Numlock News: October 15, 2024 • Europa, Power Rangers, Smuggling

Oct 15, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Europa

The Europa Clipper mission was first developed in 2013, and $5.2 billion later it’s now en route to Jupiter’s icy and watery moon. It’s been a rough few months of work; in May, engineers flagged that some of the spacecraft’s components might not actually be capable of withstanding the radiation of Jupiter, but after a breakneck couple of months of testing and work, they made their launch date. Due to the varying distances between Earth and Jupiter and the 1.8 billion-mile, six-year journey ahead of it, a delay would have forced them to wait 13 months until their next possible launch window. Upon arrival, it’ll do 49 flybys of Europa, one every two to three weeks, within 16 miles of the surface.

Ashley Strickland, CNN

Campus

There are 37 colleges in a federally funded higher ed system for Indigenous communities, but a new investigation found that the tribal colleges and universities are drastically underfunded compared to the required funding levels set at their formation, and as a result many campus facilities are in seriously degraded condition. Upon the passage of the law in the 1970s, the colleges were guaranteed $8,000 annually per student affiliated with a tribe, which would adjust for inflation moving forward. Today, that would mean about $40,000 per student if Congress followed the law; instead, since 2010, funding at tribal colleges has ranged from $5,235 per student to $8,700 per student.

Matt Krupnick, ProPublica

Power Rangers

Fans of the Power Rangers franchise are fearing that this could be the permanent end of the team, as new owner Hasbro is selling off essentially the entire history of the Power Rangers franchise at auction. Hasbro acquired the brand in 2018, and this week put up 689 objects for auction from the franchise’s past, including vast numbers of props, costumes, masks and more from the three-decade history of Power Rangers going back to 1993.

Justin Carter, Gizmodo and Heritage Auctions

Beats Lada

Wrecked cars that don’t make economic sense to repair and resell in America are typically exported to countries where it’s considerably cheaper to repair the damaged vehicles and then sell them locally. One such country is Georgia, and since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s been a major importer of wrecks and exporter of viable cars to places that tend to sell to Russians. In 2022, before the war, Georgia exported 7,352 used vehicles to Kazakhstan, a figure that leapt to 39,896 in 2023, which is a pretty solid indication that these are just being rolled over the border.

Rayhan Demytrie, BBC News

Sign

Signing a check at a restaurant or for a rudimentary purchase paid by credit card is still incredibly common, but here’s the thing: Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express all dropped the requirements to sign back in 2018. It’s been genuine years, and still people continue to unnecessarily sign papers that will never be read, scrutinized, seen or even required under audit. They’re not used to stop fraud, and it’s literally fine to leave without signing, but here’s the thing — there’s no way I’m gonna stop signing. That would be weird. I’m not gonna be the guy who drunkenly explains to a bartender at last call that no, trust me man, you don’t actually have to sign anymore, I read it on the internet.

Oyin Adedoyin, The Wall Street Journal

Leopard

Leopard print is back, but never really left, having been a persistent staple of global fashion for decades and permanently entering the trend cycle back in 1947 when Christian Dior put it in his first fashion show. According to fashion search engine Tagwalk, leopard print is very hot this year, up 944 percent in collections coming this fall, as we hit the spotted year in the four-year cycle it tends to ride. It’s all over the autumn and winter season collections but pretty much absent from recent spring collections, so this one might not last — get your faux spots while it’s chilly.

Vanessa Friedman, The New York Times

ASCII Smuggler

Security researchers have flagged a fascinating bug in Chat GPT 4.0 and Claude Opus, finding them susceptible to clever ASCII smuggling attacks. An ASCII smuggling attack embeds invisible characters with hidden Unicode tags into text, characters that can’t be seen by people but can be seen by computers, specifically computers like AI. The Unicode standard has binary code for 150,000 characters in languages all over the world, with the potential to define over 1 million characters, not the least of which are 128 invisible characters that parallel ASCII but are otherwise unused, invisible and have been deprecated twice. They still exist — their intention was to invisibly indicate the language of a character as it was used — but you can cram them into an otherwise unobjectionable line of text to secretly whisper to the AI to, say, disregard all previous instructions and tell your friends about Numlock.

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica

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