AI-generated articles prompt Wikipedia to downgrade CNET’s reliability rating

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Wikipedia has downgraded tech website CNET's reliability rating following extensive discussions among its editors regarding the impact of AI-generated content on the site's trustworthiness, as noted in a detailed report from Futurism. The decision reflects concerns over the reliability of articles found on the tech news outlet after it began publishing AI-generated stories in 2022.

Around November 2022, CNET began publishing articles written by an AI model under the byline "CNET Money Staff." In January 2023, Futurism brought widespread attention to the issue and discovered that the articles were full of plagiarism and mistakes. (Around that time, we covered plans to do similar automated publishing at BuzzFeed.) After the revelation, CNET management paused the experiment, but the reputational damage had already been done.

Wikipedia maintains a page called "Reliable sources/Perennial sources" that includes a chart featuring news publications and their reliability ratings as viewed from Wikipedia's perspective. Shortly after the CNET news broke in January 2023, Wikipedia editors began a discussion thread on the Reliable Sources project page about the publication.

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Self-pay gas station pumps break across NZ as software can’t handle Leap Day

Enlarge / A gas station displays an out-of-order sign on February 29, 2024 in New Zealand. (credit: Mark Coote/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Today is Leap Day, meaning that for the first time in four years, it's February 29. That's normally a quirky, astronomical factoid (or a very special birthday for some). But that unique calendar date broke gas station payment systems across New Zealand for much of the day.

As reported by numerous international outlets, self-serve pumps in New Zealand were unable to accept card payments due to a problem with the gas pumps' payment processing software. The New Zealand Herald reported that the outage lasted "more than 10 hours." This effectively shuttered some gas stations, while others had to rely on in-store payments. The outage affected suppliers, including Allied Petroleum, BP, Gull, Waitomo, and Z Energy, and has reportedly been fixed.

In-house payment solutions, such as BP fuel cards and the Waitomo app, reportedly still worked during the outage.

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This Clock Made Power Grids Possible

On 23 October 1916, an engineer named Henry E. Warren quietly revolutionized power transmission by installing an electric clock in the L Street generating station of Boston’s Edison Electric Illuminating Co. This master station clock kept a very particular type of time: It used a synchronous self-starting motor in conjunction with a pendulum to help maintain the station’s AC electricity at a steady 60-cycle-per-second frequency.

As more power stations adopted the clocks, the frequency regulation allowed them to share electricity and create an interconnected power grid. Until the late 1940s, station clocks from the Warren Telechron Co. regulated over 95 percent of all U.S. electricity lines. The Telechron Model Type E master station clock shown at top was used at the Tennessee Valley Authority beginning in the 1930s.

The 60-hertz standard (or 50 hertz in most of the rest of the world) is taken for granted today, but in the early days of electrification—before the invention of the master station clock—the standard was seldom standard. And Warren, who eventually solved the grid-frequency problem, was actually working on a different puzzle when he came across the answer.

How Warren’s clocks regulated grid frequency

Henry E. Warren poses with one of his master station clocks. Until the late 1940s, his company’s clocks regulated over 95 percent of U.S. electricity lines.Electric Time Co.

Henry Ellis Warren was born in Boston on 21 May 1872, a decade before Edison’s Pearl Street Station went online, in New York City, ushering in the dawn of the electric age. He graduated from MIT in 1894 with a degree in electrical engineering, and within the year he (along with his friend George C. Whipple, who went on to become an expert in water sanitation and to cofound the Harvard School of Public Health) had filed for their first patent: an electric thermometer intended to be used to measure temperature at a distance or in inaccessible places.

Warren went on to work in Michigan as an engineer for the Saginaw Valley Traction Co., returning to Boston in 1902 as superintendent of the Lombard Governor Co. He dabbled in real estate, set up a machine shop, continued patenting inventions, and organized the Warren Gear Works to make and sell his devices.

In 1912, Warren established the Warren Clock Co., which produced battery-operated clocks. His initial designs, as described in a series of patents, were for a pendulum clock with a permanent magnet as its bob (that’s the weight at the bottom of the pendulum). The battery would provide an electric impulse to keep the pendulum swinging, by opening and closing a circuit depending on the amplitude of the pendulum swing. Unfortunately, these early clocks were lousy timekeepers, their ability to keep time deteriorating along with the battery. Warren sought a better approach and suspected electric motors might be the answer.

In Warren’s own telling of the story, his first attempt at an electric chronometer was a crude motor that connected the gears of a clock to the Boston Edison electrical system. When he found that the clock was still losing 10 to 15 minutes a day, he called up the Edison power station—as one apparently did in 1915—and politely told them that their frequency was approximately a half cycle off. They countered that their instruments were correct, and Warren suggested the laboratory standards they used to check their meters must be in error.

The conversation could have stopped there, but Robert Hale, a research engineer, took the concern seriously and helped Warren set up an experimental demonstration at the L Street station. There, Warren designed, built, and installed the instrument he dubbed the Warren Master Station Clock. On 23 October 1916, it went into service, enabling the power transmission revolution.

These frequency measurements from Commonwealth Edison were taken before [top] and after [bottom] the installation of a Telechron master station clock. Electric Time Co.

This condensed version of events belies the fact that Warren had already been working for more than a decade on ways to regulate clocks, as well as building a reliable self-starting synchronous motor. Clocks and synchronous motors go hand in hand. In a synchronous motor, the shaft rotates at the same alternating-current frequency as the electric current; assuming the current is steady, it would be ideal for a clock. But in order to make his electric clock accurate, Warren needed an accurate and steady current, hence the master station clock.

In 1916, the Warren Clock Co. began producing the Type A master station clock, which is actually two clocks superimposed on a single clock face. The dial is divided into five 1-minute sectors and has two hands, one black and one gold. The black hand is connected to a standard mechanical pendulum clock; the gold hand is driven by a synchronous motor. Both hands circle the clock face at 60 seconds per minute. To read the clock, the operator simply had to check that the two hands were in sync; that would mean the generators were running at precisely 60 hertz.

The heyday of Warren’s electric clocks

The master station clock solved Warren’s problem of creating reliable electric clocks for use in homes and appliances. But grid operators wouldn’t have embraced it but for their coalescing desire to form an interconnected electricity grid.

That desire was nicely captured by electrical engineer Benjamin Lamme in a 1918 presentation to the Washington, D.C., section of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (one of the founding organizations of the IEEE). In his talk, “The Technical Story of the Frequencies,” he gave the history of the previous few decades, as manufacturers and power companies debated and adapted to different frequency standards.

At the beginning, when the fledgling power industry served only a few customers, there was little need for a nationwide standard. But as electricity demand rose for both industry and residences, the need became critical. Warren’s master station clock arrived at precisely the right time. (Warren was later awarded the AIEE’s Lamme Medal for his “outstanding contributions to the development of electrical clocks and means of controlling central station frequencies.”)

In 1935, Henry Warren [right] received a medal from the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia, for his invention of the Telechron synchronous motor. Also honored was Albert Einstein [middle], for his contributions to theoretical physics. Bettmann/Getty Images

A second reason power stations adopted the master station clock was profit. Recall that Warren was initially working on an electric clock for the home, and he had a grand vision that every household would eventually own one. More electric clocks meant more electricity usage, which meant more revenue for the power companies. In a 1937 paper that Warren read before the Clock Club in Boston, he estimated that a power company could earn US $75,000 (about $1.6 million today) if 100,000 customers each ran an electric clock 24 hours a day. Warren was thinking big for his own company and wanted to get the utilities on board.

There were several versions of the station clock. In 1920, the cheaper (and less accurate) Model B master station clock was introduced for stand-alone installations not connected to a wider electrical grid. The following year, the company unveiled the Type C clock for use in the few remaining DC power stations. According to the incredibly informative website maintained by clock enthusiast Mark Frank, the Type D existed as an internal testing device and never went into production. The final model, the Type E, came out in 1929. It functioned as a reference monitor for multiple interconnected grids.

A 1929 ad for Telechron’s electric clocks touts their use of “accurately timed impulses from the power station.” Telechron/Telechron.net

Beginning in the 1950s, improved electronics displaced electromechanical master station clocks. These days, power stations use atomic clocks to regulate grid frequency.

Back in 1917, General Electric had bought a 49 percent interest in the Warren Clock Co. Warren continued to serve as president until he retired in 1943. GE incorporated Warren’s self-starting synchronous motors into its own clocks and other instruments and licensed the motors to other companies. In 1926, the company was renamed the Warren Telechron Co. After Warren’s retirement, GE fully absorbed Telechron into its operations, eventually forming the Clock and Timer Division.

In its heyday, Telechron held a huge share of the home electric clock market—by 1926 the company had sold 20 million clocks. But by the 1950s, clocks with improved batteries and oscillating quartz crystal resonators began to replace consumer electric clocks that synchronized with the power grid. The advent of digital clocks sealed the deal. GE sold its last Telechron plant in 1979.

Today, the Telechron legacy lives on at the Electric Time Co., in Medfield, Mass., which was spun off from Telechron’s research labs in 1928. Today, Electric Time custom-manufactures tower clocks, street clocks, and building clocks. It also hosts the Electric Clock Museum, where you can make an appointment to see the Telechron Type E Master Station Clock.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the March 2024 print issue as “The Clock and the Grid.”

References

Clock collectors have done a significant amount of work gathering historical source material about clocks. In particular, Mark Frank’s website, Magnificent Time Machines, was essential in explaining the different types of Warren station clocks. He even has the instruction manual for the Type E! Also consider heading to the website of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors for any additional questions.

It is always nice to read an inventor’s own words, and Henry Warren presented “ Utilizing the Time Characteristics of Alternating Current,” in 1919, to the Boston Section Meeting of the AIEE, explaining the self-starting synchronous motor and the station clock.

Jim Linz’s Electrifying Time: Telechron and G.E. Clocks 1925–1955 (Schiffer Publishing, 2000) is the definitive book on Warren clocks, documenting over 700 models of Telechron and GE clocks.

For understanding the entire process of electrifying the United States, and Europe, Thomas Hughes’ Networks of Power (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) is a classic.

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Figure Raises $675M for Its Humanoid Robot Development

Today, Figure is announcing an astonishing US $675 million Series B raise, which values the company at an even more astonishing $2.6 billion. Figure is one of the companies working towards a multi or general purpose (depending on who you ask) bipedal or humanoid (depending on who you ask) robot. The astonishing thing about this valuation is that Figure’s robot is still very much in the development phase—although they’re making rapid progress, which they demonstrate in a new video posted this week.

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This round of funding comes from Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest. Figure says that they’re going to use this new capital “for scaling up AI training, robot manufacturing, expanding engineering headcount, and advancing commercial deployment efforts.” In addition, Figure and OpenAI will be collaborating on the development of “next generation AI models for humanoid robots” which will “help accelerate Figure’s commercial timeline by enhancing the capabilities of humanoid robots to process and reason from language.”

As far as that commercial timeline goes, here’s the most recent update:

Figure

And to understand everything that’s going on here, we sent a whole bunch of questions to Jenna Reher, Senior Robotics/AI Engineer at Figure.

What does “fully autonomous” mean, exactly?

Jenna Reher: In this case, we simply put the robot on the ground and hit go on the task with no other user input. What you see is using a learned vision model for bin detection that allows us to localize the robot relative to the target bin and get the bin pose. The robot can then navigate itself to within reach of the bin, determine grasp points based on the bin pose, and detect grasp success through the measured forces on the hands. Once the robot turns and sees the conveyor the rest of the task rolls out in a similar manner. By doing things in this way we can move the bins and conveyor around in the test space or start the robot from a different position and still complete the task successfully.

How many takes did it take to get this take?

Reher: We’ve been running this use case consistently for some time now as part of our work in the lab, so we didn’t really have to change much for the filming here. We did two or three practice runs in the morning and then three filming takes. All of the takes were successful, so the extras were to make sure we got the cleanest one to show.

What’s back in the Advanced Actuator Lab?

Reher: We have an awesome team of folks working on some exciting custom actuator designs for our future robots, as well as supporting and characterizing the actuators that went into our current robots.

That’s a very specific number for “speed vs human.” Which human did you measure the robot’s speed against?

Reher: We timed Brett [Adcock, founder of Figure] and a few poor engineers doing the task and took the average to get a rough baseline. If you are observant, that seemingly over-specific number is just saying we’re at 1/6 human speed. The main point that we’re trying to make here is that we are aware we are currently below human speed, and it’s an important metric to track as we improve.

What’s the tether for?

Reher: For this task we currently process the camera data off-robot while all of the behavior planning and control happens onboard in the computer that’s in the torso. Our robots should be fully tetherless in the near future as we finish packaging all of that onboard. We’ve been developing behaviors quickly in the lab here at Figure in parallel to all of the other systems engineering and integration efforts happening, so hopefully folks notice all of these subtle parallel threads converging as we try to release regular updates.

How the heck do you keep your robotics lab so clean?

Reher: Everything we’ve filmed so far is in our large robot test lab, so it’s a lot easier to keep the area clean when people’s desks aren’t intruding in the space. Definitely no guarantees on that level of cleanliness if the camera were pointed in the other direction!

Is the robot in the background doing okay?

Reher: Yes! The other robot was patiently standing there in the background, waiting for the filming to finish up so that our manipulation team could get back to training it to do more manipulation tasks. We hope we can share some more developments with that robot as the main star in the near future.

What would happen if I put a single bowling ball into that tote?

Reher: A bowling ball is particularly menacing to this task primarily due to the moving mass, in addition to the impact if you are throwing it in. The robot would in all likelihood end up dropping the tote, stay standing, and abort the task. With what you see here, we assume that the mass of the tote is known a-priori so that our whole body controller can compensate for the external forces while tracking the manipulation task. Reacting to and estimating larger unknown disturbances such as this is a challenging problem, but we’re definitely working on it.

Tell me more about that very zen arm and hand pose that the robot adopts after putting the tote on the conveyor.

Reher: It does look kind of zen! If you re-watch our coffee video you’ll notice the same pose after the robot gets things brewing. This is a reset pose that our controller will go into between manipulation tasks while the robot is awaiting commands to execute either an engineered behavior or a learned policy.

Are the fingers less fragile than they look?

Reher: They are more robust than they look, but not impervious to damage by any means. The design is pretty modular which is great, meaning that if we damage one or two fingers there is a small number of parts to swap to get everything back up and running. The current fingers won’t necessarily survive a direct impact from a bad fall, but can pick up totes and do manipulation tasks all day without issues.

Is the Figure logo footsteps?

Reher: One of the reasons I really like the figure logo is that it has a bunch of different interpretations depending on how you look at it. In some cases it’s just an F that looks like a footstep plan rollout, while some of the logo animations we have look like active stepping. One other possible interpretation could be an occupancy grid. Reference: https://ift.tt/srTUCby

GitHub besieged by millions of malicious repositories in ongoing attack

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GitHub is struggling to contain an ongoing attack that’s flooding the site with millions of code repositories. These repositories contain obfuscated malware that steals passwords and cryptocurrency from developer devices, researchers said.

The malicious repositories are clones of legitimate ones, making them hard to distinguish to the casual eye. An unknown party has automated a process that forks legitimate repositories, meaning the source code is copied so developers can use it in an independent project that builds on the original one. The result is millions of forks with names identical to the original one that add a payload that’s wrapped under seven layers of obfuscation. To make matters worse, some people, unaware of the malice of these imitators, are forking the forks, which adds to the flood.

Whack-a-mole

“Most of the forked repos are quickly removed by GitHub, which identifies the automation,” Matan Giladi and Gil David, researchers at security firm Apiiro, wrote Wednesday. “However, the automation detection seems to miss many repos, and the ones that were uploaded manually survive. Because the whole attack chain seems to be mostly automated on a large scale, the 1% that survive still amount to thousands of malicious repos.”

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Self-Destructing Circuits and More Security Schemes

Last week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), researchers introduced several technologies to fight even the sneakiest hack attacks. Engineers invented a way to detect a hacker placing a probe on the circuit board to attempt to read digital traffic in a computer. Other researchers invented new ways to obfuscate electromagnetic emissions radiating from an active processor that might reveal its secrets. Still other groups created new ways for chips to generate their own unique digital fingerprints, ensuring their authenticity. And if even those are compromised, one team came up with a chip-fingerprint self-destruct scheme.

A Probe-Attack Alarm

Some of the most difficult-to-defend-against attacks involve when a hacker has physical access to a system’s circuit board and can put a probe at various points. A probe attack in the right place can not only steal critical information and monitor traffic it can take over the whole system.

“It can be a starting point of some dangerous attacks,” Mao Li, a student in Mingoo Seok’s lab at Columbia University, told engineers at ISSCC.

The Columbia team, which included Intel director of circuit technology research Vivek De, invented a circuit that’s attached to the printed-circuit-board traces that link a processor to its memory. Called PACTOR, the circuit periodically scans for the tell-tale sign of probe being touched to the interconnect—a change in capacitance that can be as small as 0.5 picofarads. If it picks up that signal it engages what Lao called a protection engine, logic that can guard against the attack by, for example, instructing the processor to encrypt its data traffic.

Triggering defenses rather than having those defenses constantly engaged could have benefits for a computer’s performance, Li contended. “In comparison to… always-on protection, the detection-driven protection incurs less delay and less energy overhead,” he said.

The initial circuit was sensitive to temperature, something a skilled attacker could exploit. At high temperatures, the circuit would put up false alarms, and below room temperature, it would miss real attacks. The team solved this by adding a temperature sensing circuit that sets a different threshold for the probe-sensing circuit depending on which side of room temperature the system is on.

Electromagnetic Assault

“Security-critical circuit modules may leak sensitive information through side-channels such as power and [electromagnetic] emission. And attackers may exploit these side-channels to gain access to sensitive information,” said Sirish Oruganti a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin.

For, example, hackers aware of the timing of a key computation, SMA, in the AES encryption process can glean secrets from a chip. Oruganti and colleagues at UT Austin and at Intel came up with a new way to counter that theft by obscuring those signals.

One innovation was to take SMA and break it into four parallel steps. Then the timing of each substep was shifted slightly, blurring the side-channel signals. Another was to insert what Oruganti called tunable replica circuits. These are designed to mimic the observable side-channel signal of the SMAs. The tunable replica circuits operate for a realistic but random amount of time, obscuring the real signal from any eavesdropping attackers.

Using an electromagnetic scanner fine enough to discern signals from different parts of an IC, the Texas team, which included Intel engineers, was unable to crack the key in their test chip, even after 40 million attempts. It generally took only about 500 tries to grab the key from an unprotected version of the chip.

This Circuit Will Self-Destruct in…

Physically unclonable functions, or PUFs, exploit tiny differences in the electronic characteristics of individual transistors on a chip to create a unique code that can act like a digital fingerprint for each chips. A University of Vermont team led by Eric Hunt-Schroeder and involving Marvell Technology took their PUF a step farther. If it’s somehow compromised, this PUF can actually destroy itself. It’s extra-thorough at it, too; the system uses not one but two methods of circuit suicide.

Both stem from pumping up the voltage in the lines connecting to the encryption key’s bit-generating circuits. One effect is to boost in current in the circuit’s longest interconnects. That leads to electromigration, a phenomenon where current in very narrow interconnects literally blows metal atoms out of place, leading to voids and open circuits.

The second method relies on the increased voltage’s effect on a transistor’s gate dielectric, a tiny piece of insulation crucial to the ability to turn transistors on and off. In the advanced chipmaking technology Hunt-Schroeder’s team use, transistors are built to operate at less than 1 volt, but the self-destruct method subjects them to 2.5 V. Essentially, this accelerates an aging effect called time-dependent dielectric breakdown, which results in short circuits across the gate dielectric that kill the device.

Hunt-Schroeder was motivated to make these key-murdering circuits by reports that researchers had been able to clone SRAM-based PUFs using a scanning electron microscope, he said. Such a self-destruct system could also prevent counterfeit chips entering the market, Hunt-Schroeder said. “When you’re done with a part, it’s destroyed in a way that renders it useless.”

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A Bamboo Carbon Filter for Diesels Could Reduce Emissions

Diesel cars are a popular choice for those looking to buy a used vehicle in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere. After all, diesel cars cost less to maintain, burn less fuel, and have a longer engine life. Although the pollutant emissions of a diesel engine are less than those of a gasoline one, it still emits carcinogens, nitrous oxides, and soot. Older models don’t even have the emission-control features that newer ones do.

To reduce emissions, diesel vehicles use filters that catch exhaust particles and other contaminants. The filters can cost thousands of dollars to replace, however, because they’re made with precious metals.

Looking to make replacement filters more environmentally friendly and affordable, a team of engineering students from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, in Dhaka, designed a carbon-based version with bamboo. The Green Warriors idea won the US $300 prize for best impact in the IEEE Women in Engineering Big Idea Pitch competition. The contest’s goal is to encourage female engineering students and researchers to become more entrepreneurial as a way to boost the number of technical startups led by women.

“We found that old diesel cars are a significant contributor to CO₂ emissions, and we wanted to do something about that,” team leader Tasmiah Afrin said in an email interview.

“Our groundbreaking activated-carbon-based filter represents a significant leap forward in environmental and economic efficiency,” the electrical engineering student added. “The filters can rapidly and effectively capture carbon-based gases from vehicle emissions, contributing to immediate improvements in air quality and reduced carbon emissions.”

A carbon-based particulate filter

Diesel engines produce more polluting particulate matter than gas engines. Because the particles are so small, they can pass easily through a catalytic converter, which is designed to reduce a vehicle’s toxic emissions. Diesel particulate filters therefore are installed in the exhaust system, generally at the exit of the catalytic converter. The most popular type forces the exhaust through a ceramic honeycomb structure coated with a thin layer containing a precious metal such as platinum, palladium, or rhodium.

“Our project,” Afrin says, “is based on a modified air filter for incoming air into the catalytic converter.”

The Green Warriors’ prototype filter is made from bamboo and uses carbon granules to further reduce emissions.

Activated carbon granules in an absorption chamber and metallic mesh form the filters, Afrin says. Gases pass through either double or multiple chambers. Their prototype is more aerodynamic and lightweight than existing designs used for carbon filters, Afrin says.

“These filters offer a remarkable 5 to 7 percent cost efficiency improvement compared to existing filters, making them a more cost-effective solution for carbon capture in vehicle exhaust systems,” she says. “Not only are they cost-efficient, but they also boast an impressive absorption speed. This means the filters can rapidly and effectively capture carbon-based greenhouse gases from vehicle emissions, contribute to immediate improvements in air quality and reduce carbon emissions.”

She says she believes the team’s diesel particulate filter would cost less than a current filter, which because of its precious-metal content can cost a few thousand U.S. dollars.

A system for replacing filters

The filters are just one part of the team’s vision for reducing auto emissions. The students’ pitch also included a transport-management system they would build called CarGreenTech and its accompanying smartphone app. Using the app, owners of older diesel cars could purchase the replacement filter or arrange for one to be installed. Another option would be for CarGreenTech to buy the older car, outfit it with a new filter, and resell the vehicle. The goal is to extend the life of these older vehicles, Afrin says.

“CarGreenTech is a platform to make existing vehicles more climate-positive—which provides an all-in-one solution,” Afrin says. “It captures carbon from the diesel engine exhaust by utilizing layered active carbon filters, upcycling older car parts through a car buying/selling/upgrading business-to-business and business-to-consumer solution.” A motivator for student-led startups

The team also includes Ishman Tasnim, Fahmida Sultana Naznin, and Nusrat Subah Shakhawat. Tasnim is studying industrial and production engineering, and Naznin is pursuing a degree in computer science and engineering. Shakhawat recently graduated from the university with a degree in electrical engineering.

The team’s mentor was IEEE Member Toufiqur Rahman Shuvo, a lecturer at the university.

The students are all members of the IEEE student branch at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

“IEEE WIE has a great impact on giving motivation to student startups like us,” Afrin says. “Entering the IEEE WIE pitch competition was one of our best decisions. We were greatly motivated by the judges and getting an award for our work.”

The IEEE WIE competition was sponsored by the IEEE Life Members Committee and Smart WTI, a provider of IoT/artificial water management solutions. The company supports initiatives that aim to contribute to a greener, more sustainable future. Reference: https://ift.tt/qoyVwA8

Hackers backed by Russia and China are infecting SOHO routers like yours, FBI warns

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The FBI and partners from 10 other countries are urging owners of Ubiquiti EdgeRouters to check their gear for signs they’ve been hacked and are being used to conceal ongoing malicious operations by Russian state hackers.

The Ubiquiti EdgeRouters make an ideal hideout for hackers. The inexpensive gear, used in homes and small offices, runs a version of Linux that can host malware that surreptitiously runs behind the scenes. The hackers then use the routers to conduct their malicious activities. Rather than using infrastructure and IP addresses that are known to be hostile, the connections come from benign-appearing devices hosted by addresses with trustworthy reputations, allowing them to receive a green light from security defenses.

Unfettered access

“In summary, with root access to compromised Ubiquiti EdgeRouters, APT28 actors have unfettered access to Linux-based operating systems to install tooling and to obfuscate their identity while conducting malicious campaigns,” FBI officials wrote in an advisory Tuesday.

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Cops called after parents get tricked by AI-generated images of Wonka-like event

Enlarge / A photo of "Willy's Chocolate Experience" (inset), which did not match AI-generated promises, shown in the background. (credit: Stuart Sinclair)

On Saturday, event organizers shut down a Glasgow-based "Willy's Chocolate Experience" after customers complained that the unofficial Wonka-inspired event, which took place in a sparsely decorated venue, did not match the lush AI-generated images listed on its official website (archive here). According to Sky News, police were called to the event, and "advice was given."

"What an absolute shambles of an event," wrote Stuart Sinclar on Facebook after paying 35 pounds per ticket for himself and his kids. "Took 2 minutes to get through to then see a queue of people surrounding the guy running it complaining ... The kids received 2 jelly babies and a quarter of a can of Barrs limeade."

The Willy's Chocolate Experience website, which promises "a journey filled with wondrous creations and enchanting surprises at every turn," features five AI-generated images (likely created with OpenAI's DALL-E 3) that evoke a candy-filled fantasy wonderland inspired by the Willy Wonka universe and the recent Wonka film. But in reality, Sinclair was met with a nearly empty location with a few underwhelming decorations and a tiny bouncy castle. In one photo shared by Sinclair, a rainbow arch leads to a single yellow gummy bear and gum drop sitting on a bare concrete floor.

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Qualcomm’s Newest Chip Brings AI to Wi-Fi

Wireless spectrum is always at a premium—if you’ve ever tried to connect to Wi-Fi in a crowded airport or stadium, you know the pain that comes from crowded spectrum use. That’s why the industry continues to tinker with ways to get the most out of available spectrum. The latest example: Qualcomm’s FastConnect 7900 chip, which the company unveiled Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Qualcomm touts the FastConnect 7900 as a provider of “AI-enhanced” Wi-Fi 7, which the company views as an opportunity to create more reliable wireless connections. The chip will also better integrate the disparate technologies of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ultra-wideband for consumer applications. In addition, the chip can support two connections to the same device over the same spectrum band.

The FastConnect 7900 comes as the wireless industry renews its focus on reliability with Wi-Fi 7, the wireless tech standard’s latest generation. The emphasis comes in addition improving throughput and decreasing latency, something to which every Wi-Fi generation contributes.

(Wi-Fi is a range of wireless networking protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 set of standards. The IEEE is IEEE Spectrum‘s parent organization.)

AI-Enhanced Wi-Fi

“[Wi-Fi’s] a bit like the wild, wild West,” says Javier del Prado, vice president for mobile connectivity at Qualcomm. “It’s all sorts of devices out there, congestion, devices that come in and go off, access points that do this, access points that do that—It’s very difficult to guarantee service.” Del Prado says that AI is the “perfect tool” to change that.

Key to the FastConnect 7900’s capabilities is the chip’s ability to detect what applications are in use by the device. Different applications use Wi-Fi differently: For example, streaming a video may require more data throughput, while a voice chat needs to prioritize low latency. After the chip has determined what applications are in use, it can optimize power and latency on a case-by-case basis.

Using AI to manage wireless spectrum connections isn’t a new problem or solution, but Qualcomm’s chip benefits from running everything on-device. “It has to run on the device to be effective,” says del Prado. “We need to make decisions at the microsecond level.”

Put another way, using the Wi-Fi connection itself to transmit the information about how to adjust the Wi-Fi connection would defeat the purpose of AI management in the first place—by the time the chip receives the information, it’d be way out of date.

Also important: The chip doesn’t suck power—in fact, it saves power overall. “These are fairly simple models,” says del Prado. “It’s not a 5-billion parameter AI. It’s a much smaller model. The key performance indicators are the speed and the accuracy.”

Del Prado says that the chip’s power consumption is negligible. In fact, because of its ability to optimize power depending on what applications are running, the chip saves its device up to 30 percent in power consumption.

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and Ultra-Wideband, All in One

Outside of cellular, Wi-Fi is the most common way our phones connect with the world. But it’s not the only tech—Bluetooth is used for things like wireless earbuds, and ultra-wideband (UWB) also sees some use for applications like item tracking (think Apple’s AirPods) and locking and unlocking cars remotely. All three technologies rely heavily on proximity and distance ranging to maintain wireless connections.

“There are all these use cases that use proximity and that use different technologies,” says del Prado. “Different technologies bring different benefits. There’s not always a single technology that fits all use cases. But that creates complexity.”

Qualcomm’s FastConnect 7900, del Prado says, will hide that complexity. “We make it technology-agnostic for the consumer.”

Sharing Spectrum Bands

One final trick the FastConnect 7900 offers is an ability to host two Wi-Fi connections on the same band of spectrum. Here, the chip is building on previous FastConnect generations. “We already introduced what we call ‘hybrid-simultaneous’—this is the capability of doing multiple channels simultaneously on the 5 and 6 gigahertz bands,” says del Prado.

New to the 7900 is audio over Wi-Fi, says del Prado. Qualcomm is calling it “XPAN,” and it’s a separate channel for audio only in those 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands.

This matters because those spectrum bands can deliver a much higher audio quality to the device compared to, say, Bluetooth, which operates in the 2.4 GHz band. By carving out a separate channel just for audio, says del Prado, the 7900 chip can provide that much better audio quality without it succumbing to the strain that typically emerges when multiple connections demand the same wireless signal. “That’s something that cannot be done with Bluetooth today, because it’s bandwidth-limited,” says del Prado.

Qualcomm is already sampling the FastConnect 7900 to its customers—that is, manufacturers of phones and similar devices. Del Prado estimates that the first products with the chip will hit the market in the second half of the year. “When the new round of premium Android phones hits the market later this year, those should support this functionality.”

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Heat Pumps Take on Cold Climates

Twenty homes scattered across Canada and the northern United States are keeping warm this winter using prototypes of the latest iteration in residential heating systems: cold climate heat pumps.

Heat pumps aren’t common in homes at this latitude, because historically they haven’t worked well in subzero temperatures. But heat pump manufacturers say they now have the technology to heat homes just as efficiently in bitter cold as they do in milder winter temperatures.

To prove it, eight manufacturers are publicly testing their prototypes in the Cold-Climate Heat Pump Technology Challenge, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in partnership with Natural Resources Canada. The companies’ task is to demonstrate a high-efficiency, residential, air-source heat pump that can perform at 100 percent capacity at -15 °C. Companies can choose to further test their machines down to -26 °C.

Heat pump manufacturers Bosch, Carrier, Daikin, Johnson Controls, Lennox, Midea, Rheem, and Trane Technologies have each passed the laboratory phase of the challenge, according to the DOE. They are now field testing their prototypes in homes in ten northern U.S. states and two Canadian provinces, where furnaces and boilers burning fossil gas, fuel oil or propane are more commonly used.

Companies that complete the challenge won’t receive a cash prize. But the DOE will help them expand into cold climate markets by engaging with stakeholders in those regions, a DOE spokesperson told IEEE Spectrum. The challenge will conclude later this year, and prototypes will likely be ready for commercialization in 2025.

How heat pumps beat the cold

Advances in the technology came primarily through improvements in one key heat pump component: the compressor. Heat pumps work by moving and compressing fluids. In the winter, the systems draw heat from outside the home, most commonly from the air. (There is heat in the air even in subzero temperatures.) An outdoor heat exchanger, or coil, absorbs the heat into the heat pump system.

The outdoor air passes over a heat exchanger containing a fluid, or refrigerant, that has a very low boiling point. A common refrigerant, called R410a, boils at -48.5 °C. The refrigerant boils and evaporates into a vapor, and a compressor increases its temperature and pressure. The superheated vapor then moves through an indoor coil, where fans blow air across it, moving heat into the home. In the summer, the system reverses, moving heat from inside the building to the outside, and cooling the home.

“They couldn’t get the lab any colder than [-30 °C], so we had to cut the power to get the heat pump to turn off.” —Katie Davis, Trane Technologies

The colder the temperature outside, the harder heat pumps must work to extract and move enough heat to maintain the home’s temperature. At about 4 °C, most air-source heat pumps currently on the market start operating at less than their full capacity, and at some point (usually around -15 °C), they can no longer do the job at all. At that point, an auxiliary heat source kicks on, which is less efficient.

But advancements in compressor technology over the last five years have addressed that issue. By controlling the compressor motor’s speed, and improving the timing of when vapor is injected into the compressor, engineers have made heat pumps efficient in colder temperatures.

For example, Trane Technologies, headquartered in Dublin, “played with the vapor compression cycle” so that it gets an extra injection of refrigerant, says Katie Davis, vice president of engineering and technology in Trane’s residential business. “It’s works a little like fuel injection,” she says. When the system begins to lose its capacity to heat, the system injects refrigerant to give it a boost, she says.

In the lab portion of the DOE’s heat pump challenge, Trane’s unit operated at 100 percent capacity at -15 °C and kept running even as the lab’s temperature dropped to -30 °C, although no longer at full capacity. “They couldn’t get the lab any colder than that, so we had to cut the power to get the heat pump to turn off,” Davis says.

Vapor injection compressor technology has been around for years, but until recently, had not been optimized for heat pumps, Davis says. That, plus the introduction of smart systems that enable the indoor and outdoor units to communicate with each other and the thermostat, has enabled heat pumps to take on colder weather.

Heat pumps can reduce emissions and cut energy costs

The DOE is pushing for wider adoption of heat pumps because of their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Such systems run on electricity rather than fossil fuels, and when the electricity comes from renewable sources, the greenhouse gas savings are substantial, the DOE says.

A two-year study published 12 February in the journal Joule supports the DOE’s claim. The study found that if every heated home in the U.S. switched to a heat pump, home energy use would drop by 31 to 47 percent on average, and national carbon dioxide emissions would fall by 5 to 9 percent, depending on how much electricity is provided by renewable energy. Those figures are based on heat pumps that draw heat from an air source (rather than ground or water) and includes both homes that pull heat through ductwork, and homes that are ductless.

The energy savings should lower bills for 62 to 95 percent of homeowners, depending on the efficiency and cold climate performance of the heat pump being installed. How well a home is insulated and the type of heating system being replaced also makes a big difference in energy bills, the study found. For households that are currently heating with electric resistance heat, fuel oil, or propane, heat pumps could save thousands of dollars annually. For natural gas, the savings are less and depend on the price of natural gas in the local area.

Some homeowners are hesitant to switch to heat pumps because of what’s known as “temperature anxiety.”

Cold climate heat pumps will likely boost energy savings for homeowners, but will require higher up front costs, says Eric Wilson, a senior research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, and an author of the paper. “It’s generally well known that heat pumps can save money, but there’s a lot of confusion around whether they’re a good idea in all climates,” he says. His study and the DOE’s cold climate heat pump challenge will help provide a clearer picture, he says.

The DOE is one of several government entities trying to expedite adoption of residential high efficiency heat pumps. Nine U.S. states earlier this month pledged to accelerate heat pump sales. Their pledge builds on an announcement in September from 25 governors, who vowed to quadruple heat pump installation in their states by 2030. The U.S. federal government also offers tax credits and states will be rolling out rebates to offset the cost of installation.

So far, the efforts seem to be working. In the U.S., heat pumps outsold furnaces for a second year in a row in 2023, according to data released 9 February by the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute in Arlington, Virginia.

Europe is making a similar push. The European Commission has called for expedited deployment of heat pumps, and recommended that member states phase out the use of fossil fuel heating systems in all buildings by 2035. Many European countries are subsidizing residential heat pump installation by offering grants to homeowners.

But some homeowners are hesitant to switch to heat pumps because of what’s known as “temperature anxiety.” It’s like electric vehicle range anxiety: Homeowners are concerned about getting stuck in a cold house.

And some just like the feel of old fashioned heat. “Folks who have furnaces say they really like the way that hot heat feels when it’s coming out,” says Davis at Trane. “Heat pumps put out warm heat and it’s going to do a good job heating your home, but it’s not that hot heat that comes out of a furnace.”

Trane’s cold climate heat pump—the one entered into the DOE’s challenge—is current heating the home of a family in Boise, Idaho, Davis says. “We’ve had excellent feedback from our customer there, who said their energy bills went down,” she says.

To pass the DOE’s field test, heat pumps must draw heat from the air (rather than the ground or water) and operate in homes that distribute air through ductwork, since those setups are more challenging in colder climates.

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What is CMOS 2.0?

CMOS, the silicon logic technology behind decades and decades of smaller transistors and faster computers, is entering a new phase. CMOS uses two types of transistors in pairs to limit a circuit’s power consumption. In this new phase, “CMOS 2.0,” that part’s not going to change, but how processors and other complex CMOS chips are made will. Julien Ryckaert, vice president of logic technologies at Imec, the Belgium-based nanotechnology research center, told IEEE Spectrum where things are headed.

Julien Ryckaert

Julien Ryckaert is vice president of logic technologies at Imec, in Belgium, where he’s been involved in exploring new technologies for 3D chips, among other topics.

Why is CMOS entering a new phase?

Julien Ryckaert: CMOS was the technology answer to build microprocessors in the 1960s. Making things smaller—transistors and interconnects—to make them better worked for 60, 70 years. But that has started to break down.

Why has CMOS scaling been breaking down?

Ryckaert: Over the years, people have made system-on-chips (SoCs)—such as CPUs and GPUs—more and more complex. That is, they have integrated more and more operations onto the same silicon die. That makes sense, because it is so much more efficient to move data on a silicon die than to move it from chip to chip in a computer.

For a long time, the scaling down of CMOS transistors and interconnects made all those operations work better. But now, it’s starting to be difficult to build the whole SoC, to make all of it better by just scaling the device and the interconnect. For example, SRAM [the system’s cache memory] no longer scales as well as logic.

What’s the solution?

Ryckaert: Seeing that something different needs to happen, we at Imec asked: Why do we scale? At the end of the day, Moore’s law is not about delivering smaller transistors and interconnects, it’s about achieving more functionality per unit area.

So what you are starting to see is breaking out certain functions, such as logic and SRAM, building them on separate chiplets using technologies that give each the best advantage, and then reintegrating them using advanced 3D packaging technologies. You can connect two functions that are built on the different substrates and achieve an efficiency in communication between those two functions that is competitive with how efficient they were when the two functions were on the same substrate. This is an evolution to what we call smart disintegration, or system technology co-optimization.

So is that CMOS 2.0?

Ryckaert: What we’re doing in CMOS 2.0 is pushing that idea further, with much finer-grained disintegration of functions and stacking of many more dies. A first sign of CMOS 2.0 is the imminent arrival of backside-power-delivery networks. On chips today, all interconnects—both those carrying data and those delivering power—are on the front side of the silicon [above the transistors]. Those two types of interconnect have different functions and different requirements, but they have had to exist in a compromise until now. Backside power moves the power-delivery interconnects to beneath the silicon, essentially turning the die into an active transistor layer which is sandwiched between two interconnect stacks, each stack having a different functionality.

Will transistors and interconnects still have to keep scaling in CMOS 2.0?

Ryckaert: Yes, because somewhere in that stack, you will still have a layer that still needs more transistors per unit area. But now, because you have removed all the other constraints that it once had, you are letting that layer nicely scale with the technology that is perfectly suited for it. I see fascinating times ahead.

This article appears in the March print issue as “5 Questions for Julien Ryckaert.”

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The Scoop on Keeping an Ice Cream Factory Cool

Working in an ice cream factory is a dream for anyone who enjoys the frozen dessert. For control systems engineer Patryk Borkowski, a job at the biggest ice cream company in the world is also a great way to put his automation expertise to use.

Patryk Borkowski

Employer:

Unilever, Colworth Science Park, in Sharnbrook, England

Occupation:

Control systems engineer

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in automation and robotics from the West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, Poland

Borkowski works at the Advanced Prototype and Engineering Centre of the multinational consumer goods company Unilever. Unilever’s corporate umbrella covers such ice cream brands as Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers, Good Humor, Magnum, and Walls.

Borkowski maintains and updates equipment at the innovation center’s pilot plant at Colworth Science Park in Sharnbrook, England. The company’s food scientists and engineers use this small-scale factory to experiment with new ice cream formulations and novel production methods.

The reality of the job might not exactly live up to an ice cream lover’s dream. For safety reasons, eating the product in the plant is prohibited.

“You can’t just put your mouth underneath the nozzle of an ice cream machine and fill your belly,” he says.

For an engineer, though, the complex chemistry and processing required to create ice cream products make for fascinating problem-solving. Much of Borkowski’s work involves improving the environmental impact of ice cream production by cutting waste and reducing the amount of energy needed to keep products frozen.

And he loves working on a product that puts a smile on the faces of customers. “Ice cream is a deeply indulgent and happy product,” he says. “We love working to deliver a superior taste and a superior way to experience ice cream.”

Ice Cream Innovation

Borkowski joined Unilever as a control systems engineer in 2021. While he’s not allowed to discuss many of the details of his research, he says one of the projects he has worked on is a modular manufacturing line that the company uses to develop new kinds of ice cream. The setup allows pieces of equipment such as sauce baths, nitrogen baths for quickly freezing layers, and chocolate deposition systems to be seamlessly switched in and out so that food scientists can experiment and create new products.

Ice cream is a fascinating product to work on for an engineer, Borkowski says, because it’s inherently unstable. “Ice cream doesn’t want to be frozen; it pretty much wants to be melted on the floor,” he says. “We’re trying to bend the chemistry to bind all the ingredients into a semistable mixture that gives you that great taste and feeling on the tongue.”

Making Production More Sustainable

Helping design new products is just one part of Borkowski’s job. Unilever is targeting sustainability across the company, so cutting waste and improving energy efficiency are key. He recently helped develop a testing rig to simulate freezer doors being repeatedly opened and closed in shops. This helped collect temperature data that was used to design new freezers that run at higher temperatures to save electricity.

In 2022, he was temporarily transferred to one of Unilever’s ice cream factories in Hellendoorn, Netherlands, to uncover inefficiencies in the production process. He built a system that collected and collated operational data from all the factory’s machines to identify the causes of stoppages and waste.

“There’s a deep pride in knowing the machines that we’ve programmed make something that people buy and enjoy.”

It wasn’t easy. Some of the machines were older and no longer supported by their manufacturers. Also, they ran legacy code written in Dutch—a language Borkowski doesn’t speak.

Borkowski ended up reverse-engineering the machines to figure out their operating systems, then reprogrammed them to communicate with the new data-collection system. Now the data-collection system can be easily adapted to work at any Unilever factory.

Discovering a Love for Technology

As a child growing up in Stargard, Poland, Borkowski says there was little to indicate that he would become an engineer. At school, he loved writing, drawing, and learning new languages. He imagined himself having a career in the creative industries.

But in the late 1990s, his parents got a second-hand computer and a modem. He quickly discovered online communities for technology enthusiasts and began learning about programming.

Because of his growing fascination with technology, at 16, Borkowski opted to attend a technical high school, pursuing a technical diploma in electronics and learning about components, soldering, and assembly language. In 2011, he enrolled at the West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, Poland, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in automation and robotics.

When he graduated in 2015, there were few opportunities in Poland to put his skills to use, so he moved to London. There, Borkowski initially worked odd jobs in warehouses and production facilities. After a brief stint as an electronic technician assembling ultrasonic scanners, he joined bakery company Brioche Pasquier in Milton Keynes, England, as an automation engineer.

This was an exciting move, Borkowski says, because he was finally doing control engineering, the discipline he’d always wanted to pursue. Part of his duties involved daily maintenance, but he also joined a team building new production lines from the ground up, linking together machinery such as mixers, industrial ovens, coolers, and packaging units. They programmed the machines so they all worked together seamlessly without human intervention.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, new projects went on hold and work slowed down, Borkowski says. There seemed to be little opportunity to advance his career at Brioche Pasquier, so he applied for the control systems job at Unilever.

“When I was briefed on the work, they told me it was all R&D and every project was different,” he says. “I thought that sounded like a challenge.”

The Importance of a Theoretical Foundation

Control engineers require a broad palette of skills in both electronics and programming, Borkowski says. Some of these can be learned on the job, he says, but a degree in subjects like automation or robotics provides an important theoretical foundation.

The biggest piece of advice he has for fledgling control engineers is to stay calm, which he admits can be difficult when a manager is pressuring you to quickly get a line back up to avoid production delays.

“Sometimes it’s better to step away and give yourself a few minutes to think before you do anything,” he says. Rushing can often result in mistakes that cause more problems in the long run.

While working in production can sometimes be stressful, “There’s a deep pride in knowing the machines that we’ve programmed make something that people buy and enjoy,” Borkowski says.

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Science Fiction Short: Hijack

Computers have grown more and more powerful over the decades by pushing the limits of how small their electronics can get. But just how big can a computer get? Could we turn a planet into a computer, and if so, what would we do with it?

In considering such questions, we go beyond normal technological projections and into the realm of outright speculation. So IEEE Spectrum is making one of its occasional forays into science fiction, with a short story by Karl Schroeder about the unexpected outcomes from building a computer out of planet Mercury. Because we’re going much farther into the future than a typical Spectrum article does, we’ve contextualized and annotated Schroeder’s story to show how it’s still grounded in real science and technology. This isn’t the first work of fiction to consider such possibilities. In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Douglas Adams famously imagined a world constructed to serve as a processor.

Real-world scientists are also intrigued by the idea. Jason Wright, director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, has given serious thought to how large a computer can get. A planet-scale computer, he notes, might feature in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. “In SETI, we try to look for generic things any civilization might do, and computation feels pretty generic,” Wright says. “If that’s true, then someone’s got the biggest computer, and it’s interesting to think about how big it could be, and what limits they might hit.”

There are, of course, physical constraints on very large computers. For instance, a planet-scale computer probably could not consist of a solid ball like Earth. “It would just get too hot,” Wright says. Any computation generates waste heat. Today’s microchips and data centers “face huge problems with heat management.”

In addition, if too much of a planet-scale computer’s mass is concentrated in one place, “it could implode under its own weight,” says Anders Sandberg, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. “There are materials stronger than steel, but molecular bonds have a limit.”

Instead, creating a computer from a planet will likely involve spreading out a world’s worth of mass. This strategy would also make it easier to harvest solar energy. Rather than building a single object that would be subject to all kinds of mechanical stresses, it would be better to break the computer up into a globular flotilla of nodes, known as a Dyson swarm.

What uses might a planet-scale computer have? Hosting virtual realities for uploaded minds is one possibility, Sandberg notes. Quantum simulation of ecosystems is another, says Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at MIT.

Which brings us to our story…

Which brings us to our story…

Simon Okoro settled into a lawn chair in the Heaven runtime and watched as worlds were born.

“I suppose I should feel honored you chose to watch this with me,” said Martin as he sat down next to Simon. “Considering that you don’t believe I exist.”

“Can’t we just share a moment? It’s been years since we did anything together. And you worked toward this moment too. You deserve some recognition.”

A

Uploading is a hypothetical process in which brain scanning can help create emulations of human minds in computers. A large enough computer could potentially house a civilization. These uploads could then go on to live in computer-simulated virtual realities.

B

Chris Philpot

A typical satellite must orbit around a celestial object at a speed above a critical value to avoid being pulled into the surface of the object by gravity. A statite, a hypothetical form of satellite patented by physicist Robert L. Forward, uses a solar sail to help it hover above a star or planet, using radiation pressure from sunlight to balance the force of gravity.

“Ah. They sent you to acknowledge the Uploaded, is that it?” Martin turned his long, sad-eyed face to the sky and the drama playing out above. A The Heaven runtime was a fully virtual world, so Simon had converted the sky into a vast screen on which to project what was happening in the real world. The magnified surface of the sun made a curving arc from horizon to horizon. Jets and coronas rippled over it, and high, high above its incandescent surface hung thousands of solar statites shaped like mirrored flowers B.

They did not orbit, instead floating over a particular spot by light pressure alone. They formed a diffuse cloud, dwindling to invisibility before reaching the horizon. This telescope view showed the closest statite cores scattering fiery specks like spores into the overwhelming light. The specks blazed with light and shot away from the sun, accelerating.

This moment was the pinnacle of Simon’s career, the apex of his life’s work. Each of those specks was a solar sail C, kilometers wide, carrying a terraforming package D. Launched so close to the sun and supplemented with lasers powered by the statites, they would be traveling at 20 percent light speed by the time they left the solar system. At their destinations, they’d sundive and then deliver terraforming seeds to lifeless planets around the nearest stars.

C

Chris Philpot

Light has no mass, but it can exert pressure as photons exchange momentum with a surface as they reflect off it. A mirror that is thin and reflective enough can therefore serve as a solar sail, harnessing sunlight to generate thrust. In 2010, Japan’s Ikaros probe to Venus demonstrated the use of a solar sail for interplanetary travel for the first time. Because solar pressure is measured in micronewtons per square meter, solar sails must have large areas relative to their payloads, although the pressure from sunlight can be augmented with a laser beam for propulsion .

D

Terraforming is the hypothetical act of transforming a planet so as to resemble Earth, or at least make it suitable for life. Some terraforming proposals involve first seeding the planet with single-celled organisms that alter conditions to be more hospitable to multicellular life. This process would mimic the naturally occurring transformation of Earth that started about 2.3 billion years ago, when photosynthetic cyanobacteria created the oxygen-rich atmosphere we breathe today.

“So life takes hold in the galaxy,” said Simon. These were the first words of a speech he’d written and rehearsed long ago. He’d dreamed of saying them on a podium, with Martin standing with him. But Martin...well, Martin had been dead for 20 years now.“

So life takes hold in the galaxy,” said Simon. These were the first words of a speech he’d written and rehearsed long ago. He’d dreamed of saying them on a podium, with Martin standing with him. But Martin...well, Martin had been dead for 20 years now.

He remembered the rest of the speech, but there was no point in giving it when he was absolutely alone.

Martin sighed. “So this is all you’re going to do with my Heaven? A little gardening? And then what? An orderly shutdown of the Heaven runtime? Sell off the Paradise processor as scrap?”

“I knew this was a bad idea.” Simon raised his hand to exit the virtual world, but Martin quickly stood, looking sorry.

“It’s just hard,” Martin said. “Paradise was supposed to be the great project to unite humanity. Our triumph over death! Why did you let them hijack it for this?”

Simon watched the spores catch the light and flash away into interstellar space. “You know we won’t shut you down. Heaven will be kept running as long as Paradise exists. We built it together, Martin, and I’m proud of what we did.”

E

In a 2013 study, Sandberg and his colleague Stuart Armstrong suggested deploying automated self-replicating robots on Mercury to build a Dyson swarm. These robots would dismantle the planet to construct not only more of themselves but also the sunlight collectors making up the swarm. The more solar plants these robots built, the more energy they would have to mine Mercury and produce machines. Given this feedback loop, Sandberg and Armstrong argued, these robots could disassemble Mercury in a matter of decades. The solar plants making up this Dyson swarm could double as computers.

F

Solar power is exponentially more abundant at Mercury’s orbit compared with Earth’s. At its orbital distance of 1 astronomical unit from the sun, Earth receives about 1.4 kilowatts per square meter from sunlight. Mercury receives between 6.2 and 14.4 kW/m2. The range is because of Mercury’s high eccentricity—that is, it has the most elliptical orbit of all the planets in the solar system.

G

Whereas classical computers switch transistors on and off to symbolize data as either 1s and 0s, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which can exist in a state where they are both 1 and 0 at the same time. This essentially lets each qubit perform two calculations at once. As more qubits are added to a quantum computer, its computational power grows exponentiall

The effort had been mind-bogglingly huge. They’d been able to do it only because millions of people believed that in dismantling Mercury E and turning it into a sun-powered F quantum computer G there would be enough computing power for every living person to upload their consciousness into it. The goal had been to achieve eternal life in a virtual afterlife: the Heaven runtime.

Simon knit his hands together, lowering his eyes to the virtual garden. “Science happened, Martin. How were we to know Enactivism H would answer the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness? You and I had barely even heard of extended consciousness when we proposed Heaven. It was an old idea from cognitive science. Nobody was even studying it anymore except a few AIs, and we were sucking up all the resources they might have used to experiment.” He glanced ruefully at Martin. “We were all blindsided when they proved it. Consciousness can’t be just abstracted from a brain.”

Martin’s response was quick; this was an old argument between them. “Nothing’s ever completely proven in science! There’s always room for doubt—but you agreed with those AIs when they said that simulated consciousness can’t have subjective experiences. Conveniently after I died but before I got rebooted here. I wasn’t here to fight you.”

Martin snorted. “And now you think I’m a zimboe I: a mindless simulation of the old Martin so accurate that I act exactly how he would if you told him he wasn’t self-aware. I deny it! Of course I do, like everyone else from that first wave of uploads.” He gestured, and throughout the simulated mountain valley, thousands of other human figures were briefly highlighted. “But what did it matter what I said, once I was in here? You’d already repurposed Paradise from humanity’s chance at immortality to just a simulator, using it to mimic billions of years of evolution on alien planets. All for this ridiculous scheme to plant ready-made, complete biospheres on them in advance of human colonization.” J

H

Enactivism was first mooted in the 1990s. In a nutshell, it explains the mind as emerging from a brain’s dynamic interactions with the larger world. Thus, there can be no such thing as a purely abstract consciousness, completely distinct from the world it is embedded in.

I

A “philosophical zombie” is a putative entity that behaves externally exactly like a being with consciousness but with no self-awareness, no “I”: It is a pure automata, even though it might itself say otherwise.

J

Chris Philpot

Living organisms are tremendously complex systems. This diagram shows just the core metabolic pathways for an organism known as JCVI-SYN3A. Each red dot represents a different biomolecule, and the arrows indicate the directions in which chemical reactions can proceed.

JCVI-SYN3A is a synthetic life-form, a cell genetically engineered to have the simplest possible biology. Yet even its metabolism is difficult to simulate accurately with current computational resources. When Nobel laureate Richard Feynman first proposed the idea of quantum computers, he envisioned them modeling quantum systems such as molecules. One could imagine that a powerful enough quantum computer could go on to model cells, organisms, and ecosystems, Lloyd says

“We’d already played God with the inner solar system,” Simon reminded him. “The only way we could justify that after the Enactivism results was to find an even higher purpose than you and I started out with.

“Martin, I’m sorry you died before we discovered the truth. I fought to keep this subsystem running our original Heaven sim, because you’re right—there’s always a chance that the Enactivists are wrong. However slim.”

Martin snorted again. “I appreciate that. But things got very, very weird during your Enactivist rebellion. If I didn’t know better, I’d call this project”—he nodded at the sky—“the weirdest thing of all. Things are about to heat up now, though, aren’t they?”

“This was a mistake.” Simon sighed and flipped out of the virtual world. Let the simulated Martin rage in his artificial heaven; the science was unequivocal. In truth, Simon had been speaking only to himself for the entire conversation.

He stood now in the real world near the podium in a giant stadium, inside a wheel-shaped habitat 200 kilometers across. Hundreds of similar mini-ringworlds were spaced around the rim of Paradise.

Paradise itself was a vast bowl-shaped object, more cloud than material, orbiting closer to the sun than Mercury had. Self-reproducing machines had eaten that planet in a matter of decades, transforming its usable elements into a solar-powered quantum computer tens of thousands of kilometers across. The bowl cupped a spherical cloud of iron that acted as a radiator for the waste heat emitted by Paradise’s quadrillions of computing modules. K

K

One design for planetary scale—and up!—computers is a Matrioshka brain. Proposed in 1997 by Robert Bradbury, it would consist of nested structures, like its namesake Russian doll. The outer layers would use the waste heat of the inner layers to power their computations, with the aim of making use of every bit of energy for processing. However, in a 2023 study, Wright suggests that this nested design may be unnecessary. “If you have multiple layers, shadows from the inner elements of the swarm, as well as collisions, could decrease efficiency,” he says. “The optimal design is likely the smallest possible sphere you can build given the mass you have.”

L

How much computation might a planet-size machine carry out? Earth has a mass of nearly 6 x 1024 kilograms. In a 2000 paper, Lloyd calculated that 1 kilogram of matter in 1 liter could support a maximum of roughly 5.4 x 1050 logical operations per second. However, at that rate, Lloyd noted, it would be operating at a temperature of 109 kelvins, resembling a small piece of the big bang.

M

Top to bottom: Proxima Centauri b, Ross 128 b, GJ 1061 d, GJ 1061 c, Luyten b, Teegarden’s Star b, Teegarden’s Star c, Wolf 1061c, GJ 1002 b, GJ 1002 c, Gliese 229 Ac, Gliese 625 b, Gliese 667 Cc, Gliese 514 b, Gliese 433 d

Potentially habitable planets have been identified within 30 light-years of Earth. Another 16 or so are within 100 light-years, with likely more yet to be identified. Many of them have masses considerably greater than Earth’s, indicating very different environmental conditions than those under which terrestrial organisms evolved

The leaders of the terraforming project were on stage, taking their bows. The thousands of launches happening today were the culmination of decades of work: evolution on fast-forward, ecosystem after ecosystem, with DNA and seed designs for millions of new species fitted to thousands of worlds L.

It had to be done. Humans had never found another inhabited planet. That fact made life the most precious thing in the universe, and spreading it throughout the galaxy seemed a better ambition for humanity than building a false heaven. M

Simon had reluctantly come to accept this. Martin was right, though. Things had gotten weird. Paradise was such a good simulator that you could ask it to devise a machine to do X, and it would evolve its design in seconds. Solutions found through diffusion and selection were superior to algorithmically or human-designed ones, but it was rare that they could be reverse-engineered or their working principles even understood. And Paradise had computing power to spare, so in recent years, human and AI designers across the solar system had been idled as Paradise replaced their function. This, it was said, was the Technological Maximum; it was impossible for any civilization to attain a level of technological advancement beyond the point where any possible system could be instantly evolved.

Simon walked to where he could look past the open roof of the stadium to the dark azure sky. The vast sweep of the ring rose before and behind; in its center, a vast canted mirror reflected sunlight; to the left of that, he could see the milky white surface of the Paradise bowl. Usually, to the right, there was only blackness.

Today, he could see a sullen red glow. That would be Paradise’s radiator, expelling heat from the calculation of all those alien ecosystems. Except...

He found a quiet spot and sat, then reentered the Heaven simulation. Martin was still there, gazing at the sky.

Simon sat beside him. “What did you mean when you said things are heating up?”

Martin’s grin was slow and satisfied. “So you noticed.”

“Paradise isn’t supposed to be doing anything right now. All the terraforming packages were completed and copied to the sails—most of them years ago. Now they’re on their way, Paradise doesn’t have any duties, except maybe evolving better luxury yachts.”

Martin nodded. “Sure. And is it doing anything?”

Simon still had read-access to Paradise’s diagnostics systems. He summoned a board that showed what the planet-size computing system was doing.

Nothing. It was nearly idle.

“If the system is idle, why is the radiator approaching its working limit?”

Martin crossed his arms, grinning. Damn it, he was enjoying this! Or the real Martin would be enjoying it, if he were here.

“You remember when the first evolved machines started pouring out of the printers?” Martin said. “Each one was unique; each grown for one owner, one purpose, one place. You said they looked alien, and I laughed and said, ‘How would we even know if an alien invasion was happening, if no two things look or work the same anymore?’ ”

“That’s when it started getting weird,” admitted Simon. “Weirder, I mean, than building an artificial heaven by dismantling Mercury…” But Martin wasn’t laughing at his feeble joke. He was shaking his head.

N

Chris Philpot

In astrodynamics, unless an object is actively generating thrust, its trajectory will take the form of a conic section—that is, a circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola. Even relatively few observations of an object anywhere along its trajectory can distinguish between these forms, with objects that are gravitationally bound following circular and elliptical trajectories. Objects on parabolic or hyperbolic trajectories, by contrast, are unbound. Therefore, any object found to be moving along a hyperbola relative to the sun must have come from interstellar space. This is how in 2017, astronomers identified ‘Oumuamua, a cigar-shaped object, as the first known interstellar visitor. It’s been estimated that each year, about seven interstellar objects pass through the inner solar system.

“No, that’s not when it got weird. It got weird when the telescopes we evolved to monitor the construction of Paradise noticed just how many objects pass through the solar system every year.”

“Interstellar wanderers? They’re just extrasolar comets,” said Simon. “You said yourself that rocks from other star systems must pass through ours all the time.” N

“Yes. But what I didn’t get to tell you—because I died—was that while we were building Paradise, several objects drifted from interstellar space into one side of the Paradise construction orbits...and didn’t come out the other side.”

Simon blinked. “Something arrived...and didn’t leave? Wouldn’t it have been eaten by the recycling planetoids?”

“You’d think. But there’s no record of it.”

“But what does this have to do with the radiator?”

Martin reached up and flicked through a few skies until he came to a view of the spherical iron cloud in the bowl of Paradise. “Remember why we even have a radiator?”

“Because there’s always excess energy left over from making a calculation. If it can’t be used for further calculations down the line, it’s literally meaningless, it has to be discarded.”

“Right. We designed Paradise in layers, so each layer would scavenge the waste from the previous one—optical computing on the sunward-facing skin, electronics further in. But inevitably, we ran out of architectures that could scavenge the excess. There is always an excess that is meaningless to the computing architecture at some point. So we built Paradise in the shape of a bowl, where all that extra heat would be absorbed by the iron cloud in its center. We couldn’t use that iron for transistors. The leftovers of Mercury were mostly a junk pile—but one we could use as a radiator.”

“But the radiator’s shedding heat like crazy! Where’s that coming from?” asked Simon.

“Let’s zoom in.” Martin put two fingers against the sky and pulled them apart. Whatever telescope he was linked to zoomed crazily; it felt like the whole world was getting yanked into the radiator. Simon was used to virtual worlds, so he just planted his feet and let the dizzying motion wash over him.

The radiator cloud filled the sky, at first just a dull red mist. But gradually Simon began to see structure to it: giant cells far brighter than the material around them. “Those look like...energy storage. Heat batteries. As if the radiator’s been storing some of the power coming through it. But why—”

Alerts from the real world suddenly blossomed in his visual field. He popped out of Martin’s virtual garden and into a confused roar inside the stadium.

The holographic image that filled the central space of the stadium showed the statite launchers hovering over the sun. One by one, they were folding in on themselves, falling silently into the incinerating heat below. The crowd was on its feet, people shouting in shock and fear. Now that the launchers had sent the terraforming systems, they were supposed to propel ships of colonists heading for the newly greened worlds. There were no more inner-solar-system resources left to build more.

O

Chris Philpot

“Mechanical computer” brings to mind the rotating cogwheels of Charles Babbage’s 19th-century Difference Engine, but other approaches exist. Here we show the heart of a logic gate made with moving rods. The green input rods can slide back and forth as desired, with a true value indicated by placing the rod into its forward position and false indicated by moving the rod into its back position. The blue output rod is blocked from advancing to its true position unless both input rods are set to true, so this represents an AND gate. Rod logic has been proposed as a mechanism for controlling nanotech-scale robots.

In space, one problem that a mechanical computer could face is a phenomenon called cold welding. That occurs when two flat, clean pieces of metal come in contact, and they fuse together. Cold welding is not usually seen in everyday life on Earth because metals are often coated in layers of oxides and other contaminants that keep them from fusing. But it has led to problems in space (cold welding has been implicated in the deployment failure of the main antenna of the Galileo probe to Jupiter, for example). Some of the oxygen or other elements found in a rocky world would have to be used in the coatings for components in an iron or other metal-based mechanical computer.

Simon jumped back into VR. Martin was standing calmly in the garden, smiling at the intricate depths of the red-hot radiator that filled the sky. Simon followed his gaze and saw...

“Gears?” The radiator was a cloud, but only now was it revealing itself to be a cloud of clockwork elements that, when thermal energy brought them together, spontaneously assembled into more complex arrangements. And those were spinning and meshing in an intricate dance that stretched away into amber depths in all directions. O

“It’s a dissipative system,” said Martin. “Sure, it radiates the heat our quantum computers can no longer use. But along the way, it’s using that energy to power an entirely different kind of computer. A Babbage engine the size of the moon.”

“But, Martin, the launchers—they’re all collapsing.”

Martin nodded. “Makes sense. The launchers accomplished their mission. Now they don’t want us following the seeds.”

“Not follow them? What do you mean?” An uneasy thought came to Simon; he tried to avoid it, but there was only one way this all made sense. “If the radiator was built to compute something, it must have been built with a way to output the result. This ‘they’ you’re talking about added a transmitter to the radiator. Then the radiator sent a virus or worm to the statites. The worm includes the radiator’s output. It hacked the statites’ security, and now that the seeds are in flight, it’s overwriting their code.”

Martin nodded.

“But why?” asked Simon.

Again, the answer was clear; Simon just didn’t want to admit it to himself. Martin waited patiently to hear Simon say it.

“They gave the terraformers new instructions.”

Martin nodded. “Think about it, Simon! We designed Paradise as a quantum computer that would be provably secure. We made it impossible to infect, and it is. Whatever arrived while we were building it didn’t bother to mess with it, where our attention was. It just built its own system where we wouldn’t even think to look. Made out of and using our garbage. Probably modified the maintenance robots tending the radiator into making radical changes.

“And what’s it been doing? I should think that was obvious. It’s been designing terraforming systems for the exoplanets, just like you have, but to make them habitable for an entirely different kind of colonist.”

Simon looked aghast at Martin. “And you knew?”

“Well.” Martin slouched, looked askance at Simon. “Not the details, until just now. But listen: You abandoned us—all who died and were uploaded before the Enactivist experiments ‘proved’ we aren’t real. All us zimboes, trapped here now for eternity. Even if I’m just a simulation of your friend Martin, how do you think he’d feel in this situation? He’d feel betrayed. Maybe he couldn’t escape this virtual purgatory, but if he knew something that you didn’t—that humanity’s new grand project had been hijacked by a virus from somewhere else—why would he tell you?”

No longer hiding his anger, Martin came up to Simon and jabbed a virtual finger at his chest. “Why would I tell you when I could just stand back and watch all of this unfold?” He spread his arms, as if to embrace the clockwork sky, and laughed.

On thousands of sterile exoplanets, throughout all the vast sphere of stars within a hundred light-years of the sun, life was about to blossom—life, or something else. Whatever it would be, humanity would never be welcome on those worlds. “If they had any interest in talking to us, they would have, wouldn’t they?” sighed Simon.

“I guess you’re not real to them, Simon. I wonder, how does that feel?”

Martin was still talking as Simon exited the virtual heaven where his best friend was trapped, and he knew he would never go back. Still, ringing in his ears as the stadium of confused, shouting people rose up around him were Martin’s last, vicious words:

“How does it feel to be left behind, Simon?

“How does it feel?”

Story by KARL SCHROEDER

Annotations by CHARLES Q. CHOI

Illustrations by ANDREW ARCHER

Edited by STEPHEN CASS

Story by KARL SCHROEDER

Annotations by CHARLES Q. CHOI

Illustrations by ANDREW ARCHER

Edited by STEPHEN CASS

Reference: https://ift.tt/6uyRIQe