the road. (credit: Ford)

The federal regulator responsible for road safety has opened yet another probe into the safety of a hands-free driver assistance system, we learned this morning. And no, it's not a system from Tesla. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation has opened a preliminary investigation into Ford's BlueCruise system, following a pair of fatal crashes, both of which occurred at night.

Ford introduced BlueCruise in 2021. Like the similar General Motors Super Cruise, but unlike Tesla Autopilot, BlueCruise has been designed with a tightly controlled operational design domain (ODD) that only allows it to be engaged on restricted access, divided lane highways that have been lidar-mapped in advance.

Additionally, like Super Cruise but unlike Tesla's far more dangerous system, there is an infrared gaze-tracking driver monitoring camera that will disengage the system if it determines the driver is not paying attention to the road.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Enlarge (credit: FT)

Brussels is set to open a probe into Meta’s Facebook and Instagram as soon as Monday over concerns the social media giant is failing to do enough to counter disinformation from Russia and other countries.

Regulators suspect that Meta’s moderation does not go far enough to stop the widespread dissemination of political advertising that risks undermining the electoral process, the European Commission is expected to say on Monday, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

EU officials are particularly worried about the way Meta’s platforms are handling Russia’s efforts to undermine upcoming European elections. The commission, however, is not expected to single out Russia in its statement and will only make reference to the manipulation of information by foreign actors.

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments