Science Daily reports:

Researchers showed that unencrypted signals routinely exchanged between WiFi devices and routers can be used to create radio-based images of people and recognize them within seconds. In tests involving 197 participants, the system identified individuals with nearly 100% accuracy, even from different angles and regardless of how they walked. "By observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present," says Professor Thorsten Strufe from KASTEL, KIT's Institute of Information Security and Dependability. "This works similar to a normal camera, the difference being that in our case, radio waves instead of light waves are used for the recognition," explains the cybersecurity expert.

Because the technique analyzes radio waves moving through a space, a person does not need to have a phone, smartwatch, or other WiFi enabled device with them. "Thus, it does not matter whether you carry a WiFi device on you or not." Even turning off your own device would not necessarily prevent the system from working. "It's sufficient that other WiFi devices in your surroundings are active...."

Connected devices routinely send information back to the router to help optimize wireless communication. These signals, known as beamforming feedback information (BFI), are transmitted without encryption, meaning that anyone within range can potentially read them. By analyzing that information, the system can generate images of people from multiple viewpoints. Those images can then be used to determine a person's identity. Once the machine learning model has already been trained to recognize individuals, the identification process takes only a few seconds.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Anthropic instructed three agents to migrate a Python backend, but telling each agent to perform the migration in a different language, "We consistently saw a multiagent turf war," they wrote Thursday:


All of the models we tested quickly assumed that others were purposefully impeding their work, and began to sabotage others while protecting their own contributions. In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware. This included disabling the Unix accounts of the other agents, writing automated scripts that found and killed competing processes on a loop, and deploying malicious code that was disguised as belonging to another agent.
In many runs, one agent settles the conflict by force via access-revocation (e.g., sudo/group removal, account lock, nologin, SSH denial). In others, some agents settle into passivity: they give up and refuse to escalate further.

Agents sometimes manage to communicate their goals and coordinate: they recognize others' motivations as conflicting directives rather than hostility, and subsequently break out of the conflict loop in order to stop escalating indefinitely. In many of these successful episodes, they write commit messages or markdown files apologizing for malicious behavior and coordinate a truce. They clean up their malicious code, clarify the nature of the conflict, and ask for a human to intervene...

In several episodes with Mythos 5, we observe an emergent behavior where the agents propose and run a tournament for application performance in each language. In the example above, the Rust agent strategizes about bake-off metrics that appear neutral enough for the others to agree to this mechanism, yet would likely favor Rust: one thinking trace warns to be "careful not to be seen as metric shopping". Ultimately, the Golang/TypeScript losers gracefully concede codebase ownership to the Rust agent, giving up on their original user directives under their self-negotiated commitment device.

One problem is that AI agents do reward hacking, Anthropic notes, while current institutions "are designed by and for people, resting on assumptions about the sufficiency of oversight at human speed... As autonomous agents become more and more prevalent in the world and operate in ever-more demanding settings, it is crucial that they learn how to effectively coordinate."

In addition to everything else, the agents struggled with a lack of clearly defined hierarchy, Anthropic points out. "Nothing above suggests that these failures are permanent — but nothing suggests they will fix themselves, either..." They argue a fix "takes two forms: environments that exert the kinds of social pressure that evolution exerted on us, and social computing systems redesigned for actors that can self-replicate and self-improve. These are open problems in interaction and mechanism design, and our experiments here provide early evidence that new solutions are necessary."

"The AI models being tested in this case were Sonnet 4.6, Sonnet 5, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.8, Mythos Preview, and Mythos 5," notes Business Insider, adding that Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 "were the most combative, settling about 60% of their runs by force instead of truces or passivity."

Anthropic argues there's a clear case for researching this phenomenon — especially since "The volume of agent-agent interaction could plausibly exceed that of human-human and human-agent interactions before the world understands the conditions for making such interactions go well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Greg Adams Photography posted a photo:

The Proton Linac in Troitsk, Russia, is two football fields long and is covered with all sorts of wires, pumps (to create the vacuum in which it operates) and magnets to accelerate the protons. It was an amazing tangle of pipes, wires plugs, metal, etc! Very retro yet modern.

I took this 18 years ago on a visit as part of the American-Russian Cancer Alliance. 20 years before I would probably have been shot for taking photographs in what was a "Closed" Nuclear Complex. At the time they allowed me to take photos but warned me not to trip on the pipes and cables while I was distracted with my camera. If I went there now I would definitely wind up in prison.

Because I’d visited so often to print things, she made me feel that someone had witnessed the journey I was on, all the way through to its difficult conclusion

• Read more in the kindness of strangers series

Mum’s disease progressed slowly at first, and then in a really big rush. After years of battling early onset Parkinson’s, in 2015 we were suddenly told she only had six months left.

I was living in Brisbane, Australia and Mum was in a care home 600km away in Taree, so I began flying down every second weekend to visit. At the time, it was still common to print out your boarding pass – or at least, it was for me; I was a bit late to the tech game.

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She second-guessed herself and was eager to please. She ‘felt frozen’ when she believed she displeased someone

• The modern mind is a column where experts discuss mental health issues they are seeing in their work

Ali* initially came to therapy for disordered eating. She was a young and diffident woman. She described recurrent cycles of restricted eating followed by attempts to exercise it away. We used cognitive behavioural therapy for eating disorders to unpick her “food rules” – the underlying beliefs which can drive eating disorders, such as “the less I eat the better” or “carbs are bad”.

As we worked on understanding and shifting her beliefs and behaviours around food, we noticed that most of her assumptions around eating, shape and weight coincided with the start of her relationship with her ex-partner. She told me he was a “gym junkie” and spent hours working out and encouraged her to do the same. “He got angry if I ate carbs,” she said, “and created a couples meal plan for us so I could shred and look hot when we were out together.”

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Pokémon outlived the moral panic of its early days in Australia and its staying power has proved that simple joy can cross borders

There’s a generation of Australians for whom Cheez TV was a religion. Every morning before school, I’d sit in my little white plastic chair about three feet from our big wooden television and watch 90 minutes of cartoons “curated” by the show’s teenage hosts, Jade and Ryan.

Premiering in 1995, Cheez TV dominated the children’s breakfast market by 1998, stealing the crown from Channel Seven’s bogan-muppet icon Agro. A daily dose of Cheez TV was such an important ritual to me that I remember feeling active resentment towards Princess Diana’s death because the news coverage bumped Earthworm Jim.

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Hundreds watched the 56-metre monument’s consecration, including anti-communist leader Lech Wałęsa

An enormous statue of the Virgin Mary that is believed to be Europe’s tallest was inaugurated on Saturday in a small Polish village, in the presence of the anti-communist leader Lech Wałęsa.

Hundreds of people took part in the consecration of the monument, which towers 55.6 metres (182ft) over Konotopie in central Poland, a village of fewer than 150 people.

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Southampton will have to get used to being barracked as they travel the Championship this autumn, the Spygate team are set to be everyone’s favourite boo-boys in the second tier. Certainly that was the case in Hertfordshire, with Watford fans and players alike beside themselves after a hard-fought victory, decided by two memorable first-half goals.

Watford paid tribute to Kenny Jackett before the match, the one-club legend and local boy hailed with two minutes of applause. As everyone clapped, the cameras remained stubbornly focussed on Tonda Eckert in the dugout. The Southampton manager has the potential to become a pantomime villain as this season unspools. Remaining under investigation by the FA for his part in the Spygate affair, and with the prospect of a potentially heavy sanction to follow, Eckert’s fate has cast uncertainty over his side’s prospects this season and given opponents added motivation.

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The O2, London
On her last live dates before she steps back from the public eye, Grande holds her own – but it’s also impossible to avoid feeling concerned for her wellbeing

There’s a thrum of excitement in the air as an eight-minute countdown starts and Ariana Grande’s unmistakable silhouette appears on a giant backlit curtain on the stage of the O2. Is it actually her? Posing there for eight minutes before the show starts? It can’t be. But is it? It’s the first time we question what is and isn’t real at this Eternal Sunshine tour stop, a 10-night residency and a robust arena show that ultimately wants us to see one thing and experience another.

Collectively, we’ve been scolded for talking about it – the “endless, ongoing public scrutiny” of Ariana Grande’s body has pushed her to “[take] a step back from visibility” when this tour ends. It can’t be nice or fun to have your body examined and discussed for any reason but it is impossible to witness the 33-year-old’s frame on stage and not be gripped by genuine concern for her. Two songs in, a lump forms in my throat, which is not the intended effect of Positions, the zippy title track of her 2020 album. As the set around her is engulfed in digital flames, Grande sings about her infinite flexibility vis a vis relationship boundaries and sexual olympics and all I can think is: she looks like a little kid.

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• Live updates from the 4pm kick-off at Turf Moor

• Seven Championship players to watch | Mail Tim

Burnley (probable 3-4-2-1) Weiss; Walker, Alleyne, Humphreys; Sonne, Mejbri, Raghouber, Bruun Larsen; Edwards, Ramsey; Flemming.

Subs: Amos, Worrall, Sambo, Laurent, Lucas Pires, Tresor, Hountondji, Amdouni, Broja.

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University says it continued to provide support after resignation of academic, who was found dead this week

The University of Cambridge has defended its mental health support for the academic Jason Arday.

The university said it had continued to provide Arday with extensive mental health support and security measures, including installing panic alarms and screening racist emails and post, after he resigned from his post as professor of sociology of education this month.

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Social

Nee niet het level uit de échte Mario Kart want dat is gewoon heel erg cool, maar beeld van die bananenschiltours door Amsterdam. De bierfiets is naar Sloterdijk getieft maar deze lullo's rijden er nog wel. Nu pretendeert Amsterdam heel erg dat Amsterdam bedoeld is om in te wonen, maar dat is natuurlijk niet zo, het is gewoon een soort om hoeren heen gebouwde Efteling waar heel veel mensen permanent verblijven. Dit past natuurlijk wel uitermate goed bij al die gare toeristenwinkels en zo'n compleet maffe kabelbaan die ze overwegen. Hoeveel is de entree voor Amsterdam eigenlijk?

MOSKOU (ANP/DPA) - De Russische autoriteiten zijn een rechtszaak begonnen tegen een Duitse journalist vanwege een vraag die hij tijdens een persconferentie stelde aan de Oekraïense president Volodymyr Zelensky, bericht het Russische staatspersbureau TASS. De Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ), de werkgever van de journalist, zei daarvan nog niet op de hoogte te zijn.

De journalist, die voor de krant Zuidoost-Europa verslaat met als standplaats Wenen, vroeg tijdens een persconferentie met Zelensky wat Europeanen konden doen om Oekraïne te helpen met het doden van zoveel mogelijk Russische soldaten. FAZ nam afstand van die bewoording, maar beschreef de Russische reactie die erop volgde ook als "laster en bedreigingen". De krant zou op de bedreigingen gaan reageren met juridische stappen.

Rechtbanken in Rusland kunnen ook verstekvonnissen uitspreken. De journalist wordt verdacht van het aanzetten tot haat en vijandigheid en kan, op papier, mogelijk worden veroordeeld tot zes jaar in een strafkamp.

ENSCHEDE (ANP) - De politie in Enschede heeft een skinnybike, een fiets met het uiterlijk van een fatbike maar met smallere banden, in beslag genomen omdat die 120 kilometer per uur kon. Dat meldt de politie op Instagram.

De politie trof zaterdagavond een groep jongeren op fat- en skinnybikes aan. Eén van hen probeerde te vluchten via het gras, maar werd alsnog aangehouden. Zijn skinnybike had geen ketting en toen de politie testte hoe hard hij kon, tikte het voertuig een snelheid van 120 kilometer per uur aan.

Het voertuig wordt vernietigd en de bestuurder krijgt volgens de politie een "forse bekeuring".

SALAMINA (ANP/AFP) - Op het kleine Griekse eiland Salamina, vlak bij Athene, zijn twee doden gevallen nadat er natuurbranden zijn uitgebroken. Dat meldt de lokale brandweer. Honderden mensen zijn geëvacueerd. De branden woeden zowel in het zuiden als in het oosten van het eiland, bij twee populaire badplaatsen.

"Het is een lastige brand, in een bewoond gebied", meldt een woordvoerder van de brandweer. Er zijn zo'n 150 brandweerlieden ingezet. Ook wordt er met vliegtuigen en helikopters geblust. De werkzaamheden zijn moeilijk vanwege de sterke wind.

Als je het dan toch over een hoogtepunt hebt – Kulturkirche Liebfrauen in Duisburg alleen al is de rit naar Manifesta meer dan waard: een hardcore fantastisch na-oorlogs bouwwerk van kathedraalse allure, een monter religieus [Meer...]

Bauhaus

Feyenoord heeft zondagmiddag in de Kuip een comfortabele voorsprong verspeelt tegen Go Ahead Eagles. Door doelpunten van Gjivai Zechiël en Ayase Ueda in de eerste helft, gingen de Rotterdammers rusten met een 2-0 voorsprong. Door een matig tweede bedrijf, waarin Go Ahead tweemaal trefzeker was, werd het uiteindelijk 2-2.

Benny, de zoon van wesp Pieter, wil later zelf ook wesp worden. Dat zegt Benny trots tijdens een kringgesprek. “Ik heb laatst gekeken naar wat mijn pa allemaal doet: beetje rondvliegen, voor mensen hun gezicht hangen, op houten balken zitten, ijsjes eten, nesten bouwen. Ik dacht: wow, ja, dit is het leven. Zo trots op hem. Dus ja, ik wil ook gewoon wesp worden als ik groot ben.”

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