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AI companies are generally secretive about their sources of training data, but an investigation by Proof News found some of the wealthiest AI companies in the world have used material from thousands of YouTube videos to train AI. Companies did so despite YouTube's rules against harvesting materials from the platform without permission. From a report: Our investigation found that subtitles from 173,536 YouTube videos, siphoned from more than 48,000 channels, were used by Silicon Valley heavyweights, including Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple, and Salesforce. The dataset, called YouTube Subtitles, contains video transcripts from educational and online learning channels like Khan Academy, MIT, and Harvard. The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC also had their videos used to train AI, as did The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, and Jimmy Kimmel Live. Proof News also found material from YouTube megastars, including MrBeast (289 million subscribers, two videos taken for training), Marques Brownlee (19 million subscribers, seven videos taken), Jacksepticeye (nearly 31 million subscribers, 377 videos taken), and PewDiePie (111 million subscribers, 337 videos taken). Some of the material used to train AI also promoted conspiracies such as the "flat-earth theory." Further reading: YouTube Says OpenAI Training Sora With Its Videos Would Break Rules.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The climate crisis is causing the length of each day to get longer, analysis shows, as the mass melting of polar ice reshapes the planet. From a report: The phenomenon is a striking demonstration of how humanity's actions are transforming the Earth, scientists said, rivalling natural processes that have existed for billions of years. The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions and GPS navigation, all of which rely on precise timekeeping. The length of the Earth's day has been steadily increasing over geological time due to the gravitational drag of the moon on the planet's oceans and land. However, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets due to human-caused global heating has been redistributing water stored at high latitudes into the world's oceans, leading to more water in the seas nearer the equator. This makes the Earth more oblate -- or fatter -- slowing the rotation of the planet and lengthening the day still further. The planetary impact of humanity was also demonstrated recently by research that showed the redistribution of water had caused the Earth's axis of rotation -- the north and south poles -- to move. Other work has revealed that humanity's carbon emissions are shrinking the stratosphere.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's investment into Inflection AI will get a full-blown UK antitrust probe, after the watchdog said it needed to take a closer look at the hiring of former employees from the artificial intelligence startup. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority said Tuesday it was opening the formal phase one merger probe into the partnership, setting a Sept. 11 deadline on whether to escalate it to an in-depth investigation. The agency has been swift to act against big tech's AI startup investments after it found a pattern of large tech firms piling money into start ups.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, the U.S. Senate introduced a new bill to outlaw the unethical use of AI-generated content and deepfake technology. Called the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act), the bill would "set new federal transparency guidelines for marking, authenticating and detecting AI-generated content, protect journalists, actors and artists against AI-driven theft, and hold violators accountable for abuses." TechSpot reports: Proposed and sponsored by Democrats Maria Cantwell of Washington and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, along with Republican Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, the aims to establish enforceable transparency standards in AI development [such a through watermarking]. The legislation also wants to curb unauthorized data use in training models. The senators intend to task the National Institutes of Standards and Technology with developing sensible transparency guidelines should the bill pass. [...] The senators feel that clarifying and defining what is okay and what is not regarding AI development is vital in protecting citizens, artists, and public figures from the harm that misuse of the technology could cause, particularly in creating deepfakes. The text of the bill can be read here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: A team of researchers think they've discovered a cave on the Moon in radar images of the lunar surface, which they posit could be a future site for an established human presence on our rocky satellite. The tunnel is in the Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility) pit, the deepest known pit on the Moon. (If the name is familiar to you, the Sea of Tranquility is where the Apollo 11 mission landed in 1969.) The pit formed due to a lava tube's roof collapse or a collapse of a void structure created by tectonic processes. To look for potential cave structures within the pit, the researchers studied side-looking radar images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's Mini-RF instrument between 2009 and 2011. The team then conducted 3D radar simulations of potential geometries of the pit and its cave, to determine that the brightness they saw in radar images could be due to subsurface features. Ultimately, the team determined there is a tunnel in the pit that is between 98 feet (30 meters) long and 262ft (80m) long. The tunnel is roughly 148ft (45m) wide and is either flat or inclined with a maximum steepness of 45 degrees. "The exploration of lunar caves through future robotic missions could provide a fresh perspective on the lunar subsurface and yield new insights into the evolution of lunar volcanism," the team wrote in the paper. "Furthermore, direct exploration could confirm the presence of stable subsurface environments shielded from radiation and with optimal temperature conditions for future human utilization." The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Just before the weekend, dozens of record labels including UMG, Warner, and Sony, filed a massive copyright infringement lawsuit against Verizon at a New York federal court. In common with previous lawsuits that accused rivals of similar inaction, Verizon Communications Inc., Verizon Services Corp., and Cellco Partnership (dba Verizon Wireless), stand accused of assisting subscribers to download and share pirated music, by not doing enough to stop them. The labels' complaint introduces Verizon as one of the largest ISPs in the country, one that "knowingly provides its high-speed service to a massive community of online pirates." Knowledge of infringement, the labels say, was established at Verizon over a period of several years during which it received "hundreds of thousands" of copyright notices, referencing instances of infringement allegedly carried out by its subscribers. The complaint cites Verizon subscribers' persistent use of BitTorrent networks to download and share pirated music, with Verizon allegedly failing to curtail their activity. "While Verizon is famous for its 'Can you hear me now?' advertising campaign, it has intentionally chosen not to listen to complaints from copyright owners. Instead of taking action in response to those infringement notices as the law requires, Verizon ignored Plaintiffs' notices and buried its head in the sand," the labels write. "Undeterred, infringing subscribers identified in Plaintiffs' notices continued to use Verizon's services to infringe Plaintiffs' copyrights with impunity. Meanwhile, Verizon continued to provide its high-speed service to thousands of known repeat infringers so it could continue to collect millions of dollars from them." Through this lawsuit, which references piracy of songs recorded by artists including The Rolling Stones, Ariana Grande, Bob Dylan, Bruno Mars, Elvis Presley, Dua Lipa, Drake, and others, the labels suggest that Verizon will have no choice but to hear them now. [...] Attached to the complaint, Exhibit A contains a non-exhaustive list of the plaintiffs' copyright works allegedly infringed by Verizon's subscribers. The document is over 400 pages long, with each track listed representing potential liability for Verizon as a willful, intentional, and purposeful contributory infringer, the complaint notes. This inevitably leads to claims based on maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per copyrighted work infringed on Count I (contributory infringement). The statutory maximum of $150,000 per infringed work is also applied to Count II (vicarious infringement), based on the labels' claim that Verizon derived a direct financial benefit from the direct infringements of its subscribers. The labels' complaint can be found here (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni plans to revive Italy's nuclear energy sector, focusing on small modular reactors to be operational within a decade. He said that nuclear energy could constitute at least 11% of the country's electricity mix by 2050. Semafor reports: Italy's energy minister told the Financial Times that the government would introduce legislation to support investment in small modular reactors, which could be operational within 10 years. [...] In Italy, concerns about energy security since Russia's invasion of Ukraine have pushed the government to reconsider nuclear power, Bloomberg wrote. Energy minister Pichetto Fratin told the Financial Times he was confident that Italians' historic "aversion" could be overcome, as nuclear technology now has "different levels of safety and benefits families and businesses." In Italy, safety is also top of mind: The Chernobyl tragedy of 1986 was the trigger for it to cease nuclear production in the first place, and the 2011 Fukushima disaster reignited those concerns. As of April, only 51% of Italians approved of nuclear power, according to polls shared by Il Sole 24 Ore. The plan to introduce small modular reactors in Italy could add to the country's history of failure in nuclear energy, a former Italian lawmaker and researcher argued in Italian outlet Il Fatto Quotidiano, writing that these reactors are expensive and produce too little energy to justify an investment in them.They could also become obsolete within the next decade, the timeline for the government to introduce them, Italian outlet Domani added, and be overtaken by nuclear fusion reactors, which are more efficient and have "virtually no environmental impact." Italy's main oil company, Eni, has signed a deal with MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion System, with the goal of providing the first operational nuclear fusion plant by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has quietly announced the first details of its new "SpreadsheetLLM," claiming it has the "potential to transform spreadsheet data management and analysis, paving the way for more intelligent and efficient user interactions." You can read more details about the model in a pre-print paper available here. Jasper Hamill reports via The Stack: One of the problems with using LLMs in spreadsheets is that they get bogged down by too many tokens (basic units of information the model processes). To tackle this, Microsoft developed SheetCompressor, an "innovative encoding framework that compresses spreadsheets effectively for LLMs." "It significantly improves performance in spreadsheet table detection tasks, outperforming the vanilla approach by 25.6% in GPT4's in-context learning setting," Microsoft added. The model is made of three modules: structural-anchor-based compression, inverse index translation, and data-format-aware aggregation. The first of these modules involves placing "structural anchors" throughout the spreadsheet to help the LLM understand what's going on better. It then removes "distant, homogeneous rows and columns" to produce a condensed "skeleton" version of the table. Index translation addresses the challenge caused by spreadsheets with numerous empty cells and repetitive values, which use up too many tokens. "To improve efficiency, we depart from traditional row-by-row and column-by-column serialization and employ a lossless inverted index translation in JSON format," Microsoft wrote. "This method creates a dictionary that indexes non-empty cell texts and merges addresses with identical text, optimizing token usage while preserving data integrity." [...] After conducting a "comprehensive evaluation of our method on a variety of LLMs" Microsoft found that SheetCompressor significantly reduces token usage for spreadsheet encoding by 96%. Moreover, SpreadsheetLLM shows "exceptional performance in spreadsheet table detection," which is the "foundational task of spreadsheet understanding." The new LLM builds on the Chain of Thought methodology to introduce a framework called "Chain of Spreadsheet" (CoS), which can "decompose" spreadsheet reasoning into a table detection-match-reasoning pipeline.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OW2, the non-profit international consortium dedicated to developing open-source middleware, published an open letter to the European Commission today. They're urging the European Union to continue funding free software after noticing that the Next Generation Internet (NGI) programs were no longer mentioned in Cluster 4 of the 2025 Horizon Europe funding plans. OW2 argues that discontinuing NGI funding would weaken Europe's technological ecosystem, leaving many projects under-resourced and jeopardizing Europe's position in the global digital landscape. The letter reads, in part: NGI programs have shown their strength and importance to support the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations. Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 millions euros to:- "Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe";- "A flourishing internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life";- "A structured eco-system of talented contributors driving the creation of new internet commons and the evolution of existing internet commons." In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI funding in the first 5 years, backed by 18 organizations managing these European funding consortia.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: During an interview with Sequoia Capital's Training Data podcast published last Tuesday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott doubled down on his belief that so-called large language model (LLM) "scaling laws" will continue to drive AI progress, despite some skepticism in the field that progress has leveled out. Scott played a key role in forging a $13 billion technology-sharing deal between Microsoft and OpenAI. "Despite what other people think, we're not at diminishing marginal returns on scale-up," Scott said. "And I try to help people understand there is an exponential here, and the unfortunate thing is you only get to sample it every couple of years because it just takes a while to build supercomputers and then train models on top of them." LLM scaling laws refer to patterns explored by OpenAI researchers in 2020 showing that the performance of language models tends to improve predictably as the models get larger (more parameters), are trained on more data, and have access to more computational power (compute). The laws suggest that simply scaling up model size and training data can lead to significant improvements in AI capabilities without necessarily requiring fundamental algorithmic breakthroughs. Since then, other researchers have challenged the idea of persisting scaling laws over time, but the concept is still a cornerstone of OpenAI's AI development philosophy. Scott's comments can be found around the 46-minute mark.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UPDATE 7/15/24 3:05 p.m. EDT: In a press release published this afternoon, the FBI said they "successfully gained access to Thomas Matthew Crooks' phone, and they continue to analyze his electronic devices." The bureau added that it has completed its search of the subject's residence and vehicle, and "conducted nearly 100 interviews of law enforcement personnel, event attendees, and other witnesses." Original Story: July 15, 16:45 UTC: Investigators are working to break into the phone of the man who shot at former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday. The Verge: The FBI said in a statement that it had obtained the shooter's phone "for examination." Officials told reporters in a conference call on Sunday, as reported by The New York Times, that agents in Pennsylvania were unable to break into the phone. It's been shipped to the FBI's lab in Quantico, Virginia, where the FBI hopes to get past the phone's password protection, the Times reported. Investigators are still looking for insight into the motives of Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, who they identified as the gunman. Kevin Rojek, the FBI special agent in charge in Pittsburgh, told the Times and other outlets that the agency has access to some of Crooks' text messages, but they haven't shed much light on his beliefs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On July 12, 1999, the last Morse code message was sent from a Bay Area radio station, marking the end of an era. Every July 12, the Historic KPH Maritime Radio Receiving Station in Point Reyes revives the golden age of maritime radio, with volunteers exchanging Morse code messages worldwide. The Mercury News reports: Friday's "Night of Nights" event, which commemorates the long-gone stations and the skilled radiotelegraph operators who linked ships to shore, starts at 5:01 p.m. -- precisely one minute after the 1999 message ended. Operators will keep working until 11 p.m. "We're carrying on," said historical society president Richard Dillman, 80, who learned Morse code as a boy. "Morse code is not dead." The event, based at KPH's stations that are now part of the wild and windswept Point Reyes National Seashore, northwest of San Francisco, is not open to the public. But amateur radio operators around the world can participate by sending messages and exchanging greetings. The operating frequencies of the historical society's amateur station, under the call sign K6KPH, are 3550, 7050, 14050, 18097.5 and 21050. Radiogrammed messages arrive from as far away as New Zealand and Europe, rich with memories of rewarding careers or poignant tributes to lost loved ones. "Dear dad, we love you and we miss you so much," said one. The station uses the original historic KPH transmitters, receivers, antennas and other equipment, carefully repaired and restored by the society's experts. [...] All over the Pacific coast, stations closed. KPH's receiving headquarters -- an Art Deco cube built between 1929 and 1931, its entrance framed by a tunnel of cypress trees -- was acquired by the National Park Service in 1999. Its transmission station is located on a windswept bluff in Bolinas. [Historical society president Richard Dillman] and friend Tom Horsfall resolved to repair, restore and operate KPH as a way to honor the men and women who for 100 years had served ships in the North Pacific and Indian Ocean. "It was a brotherhood," said Dillman. "There was camaraderie -- a love of Morse code and the ability to do a job well." [...] They pitched their ambitious plan to the National Park Service. "At first, I was skeptical about their proposal," said Don Neubacher, the Seashore's former Superintendent. "But over time, I realized the Maritime Radio Historical Society, led by Richard Dillman, was a gift for the National Park Service." "I was impressed by the overwhelming knowledge of early wireless and ship-to-shore communication," he said, "and their lifelong commitment to saving this critical piece of Point Reyes history." With a dozen society volunteers from all over the Bay Area -- all over the age of 60, self-described "radio squirrels" -- they went to work. They meet on Saturday mornings over coffee and breakfast "services" dubbed "The Church of the Continuous Wave," sometimes ogling over radio schematics. Then, for a few hours, they broadcast news and weather.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week, Senior Advisor on AI Governance at the Center for Democracy & Technology, Kevin Bankston, took to X to report that Google's Gemini AI was caught summarizing his private tax return on Google Drive without his permission. "Despite attempts to disable the feature, Bankston found that Gemini's continued to operate in Google Drive, raising questions about Google's handling of user data and privacy settings," writes TechRadar's Craig Hale. From the report: After failing to find the right controls to disable Gemini's integration, the Advisor asked Google's ChatGPT-rivalling AI chatbot on two occasions to pinpoint the settings. A second, more detailed response still brought no joy: "Gemini is *not* in Apps and services on my dashboard (1st option), and I didn't have a profile pic in the upper right of the Gemini page (2nd)." With help from another X user, Bankston found the control, which was already disabled, highlighting either a malfunctioning control or indicating that further settings are hidden elsewhere. However, previous Google documentation has confirmed that the company will not use Google Workspace data to train or improve its generative AI services or to feed targeted ads. Bankston theorizes that his previous participation in Google Workspace Labs might have influenced Gemini's behavior. The Gemini side panel in Google Drive for PDFs can be closed if a user no longer wishes to access generative AI summaries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: A federal appeals court has agreed to halt the reinstatement of net neutrality rules until August 5th, while the court considers whether more permanent action is justified. It's the latest setback in a long back and forth on net neutrality -- the principle that internet service providers (ISPs) should not be able to block or throttle internet traffic in a discriminatory manner. The Federal Communications Commission has sought to achieve this by reclassifying ISPs under Title II of the Communications Act, which gives the agency greater regulatory oversight. The Democratic-led agency enacted net neutrality rules under the Obama administration, only for those rules to be repealed under former President Donald Trump's FCC. The current FCC, which has three Democratic and two Republican commissioners, voted in April to bring back net neutrality. The 3-2 vote was divided along party lines. Broadband providers have since challenged the FCC's action, which is potentially more vulnerable after the Supreme Court's recent decision to strike down Chevron deference -- a legal doctrine that instructed courts to defer to an agency's expert decisions except in a very narrow range of circumstances. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Matt Schettenhelm said in a report prior to the court's ruling that he doesn't expect the FCC to prevail in court, in large part due to the demise of Chevron. A panel of judges for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said in an order that a temporary "administrative stay is warranted" while it considers the merits of the broadband providers' request for a permanent stay. The administrative stay will be in place until August 5th. In the meantime, the court requested the parties provide additional briefs about the application of National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services to this lawsuit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a perplexing turn of events that has raised concerns about the vulnerability of critical undersea infrastructure, Norway's Institute of Marine Research is reconfiguring its sophisticated underwater observatory after a mysterious incident left a section of its seafloor cable cleanly severed. The Lofoten-Vesteralen Ocean Observatory (LoVe), an advanced array of sensors designed to monitor marine life and environmental conditions off Norway's rugged coastline, unexpectedly went silent in April 2021, prompting an investigation that would uncover more questions than answers. As the institute's acoustic engineer Guosong Zhang delved into the mystery, he meticulously traced ship movements in the area, uncovering a curious pattern: a Russian trawler had repeatedly crossed the cable's location at the precise time the outage occurred, a coincidence that seemed too striking to ignore. Despite this compelling lead, subsequent police investigations proved inconclusive, leaving the institute grappling with the unsettling possibility of deliberate sabotage. The incident, compounded by similar damage to a communications cable serving the remote Svalbard archipelago, has cast a spotlight on the potential vulnerabilities of submarine assets in an era of heightened geopolitical tensions, with some experts pointing to the possibility of Russian intelligence activities targeting Norway's undersea infrastructure. In response to these challenges and the unresolved nature of the cable damage, the Institute of Marine Research has made the difficult decision to adapt its approach, opting to replace the compromised cable section with wireless modules -- a solution that, while sacrificing some data transmission capacity, aims to enhance the security and resilience of this vital scientific installation in the face of evolving threats beneath the waves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At least a dozen organizations with domain names at domain registrar Squarespace saw their websites hijacked last week. Krebs on Security: Squarespace bought all assets of Google Domains a year ago, but many customers still haven't set up their new accounts. Experts say malicious hackers learned they could commandeer any migrated Squarespace accounts that hadn't yet been registered, merely by supplying an email address tied to an existing domain. The Squarespace domain hijacks, which took place between July 9 and July 12, appear to have mostly targeted cryptocurrency businesses, including Celer Network, Compound Finance, Pendle Finance, and Unstoppable Domains. In some cases, the attackers were able to redirect the hijacked domains to phishing sites set up to steal visitors' cryptocurrency funds. New York City-based Squarespace purchased roughly 10 million domain names from Google Domains in June 2023, and it has been gradually migrating those domains to its service ever since. Squarespace has not responded to a request for comment, nor has it issued a statement about the attacks. But an analysis released by security experts at Metamask and Paradigm finds the most likely explanation for what happened is that Squarespace assumed all users migrating from Google Domains would select the social login options -- such "Continue with Google" or "Continue with Apple" -- as opposed to the "Continue with email" choice.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky Lab, has told workers in its U.S.-based division that they are being laid off this week and that it is closing its U.S. business, Zero Day reported Monday, citing sources. From a report: The sudden move comes after the U.S. Commerce Department announced last month that it was banning the sale of Kaspersky software in the U.S. beginning July 20. The company has been selling its software here since 2005. Kaspersky confirmed the news to Zero Day, saying that beginning July 20 it will "gradually wind down" its U.S. operations and eliminate U.S.-based positions as a result of the new ban, despite initially vowing to fight the ban in court.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: During an interview with Sequoia Capital's Training Data podcast published last Tuesday, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott doubled down on his belief that so-called large language model (LLM) "scaling laws" will continue to drive AI progress, despite some skepticism in the field that progress has leveled out. Scott played a key role in forging a $13 billion technology-sharing deal between Microsoft and OpenAI. "Despite what other people think, we're not at diminishing marginal returns on scale-up," Scott said. "And I try to help people understand there is an exponential here, and the unfortunate thing is you only get to sample it every couple of years because it just takes a while to build supercomputers and then train models on top of them." LLM scaling laws refer to patterns explored by OpenAI researchers in 2020 showing that the performance of language models tends to improve predictably as the models get larger (more parameters), are trained on more data, and have access to more computational power (compute). The laws suggest that simply scaling up model size and training data can lead to significant improvements in AI capabilities without necessarily requiring fundamental algorithmic breakthroughs. Since then, other researchers have challenged the idea of persisting scaling laws over time, but the concept is still a cornerstone of OpenAI's AI development philosophy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A small business selling washable swim diapers on Amazon is facing financial difficulties following a one-star review claiming they received a used, stained product. Paul and Rachelle Baron, owners of Beau & Belle Littles, say their once-thriving business has been severely impacted by the review, which remains on the site despite their appeals. The incident, described in detail in a Bloomberg story, highlights ongoing concerns about Amazon's handling of returned items. While the company claims to inspect returns before resale, former employees suggest time constraints may lead to oversights. The Barons report being $600,000 in debt and unable to make a living from their business since the review. Amazon has not removed the review, despite the couple's repeated requests.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Investigators are working to break into the phone of the man who shot at former President Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday. The Verge: The FBI said in a statement that it had obtained the shooter's phone "for examination." Officials told reporters in a conference call on Sunday, as reported by The New York Times, that agents in Pennsylvania were unable to break into the phone. It's been shipped to the FBI's lab in Quantico, Virginia, where the FBI hopes to get past the phone's password protection, the Times reported. Investigators are still looking for insight into the motives of Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, who they identified as the gunman. Kevin Rojek, the FBI special agent in charge in Pittsburgh, told the Times and other outlets that the agency has access to some of Crooks' text messages, but they haven't shed much light on his beliefs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cybercriminals are using Facebook business pages and advertisements to promote fake Windows themes that infect unsuspecting users with the SYS01 password-stealing malware. From a report: Trustwave researchers who observed the campaigns said the threat actors also promote fake downloads for pirated games and software, Sora AI, 3D image creator, and One Click Active. While using Facebook advertisements to push information-stealing malware is not new, the social media platform's massive reach makes these campaigns a significant threat. The threat actors take out advertisements that promote Windows themes, free game downloads, and software activation cracks for popular applications, like Photoshop, Microsoft Office, and Windows. These advertisements are promoted through newly created Facebook business pages or by hijacking existing ones. When using hijacked Facebook pages, the threat actors rename them to suit the theme of their advertisement and to promote the downloads to the existing page members.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two of the nation's major telecommunications companies are feuding over a plan to boost service for police, firefighters and other state and local agencies -- a move Verizon says would amount to a $14 billion gift to rival. From a report: AT&T and its allies are asking regulators to provide more wireless frequencies to FirstNet, a cellular network launched in 2017 to connect emergency responders and other public-sector groups. The Dallas-based telecom giant holds an exclusive 25-year contract to run the network for the federal FirstNet Authority, which oversees the project. Rival telecom companies say the proposal would let AT&T's commercial business piggyback on those airwaves free. Verizon, which vies with FirstNet for public-safety contracts, called the proposal a giveaway of spectrum valued at around $14 billion that would give its competitor a "substantial windfall." T-Mobile US likewise urged regulators to avoid a "FirstNet takeover" of the spectrum. The carrier hasn't made its case as forcefully as Verizon, whose chief executive traveled to Washington twice in recent weeks to lobby regulators.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, is reportedly in advanced negotiations to acquire cloud security startup Wiz for approximately $23 billion, Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The potential deal, which would value Wiz at nearly double its most recent private valuation of $12 billion, underscores the growing importance of cybersecurity in Alphabet's enterprise strategy as it seeks to narrow the gap with cloud computing rivals such as Microsoft, Morgan Stanley said in a note. Founded in January 2020, Wiz has quickly established itself as a leading player in the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) space, utilizing an agentless approach to secure cloud application deployments throughout their lifecycle. The company's platform continuously assesses and prioritizes critical risks across various security domains, providing customers with a comprehensive view of their cloud security posture. Wiz has experienced rapid growth since its inception, with annual recurring revenue (ARR) exceeding $350 million as of January 2024, representing a year-over-year increase of over 75%. The company boasts an impressive client roster, with more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies among its customers, and has raised nearly $2 billion in funding to date. If confirmed, the acquisition would mark Alphabet's largest to date, significantly expanding its footprint in the burgeoning cloud security market. The move follows previous security-focused acquisitions by the tech giant, including the $5.4 billion purchase of Mandiant in 2022 and the $500 million acquisition of Siemplify. Morgan Stanley adds that the potential acquisition could raise questions about Wiz's ability to maintain neutrality across multiple cloud platforms, potentially benefiting competitors such as Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike in the near term.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A basket of 27 large-cap AI stocks created by wealth manager and brokerage house Jefferies has surged 127% in value since ChatGPT's launch in late 2022, adding about $10 trillion in market cap. However, 2025 earnings forecasts for these companies have increased only 25% over the same period, Jefferies warned in a note to clients. This disconnect has pushed the incremental price-to-earnings ratio for AI stocks to 73 times, suggesting investors are pricing in extremely optimistic growth expectations across the sector. Nvidia has seen the largest gains, with its stock price up 656% since late 2022. Despite signs of overvaluation, Jefferies believes the AI bubble could keep expanding in the near term, citing strong capital expenditure plans through 2025 and ample cash reserves at major cloud providers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From The New York Times:The key to "Eno" comes near the beginning of the film - at least, the beginning of the first version I saw. The musician Brian Eno, the documentary's subject, notes that the fun of the kind of art he makes is that it's a two-way street. "The audience's brain does the cooking and keeps seeing relationships," he says. Most movies are made up of juxtapositions of scenes, carefully selected and designed by the editor. But "Eno," directed by Gary Hustwit, turns that convention on its head. Writ large, it's a meditation on creativity. But every version of the movie you see is different, generated by a set of rules that dictate some things about the film, while leaving others to chance. (I've seen it twice, and maybe half the same material appeared across both films.) Eno, one of the most innovative and celebrated musicians and producers of his generation, has fiddled with randomness in his musical practice for decades, often propelled along by new technologies. He agreed to participate in "Eno" only if it, too, could be an example of what he and others have long called generative art... "Brain One", programmed by the artist Brendan Dawes, generates a new version of the film on the fly every time the algorithm is run. Dawes's system selects from a database of 30 hours of new interviews with Eno and 500 hours of film from his personal archive and, following a system of rules set down by the filmmakers with code, creating a new film. According to the filmmakers, there are 52 quintillion (that is, 52 billion billion) possible combinations, which means the chances of Brain One generating two exact copies of "Eno" are so small as to be functionally zero. "But the ambitions of Eno are greater than the film itself," writes the Verge, with director Hustwit hoping for a cinematic future exploring generative filmmaking with their software and hardware package. "We have a patent pending on the system, and we just launched a startup called Anamorph that is basically exploring this idea further with other filmmakers and studios and streamers." In an interview with the Verge, Hustwit points out that Brian Eno did the soundtrack for his previous film. "I was having these thoughts about, well, why can't showing a film be more performative? Why does it have to be this static thing every time?" The film just began a two-week run at Greenwich Village's nonprofit theatre Film Forum, and in the U.K. is appearing this week at 17 Picturehouse Cinemas across England and Scotland. Check this online schedule for upcoming dates this week in Nashville (Thursday), Austin (Friday), Dallas (Saturday) - with later dates this month including Toronto, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and more cities in August.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian:A team of researchers from the UK and US have found that pancreatic cancer is able to shut down molecules in one of the body's most important genes, helping the disease to grow and spread rapidly... Dr Maria Hatziapostolou, of Nottingham Trent University's John van Geest Cancer Research Centre, said: "This work, which has provided new understanding and knowledge of how the cancer behaves, will hopefully help pave the way for potential new treatments in the future...." For the study, published in the journal Gastro Hep Advances, the researchers analysed healthy as well as pancreatic cancer tissue samples. They found pancreatic cancers triggered a process known as DNA methylation, causing molecules in the normally beneficial HNF4A gene to switch off, allowing tumours to grow extremely quickly. The HNF4A gene is crucial to human health because it helps many of the body's organs to function properly. But the researchers discovered pancreatic cancer can covertly disable the gene's benefits. Hatziapostolou said: "Loss of HNF4A drives pancreatic cancer development and aggressiveness and we now know correlates with poor patient survival." Scientists from the University of Nottingham, Stanford University and the University of California and Cedars-Sinai medical centre, Los Angeles, were also involved in the project. The published study calls the targeted HNF4A gene is "a novel tumor suppressor in pancreatic cancer, regulating cancer growth and aggressiveness." And ultimately, according to the Guardian, pancreatic cancer "is the 12th most common cancer worldwide," according to the Guardian, "with more than half a million people diagnosed every year. It has the worst survival rates of all the most common forms of the disease." The researchers paper ends with this conclusion. "HNF4A silencing... drives pancreatic cancer development and aggressiveness leading to poor patient survival."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In a significant advancement for space technology, a team of UC Berkeley researchers, led by doctoral student Taylor Waddell, successfully launched a 3D printer into space," reports the university's student newspaper:As part of the Virgin Galactic 07 mission, the team sent a 3D printer named SpaceCAL to space to explore the potential of Computed Axial Lithography, or CAL, and additive manufacturing in space... During its 140-second flight in suborbital space, the SpaceCAL printer autonomously detected microgravity and printed four test parts: two space shuttles and two Benchies, or 3D-printed boats created to check the printer's accuracy, according to Sean Chu, a member of the team who worked on designing structures and mechanisms. Within the 140 seconds, the process involved multiple steps such as printing, post-washing, flushing with water and post-curing with light to fully solidify the parts. But that's just the beginning, says the university's engineering department:To date, CAL has shown that it can successfully print with more than 60 different materials on Earth, such as silicones, glass composites and biomaterials. According to Waddell, this versatility could come in handy for both the cabin and the crew... "CAL is also capable of repairing the crew. We can print dental replacements, skin grafts or lenses, or things personalized in emergency medicine for astronauts, which is very important in these missions, too." Someday, CAL may be used to print even more sophisticated parts, such as human organs. Lawrence Livermore National Lab has received a grant from NASA to test this technology on the International Space Station. "They're going to basically do bioprinting on the Space Station," said Waddell. "And the long, long-term goal is to print organs up in space with CAL, then bring them back down to Earth." Next, Waddell and his colleagues hope to begin work with NASA on developing and validating a single object that could support crew health and wellness, like a dental crown for an astronaut or a surgical wound closure tool... This project was made possible through a $1.4 million grant and engineering support provided by NASA. In addition, Virgin Galactic played a pivotal role in taking this project to the next level.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The latest version of the Linux kernel adds an array of improvements," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu, " including a new memory sealing system call, a speed boost for AES-XTS encryption on Intel and AMD CPUs, and expanding Rust language support within the kernel to RISC-V."Plus, like in all kernel releases, there's a glut of groundwork to offer "initial support" for upcoming CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, Wi-Fi, and other hardware (that most of us don't use yet, but require Linux support to be in place for when devices that use them filter out)... Linux 6.10 adds (after much gnashing) the mseal() system call to prevent changes being made to portions of the virtual address space. For now, this will mainly benefit Google Chrome, which plans to use it to harden its sandboxing. Work is underway by kernel contributors to allow other apps to benefit, though. A similarly initially-controversial change merged is a new memory-allocation profiling subsystem. This helps developers fine-tune memory usage and more readily identify memory leaks. An explainer from LWN summarizes it well. Elsewhere, Linux 6.10 offers encrypted interactions with trusted platform modules (TPM) in order to "make the kernel's use of the TPM reasonably robust in the face of external snooping and packet alteration attacks". The documentation for this feature explains: "for every in-kernel operation we use null primary salted HMAC to protect the integrity [and] we use parameter encryption to protect key sealing and parameter decryption to protect key unsealing and random number generation." Sticking with security, the Linux kernel's Landlock security module can now apply policies to ioctl() calls (Input/Output Control), restricting potential misuse and improving overall system security. On the networking side there's significant performance improvements to zero-copy send operations using io_uring, and the newly-added ability to "bundle" multiple buffers for send and receive operations also offers an uptick in performance... A couple of months ago Canonical announced Ubuntu support for the RISC-V Milk-V Mars single-board computer. Linux 6.10 mainlines support for the Milk-V Mars, which will make that effort a lot more viable (especially with the Ubuntu 24.10 kernel likely to be v6.10 or newer). Others RISC-V improvements abound in Linux 6.10, including support for the Rust language, boot image compression in BZ2, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, and Zstandard (instead of only Gzip); and newer AMD GPUs thanks to kernel-mode FPU support in RISC-V. Phoronix has their own rundown of Linux 6.10, plus a list of some of the highlights, which includes: The initial DRM Panic infrastructure The new Panthor DRM driver for newer Arm Mali graphics Better AMD ROCm/AMDKFD support for "small" Ryzen APUs and new additions for AMD Zen 5. AMD GPU display support on RISC-V hardware thanks to RISC-V kernel mode FPU More Intel Xe2 graphics preparations Better IO_uring zero-copy performance Faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption with modern Intel and AMD CPUs Continued online repair work for XFS Steam Deck IMU support TPM bus encryption and integrity protectionRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian:In March, after analysing 22,000 tasks in the UK economy, covering every type of job, a model created by the Institute for Public Policy Research predicted that 59% of tasks currently done by humans - particularly women and young people - could be affected by AI in the next three to five years. In the worst-case scenario, this would trigger a "jobs apocalypse" where eight million people lose their jobs in the UK alone.... Darrell West, author of The Future of Work: AI, Robots and Automation, says that just as policy innovations were needed in Thomas Paine's time to help people transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy, they are needed today, as we transition to an AI economy. "There's a risk that AI is going to take a lot of jobs," he says. "A basic income could help navigate that situation." AI's impact will be far-reaching, he predicts, affecting blue- and white-collar jobs. "It's not just going to be entry-level people who are affected. And so we need to think about what this means for the economy, what it means for society as a whole. What are people going to do if robots and AI take a lot of the jobs?" Nell Watson, a futurist who focuses on AI ethics, has a more pessimistic view. She believes we are witnessing the dawn of an age of "AI companies": corporate environments where very few - if any - humans are employed at all. Instead, at these companies, lots of different AI sub-personalities will work independently on different tasks, occasionally hiring humans for "bits and pieces of work". These AI companies have the potential to be "enormously more efficient than human businesses", driving almost everyone else out of business, "apart from a small selection of traditional old businesses that somehow stick in there because their traditional methods are appreciated"... As a result, she thinks it could be AI companies, not governments, that end up paying people a basic income. AI companies, meanwhile, will have no salaries to pay. "Because there are no human beings in the loop, the profits and dividends of this company could be given to the needy. This could be a way of generating support income in a way that doesn't need the state welfare. It's fully compatible with capitalism. It's just that the AI is doing it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis writes: According to a new report from the United Nations, the world population is expected to grow to an estimated peak of 10.3 billion people in the mid-2080s, an increase over the current global population of 8.2 billion people. The estimated world population at the end of the century (2100) is now expected to be 6% less than estimates from a decade ago. However, calculating the number of future people is not a perfect science, with "many sources of uncertainty in estimating the global population," according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It estimated the world reached 8 billion people last September, while the U.N. timed the milestone nearly one year earlier.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Researchers are proposing a new way to battle the effects of climate change..." writes Science magazine: slowing the rising of sea levels with "glacial geoengineering". (That is, "building flexible barriers around them or drilling deep into them to slow their slippage into the sea.")Geoengineering proponents say it would be better to begin research now on how to staunch sea level rise at its source, rather than spending billions and billions of dollars to wall off coastal cities. "At some point you have to think, 'Well, is there anything else we can do?'" asks glaciologist John Moore of the University of Lapland, an author on the white paper, which was sponsored by the University of Chicago. One idea researched by Moore and covered in the report is to build buoyant "curtains," moored to the sea floor beyond the edge of ice shelves and glaciers, to block natural currents of warm water that erode ice sheets from below. (Especially in Antarctica, warming ocean water is a bigger threat to glaciers than warming air.) Early designs called for plastic, but natural fibers such as canvas and sisal are now being considered to avoid pollution concerns. According to the white paper, initial modeling studies show that curtain heights stretching only partway up from the sea floor off the coast of western Antarctica could reduce glacial melting by a factor of 10 in some locations. Another intervention some scientists are contemplating would slow the slippage of ice sheets by drilling holes to their bases and pumping out water or heat. Such massive engineering efforts would surely be some of the most expensive ever undertaken by humanity. At a workshop at the University of Chicago in October 2023, researchers suggested it might cost $88 billion to build 80 kilometers of curtains around Antarctic glaciers. Interventions would also require international political support, which some glaciologists view as an even bigger hurdle than the price tag. Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, says such projects would require fleets of icebreakers, extensive shipping and supply chain needs, and significant personnel to construct, maintain, and guard the final structures - in ocean conditions she calls "eye-poppingly difficult." The projects could also incur unintended consequences, potentially disrupting ocean circulation patterns or endangering wildlife. Furthermore, it would take decades to find out whether the interventions were working. Even if the engineering and logistics were possible, that "does not answer the question of whether it should be pursued," says Moon, who opposes even preliminary studies on the concepts. "The report, which also stresses the importance of emissions reductions, takes pains to say it 'does not advocate for intervention; rather, it advocates for research into whether any interventions may be viable'..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the number of autism diagnoses rises in America, a number of large employers "are taking steps to make workplaces more accessible and welcoming for neurodivergent employees," reports the New York Times - including Microsoft, Dell and Ford. [Alternate URL here.]The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 in 36 8-year-olds in the United States has autism. That's up from 1 in 44 in 2018 and 1 in 150 in 2000, an increase that experts attribute, in part, to better screening. In addition, 2.2% of adults in the country, or 5.4 million people, are autistic, according to the CDC... Autism activists have praised companies that have become more accepting of remote work since the coronavirus pandemic. Workplaces with too much light and noise can overwhelm those who are autistic, leading to burnout, said Jessica Myszak, a clinical psychologist in Chicago who specializes in testing and evaluations for autism. Remote work "reduces the social demands and some of the environmental sensitivities" that autistic people struggle with, Myszak added. The article notes Microsoft's neurodiversity hiring program, which was established in 2015.The company's program was modeled after a venture created by the German software firm SAP, and has since been adopted in some form by companies including Dell and Ford. The initiative has brought in about 300 full-time neurodivergent employees to Microsoft, said Neil Barnett, the company's director for inclusive hiring and accessibility. "All they needed was this different, more inclusive process," Barnett said, "and once they got into the company, they flourished." [One job applicant] was given a job coach to help her with time management and prioritization. Microsoft also paired her with a mentor who showed her around the company's campus in Redmond. Perhaps more important, she works with managers who have received neurodiversity training. The Microsoft campus also has "focus rooms," where lights can be dimmed and the heights of desks can be changed to fit sensory preferences. Employees seated in the open office may also request to sit away from busy aisles or receive noise-canceling headphones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AT&T paid more than $300,000 to a member of the team that stole call records for tens of millions of customers, reports Wired - "to delete the data and provide a video demonstrating proof of deletion."The hacker, who is part of the notorious ShinyHunters hacking group that has stolen data from a number of victims through unsecured Snowflake cloud storage accounts, tells WIRED that AT&T paid the ransom in May. He provided the address for the cryptocurrency wallet that sent the currency to him, as well as the address that received it. WIRED confirmed, through an online blockchain tracking tool, that a payment transaction occurred on May 17 in the amount of 5.7 bitcoin... The hacker initially demanded $1 million from AT&T but ultimately agreed to a third of that. WIRED viewed the video that the hacker says he provided to AT&T as proof to the telecom that he had deleted its stolen data from his computer... AT&T is one of more than 150 companies that are believed to have had data stolen from poorly secured Snowflake accounts during a hacking spree that unfolded throughout April and May. It's been previously reported that the accounts were not secured with multi-factor authentication, so after the hackers obtained usernames and passwords for the accounts, and in some cases authorization tokens, they were able to access the storage accounts of companies and siphon their data. Ticketmaster, the banking firm Santander, LendingTree, and Advance Auto Parts were all among the victims publicly identified to date... The timeline suggests that if [John] Binns is responsible for the AT&T breach, he allegedly did it when he was likely already aware that he was under indictment for the T-Mobile hack and could face arrest for it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thunderbird's annual Extended Support Release was revealed Friday, promising "significant" improvements to the overall user experience and "the speed at which we can deliver new features to you," according to the Thunderbird blog:We've devoted significant development time integrating Rust - a modern programming language originally created by Mozilla Research - into Thunderbird. Even though this is a seemingly invisible change, it is a major leap forward because it enhances our code quality and performance. This overhaul will allow us to share features between the desktop and future mobile versions of Thunderbird, and speed up our development process. It's a win for our developers and a win for you. More from the blog OMG Ubuntu:I'm also stoked to see that Thunderbird 128 makes 'newest first' the default sort order for messages in message list. While some prefer the old way, I always found it strange that the oldest mails were shown first - team reverse chronology, represent! They also cite "a number of OpenPGP improvements," plus a new preference option for displaying full names and email addresses of all recipients in the message list. (Plus, threaded-message views now display a "New Message" count.) Other new features in this release:A new and more attractive layout for Cards View (with adjustable heights) that "makes it easier to scan your email threads and glean information."The folder pane has better recall of message thread statesImproved theme compatibility. "Your Thunderbird should blend seamlessly with your desktop environment, matching the system's accent colors perfectly." (Especially beneficial on Ubuntu and Mint.)You can now customize the color of your account icon.The Thunderbird blog also mentions that "We plan to launch the first phase of built-in support for Exchange, as well as Mozilla Sync, in a future Nebula point release (e.g. Thunderbird 128.X)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from non-profit libertarian law firm, the Institute for Justice:U.S. District Judge Rita Lin has permanently enjoined the California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services from enforcing its private-investigator licensing requirement against anti-spam entrepreneur Jay Fink. The order declares that forcing Jay to get a license to run his business is so irrational that it violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment... Jay's business stems from California's anti-spam act, which allows individuals to sue spammers. But to sue, they have to first compile evidence. To do that, recipients often have to wade through thousands of emails. For more than a decade, Jay has offered a solution: he and his team will scour a client's junk folder and catalog the messages that likely violate the law. But last summer, Jay's job - and Californians' ability to bring spammers to justice - came to a screeching halt when the state told him he was a criminal. A regulator told Jay he needed a license to read through emails that might be used as evidence in a lawsuit. And because Jay didn't have a private investigator license, the state shut him down. The state of California has since "agreed to jointly petition the court for an order that forever prohibits it from enforcing its licensure law against Jay," according to the article. Otherwise the anti-spam crusader would've had to endure thousands of hours of private investigator training...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the end of June, Apple's App Store rejected the Windows/retro PC emulator "UTM SE". But in a reversal Apple approved the app Saturday, reports the Verge. "We are happy to announce that UTM SE is available (for free) on iOS and visionOS App Store," the developer posted on X, "and coming soon to AltStore PAL." From the Verge:After Apple rejected the app in June, the developer said it wasn't going to keep trying because the app was "a subpar experience." Today, UTM thanked the AltStore team for helping it and credited another developer "whose QEMU TCTI implementation was pivotal for this JIT-less build." As with other emulators on the App Store, you can't do much with UTM SE out of the box. It doesn't come with any operating systems, though the app does link to UTM's site, which has guides for Windows XP through Windows 11 emulation, as well as downloads of pre-built virtual Linux machines. Mac OS 9.2.1 and DOS are listed in one screenshot from the UTM SE App Store page. Mac OS 9.2.1 and DOS are listed in one screenshot from the UTM SE App Store page.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from ScienceAlert:NASA's Parker Solar Probe, tasked with taking a close-up look at the Sun's outer corona, has just equalled the record for the fastest-moving human-made object ever.The previous record holder? The Parker Solar Probe, again.The probe was recorded traveling at 635,266 kilometers (394,736 miles) per hour on June 29, the second time it's reached that speed since it launched in 2018. We're talking around 500 times faster than the speed of sound here.It's on course to get even faster too, with a top speed of around 692,000 kph (430,000 mph) expected when it makes its closest approach to the Sun in 2025. It's the probe's 20th approach to the sun, according to the article, with the probe using Venus "to create a sort of gravity-powered slingshot," according to the article. (NASA has created a nice interactive 3D model of the probe...) Besides collecting particle samples in 2021, "The probe is eventually going to get nice and close to the swirling mass of ultra-hot plasma surrounding the Sun, and take a wealth of different measurements to help improve our scientific understanding of it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld:Rust has leaped to its highest position ever in the monthly Tiobe index of language popularity, scaling to the 13th spot this month, with placement in the top 10 anticipated in an upcoming edition. Previously, Rust has never gone higher than 17th place in the Tiobe Programming Index. Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen attributed Rust's ascent in the just-released July index to a February 2024 U.S. White House report recommending Rust over C/C+ for safety reasons. He also credited the growing community and ecosystem support for the language. "Rust is finally moving up." The article adds that these rankings are based on "the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses, and third-party vendors pertaining to languages, examining websites such as Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, and more than 20 others to determine the monthly numbers." Python C++ C Java C# JavaScript Go Visual Basic Fortran SQLInterestingly, Rust has just moved into the top ten on the rival rankings from the rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index (which according to the article "assesses how often languages are searched on in Google.") Python Java JavaScript C# C/C++ R PHP TypeScript Swift RustRead more of this story at Slashdot.

"A leading South Korean producer of electric vehicle batteries has declared itself in crisis," reports the Financial Times, "as its customers struggle with disappointing EV sales in Europe and the US."SK On, the world's fourth-largest EV battery maker behind Chinese giants CATL and BYD and South Korean rival LG Energy Solution, has recorded losses for 10 consecutive quarters since being spun off by its parent company in 2021. Its net debt has increased more than fivefold, from Won2.9tn ($2.1bn) to Won15.6tn over the same period, as western EV sales have fallen far short of its expectations. With losses snowballing, chief executive Lee Seok-hee announced a series of cost-cutting and working practice measures last Monday, describing them as a state of "emergency management". "We have our back against the wall," Lee wrote in a letter to employees. "We should all pull together." [...] Tim Bush, a Seoul-based battery analyst at UBS, said the South Korean battery makers had been "badly let down" by US car manufacturers, which he said had failed to produce EVs sufficiently attractive to mass market consumers to meet their own bullish sales projections. He noted that until as recently as last year, General Motors was forecasting it would sell 1 million EVs in 2025. It sold just 21,930 in the second quarter of this year. Bush tells the Financial Times that "the automakers didn't invest enough in producing high-quality affordable EVs." But he also tells the newspaper that a transition to EVs is still "inevitable". "As long as the wider SK Group continues to see SK On as a trophy asset and gives it the support it needs to weather the present storm, then its long-term future is likely to be assured." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"In the largest public sector trial of the four-day week in Britain, fewer refuse collectors quit," reports the Guardian, "and there were faster planning decisions, more rapid benefits processing and quicker call answering, independent research has found."South Cambridgeshire district council's controversial experiment with a shorter working week resulted in improvements in performance in 11 out of 24 areas, little or no change in 11 areas and worsening of performance in two areas, according to analysis of productivity before and during the 15-month trial by academics at the universities of Cambridge and Salford... The multi-year study of the trial involving about 450 desk staff plus refuse collectors found: - Staff turnover fell by 39%, helping save 371,500 in a year, mostly on agency staff costs.- Regular household planning applications were decided about a week and a half earlier.- Approximately 15% more major planning application decisions were completed within the correct timescale, compared with before.- The time taken to process changes to housing benefit and council tax benefit claims fell....Under the South Cambridgeshire trial, which began in January 2023 and ran to April 2024, staff were expected to carry out 100% of their work in 80% of the time for 100% of the pay. The full trial cut staff turnover by 39% and scores for employees' physical and mental health, motivation and commitment all improved, the study showed. "Coupled with the hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayer money that we have saved, improved recruitment and retention and positives around health and wellbeing, this brave and pioneering trial has clearly been a success," said John Williams, the lead council member for resources... Scores of private companies have already adopted the approach, with many finding it helps staff retention. Ryle said the South Cambridgeshire results "prove once and for all that a four-day week with no loss of pay absolutely can succeed in a local government setting". Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ewhac (Slashdot reader #5,844) writes: Friday the hardware review site Gamers Nexus filed a YouTube video report alleging some serious claims: that PC component manufacturer MSI left their internal warranty and RMA processing web site accessible to the open Internet, with no authentication. Virtually the entire history of MSI warranty claims going back to at least 2017 were searchable and accessible for the browsing, including customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, and serial numbers of MSI devices. This event follows closely on the heels of a video report just a few days earlier alleging PC component manufacturer Zotac left their warranty/RMA and B2B records server open to indexing by Google. Gamers Nexus posted their reports after informing Zotac and MSI of their open servers and verifying they were no longer accessible. However, the data from MSI's server could have been fully scraped at this point, giving scammers a gold mine of data permitting them to impersonate MSI personnel and defraud customers. Anyone who's filed a warranty or RMA claim with MSI in the past seven years should exercise caution when receiving unsolicited emails or phone calls purporting to be from MSI.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Signal is finally tightening its desktop client's security," reports BleepingComputer - by changing the way it stores plain text encryption keys for the SQLite database where users' messages are stored:When BleepingComputer contacted Signal about the flaw in 2018, we never received a response. Instead, a Signal Support Manager responded to a user's concerns in the Signal forum, stating that the security of its database was never something it claimed to provide. "The database key was never intended to be a secret. At-rest encryption is not something that Signal Desktop is currently trying to provide or has ever claimed to provide," responded the Signal employee... [L]ast week, mobile security researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk of Mysk Inc warned on X not to use Signal Desktop because of the same security weakness we reported on in 2018... In April, an independent developer, Tom Plant, created a request to merge code that uses Electron's SafeStorage API "...to opportunistically encrypt the key with platform APIs like DPAPI on Windows and Keychain on macOS," Plant explained in the merge request... When used, encryption keys are generated and stored using an operating system's cryptography system and secure key stores. For example, on Macs, the encryption key would be stored in the Keychain, and on Linux, it would use the windows manager's secret store, such as kwallet, kwallet5, kwallet6, and gnome-libsecret... While the solution would provide additional security for all Signal desktop users, the request lay dormant until last week's X drama. Two days ago, a Signal developer finally replied that they implemented support for Electron's safeStorage, which would be available soon in an upcoming Beta version. While the new safeStorage implementation is tested, Signal also included a fallback mechanism that allows the program to decrypt the database using the legacy database decryption key... Signal says that the legacy key will be removed once the new feature is tested. "To be fair to Signal, encrypting local databases without a user-supplied password is a problem for all applications..." the article acknowledges. "However, as a company that prides itself on its security and privacy, it was strange that the organization dismissed the issue and did not attempt to provide a solution..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

clovis (Slashdot reader #4,684) writes: Joe Engle received his astronaut wings in a ceremony on July 15, 1965, for his flight in the hypersonic aircraft, reaching an altitude of 50 miles above the Earth. At 32, he was the youngest man to become an astronaut. Later, he entered the Apollo program and eventually commanded the STS-2 flight of the Space Shuttle. Here is an interview from 2004. I thought it was interesting that they used the F-104 as the chase plane and for training because the flight characteristics were so similar, which says a lot about the F-104. Anyway, the X-15 project was a big deal for us science/geek types back when I was a kid. I wonder if it's something today's generation is even aware of.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader joshuark shared this report from BetaNews:Check Point Research has identified a critical zero-day spoofing attack exploiting Microsoft Internet Explorer on modern Windows 10/11 systems, despite the browser's retirement. Identified as CVE-2024-38112, this vulnerability allows attackers to execute remote code by tricking users into opening malicious Internet Shortcut (.url) files. This attack method has been active for over a year and could potentially impact millions... Attackers use a sophisticated trick to mask the malicious .hta extension, making use of the outdated security of Internet Explorer to compromise systems running updated Windows operating systems. From Check Point Research:Even though IE has been proclaimed "retired and out-of-support," technically speaking, IE is still part of the Windows OS and is "not inherently unsafe, as IE is still serviced for security vulnerabilities, and there should be no known exploitable security vulnerabilities," according to our communications with Microsoft.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechSpot writes:Users of the Linksys Velop Pro 6E and 7 mesh routers should change their passwords and Wi-Fi network names through an external web browser. The two models transmit critical information to outside servers in an insecure manner upon initial installation. New patches have emerged since the issue was discovered, but Linksys hasn't publicly responded to the matter, and it is unclear if the latest firmware leaves sensitive data exposed to interception. The issue was discovered by Testaankoop, the Belgian equivalent of the Consumers' Association. And they warned Linksys back in November, according to the tech news site Stack Diary. (The practice could leave passwords and other information vulnerable to Man-in-the-Middle attacks.)Testaankoop suspects the security issue might stem from third-party software used in the Linksys firmware. However, they emphasize that this does not excuse the vulnerability. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MuckRock is a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) non-profit collaborative news site to "request, analyze and share government documents," according to its web site. And long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared their report about a lecture by Admiral Grace Hopper:In a vault at the National Security Agency lies a historical treasure: two AMPEX 1-inch open reel tapes containing a landmark lecture by Admiral Grace Hopper, a giant in the field of computer science. Titled 'Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People,' this lecture, recorded on August 19, 1982, at the NSA's Fort Meade headquarters, and stored in the video archives of the National Cryptographic School, offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a pioneer who shaped the very fabric of technology. Yet this invaluable artifact remains inaccessible, trapped in an obsolete format that the NSA will not release, stating that the agency is unable to play it back. "NSA is not required to find or obtain new technology (outdated or current) in order to process a request," states the official response from the agency. But MuckRock adds that on June 25, "responding to a follow-up request, the NSA at least provided an image of the tape labels," leading MuckRock to complain that the NSA "is well-positioned to locate, borrow and use a working VTR machine to access Admiral Hopper's lectures... The NSA, with its history of navigating complex technological landscapes and decrypting matters of national significance, does not typically shy away from a challenge."The challenge of accessing these recordings is not just technical, but touches on broader issues around preserving technological heritage.... It is our shared obligation to safeguard such pivotal elements of our nationa(TM)s history, ensuring they remain within reach of future generations. While the stewardship of these recordings may extend beyond the NSAa(TM)s typical purview, they are undeniably a part of Americaa(TM)s national heritage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Kirschey writes: The U.S. Customs and Border Protection determined that the redesigned Apple Watch models do not violate AliveCor's electrocardiogram patents, allowing them to be imported. This decision comes before a consolidated hearing at the Federal Circuit Court regarding the same patents. From the decision:We find that Apple Inc. ("Apple") has met its burden to show that certain redesigned wearable devices ("articles at issue") do not infringe one or more of claims 12, 13, and 19-23 of U.S. Patent No. 10,638,941 ("the '941 Patent") and claims 1, 3, 5, 8-10, 12, 15, and 16 of U.S. Patent No. 10,595,731 ("the '731 Patent). Thus, CBP's position is that the articles at issue are not subject to the limited exclusion order that the U.S. International Trade Commission ("Commission" or "ITC") issued in Investigation No. 337-TA-1266 ("the underlying investigation" or "the 1266 investigation"), pursuant to Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended, 19 U.S.C. 1337 ("Section 337").Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A report from TechSpot:For home videographers and data hoarders who still rely on optical discs for archiving, some bad news just dropped: Sony is winding down production of recordable Blu-ray media... In an interview Sony gave to AV Watch recently, the company admitted it's going to "gradually end development and production" of recordable Blu-rays and other optical disc formats at its Tagajo City plants in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Essentially, 25GB BD-REs, 50GB BD-RE DLs, 100GB BD-RE XLs, or 128GB BD-R XLs will soon not be available to consumers. Professional discs for video production and optical archives for data storage are also being discontinued. Sony says it's pulling the plug because the cold storage market never really took off like they hoped, and the overall storage media business has been operating in the red for years... It's not all bad news, though. The commercial Blu-ray discs you buy movies and games on will still be produced, so there's no need to panic about the death of physical media just yet. Share your thoughts and reactions in the comments. (Long-time Slashdot reader storkus wonders if it's possible there are still other companies, possibly Chinese, that are still making the disks?)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Intel's problems with unstable 13th-gen and 14th-gen high-end CPUs appear to run deeper than we thought," writes TechRadar, "and a new YouTube video diving into these gremlins will do little to calm any fears that buyers of Raptor Lake Core i9 processors (and its subsequent refresh) have." Level1Techs is the YouTuber in question, who has explored several avenues in an effort to make more sense of the crashing issues with these Intel processors that are affecting some PC gamers and making their lives a misery - more so in some cases than others. Data taken from game developer crash logs - from two different games - clearly indicates a high prevalence of crashes with the mentioned more recent Intel Core i9 chips (13900K and 14900K). In fact, for one particular type of error (decompression, a commonly performed operation in games), there was a total of 1,584 that occurred in the databases Level1Techs sifted through, and an alarming 1,431 of those happened with a 13900K or 14900K. Yes - that's 90% of those decompression errors hitting just two specific CPUs. As for other processors, the third most prevalent was an old Intel Core i7 9750H (Coffee Lake laptop CPU) - which had a grand total of 11 instances. All AMD processors in total had just 4 occurrences of decompression errors in these game databases. "In case you were thinking that AMD chips might be really underrepresented here, hence that very low figure, well, they're not - 30% of the CPUs in the database were from Team Red..." "The YouTuber also brings up another point here: namely that data centers are noticing these issues with Core i9s." More details at Digital Trends... And long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool wrote a summary of the video's claims here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from DefenseScoop: A group of NATO countries are set to begin implementing a new project aimed at improving the alliance's ability to quickly share intelligence gathered by space-based assets operated by both member nations and the commercial sector. Seventeen NATO members signed a memorandum of understanding for the Alliance Persistence Surveillance from Space (APSS) program as part of the annual NATO summit being held in Washington this week, the alliance announced Tuesday. Members will now move into a five-year implementation phase of the project, during which allies will contribute more than $1 billion "to leverage commercial and national space assets, and to expand advanced exploitation capacities," according to a press release. The United States is one of the nations signed onto the initiative, as well as Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden and Turkey, according to a NATO source. The transatlantic organization created APSS last year with the intent to establish a "virtual constellation" -- dubbed Aquila -- comprising both national and commercial space systems, sensors and data that can be used by NATO's command structure and other allies. The project is considered "the largest multinational investment in space-based capabilities" in the alliance's history, and is set to increase NATO's ability "to monitor activities on the ground and at sea with unprecedented accuracy and timeliness," a press release stated. Participating nations will be able to use their own space systems, provide tools for intelligence collection and analysis, or purchase space-based data gathered by commercial constellations. "Integrating and exploiting data from space effectively has been a growing challenge over time," a NATO press release stated. "By leveraging latest technologies from industry, APSS will help advance NATO's innovation agenda and offer a new platform to engage with the growing space industry." The APSS project is part of the larger implementation of NATO's overarching space policy adopted in 2019, which officially recognized space as a new operational domain. Since then, the alliance has worked to bolster its presence in space -- including the establishment of a NATO Space Centre in 2020 and approval of an official Space Branch within the Allied Command Transformation in June.Read more of this story at Slashdot.