The Google-backed firm taught a reinforcement learning algorithm to control the fiery plasma inside a tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. From a report: The inside of a tokamak -- the doughnut-shaped vessel designed to contain a nuclear fusion reaction -- presents a special kind of chaos. Hydrogen atoms are smashed together at unfathomably high temperatures, creating a whirling, roiling plasma that's hotter than the surface of the sun. Finding smart ways to control and confine that plasma will be key to unlocking the potential of nuclear fusion, which has been mooted as the clean energy source of the future for decades. At this point, the science underlying fusion seems sound, so what remains is an engineering challenge.

That's where DeepMind comes in. The artificial intelligence firm, backed by Google parent company Alphabet, has previously turned its hand to video games and protein folding, and has been working on a joint research project with the Swiss Plasma Center to develop an AI for controlling a nuclear fusion reaction. In stars, which are also powered by fusion, the sheer gravitational mass is enough to pull hydrogen atoms together and overcome their opposing charges. On Earth, scientists instead use powerful magnetic coils to confine the nuclear fusion reaction, nudging it into the desired position and shaping it like a potter manipulating clay on a wheel. The coils have to be carefully controlled to prevent the plasma from touching the sides of the vessel: this can damage the walls and slow down the fusion reaction. (There's little risk of an explosion as the fusion reaction cannot survive without magnetic confinement).

But every time researchers want to change the configuration of the plasma and try out different shapes that may yield more power or a cleaner plasma, it necessitates a huge amount of engineering and design work. Conventional systems are computer-controlled and based on models and careful simulations, but they are, Ambrogio Fasoli, director of the Swiss Plasma Center at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. says, "complex and not always necessarily optimized." DeepMind has developed an AI that can control the plasma autonomously. A paper published in the journal Nature describes how researchers from the two groups taught a deep reinforcement learning system to control the 19 magnetic coils inside TCV, the variable-configuration tokamak at the Swiss Plasma Center, which is used to carry out research that will inform the design of bigger fusion reactors in the future.

The Markup reports: When Kurt Wilson, a computer science student at the University of Central Florida, heard that his university was using a controversial online proctoring tool called Honorlock, he immediately wanted to learn more. The company, whose business has boomed during the pandemic, promises to ensure that remote students don't cheat on exams through AI-powered software used by students that "monitors each student's exam session and alerts a live, US-based test proctor if it detects any potential problems." The software can scan students' faces to verify their identity, track specific phrases that their computer microphone captures, and even promises to search for and remove test questions that leak online.

One feature from Honorlock especially piqued Wilson's interest. The company, according to its materials, provides a way to track cheating students through what Honorlock calls "seed sites" or others call "honeypots" -- fake websites that remotely tattle on students who visit them during exams. Wilson pored over a patent for the software to learn more, finding example sites listed. By looking for common code and the same test questions over the past year, Wilson eventually turned up about a dozen honeypots apparently linked to Honorlock, five of which are still operating.

[...] While several companies offer services that tap into students' webcams to track them, setting up fake sites to catch potential cheaters appears to be an innovation -- one that crosses an ethical line for some experts. Before, students searching online for answers may simply have turned up nothing, while now, a potentially incriminating website will be there to tempt them. Ceceilia Parnther, an associate professor at St. John's University who has studied remote proctoring, said the situation is ironic: Students "are being set up" through honeypots, she said, in an attempt to detect academic integrity violations, a practice that's itself ethically questionable.

Robots are being trialled to deliver food and other items in South Korea, which is planning to allow them on roads from 2023. Nikkei Asia reports: Woowa Brothers, operator of the country's biggest food delivery app, started using robots on a trial basis in 2020 while a convenience store chain started in November 2021. The government plans to develop such robots for export in the future. For now, the government is working to give the robots a legal definition by the end of this year so that they can be allowed to operate on roads. They are currently banned on roads as the law treats them as unmanned "vehicles." As a trial, the government has established a special zone around an apartment complex in Suwon, a city on the outskirts of Seoul, where Woowa has begun a food delivery service using a robot it developed. The robot is called "Dilly Drive" and stands about 70 cm high.

Google said on Wednesday that it was working on privacy measures meant to limit the sharing of data on smartphones running its Android software. But the company promised those changes would not be as disruptive as a similar move by Apple last year. From a report: Apple's changes to its iOS software on iPhones asked users for permission before allowing advertisers to track them. Apple's permission controls -- and, ultimately, the decision by users to block tracking -- have had a profound impact on internet companies that built businesses on so-called targeted advertising. Google did not provide an exact timeline for its changes, but said it would support existing technologies for at least two more years.

This month, Meta, the company founded as Facebook, said Apple's privacy changes would cost it $10 billion this year in lost advertising revenue. The revelation weighed on Meta's stock price and led to concerns about other companies reliant on digital advertising. Anthony Chavez, a vice president at Google's Android division, said in an interview before the announcement that it was too early to gauge the potential impact from Google's changes, which are meant to limit the sharing of data across apps and with third parties. But he emphasized that the company's goal was to find a more private option for users while also allowing developers to continue to make advertising revenue.

Second Sight left users of its retinal implants in the dark. IEEE Spectrum reports: Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station during rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her completely blind in her 30s. "I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train," Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. "I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little 'beep, beep, beep' sound." It wasn't her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she'd been able to see with the implant's help vanished.

Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004 and the subsequent Argus II implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology, spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder at a conference. "[I] went from being just a person that was doing the testing to being a spokesman," he remembers. Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant system is still working, he doesn't know how long that will be the case. "As long as nothing goes wrong, I'm fine," he says. "But if something does go wrong with it, well, I'm screwed. Because there's no way of getting it fixed."

Ross Doerr, another Second Sight patient, doesn't mince words: "It is fantastic technology and a lousy company," he says. He received an implant in one eye in 2019 and remembers seeing the shining lights of Christmas trees that holiday season. He was thrilled to learn in early 2020 that he was eligible for software upgrades that could further improve his vision. Yet in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he heard troubling rumors about the company and called his Second Sight vision-rehab therapist. "She said, âWell, funny you should call. We all just got laid off,'" he remembers. "She said, 'By the way, you're not getting your upgrades.'" These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight's implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget. One technical hiccup, one broken wire, and they lose their artificial vision, possibly forever.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Here's a fun new feature of Android 13: working virtualization support. Google is building virtualization into Android for its own reasons, but Android developer kdrag0n has commandeered the feature to boot ARM Windows 11 and desktop Linux. The developer even got the Windows version of Doom running, all inside a VM on the Pixel 6. kdrag0n says that Android 13 has "full KVM functionality" at "near-native performance." You need root to enable the functionality, which doesn't support GPU acceleration. The functionality also doesn't support nested virtualization, so while you can now run Android on Windows and Windows on Android, making an infinitely nested OS turducken is out of the question.

This makes for a neat demo that's not at all what Google wants to do with Android's upcoming VM support. Esper's Mishaal Rahman has been meticulously tracking Android's virtualization progress for some time now, and the apparent plan is to someday (maybe in Android 13) use virtual machines as a security and privacy sandbox for various features. Imagine instead of processing sensitive data at the normal app permission level, the data could be processed in a separate OS, so any attackers would have to break through the app security model, then Android, then the hypervisor, then this other, private OS.

In an all-hands meeting at Meta "explaining the company's updated values," Mark Zuckerberg says employees are not supposed to "nice ourselves to death," adding that they are now to be known as "Metamates."

According to the Daily Beast, citing long-time executive Andrew Bosworth, "the term was coined by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter and is a play on the naval-inspired slogan used at Instagram: 'ship, shipmates, self.'"

Apple and Google face a potential class action lawsuit in the Netherlands over app store charges, after a foundation headed by Dutch entrepreneur Alexander Klopping began gathering claimants. Reuters reports: Klopping is a co-founder of Blendle, a digital platform that enables users to buy individual news articles, which he sold in 2020. He told Reuters his determination to pursue the tech giants grew out of his experience at Blendle. "The reason it's getting so much attention right now is that everyone feels in their gut that there's this imbalance of power when it comes to big tech companies." He said while developers have complained most about app store practices, costs are ultimately passed on to consumers.

Klopping's App Store Claims Foundation is being represented by law firm Hausfeld, with funding from Fortress Investment Group. Klopping's App Store Claims Foundation is being represented by law firm Hausfeld, with funding from Fortress Investment Group. Hausfeld lawyer Rob Okhuijsen said the next step will be submitting evidence to the Amsterdam District Court in April. If a judge agrees, the court would then begin weighing the merits of the complaint.

Ukraine's Ministry of Defense website suffered from what appeared to be a distributed denial of service attack Tuesday, according to the government's Facebook account. CNET reports: The military's website remained unavailable as of 12 p.m. PT Tuesday, with the Ukrainian military's Facebook account saying work is currently underway to restore regular functioning to the online portal. The nation's largest commercial bank, PrivatBank, has also been subjected to a "massive DDoS attack" for the past few hours, according to the Ukraine Center for Strategic Communications. There's no threat to customer funds stored at the bank, it said, though the attack is preventing customers from accessing the Privat24 application and viewing their balances. Online banking with Oschadbank is also down, the Center for Strategic Communications said, as reported earlier by Vice. Nobody has yet to be blamed for the attack, but as CNET notes, "it comes after Russia is believed to have mounted multiple cyberattacks on Ukraine as part of efforts that security experts say are designed to destabilize the country's government and economy."

UPDATE (2/16/2022): America's Undersecretary of State said Wednesday that "While we're still investigating and doing forensics along with the Ukrainians, I think what's most important is that these cyberattacks were not very successful," reports CNN, which adds that the official "credited Ukrainian officials for responding quickly and helping the websites recover."

Google has announced a new version of Chrome OS called Chrome OS Flex, which is designed to run on old PCs and Macs. The Verge reports: The operating system can be installed "within minutes," according to Google's blog post. Google told me that Chrome OS Flex will look and feel identical to Chrome OS on a Chromebook -- it's built from the same code base and follows the same "release cadence." It did caveat that some features may be dependent on the hardware of the PC you're using. In fact, it said this for every specific feature I asked about, including always-on Google Assistant and Android phone syncing. So, if you're going to try this, keep an eye out.

If you want to try out Chrome OS Flex yourself, you can learn more on the Chrome Enterprise website. Note that the OS is still in early access mode, so you may encounter bugs -- you can boot it directly from a USB drive if you'd rather poke around before installing it on your machine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The newest entrant in the fight for EV market share is going back to the future with an all-electric DeLorean. The infamous gull-winged car is being resurrected in Texas by a group of executives who most recently spent time at China-backed EV startup Karma Automotive. They're working with Stephen Wynne, who acquired the DeLorean branding rights in the 1990s and supplies parts for the 6,000 or so remaining vehicles. [...] The new company is called DeLorean Motors Reimagined LLC and its chief executive officer is Joost de Vries, Texas business records and LinkedIn postings show. The firm will set up a headquarters and an engineering outfit in San Antonio, with potential to bring 450 jobs, the city's development arm said in a statement.

It's not the first time the idea of a DeLorean redux has surfaced -- web searches turn up stories every few years about how Wynne has tried to revive the brand or produce low-volume models -- but using an electric powertrain is a new twist on the idea. The original car gained notoriety in the early 1980s both for its quality problems and for the legal woes of its creator, the late John DeLorean, before the "Back to the Future" film franchise turned it into a pop-culture icon.

Google is continuing to give its document editing suite a more modern makeover. The latest update to Google Docs makes pageless documents available to all users after the company announced the feature last May. It also adds new features such as AI-generated document summaries, inline Google Maps previews, and the ability to draft emails with other users before transferring them over to Gmail. Most of those features are launching today, while email drafting will roll out in the "coming weeks." From a report: The update may be seen as part of a broader effort to compete with startups such as Notion and Coda, which are reimagining document editing around free-flowing, dynamic pages. Those products have also caught the attention of Microsoft, which announced an entirely new document editing app called Loop last November. While Google isn't fundamentally reinventing Docs in response, it's leaning on its ecosystem of other apps and services to make documents feel more dynamic and less like the printed page.

For most Google Docs users, the most striking change will be the new pageless format, which extends whitespace to both edges of the screen and dispenses with the page markers used for printing purposes. It also allows for a fully-responsive design, in which documents reflow when users adjust the size of their browser window. (Pagination will still be the default, but users can switch to pageless formatting under File > Setup.) Other changes won't be as immediately noticeable, but speak to where Google Docs -- and the Workspace suite as a whole -- are headed. Document summaries created using AI technology, for instance, will appear in a sidebar view where users can accept them or modify their text. When users hover over links to another document that includes a summary, it'll appear inside a pop-up preview window. [...] Google's also adding a way to draft Gmail messages inside Docs, so users can collaborate on messaging before passing the contents off to Gmail proper. And a recently-added Meeting Notes feature lets users pull in contacts, action items, and other details from Google Calendar events.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's Inbox experiment was a glorious thing while it lasted. Launched as an invitation-only service in 2014, it was the company's next-gen email client. Because it was so good, it's no surprise Google shut it down in 2019. Thankfully, though, a group of ex-Google/Firebase employees is now resurrecting the Inbox experience -- with a bit of the Slack user experience mixed in, too.

As Lee told me, the team took two important inspirations from Inbox. "One is the idea that you should work with your email in groups," he said, referring to Inbox's ability to bundle emails by topic. "As the volume of email grows in your inbox, it becomes impractical just to page through every single email. Even if you have all the keyboard shortcuts and your app is super optimized, just scanning through all that stuff takes a long time." While you want to know about automated emails like calendar notifications for example, chances are you've already accepted those invites in your calendar, for example, so marking all those as read or snooze them for later with a couple of clicks saves a lot of time. In addition, the team also built Shortwave with the idea that your inbox, whether you like it or not, is a to-do list.

Microsoft is releasing its first big update to Windows 11 today, and it includes a lot of new additions. From a report: A public preview of Android apps on Windows 11 will be available today in the US, alongside redesigned Notepad and Media Player apps. The first big Windows 11 update will also include a bunch of improvements to the taskbar. The public preview of Android apps on Windows 11 will allow users to install apps from Amazon's Appstore. The Verge points to workarounds to get Google Play Store running on Windows 11 unofficially. Back to more changes: The biggest changes in this Windows 11 update are related to the taskbar. The time and date will finally be available on multiple monitors in Windows 11, something that was missing at launch. The weather widget also returns to the taskbar in this update, and a new mute / unmute feature in the taskbar will be available for Microsoft Teams calls. You'll also be able to quickly screen share a specific app or window from the taskbar directly into a Microsoft Teams call. Microsoft has also redesigned the Media Player and Notepad apps for Windows 11. Notepad now includes multi-step undo, an improved search interface, and dark mode support. The new Media Player app is designed to replace Groove Music and Windows Media Player and includes support for both audio and video and a design that better matches Windows 11's UI improvements.

New Yorkers who live in areas where controversial stop-and-frisk searches happen most frequently are also more likely to be surveilled by facial recognition technology, according to research by Amnesty International and other researchers. From a report: Research also showed that in the Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens boroughs of the city there was a direct correlation between the proportion of non-white residents and the concentration of controversial facial recognition technology. "Our analysis shows that the NYPD's use of facial recognition technology helps to reinforce discriminatory policing against minority communities in New York City," said Matt Mahmoudi, artificial intelligence and human rights researcher at Amnesty International. The research is a part of the global anti-facial recognition technology campaign, Ban the Scan, investigating increasing use of surveillance initiatives in the New York police department (NYPD). Using thousands of digital volunteers through the Decode NYC Surveillance project, more than 25,500 CCTV cameras were mapped across New York City. Data scientists and researchers from Amnesty International compared the data on the camera placement with statistics on police stop-and-frisk. "We have long known that stop-and-frisk in New York is a racist policing tactic. We now know that the communities most targeted with stop-and-frisk are also at greater risk of discriminatory policing through invasive surveillance," said Mahmoudi.

As Masayoshi Son tried to persuade investors of the wisdom of purchasing one of the most successful chip companies in the world in 2016, the SoftBank chief had one clear message: "For the era of the 'Internet of things,' I think the champion will be Arm." But the concept of connecting billions of everyday and industrial devices to the Internet has been much slower than anticipated to materialize. From a report: Son's drive to capture the chip design market for the Internet of things (IoT) was the first bet he made on Arm that has not paid off. The second was a $66 billion sale of the company to Nvidia that unraveled last week. Arm remains the dominant player in designing chips for smartphones, still the most ubiquitous form of computing but a source of much slower growth in recent years. Ahead of an initial public offering that could come as soon as this year, the company is racing to solidify its position in new markets that it has underexploited to date, while trying to drive up profits to appeal to a new set of investors. Rene Haas, Arm's incoming chief executive, told the Financial Times that its products were now "far more competitive" in data centers and cars than when SoftBank bought the Cambridge-based company.

"Making trade-offs about where to invest, where not to invest...âthose are the trade-offs that public companies and even private companies have to do every day," he said. "The company is in great shape." When Son spearheaded the $31 billion purchase of Arm, he saw it as a wager on the future of the entire technology industry, which was crystallizing at that time around the IoT concept. He proceeded to push the executive team firmly on the course to designing chips for this future of machine connectivity. Five-and-a-half years later, it has become increasingly clear that the IoT gamble was a costly misadventure. Moreover, it distracted Arm from attacking Intel's dominance in the much larger data center market. As Son's vision collided with reality, SoftBank quietly revised its market calculations. A presentation from 2018 forecast that by 2026, the IoT controller market would be worth $24 billion, and the server market $22 billion. But, a similar presentation from 2020 predicted that by 2029, the IoT chip market would reach only $16 billion, while the server market -- of which Arm had so far only captured a 5 percent share -- would reach $32 billion. The Japanese technology group also revised down its estimate of the value of the IoT market, from $7 billion in 2017 to $4 billion in 2019.

Worldle, the latest spinoff of the viral online word game Wordle, gives players six chances to guess a country outlined in black. CNET reports: As with Wordle, which was recently purchased by The New York Times, Worldle flashes green, gray and yellow squares. The difference is, here the more green squares you see the closer you are geographically to the right nation. Worldle also shows the distance in kilometers your guess was to the actual location. (You can change that measurement to miles in the Settings section, or even hide the country image for more of a challenge.)

Microsoft is enabling a Microsoft Defender 'Attack Surface Reduction' security rule by default to block hackers' attempts to steal Windows credentials from the LSASS process. BleepingComputer reports: When threat actors compromise a network, they attempt to spread laterally to other devices by stealing credentials or using exploits. One of the most common methods to steal Windows credentials is to gain admin privileges on a compromised device and then dump the memory of the Local Security Authority Server Service (LSASS) process running in Windows. This memory dump contains NTLM hashes of Windows credentials of users who had logged into the computer that can be brute-forced for clear-text passwords or used in Pass-the-Hash attacks to login into other devices. While Microsoft Defender block programs like Mimikatz, a LSASS memory dump can still be transferred to a remote computer to dump credentials without fear of being blocked.

To prevent threat actors from abusing LSASS memory dumps, Microsoft has introduced security features that prevent access to the LSASS process. One of these security features is Credential Guard, which isolates the LSASS process in a virtualized container that prevents other processes from accessing it. However, this feature can lead to conflicts with drivers or applications, causing some organizations not to enable it. As a way to mitigate Windows credential theft without causing the conflicts introduced by Credential Guard, Microsoft will soon be enabling a Microsoft Defender Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rule by default. The rule, ' Block credential stealing from the Windows local security authority subsystem,' prevents processes from opening the LSASS process and dumping its memory, even if it has administrative privileges.

While enabling the ASR rule by default will significantly impact the stealing of Windows credentials, it is not a silver bullet by any means. This is because the full Attack Surface Reduction feature is only supported on Windows Enterprise licenses running Microsoft Defender as the primary antivirus. However, BleepingComputer's tests show that the LSASS ASR rule also works on Windows 10 and Windows 11 Pro clients. Unfortunately, once another antivirus solution is installed, ASR is immediately disabled on the device. Furthermore, security researchers have discovered built-in Microsoft Defender exclusion paths allowing threat actors to run their tools from those filenames/directories to bypass the ASR rules and continue to dump the LSASS process. Mimikatz developer Benjamin Delpy told BleepingComputer that Microsoft probably added these built-in exclusions for another rule, but as exclusions affect ALL rules, it bypasses the LSASS restriction.

AMD on Monday completed the acquisition of Xilinx, creating a company that can offer various types of compute devices, including CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. Tom's Hardware reports: AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su told analyst Patrick Moorhead that the first processor combining Xilinx technologies will arrive in 2023, which is in contrast to the company's previous integration efforts. After AMD bought ATI Technologies in 2006, it took the company five years to build its first accelerated processing units (which included AMD's x86 cores and ATI's GPU). This time AMD inked a long-term development pact with Xilinx and was able to work collaboratively even before the regulators approved the transaction. It remains to be seen what exactly AMD plans to offer, but it is reasonable to expect the new processor to feature AMD's x86 cores and Xilinx's programmable engines.

The move will help AMD to continue expanding its presence in the datacenter sector and offer unique solutions that will combine IP ingredients designed by the two companies. Interestingly, the first fruits of the deal are expected to materialize next year. [...] The Xilinx business will become AMD's Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group (AECG), led by former Xilinx CEO Victor Peng. As a result, Xilinx will maintain its leadership for at least a while. Furthermore, AMD's embedded business will cease to be a part of the company's enterprise and semi-custom unit and will merge into AECG, which might be good news as executives from the enterprise division will now spend more time on EPYC CPUs. "The acquisition of Xilinx brings together a highly complementary set of products, customers and markets combined with differentiated IP and world-class talent to create the industry's high-performance and adaptive computing leader," said Lisa Su, chief executive of AMD. "Xilinx offers industry-leading FPGAs, adaptive SoCs, AI inference engines and software expertise that enable AMD to offer the strongest portfolio of high-performance and adaptive computing solutions in the industry and capture a larger share of the approximately $135 billion market opportunity we see across cloud, edge, and intelligent devices."

omfglearntoplay shares a report from CNBC: Electric vehicle firm Polestar roasted Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Volkswagen in its Super Bowl ad, with references to "conquering Mars" and "Dieselgate." The electric vehicle startup's "No Compromises" advertisement, which lasted 30 seconds, featured close-up shots of the Polestar 2 with dramatic background music. The ad included phrases such as "no dirty secrets," "no empty promises," and "no greenwashing." Words following "No" during the ad range from general terms such as "epic voiceovers" and "dirty secrets" to "dieselgate" -- referring to a former diesel emissions scandal with Volkswagen -- and "conquering Mars" -- a critique on Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk, who has plans to land humans on Mars by 2026. The commercial ends at "No. 2" and then "Polestar 2," the company's all-electric performance car. Further reading: This Year's Super Bowl Broadcast May Seem 'Crypto-Happy'. But the NFL Isn't