Month: May 2024
AI is shockingly good at making fake nudes and causing havoc in schools
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Ubisoft Forward showcase announced for June in the heart of summer games season
Ubisoft, the publisher of the Assassin’s Creed and Tom Clancy’s series of adventures, as well as the recently launched XDefiant… Continue reading Ubisoft Forward showcase announced for June in the heart of summer games season
The post Ubisoft Forward showcase announced for June in the heart of summer games season appeared first on ReadWrite.
Ubisoft, the publisher of the Assassin’s Creed and Tom Clancy’s series of adventures, as well as the recently launched XDefiant crossover shooter, will host a Ubisoft Forward livestream in June, when major video game companies showcase their wares and plans for the coming year.
Ubisoft Forward 2024 will air June 10 at noon Pacific Time/3 pm Eastern Time/8 pm British Standard Time. Fans can watch the show through Ubisoft’s official YouTube and Twitch channels.
What will be shown at Ubisoft Forward 2024?
Ubisoft has already confirmed that XDefiant, which launched May 21, will appear during the stream, as will Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the next installment of that franchise due in November, and Star Wars Outlaws, slated for an Aug. 30, 2024 drop.
Other franchises that could see a mention include Skull and Bones (which launched in February); Rainbow Six Siege (a live-service game); and possibly Tom Clancy’s The Division 3, especially as Ubisoft ash-canned plans for The Division Heartland, a free-to-play take on the loot-shooter that began with Tom Clancy’s The Division in 2016.
For more clues as to who or what may show up, Ubisoft has revealed a schedule of content drops, via Twitch, for those who stay tuned through the whole 60 minutes of the show:
15 minutes: Ultra Top Fan Charm for Rainbow Six Siege
20 minutes: Forest’s Dawn Trinket for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
30 minutes: Trailblazer Trinket for Star Wars Outlaws
45 minutes: M60 Eruption Weapon Skin for XDefiant, Skull and Bones Welcome Fireworks
60 Minutes: Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale (1964) for The Crew Motorfest, Yurei Bushido Gear Set and the Koi Uchide-no-Kozuchi trinket for Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a long awaited remake of of the 2003 classic, could also appear during the showcase. When last we heard from it, Ubisoft Montreal was at work remaking the whole thing from the ground up, following two years of delays and false starts with the project’s original developers at Ubisoft Pune and Ubisoft Mumbai in India.
The post Ubisoft Forward showcase announced for June in the heart of summer games season appeared first on ReadWrite.
CNN, NBC and Other News Outlets Cut Away From Trump Speech
It was the latest example of journalists having to weigh the news value of a major political moment against the challenges of reporting on a candidate who regularly speaks in falsehoods.
It was the latest example of journalists having to weigh the news value of a major political moment against the challenges of reporting on a candidate who regularly speaks in falsehoods.
Senators inquire about crypto’s role in fentanyl trade
A bipartisan duo of senators in the United States have sent an inquiry to government agencies concerning the efforts to… Continue reading Senators inquire about crypto’s role in fentanyl trade
The post Senators inquire about crypto’s role in fentanyl trade appeared first on ReadWrite.
A bipartisan duo of senators in the United States have sent an inquiry to government agencies concerning the efforts to combat the use of cryptocurrency in the illicit fentanyl market.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and William Cassidy (R-La.) have sent a letter to the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Drug Enforcement Administration, which reads:
[We] seek an update on the Biden Administration’s actions to crack down on drug traffickers’ exploitation of crypto to grow their business and launder their ill-gotten gains
The Senators claim that cryptocurrencies have become increasingly prominent in the fentanyl trade, with much of the drug ending up in the United States for consumption. The letter, addressed to ONDCP director Rahul Gupta and DEA administrator Anne Melissa Milgram, asks the agencies to provide answers by June 14.
Questioning the crypto fentanyl trade
The senators are requesting information regarding the significance of cryptocurrency in drug trafficking; new initiatives to be implemented in the next 12 months; metrics for measuring success; and challenges faced by their offices in those efforts. The senators cited data showing that Chinese companies supplying fentanyl precursors received nearly $30 million in crypto, which they claim is enough to produce $54 billion worth of fentanyl.
Warren has been previously criticized for citing misconstrued data in her anti-crypto agenda. In a letter addressing illicit cryptocurrency activity, she cited an article that had incorrectly stated the extent of Hamas’s use of cryptocurrency. Though The Wall Street Journal later corrected the article she cited, Warren did not publicly respond.
This development follows late April reports that a collaboration among law enforcement in India and the United States has led to the discovery of a cryptocurrency drug ring worth $360 million.
The post Senators inquire about crypto’s role in fentanyl trade appeared first on ReadWrite.
Federal agency warns critical Linux vulnerability being actively exploited
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency urges affected users to update ASAP.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has added a critical security bug in Linux to its list of vulnerabilities known to be actively exploited in the wild.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-1086 and carrying a severity rating of 7.8 out of a possible 10, allows people who have already gained a foothold inside an affected system to escalate their system privileges. It’s the result of a use-after-free error, a class of vulnerability that occurs in software written in the C and C++ languages when a process continues to access a memory location after it has been freed or deallocated. Use-after-free vulnerabilities can result in remote code or privilege escalation.
The vulnerability, which affects Linux kernel versions 5.14 through 6.6, resides in the NF_tables, a kernel component enabling the Netfilter, which in turn facilitates a variety of network operations, including packet filtering, network address [and port] translation (NA[P]T), packet logging, userspace packet queueing, and other packet mangling. It was patched in January, but as the CISA advisory indicates, some production systems have yet to install it. At the time this Ars post went live, there were no known details about the active exploitation.
Alzheimer’s Takes a Financial Toll Long Before Diagnosis, Study Finds
Long before people develop dementia, they often begin falling behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows. The New York Times: A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people’s borrowing behavior changed [PDF] in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or a similar disorder. What they found was striking: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is formally identified. A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2 percent more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3 percent more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills. The issues start even earlier: The study finds evidence of people falling behind on their debts five years before diagnosis.
“The results are striking in both their clarity and their consistency,” said Carole Roan Gresenz, a Georgetown University economist who was one of the study’s authors. Credit scores and delinquencies, she said, “consistently worsen over time as diagnosis approaches, and so it literally mirrors the changes in cognitive decline that we’re observing.” The research adds to a growing body of work documenting what many Alzheimer’s patients and their families already know: Decision-making, including on financial matters, can begin to deteriorate long before a diagnosis is made or even suspected. People who are starting to experience cognitive decline may miss payments, make impulsive purchases or put money into risky investments they would not have considered before the disease.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Long before people develop dementia, they often begin falling behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows. The New York Times: A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people’s borrowing behavior changed [PDF] in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or a similar disorder. What they found was striking: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is formally identified. A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2 percent more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3 percent more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills. The issues start even earlier: The study finds evidence of people falling behind on their debts five years before diagnosis.
“The results are striking in both their clarity and their consistency,” said Carole Roan Gresenz, a Georgetown University economist who was one of the study’s authors. Credit scores and delinquencies, she said, “consistently worsen over time as diagnosis approaches, and so it literally mirrors the changes in cognitive decline that we’re observing.” The research adds to a growing body of work documenting what many Alzheimer’s patients and their families already know: Decision-making, including on financial matters, can begin to deteriorate long before a diagnosis is made or even suspected. People who are starting to experience cognitive decline may miss payments, make impulsive purchases or put money into risky investments they would not have considered before the disease.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Japan’s universities will receive 10 billion yen (around US$63 million) to build the digital infrastructure needed to make papers free to read. This will make Japan one of the first countries to move towards a unified record of all research produced by its academics.
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Mutations in a non-coding gene associated with intellectual disability
A gene that only makes an RNA is linked to neurodevelopmental problems.
Enlarge / The spliceosome is a large complex of proteins and RNAs. (credit: NCBI)
Almost 1,500 genes have been implicated in intellectual disabilities; yet for most people with such disabilities, genetic causes remain unknown. Perhaps this is in part because geneticists have been focusing on the wrong stretches of DNA when they go searching. To rectify this, Ernest Turro—a biostatistician who focuses on genetics, genomics, and molecular diagnostics—used whole genome sequencing data from the 100,000 Genomes Project to search for areas associated with intellectual disabilities.
His lab found a genetic association that is the most common one yet to be associated with neurodevelopmental abnormality. And the gene they identified doesn’t even make a protein.
Trouble with the spliceosome
Most genes include instructions for how to make proteins. That’s true. And yet human genes are not arranged linearly—or rather, they are arranged linearly, but not contiguously. A gene containing the instructions for which amino acids to string together to make a particular protein—hemoglobin, insulin, serotonin, albumin, estrogen, whatever protein you like—is modular. It contains part of the amino acid sequence, then it has a chunk of DNA that is largely irrelevant to that sequence, then a bit more of the protein’s sequence, then another chunk of random DNA, back and forth until the end of the protein. It’s as if each of these prose paragraphs were separated by a string of unrelated letters (but not a meaningful paragraph from a different article).
Apple Says iPhone 5s Now Obsolete as iPod Touch 6 Becomes ‘Vintage’
Apple today made three changes to its vintage and obsolete products list, involving the iPhone 5s, sixth-generation iPod touch, and an older iMac model.
First, Apple now considers the iPhone 5s to be an “obsolete” product worldwide, meaning that Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers no longer offer repairs or other hardware service for the device. Apple says it considers a product “obsolete” once seven years have passed since the company last distributed it for sale.
Apple released the iPhone 5s in September 2013, with its key new feature being the Touch ID fingerprint sensor built into the Home button. The device also introduced the A7 chip, which was Apple’s first iPhone chip with 64-bit architecture.
Second, the sixth-generation iPod touch and the late 2015 edition of the 21.5-inch iMac with a Retina 4K display are now classified as “vintage” products, as more than five years have passed since the company stopped distributing the devices for sale. Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers can continue to offer repairs for vintage products for up to two more years, but only if the necessary parts remain available.
The sixth-generation iPod touch was released in 2015, and it was the second-last model of the device. Apple discontinued the iPod touch line in 2022.Tag: Vintage and Obsolete Apple ProductsThis article, “Apple Says iPhone 5s Now Obsolete as iPod Touch 6 Becomes ‘Vintage'” first appeared on MacRumors.comDiscuss this article in our forums
Apple today made three changes to its vintage and obsolete products list, involving the iPhone 5s, sixth-generation iPod touch, and an older iMac model.
First, Apple now considers the iPhone 5s to be an “obsolete” product worldwide, meaning that Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers no longer offer repairs or other hardware service for the device. Apple says it considers a product “obsolete” once seven years have passed since the company last distributed it for sale.
Apple released the iPhone 5s in September 2013, with its key new feature being the Touch ID fingerprint sensor built into the Home button. The device also introduced the A7 chip, which was Apple’s first iPhone chip with 64-bit architecture.
Second, the sixth-generation iPod touch and the late 2015 edition of the 21.5-inch iMac with a Retina 4K display are now classified as “vintage” products, as more than five years have passed since the company stopped distributing the devices for sale. Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers can continue to offer repairs for vintage products for up to two more years, but only if the necessary parts remain available.
The sixth-generation iPod touch was released in 2015, and it was the second-last model of the device. Apple discontinued the iPod touch line in 2022.
This article, “Apple Says iPhone 5s Now Obsolete as iPod Touch 6 Becomes ‘Vintage’” first appeared on MacRumors.com
Discuss this article in our forums