Japan is aiming to phase out floppy disks and CD-ROMs, which until now were forms of physical media required for submitting some official documents to the government. Engadget reports: Back in 2022, Minister of Digital Affairs Taro Kono urged various branches of the government to stop requiring businesses to submit information on outdated forms of physical media. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) is one of the first to make the switch. "Under the current law, there are many provisions stipulating the use of specific recording media such as floppy disks regarding application and notification methods," METI said last week, according to The Register. After this calendar year, METI will no longer require businesses to submit data on floppy disks under 34 ordinances. The same goes for CD-ROMs when it comes to an unspecified number of procedures. There's still quite some way to go before businesses can stop using either format entirely, however. Kono's staff identified some 1,900 protocols across several government departments that still require the likes of floppy disks, CD-ROMs and even MiniDiscs. The physical media requirements even applied to key industries such as utility suppliers, mining operations and aircraft and weapons manufacturers. There are a couple of main reasons why there's a push to stop using floppy disks, as SoraNews24 points out. One major factor is that floppy disks can be hard to come by. Sony, the last major manufacturer, stopped selling them in 2011. Another is that some data types just won't fit on a floppy disk. A single photo can easily be larger than the format's 1.4MB storage capacity.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Mercedes-Benz accidentally exposed a trove of internal data after leaving a private key online that gave "unrestricted access" to the company's source code, according to the security research firm that discovered it. Shubham Mittal, co-founder and chief technology officer of RedHunt Labs, alerted TechCrunch to the exposure and asked for help in disclosing to the car maker. The London-based cybersecurity company said it discovered a Mercedes employee's authentication token in a public GitHub repository during a routine internet scan in January. According to Mittal, this token -- an alternative to using a password for authenticating to GitHub -- could grant anyone full access to Mercedes's GitHub Enterprise Server, thus allowing the download of the company's private source code repositories. "The GitHub token gave 'unrestricted' and 'unmonitored' access to the entire source code hosted at the internal GitHub Enterprise Server," Mittal explained in a report shared by TechCrunch. "The repositories include a large amount of intellectual property connection strings, cloud access keys, blueprints, design documents, [single sign-on] passwords, API Keys, and other critical internal information." Mittal provided TechCrunch with evidence that the exposed repositories contained Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) keys, a Postgres database, and Mercedes source code. It's not known if any customer data was contained within the repositories. It's not known if anyone else besides Mittal discovered the exposed key, which was published in late-September 2023. A Mercedes spokesperson confirmed that the company "revoked the respective API token and removed the public repository immediately." "We can confirm that internal source code was published on a public GitHub repository by human error. The security of our organization, products, and services is one of our top priorities. We will continue to analyze this case according to our normal processes. Depending on this, we implement remedial measures."

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Andrew Joseph, writing for STAT News: There was something odd about these Alzheimer's cases. Part of it was the patients' presentations: Some didn't have the classic symptoms of the condition. But it was also that the patients were in their 40s and 50s, even their 30s, far younger than people who normally develop the disease. They didn't even have the known genetic mutations that can set people on the course for such early-onset Alzheimer's. But this small handful of patients did share a particular history. As children, they had received growth hormone taken from the brains of human cadavers, which used to be a treatment for a number of conditions that caused short stature. Now, decades later, they were showing signs of Alzheimer's. In the interim, scientists had discovered that that type of hormone treatment they got could unwittingly transfer bits of protein into recipients' brains. In some cases, it had induced a fatal brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD -- a finding that led to the banning of the procedure 40 years ago. It seemed that it wasn't just the proteins behind CJD that could get transferred. As the scientific team treating the patients reported Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, the hormone transplant seeded the beta-amyloid protein that's a hallmark of Alzheimer's in some recipients' brains, which, decades later, propagated into disease-causing plaques. They are the first known cases of transmitted Alzheimer's disease, likely a scientific anomaly yet a finding that adds another wrinkle to ongoing arguments about what truly causes Alzheimer's. "It looks real that some of these people developed early-onset Alzheimer's because of that [hormone treatment]," said Ben Wolozin, an expert on neurodegenerative diseases at Boston University's medical school, who was not involved in the study.

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IBM delivered a companywide ultimatum to managers who are still working remotely: move near an office or leave the company. From a report: All US managers must immediately report to an office or client location at least three days a week "regardless of current work location status," according to a memo sent on Jan. 16 viewed by Bloomberg. Badge-in data will be used to "assess individual presence" and shared with managers and human resources, Senior Vice President John Granger wrote in the note. Those working remotely, other than employees with exceptions such as medical issues or military service, who don't live close enough to commute to a facility must relocate near an IBM office by the start of August, according to the memo. Managers who don't agree to relocate and are unable to secure a role that's approved to be remote must "separate from IBM," Granger wrote.

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Regulators put limits on Boeing 737 MAX production; grounded MAX 9 jets have resumed flying after required inspections. From a report: Bolts needed to secure part of an Alaska Airlines jet that blew off in midair appear to have been missing when the plane left Boeing's factory. Boeing and other industry officials increasingly believe the plane maker's employees failed to put back the bolts when they reinstalled a 737 MAX 9 plug door after opening or removing it during production, according to people familiar with the matter. The increasingly likely scenario, according to some of these people, is based partly on an apparent absence of markings on the Alaska door plug itself that would suggest bolts were in place when it blew off the jet around 16,000 feet over Oregon on Jan. 5. They also pointed to paperwork and process lapses at Boeing's Renton, Wash., factory related to the company's work on the plug door. The National Transportation Safety Board has been conducting metallurgical analysis of the plug door but hasn't released the results of the testing. Laboratory tests might show whether the bolts were in place or not there at all. An update in the NTSB probe is expected as soon as this week. New evidence could later emerge before accident investigators reach final conclusions. It couldn't be determined how many people were involved with work on the plug door at Boeing's 737 factory. Supplier Spirit AeroSystems delivered the 737 fuselage to Boeing's factory with the door plug installed. The plug door itself was constructed in Spirit's Malaysian factory, while the fuselage was assembled in Wichita, Kan. Boeing opened or removed the door plug after the 737 MAX 9 jet's fuselage arrived at the plane maker's Renton, Wash., factory for final assembly, The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets have reported.

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UnknowingFool writes: Jurors on Friday, January 26, 2024 ruled in favor of celebrity tattoo artist Kat Von D (real name Katherine von Drachenberg) in a copyright lawsuit regarding a photo of Miles Davis in that her use of the photo was not copyright infringement. The photographer of the photo, Jeffrey Sedlik, sued Von D in February 2021 after she used the photo as the basis for a tattoo she inked on a friend. Kat Von D, who gained fame in the reality shows about tattoo artists "LA Ink" and "Miami Ink", put the tattoo on her friend's arm in 2017 as a gift. The jury found that the tattoo was not "substantially similar" to the photo and were also persuaded that the non-commercial nature of the work meant her use of the photo would be fair use. The plaintiff Sedilk said he is planning to appeal the ruling arguing it contradicts the Supreme Court ruling in Warhol Foundation vs Goldsmith (PDF) where the artist Andy Warhol made a silkscreen print of Lynn Goldsmith's photo of Prince. The main difference pointed out by Von D's lawyers is that Warhol charged $10,000 for his print whereas Von D did not charge her friend for the tattoo and that is was closer to "fan art".

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T-Mobile has tweaked its terms of service for its home broadband users to add a new clause: If you are a heavy internet user that passes 1.2TB of data in a monthly billing cycle, you may have your speeds slowed in "times of congestion" or when there is a lot of pressure on the network. CNET: As spotted by The Mobile Report, the change went into effect on Jan. 18. In its updated terms, the carrier says that these users "will be prioritized last on the network" in congestion situations, which could mean painfully slow speeds for however long the congestion persists. T-Mobile does note that since its Home Internet service is available only in "limited areas" and intended to be used in a "stationary" setting, as opposed to a phone that could be in a busy place like a packed stadium, "these customers should be less likely to notice congestion in general."

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Spying used to be all about secrets. Increasingly, it's about what's hiding in plain sight [non-paywalled link] . From a report: A staggering amount of data, from Facebook posts and YouTube clips to location pings from mobile phones and car apps, sits in the open internet, available to anyone who looks. US intelligence agencies have struggled for years to tap into such data, which they refer to as open-source intelligence, or OSINT. But that's starting to change. In October the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all the nation's intelligence agencies, brought in longtime analyst and cyber expert Jason Barrett to help with the US intelligence community's approach to OSINT. His immediate task will be to help develop the intelligence community's national OSINT strategy, which will focus on coordination, data acquisition and the development of tools to improve its approach to this type of intelligence work. ODNI expects to implement the plan in the coming months, according to a spokesperson. Barrett's appointment, which hasn't previously been reported publicly, comes after more than a year of work on the strategy led by the Central Intelligence Agency, which has for years headed up the government's efforts on OSINT. The challenge with other forms of intelligence-gathering, such as electronic surveillance or human intelligence, can be secretly collecting enough information in the first place. With OSINT, the issue is sifting useful insights out of the unthinkable amount of information available digitally. "Our greatest weakness in OSINT has been the vast scale of how much we collect," says Randy Nixon, director of the CIA's Open Source Enterprise division. Nixon's office has developed a tool similar to ChatGPT that uses AI to sift the ever-growing flood of data. Now available to thousands of users within the federal government, the tool points analysts to the most important information and auto-summarizes content. Government task forces have warned since the 1990s that the US was at risk of falling behind on OSINT. But the federal intelligence community has generally prioritized information it gathers itself, stymying progress.

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Blackstone is betting big on AI, plowing billions into data centers after its $10 billion takeover of QTS last year. The private equity giant is bankrolling the development of massive computing bunkers on hundreds of acres in Phoenix and other key markets to meet exploding demand from tech titans like Microsoft. With AI taking hold, QTS has become North America's top provider of leased data center capacity. But the data crunch has strained power grids. QTS estimates its data centers will tap 6 gigawatts of electricity, equal to the needs of 5 million homes.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has introduced more protections to Designer, an AI text-to-image generation tool that people were using to make nonconsensual sexual images of celebrities. Microsoft made the changes after 404 Media reported that the AI-generated nude images of Taylor Swift that went viral last week came from 4chan and a Telegram channel where people were using Designer to make AI-generated images of celebrities. "We are investigating these reports and are taking appropriate action to address them," a Microsoft spokesperson told us in an email on Friday. "Our Code of Conduct prohibits the use of our tools for the creation of adult or non-consensual intimate content, and any repeated attempts to produce content that goes against our policies may result in loss of access to the service. We have large teams working on the development of guardrails and other safety systems in line with our responsible AI principles, including content filtering, operational monitoring and abuse detection to mitigate misuse of the system and help create a safer environment for users."

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China has approved more than 40 AI models for public use in the first six months since authorities began the approval process, as the country strives to catch up to the U.S. in AI development, according to Chinese media. Reuters: Chinese regulators granted approvals to a total of 14 large language models (LLM) for public use last week, Chinese state-backed Securities Times reported. It marks the fourth batch of approvals China has granted, which counts Xiaomi, 4Paradigm and 01.AI among the recipients. Beijing started requiring tech companies to obtain approval from regulators to open their LLMs to the public last August. It underscored China's approach towards developing AI technology while striving to keep it under its purview and control. Beijing approved its first batch of AI models in August shortly after the approval process was adopted. Baidu, Alibaba and ByteDance were among China's first companies to receive approvals Chinese regulators then granted two more batches of approvals in November and December before another batch was given the greenlight this month. While the government has not disclosed the exact list of approved companies available for public checks, Securities Times said on Sunday more than 40 AI models have been approved.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon Prime Video has been a free perk for those who subscribe to the ecommerce giant's free shipping service, but if you're a US Prime subscriber, things change from today. We first learned of the planned change back in September of last year, with the implementation date announced in an email to customers in December. If you want to retain the ad-free experience, you have to hand over an extra $2.99 per month. The WSJ notes Amazon's claim that it has a lower ad-load than most ad-supported services. Amazon's presentation said the average ad load per hour is expected to be between two and three-and-half minutes, which would be meaningfully smaller than traditional television and most other streaming services. Some commercials would appear before a program begins playing, while others would interrupt it.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The estate of George Carlin has filed a federal lawsuit against the comedy podcast Dudesy for an hour-long comedy special sold as an AI-generated impression of the late comedian. But a representative for one of the podcast hosts behind the special now admits that it was actually written by a human. In the lawsuit, filed by Carlin manager Jerold Hamza in a California district court, the Carlin estate points out that the special, "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead," (which was set to "private" on YouTube shortly after the lawsuit was filed) presents itself as being created by an AI trained on decades worth of Carlin's material. That training would, by definition, involve making "unauthorized copies" of "Carlin's original, copyrighted routines" without permission in order "to fabricate a semblance of Carlin's voice and generate a Carlin stand-up comedy routine," according to the lawsuit. Despite the presentation as an AI creation, there was a good deal of evidence that the Dudesy podcast and the special itself were not actually written by an AI, as Ars laid out in detail this week. And in the wake of this lawsuit, a representative for Dudesy host Will Sasso admitted as much to The New York Times. "It's a fictional podcast character created by two human beings, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen," spokeswoman Danielle Del told the newspaper. "The YouTube video 'I'm Glad I'm Dead' was completely written by Chad Kultgen." Regardless of that admission, Carlin estate lawyer Josh Schiller told the Times that the lawsuit would move forward. "We don't know what they're saying to be true," he said. "What we will know is that they will be deposed. They will produce documents, and there will be evidence that shows one way or another how the show was created."

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Amazon will not move forward with a planned acquisition of vacuum-maker iRobot, the two said Monday, citing "no path to regulatory approval" as the deal-breaker. Amazon announced its plan to acquire iRobot for $1.7 billion in August 2022. iRobot said separately that it will lay off about 350 jobs, or 31% of its workforce.

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The Los Angeles Times reports that after more than 10 years of planning, "Barring weather delays, the space shuttle Endeavour will undergo its final, historic lift starting Monday night, a maneuver no other retired orbiter has undergone..." First, a pair of cranes will hoist the shuttle from a horizontal position to a vertical one; the spacecraft will be attached to a sling, a large metal frame that'll support it during the move. An 11-story crane will lift the tail of Endeavour, while a 40-story crawler crane — about the height of [Los Angeles'] City Hall — will lift the nose. Once the shuttle is pointed toward the stars, the shorter crane will be disconnected, leaving the taller crane to gently swing the orbiter to its final position and lowering it to be affixed with the giant orange external tank. The external tank is attached to twin solid rocket boosters, which are connected to the exhibit's foundation... Once the shuttle full stack is in place, the rest of the museum will be built around it. It could be a few years before it is open to the public, given the construction schedule and additional time needed to install exhibits. "Los Angeles will be home to the only retired space shuttle displayed in a full-stack arrangement as if ready for launch," the article points out. Officials hope to livestream the historic lift on Monday night at 9:30 p.m. PST.

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"Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope observed the smallest exoplanet where water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere," writes SciTechDaily. "At only approximately twice Earth's diameter, the planet GJ 9827d could be an example of potential planets with water-rich atmospheres elsewhere in our galaxy." "This would be the first time that we can directly show through an atmospheric detection, that these planets with water-rich atmospheres can actually exist around other stars," said team member Björn Benneke of the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets at Université de Montréal. "This is an important step toward determining the prevalence and diversity of atmospheres on rocky planets." "Water on a planet this small is a landmark discovery," added co-principal investigator Laura Kreidberg of Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. "It pushes closer than ever to characterizing truly Earth-like worlds." However, it remains too early to tell whether Hubble spectroscopically measured a small amount of water vapor in a puffy hydrogen-rich atmosphere, or if the planet's atmosphere is mostly made of water, left behind after a primeval hydrogen/helium atmosphere evaporated under stellar radiation... Because the planet is as hot as Venus, at 800 degrees Fahrenheit, it definitely would be an inhospitable, steamy world if the atmosphere were predominantly water vapor... "Observing water is a gateway to finding other things," said Thomas Greene, astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "This Hubble discovery opens the door to future study of these types of planets by the James Webb Space Telescope.

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Luke has inherited a Java Struts-based application. Struts is one of the many Java web frameworks, designed around having HTTP requests trigger actions- that is routing HTTP requests to a specific function call.

Now, on one screen, the user filled in a form, and then the corresponding action on the server side needed to read the form data for an eventId and act upon it. In Struts, this can be very simple:

int event_id = Integer.parseInt(request.getParameter("event_id"));

That's the assumed way of doing that. But if you don't learn how to use the framework properly, you might end up writing something else:

public ActionForward execute(ActionMapping mapping, ActionForm form, HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception { int event_id = 0; try { InputStream is = request.getInputStream(); InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(is); BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(isr); String eventStr = ""; StringBuffer buff = new StringBuffer(); String line; do { line = br.readLine(); buff.append(line); } while (br.readLine() != null); eventStr = buff.toString(); StringTokenizer parseEventId = new StringTokenizer(eventStr, ","); while (parseEventId.hasMoreTokens()) { String eventString = parseEventId.nextToken(); if (eventString.startsWith("event_id")) { event_id = Integer.parseInt(eventString.substring(eventString.indexOf("=") + 1)); } } } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } ... }

This pile of code opts to read in the entire body of the input stream as a string, and then parse that string using a tokenizer, searching for substring which starts with event_id, at which point they can split on the = and get the integer value.

All of this is too complicated and reinventing a wheel badly, but the specific token we split on hints at deeper problems: ", ", as well as the fact that our read do/while loop only reads every other line.

An HTML form POST request encodes the data either as application/x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart/form-data. Neither of those formats sends up commas to separate key/value pairs. Either the client side is applying its own custom formatting, which we need to parse, or this code is just plain wrong.

But also, Struts does have a whole model/form binding feature set, so the "official" way to do this would be to just map to a Java Bean object.

Everything about this is wrong and overengineered, and smells like it was written by someone who was "smarter" than everyone else, and thus couldn't be bothered with using standard approaches to anything.

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Around three hours after its moon lander had touched down, Japan's space agency "decided to switch SLIM off with 12% power remaining to allow for a possible resumption when the sun's angle changed," reports Agence France-Presse. Today there was good news: Japan's Moon lander has resumed operations, the country's space agency said on Monday, indicating that power had been restored after it was left upside down during a slightly haphazard landing. The probe, nicknamed the "moon sniper", had tumbled down a crater slope during its landing on 20 January, leaving its solar batteries facing in the wrong direction and unable to generate electricity... The agency posted on X an image shot by Slim of "toy poodle", a rock observed near the lander.

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"Someday in the not too distant future, it might no longer be possible to drive a brand-new car faster than 80 mph in California," writes Car and Driver: That's because state senator Scott Wiener earlier this week proposed a new bill that aims to prevent certain new vehicles from going more than 10 mph over the speed limit. In California, the maximum posted speed limit is 70 mph, meaning anything north of 80 mph would be off limits. The Speeding and Fatality Emergency Reduction on California Streets — or SAFER California Streets, for short — is a package of bills that includes SB 961 that was published Tuesday, which essentially calls for speed governors on new cars and trucks built or sold in California starting with the 2027 model year. These vehicles would be required to have an "intelligent speed limiter system" that electronically prevents the driver from speeding above the aforementioned threshold. The speed-limiter tech wouldn't apply to emergency vehicles. There's also language in the bill that the passive device would have the ability to be temporarily disabled by the driver, however, it's unclear in what situations that might apply. The bill also states that automakers would be able to fully disable the speed-limiter, but presumably only for authorized emergency vehicles. The commissioner of the California Highway Patrol could authorize disabling the speed-limiter too at their discretion... The proposed legislation is said to be an attempt to address rising traffic fatalities, which in California have reportedly increased by 22 perecent from 2019 to 2022.

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Halo — the TV series — launches its second season on February 8th. But today a trailer premiered during halftime of the pre-Super Bowl football playoff. Gizmodo reports: Even though the Covenant are the other side of Halo's ongoing conflict, the first season of Paramount+'s TV series largely represented them through a human proxy named Makee. With the upcoming second season, the coalition of alien races is set to become a more prominent threat, and that means they'll be getting more proper screentime. IGN had written that Season 1 "isn't a perfect adaptation of the games, but it ultimately succeeds in expanding the series' mythology and taking a more character-driven approach to Master Chief's adventures." This week Paramount+ also released a 28-minute compilation of "Epic Battle Scenes from Season 1, a season which reportedly cost $200 million to film. And now the entertainment site Collider reports on what comes next: While on the set for Halo Season 2, Collider's Steve Weintraub and some other reporters got the chance to sit down with stars Schreiber and Kate Kennedy to discuss how the show will further flesh out the Covenant in the upcoming episodes. Part of that involves expanding their arsenal with new vehicles like the corvette, a class of ships used in the Halo canon by the Covenant for reconnaissance, stealth, and much more. Kennedy placed it among her favorite Season 2 set designs, saying... "It's huge, and what the set guys did for it, and the art department, is really, really impressive. They turned it around so quickly, and it's, like, awe-inspiring, it's huge." Aside from making the Covenant more formidable, Season 2 will also focus on making them more understandable. Part of that involves diving into the thought process of key players within the alien faction, including two that Schreiber could tease. "Yeah, we definitely go into the Covenant mind-state, mentality," he said... In future seasons, Schreiber believes Halo will only continue to develop the Covenant, their motives, and the relationships and allegiances within the coalition as the story of intergalactic war unfolds.

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