Month: February 2024

And here in 2024, “we can now start reading its contents.”

A worldwide competition to decipher the charred texts of the Villa of Papyri — an ancient Roman mansion destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius — has revealed a timeless infatuation with the pleasures of music, the color purple, and, of course, the zingy taste of capers. The so-called Vesuvius challenge was launched a few years ago by computer scientist Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky with support from Silicon Valley investors. The ongoing ‘master plan’ is to build on Seales’ previous work and read all 1,800 or so charred papyri from the ancient Roman library, starting with scrolls labeled 1 to 4.

In 2023, the annual gold prize was awarded to a team of three students, who recovered four passages containing 140 characters — the longest extractions yet. The winners are Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger. “After 275 years, the ancient puzzle of the Herculaneum Papyri has been solved,” reads the Vesuvius Challenge Scroll Prize website. “But the quest to uncover the secrets of the scrolls is just beginning….” Only now, with the advent of X-ray tomography and machine learning, can their inky words be pulled from the darkness of carbon.
A few months ago students deciphered a single word — “purple,” according to the article. But “That winning code was then made available for all competitors to build upon.”
Within three months, passages in Latin and Greek were blooming from the blackness, almost as if by magic. The team with the most readable submission at the end of 2023 included both previous finders of the word ‘purple’. Their unfurling of scroll 1 is truly impressive and includes more than 11 columns of text. Experts are now rushing to translate what has been found. So far, about 5 percent of the scroll has been unrolled and read to date. It is not a duplicate of past work, scholars of the Vesuvius Challenge say, but a “never-before-seen text from antiquity.”
One line reads: “In the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.”

Thanks to davidone (Slashdot reader #12,252) for sharing the article.

“This trend poses new threats for elections, financial fraud, harassment through nonconsensual pornography, and the next generation of cyber bullying.” Microsoft found its own tools being used in a recently-publicized episode, and the VP writes that “We need to act with urgency to combat all these problems.”

Microsoft’s blog post says they’re “committed as a company to a robust and comprehensive approach,” citing six different areas of focus:

A strong safety architecture. This includes “ongoing red team analysis, preemptive classifiers, the blocking of abusive prompts, automated testing, and rapid bans of users who abuse the system… based on strong and broad-based data analysis.”
Durable media provenance and watermarking. (“Last year at our Build 2023 conference, we announced media provenance capabilities that use cryptographic methods to mark and sign AI-generated content with metadata about its source and history.”)
Safeguarding our services from abusive content and conduct. (“We are committed to identifying and removing deceptive and abusive content” hosted on services including LinkedIn and Microsoft’s Gaming network.)
Robust collaboration across industry and with governments and civil society. This includes “others in the tech sector” and “proactive efforts” with both civil society groups and “appropriate collaboration with governments.”
Modernized legislation to protect people from the abuse of technology. “We look forward to contributing ideas and supporting new initiatives by governments around the world.”
Public awareness and education. “We need to help people learn how to spot the differences between legitimate and fake content, including with watermarking. This will require new public education tools and programs, including in close collaboration with civil society and leaders across society.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article

Theres autonomous tractors and “smart spraying” systems that use AI-powered cameras to identify weeds, just for starters. “Among the critical components of precision agriculture: Internet- and GPS connected agricultural equipment, highly accurate remote sensors, ‘big data’ analytics and cloud computing…”

As with any technological revolution, however, there are both “winners” and “losers” in the emerging age of precision agriculture… Precision agriculture, once broadly adopted, promises to further reduce the need for human labor to run farms. (Autonomous equipment means you no longer even need drivers!) However, the risks it poses go well beyond a reduction in the agricultural work force. First, as the USDA notes on its website: the scale and high capital costs of precision agriculture technology tend to favor large, corporate producers over smaller farms. Then there are the systemic risks to U.S. agriculture of an increasingly connected and consolidated agriculture sector, with a few major OEMs having the ability to remotely control and manage vital equipment on millions of U.S. farms… (Listen to my podcast interview with the hacker Sick Codes, who reverse engineered a John Deere display to run the Doom video game for insights into the company’s internal struggles with cybersecurity.)

Finally, there are the reams of valuable and proprietary environmental and operational data that farmers collect, store and leverage to squeeze the maximum productivity out of their land. For centuries, such information resided in farmers’ heads, or on written or (more recently) digital records that they owned and controlled exclusively, typically passing that knowledge and data down to succeeding generation of farm owners. Precision agriculture technology greatly expands the scope, and granularity, of that data. But in doing so, it also wrests it from the farmer’s control and shares it with equipment manufacturers and service providers — often without the explicit understanding of the farmers themselves, and almost always without monetary compensation to the farmer for the data itself. In fact, the Federal Government is so concerned about farm data they included a section (1619) on “information gathering” into the latest farm bill.
Over time, this massive transfer of knowledge from individual farmers or collectives to multinational corporations risks beggaring farmers by robbing them of one of their most vital assets: data, and turning them into little more than passive caretakers of automated equipment managed, controlled and accountable to distant corporate masters.

Weighing in is Kevin Kenney, a vocal advocate for the “right to repair” agricultural equipment (and also an alternative fuel systems engineer at Grassroots Energy LLC). In the interview, he warns about the dangers of tying repairs to factory-installed firmware, and argues that its the long-time farmer’s “trade secrets” that are really being harvested today. The ultimate beneficiary could end up being the current “cabal” of tractor manufacturers.

“While we can all agree that it’s coming…the question is who will own these robots?”

First, we need to acknowledge that there are existing laws on the books which for whatever reason, are not being enforced. The FTC should immediately start an investigation into John Deere and the rest of the ‘Tractor Cabal’ to see to what extent farmers’ farm data security and privacy are being compromised. This directly affects national food security because if thousands- or tens of thousands of tractors’ are hacked and disabled or their data is lost, crops left to rot in the fields would lead to bare shelves at the grocery store… I think our universities have also been delinquent in grasping and warning farmers about the data-theft being perpetrated on farmers’ operations throughout the United States and other countries by makers of precision agricultural equipment.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy for sharing the article.

Meanwhile, on the trade front, the Commerce Department has continued to step up restrictions, limiting the performance of accelerators sold to China. But, as we’ve previously reported, while these efforts have made it harder for countries like China to get their hands on American chips, they are far from perfect. To address these limitations, the researchers have proposed implementing a global registry for AI chip sales that would track them over the course of their lifecycle, even after they’ve left their country of origin. Such a registry, they suggest, could incorporate a unique identifier into each chip, which could help to combat smuggling of components.

At the more extreme end of the spectrum, researchers have suggested that kill switches could be baked into the silicon to prevent their use in malicious applications. […] The academics are clearer elsewhere in their study, proposing that processor functionality could be switched off or dialed down by regulators remotely using digital licensing: “Specialized co-processors that sit on the chip could hold a cryptographically signed digital “certificate,” and updates to the use-case policy could be delivered remotely via firmware updates. The authorization for the on-chip license could be periodically renewed by the regulator, while the chip producer could administer it. An expired or illegitimate license would cause the chip to not work, or reduce its performance.” In theory, this could allow watchdogs to respond faster to abuses of sensitive technologies by cutting off access to chips remotely, but the authors warn that doing so isn’t without risk. The implication being, if implemented incorrectly, that such a kill switch could become a target for cybercriminals to exploit.

Another proposal would require multiple parties to sign off on potentially risky AI training tasks before they can be deployed at scale. “Nuclear weapons use similar mechanisms called permissive action links,” they wrote. For nuclear weapons, these security locks are designed to prevent one person from going rogue and launching a first strike. For AI however, the idea is that if an individual or company wanted to train a model over a certain threshold in the cloud, they’d first need to get authorization to do so. Though a potent tool, the researchers observe that this could backfire by preventing the development of desirable AI. The argument seems to be that while the use of nuclear weapons has a pretty clear-cut outcome, AI isn’t always so black and white. But if this feels a little too dystopian for your tastes, the paper dedicates an entire section to reallocating AI resources for the betterment of society as a whole. The idea being that policymakers could come together to make AI compute more accessible to groups unlikely to use it for evil, a concept described as “allocation.”

The tech giant, Bloomberg has learned, has plans to integrate AI features into its next software updates for its iPhone and iPad known internally as Crystal. Glow, another internal AI project, is slated to be added to MacOS. The company is also building features that will generate Apple Music playlists and slideshows, according to the outlet. An AI-powered search feature titled Spotlight, currently limited to answering questions around launching apps, is in the works as well, Bloomberg reported.