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The World’s Population Is Projected To Peak At 10.3 Billion In the 2080s

Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis writes: According to a new report from the United Nations, the world population is expected to grow to an estimated peak of 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s, an increase over the current global population of 8.2 billion people.

The estimated world population at the end of the century (2100) is now expected to be 6% less than estimates from a decade ago.

However, calculating the number of future people is not a perfect science, with “many sources of uncertainty in estimating the global population,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It estimated the world reached 8 billion people last September, while the U.N. timed the milestone nearly one year earlier.

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14 Jul

Elon Musk ‘Fully Endorses’ Donald Trump After Deadly Rally Shooting

“I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Elon Musk posted on X after the incident.

14 Jul

Check Out WIRED’s Merch Store Refresh

Brand-new mugs, hats, and shirts are just a few of the things you’ll find in our store for branded merchandise, SHOP.WIRED.

14 Jul

The Best Hearing Aids for Seniors (2024)

These WIRED-tested hearing aids, approved by a licensed audiologist, will help seniors whose hearing has faded with age.

14 Jul

YouTube Investigators Say MSI Exposed 600K+ Warranty Records Via an Open Server

ewhac (Slashdot reader #5,844) writes:

Friday the hardware review site Gamers Nexus filed a YouTube video report alleging some serious claims: that PC component manufacturer MSI left their internal warranty and RMA processing web site accessible to the open Internet, with no authentication. Virtually the entire history of MSI warranty claims going back to at least 2017 were searchable and accessible for the browsing, including customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, and serial numbers of MSI devices.

This event follows closely on the heels of a video report just a few days earlier alleging PC component manufacturer Zotac left their warranty/RMA and B2B records server open to indexing by Google.

Gamers Nexus posted their reports after informing Zotac and MSI of their open servers and verifying they were no longer accessible. However, the data from MSI’s server could have been fully scraped at this point, giving scammers a gold mine of data permitting them to impersonate MSI personnel and defraud customers. Anyone who’s filed a warranty or RMA claim with MSI in the past seven years should exercise caution when receiving unsolicited emails or phone calls purporting to be from MSI.

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14 Jul

After Criticism, Signal Agrees to Secure Plain-Text Encryption Keys for Users’ Message Databases

“Signal is finally tightening its desktop client’s security,” reports BleepingComputer — by changing the way it stores plain text encryption keys for the SQLite database where users’ messages are stored:

When BleepingComputer contacted Signal about the flaw in 2018, we never received a response. Instead, a Signal Support Manager responded to a user’s concerns in the Signal forum, stating that the security of its database was never something it claimed to provide. “The database key was never intended to be a secret. At-rest encryption is not something that Signal Desktop is currently trying to provide or has ever claimed to provide,” responded the Signal employee…

[L]ast week, mobile security researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk of Mysk Inc warned on X not to use Signal Desktop because of the same security weakness we reported on in 2018… In April, an independent developer, Tom Plant, created a request to merge code that uses Electron’s SafeStorage API “…to opportunistically encrypt the key with platform APIs like DPAPI on Windows and Keychain on macOS,” Plant explained in the merge request… When used, encryption keys are generated and stored using an operating system’s cryptography system and secure key stores. For example, on Macs, the encryption key would be stored in the Keychain, and on Linux, it would use the windows manager’s secret store, such as kwallet, kwallet5, kwallet6, and gnome-libsecret… While the solution would provide additional security for all Signal desktop users, the request lay dormant until last week’s X drama.

Two days ago, a Signal developer finally replied that they implemented support for Electron’s safeStorage, which would be available soon in an upcoming Beta version. While the new safeStorage implementation is tested, Signal also included a fallback mechanism that allows the program to decrypt the database using the legacy database decryption key…

Signal says that the legacy key will be removed once the new feature is tested.

“To be fair to Signal, encrypting local databases without a user-supplied password is a problem for all applications…” the article acknowledges.
“However, as a company that prides itself on its security and privacy, it was strange that the organization dismissed the issue and did not attempt to provide a solution…”

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14 Jul

Joe Engle, the Last Living X-15 Pilot, Passed Away July 10 At the Age of 91

clovis (Slashdot reader #4,684) writes: Joe Engle received his astronaut wings in a ceremony on July 15, 1965, for his flight in the hypersonic aircraft, reaching an altitude of 50 miles above the Earth. At 32, he was the youngest man to become an astronaut.

Later, he entered the Apollo program and eventually commanded the STS-2 flight of the Space Shuttle.

Here is an interview from 2004. I thought it was interesting that they used the F-104 as the chase plane and for training because the flight characteristics were so similar, which says a lot about the F-104.

Anyway, the X-15 project was a big deal for us science/geek types back when I was a kid. I wonder if it’s something today’s generation is even aware of.

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13 Jul

21 Best Early Amazon Prime Day Deals (2024)

Prime Day falls on July 16 and 17, but we’ve handpicked deals on WIRED-tested products—from tech to blenders to hair straighteners—sitting at some of their lowest prices ever.

13 Jul

The Sweeping Danger of the AT&T Phone Records Breach

Telecom giant AT&T says a major data breach has exposed the call and text records of “nearly all” of its customers, epitomizing the dire state of data security.

13 Jul

OpenAI Working On New Reasoning Technology Under Code Name ‘Strawberry’

OpenAI is close to a breakthrough with a new project called “Strawberry,” which aims to enhance its AI models with advanced reasoning abilities. Reuters reports: Teams inside OpenAI are working on Strawberry, according to a copy of a recent internal OpenAI document seen by Reuters in May. Reuters could not ascertain the precise date of the document, which details a plan for how OpenAI intends to use Strawberry to perform research. The source described the plan to Reuters as a work in progress. The news agency could not establish how close Strawberry is to being publicly available. How Strawberry works is a tightly kept secret even within OpenAI, the person said.

The document describes a project that uses Strawberry models with the aim of enabling the company’s AI to not just generate answers to queries but to plan ahead enough to navigate the internet autonomously and reliably to perform what OpenAI terms “deep research,” according to the source. This is something that has eluded AI models to date, according to interviews with more than a dozen AI researchers. Asked about Strawberry and the details reported in this story, an OpenAI company spokesperson said in a statement: “We want our AI models to see and understand the world more like we do. Continuous research into new AI capabilities is a common practice in the industry, with a shared belief that these systems will improve in reasoning over time.”

On Tuesday at an internal all-hands meeting, OpenAI showed a demo of a research project that it claimed had new human-like reasoning skills, according to Bloomberg, opens new tab. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the meeting but declined to give details of the contents. Reuters could not determine if the project demonstrated was Strawberry. OpenAI hopes the innovation will improve its AI models’ reasoning capabilities dramatically, the person familiar with it said, adding that Strawberry involves a specialized way of processing an AI model after it has been pre-trained on very large datasets. Researchers Reuters interviewed say that reasoning is key to AI achieving human or super-human-level intelligence.

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