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Ebury Botnet Malware Compromises 400,000 Linux Servers Over Past 14 Years  The Hacker News

Arm Mali/Immortalis GPU Driver, New AMD Graphics IP & Lunar Lake Display In Linux 6.10  Phoronix

Manjaro Linux 24.0 'Wynsdey' Releases With Linux Kernel 6.9  It's FOSS News

At Google I/O on Tuesday, Google previewed a feature that will alert users to potential scams during a phone call. TechCrunch reports: The feature, which will be built into a future version of Android, uses Gemini Nano, the smallest version of Google's generative AI offering, which can be run entirely on-device. The system effectively listens for "conversation patterns commonly associated with scams" in real time. Google gives the example of someone pretending to be a "bank representative." Common scammer tactics like password requests and gift cards will also trigger the system. These are all pretty well understood to be ways of extracting your money from you, but plenty of people in the world are still vulnerable to these sorts of scams. Once set off, it will pop up a notification that the user may be falling prey to unsavory characters. No specific release date has been set for the feature. Like many of these things, Google is previewing how much Gemini Nano will be able to do down the road sometime. We do know, however, that the feature will be opt-in.

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The FA is using Google Cloud gen AI to identify England's next football stars by analyzing scouting reports.The FA is using Google Cloud gen AI to identify England's next football stars by analyzing scouting reports.

Looks Like Arch Linux Is Going To Officially Support ARM/RISC-V  It's FOSS News

Linux Operating System Market to Witness an Outstanding Growth during 2023-2032 | Arch Linux, SUSE  openPR

Kimsuky APT Using Newly Discovered Gomir Linux Backdoor  Duo Security

Philip Ball reports via Scientific American: Thomas Gingeras did not intend to upend basic ideas about how the human body works. In 2012 the geneticist, now at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, was one of a few hundred colleagues who were simply trying to put together a compendium of human DNA functions. Their Âproject was called ENCODE, for the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements. About a decade earlier almost all of the three billion DNA building blocks that make up the human genome had been identified. Gingeras and the other ENCODE scientists were trying to figure out what all that DNA did. The assumption made by most biologists at that time was that most of it didn't do much. The early genome mappers estimated that perhaps 1 to 2 percent of our DNA consisted of genes as classically defined: stretches of the genome that coded for proteins, the workhorses of the human body that carry oxygen to different organs, build heart muscles and brain cells, and do just about everything else people need to stay alive. Making proteins was thought to be the genome's primary job. Genes do this by putting manufacturing instructions into messenger molecules called mRNAs, which in turn travel to a cell's protein-making machinery. As for the rest of the genome's DNA? The "protein-coding regions," Gingeras says, were supposedly "surrounded by oceans of biologically functionless sequences." In other words, it was mostly junk DNA. So it came as rather a shock when, in several 2012 papers in Nature, he and the rest of the ENCODE team reported that at one time or another, at least 75 percent of the genome gets transcribed into RNAs. The ENCODE work, using techniques that could map RNA activity happening along genome sections, had begun in 2003 and came up with preliminary results in 2007. But not until five years later did the extent of all this transcription become clear. If only 1 to 2 percent of this RNA was encoding proteins, what was the rest for? Some of it, scientists knew, carried out crucial tasks such as turning genes on or off; a lot of the other functions had yet to be pinned down. Still, no one had imagined that three quarters of our DNA turns into RNA, let alone that so much of it could do anything useful. Some biologists greeted this announcement with skepticism bordering on outrage. The ENCODE team was accused of hyping its findings; some critics argued that most of this RNA was made accidentally because the RNA-making enzyme that travels along the genome is rather indiscriminate about which bits of DNA it reads. Now it looks like ENCODE was basically right. Dozens of other research groups, scoping out activity along the human genome, also have found that much of our DNA is churning out "noncoding" RNA. It doesn't encode proteins, as mRNA does, but engages with other molecules to conduct some biochemical task. By 2020 the ENCODE project said it had identified around 37,600 noncoding genes -- that is, DNA stretches with instructions for RNA molecules that do not code for proteins. That is almost twice as many as there are protein-coding genes. Other tallies vary widely, from around 18,000 to close to 96,000. There are still doubters, but there are also enthusiastic biologists such as Jeanne Lawrence and Lisa Hall of the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. In a 2024 commentary for the journal Science, the duo described these findings as part of an "RNA revolution." What makes these discoveries revolutionary is what all this noncoding RNA -- abbreviated as ncRNA -- does. Much of it indeed seems involved in gene regulation: not simply turning them off or on but also fine-tuning their activity. So although some genes hold the blueprint for proteins, ncRNA can control the activity of those genes and thus ultimately determine whether their proteins are made. This is a far cry from the basic narrative of biology that has held sway since the discovery of the DNA double helix some 70 years ago, which was all about DNA leading to proteins. "It appears that we may have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of genetic programming," wrote molecular biologists Kevin Morris of Queensland University of Technology and John Mattick of the University of New South Wales in Australia in a 2014 article. Another important discovery is that some ncRNAs appear to play a role in disease, for example, by regulating the cell processes involved in some forms of cancer. So researchers are investigating whether it is possible to develop drugs that target such ncRNAs or, conversely, to use ncRNAs themselves as drugs. If a gene codes for a protein that helps a cancer cell grow, for example, an ncRNA that shuts down the gene might help treat the cancer.

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While working on the bash shell script wrapper, I needed to ensure that I only passed an integer in the Bash script under Linux and Unix-like systems. Here is how to check if a number is an integer in Bash Linux or Unix script or at the command-line interface (CLI) Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post Bash see if an input number is an integer or not appeared first on nixCraft. 2023-05-04T06:33:48Z 2023-05-04T06:33:48Z Vivek Gite

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is announcing the availability of FreeBSD version 13.2-RELEASE on 11/April/2023. It is the third release of the stable/13 branches. I updated my FreeBSD version 13.1 to 13.2 using the CLI over an ssh-based session. Here are my quick notes. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post How to upgrade FreeBSD 13.1 to 13.2 release appeared first on nixCraft. 2023-04-12T01:55:17Z 2023-04-12T01:55:17Z Vivek Gite

New Automotive Grade Linux Platform Release Adds Cloud-Native Functionality, RISC-V Architecture and Flutter ...  Design and Reuse

Linus Torvalds Is Doing More ARM64 Linux Testing Now That He Has A More Powerful System  HardForum

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting in June of last year, global temperatures went from very hot to extreme. Every single month since June, the globe has experienced the hottest temperatures for that month on record -- that's 11 months in a row now, enough to ensure that 2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 will likely be similarly extreme. There's been nothing like this in the temperature record, and it acts as an unmistakable indication of human-driven warming. But how unusual is that warming compared to what nature has thrown at us in the past? While it's not possible to provide a comprehensive answer to that question, three European researchers (Jan Esper, Max Torbenson, and Ulf Buntgen) have provided a partial answer: the Northern Hemisphere hasn't seen anything like this in over 2,000 years. [...] The first thing the three researchers did was try to align the temperature record with the proxy record. If you simply compare temperatures within the instrument record, 2023 summer temperatures were just slightly more than 2C higher than the 1850-1900 temperature records. But, as mentioned, the record for those years is a bit sparse. A comparison with proxy records of the 1850-1900 period showed that the early instrument record ran a bit warm compared to a wider sampling of the Northern Hemisphere. Adjusting for this bias revealed that the summer of 2023 was about 2.3 C above pre-industrial temperatures from this period. But the proxy data from the longest tree ring records can take temperatures back over 2,000 years to year 1 CE. Compared to that longer record, summer of 2023 was 2.2 C warmer (which suggests that the early instrument record runs a bit warm). So, was the summer of 2023 extreme compared to that record? The answer is very clearly yes. Even the warmest summer in the proxy record, CE 246, was only 0.97 C above the 2,000-year average, meaning it was about 1.2 C cooler than 2023. The coldest summer in the proxies was 536 CE, which came in the wake of a major volcanic eruption. That was roughly 4 C cooler than 2023. While the proxy records have uncertainties, those uncertainties are nowhere near large enough to encompass 2023. Even if you take the maximum temperature with the 95 percent confidence range of the proxies, the summer of 2023 was more than half a degree warmer. Obviously, this analysis is limited to comparing a portion of one year to centuries of proxies, as well as limited to one area of the globe. It doesn't tell us how much of an outlier the rest of 2023 was or whether its extreme nature was global. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

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Later this month, Comcast will launch a three-way bundle with Peacock, Netflix and Apple TV+. It will "come at a vastly reduced price to anything in the market today," said. Comcast chief Brian Roberts. Variety reports: The goal is to "add value to consumers" and at the same time "take some of the dollars out of" other companies' streaming businesses, he added, while reinforcing Comcast's broadband service offerings. Comcast's impending launch of the StreamSaver bundle come as other media companies have been assembling similar offerings. [...] Like the other streaming bundling strategies, Comcast's forthcoming Peacock, Netflix and Apple TV+ package is an effort to reduce cancelation rates (aka "churn") and provide a more efficient means of subscriber acquisition -- coming as the traditional cable TV business continues to deteriorate. Last week, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced a three-way bundle comprising of Max, Disney+ and Hulu.

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At Google I/O today, Google introduced a "next-generation AI assistant" called Project Astra that can "make sense of what your phone's camera sees," reports Wired. It follows yesterday's launch of GPT-4o, a new AI model from OpenAI that can quickly respond to prompts via voice and talk about what it 'sees' through a smartphone camera or on a computer screen. It "also uses a more humanlike voice and emotionally expressive tone, simulating emotions like surprise and even flirtatiousness," notes Wired. From the report: In response to spoken commands, Astra was able to make sense of objects and scenes as viewed through the devices' cameras, and converse about them in natural language. It identified a computer speaker and answered questions about its components, recognized a London neighborhood from the view out of an office window, read and analyzed code from a computer screen, composed a limerick about some pencils, and recalled where a person had left a pair of glasses. [...] Google says Project Astra will be made available through a new interface called Gemini Live later this year. [Demis Hassabis, the executive leading the company's effort to reestablish leadership inÂAI] said that the company is still testing several prototype smart glasses and has yet to make a decision on whether to launch any of them. Hassabis believes that imbuing AI models with a deeper understanding of the physical world will be key to further progress in AI, and to making systems like Project Astra more robust. Other frontiers of AI, including Google DeepMind's work on game-playing AI programs could help, he says. Hassabis and others hope such work could be revolutionary for robotics, an area that Google is also investing in. "A multimodal universal agent assistant is on the sort of track to artificial general intelligence," Hassabis said in reference to a hoped-for but largely undefined future point where machines can do anything and everything that a human mind can. "This is not AGI or anything, but it's the beginning of something."

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At its I/O developer conference today, Google announced Veo, its latest generative AI video model, that "can generate 'high-quality' 1080p resolution videos over a minute in length in a wide variety of visual and cinematic styles," reports The Verge. From the report: Veo has "an advanced understanding of natural language," according to Google's press release, enabling the model to understand cinematic terms like "timelapse" or "aerial shots of a landscape." Users can direct their desired output using text, image, or video-based prompts, and Google says the resulting videos are "more consistent and coherent," depicting more realistic movement for people, animals, and objects throughout shots. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said in a press preview on Monday that video results can be refined using additional prompts and that Google is exploring additional features to enable Veo to produce storyboards and longer scenes. As is the case with many of these AI model previews, most folks hoping to try Veo out themselves will likely have to wait a while. Google says it's inviting select filmmakers and creators to experiment with the model to determine how it can best support creatives and will build on these collaborations to ensure "creators have a voice" in how Google's AI technologies are developed. Some Veo features will also be made available to "select creators in the coming weeks" in a private preview inside VideoFX -- you can sign up for the waitlist here for an early chance to try it out. Otherwise, Google is also planning to add some of its capabilities to YouTube Shorts "in the future." Along with its new AI models and tools, Google said it's expanding its AI content watermarking and detection technology. The company's new upgraded SynthID watermark imprinting system "can now mark video that was digitally generated, as well as AI-generated text," reports The Verge in a separate report.

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Linus Torvalds Is Doing More ARM64 Linux Testing Now That He Has A More Powerful System  Phoronix

An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: 1 in 4 U.S. teens told Pew Research Center they play games on a VR headset. The survey was conducted on 1453 U.S. teens aged 13 to 17. Pew claims the participants were "recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses" and "weighted to be representative of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who live with their parents by age, gender, race and ethnicity, household income, and other categories." Broken out by gender, 32% of boys and 15% of girls said they play games on a VR headset. The survey doesn't ask whether they actually own the headset, so this will include those who play on a sibling or parent's headset.

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OpenAI's co-founder and Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever, is leaving the company to work on "something personally meaningful," wrote CEO Sam Altman in a post on X. "This is very sad to me; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend. [...] I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together." He will be replaced by OpenAI researcher Jakub Pachocki. Here's Altman's full X post announcing the departure: Ilya and OpenAI are going to part ways. This is very sad to me; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend. His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important. OpenAI would not be what it is without him. Although he has something personally meaningful he is going to go work on, I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together. I am happy that for so long I got to be close to such genuinely remarkable genius, and someone so focused on getting to the best future for humanity. Jakub is going to be our new Chief Scientist. Jakub is also easily one of the greatest minds of our generation; I am thrilled he is taking the baton here. He has run many of our most important projects, and I am very confident he will lead us to make rapid and safe progress towards our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits everyone. The New York Times notes that Ilya joined three other board members to force out Altman in a chaotic weekend last November. Ultimately, Altman returned as CEO five days later. Ilya said he regretted the move.

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