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A climate newsletter from the Los Angeles Times asked the question: Is it ethical to have children in the face of climate change? And they start by noting many people ask that question:A Pew Research Survey published in July found that among U.S. adults aged 18 to 49 who don't plan on having kids, more than a quarter - 26% - cited "concerns about the environment, including climate change," as a major factor. Of the people over 50 who did not have kids, 6% cited the same reason, pointing to a generational divide that may be fueled by growing awareness of the issue, as well as increasing exposure to worsening climate hazards... I worry about the well-being of these kids: What kind of world will they live in? Will there be clean air and water? Will it be too hot or smoky to play outside? (To be blunt, the outlook on these matters doesn't look great under most emissions scenarios.) But the other side of the coin involves the well-being of the planet. Is it wrong to add more people at a moment when resources are so strained - when, say, the Colorado River is shrinking to record lows and the global average temperature is soaring to record highs? Each new child, after all, will bring not only a cute little footprint but a carbon footprint as well... [T]he fact is that climate change is also affecting reproduction. Hotter temperatures and air pollution, for instance, have been linked to increased stillbirths, preterm births, lower birth weight and increased risk of hospitalization for newborns and infants, among other negative outcomes. Pregnant people are also especially vulnerable to climate hazards, which can trigger hypertension and other health issues and contribute to reduced fertility rates. The newsletter makes many other points, but ultimately concludes that "children, after all, are one of the clearest symbols of how we, as a society, feel about the future." And it includes this quote from the book The Quickening, in which author Elizabeth Rush visits the melting Thwaites Glacier in Antarctic. "I can celebrate the idea that to have a child means having faith that the world will change, and more importantly, committing to being a part of the change yourself."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The online news site San Francisco Standard profiles an open-source platform "that takes advantage of large language models to help users generate health insurance appeals with AI... "A Fight Health Insurance user can scan their insurance denial, and the system will craft several appeal letters to choose from and modify."With the slogan "Make your health insurance company cry too," [San Francisco tech worker Holden Karau's site] makes filing appeals faster and easier. A recent study found that Affordable Care Act patients appeal only about 0.1% of rejected claims, and she hopes her platform will encourage more people to fight back... The "dirty secret" of the insurance industry is that most denials can be successfully appealed, according to Dr. Harley Schultz, a patient advocate in the Bay Area. "Very few people know about the process, and even fewer take advantage of it, because it's rather cumbersome, arcane, and confusing, by design," he said. "But if you fight hard enough and long enough, most denials get overturned...." While some doctors have turned to artificial intelligence themselves to fight claims, Karau's service puts the power in the hands of patients, who likely have more time and motivation to dedicate to their claims. "In an ideal world, we would have a different system, but we don't live in an ideal world, so what I'm shooting for here is incremental progress and making the world suck a little less," she said. Karau estimates she's spent about $10,000 building the platform, according to the article, which adds that "it's free for users, though she might eventually charge for added services like faxing appeals." Thanks to Slashdot reader mirro_dude for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Though the ocean covers about 70% of earth, we humans have only mapped a quarter of its floor to a high resolution, reports CNN.Many of the world's highest mountains aren't visible on land - they rise up thousands of meters from the seafloor. An expedition to the Nazca Ridge, 900 miles off the coast of Chile, has mapped and explored a newly discovered seamount four times taller than the world's tallest building. What's more, the underwater mountain's peaks, crags and ridges are home to coral gardens that host rare deep-dwelling octopuses, squids and creatures known as flying spaghetti monsters, some of which hadn't been well documented before this research. The undersea mountain is 1.9 miles (3,109 meters) tall, according to another article, which notes that the researchers also used a sonar system to bounce waves to the ocean floor, timing how long they took to reach the surface:The researchers documented a ghostly white Casper octopus, marking the first time this deep-dwelling cephalopod has been seen in the southern Pacific. They also spotted two rare Bathyphysa siphonophores, sometimes known as flying spaghetti monsters for their stringlike appearance. "The (Casper) octopus has never been captured, so it doesn't actually have a scientific name yet," Virmani said. The team also recorded the first footage of a live Promachoteuthis squid, known only from a few collected specimens.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post writes that Telegram's "anything-goes approach" to its 950 million users "has also made it one of the internet's largest havens for child predators, experts say...." "Durov's critics say his public idealism masks an opportunistic business model that allows Telegram to profit from the worst the internet has to offer, including child sexual abuse material, or CSAM... "[Telegram is] an app of choice for political organizing, including by dissidents under repressive regimes. But it is equally appealing for terrorist groups, criminal organizations and sexual predators, who use it as a hub to share and consume nonconsensual pornography, AI "deepfake" nudes, and illegal sexual images and videos of exploited minors, said Alex Stamos, chief information security officer at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne. "Due to their advertised policy of not cooperating with law enforcement, and the fact that they are known not to scan for CSAM, Telegram has attracted large groups of pedophiles trading and selling child abuse materials," Stamos said. That reach comes even though many Telegram exchanges don't actually use the strong forms of encryption available on true private messaging apps, he added. Telegram is used for private messaging, public posts and group chats. Only one-to-one conversations can be encrypted in a way that even Telegram can't access them. And that occurs only if users choose the option, meaning the company could turn over everything else to governments if it wanted to... French prosecutors argue that Durov is in fact responsible for Telegram's emergence as a global haven for illegal content, including CSAM, because of his reluctance to moderate it and his refusal to help authorities police it, among other allegations... David Kaye, a professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law and former U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of expression... said that while Telegram has at times banned groups and taken down [CSAM] content in response to law enforcement, its refusal to share data with investigators sets it apart from most other major tech companies. Unlike U.S.-based platforms, Telegram is not required by U.S. law to report instances of CSAM to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. Many online platforms based overseas do so anyway - but not Telegram. "NCMEC has tried to get them to report, but they have no interest and are known for not wanting to work with [law enforcement agencies] or anyone in this space," a NCMEC spokesperson said. The Post also writes that Telegram "has repeatedly been revealed to serve as a tool to store, distribute and share child sexual imagery." (They cite several examples, including two different men convicted to minimum sentences of at least 10 years for using the service to purchase CSAM and solicit explicit photos from minors.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember when a door-sized panel blew off a Boeing aircraft back in January? The Seattle Times reports that the "door plug" incident "was caused by two distinct manufacturing errors by different crews" in a Boeing assembly plant in Renton, Washington last fall. (And that Boeing's quality control system "failed to catch the faulty work.") But the details tell a larger story. The newspaper bases their conclusion on "transcripts of federal investigators' interviews of a dozen Boeing workers, synchronized with an internal Boeing document obtained by The Seattle Times," tracing the whole history of that panel's production. Within a day of its fuselage arriving at the factory, "a small defect was discovered: Five rivets installed by Spirit on the door frame next to the door plug were damaged."That day, the Friday before the Labor Day weekend, repair of those rivets was handed to Spirit, which has contract mechanics on-site in Renton to do any rework on its fuselage. In the meantime, inspectors gave mechanics the OK to install insulation blankets, which covered the door plug. By the following Thursday, a Spirit mechanic had logged an entry in the official Federal Aviation Administration-required record of this aircraft's assembly - the Common Manufacturing Execution System or CMES, pronounced "sea-mass" by the mechanics - that the rivet repair was complete: "removed and replaced rivets." But that day, a Boeing inspector responded with a scathing rebuttal, stating that the rivets had not been replaced but just painted over. "Not acceptable," read the work order. On Sept. 10, records show Spirit was ordered a second time to remove and replace the rivets... ["Shipside Action Tracker"] entries show that after several days, the still-unfinished work order was elevated to higher-level Boeing managers. On Sept. 15, Boeing cabin interiors manager Phally Meas, who needed the work finished so he could get his crew to install cabin walls and seats, texted on-site Spirit manager Tran Nguyen to ask why the rivet work hadn't been done, NTSB interview transcripts show. Spirit mechanics couldn't get to the rivets unless the plug door was opened, Nguyen responded. He sent Meas a photo from his phone showing it was closed, according to the transcripts. It wasn't Spirit's job to open the sealed door plug. Boeing's door team would have to do that, the records show. "He kept asking me how come there wasn't work yet," Nguyen told the NTSB. "The door was not open. That's why there wasn't work yet." By Sept. 17, the door was still closed, the rivets still unrepaired. The job was elevated again, to the next level of managers. On that day, according to the SAT record, senior managers worked with Ken McElhaney, the door crew manager in Renton, "to determine if the door can just merely be opened or if it needs removal...." [On September 18] at 6:48 a.m., a Boeing mechanic identified as a Door Master Lead texted a young Trainee mechanic on his team to come to the Alaska jet and open the door. The NTSB interviewed but did not name the Trainee or the Door Master Lead, who had almost 16 years at Boeing. Filling in for the veteran mechanic on vacation, the Trainee was perhaps the least equipped to do this atypical job. He'd been at Boeing for about 17 months, his only previous jobs being at KFC and Taco Bell. "He's just a young kid," the Door Master Lead said... More key quotes from the article: Boeing put both employees on paid administrative leave."A company investigator accused one of them of lying. That employee told the NTSB that Boeing has set the pair up as scapegoats.""A 35-year veteran on the door team told NTSB investigators that he is 'the only one that can work on all the doors' and he was typically the only mechanic who would work on door plugs. That mechanic was on vacation on the two critical days, September 18 and 19 last year, when the door plug on the Alaska MAX 9 had to be opened and closed...""No quality inspection of the door plug was conducted, since no record of its opening and closing was ever entered in the system, documents show."The FBI is investigating Boeing "for potential criminal negligence," according to the article, "and has issued subpoenas using a Seattle grand jury."Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal reports that long Covid "has pushed around one million Americans out of the labor force, economists estimate."More than 5% of adults in the U.S. have long Covid, and it is most prevalent among Americans in their prime working years. About 3.6 million people reported significantly modifying their activities because of the illness in a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Long Covid is a chronic condition with symptoms lasting at least three months after a Covid infection, according to the CDC. Symptoms include fatigue, changes in memory, shortness of breath and trouble concentrating. Long Covid can make tasks as simple as responding to an email arduous, people with the condition say. They struggle to summon the right word or manage stress. Among its many symptoms is post-exertional malaise, which can worsen after even minor physical or mental activity. "People can't go back to work or have to significantly cut down on the amount of work that they can handle," said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunobiology professor at Yale School of Medicine. Researchers don't know how long symptoms can last. Few people with long Covid have fully recovered within two years. Patients say their doctors have tried everything from antihistamines to blood thinners to physical therapy to acupuncture. Some people might live with the condition for the rest of their lives, said Dr. Paul Volberding, a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco... Some people with long Covid, which the federal government has classified as a disability, have stayed in their jobs. Human-resource managers have made accommodations including remote work, flexible hours or modified responsibilities, said Rue Dooley of the Society for Human Resource Management. "It's not going away," he said. "It's going to be one of another 100 conditions that we have to grapple with." People were more likely to develop long Covid at the start of the pandemic, according to a study published in July in the New England Journal of Medicine. The proliferation of vaccines and changes to the virus have made people infected with Covid less likely to develop long Covid.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CSO Online reports that North Korea "is actively infiltrating Western companies using skilled IT workers who use fake identities to pose as remote workers with foreign companies, typically but not exclusively in the U.S." Slashdot reader snydeq shares their report, which urges information security officers "to carry out tighter vetting of new hires to ward off potential 'moles' - who are increasingly finding their way onto company payrolls and into their IT systems."The schemes are part of illicit revenue generation efforts by the North Korean regime, which faces financial sanctions over its nuclear weapons program, as well as a component of the country's cyberespionage activities. The U.S. Treasury department first warned about the tactic in 2022. Thosands of highly skilled IT workers are taking advantage of the demand for software developers to obtain freelance contracts from clients around the world, including in North America, Europe, and East Asia. "Although DPRK [North Korean] IT workers normally engage in IT work distinct from malicious cyber activity, they have used the privileged access gained as contractors to enable the DPRK's malicious cyber intrusions," the Treasury department warned... North Korean IT workers present themselves as South Korean, Chinese, Japanese, or Eastern European, and as U.S.-based teleworkers. In some cases, DPRK IT workers further obfuscate their identities by creating arrangements with third-party subcontractors. Christina Chapman, a resident of Arizona, faces fraud charges over an elaborate scheme that allegedly allowed North Korean IT workers to pose as U.S. citizens and residents using stolen identities to obtain jobs at more than 300 U.S. companies. U.S. payment platforms and online job site accounts were abused to secure jobs at more than 300 companies, including a major TV network, a car manufacturer, a Silicon Valley technology firm, and an aerospace company... According to a U.S. Department of Justice indictment, unsealed in May 2024, Chapman ran a "laptop farm," hosting the overseas IT workers' computers inside her home so it appeared that the computers were located in the U.S. The 49-year-old received and forged payroll checks, and she laundered direct debit payments for salaries through bank accounts under her control. Many of the overseas workers in her cell were from North Korea, according to prosecutors. An estimated $6.8 million were paid for the work, much of which was falsely reported to tax authorities under the name of 60 real U.S. citizens whose identities were either stolen or borrowed... Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko, 27, of Kyiv, was separately charged over a years-long scheme to create fake accounts at U.S. IT job search platforms and with U.S.-based money service transmitters. "Didenko sold the accounts to overseas IT workers, some of whom he believed were North Korean, and the overseas IT workers used the false identities to apply for jobs with unsuspecting companies," according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Didenko, who was arrested in Poland in May, faces U.S. extradition proceedings... How this type of malfeasance plays out from the perspective of a targeted firm was revealed by security awareness vendor KnowBe4's candid admission in July that it unknowingly hired a North Korean IT spy... A growing and substantial body of evidence suggests KnowBe4 is but one of many organizations targeted by illicit North Korean IT workers. Last November security vendor Palo Alto reported that North Korean threat actors are actively seeking employment with organizations based in the U.S. and other parts of the world... Mandiant, the Google-owned threat intel firm, reported last year that "thousands of highly skilled IT workers from North Korea" are hunting work. More recently, CrowdStrike reported that a North Korean group it dubbed "Famous Chollima" infiltrated more than 100 companies with imposter IT pros. The article notes the infiltrators use chatbots to tailor the perfect resume "and further leverage AI-created deepfakes to pose as real people." And the article includes this quote from a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force turned cybersecurity strategist at Sysdig. "In some cases, they may try to get jobs at tech companies in order to steal their intellectual property before using it to create their own knock-off technologies." The article closes with its suggested "countermeasures," including live video-chats with prospective remote-work applicants - and confirming an applicant's home address.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After game developer Nolen Royalty launched his short-lived viral site "One Million Checkboxes" in June. (Any visitor could check or uncheck a box in the grid - which would change how it displayed for every other visitor to the site, in near real-time.) "Within days there were half a million people on the site," he says in a new video, "and people checked over 650 million boxes in the two weeks that I kept the site online." But he also explains how what happened next was even more amazing:He'd stored the state of his one million checkboxes in a million-bit database - 125 kilobytes - and got a surprise after rewriting the backend in Go. Looking at the raw bytes (converted into their value in the 256-character ASCII table)... they spelled out a URL. Had someone hacked into his database? No, the answer was even stranger. Somebody was writing me a message in binary." "Someone was sitting there, checking and unchecking boxes to form numbers that formed letters that spelled out this URL. And they were probably doing this with a bot, to make sure those boxes remained checked and unchecked in exactly the way that they wanted them to." The URL led to a Discord channel, where he found himself talking to the orchestrators of the elaborate prank. And it was then that they asked him: "Have you seen your checkboxes as a 1,000 x 1,000 image yet?" It turns out they'd also input two alternate versions of the same message - one in base64, and one drawn out as a fully-functional QR code. (And some drawings....) "The Discord was full of very sharp teens, and they were writing this message in secret - with tens of thousands of people on the web site - to gather other very sharp teens. And it totally worked. There were 15 people when I joined, over 60 people in the Discord by the time that i left. "I tried to make it hard for them to draw, but... no problem. They found a way. And they started drawing some very cool things. They put a Windows blue-screen-of-death on the site. They put sexy Jake Gyllenhaal gifs on the site. At the end I removed all my rate limits for an hour as a treat, and they did a real-time [animated] Rickroll across the entire site." The video ends with the webmaster explaining why he thought their project was so cool. "As I kid, I spent a lot of time doing dum stuff on the computer, and I didn't get into too much trouble when I, for example, repeatedly crashed my high school mail server. There is no way that I would be doing what I do now without the encouragement of people back then. So providing a playground like this, getting to see what they were doing, provide some encouragement and say, 'Hey this is amazing' - was so special for me. "The people in that Discord are so extraordinarily talented, so creative, so cool, I cannot wait to see what they go on to make." Link via Kottke.orgRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Several items were stolen from a woman's P.O. box. So she mailed herself a package containing an Apple AirTag, according to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's office:Her mail was again stolen on Monday morning, including the package with the AirTag that she was able to track. It is important to note that the victim did not attempt to contact the suspects on her own... The Sheriff's Office would like to commend the victim for her proactive solution, while highlighting that she also exercised appropriate caution by contacting law enforcement to safely and successfully apprehend the suspects. CNN reports on what the authorities found:The suspected thieves were located in nearby Santa Maria, California, with the victim's mail - including the package containing the AirTag - and other items authorities believe were stolen from more than a dozen victims, according to the sheriff's office. Virginia Franchessca Lara, 27, and Donald Ashton Terry, 37, were arrested in connection with the crime, authorities said. Lara was booked on felonies including possession of checks with intent to commit fraud, fictitious checks, identity theft, credit card theft and conspiracy, and remains held on a $50,000 bail as of Thursday, jail records show. Terry faces felony charges including burglary, possession of checks with intent to commit fraud, credit card theft, identity theft and conspiracy and was held on a $460,000 bail, according to jail records... Authorities said they're working on contacting other victims of theft in this case. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Google Play Store is now rolling out support for downloading up to three Android app updates simultaneously, addressing a long-standing limitation where apps could only be downloaded one at a time. 9to5Google reports: We're seeing simultaneous app update downloads working in the Google Play Store today across multiple devices, and a few of our readers are seeing the same behavior this week as well. It's unclear if this is a server-side change on Google's part or an update to the Play Store itself, but the functionality is much appreciated. As far as we can tell, you can download up to three app updates at once through the Play Store. The apps will start to download, with only anything beyond three showing the "Pending" status that we're all so used to seeing in the Play Store. This matches the App Store on iOS which can also download up to three apps at once. The same limit of three also now applies to new app installs, which was previously limited to two at a time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have finally detected and measured the ambipolar field, a weak electric field surrounding Earth that was first theorized over 60 years ago. "Any planet with an atmosphere should have an ambipolar field," says astronomer Glyn Collinson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "Now that we've finally measured it, we can begin learning how it's shaped our planet as well as others over time." ScienceAlert reports: Here's how the ambipolar field was expected to work. Starting at an altitude of around 250 kilometers (155 miles), in a layer of the atmosphere called the ionosphere, extreme ultraviolet and solar radiation ionizes atmospheric atoms, breaking off negatively charged electrons and turning the atom into a positively charged ion. The lighter electrons will try to fly off into space, while the heavier ions will try to sink towards the ground. But the plasma environment will try to maintain charge neutrality, which results in the emergence of an electric field between the electrons and the ions to tether them together. This is called the ambipolar field because it works in both directions, with the ions supplying a downward pull and the electrons an upward one. The result is that the atmosphere is puffed up; the increased altitude allows some ions to escape into space, which is what we see in the polar wind. This ambipolar field would be incredibly weak, which is why Collinson and his team designed instrumentation to detect it. The Endurance mission, carrying this experiment, was launched in May 2022, reaching an altitude of 768.03 kilometers (477.23 miles) before falling back to Earth with its precious, hard-won data. And it succeeded. It measured a change in electric potential of just 0.55 volts -- but that was all that was needed. "A half a volt is almost nothing -- it's only about as strong as a watch battery," Collinson says. "But that's just the right amount to explain the polar wind." That amount of charge is enough to tug on hydrogen ions with 10.6 times the strength of gravity, launching them into space at the supersonic speeds measured over Earth's poles. Oxygen ions, which are heavier than hydrogen ions, are also lofted higher, increasing the density of the ionosphere at high altitudes by 271 percent, compared to what its density would be without the ambipolar field. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The Biden administration has finalized a plan to expand solar on 31 million acres of federal lands in 11 western states. The proposed updated Western Solar Plan is a roadmap for Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) governance of solar energy proposals and projects on public lands. It bumps up the acreage from the 22 million acres it recommended in January, and this plan adds five additional states -- Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming -- to the six states -- Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah -- analyzed in the original plan. It would make the public lands available for potential solar development, putting solar farms closer to transmission lines or on previously disturbed lands and avoiding protected lands, sensitive cultural resources, and important wildlife habitats. [...] BLM surpassed its goal of permitting more than 25 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy projects on public lands earlier in 2024. It's permitted 29 GW of projects on public lands -- enough to power over 12 million homes. The Biden administration set the goal to achieve 100% clean electricity on the US grid by 2035.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechCrunch's Sarah Perez reports: Apple is standing by its decision to terminate the Apple Developer Account of Appstun, a mobile app company created by one of Apple's own Worldwide Developer Conference 2021 student winners. According to an announcement published on Appstun's website, Apple moved to terminate the developer's account after multiple rejections of its app that Apple says violates its App Store guidelines. Apple's decision to shut down the developer's account was recently highlighted on X by Apple critic and 37signals co-owner and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson, where he celebrated how much better web developers had it, noting they could run their businesses without the involvement of big tech gatekeepers. "No fear on [sic] capricious rejections that might suddenly kill the business overnight," he remarked. Appstun co-founder Batuhan Karababa says that he and the other co-founder had been trying to work with Apple over the App Store rejections. (Karababa tells us that he's only the formal founder on paper.) "We responded transparently and collaborated with Apple to ensure our app doesn't violate any guidelines. However, as the process continued, we began to face rejection for the issue that we thought we had already resolved in previous submissions. Apple didn't find our solution good enough," according to the announcement on Appstun's website. The company went back and forth with App Review, receiving multiple rejections over an app for designing Apple Watch faces. In addition to a more standard watch face, Appstun also came up with a workaround that would allow it to offer more highly customizable watch faces. But these weren't actually watch faces in the traditional sense, but rather custom images and animations that run independently of the App Watch face system. Essentially, the app would take over the screen showing an image that was similar to a watch face, allowing Appstun to offer more customization. Of course, running a custom animation in this way could drain the Apple Watch battery faster. Apple was also concerned that customers wouldn't understand that they weren't running a normal watch face, and that Appstun deceived them by suggesting that's what it was offering. Though Appstun added notifications to its app that these were not real watch faces, in an attempt to placate App Review, Apple instead decided to terminate the company's developer account after repeated back-and-forth. The company pleaded on its website for any help in getting its developer account restored. According to Apple, there's more to this story, and it thinks it made the correct decision. The iPhone maker said Appstun's app repeatedly tried to mislead users into thinking that it offered features and functionality that it didn't support and also marketed the app with deceptive ads, leading to negative app ratings and reviews. [...] Apple pointed to its guideline 5.6 -- a developer code of conduct -- that warns developers that "repeated manipulative or misleading behavior or other fraudulent conduct will lead to your removal from the Apple Developer Program."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Denise Prudhomme, a 60-year-old Wells Fargo employee, was found dead at her desk four days after clocking in. Apparently, nobody noticed her body because of the secluded location of her cubicle and the fact that many employees were working remotely. VICE reports: Prudhomme last scanned into her office job in Tempe, Arizona, at 7 AM on Friday, and her body was reportedly discovered at 4:55 PM on Tuesday, August 20. Her coworkers did pick up that something weird was going on. They detected a weird smell but assumed it was some kind of plumbing issue. Prudhomme's cubicle was on the third floor of the building, tucked away from any main thoroughfares that employees would use to travel between departments. On top of that, most employees at the Tempe Wells Fargo location worked remotely, significantly cutting down the chance of someone finding her body. Tempe police and the Maricopa County Medical Examiner didn't detect any signs of foul play, but the woman's official cause of death remains to be seen. Wells Fargo has said that they're going to look into their internal procedures to make sure employees receive some kind of check-in to make sure they're not, you know, dead.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Dan Goodin: A judge in Ohio has issued a temporary restraining order against a security researcher who presented evidence that a recent ransomware attack on the city of Columbus scooped up reams of sensitive personal information, contradicting claims made by city officials. The order, issued by a judge in Ohio's Franklin County, came after the city of Columbus fell victim to a ransomware attack on July 18 that siphoned 6.5 terabytes of the city's data. A ransomware group known as Rhysida took credit for the attack and offered to auction off the data with a starting bid of about $1.7 million in bitcoin. On August 8, after the auction failed to find a bidder, Rhysida released what it said was about 45 percent of the stolen data on the group's dark web site, which is accessible to anyone with a TOR browser. Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther said on August 13 that a "breakthrough" in the city's forensic investigation of the breach found that the sensitive files Rhysida obtained were either encrypted or corrupted, making them "unusable" to the thieves. Ginther went on to say the data's lack of integrity was likely the reason the ransomware group had been unable to auction off the data. Shortly after Ginther made his remarks, security researcher David Leroy Ross contacted local news outlets and presented evidence that showed the data Rhysida published was fully intact and contained highly sensitive information regarding city employees and residents. Ross, who uses the alias Connor Goodwolf, presented screenshots and other data that showed the files Rhysida had posted included names from domestic violence cases and Social Security numbers for police officers and crime victims. Some of the data spanned years. On Thursday, the city of Columbus sued Ross (PDF) for alleged damages for criminal acts, invasion of privacy, negligence, and civil conversion. The lawsuit claimed that downloading documents from a dark web site run by ransomware attackers amounted to him "interacting" with them and required special expertise and tools. The suit went on to challenge Ross alerting reporters to the information, which ii claimed would not be easily obtained by others. "Only individuals willing to navigate and interact with the criminal element on the dark web, who also have the computer expertise and tools necessary to download data from the dark web, would be able to do so," city attorneys wrote. "The dark web-posted data is not readily available for public consumption. Defendant is making it so." The same day, a Franklin County judge granted the city's motion for a temporary restraining order (PDF) against Ross. It bars the researcher "from accessing, and/or downloading, and/or disseminating" any city files that were posted to the dark web. The motion was made and granted "ex parte," meaning in secret before Ross was informed of it or had an opportunity to present his case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader mmell writes: Regular Slashdot users will certainly be aware of the saga unfolding between the country of Brazil and X. Reuters has already reported that what I have to relay here will come as no surprise to Elon Musk, but reporting on CNN confirms that Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes has ordered X to suspend operations in Brazil until X names a representative to appear on X's behalf in Brazilian Courts. Is this the end of X or some brilliant Machiavellian ploy on the part of Elon Musk? Only time and the informed and spirited debate of the users here at /. can be sure. Here's a recap of the saga, as told by X's Grok-2 chatbot: The Beginning: Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice with a reputation for tackling misinformation, especially around elections, found himself at odds with Elon Musk, the space-faring, electric-car magnate turned social media mogul. The conflict kicked off when Moraes ordered X to block certain accounts in Brazil, part of his broader crackdown on what he deemed as misinformation. The Escalation: Musk, never one to shy away from a fight, especially when it involves what he perceives as free speech issues, declared on X that he would not comply with Moraes' orders. This defiance wasn't just a tweet; it was a digital declaration of war. Musk accused Moraes of overstepping his bounds, betraying the constitution, and even likened him to Darth Vader in a less than flattering comparison. Moraes, not amused, opened an investigation into Musk for obstruction of justice, accusing him of inciting disobedience and disrespecting Brazil's sovereignty. The stakes were raised with fines of around $20,000 per day for each reactivated account, and threats of arresting X employees in Brazil. The Drama Unfolds: The internet, as it does, had a field day. Posts on X ranged from Musk supporters calling Moraes a dictator to others backing Moraes, arguing he was defending democracy against foreign billionaires. The conflict became a global spectacle, with Musk's posts drawing international attention, comparing the situation to a battle for free speech versus censorship. Musk, in true Musk fashion, didn't just stop at defiance. He shared all of Moraes' demands publicly, suggesting users use VPNs, and even hinted at closing X's operations in Brazil, which eventually happened, citing the need to protect staff safety. The Latest Chapter: Recently, X announced the closure of its operations in Brazil, a move seen as the culmination of this legal and ideological battle. Musk framed it as a stand against what he saw as an assault on free speech, while critics viewed it as an overreaction or a strategic retreat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Pidgin messaging app removed the ScreenShareOTR plugin from its third-party plugin list after it was found to be used to install keyloggers, information stealers, and malware targeting corporate networks. BleepingComputer reports: The plugin was promoted as a screen-sharing tool for secure Off-The-Record (OTR) protocol and was available for both Windows and Linux versions of Pidgin. According to ESET, the malicious plugin was configured to infect unsuspecting users with DarkGate malware, a powerful malware threat actors use to breach networks since QBot's dismantling by the authorities. [...] Those who installed it are recommended to remove it immediately and perform a full system scan with an antivirus tool, as DarkGate may be lurking on their system. After publishing our story, Pidgin's maintainer and lead developer, Gary Kramlich, notified us on Mastodon to say that they do not keep track of how many times a plugin is installed. To prevent similar incidents from happening in the future, Pidgin announced that, from now on, it will only accept third-party plugins that have an OSI Approved Open Source License, allowing scrutiny into their code and internal functionality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Amazon releases its revamped AI Alexa update in October, it'll be powered by Anthropic's Claude AI models due to performance issues with its in-house AI. Reuters reports: Amazon plans to charge $5 to $10 a month for its new "Remarkable" version of Alexa as it will use powerful generative AI to answer complex queries, while still offering the "Classic" voice assistant for free, Reuters reported in June. But initial versions of the new Alexa using in-house software simply struggled for words, sometimes taking six or seven seconds to acknowledge a prompt and reply, one of the people said. That's why Amazon turned to Claude, an AI chatbot developed by startup Anthropic, as it performed better than the online retail giant's own AI models, the people said. "Amazon uses many different technologies to power Alexa," a company spokeswoman said in a statement in response to detailed Reuters questions for this story. "When it comes to machine learning models, we start with those built by Amazon, but we have used, and will continue to use, a variety of different models - including (Amazon AI model) Titan and future Amazon models, as well as those from partners - to build the best experience for customers," the spokeswoman said. Amazon has typically eschewed relying on technology it hasn't developed in-house so it can ensure it has full control of the user experience, data collection and direct relationships with customers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Thousands of Tennesseans were illegally denied Medicaid and other benefits due to programming and data errors in an algorithmic system the state uses to determine eligibility for low-income residents and people with disabilities, a U.S. District Court judge ruled this week. The TennCare Connect system -- built by Deloitte and other contractors for more than $400 million -- is supposed to analyze income and health information to automatically determine eligibility for benefits program applicants. But in practice, the system often doesn't load the appropriate data, assigns beneficiaries to the wrong households, and makes incorrect eligibility determinations, according to the decision (PDF) from Middle District of Tennessee Judge Waverly Crenshaw Jr. "When an enrollee is entitled to state-administered Medicaid, it should not require luck, perseverance, and zealous lawyering for him or her to receive that healthcare coverage," Crenshaw wrote in his opinion. The decision was a result of a class action lawsuit filed in 2020 on behalf of 35 adults and children who were denied benefits. [...] ]Crenshaw found that TennCare Connect did not consider whether applicants were eligible for all available programs before it terminated their coverage. Deloitte was a major beneficiary of the nationwide modernization effort, winning contracts to build automated eligibility systems in more than 20 states, including Tennessee and Texas. Advocacy groups have asked (PDF) the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Deloitte's practices in Texas, where they say thousands of residents are similarly being inappropriately denied life-saving benefits by the company's faulty systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel is working with investment bankers to help navigate the most difficult period in its 56-year history, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The company is discussing various scenarios, including a split of its product-design and manufacturing businesses, as well as which factory projects might potentially be scrapped, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, Intel's longtime bankers, have been providing advice on the possibilities, which could also include potential M&A, the people said. The discussions have only grown more urgent since the Santa Clara, California-based company delivered a grim earnings report this month, which sent the shares plunging to their lowest level since 2013.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter meisdug writes: A new feature has been submitted for inclusion in Linux 6.12, allowing the display of a QR code when a kernel panic occurs using the DRM Panic handler. This QR code can capture detailed error information that is often missed in traditional text-based panic messages, making it more user-friendly. The feature, written in Rust, is optional and can be enabled via a specific build switch. This implementation follows similar ideas from other operating systems and earlier discussions in the Linux community.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's been a burning question for months -- are Intel's laptop chips susceptible to the same permanent damage that can potentially lay 24 different flagship desktop chips low? Today, Intel has finally confirmed: its 13th and 14th Gen laptop chips do not seem to have an instability issue. And the company claims they are definitely not affected by the too-high voltage issue, which it's now calling "Vmin Shift Instability." While Intel maintains that Vmin Shift Instability is not necessarily the root cause or only cause of the crashes -- it's still investigating -- Intel spokesperson Thomas Hannaford now tells The Verge that laptop chips basically aren't affected at all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pakistani businesses say internet disruptions this month have harmed their businesses [non-paywalled link] and unsettled investors at a time when the country is counting on the information technology sector to help break a cycle of economic crises and bailouts. From a report: The warnings from executives, investors and a leading IT organisation come as internet watchdogs have reported a marked slowdown in connection speeds and service interruptions to applications such as WhatsApp, the Meta-owned messaging platform that is widely used in the country. Nadeem Elahi, managing director for TRG, a venture capital firm that operates Pakistan's biggest outsourcing services provider, said internet connectivity was "by far the worst it has been in the last 12 months." "If we want to be a global business processing operation destination, then 100 per cent reliable connectivity is essential for customers," he said, estimating that the quality of connection had degraded by 30 to 40 per cent. Technology is one of Pakistan's few standout sectors, and Islamabad is relying on software developers and IT freelancers to help lift the country out of a chronic foreign exchange rut that has sent it to the IMF for support two dozen times. IT exports rose 24 per cent to $3.2bn, an all-time high, in the 12 months to the end of June, according to the State Bank of Pakistan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For decades drugmakers have taken a more-is-more model when dosing cancer drugs in clinical trials. U.S. regulators want them to reconsider that approach. From a report: Companies with cancer drugs in clinical trials must strike a balance between doses high enough to thwart tumors, but low enough to avoid intolerable side effects. For years, Food and Drug Administration officials have expressed concern that cancer drug doses are often too high, leading to unnecessary side effects. An FDA program launched in 2021, Project Optimus, requires companies to re-examine how they set doses of cancer treatments. This typically involves larger clinical trials to test doses to find those that optimally balance safety and efficacy. Entrepreneurs support the aim, but some fear the initiative will add time and cost to drug development, putting startups at a further disadvantage to larger competitors. [...] The FDA says it encourages drugmakers to discuss dosing plans with the agency and that new medications can still be brought to patients quickly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When French prosecutors charged Pavel Durov, the chief executive of the messaging app Telegram, with a litany of criminal offenses on Wednesday, one accusation stood out to Silicon Valley companies. Telegram, French authorities said in a statement, had provided cryptology services aimed at ensuring confidentiality without a license. In other words, the topic of encryption was being thrust into the spotlight. The cryptology charge raised eyebrows at U.S. tech companies including Signal, Apple and Meta's WhatsApp, according to three people with knowledge of the companies. These companies provide end-to-end encrypted messaging services and often stand together when governments challenge their use of the technology, which keeps online conversations between users private and secure from outsiders. But while Telegram is also often described as an encrypted messaging app, it tackles encryption differently than WhatsApp, Signal and others. So if Mr. Durov's indictment turned Telegram into a public exemplar of the technology, some Silicon Valley companies believe that could damage the credibility of encrypted messaging apps writ large, according to the people, putting them in a tricky position of whether to rally around their rival. Encryption has been a long-running point of friction between governments and tech companies around the world. For years, tech companies have argued that encrypted messaging is crucial to maintain people's digital privacy, while law enforcement and governments have said that the technology enables illicit behaviors by hiding illegal activity. The debate has grown more heated as encrypted messaging apps have become mainstream. Signal has grown by tens of millions of users since its founding in 2018. Apple's iMessage is installed on the hundreds of millions of iPhones that the company sells each year. WhatsApp is used by more than two billion people globally.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new AI model being developed by Google could make diagnosing tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments as easy as recording a voice note. From a report: Google is training one of its foundational AI models to listen for signs of disease using sound signals, like coughing, sneezing, and sniffling. This tech, which would work using people's smartphone microphones, could revolutionize diagnoses for communities where advanced diagnostic tools are difficult to come by. The tech giant is collaborating with Indian respiratory health care AI startup, Salcit Technologies. The tech, which was introduced earlier this year as Health Acoustic Representations, or HeAR, is what's known as a bioacoustic foundation model. HeAR was then trained on 300 million pieces of audio data, including 100 million cough sounds, to learn to pick out patterns in the sounds.Salcit is then using this AI model, in combination with its own product Swaasa, which uses AI to analyze cough sounds and assess lung health, to help research and improve early detection of TB based solely on cough sounds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. Space Command chief Gen. Stephen Whiting called for greater transparency from China regarding space debris this week, citing concerns over the recent breakup of a Long March 6A rocket's upper stage. The incident, which occurred after an August 6 satellite launch, scattered over 300 pieces of debris in low-Earth orbit. While acknowledging some improvement in U.S.-China military dialogue, Whiting stressed on the need for proactive communication about space junk, ArsTechnica reports. "I hope the next time there's a rocket like that, that leaves a lot of debris, that it's not our sensors that are the first to detect that, but we're getting communications to help us understand that," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. Space Command chief Gen. Stephen Whiting called for greater transparency from China regarding space debris this week, citing concerns over the recent breakup of a Long March 6A rocket's upper stage. The incident, which occurred after an August 6 satellite launch, scattered over 300 pieces of debris in low-Earth orbit. While acknowledging some improvement in U.S.-China military dialogue, Whiting stressed on the need for proactive communication about space junk, ArsTechnica reports. "I hope the next time there's a rocket like that, that leaves a lot of debris, that it's not our sensors that are the first to detect that, but we're getting communications to help us understand that," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mukesh Ambani, Asia's richest man and the chairman of Reliance Industries, said this week that his telecom firm will offer users 100 GB of free cloud storage. Oil-to-retail giant Reliance, which is India's most valuable firm by market cap, has upended the telecom market in India by offering free voice calls and dirt-cheap internet access. Jio, Reliance's telecom subsidiary, serves 490 million subscribers, more than any rival in India. Jio offers access to at least 2GB of data per day for 14 days to subscribers for a total of $2.3. TechCrunch adds: Reliance plans to offer Jio users up to 100 GB of free cloud storage through its Jio AI Cloud service, set to launch around Diwali in October, Ambani said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AnandTech, a pioneering technology news website, is shutting down after 27 years on August 30, 2024. Founded in 1997 by Anand Lal Shimpi, the site earned a reputation for its in-depth hardware reviews and technical analysis. In a final post on the site, AnandTech Editor-in-Chief Ryan Smith cited changing market dynamics for written tech journalism as the primary reason for closure. The site's 21,500 articles will remain accessible indefinitely, hosted by publisher Future PLC. AnandTech's forums will continue operating under Future's management.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Facebook owner Meta struck a deal to buy geothermal power from Sage Geosystems to supply its U.S. data centers, it said on Monday, as it races to build out the infrastructure to support its massive investments in energy-hungry artificial intelligence. The first phase of the 150-megawatt project should be operational by 2027 and "significantly" expand the use of geothermal power in the United States, the social media company said. The location has yet to be determined, but the companies said it will be east of the Rocky Mountains. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. [...] Sage, which is based in Houston, is a four-year-old startup developing next-generation technology that it says can be deployed in more locations than traditional geothermal, which requires naturally occurring underground reservoirs of hot water and accounts for 0.4% of U.S. power generation. The company is backed by oil and gas firms Chesapeake Energy and Nabors Industries and venture capital firms Virya and Helium-3 Ventures. The project for Meta would be Sage's largest to date by far. The company said it first validated the technology in the field just two years ago. A Meta spokesperson told Reuters the company expected the Sage Geosystems energy to feed the power grid, rather than directly supplying any specific data center.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lego plans to make half of its bricks from renewable or recycled materials by 2026, with a goal of fully transitioning by 2032. While the company cites higher production costs and challenges with existing materials, it says it's committed to not passing these costs onto consumers. The Guardian reports: The Danish company last year ditched efforts to make bricks entirely from recycled bottles because of cost and production issues. At the moment, 22% of the material in its colourful bricks is not made from fossil fuels. The toymaker hopes gradually to bring down the amount of oil-based plastic it uses by paying up to 70% more for certified renewable resin, the raw plastic used to manufacture the bricks, in an attempt to encourage manufacturers to increase production. [...] Lego has also expanded its brick takeback programme, Replay -- where consumers can donate old bricks to the company through free shipping -- into the UK and continued to test similar models in the US and Europe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Astronomy researchers are urging the FCC to reconsider exempting large constellations of low Earth satellites from environmental reviews due to growing concerns over pollution, safety risks, and the impact on stargazing. They argue that the decades-old exemption is outdated, given the massive increase in satellite launches and potential long-term effects on the ozone, climate, and environment. The Register reports: Astronomers from Princeton University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Arizona, among others, have added their names to a public letter that will be presented at some point to FCC space bureau chief Julie Kearney. The letter asks the FCC to follow prior recommendations from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which in 2022 issued a report calling for the telecom regulator to revisit its decision to exempt large constellations of satellites from environmental review. The exemption was created way back in 1986, when far fewer satellites were being launched. The GAO, however, urged the FCC to review the exemption, citing the recent proliferation of satellites and the questions that have been raised about the sustainability of the exemption. That recommendation was recently echoed by US PIRG, which earlier this month made a similar request to the FCC. US PIRG notes that the number of satellites in low Earth orbit has increased by a factor of 127 over the past five years, driven largely by the deployment of mega-constellations of communications satellites from SpaceX's Starlink subsidiary.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recent indictment (PDF) of an Alaska man stands out due to the sophisticated use of multiple encrypted communication tools, privacy-focused apps, and dark web technology. "I've never seen anyone who, when arrested, had three Samsung Galaxy phones filled with 'tens of thousands of videos and images' depicting CSAM, all of it hidden behind a secrecy-focused, password-protected app called 'Calculator Photo Vault,'" writes Ars Technica's Nate Anderson. "Nor have I seen anyone arrested for CSAM having used all of the following: [Potato Chat, Enigma, nandbox, Telegram, TOR, Mega NZ, and web-based generative AI tools/chatbots]." An anonymous reader shares the report: According to the government, Seth Herrera not only used all of these tools to store and download CSAM, but he also created his own -- and in two disturbing varieties. First, he allegedly recorded nude minor children himself and later "zoomed in on and enhanced those images using AI-powered technology." Secondly, he took this imagery he had created and then "turned to AI chatbots to ensure these minor victims would be depicted as if they had engaged in the type of sexual contact he wanted to see." In other words, he created fake AI CSAM -- but using imagery of real kids. The material was allegedly stored behind password protection on his phone(s) but also on Mega and on Telegram, where Herrera is said to have "created his own public Telegram group to store his CSAM." He also joined "multiple CSAM-related Enigma groups" and frequented dark websites with taglines like "The Only Child Porn Site you need!" Despite all the precautions, Herrera's home was searched and his phones were seized by Homeland Security Investigations; he was eventually arrested on August 23. In a court filing that day, a government attorney noted that Herrera "was arrested this morning with another smartphone -- the same make and model as one of his previously seized devices." The government is cagey about how, exactly, this criminal activity was unearthed, noting only that Herrera "tried to access a link containing apparent CSAM." Presumably, this "apparent" CSAM was a government honeypot file or web-based redirect that logged the IP address and any other relevant information of anyone who clicked on it. In the end, given that fatal click, none of the "I'll hide it behind an encrypted app that looks like a calculator!" technical sophistication accomplished much. Forensic reviews of Herrera's three phones now form the primary basis for the charges against him, and Herrera himself allegedly "admitted to seeing CSAM online for the past year and a half" in an interview with the feds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI said that ChatGPT now has more than 200 million weekly active users -- twice as many as last year. Axios reports: OpenAI also said that 92% of Fortune 500 companies are using its products and that usage of its automated API has doubled since the release of GPT-4o mini in July. "People are using our tools now as a part of their daily lives, making a real difference in areas like healthcare and education -- whether it's helping with routine tasks, solving hard problems, or unlocking creativity," CEO Sam Altman said in a statement to Axios. Further reading: Apple Is in Talks To Invest in OpenAI, WSJ SaysRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Most of the attention today has been focused on California's controversial "kill switch" AI safety bill, which passed the California State Assembly by a 45-11 vote. However, California legislators passed another tech bill this week which requires internet browsers and mobile operating systems to offer a simple tool for consumers to easily opt out of data sharing and selling for targeted advertising. Slashdot reader awwshit shares a report from The Record: The state's Senate passed the landmark legislation after the General Assembly approved it late Wednesday. The Senate then added amendments to the bill which now goes back to the Assembly for final sign off before it is sent to the governor's desk, a process Matt Schwartz, a policy analyst at Consumer Reports, called a "formality." California, long a bellwether for privacy regulation, now sets an example for other states which could offer the same protections and in doing so dramatically disrupt the online advertising ecosystem, according to Schwartz. "If folks use it, [the new tool] could severely impact businesses that make their revenue from monetizing consumers' data," Schwartz said in an interview with Recorded Future News. "You could go from relatively small numbers of individuals taking advantage of this right now to potentially millions and that's going to have a big impact." As it stands, many Californians don't know they have the right to opt out because the option is invisible on their browsers, a fact which Schwartz said has "artificially suppressed" the existing regulation's intended effects. "It shouldn't be that hard to send the universal opt out signal," Schwartz added. "This will require [browsers and mobile operating systems] to make that setting easy to use and find."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to The Information (paywalled), Meta plans to ship an extremely light mixed reality headset in 2027, codenamed Puffin. It follows a report that the company canceled a high-end headset planned for the same year, which previous reports speculated as being a Quest Pro 2. UploadVR reports: Puffin reportedly resembles "a bulky pair of glasses" and weighs less than 110 grams, yet is an opaque VR-style headset with pancake lenses and passthrough cameras. Its remarkably light weight is apparently being achieved by offloading both the battery and computing hardware to an external tethered puck, which Meta "hopes" will be small enough to fit in the user's pocket. If the report is accurate, Puffin will be significantly lighter than any other shipping fully functional VR headset to date. For comparison, Meta Quest 3 weighs around 400 grams without its straps and facial interface and around 515 grams with them. Of this weight, the battery is around 70 grams. The report describes Puffin as not including controllers, instead using the gaze-and-pinch input scheme introduced by Apple Vision Pro.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotify claims Apple may be again in violation of European regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which requires interoperability from big technology companies dubbed "gatekeepers." From a report: This time, the issue isn't about in-app purchases, links or pricing information, but rather how Apple has discontinued the technology that allows Spotify users to control the volume on their connected devices. When streaming to connected devices via Spotify Connect on iOS, users were previously able to use the physical buttons on the side of their iPhone to adjust the volume. As a result of the change, this will no longer work. To work around the issue, Spotify iOS users will instead be directed to use the volume slider in the Spotify Connect menu in the app to control the volume on connected devices. The company notes that this issue doesn't affect users controlling the volume on iOS Bluetooth or AirPlay sessions, nor users on Android. It only applies to those listening via Spotify Connect on iOS. As a result, Spotify iOS users globally will be directed to use the new in-app volume slider beginning on September 3.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Every day for the last four years, dozens of people have shown up in the comments of one particular YouTube, declaring their love and appreciation for the content. The content: two minutes and six seconds of deep, low buzzing, the kind that makes your phone vibrate on the table, underscoring a vaguely trippy animation of swirled stained glass. It's not a good video. But it's not meant to be. The video is called "Sound To Remove Water From Phone Speaker ( GUARANTEED )." [...] If you believe the comments, about half the video's 45 million views come from people who bring their phone into the shower or bathtub and trust that they can play this video and everything will be fine. The theory goes like this: all a speaker is really doing is pushing air around, and if you can get it to push enough air, with enough force, you might be able to push droplets of liquid out from where they came. "The lowest tone that that speaker can reproduce, at the loudest level that it can play," says Eric Freeman, a senior director of research at Bose. "That will create the most air motion, which will push on the water that's trapped inside the phone." Generally, the bigger the speaker, the louder and lower it can go. Phone speakers tend to be tiny. "So those YouTube videos," Freeman says, "it's not, like, really deep bass. But it's in the low range of where a phone is able to make sound." The best real-world example of how this can work is probably the Apple Watch, which has a dedicated feature for ejecting water after you've gotten it wet. When I first reached out to iFixit to ask about my water-expulsion mystery, Carsten Frauenheim, a repairability engineer at the company, said the Watch works on the same theory as the videos. "It's just a specific oscillating tone that pushes the water out of the speaker grilles," he said. "Not sure how effective the third-party versions are for phones since they're probably not ideally tuned? We could test."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from overkill.wtf: The team behind popular emulation tool EmuDeck is today announcing something rather special: they've spent the first half of 2024 working on their very first hardware product, called the EmuDeck Machine, and it's due to arrive before the year is out. This EmuDeck Machine is an upcoming, crowdfunded, retro emulation mini PC running Bazzite, a Linux-based system similar to SteamOS. [...] This new EmuDeck Machine comes in two variants, the EM1 running an Intel N97 APU, and the EM2 -- based on an AMD Ryzen 8600G. While both machines are meant as emulation-first devices, the AMD-based variant can easily function as a console-like PC. This is also thanks to some custom work done by the team: "We've optimized the system for maximum power. The default configuration of an 8600G gets you 32 FPS in Cyberpunk; we've managed to reach 47 FPS with a completely stable system, or 60FPS if you use FSR." Both machines will ship with a Gamesir Nova Lite controller and EmuDeck preinstalled naturally. The team has also preinstalled all available Decky plugins. But that's not all: if the campaign is successful, the EmuDeck team will also work on a docking station for the EM2 that will upgrade the graphics to an AMD Radeon 7600 desktop GPU. With this, in games like Cyberpunk 2077, you'll be able to reach 160 FPS in 1080p as per EmuDeck's measurements. You can preorder the EmuDeck Machines via Indigogo, starting at $322 and shipping in December.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists are harvesting genetic data from microorganisms in a North Yorkshire quarry, fueling a global debate over ownership and profit-sharing of natural genetic resources. Researchers from London-based startup Basecamp Research are collecting samples and digitizing genetic codes for sale to AI companies. This practice of trading digital sequencing information (DSI) has become central to biotechnology research and development. The issue will be a focal point at October's COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, The Guardian reports. Developing nations, home to much of the world's biodiversity, are pushing for a global system requiring companies to pay for genetic data use. Past discoveries underscore the potential value: heat-resistant bacteria crucial for COVID-19 testing and marine organisms used in cancer treatments have generated significant profits. Critics accuse companies of "biopiracy" for commercializing genetic information without compensating source countries. Proposed solutions include a global fund for equitable benefit-sharing, though implementation details remain contentious.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has laid off about 100 employees in its services group (source may be paywalled; alternative source), primarily affecting roles associated with the Apple Books app and Apple Bookstore. The San Francisco Chronicle reports: The impacted employees at the Cupertino-based tech giant were informed of the cuts on Tuesday, Bloomberg reported (paywalled). The layoffs spanned various teams under Senior Vice President Eddy Cue. The job cuts include roles primarily associated with the Apple Books app and Apple Bookstore, with the company shifting its focus to other divisions. Additionally, other services teams, such as the one managing Apple News, also experienced layoffs. While Apple has largely avoided mass layoffs even as other major tech companies have downsized, it did lay off 614 employees in Santa Clara earlier this year. Those cuts marked Apple's first significant job reductions since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and coincided with the cancellation of its decade-long electric car project.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Midjourney, the AI image-generating platform, announced on Wednesday that it's "officially getting into hardware." TechCrunch reports: As for what hardware Midjourney, which has a team of fewer than 100 people, might pursue, there might be a clue in its hiring of Ahmad Abbas in February. Abbas, an ex-Neuralink staffer, helped engineer the Apple Vision Pro, Apple's mixed reality headset. Midjourney CEO David Holz is also no stranger to hardware. He co-founded Leap Motion, which built motion-tracking peripherals. (Abbas worked together with Holz at Leap, in fact.) Despite the lawsuits over its AI training approach working their way through the courts, Midjourney has said it's continuing to develop AI models for video and 3D generation. The hardware could perhaps be related to those efforts, as well.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A controversial bill aimed at enforcing safety standards for large artificial intelligence models has now passed the California State Assembly by a 45-11 vote. Following a 32-1 state Senate vote in May, SB-1047 now faces just one more procedural state senate vote before heading to Governor Gavin Newsom's desk. As we've previously explored in depth, SB-1047 asks AI model creators to implement a "kill switch" that can be activated if that model starts introducing "novel threats to public safety and security," especially if it's acting "with limited human oversight, intervention, or supervision." Some have criticized the bill for focusing on outlandish risks from an imagined future AI rather than real, present-day harms of AI use cases like deep fakes or misinformation. [...] If the Senate confirms the Assembly version as expected, Newsom will have until September 30 to decide whether to sign the bill into law. If he vetoes it, the legislature could override with a two-thirds vote in each chamber (a strong possibility given the overwhelming votes in favor of the bill). At a UC Berkeley Symposium in May, Newsom said he worried that "if we over-regulate, if we overindulge, if we chase a shiny object, we could put ourselves in a perilous position." At the same time, Newsom said those over-regulation worries were balanced against concerns he was hearing from leaders in the AI industry. "When you have the inventors of this technology, the godmothers and fathers, saying, 'Help, you need to regulate us,' that's a very different environment," he said at the symposium. "When they're rushing to educate people, and they're basically saying, 'We don't know, really, what we've done, but you've got to do something about it,' that's an interesting environment." Supporters of the AI safety bill include state senator Scott Weiner and AI experts including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. Bengio supports the bill as a necessary step for consumer protection and insists that AI should not be self-regulated by corporations, akin to other industries like pharmaceuticals and aerospace. Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li opposes the bill, arguing that it could have harmful effects on the AI ecosystem by discouraging open-source collaboration and limiting academic research due to the liability placed on developers of modified models. A group of business leaders also sent an open letter Wednesday urging Newsom to veto the bill, calling it "fundamentally flawed."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study of broadband reliability finds a top-two finish that you might not expect from recent surveys of ISP customer satisfaction: Charter's Spectrum and Comcast's Xfinity, the two largest cable operators in the US. From a report: Opensignal's report, published Thursday, draws on software telemetry collected from April 1 through June 29 of downtime, consistency of service, and how well a provider meets basic thresholds for speed, latency, and other core performance metrics. Spectrum comes in first with a "Reliability Experience" score of 741 out of 1,000, followed by Xfinity with 710, Verizon with 625, AT&T with 546, and T-Mobile with 525. Opensignal chose those five companies to study because each passes more than a third of US homes. But while Comcast and Charter employ the same basic cable architecture except for a few fiber-to-the-home pockets, Verizon and AT&T have mixed networks. That includes extensive and growing fiber service but also fixed 4G and 5G wireless from Verizon and hybrid-fiber broadband from AT&T, both of which lack fiber's speed and capacity advantages, plus obsolete DSL connectivity. T-Mobile's home connectivity, meanwhile, is almost exclusively fixed wireless.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is in talks to invest in OpenAI, a move that would cement ties to a partner integral to its efforts to gain ground in the artificial-intelligence race. WSJ: The investment would be part of a new OpenAI fundraising round that would value the ChatGPT maker above $100 billion, people familiar with the situation said. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that venture-capital firm Thrive Capital is leading the round, which will total several billion dollars, and Apple rival Microsoft is also expected to participate. It couldn't be learned how much Apple or Microsoft will invest into OpenAI this round. To date, Microsoft has been the primary strategic investor into OpenAI. It owns a 49% share of the AI startup's profits after investing $13 billion since 2019. Apple in June announced OpenAI as the first official partner for Apple Intelligence, its system for infusing AI features throughout its operating system. The new AI will feature an improved Siri voice assistant, text proofreading and creating custom emojis.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new national survey reveals a concerning trend in school engagement among Gen Z students aged 12-18. The joint Gallup and Walton Family Foundation study [PDF] found that middle and high school students find classes less interesting than last year, with only half feeling positively challenged. Student engagement has dropped significantly since 2023, with 10% fewer respondents saying they learned something interesting at school in the past week. Non-college-bound students report feeling particularly disconnected, with only 41% saying schoolwork challenges them positively compared to 55% of college-bound peers. Despite only half of students planning to attend four-year colleges, schools heavily emphasize higher education. 68% of high schoolers report hearing "a lot" about college, while only 23% hear as much about vocational alternatives.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brussels is investigating whether Telegram breached EU digital rules by failing to provide accurate user numbers [non-paywalled source], as officials push to bring the controversial messaging app under stricter supervision. Financial Times: EU legal and data experts suspect that the app has understated its presence in the EU to stay under a 45mn user threshold, above which large online platforms are subject to a swath of Brussels regulations designed to check their influence. The EU probe comes alongside a wide-ranging French investigation into alleged criminal activity on Telegram that led to the arrest on Saturday of its founder, Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov. Telegram has said Durov, who is now a French-Emirati citizen, has "nothing to hide." Telegram said in February it had 41mn users in the EU. Under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), Telegram was supposed to provide an updated number this month but did not, only declaring it had "significantly fewer than 45mn average monthly active recipients in the EU."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Verizon has teamed up with another satellite operator to offer US customers a commercial direct-to-device messaging service for when a terrestrial cell network is not available, starting this fall. From a report: The telecoms giant says that US customers with compatible smartphones will have access to emergency messaging and location sharing, even when out of range of a cell tower, and from early next year it will offer the ability to text anywhere via a satellite connection, again with compatible devices. Verizon told The Register that there are no additional costs planned for this service, and any customer with a capable device can take advantage of it, irrespective of price plan. It will be available on the Pixel 9 family of devices out of the box, with the Galaxy S25 to follow, a Verizon spokesperson told us. "Next year we will add text anywhere functionality to the emergency text and location services available this year," they added. This sounds somewhat similar to the Emergency SOS feature introduced by Apple with the iPhone 14 two years ago, which also enabled users to contact emergency services via a satellite link. Verizon says its service will complement Apple's iOS 18 satellite features, so customers using different devices will also have the ability to text anywhere. As partner for this service, Verizon has picked Skylo, a company that styles itself as a pioneer in Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) communications for smartphones and other devices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S. appeals court has revived a lawsuit against TikTok over a child's death, potentially limiting tech companies' legal shield under Section 230. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law does not protect TikTok from claims that its algorithm recommended a deadly "blackout challenge" to a 10-year-old girl. Judge Patty Shwartz wrote that Section 230 only immunizes third-party content, not recommendations made by TikTok's own algorithm. The decision marks a departure from previous rulings, citing a recent Supreme Court opinion that platform algorithms reflect "editorial judgments." This interpretation could significantly impact how courts apply Section 230 to social media companies' content curation practices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.