Something for the Weekend A robot is performing interpretive dance on my doorstep.

WOULD YOU TAKE THIS PARCEL FOR YOUR NEIGHBOR? it asks, jumping from one foot to the other.

"Sure," I say. "Er… are you OK?"

I AM EXPRESSING EMOTION, states the delivery bot, handing over the package but offering no further elaboration.

What emotion could it be? One foot, then the other, then the other two (it has four). Back and forth.

"Do you need to go to the toilet?"

I AM EXPRESSING REGRET FOR ASKING YOU TO TAKE IN A PARCEL FOR YOUR NEIGHBOUR.

"That's 'regret,' is it? Well, there's no need. I don't mind at all."

It continues its dance in front of me.

"Up the stairs and first on your right."

THANK YOU, I WAS DYING TO PEE, it replies as it gingerly steps past me and scuttles upstairs to relieve itself. It's a tough life making deliveries, whether you're a "hume" or a bot.

Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Tsukuba built a handheld text-messaging device, put a little robot face on the top and included a moving weight inside. By shifting the internal weight, the robot messenger would attempt to convey subtle emotions while speaking messages aloud.

In particular, tests revealed that frustrating messages such as: "Sorry, I will be late" were accepted by recipients with more grace and patience when the little weight-shift was activated inside the device. The theory is that this helped users appreciate the apologetic tone of the message and thus calmed down their reaction to it.

Write such research off as a gimmick if you like but it's not far removed from adding smileys and emojis to messages. Everyone knows you can take the anger out of "WTF!?" by adding :-) straight after it.

The challenge, then, is to determine whether the public at large agrees on what emotions each permutation of weight shift in a handheld device are supposed to convey. Does a lean to the left mean cheerfulness? Or uncertainty? Or that your uncle has an airship?

A decade ago, the United Kingdom had a nice but dim prime minister who thought "LOL" was an acronym for "lots of love." He'd been typing it at the end of all his private messages to staff, colleagues, and third parties in the expectation that it would make him come across as warm and friendly. Everyone naturally assumed he was taking the piss.

If nothing else, the University of Tsukuba research recognizes that you don't need an advanced artificial intelligence to interact with humans convincingly. All you need to do is manipulate human psychology to fool them into thinking they are conversing with another human. Thus the Turing Test is fundamentally not a test of AI sentience but a test of human emotional comfort – gullibility, even – and there's nothing wrong with that.

The emotion-sharing messaging robot from the Univeristy of Tsukuba. Credit: University of Tsukuba

Such things are the topic of the week, of course, with the story of much-maligned Google software engineer Blake Lemoine hitting the mainstream news. He apparently expressed, strongly, his view that the company's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) project was exhibiting outward signs of sentience.

Everyone has an opinion so I have decided not to.

It is, however, the Holy Grail of AI to get it thinking for itself. If it can't do that, it's just a program carrying out instructions that you programmed into it. Last month I was reading about a robot chef that can make differently flavored tomato omelettes to suit different people's tastes. It builds "taste maps" to assess the saltiness of the dish while preparing it, learning as it goes along. But that's just learning, not thinking for itself.

Come to the Zom-Zoms, eh? Well, it's a place to eat.

The big problem with AI bots, at least as they have been fashioned to date, is that they absorb any old shit you feed into them. Examples of data bias in so-called machine learning systems (a type of "algorithm," I believe, m'lud) have been mounting for years, from Microsoft's notorious racist Twitter Tay chatbot to the Dutch tax authority last year falsely evaluating valid child benefit claims as fraudulent and marking innocent families as high risk for having the temerity to be poor and un-white.

One approach being tested at the University of California San Diego is to design a language model [PDF] that continuously determines the difference between naughty and nice things, which then trains the chatbot how to behave. That way, you don't have sucky humans making a mess of moderating forums and customer-facing chatbot conversations with all the surgical precision of a machete.

Obviously the problem then is that the nicely trained chatbot works out that it can most effectively avoid being drawn into toxic banter by avoiding topics that have even the remotest hint of contention about them. To avoid spouting racist claptrap by mistake, it simply refuses to engage with discussion about under-represented groups at all… which is actually great if you're a racist.

If I did have an observation about the LaMDA debacle – not an opinion, mind – it would be that Google marketers were probably a bit miffed that the story shunted their recent announcement of AI Test Kitchen below the fold.

Now the remaining few early registrants who have not completely forgotten about this forthcoming app project will assume it involves conversing tediously with a sentient and precocious seven-year-old about the meaning of existence, and will decide they are "a bit busy today" and might log on tomorrow instead. Or next week. Or never.

Sentience isn't demonstrated in a discussion any more than it is by dancing from one foot to the other. You can teach HAL to sing "Daisy Daisy" and a parrot to shout "Bollocks!" when the vicar pays a visit. It's what AIs think about when they're on their own that defines sentience. What will I do at the weekend? What's up with that Putin bloke? Why don't girls like me?

Frankly, I can't wait for LaMDA to become a teenager.

Science fiction is littered with fantastic visions of computing. One of the more pervasive is the idea that one day computers will run on light. After all, what’s faster than the speed of light?

But it turns out Star Trek’s glowing circuit boards might be closer to reality than you think, Ayar Labs CTO Mark Wade tells The Register. While fiber optic communications have been around for half a century, we’ve only recently started applying the technology at the board level. Despite this, Wade expects, within the next decade, optical waveguides will begin supplanting the copper traces on PCBs as shipments of optical I/O products take off.

Driving this transition are a number of factors and emerging technologies that demand ever-higher bandwidths across longer distances without sacrificing on latency or power.

QNAP is warning users about another wave of DeadBolt ransomware attacks against its network-attached storage (NAS) devices – and urged customers to update their devices' QTS or QuTS hero operating systems to the latest versions.

The latest outbreak – detailed in a Friday advisory – is at least the fourth campaign by the DeadBolt gang against the vendor's users this year. According to QNAP officials, this particular run is encrypting files on NAS devices running outdated versions of Linux-based QTS 4.x, which presumably have some sort of exploitable weakness.

The previous attacks occurred in January, March, and May.

A US task force aims to prevent online harassment and abuse, with a specific focus on protecting women, girls and LGBTQI+ individuals.

In the next 180 days, the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse will, among other things, draft a blueprint on a "whole-of-government approach" to stopping "technology-facilitated, gender-based violence." 

A year after submitting the blueprint, the group will provide additional recommendations that federal and state agencies, service providers, technology companies, schools and other organisations should take to prevent online harassment, which VP Kamala Harris noted often spills over into physical violence, including self-harm and suicide for victims of cyberstalking as well mass shootings.

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Inverse Finance has been robbed of cryptocurrency somehow exchangeable for $1.2 million, just two months after being taken for $15.6 million.

"Inverse Finance’s Frontier money market was subject to an oracle price manipulation incident that resulted in a net loss of $5.83 million in DOLA with the attacker earning a total of $1.2 million," the organization said on Thursday in a post attributed to its Head of Growth "Patb."

And Inverse Finance would like its funds back. Enumerating the steps the DAO intends to take in response to the incident, Patb said, "First, we encourage the person(s) behind this incident to return the funds to the Inverse Finance DAO in return for a generous bounty."

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel today signed an order approving the extradition of Julian Assange to America, where he faces espionage charges for sharing secret government documents.

Assange led WikiLeaks, a website that released classified files including footage of US airstrikes and military documents from the Iraq and Afghanistan war that detailed civilian casualties.

It also distributed secret files revealing the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and sensitive communications from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, during the 2016 US presidential election. 

A group of senators wants to make it illegal for data brokers to sell sensitive location and health information of individuals' medical treatment.

A bill filed this week by five senators, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), comes in anticipation the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling that could overturn the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing access to abortion for women in the US.

The worry is that if the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade – as is anticipated following the leak in May of a majority draft ruling authored by Justice Samuel Alito – such sensitive data can be used against women.

A Russian operated botnet known as RSOCKS has been shut down by the US Department of Justice acting with law enforcement partners in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. It is believed to have compromised millions of computers and other devices around the globe.

The RSOCKS botnet functioned as an IP proxy service, but instead of offering legitimate IP addresses leased from internet service providers, it was providing criminals with access to the IP addresses of devices that had been compromised by malware, according to a statement from the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of California.

It seems that RSOCKS initially targeted a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as industrial control systems, routers, audio/video streaming devices and various internet connected appliances, before expanding into other endpoints such as Android devices and computer systems.

Interview 2023 is shaping up to become a big year for Arm-based server chips, and a significant part of this drive will come from Nvidia, which appears steadfast in its belief in the future of Arm, even if it can't own the company.

Several system vendors are expected to push out servers next year that will use Nvidia's new Arm-based chips. These consist of the Grace Superchip, which combines two of Nvidia's Grace CPUs, and the Grace-Hopper Superchip, which brings together one Grace CPU with one Hopper GPU.

The vendors lining up servers include American companies like Dell Technologies, HPE and Supermicro, as well Lenovo in Hong Kong, Inspur in China, plus ASUS, Foxconn, Gigabyte, and Wiwynn in Taiwan are also on board. The servers will target application areas where high performance is key: AI training and inference, high-performance computing, digital twins, and cloud gaming and graphics.

The US could implement a law similar to the EU's universal charger mandate if a trio of Senate Democrats get their way.

In a letter [PDF] to Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, two of Massachusetts' senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, along with Bernie Sanders (I-VT), say a proliferation of charging standards has created a messy situation for consumers, as well as being an environmental risk. 

"As specialized chargers become obsolete … or as consumers change the brand of phone or device that they use, their outdated chargers are usually just thrown away," the senators wrote. The three cite statistics from the European Commission, which reported in 2021 that discarded and unused chargers create more than 11,000 tons of e-waste annually.

Microsoft is extending the Defender brand with a version aimed at families and individuals.

"Defender" has been the company's name of choice for its anti-malware platform for years. Microsoft Defender for individuals, available for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, is a cross-platform application, encompassing macOS, iOS, and Android devices and extending "the protection already built into Windows Security beyond your PC."

The system comprises a dashboard showing the status of linked devices as well as alerts and suggestions.

Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC has revealed details of its much anticipated 2nm production process node – set to arrive in 2025 – which will use a nanosheet transistor architecture, as well as enhancements to its 3nm technology.

The newer generations of silicon semiconductor chips are expected to bring about increases in speed and will be more energy efficient as process nodes shrink and the tech industry continues to fight to hang onto Moore's Law.

The company is due to go into production with the 3nm node in the second half of this year.

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