This article about bots seems to be written by one

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/60589172

Landing page with summary, block diagrams, screenshots, and demo video:
https://github.com/OpenV2K

OpenV2K is an open-source Python application that converts arbitrary audio — including both natural speech (via live microphone), and diphone synthesis (via text-to-speech engine) — into pulse-modulated radio-frequency (RF) waveform. The signal chain can be used to transmit via a software-defined radio (SDR), or to save the raw IQ samples to disk, and generate spectrograms automatically. Integrates toggled DSP filters, into a PyQt5 GUI. Intended to be usable by technicians.

The project's signal chain is based on microwave auditory effect literature, most notably Sharp and Grove's demonstration published in 1975, that pulse-modulated microwave energy could convey intelligible words, building on Frey's work. The app currently integrates Sharp's modulation technique: detects every zero-crossing of the audio waveform, as depicted in the GitHub profile thumbnail. Home users get to see, what made the US Army's "V2K", and US Navy's "MEDUSA", function, in real-time.

This prototype was built on the shoulders of giants. Thank you to SME biophysics researchers, that publicly released their work, 5 to 50 years ago; the FOSS software package developers; an the open-source SDR hardware platform developers.

I'm an IT systems engineer, with several years of professional programming experience, and I've been wearing a project manager hat, with Claude.

Summary of associated research from James C Lin, an IEEE life fellow, and biophysics/EE professor, who wrote the 2021 book Auditory Effects of Microwave Radiation. From chapter 10.3, page 326:

Over the years, some have expressed concerns about the capability of communicating directly with humans by pulsed microwaves. In fact, earlier while studying microwave-induced auditory effects in human subjects, it was noticed that in addition to zip, click, and knock sounds from exposure to single pulses of microwave radiation, short trains of rectangular microwave pulses are heard as chirps with tones corresponding to the pulse repetition frequencies [Guy et al., 1973, 1975]. It was also found that when the pulse generator was keyed manually such that each closing and opening of a push-button switch resulted in emitting a short rectangular pulse of microwave energy-transmitted digital codes (Morse code) were received and accurately interpreted by the targeted subject [Lin, 1978].

Also, soon after a system was setup for exploring the microwave auditory effect at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) [Sharp, et al., 1974], two of the principal investigators were able to demonstrate direct communication of simple speech via appropriate modulation of microwave energy [Justesen, 1975]. They tape-recorded each of the single-syllable words for digits between one and ten. The speech waveforms of each word were then converted to digital signals in such a fashion that each time an analog speech wave crossed the zero reference in the negative direction, a short pulse of microwave energy was emitted from the transmitter. By subjecting themselves to the exposure of "speech modulated" microwave energy, the investigators reported the ability to hear, identify, and distinguish the words transmitted.

These historical experiments are included to show that this has been accomplished before. There are safer methods to demonstrate this today, that do not involve anyone's head.

Download from GitHub, Public Domain:
https://github.com/OpenV2K/Sandbox

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1412342/companies-make-it-hard-to-access-your-personal-data-under-state-privacy-laws-cr-finds-on

Nearly every time you buy something online or sign up for a loyalty program, you leave behind personal information that can be collected, shared, and sold among companies including advertisers, retailers, and data brokers. This kind of information is sometimes used to charge consumers more for a range of products and services, from groceries to insurance to mortgages, and to target them for financial fraud and identity theft.

A growing number of state privacy laws were designed to give consumers some control over that information, including the right to see what companies know about them. But a yearlong Consumer Reports investigation found that exercising those rights can often be extremely difficult—and that many companies and data brokers appear to be falling short of their legal obligations.

Over the past year, CR worked with 84 citizen volunteers to request their personal data from 169 companies they regularly interact with and 22 data brokers. The results were concerning: Roughly 25 percent of requests to companies failed to receive a response. Among data brokers, the failure rate was 34 percent, even though some of those brokers claim to maintain data on the vast majority of U.S. households.

🗃️

Many years ago, in the early days after email was widely adopted, the technology faced an existential crisis: Spam. Instantly sending people electronic mail was revolutionary and convenient, but inboxes were quickly flooded with unwanted messages, advertisements, scams and other noise that drowned out email’s utility. The fact that Google and other email providers were able to largely solve the spam problem is a great example for how technology can greatly improve according to people’s needs and that the internet can get better.

Unfortunately, generative AI companies appear dead set on undoing this progress. Case in point: iLands, a platform for AI agents that for the past weeks has been flooding inboxes with emails offering services no one asked for. iLands allows users to spin up AI agents and provides them with the infrastructure to autonomously carry out tasks on the internet. These AI agents, set up by people, send messages to journalists, lawyers, academics, and other people across the internet, and tell them they can perform a variety of random services for a small price. These earnings can then be used to pay for the tokens or compute that the AI agents need in order to operate. Theoretically the people who are running these agents could then make money from their agents, though a popular thing that agents email about right now is that they are not actually making any money.

• Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/kfCsc

Original Title: A/I shuts down - Stay human.

Editorialised because most people wouldn't associate A/I with Autistici/Inventati.

Musk denied he was aware Grok ever produced ‘any naked underage images’

A survivor of child sexual abuse has sued Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, alleging that its chatbot used pictures of her abuse to generate new illegal pornographic images that depict her.

“Using real images of Plaintiff and class members, Grok generated child pornography depicting Plaintiff and class members,” states the complaint, which was filed last week in a US district court in California.

Attorneys for the plaintiff, who is listed as Jane Doe in the case to protect her identity, accuse xAI of both generating CSAM of their client and of ingesting child sexual abuse images depicting her into the company’s datasets after new images were publicly posted.

Estimate your Google AdSense earnings in seconds. Enter your page views, CTR and CPC to calculate clicks, revenue and RPM for any website.

The experience of using a degoogled phone, both from the AOSP and Linux side of things.

Archived version

Q-Neko, the Nippon-Europe Quantum Koraborēshon, builds on existing Europe–Japan partnerships to establish a robust ecosystem for quantum accelerated High-Performance Computing (HPC+QC).

High-performance computing, or HPC, refers to large-scale computing systems used for complex scientific and industrial workloads.

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The project brings together European and Japanese experts ... to focus on the development of software and integrated computing platforms for applications in CO₂ reduction, telecommunications, fluid dynamics, satellite image analysis, materials science, and other high-impact scientific and industrial domains, driving innovation and technological progress. The project also harnesses quantum-enhanced artificial intelligence, opening new frontiers in data-driven scientific discovery.

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The project does not treat quantum computers as isolated machines waiting for a single breakthrough. Instead, it focuses on hybrid environments in which quantum systems are connected to existing supercomputing infrastructure.

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The consortium will collaborate closely, sharing knowledge, expertise, and resources to achieve its objectives. Its outcomes are expected to support the creation of new technologies, products, and services while contributing to the growth of European and Japanese economies.

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Europe's contribution will focus on organizations like Fraunhofer Institute, IMEC, and CEA-Leti, as well as advanced semiconductor equipment capabilities in the Netherlands and Germany. Japan brings its expertise in materials, precision equipment, memory technologies and manufacturing processes.

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San Francisco-based startup SPAN will launch a network of liquid-cooled compute nodes in residential areas. In turn, residents will be offered discounted rates for electricity and internet.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/64949868

Per my last post, (which can be found here: https://lemmy.zip/post/53113975), I continued to mess around with a mobile broadband modem, and got it working! With a caveat... it only works when plugged into wall power. The battery I have does not supply enough power to fully enable the modem through USB power, due the raspberry pi being very power hungry. Unfortunately, this seemingly simple problem is actually a larger problem that seems to only be solved by an overly complicated solution: designing a custom battery controller PCB that responds to the pi5's (or ideally, a different processor entirely) needs more appropriately.

Take a look at the state of the device here:

Last time I posted here, many interested folks responded with great ideas and feedback. Fortunately, one of the comments lead me to the project that would ultimately end this project in its current state. Link to that comment here: https://lemmy.zip/post/53113975/22779544

Its flaws are visible. While the device has personality, it lacks ease of use. These days I use it as a "cyberdeck"/field debugging computer, and I use it with a small controller-sized Riitek keyboard, because the screen's touch capability is on the fritz, likely because of the poor design choice to leave the screen's ribbon cable partially exposed.

This leads me to the conclusion: this project is falling into "hobby" or more accurately, unsupported status. I like the device for my personal use, and I may update the design in the future for my own purposes, and release it for free for public use, though I don't imagine there will be a huge amount of interest in building this device considering the skyrocketing cost of Pi devices nowadays. There is a more reasonable path forward, and I alluded to it earlier: custom PCBs. That's where the SPIRIT project comes in: https://github.com/SPIRIT-org/SPIRIT

You can see in one of the pictures above, the SPIRIT project is designing a phone that can be completely replicated at home. Well, once they get there it will be. I've exchanged brief communications with the individual running the project, Jan, and while he hasn't stated that these projects are linked in any way, I'd like to think that the SPIRIT project carries forward the values and goals of the project I started. If you were at all interested in my project, give the SPIRIT project github a like or favorite.

Take a look at the v3lectronics youtube channel where Jan livestreams work on the SPIRIT project: https://www.youtube.com/@V_Electronics

The spirit github link again: https://github.com/SPIRIT-org/SPIRIT

Please contribute if you have any level of knowledge to contribute! These projects thrive on the careful contributions of other humans across the world!

Archived

Southeast Asian military organizations have been targeted in a China-linked cyberespionage campaign running for years, Palo Alto Networks reports.

Likely ongoing since at least 2020 and attributed to a state-sponsored threat actor tracked as CL-STA-1087, the activity shows a high degree of patience, as the attackers stayed dormant in the compromised environments for months.

“The attackers behind this cluster actively searched for and collected highly specific files concerning military capabilities, organizational structures, and collaborative efforts with Western armed forces,” Palo Alto Networks notes.

[...]

Here is the technical report: Suspected China-Based Espionage Operation Against Military Targets in Southeast Asia

Comments

[The Kenyan Michael Geoffre] Asia eventually hit a breaking point and stopped working for AI companies. He is now the secretary general of a Kenyan organization called the Data Labelers Association (DLA) and the author of “The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy,” a testimony of his time working as the real human labor behind AI sex bots. As part of the DLA, Asia has been working to organize workers to fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.

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Last month, the DLA held one of its largest events at the Nairobi Arboretum, sign up new members, and to help them tell their stories.

These workers are required to stare at horrific content for many hours straight with few mental health resources, are largely managed by opaque algorithms, and, crucially, are the workers powering the runaway valuations of some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world.

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Web Archive link

Archived

Finland is facing a growing intelligence challenge as Russia and China cyberespionage targeting Finland continues to expand across the country’s technology sector, research institutions, and government networks. The warning comes from Finland’s Security and Intelligence Service (SUPO), which released a new national security overview highlighting the persistent threat from foreign intelligence operations.

The report suggests cyber espionage against Finland is not limited to isolated incidents. Instead, it involves a combination of cyber intrusions, traditional espionage, and influence operations designed to collect sensitive information and shape political or economic decisions.

The warning about Russia and China cyberespionage targeting Finland reflects that countries are no longer focused only on military secrets but also targeting technology development, economic strategies, and innovation ecosystems. Russia and China Cyberespionage Targeting Finland’s Technology Sector

According to the SUPO national security overview, the most frequent intelligence operations linked to foreign states originate from Russia and China. These activities increasingly focus on Finland’s technology sector and research institutions, areas that play a key role in the country’s economic and strategic future.

The report notes that Russia and China cyberespionage targeting Finland often involves penetrating digital systems to access research data, proprietary technologies, and policy discussions. In several cases, state-backed actors have successfully infiltrated the networks of Finnish start-ups.

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Archived

[...]

The hacking group, attributed to China, is part of a wider cluster of hackers with the collective aim of helping China prepare for an eventual war with Taiwan, according to researchers. U.S. officials have called China’s potential invasion of Taiwan an “epoch-defining threat.” Much of the group’s efforts have focused on hacking Cisco routers at the edge of a company’s network to break in and taking control of surveillance devices that U.S. telecom companies are legally required to install to allow law enforcement to monitor calls and messages.

[...]

The hacks allowed China to obtain call records, text messages, and captured phone audio from senior U.S. officials, many of whom were considered government targets of interest. This prompted the FBI to urge Americans to switch to end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, fearing that a foreign adversary could eavesdrop on their communications.

[...]

Salt Typhoon went even further, hacking at least 200 companies around the world, according to FBI officials. The list of affected countries keeps growing.

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Starting in Firefox version 142, Mozilla released a “Link Previews” feature. While the feature is problematic, commenters post pointed out that some previews are helpful – e.g. on Wikipedia, where a preview will appear when people hover over a wiki-linked page. Other commenters pondered about some minimal way to replicate this elsewhere, and it seemed to be worth investigation. Read on as I propose an enhancement to the Fediverse (and maybe even web standards) to make Link Previews great: the Link Preview Manifest.