Gene-edited Hens May End Cull of Billions of Chicks

Israeli researchers say they have developed gene-edited hens that lay eggs from which only female chicks hatch. From a report: The breakthrough could prevent the slaughter of billions of male chickens each year, which are culled because they don’t lay eggs. The female chicks, and the eggs they lay when they mature, have no trace of the original genetic alteration Animal welfare group, Compassion in World Farming, has backed the research. Dr Yuval Cinnamon from the Volcani institute near Tel Aviv, who is the project’s chief scientist, told BBC News that the development of what he calls the ”Golda hen” will have a huge impact on animal welfare in the poultry industry.

“I am very happy that we have developed a system that I think can truly revolutionise the industry, first of all for the benefit of the chickens but also for all of us, because this is an issue that affects every person on the planet,” he said. The scientists have gene edited DNA into the Golda hens that can stop the development of any male embryos in eggs that they lay. The DNA is activated when the eggs are exposed to blue light for several hours. Female chick embryos are unaffected by the blue light and develop normally. The chicks have no additional genetic material inside them nor do the eggs they lay, according to Dr Cinnamon. “Farmers will get the same chicks they get today and consumers will get exactly the same eggs they get today,” he said. “The only minor difference in the production process is that the eggs will be exposed to blue light.”

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AMD Improving Linux Experience When Running New GPUs Without Proper Driver Support

An anonymous reader shares a report: While AMD provided upstream open-source driver support for the Radeon RX 7900 series launch, the initial user experience can be less than desirable if running a new Radeon GPU but initially running an out-of-date kernel or lacking the necessary firmware support. With a new patch series posted AMD is looking to improve the experience by being able to more easily fallback to the firmware frame-buffer when their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver fails to properly load.

With the new IP-based discovery “block by block” approach to how the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver is managing the hardware initialization with RDNA3 and moving forward, the AMDGPU driver will try to probe all Radeon GPUs even if it might not end up being fully supported. In turn that ends up destroying the system firmware frame-buffer. But right now in the case of booting an RDNA3 GPU with a slightly out of date kernel (pre-6.0) or lacking the necessary RDNA3 firmware for hardware initialization, it can mean the screen freezing or system appearing unresponsive.

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Tencent Chief Blasts Managers in Fiery Townhall

The founder of Chinese tech giant Tencent told employees many “corruption” issues had been discovered within the company and mismanagement was draining its vitality, Reuters reported Friday, citing employees familiar with the matter. From the report: In a rare show of frustration, Pony Ma said at a year-end meeting with staff on Dec. 15 that internal reviews this year had exposed unspecified corruption within Asia’s biggest social media and gaming company, the sources said. He also lambasted senior managers after one of the toughest years for Tencent since its founding in 1998, with revenue battered by a regulatory crackdown and headwinds from measures to stop the spread of COVID-19. “Your projects can’t even survive as a business — they are living on life support, but still you just cheerily play ball on the weekend,” Ma said during the call, according to one employee who heard the comments and another who was briefed on them.

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‘Easily’ Replaceable Batteries May Soon Be Required By EU Law

b0s0z0ku writes: The European Union is proposing a law requiring easily replaceable batteries in new appliances and portable electronic devices. The law also sets targets for collection and recycling of those batteries, requiring 73% compliance by 2030. “Companies would get plenty of notice, however, as the requirement would only come into force 3.5 years after the legislation takes effect,” adds 9to5Mac. “Companies will also be legally required to accept and recycle old batteries.”

Additionally, the European Commission is “expected to consider outlawing the use of non-rechargeable portable batteries,” though this would likely come with many exceptions and wouldn’t happen before the end of the decade.

Further reading: EU Sets December 28, 2024, Deadline For All New Phones To Use USB-C for Wired Charging

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LastPass: Hackers Stole Customer Vault Data In Cloud Storage Breach

LastPass revealed today that attackers stole customer vault data after breaching its cloud storage earlier this year using information stolen during an August 2022 incident. BleepingComputer reports: This follows a previous update issued last month when the company’s CEO, Karim Toubba, only said that the threat actor gained access to “certain elements” of customer information. Today, Toubba added that the cloud storage service is used by LastPass to store archived backups of production data. The attacker gained access to Lastpass’ cloud storage using “cloud storage access key and dual storage container decryption keys” stolen from its developer environment.

“The threat actor copied information from backup that contained basic customer account information and related metadata including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service,” Toubba said today. “The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs, as well as fully-encrypted sensitive fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data.”

Fortunately, the encrypted data is secured with 256-bit AES encryption and can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key derived from each user’s master password. According to Toubba, the master password is never known to LastPass, it is not stored on Lastpass’ systems, and LastPass does not maintain it. Customers were also warned that the attackers might try to brute force their master passwords to gain access to the stolen encrypted vault data. However, this would be very difficult and time-consuming if you’ve been following password best practices recommended by LastPass. If you do, “it would take millions of years to guess your master password using generally-available password-cracking technology,” Toubba added. “Your sensitive vault data, such as usernames and passwords, secure notes, attachments, and form-fill fields, remain safely encrypted based on LastPass’ Zero Knowledge architecture.”

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FTX Asks Judge For Help In Fight Over Robinhood Shares Worth About $450 Million

FTX sought a U.S. bankruptcy court’s help amid a battle over ownership of about $450 million worth of stock in Robinhood Markets (HOOD), according to a filing (PDF) Thursday. CoinDesk reports: At issue are about 56 million shares of the brokerage owned by Emergent Fidelity Technologies Ltd., a corporate entity organized in Antigua and Barbuda and 90% controlled by former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, according to the filing. Three parties, the filing says, have tried to get control of those shares: BlockFi (a lender that FTX had helped prop up earlier this year), Yonathan Ben Shimon (an FTX creditor appointed as a receiver in Antigua and granted permission to sell the shares under supervision of a court there) and Bankman-Fried himself (who has legal bills).

FTX’s bankruptcy estate told ED&F Man Capital Markets, the brokerage where the shares are parked, to freeze the stock around the time the Chapter 11 case began on Nov. 11. FTX has determined that Emergent only “nominally” owns the shares and that they truly belong to FTX. “Emergent is a special-purpose holding company that appears to have no other business,” the crypto exchange said in the filing. The judge overseeing the bankruptcy case should force the shares to remain frozen while FTX tries to figure out how to repay all its creditors, FTX argued in the filing.

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‘Avatar’ Sequel Crashes Movie Theater Equipment in Japan

Multiple theaters in Japan reported technical problems when playing Avatar: The Way of the Water. According to Bloomberg, one theater in central Japan was forced to reduce the 48 fps frame rate down to the traditional 24 fps. Engadget reports: Fans were reportedly turned away from other screenings and issued refunds. Some of the theater chains cited by fans as having issues, including United Cinemas Co., Toho Col, and Tokyu Corp., declined to comment on the problem. Not many movie theaters support high frame rate (HFR) 48 fps playback, as it requires the latest projectors or upgrades to existing ones. Normally, movie theaters would be aware of which formats they can play and plan accordingly. But HFR has been used so little that it would be understandable if errors cropped up.

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OpenAI Releases Point-E, an AI For 3D Modeling

OpenAI, the Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence startup behind popular DALL-E text-to-image generator, announced (PDF) on Tuesday the release of its newest picture-making machine POINT-E, which can produce 3D point clouds directly from text prompts. Engadget reports: Whereas existing systems like Google’s DreamFusion typically require multiple hours — and GPUs â” to generate their images, Point-E only needs one GPU and a minute or two. Point-E, unlike similar systems, “leverages a large corpus of (text, image) pairs, allowing it to follow diverse and complex prompts, while our image-to-3D model is trained on a smaller dataset of (image, 3D) pairs,” the OpenAI research team led by Alex Nichol wrote in PointÂE: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts, published last week. “To produce a 3D object from a text prompt, we first sample an image using the text-to-image model, and then sample a 3D object conditioned on the sampled image. Both of these steps can be performed in a number of seconds, and do not require expensive optimization procedures.”

If you were to input a text prompt, say, “A cat eating a burrito,” Point-E will first generate a synthetic view 3D rendering of said burrito-eating cat. It will then run that generated image through a series of diffusion models to create the 3D, RGB point cloud of the initial image — first producing a coarse 1,024-point cloud model, then a finer 4,096-point. “In practice, we assume that the image contains the relevant information from the text, and do not explicitly condition the point clouds on the text,” the research team points out. These diffusion models were each trained on “millions” of 3d models, all converted into a standardized format. “While our method performs worse on this evaluation than state-of-the-art techniques,” the team concedes, “it produces samples in a small fraction of the time.” OpenAI has posted the projects open-source code on Github.

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Old Blu-Ray Players Can Be Turned Into Microscopes

YouTube’s Doctor Volt repurposed a Blu-Ray drive, which are now easy to find on the cheap in the era of streaming content, to build a simple scanning laser microscope. Gizmodo reports: A couple of custom-designed and manufactured plastic parts were added to the mix to create a scanning bed for a sample that could move back in forth in one direction, while the laser itself shifted back and forth in the other. Unlike an optical microscope, where the entirely of an object is imaged at once, a scanning laser microscope takes light intensity measurements in increments, moving across an object in a grid and assembling a magnified image pixel by pixel. In this case, given the limitations of the Blu-Ray drive’s spindle, which moves the sample being viewed back and forth, the image is assembled from 16,129 measurements (a 127×127 grid) and then scaled up to a 512×512 image.

A browser-based user interface written in Java allows focus adjustments and the scanning speed of the microscope to be modified, but at the slowest possible speed, the results are surprisingly good and recognizable. Certainly not comparable to what you’d get from lab equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars, but for a re-purposed Blu-Ray drive you could get for less than $20 on eBay, this is an impressive hack.

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OneCoin Co-Founder Pleads Guilty To $4 Billion Fraud

Karl Sebastian Greenwood, co-founder of sham “Bitcoin-killer” OneCoin, pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to charges of conspiring to defraud investors and to launder money. “Greenwood was arrested in Thailand in July 2018 and subsequently extradited to the US,” reports The Register. “OneCoin’s other co-founder, ‘Cryptoqueen’ Ruja Ignatova (Dr. Ruja Ignatova — she has a law degree), remains a fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and on Europol’s Most Wanted list.” From the report: “As a founder and leader of OneCoin, Karl Sebastian Greenwood operated one of the largest international fraud schemes ever perpetrated,” said US Attorney Damian Williams in a statement. “Greenwood and his co-conspirators, including fugitive Ruja Ignatova, conned unsuspecting victims out of billions of dollars, claiming that OneCoin would be the ‘Bitcoin killer.’ In fact, OneCoins were entirely worthless.” The US has charged at least nine individuals across four related cases, including Greenwood and Ignatova, with fraud charges related to OneCoin. Authorities in China have prosecuted 98 people accused of trying to sell OneCoin. Police in India arrested 18 for pitching the Ponzi scheme.

According to the Justice Department, Greenwood and Ignatova founded OneCoin in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2014. Until 2017 or so, they’re said to have marketed OneCoin as a cryptocurrency to investors. The OneCoin exchange was shut down in January 2017, but trades evidently continued among affiliated individuals for some time. The OneCoin.eu website remained online until 2019. In fact, OneCoin was a multi-level marketing (MLM) pyramid scheme in which network members received commissions when they managed to recruit people to buy OneCoin. The firm’s own promotional materials claim more than three million people invested. And between Q4 2014 and Q4 2016, company records claim OneCoin generated more than $4.3 billion in revenue and $2.9 billion in purported profits. At the top of the MLM pyramid, Greenwood is said to have earned $21 million per month. Greenwood and others claimed that OneCoin was mined using computing power like BitCoin and recorded on a blockchain. But it wasn’t. As Ignatova allegedly put it in an email to Greenwood, “We are not mining actually — but telling people shit.”

OneCoin’s value, according to the Feds, was simply set by those managing the company — they manipulated the OneCoin exchange to simulate trading volatility but the price of OneCoin always closed higher than it opened. In an August 1, 2015 email, Ignatova allegedly told Greenwood that one of the goals for the OneCoin trade exchange was “always close on a high price end of day open day with high price, build confidence — better manipulation so they are happy.” According to the Justice Department, the value assigned to OneCoin grew steadily from $0.53 to approximately $31.80 per coin and never declined.

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