TeCHnology

Laboratories could be creating life from scratch by the end of the century, according to Swiss Nobel Prize winner Didier Queloz. “In my opinion it is only a matter of time before we succeed,” he said.

"We have had the power of destruction since we had nuclear weapons. In this century we will attain the divine power of creation by creating artificial life from the ground up,” Queloz told the Tamedia media group in an interview on Friday.

The emergence of life is ultimately a chemical process, says Queloz. "If the conditions are right, life will emerge. I see no need for an initial push from a creator god," said the Nobel Prize winner. ...

A new Swiss instrument has been installed as part of the European Southern Observatory telescope in Chile. Among other things, it will help to search for traces of life on distant planets.

The new instrument is a so-called laser frequency comb, which was developed by the Swiss Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM), the organisation said on Tuesday.

The comb generates light with an exceptionally stable frequency spectrum characterised by evenly distributed lines. It serves as an optical scale, which allows the speed at which a star is travelling towards or away from the Earth to be determined more precisely, the CSEM said. ...

Some 37% of Swiss now use payment methods such as a smartphone or a smart watch – up from 25% just two years ago.

This is shown by the results of the third edition of the Visa Payment Monitor carried out in collaboration with the forsa research institute. According to the representative online survey of 1,000 people in Switzerland, almost three-quarters (72%) now prefer to use digital payment methods.

According to the survey, 27% of Swiss in German-speaking regions actively avoid shops where they can’t pay digitally. The figure is 34% in French-speaking Switzerland and as high as 37% in Ticino. Across Switzerland, the figure is 29%.

Unnoticed by animals, robots from Switzerland have been filming crocodiles and lizards in Uganda. A new version of these robots has now been adapted for use in disaster response. The new robot was presented on Wednesday evening in the journal Science Robotics.

“It's always exciting to build a new robot. But building one that comes so close to nature is even better,” said Kamilo Melo in an interview with Keystone-SDA news agency. Melo founded KM-Robota in Lausanne, a company that develops robots.

Melo started building nature spies because of the British television station BBC. In November 2015, the producers of the BBC documentary “Spy in the Wild” approached Melo, who was doing his doctorate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) at the time, to design crocodile and lizard-like surveillance robots. These were to be able to stay undetected by real animals on the Nile in Uganda in order to film the competition between the two species. ...

The Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) has equipped itself with a new-generation magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, assisted by artificial intelligence. It will be tested by a dozen research teams.

This state-of-the-art equipment was acquired jointly by the CHUV, the University of Lausanne and the Biomedical Imaging Center. It weighs just 3 tonnes, half the weight of a standard system, and is around 2 metres high. The magnetic field is also lower.

For the time being, this "low-field" MRI unit is dedicated exclusively to research, a first in Switzerland. The aim is to evaluate the potential of this new technique, the CHUV said in a press release on Wednesday. ...

A unique solar reactor promises to overcome the high costs and transport difficulties involved in developing green hydrogen. The first pilot plant will go into operation in Switzerland in February 2024, but the innovation is also attracting interest abroad.

The parabolic dish installed on the campus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) does not go unnoticed. With a diameter of seven metres and pointed towards the sky, it looks like a telescope. However, it is designed not to receive radio waves from space but to use sunlight and water to produce hydrogen and oxygen. ...

Hackers have published large amounts of data from the Swiss city of Baden on the darknet, it has been confirmed.

NZZ online first reported the data theft on Monday. Data from the city of Baden, located in northern Switzerland, has been available for download on a hacker forum since last week, including tables with the names and addresses of residents.

In addition to partially public data, such as the city's budget from 2013 to 2023, the NZZ reported the release of sensitive information, such as parts of accounts and a list of people who have been cremated. ...

The Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne and Zurich want to position Switzerland as a leading global centre for artificial intelligence (AI). With this aim in mind, they launched an initiative called "Swiss AI" on Monday.

As part of the initiative, new large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT are to be developed and trained, the two universities (federal technology institute ETH Zurich and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL)) announced on Monday. Unlike the large language models currently available to the public, however, the initiative is based on transparency.

"It must be clear to everyone how and on which data the models were trained and how they arrive at their results," emphasised Jan Hesthaven, Academic Vice President of EPFL, in the press release. ...

The discovery of a new planet challenges theoretical models of planet formation. The planet is far too big for its star, according to a new study by an international research team with Swiss participation.

The newly discovered planet, which orbits a so-called M-dwarf star called LHS 3154 with a 3.7-day orbit, is about 13 times more massive than Earth, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science.

“Such a star, only 0.11 times the mass of the Sun, has never been observed before," wrote astronomer Frédéric Masset of the National University of Mexico in a commentary on the study published in the same journal.

According to the study's authors, including a researcher from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ), current theories of planet formation cannot explain how such a massive planet could have formed around LHS 3154.

An M dwarf star is the smallest and coolest type of star. The theories say that M dwarfs do not produce particularly large planets. Stars form from large clouds of gas and dust. The material left over from the star formation process forms a disc around the star in which planets are later born.

On October 30, Meta announced it would begin offering people in the EU, the European Economic Area, and Switzerland a choice between paying a subscription fee to opt out of any personalized advertising or consenting to ad targeting to continue accessing Facebook and Instagram for free.

Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and Wageningen University in the Netherlands have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that recognises plastic objects floating on the water in satellite images. This could make it possible to eliminate this waste using ships.

The accumulation of waste at sea is certainly visible on Sentinel 2 satellite images from the European Space Agency (ESA). But since we are talking about terabytes of data, they need to be analysed automatically using AI models, EPFL said in a press release on Thursday.

Scientists have developed an AI-based detector that estimates the probability of the presence of marine debris for each pixel of Sentinel-2 satellite images. The detector remains accurate even in difficult conditions, such as when cloud cover and haze prevent existing models from accurately identifying debris. ...

Researchers in Switzerland have developed a technique that uses a robot to trigger auditory hallucinations in healthy people. They want to investigate the causes of this common problem among people with psychiatric illnesses in order to develop possible treatments

Scientists have “no idea what happens in the brain when people have auditory hallucinations”, explains neuroscientist Pavo Orepic from the University of Geneva.

Together with a team of researchers from the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and the University of Geneva, he published a study on this subject in October in the medical journal Psychological Medicine. ...

The software company Concevis has been the victim of a cyber attack. Once again, federal government data is involved. The cybercriminals are threatening to publish the data on the darknet.

According to available information, the stolen data probably contains old operational data from the Federal Administration. In-depth analyses are still underway, writes the Federal Department of Finance in a statement on Tuesday.

After stealing the data, the cybercriminals encrypted all the company's servers. After Concevis refused to be blackmailed, the cybercriminals threatened to publish the data on the darknet. The Basel-based company has filed a criminal complaint. ...

A mass spectrometer designed at the University of Bern will be used for chemical analysis of moon rocks.

The Laser Ablation Ionization Mass Spectrometer (LIMS) will be heading to the moon as early as 2027 as part of the NASA Commercial Lunar Payoad Services (CLPS) initiative, the university announced on Thursday.

Landing in the south polar region of the moon will enable LIMS to carry out stationary measurements on site. According to researchers, this region is particularly interesting because certain elements occur there whose isotopes make it possible to determine the age of the material. ...

Link to discussion on the Signal community forums

Neuroscientists from Lausanne and France presented a neuroprosthetic on Monday that corrects the mobility disorders associated with Parkinson's disease. Once confined to his home, the first patient to receive the implant is now able to walk confidently and without falling.

Walking disorders occur in around 90% of people with advanced Parkinson's disease. Up to now, there have been no treatments available in the majority of cases.

Marc, who is in his 60s, has been living with Parkinson's disease since 1996. Dopamine and then deep brain stimulation, which he underwent in 2004, helped treat his tremors and stiffness. But he also developed severe walking difficulties.

“I could hardly walk without frequent falls, several times a day,” explained Marc, the subject of the study, at an online press briefing organized by the Lausanne University Hospital CHUV and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He also suffered from “freezing”, a blockage that caused him to be stopped in front of an obstacle, such as an elevator shaft, and be unable to move. ...

No human-like robot is able to outperform humans in a range of tasks but robots are catching up, according to a new study by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich.

“For example, there is a robot called Cheetah that can jog faster than humans. But it has a high energy consumption, and when it comes to sprinting, humans are still faster,” Robert Riener from ETH Zurich told the Keystone-SDA news agency.

Together with two other researchers, Riener compared the best humanoid robots (those with human-like features) with humans. The robots were compared on the basis of functions such as locomotion and their underlying structures, such as muscles and motors. The results were published on Tuesday in the journal “Frontiers in Robotics and AI”.

For Riener, the surprising thing about the results of the comparison was not that robots can't hold a candle to humans. “What surprised me was that the individual technical components are already better than those of humans,” said Riener.

Cameras beat eyes, microphones beat ears and motors beat muscles. “Apparently, however, we have not yet managed to assemble these components in such a way that a robot functions better than a human in terms of movement and perception,” said Riener. ...

No planes took off from Kloten Airport, in Zurich, for around two hours on Monday afternoon. The reason was a technical malfunction. Landings were always possible.

The problem lay with air traffic control Skyguide, as a media spokeswoman told the Keystone-SDA news agency. She confirmed a report from “Blick” that it was a technical problem.

As Zurich Airport announced in the evening, the disruption had an impact on flight schedules and meteorological data. No more planes took off between 2:30 pm and 4:30 pm. Landings were still possible.

Swiss passengers were contacted, the airline announced in the evening. It goes on to say that there were numerous delays.

The problem has now been resolved, said Skyguide's media spokeswoman. The flights were delayed by 20 to 100 minutes. According to Zurich Airport, 60 flights were affected. But no flight had to be cancelled.

Oct 30 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms (META.O) said on Monday it will offer users in Europe a subscription plan to use Facebook and Instagram without advertisements to comply with the European Union regulations.

The monthly subscription plans for users in the EU, European Economic Area and Switzerland, will cost 9.99 euros ($10.58) for web users, while iOS and Android users will have to shell out 12.99 euros a month.

Last week, privacy advocate (and very occasional Reg columnist) Alexander Hanff filed a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) decrying YouTube's deployment of JavaScript code to detect the use of ad blocking extensions by website visitors.

You might have heard about quantum computers, a futuristic kind of computer that can perform certain operations far faster than today’s machines. You might have also heard that quantum computers will soon break encryption and expose everyone’s data.

In reality, quantum computers are already here, but they’re still pretty basic. Quantum computing technology is years or decades away from breaking current encryption standards, and its future applications are hypothetical. For now, your data is safe.

Even so, we take the potential threat seriously. Proton is not uniquely affected by this challenge, but we are uniquely equipped to confront it. We have a decade of experience developing and maintaining innovative open source cryptography(new window). Our encrypted services protect the data of over 100 million accounts, with Proton Mail as the largest end-to-end encrypted email provider in the world. Many other services are built on the cryptographic libraries that we write and maintain. Because the security of our users and their data is our top priority, we’re always on the alert for new threats. Quantum computers are one of them. ...

Swiss train manufacturer Stadler Rail has won an order from the American state of California for the delivery of four hydrogen trains.

The contract, the value of which was not specified, also provides for the acquisition of 25 additional trainsets.

The order has been placed by the California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA) and the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the Thurgau-based company said on Friday.

Stadler's hydrogen train was designed in partnership with the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority in California. Unveiled in 2022, it has undergone extensive testing in Switzerland and the United States, according to the press release. CalSTA and Caltrans opted for this model on the basis of these tests.

Stadler Rail won its first contract for a hydrogen train in 2019 in the US. It is expected to enter service in 2024 as part of the San Bernardino County Transit Authority (SBCTA) in California and will be the first hydrogen train in American passenger transport.

Back in June 2002, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was experiencing space for the first time, the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Microsoft was reaching its final arguments, and Adam Price, using what was then called Mozilla on a Mac, had an issue with persistent tooltips. > > "If I mouseover a toolbar link, and wait for a second, a little yellow box with the description of the link appears. If I now use command-tab to move Mozilla to the background, the little yellow box stays there, in the foreground. The only way to get rid of it is to put mozilla in the foreground again, and move the mouse off the toolbar," Price wrote on June 2. There were a few other bugs related to this issue, but Price set down a reproducible issue, confirmed by many others in the weeks to come—and months to come, years to come, and more than two decades to come. > > Over the years, people would check in on the thread or mark other bugs as duplicates of this one issue. It would occasionally seem fixed, only for coders and commenters to discover that it was just a little different in different versions or that prior fixes were seemingly accidental. Sometimes it seemed to appear in Windows or Linux, too. One commenter, denis, noted that at the 21-year mark: "I'm kinda partial to let it be forever. It feels like a relic from the past." > > That relic is no more, as a fix to Bug 148624 was pushed in early September, with the fix appearing in build 119. I tried to replicate the tooltip on my not-yet-updated 118.0.1 Firefox browser on Mac but could not experience this rite of passage for myself. The patch itself is quite small, adding a check for whether a document has focus to the tooltip-showing code. > > Yifan Zhu, who wrote the patch to Firefox's Tooltip Listener, wrote to Ars that they first encountered the bug in Thunderbird on Linux, as "seemingly random segments of text floating on my screen." Switching frequently between virtual desktops left subject lines floating on their screen, which was "extremely annoying." Zhu learned to switch back to either Firefox or Thunderbird and move their cursor before switching back. > > But it grew on them, so they researched and sought to submit the bug, but "To my horror, I realized this bug report has been open for more than 20 years, and still hasn't been fixed." Because it was "a minor 'cosmetic' issue not causing crashes," there was a good chance nobody would fix it—"Unless I do it myself," Zhu wrote. > > Zhu was motivated and knew how to program but had "zero experience in projects as complicated as the Firefox browser" and had "never contributed to open source projects before." But it was the summer before their PhD program started. "So, why not?" > > Their start was inauspicious, to say the least. "I just searched for 'tooltip' in the entire code base, examined stuff for possible candidates, and inserted debugging print statements to follow the execution," Zhu wrote. This eventually bore answers. "When the mouse hovers over some element, a timer is started to display the tooltip. The timer would be canceled on a mouse-out event, which Firefox wasn't getting when I used keyboard shortcuts to switch windows or virtual desktops." > > Zhu pushed a commit that made tooltip display based on Firefox losing focus, rather than the mouse leaving the application. In the next few hours, they heard from Emilio Cobos Álvarez, who refined Zhu's approach and helped get the commit into the code base. While the fix has created some regression, that bug is seeing work, too. > > Zhu, born in 1999, just three years before this bug was submitted, had just finished their undergrad and Masters work at Stanford when they went work on it. They are just starting their PhD in electrical engineering. They can only guess why a bug like this has lasted for most of their life. Their guess it that it's both a cosmetic inconvenience and tricky to reproduce, leaving other, more serious bugs with perennially higher ranking. > > Cobos Álvarez, who shepherded Zhu's fix into a commit, wrote to us that "this area is rather tricky," given various Firefox configurations and how they respond to different operating systems. Finding a solution that elegantly dealt with a lack of input on when a Mozilla app wasn't in focus, without guarantee of OS input, was tricky. "Pretty impressive for his first Firefox contribution!" > > On social media, especially the Mastodon instances where you might expect to find people with opinions on Mozilla's XML User Interface Language, there was much rejoicing. Some noted their amazement that Bugzilla itself, the bug reporting tool, had lasted even longer than the bug (25 years as of August). Some suggested that this fix countered the prevalence of "stalebots," which single out old, unresolved issues for deletion. And one drafted a full hero's journey. > > Not anyone can make a great commit, but a great commit can come from anywhere.

Out with the old: Microsoft's decision to phase out VBScript marks the end of an era.

If you thought Microsoft's announcement about no longer updating WordPad was a curveball, brace yourself for another: VBScript is on its way out. Yes, you read that right. Microsoft has officially stated that VBScript is being deprecated.

Launched in 1996, VBScript—short for Visual Basic Scripting Edition—was Microsoft's attempt at a scripting language for web development. For a while, it was everywhere. Integrated into Internet Explorer, it was a key part of Microsoft's early web strategy. But unlike JavaScript, which saw expansive growth and community adoption, VBScript couldn't keep up the pace.

There are a couple of solid reasons Microsoft has decided to sunset VBScript.

First, the language is outdated. It hasn't seen significant updates in years, and its capabilities are far surpassed by modern languages like Python and JavaScript. Second, and perhaps more urgent, VBScript has security vulnerabilities that make it a point of concern. While Microsoft has released patches over the years, keeping an outdated language secure is a bit like patching a sinking ship—it's not a long-term solution.

One might think VBScript is just an old relic, but that's not entirely true. There are businesses with legacy systems that still rely on VBScript. Enterprise applications, in particular, are known to be late adopters of new technologies.

...

More information by Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecated-features

Cryptographic protocol helps secure the open source software ecosystem with zero-trust passwordless authentication.

The Linux Foundation, BastionZero and Docker are excited to announce the launch of OpenPubkey as a Linux Foundation open source project. To coincide with the launch of OpenPubkey, BastionZero is announcing the integration of OpenPubkey for Docker container signing, to help secure the open source software ecosystem with zero-trust passwordless authentication.

The OpenPubkey protocol was developed as part of BastionZero’s secure infrastructure access product. OpenPubkey enables users to securely and accurately bind cryptographic keys to users and workloads by turning an OpenID Connect Identity Provider (IdP) into a Certificate Authority (CA). With the rollout of this integration, Docker users can enhance software supply chain security.

This new cryptographic protocol empowers developers to build out software supply chain or security applications. OpenPubkey augments OpenID Connect to enable workloads and users to sign artifacts under their OpenID identity. These keys can be used to cryptographically sign statements, enabling applications such as secure remote access or software supply chain security features such as signed builds, deployments, and code commits.

"The Linux Foundation is proud to host the OpenPubkey Project," said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. "We believe this initiative will play a pivotal role in strengthening the security of the open source software community. We encourage developers and organizations to join this collaborative effort in enhancing software supply chain security."

"We introduced OpenPubkey as its own standalone protocol to make it easy and secure to use digital signatures with OpenID Connect,” said Ethan Heilman, co-founder and CTO of BastionZero. “We are excited to partner with Docker to offer its community of software developers and open source contributors a simple and convenient way for users, service accounts, machines, or workloads to create digital signatures using their identity."

"TestifySec recognizes the value in enhancing software supply chain security," said Cole Kennedy, CEO of TestifySec. "We're impressed with OpenPubkey's approach to easy and trustworthy signing. Docker's collaboration with Bastion Zero has our full support, and we're eager to see the broader community benefit from it."

BastionZero and Docker are excited to bring this technology to the broader open source community under the Linux Foundation and aim to expand the reach of OpenPubkey, foster increased collaboration, and improve software security across the open source ecosystem. To learn more about how the integration of OpenPubkey is enhancing open source software supply chain security, including how to get involved, contribute, and join the community, please visit the GitHub page.

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has warned around 6,800 current and former employees that their personal data was accessed via a data breach, according to a letter seen by Bleeping Computer. The nature of the personal information stolen by hackers was redacted, but the company stated that a file transfer app called MOVEit was the source of the breach. It's the second report of an attack on Sony's operations within the last two weeks.

A ransomware group called CL0P claimed credit for the attack on May 28th, and MOVEit's vendor Progress Software notified Sony about the vulnerability on May 31st "On June 2, 2023, [we] discovered the unauthorized downloads, immediately took the platform offline, and remediated the vulnerability," Sony states in the letter to employees. "An investigation was then launched with assistance from external cybersecurity experts. We also notified law enforcement."

The hackers reportedly gained access to personally identifiable information about US employees, so Sony is providing credit monitoring services to those affected.

Sony was victim of another breach first reported last week. In that case, the hackers accessed servers in Japan used for internal testing for its Entertainment, Technology and Services business, pilfering 3.14GB of data. A threat actor called Ransomed.vc took credit for the attack, but that was denied by another group calling itself MajorNelson, which posted a sampling of files as proof. Sony said it was investigating the attack, adding "there has been no adverse impact on Sony's operations."

The company's PlayStation network was attacked in 2011, and Sony Pictures was famously hacked in 2014, resulting in a massive leak of documents and content — including entire films.