Advent is starting soon!

 

Advent with the Church of England. We invite you to mark the Advent season with us and Join The Song! As you make your preparations for Advent and Christmas, we have the following resources available:

Follow The Star App: Daily Advent reflections will be available in the Follow the Star app from 1 December and run until 24 December. The reflections include a Bible reading, short reflection, activity suggestion and prayer. Audio of the reflections is also included in the app. Learn more and download the app.

Follow The Star Advent Calendar: With beautiful illustrations and 24 stickers, you can now order these for children in your family or church. You can order each individually, or in packs of 10. Click here to order yours.

Online Advent calendar: Join The Song and find daily reflections for all ages, as well as audio versions so you can take a moment to reflect, even on the move. Follow along this December.

Christmas reflections booklets, prayer cards and more: This year's Christmas reflections by Richard Carter can be ordered in standard or large print, as well as prayer cards promoting the free digital versions. Find out more.

A Church Near You: Churches around the country are holding services and events to mark Advent and Christmas. Find a service or event local to you.

Alexa: Listen to the Advent and Christmas reflections by telling Alexa to, "Ask the Church of England for today's Follow the Star reflection."

DailyHope: Listen to the day's Advent reflection by calling the DailyHope phone line on 0800 804 8044

www.churchofengland.org

Reading (and video) for today: Dwell on these things

While under house arrest in 62 AD, the apostle Paul wrote a letter to a church in the Roman colony of Philippi. He was no stranger to adversity. Yet, instead of collapsing under the weight of difficult circumstances, Paul discovered supernatural peace and joy. His inspired words (recorded in Philippians 4: 4-13) come alive in this unforgettable devotional video. It is  a message that has never been more relevant.

Philippians 4:4-13 - Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable - if anything is excellent or praiseworthy - think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me - put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

I rejoiced greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you were concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it. I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.

www.thejohn1010project.com

Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do

Commercial air crews are reporting something “unthinkable” in the skies above the Middle East: novel “spoofing” attacks have caused navigation systems to fail in dozens of incidents since September. 

In late September, multiple commercial flights near Iran went astray after navigation systems went blind. The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes’ systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. One of the aircraft almost flew into Iranian airspace without permission. Since then, air crews discussing the problem online have said it’s only gotten worse, and experts are racing to establish who is behind it.

OPSGROUP, an international group of pilots and flight technicians, sounded the alarm about the incidents in September and began to collect data to share with its members and the public. According to OPSGROUP, multiple commercial aircraft in the Middle Eastern region have lost the ability to navigate after receiving spoofed navigation signals for months. And it’s not just GPS - fallback navigation systems are also corrupted, resulting in total failure.

According to OPSGROUP, the activity is centered in three regions: Baghdad, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. The group has tracked more than 50 incidents in the last five weeks, the group said in a November update, and identified three new and distinct kinds of navigation spoofing incidents, with two arising since the initial reports in September. 

While GPS spoofing is not new, the specific vector of these new attacks was previously “unthinkable,” according to OPSGROUP, which described them as exposing a “fundamental flaw in avionics design.” The spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System, a piece of equipment often described as the “brain” of an aircraft that uses gyroscopes, accelerometers, and other tech to help planes navigate. 

www.vice.com

Reading for today: what God wants from us

 For it is not so much of our time and so much of our attention that God demands; it is not even all our time and all our attention; it is ourselves. For each of us the Baptist's words are true: “He must increase and I decrease.” He will be infinitely merciful to our repeated failures; I know no promise that He will accept a deliberate compromise. For He has, in the last resort, nothing to give us but Himself; and He can give that only insofar as our self-affirming will retires and makes room for Him in our souls. Let us make up our minds to it; there will be nothing “of our own” left over to live on, no “ordinary” life. 

I do not mean that each of us will necessarily be called to be a martyr or even an ascetic. That’s as may be. For some (nobody knows which) the Christian life will include much leisure, many occupations we naturally like. But these will be received from God’s hands. In a perfect Christian they would be as much part of his “religion,” his “service,” as his hardest duties, and his feasts would be as Christian as his fasts. What cannot be admitted - what must exist only as an undefeated but daily resisted enemy - is the idea of something that is “our own,” some area in which we are to be “out of school,” on which God has no claim.

For He claims all, because He is love and must bless. He cannot bless us unless He has us. When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death. Therefore, in love, He claims all. There’s no bargaining with Him.

By C.S. Lewis

From The Weight of Glory

Poem of a dog - by Calli

I'm the one who's always waiting for you.

Your motorcycle has a special sound that I have imprinted on my senses, I can recognize it in a thousand.

Your steps have a magic bell.

Your voice is music to my ears.

If I see your joy, it makes me happy!.

Your scent is the best.

Your presence moves my senses.

Your waking up wakes me up

I contemplate you sleeping and for me you are my daddy, I am happy watching your sleep.

Your look is a ray of light.

Your hands upon me, hold the lightness of peace and the sublime display of infinite love.

When you leave, I feel a huge void in my heart.

I keep waiting for you again and again.

I am the one who will wait for you all your life today, tomorrow and forever:

I am your dog.

Nicked from a friend

Boston Dynamics teaches robo-dog to recognise speech, respond using ChatGPT

Robot-maker Boston Dynamics has taught one of its "Spot" robo-dogs to talk, by using ChatGPT.

As explained last week in a blog post, Boston Dynamics (BD) folks observed with considerable interest the advent of foundation models (FMs) and their use powering chatbots like ChatGPT. The firm therefore became interested in developing a demo of Spot using FMs to make decisions in real time.

"Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are basically very big, very capable autocomplete algorithms; they take in a stream of text and predict the next bit of text," the post states. "We were inspired by the apparent ability of LLMs to roleplay, replicate culture and nuance, form plans, and maintain coherence over time, as well as by recently released Visual Question Answering (VQA) models that can caption images and answer simple questions about them."

A robot tour guide was chosen as good test case. "The robot could walk around, look at objects in the environment, use a VQA or captioning model to describe them, and then elaborate on those descriptions using an LLM," the droid-maker's post states. "Additionally, the LLM could answer questions from the tour audience, and plan what actions the robot should take next. In this way, the LLM can be thought of as an improv actor – we provide a broad strokes script and the LLM fills in the blanks on the fly."

www.theregister.com

Over The Air software update to Rivian cars - goes wrong & kills internal screens!

On Monday, Rivian released an incremental software update 2023.42, which bricked the infotainment system in R1Ses and R1Ts. The company is frantically working on a fix, but it might not be an OTA…

Update: The company has acknowledged the issue with affected customers but a fix will have to wait until Nov 15th

Rivian’s vice president of software engineering, Wassim Bensaid, took to Reddit to update users on the situation.

Hi All,

We made an error with the 2023.42 OTA update – a fat finger where the wrong build with the wrong security certificates was sent out. We cancelled the campaign and we will restart it with the proper software that went through the different campaigns of beta testing.

Service will be contacting impacted customers and will go through the resolution options. That may require physical repair in some cases.

This is on us – we messed up. Thanks for your support and your patience as we go through this.

* Update 1 (11/13, 10:45 PM PT): The issue impacts the infotainment system. In most cases, the rest of the vehicle systems are still operational. A vehicle reset or sleep cycle will not solve the issue. We are validating the best options to address the issue for the impacted vehicles. Our customer support team is prioritizing support for our customers related to this issue. Thank you.

That’s the last update we had over 10 hours after Rivian customer vehicles were fed the bad software update. Rivian’s PR team hasn’t replied to requests for comment.

The vehicles are drivable, but software and displays go black. It appears that the 2023.42 software update hangs at 90% on the vehicle screen or 50% on the app screen, and then the vehicle screens black out. All systems appear to still work except for the displays.

www.electrek.co