Technology

We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.

This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.

These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/43470228

Anyone who has been surfing the web for a while is probably used to clicking through a CAPTCHA grid of street images, identifying everyday objects to prove that they're a human and not an automated bot. Now, though, new research claims that locally run bots using specially trained image-recognition models can match human-level performance in this style of CAPTCHA, achieving a 100 percent success rate despite being decidedly not human.

ETH Zurich PhD student Andreas Plesner and his colleagues' new research, available as a pre-print paper, focuses on Google's ReCAPTCHA v2, which challenges users to identify which street images in a grid contain items like bicycles, crosswalks, mountains, stairs, or traffic lights. Google began phasing that system out years ago in favor of an "invisible" reCAPTCHA v3 that analyzes user interactions rather than offering an explicit challenge.

Despite this, the older reCAPTCHA v2 is still used by millions of websites. And even sites that use the updated reCAPTCHA v3 will sometimes use reCAPTCHA v2 as a fallback when the updated system gives a user a low "human" confidence rating.

Anyone who has been surfing the web for a while is probably used to clicking through a CAPTCHA grid of street images, identifying everyday objects to prove that they're a human and not an automated bot. Now, though, new research claims that locally run bots using specially trained image-recognition models can match human-level performance in this style of CAPTCHA, achieving a 100 percent success rate despite being decidedly not human.

ETH Zurich PhD student Andreas Plesner and his colleagues' new research, available as a pre-print paper, focuses on Google's ReCAPTCHA v2, which challenges users to identify which street images in a grid contain items like bicycles, crosswalks, mountains, stairs, or traffic lights. Google began phasing that system out years ago in favor of an "invisible" reCAPTCHA v3 that analyzes user interactions rather than offering an explicit challenge.

Despite this, the older reCAPTCHA v2 is still used by millions of websites. And even sites that use the updated reCAPTCHA v3 will sometimes use reCAPTCHA v2 as a fallback when the updated system gives a user a low "human" confidence rating.

Microsoft is co-sponsoring a conference in Israel to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Israeli military's Center of Computing and Information Systems unit, known by its Hebrew acronym Mamram. The conference, called "I Love Mamram," is now scheduled to be held in Tel Aviv in November, after the "security situation" (presumably the growing conflict with Lebanon) pushed the date from September.

Mamram is not merely a banal IT service provider for the Israeli military. This summer, as reported by the Israeli news outlet +972 Magazine, a commander in the unit confirmed that it was providing cloud data services and artificial intelligence support for the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip. In a speech at the "IT for IDF" conference held just outside of Tel Aviv this July, Racheli Dembinsky, a colonel in the Israeli army and commander in the information systems unit, confirmed that Mamram was assisting the offensive in Gaza through the provision of internal cloud services that she referred to as a "weapons platform" helping facilitate the campaign. Amid the war, Mamram was providing support to the Israeli military in conducting mass surveillance on the population of Gaza in addition to "marking targets for bombings, a portal for viewing live footage from UAVs over Gaza’s skies, as well as fire, command, and control systems," +972 reported.

In the same speech, Dembinsky indicated that cloud services from civilian tech giants, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, were being employed by the unit for military tasks. After the military's existing technological infrastructure was overwhelmed by the amount of data and intelligence information flowing in during the conflict, services available on contract from tech companies became a stopgap to allow the military to continue operating its platforms. “The crazy wealth of services, big data and AI—we’ve already reached a point where our systems really need it,” Dembinsky said, adding that the services provided “very significant operational effectiveness” during the fighting in Gaza.

The Israeli Defense Tech Conference, aimed at tech companies working with the Israeli military, was scheduled for November at the Google for Startups campus in Tel Aviv.

The event, according to a listing posted on the event management app Luma, was pitched at “founders, investors and innovators” looking to network and learn more about the defense tech space. It was co-sponsored by Google; Fusion Venture Capital; Genesis, a startup accelerator; and the Israeli military’s research and development arm, known as the Directorate of Defense Research and Development (DDR&D, or Ma’fat).

Google was not only listed as the physical host of the event and one of its sponsors, but the event listing also included a notice that attendees “approve of sharing [their] details with the organizers (Fusion & Google)” as part of signing up.

When The Intercept contacted Google and the other companies and venture capital firms on the event page, the event page disappeared. Google spokesperson Andréa Willis told The Intercept in an email, “Google is not associated with this event.” Willis did not respond when asked how this could be possible if Google is hosting and co-sponsoring the event, or why the event page went down. None of the other companies or venture capital firms on the event page responded to requests for comment.

California recently became the first state to ban deceptive sales of so-called "disappearing media."

On Tuesday, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2426 into law, protecting consumers of digital goods like books, movies, and video games from being duped into purchasing content without realizing access was only granted through a temporary license.