Lifeboat Foundation

Facebook users have until August to claim their share of a $725 million class-action settlement of a lawsuit alleging privacy violations by the social media company, a new website reveals.

The lawsuit was prompted in 2018 after Facebook disclosed that the information of 87 million users was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

People who had an active U.S. Facebook account between May 2007 and December 2022 have until Aug. 25 to enter a claim. Individual settlement payments haven’t yet been established because payouts depend on how many users submit claims and how long each user maintained a Facebook account.

A recent study on monkeys found that stimulating a certain part of the forebrain wakes monkeys from anesthesia.

Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel who died earlier this year, is famous for forecasting a continuous rise in the density of transistors that we can pack onto semiconductor chips. James McKenzie looks at how “Moore’s law” is still going strong after almost six decades, but warns that further progress is becoming harder and ever more expensive to sustain.

Neurophysiologic responses to the first minute of songs predicted hits with an 82% success rate, indicating that the early part of a song plays a crucial role in determining its popularity.

This week, a team of over 1,000 scientists from around the globe released to the public the first batch of data collected with the Dark Energy Spectroscopy Instrument (DESI), a telescope that cosmologists hope will help answer open questions on the nature of dark energy and the evolution of the Universe [1– 3]. “The telescope works better than we ever imagined,” says Michael Levi, a cosmologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), California, and the director of the DESI Collaboration. “We are ready to have everybody look at this [initial] data release and see what they can do with it.”

The goal of the five-year-long DESI survey is to map the Universe deeper in time and higher in detail than any previous telescope (see Feature: Entering a New Era of Dark Energy Cosmology). “We want to go way beyond what was done before and really be able to see the evolution of dark energy over the history of the Universe,” says Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille, a cosmologist at LBNL and one of the spokespeople for the DESI Collaboration. To see that evolution, the survey plans to pinpoint the locations of over 40 million galaxies. The key to filling in the cosmic map is the use of robotic technology that automatically alters the placements of light-collecting fibers so that they can retrieve spectroscopic information from targeted bright spots in the sky. The spectral measurements provide information on what an object is and how fast it is moving away from us, which is needed to estimate its distance.

The robotic technology used to target objects had never been tried before, so it was not always clear that DESI would perform as expected, Levi says. But he and other team members have been pleasantly surprised by how smoothly the machine has operated. “DESI has preserved every photon that the Universe gave us,” he says.

Warning of the catastrophic collapse of a neutron star could come in the form of potentially detectable radio bursts in the 10–20 gigahertz range.

Microsoft Azure Bastion and Azure Container Registry have each been found to have one potentially “dangerous” security flaw that, if taken advantage of, may have resulted in a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack being carried out on the affected service. XSS attacks take occur when threat actors insert arbitrary code into a website that would otherwise be trusted. This code is then run each time visitors who are not aware of the attack visit the website.

Both of the vulnerabilities that Orca found take use of a vulnerability in the postMessage iframe, which makes it possible for Window objects to communicate with one another across domains. The vulnerabilities allowed for illegal access to the victim’s session inside the compromised Azure service iframe. This may result in serious repercussions, such as unauthorized data access, unauthorized alterations, and interruption of the Azure services iframes, among other things. This meant that the vulnerability could be exploited to embed endpoints into remote servers by utilizing the iframe element. This would eventually result in the execution of malicious JavaScript code, which would compromise sensitive data.

However, in order to take advantage of these vulnerabilities, a threat actor would first need to undertake reconnaissance on various Azure services in order to identify vulnerable endpoints contained inside the Azure interface. These endpoints may be missing X-Frame-Options headers or have Content Security Policies (CSPs) that are inadequate.

Using AI-generated duplicates, brands also benefit, using stars in ways they never could before.

Join journalist Pedro Pinto and Yuval Noah Harari as they delve into the future of artificial intelligence (A.I.). Together, they explore pressing questions in front of a live audience, such as: What will be the impact of A.I. on democracy and politics? How can we maintain human connection in the age of A.I.? What skills will be crucial for the future? And what does the future of education hold?

Filmed on May 19 2023 in Lisbon, Portugal and produced by the Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos (FFMS), in what marks the first live recording of the show: “It’s not that simple.”

Continue reading “Humanity is not that simple | Yuval Noah Harari & Pedro Pinto” »