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It's the 50th anniversary of Devo, the geek-friendly, dystopia-themed band that combined synthesizers with showmanship, first founded in 1973. As a new documentary about the group celebrates its Sundance world premiere, the Los Angeles Times explores how the band made innovative use of the technology of its time:With their yellow radiation suits, red "energy dome" hats and manic energy, part playful and part angry, the band Devo combined the futuristic glamour of new wave with atomic-age anxieties and post-'60s disillusionment.... Uniquely, the band developed a fully formed, intricate internal philosophy and mythology built around the idea that humans were "de-evolving" by becoming dumber and less sophisticated. The mascot of the band, known as "Booji Boy," was an infantile urchin in a rubber mask... Was there an idea to document the band right from the very start? It's incredible that there's footage of the very first show in 1973. GERALD CASALE: We were that delusional, yes. And we were trying to document ourselves when nobody was interested in doing that. And when it was quite expensive and clumsy to do it. You're dealing with Sony U-matic reel-to-reel recorders and big heavy cameras and a scarcity of equipment and very little interest. I mean, my God, if a Devo of now existed like we did, then clearly, there'd be a million cellphone videos. MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: [...] Bob was the first of us to direct a video, back when he was in high school. Bob and me, our dad, starting when we were like babies, like 1 year old, he'd bring out an 8-millimeter camera that didn't have sound, and so he shot hundreds and hundreds of these films through the years, just family stuff. So we always kind of liked that. And Jerry was doing films at Kent State with Chuck Statler before Chuck said, "Hey, let's do a film with a couple of the songs in it." So we were always audio-visual. We were always thinking in both worlds... [DOCUMENTARY DIRECTOR] CHRIS SMITH: One of my favorite details in looking through the old footage is, there's an early show that was recorded in black-and-white, and they have such limited materials to work with, yet they do this thing where the light goes on and off on both sides of the stage. And to me it was so emblematic of where they were going because they were making something that you hadn't seen before that was super creative and visually distinctive and interesting out of something we all had to work with... You could see in that footage, the inventiveness that wasn't a result of means - it was something that was just created out of what they had to work with at that time. MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: [...] Sonically, a lot of what we did was just related to the fact that Bob Mothersbaugh bought a four-track TEAC. So we had this machine that could record four little skinny channels on a quarter-inch tape. It was an amateur home-tape machine, but it made us think about our parts, because we thought, well, OK, you're only going to get to do the bass on one track, and the guitar on one track and the drums on one track and the synth. You're not going to do all these overdubs. We had to think about it, what was an essential part. So we'd work on the song till you could play it just in one pass. Everything essential. I think it really made the early stuff sound really strong because of that. You really get a sense of that on their 1978 song "Mongoloid." But the 2023 documentary's director doesn't see his film as an ending bookmark for the band. "They're still touring. They're all still actively creatively pursuing many different things, as I hope that you would expect after seeing the film." And speaking specifically about the documentary. Mark Mothersbaugh says Booji Boy "describes it as a halfway point to the year of 2073, where we'll celebrate the 100-year anniversary." Booji Boy also says the next 50 years will be more about action. "And it'll be about positive mutation. Mutate, don't stagnate."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Seattle Times reports:Concerns have grown in recent weeks about data privacy and the ongoing impacts of a recent Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center cyberattack that leaked personal information of about 1 million patients last November. Since the breach, which hit the South Lake Union cancer research center's clinical network and has led to a host of email threats from hackers and lawsuits against Fred Hutch, menacing messages from perpetrators have escalated. Some patients have started to receive "swatting" threats, in addition to spam emails warning people that unless they pay a fee, their names, Social Security and phone numbers, medical history, lab results and insurance history will be sold to data brokers and on black markets. Steve Bernd, a spokesperson for FBI Seattle, said last week there's been no indication of any criminal swatting events... Other patients have been inundated with spam emails since the breach... According to The New York Times, large data breaches like this are becoming more common. In the first 10 months of 2023, more than 88 million individuals had their medical data exposed, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, the number of reported ransomware incidents, when a specific malware blocks a victim's personal data until a ransom is paid, has decreased in recent years - from 516 in 2021 to 423 in 2023, according to Bernd of FBI Seattle. In Washington, the number dropped from 84 to 54 in the past three years, according to FBI data. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center believes their breach was perpetrated outside the U.S. by exploiting the "Citrix Bleed" vulnerability (which federal cybersecurity officials warn can allow the bypassing of passwords and mutifactor authentication measures). The article adds that in late November, the Department of Health and Human Services' Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center "urged hospitals and other organizations that used Citrix to take immediate action to patch network systems in order to protect against potentially significant ransomware threats."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Bell Labs, the historic headwaters of so many inventions that now define our digital age, is closing in Murray Hill," writes journalism professor Jeff Jarvis (in an op-ed for New Jersey's Star-Ledger newspaper). "The Labs should be preserved as a historic site and more."I propose that Bell Labs be opened to the public as a museum and school of the internet. The internet would not be possible without the technologies forged at Bell Labs: the transistor, the laser, information theory, Unix, communications satellites, fiber optics, advances in chip design, cellular phones, compression, microphones, talkies, the first digital art, and artificial intelligence - not to mention, of course, many advances in networks and the telephone, including the precursor to the device we all carry and communicate with today: the Picturephone, displayed as a futuristic fantasy at the 1964 World's Fair. There is no museum of the internet. Silicon Valley has its Computer History Museum. New York has museums for television and the moving image. Massachusetts boasts a charming Museum of Printing. Search Google for a museum of the internet and you'll find amusing digital artifacts, but nowhere to immerse oneself in and study this immensely impactful institution in society. Where better to house a museum devoted to the internet than New Jersey, home not only of Bell Labs but also at one time the headquarters of the communications empire, AT&T, our Ma Bell...? The old Bell Labs could be more than a museum, preserving and explaining the advances that led to the internet. It could be a school... Imagine if Bell Labs were a place where scholars and students in many disciplines - technologies, yes, but also anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, ethics, economics, community studies, design - could gather to teach and learn, discuss and research. The text of Jarvis's piece is behind subscription walls, but has apparently been re-published on X by innovation theorist John Nosta. In one of the most interesting passages, Jarvis remembers visiting Bell Labs in 1995. "The halls were haunted with genius: lab after lab with benches and blackboards and history within. We must not lose that history."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One man living in Virginia oversaw "the laundering of some $7 million in fraudulently obtained gift cards" from Walmart in an international operation which over five years scammed hundreds of victims into sending the numbers over the phone, reports a new ProPublica investigation. (Citing court evidence that emerged after his arrested in 2021).Earlier that year, he complained to an associate that more and more people were competing to resell cards in China, eating into his profits. So many scammers were flocking to Walmart that he and his team regularly encountered them at self-checkout counters.... "We ran into quite a few at the store, and we even started chatting." It was apparently so common that federal prosecutors started calling it "The Walmart scheme." And while the store is supposed to watch for customers who appear to be acting on a scammer's instructions, "Too often, Walmart has failed."America's largest retailer has long been a facilitator of fraud on a mass scale, a ProPublica investigation has found. For roughly a decade, Walmart has resisted tougher enforcement while breaking promises to regulators and skimping on employee training, according to more than 50 interviews, internal documents supplied by former industry executives, court filings and other public records...More than $1 billion in fraud losses were routed through the company's financial systems between 2013 and 2022, according to filings by the Federal Trade Commission and court cases analyzed by ProPublica. That has helped fuel a boom in financial chicanery. Americans, many of them elderly, were swindled out of $27 billion between 2013 and 2022, according to the FTC... Walmart has a financial incentive to avoid cracking down. It makes money each time a Walmart gift card is used and earns a fee when another brand of card is bought. And it receives one commission when a person sends a money transfer and a second when the recipient picks it up. The company's financial services business generates hundreds of millions in annual profits. (Its filings do not provide specific figures for gift cards and money transfers.) "They were concerned about the bucks. That's all," Nick Alicea, a former fraud team leader for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service who investigated Walmart for years, told ProPublica. Walmart's deficiencies have repeatedly attracted government scrutiny. In 2017, the attorneys general of New York and Pennsylvania investigated Walmart over concerns that it was "reaping the benefits" of gift card fraud. The investigation concluded a year later with Walmart promising to restrict or eliminate the use of its gift cards to purchase other gift cards... Instead, the company let the practice continue until 2022 - even after it knew that millions of dollars were being laundered through its stores. The FTC sued Walmart in 2022, alleging it "turned a blind eye" as criminals took advantage of its money transfer service. Walmart, the FTC claimed, pocketed millions in fees while "letting fraudsters fleece its customers." Summarizing the FTC's evidence, a federal judge in the case wrote that "Walmart knew that its services were used by fraudsters" and that the company was repeatedly warned about certain stores where "twenty-five, fifty, or even seventy-five percent of money transfer activity was fraudulent." Separately, a federal grand jury in Pennsylvania is hearing evidence of possible criminal conduct in Walmart's money transfer business, according to corporate filings that did not detail the allegations. While the FTC says Americans were swindled out of $27 billion between 2013 and 2022, Walmart responded to ProPublica's investigation by pointing out it's refunded $4 million to gift-card fraud victims, and also blocked more than $700 million in suspicious money transfers. "We have a robust anti-fraud program and other controls to help stop scammers and other criminals who may use the financial services we offer to harm our customers."The company's legal filings in the FTC case struck a different tone. Walmart is seeking to dismiss the suit, partly on the grounds that it has "no responsibility to protect against the criminal conduct of third parties." Though fraud is "deeply unfortunate," Walmart argues, such schemes are "reasonably avoidable by consumers." Other interesting quotes from the article:"Walmart outlets at one point accounted for the top 20 locations for fraud nationally among chains that partnered with MoneyGram, according to internal documents.""In a single week in March 2017, consumers claiming they'd been duped into a money transfer filed 610 complaints about Walmart, according to documents obtained by ProPublica. CVS ranked second, with 47.""Site inspections routinely found that Walmart staff lacked anti-fraud training and that employees failed to ask screening questions..."Walmart resisted MoneyGram's attempts to fight fraud [according to the former fraud team leader for the postal inspector's office in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who investigated MoneyGram and Walmart].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The pandemic may have proved to employeers that remote and flexible-work arrangements were viable - and changed the way we work forever. Axios writes:Just 6 out of 158 U.S. CEOs said they'll prioritize bringing workers back to the office full-time in 2024, according to a new survey released by the Conference Board. Executives are increasingly resigned to a world where employees don't come in every day, as hybrid work arrangements - mixing work from home and in-office - become the norm for knowledge workers. "Maintain hybrid work," was cited as a priority by 27% of the U.S. CEOs who responded to the survey, conducted in October and November. A separate survey of chief financial officers by Deloitte, conducted in November, found that 65% of CFOs expect their company to offer a hybrid arrangement this year. "Remote work appears likely to be the most persistent economic legacy of the pandemic," write Goldman Sachs economists in a recent note. About 20%-25% of workers in the U.S. work from home at least part of the week, according to data Goldman cites. That's below a peak of 47% during the pandemic but well above its prior average of around 3%. "The battle is over," said Diana Scott, human capital center leader at The Conference Board. "There are so many other issues CEOs are facing." Headlines about CEOs determined to get butts in seats get attention, but they are the exception, says Brian Elliott, the cofounder of Future Forum, a future of work think tank. "There are a lot more CEOs that are actually quietly becoming more flexible...." Though the labor market has softened, employers still do care about keeping employees satisfied - and they don't want to fight with them. "It's not worth the fight," says Elliott.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The pandemic may have proved to employeers that remote and flexible-work arrangements were viable - and changed the way we work forever. Axios writes:Just 6 out of 158 U.S. CEOs said they'll prioritize bringing workers back to the office full-time in 2024, according to a new survey released by the Conference Board. Executives are increasingly resigned to a world where employees don't come in every day, as hybrid work arrangements - mixing work from home and in-office - become the norm for knowledge workers. "Maintain hybrid work," was cited as a priority by 27% of the U.S. CEOs who responded to the survey, conducted in October and November. A separate survey of chief financial officers by Deloitte, conducted in November, found that 65% of CFOs expect their company to offer a hybrid arrangement this year. "Remote work appears likely to be the most persistent economic legacy of the pandemic," write Goldman Sachs economists in a recent note. About 20%-25% of workers in the U.S. work from home at least part of the week, according to data Goldman cites. That's below a peak of 47% during the pandemic but well above its prior average of around 3%. "The battle is over," said Diana Scott, human capital center leader at The Conference Board. "There are so many other issues CEOs are facing." Headlines about CEOs determined to get butts in seats get attention, but they are the exception, says Brian Elliott, the cofounder of Future Forum, a future of work think tank. "There are a lot more CEOs that are actually quietly becoming more flexible...." Though the labor market has softened, employers still do care about keeping employees satisfied - and they don't want to fight with them. "It's not worth the fight," says Elliott.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal reports:Moves by Broadcom to shore up its $69 billion VMware acquisition, completed in November, include a streamlining of product bundles and new billing models - efforts in line with the chip giant's past acquisitions, but not necessarily welcomed by all of VMware's customers... Broadcom has also recently laid off at least hundreds of VMware workers, disclosures from the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification show.... VMware has approximately 330,000 customers, according to the company. Chief information officers say they are closely monitoring what comes next. "Any CIO that's not taking stock of what they have and mentally considering alternatives and monitoring what else is out there is probably not doing their job," said Jay Ferro, executive vice president and chief information, technology and product officer at clinical research data-management company Clario. All these changes, plus past remarks by Broadcom that its go-to-market strategy is to focus completely on the needs and priorities of its top 600 customers, has left some CIOs rethinking the relationship. Price increases and degrading levels of support are among their biggest concerns. "I'm not one of their top, probably 600 customers, so they've been very clear to me where I fit in that pecking order," said Todd Florence, CIO of trucking company Estes Express Lines. Florence said he's started looking into alternatives. "It certainly doesn't make you feel good, like you're going to get lots of support going forward...." Goya Foods CIO Suvajit Basu said he is thinking about how to reduce the food company's reliance on VMware as the sole and longtime dominant provider of virtualization for the data center. "They're going to increase their prices or change their licensing so the customer pays more," he said. "And I think this is starting to hit us right now...." Forrester estimates that in 2024, 20% of VMware customers will begin the process of exiting VMware in favor of alternatives. On the other hand, a group VP at market researcher IDC tells the Journal that on the upside, now VMware and Broadcom will have to engage more actively with customers on the value of new produces included in their bundles...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader quonset writes: After decades of study and testing, a potential vaccine for cancer may be on the horizon. Dr. Thomas Wagner, founder of Orbis Health Solutions, is using the body's own immune system to fight the disease, with each shot personalized to the patient, according to ABC News. From the article:Typically, cancer cells evade a person's immune system because it is recognized as that person's cells. Wagner developed a tumor lysate particle only (TLPO) vaccine that uses a person's tumor cells to identify particular parts that are then presented back in the body using the vaccine in a way that can stimulate their immune system to gain the ability to detect these cancer cells like an infection, allowing the immune system to fight the cancer itself. "People used to ask me the question, 'When will there be a cure for cancer?' And I've been doing this for 60 years and I could never answer that question," Wagner said. "Until recently, until the last three or four or five years." Wagner believes this type of cancer treatment could be a key to finding the long-awaited cure for cancer, all cancers, if paired with early detection. Wagner's TLPO cancer vaccine has been tested in hundreds of patients with advanced forms of melanoma in Phase 2 clinical trials. The most recent data presented at an academic conference showed nearly 95% of people given only the vaccine were still alive three years after starting treatment and 64% were still disease-free. Among the most advanced forms of melanoma, disease-free survival after three years for people with stage III disease was 60% in the vaccine-only group, compared to about 39% in the placebo group. Disease-free survival for those with stage IV disease was about 68% in the vaccine-only group, and zero in the placebo group. The most common side effects were redness or pain at the injection site, fever and fatigue after the injection - similar to other vaccines that stimulate an immune response. Based on this data and other studies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has greenlit Wagner's vaccine to start a Phase 3 clinical trial. It will be a three-year endeavor with a goal to enroll 500 people and is planned to launch sometime this year, Riley Polk, president of Orbis Health Solutions, told WLOS, an ABC News affiliate in Asheville, North Carolina. Polk's own father was told there were no treatment options left for his lung cancer, according to the article. That was more than 10 years ago, and "His father opted to try Wagner's cancer vaccine and lived 10 more years before dying from something unrelated to cancer." Polk gives ABC News this quote. "You can tell me a lot of things, but you can't tell me [the vaccine] doesn't work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Some of the most convenient fast-charging stations - mostly those located off major highways - have become gridlocked, especially on busy weekends," complains the opinion editor for California's Tribune newspaper in San Luis, Obispo.Drivers are reporting waits of half an hour or more - sometimes much more. One driver who posted on Reddit waited three hours to charge in Kettleman City on Thanksgiving weekend, turning a five-and-a-half-hour trip into a 10-and-a-half-hour ordeal... Look, it's one thing to spend 30 or 40 minutes charging a battery, which is a given when you take an EV on a road trip. But having to wait in a long line just to get to an open charging bay? What's happening now is "potentially a nightmare for drivers as more EVs hit the road," described GreenBiz transportation writer Vartan Badalian [after a March visit to New York State]... Badalian, the transportation writer, has an idea on how to deal with gridlock. "As you approach a full charging location, your EV (of any make) connects to the charging location and enters itself into a virtual queue, with entry to the queue dependent upon close geographical proximity. Drivers then park in an available normal parking spot, and only when prompted, proceed to plug in and charge. If a driver attempted to charge before their turn, the chargers would simply not communicate with the vehicle..." If only that would work. Unfortunately, plug-in chargers have a tough enough time fulfilling their basic task of delivering electricity. Herea(TM)s how bad it is: A survey of non-Tesla chargers conducted in the Bay Area in 2022 found that 27% of chargers were not working. This would be a good time to point out that Tesla superchargers have a much better performance record than other types of chargers, and that Tesla is opening "select" supercharger stations to other types of vehicles. Also, efforts are being made to increase the reliability of public chargers; the U.S. Department of Transportation just awarded $149 million in grants for the repair and replacement of broken chargers. The biggest share, $64 million, is going to California. In other words, hope is on the horizon. For now, though, we seem to be relying on a haphazard honor system. How hard would it be to use some orange cones to designate a "waiting lane"? That way drivers pulling in could get an immediate read on how long they might have to wait... Also, limit drivers to an 80% charge, and require them to drive away within, say, five minutes after the charger has stopped. That might be hard to enforce, but peer pressure can be a powerful incentive. The point is, somebody has to step up and make charging stations more driver-friendly, and the obvious choice is whoever is in charge of the chargers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Good news..." NASA posted Saturday night on X. "We've reestablished contact with the Mars Helicopter..." After a two-day communications blackout, NASA had instructed its Perseverance Mars rover "to perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity's signal" - and apparently they did the trick. "The team is reviewing the new data to better understand the unexpected comms dropout" during the helicopter's record-breaking 72nd flight. Slashdot reader Thelasko shared this report from NPR:Communications broke down on Thursday, when the little autonomous rotorcraft was sent on a "quick pop-up vertical flight," to test its systems after an unplanned early landing during its previous flight, the agency said in a status update on Friday night. The Perseverance rover, which relays data between the helicopter and Earth during the flights, showed that Ingenuity climbed to its assigned maximum altitude of 40 feet, NASA said. During its planned descent, the helicopter and rover stopped communicating with each other... Even before it came back online, RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) pointed out that the Mars copter has done this before. "Batteries dieing, resulting in a communications re-set, If I remember correctly." Space.com also noted additional alternatives:"Perseverance is currently out of line-of-sight with Ingenuity, but the team could consider driving closer for a visual inspection," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages both robots' missions, said via X on Friday. Ingenuity has stayed aloft for more than 128 minutes and covered a total of 11 miles (17.7 kilometers) during its 72 Mars flights, according to the mission's flight log.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It's ridiculous just how virulent some of these bacteria get over time," says Dwayne Roach, assistant professor of bacteriophages, infectious disease and immunology at San Diego State University. But now CNN says doctors are fighting multi-drug-resistant superbugs with "nature's oldest predators - tiny tripod-looking viruses called phages designed to find, attack and gobble up bacteria."The microscopic creatures have saved the lives of patients dying from superbug infections and are being used in clinical trials as a potential solution to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance... In labs around the country, phage scientists are taking research and discovery to the next level... [Yale scientists] are busy mapping which phages and antibiotics are most symbiotic in the fight against a pathogen. Roach's San Diego State lab is investigating the body's immune response to phages while developing new phage purification techniques to prepare samples for intravenous use in patients. Currently, clinical trials are underway to test the effectiveness of phages against intractable urinary tract infections, chronic constipation, joint infections, diabetic foot ulcers, tonsillitis and the persistent, reoccurring infections that occur in patients with cystic fibrosis. The chronic infections common in cystic fibrosis are typically due to various strains of drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa - the same pathogen responsible for Horton's ear infection and the artificial tears outbreak. A number of labs are developing libraries of phages, stockpiled with strains found in nature that are known to be effective against a particular pathogen. In Texas, a new facility is taking that a step further - speeding up evolution by creating phages in the lab. "Rather than just sourcing new phages from the environment, we have a bioreactor that in real time creates billions upon billions of phages," said Anthony Maresso, associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "Most of those phages won't be active against the drug-resistant bacteria, but at some point there will be a rare variant that has been trained, so to speak, to attack the resistant bacteria, and we'll add that to our arsenal," Maresso said. "It's a next-generation approach on phage libraries." Maresso's lab published a study last year on the treatment of 12 patients with phages customized to each patient's unique bacterial profile. It was a qualified success: The antibiotic-resistant bacteria in five patients were eradicated, while several more patients showed improvements. "There's a lot of approaches right now that are happening in parallel," Roach said. "Do we engineer phages? Do we make a phage cocktail, and then how big is the cocktail? Is it two phages or 12 phages? Should phages be inhaled, applied topically or injected intravenously? There's a lot of work underway on exactly how to best do this...." Genetically engineering phages would allow scientists to target each person's unique mix of antibiotic-resistant pathogens instead of searching sewage, bogs, ponds, the bilge of boats and other prime breeding grounds for bacteria to find just the right phage for the job. Along with phage libraries, genetic engineering is also a key to churning out phages in mass, to distribute on a wider scale. In Russia and the country of Georgia, where phage therapy has been used for decades, patients can buy phage cocktails off the shelf in pharmacies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A familiar shadow looms in a fresh image of the heart of the nearby galaxy M87," reports Science magazine. "It confirms that the galaxy harbors a gravitational sinkhole so powerful that light cannot escape, one generated by a black hole 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun."But compared with a previous image from the network of radio dishes called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), the new one reveals a subtle shift in the bright ring surrounding the shadow, which could provide clues to how gases churn around the black hole. "We can see that shift now," says team member Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam. "We can start to use that." The new detail has also whetted astronomers' desire for a proposed expansion of the EHT, which would deliver even sharper images of distant black holes. The new picture, published this week in Astronomy & Astrophysics, comes from data collected 1 year after the observing campaign that led to the first-ever picture of a black hole, revealed in 2019 and named as Science's Breakthrough of the Year. The dark center of the image is the same size as in the original image, confirming that the image depicts physical reality and is not an artifact. "It tells us it wasn't a fluke," says Martin Hardcastle, an astrophysicist at the University of Hertfordshire who was not involved in the study. The black hole's mass would not have grown appreciably in 1 year, so the comparison also supports the idea that a black hole's size is determined by its mass alone. In the new image, however, the brightest part of a ring surrounding the black hole has shifted counterclockwise by about 30 degrees. That could be because of random churning in the disk of material that swirls around the black hole's equator. It could also be associated with fluctuations in one of the jets launched from the black hole's poles - a sign that the jet isn't aligned with the black hole's spin axis, but precesses around it like a wobbling top. That would be "kind of exciting," Markoff says. "The only way to know is to keep taking pictures...." [T]he team wants to add more telescopes to the network, which would further sharpen its images and enable it to see black holes in more distant galaxies. Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"After a year in which both actors and writers hit the picket lines, another Hollywood strike may be on the horizon," reports CNN:The American Federation of Musicians (AFM), a union representing musicians across the entertainment industry, will begin negotiations Monday on a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The union said it is seeking a deal to better reflect the current state of streaming media. The AFM is also seeking AI protection, increased wages, health care improvements, improved working conditions and residual payments for streaming content.According to the AFM, musicians who record on soundtracks make 75% less on streaming content due to less residual income. "The entertainment industry has fundamentally shifted," the union said in a news release. But musicians "are not being compensated accordingly for streaming media." AFM's president and chief negotiator Tino Gagliardi told CNN the union "is going to be prepared to do whatever it needs to get what we have to have, in order to make the lives of musicians better..." The AFM says it has roughly 70,000 members in the United States and Canada. Members include instrumental musicians working in orchestras, bands, clubs and theater who create music for film, television, commercials and other mediums.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week the Conversation ran an article titled "Mac at 40: User experience was the innovation that launched a technology revolution". But meanwhile, an anonymous reader shared this report from the Register:Two weeks before Apple launched the Macintosh, Sir Clive Sinclair launched his unprecedentedly powerful yet affordable Motorola-powered SOHO computer - starting a line of hardware and software that, remarkably, is still going. The QL remains a much-misunderstood computer. For its time, it was just as radical as the closely related machine that launched days later. Although it wasn't a smash hit, it wasn't the failure it's often deemed. A multinational licensed Sinclair's hardware, and several big-name companies sold versions of it around the world. The QL also inspired a dozen software-compatible successors, at least one of which is still manufactured today ... and not one but two versions of its unique operating system are still around as open source. Sinclair Research launched the QL on January 12, 1984, nearly two weeks before Apple Computer launched its new Macintosh computer on the 24th. Both machines had Motorola 68000-family processors, a mere 128 kB of memory, and just a pair of serial ports for I/O. Both launched with powerful bundled applications. Both had brutally cut-down specifications to make them price competitive, and both were big technological gambles on unproven technology, previously only available in vastly more expensive computers. Sinclair's bet was that multitasking would be the key differentiator. It was the first affordable personal computer to offer this. Today it's clear that Sinclair backed the wrong horse, but four decades ago, its mistake was understandable. Before the Macintosh, it was not at all clear that GUIs were the future... When the QL turned 30, The Reg published a detailed history, but a decade on, we thought it would be more interesting to look at the legacy of this pioneering machine - the many models of QL-compatible machines that appeared after Sinclair Research moved on to other things, and the descendants of its remarkable OS and their continued existence in the 21st century.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Would you pay $15 a month so Android doesn't track you and send all of that data back to Google?" asks Stuff South Africa:A new Swiss-based privacy company thinks $15 is a fair fee for that peace of mind. "A person's data is the original digital currency," argues Apostrophy, which has created its own operating system, called Apostrophy OS. It's based on Android - don't panic - but the version that has already been stripped of Google's intrusiveness by another privacy project called GrapheneOS, which used to be known as CopperheadOS. Launched in 2014, it which was briefly known as the Android Hardening project, before being rebranded as GrapheneOS in 2019. Apostrophy OS is "focused on empowering our users, not leveraging them," it says and is "purposely Swiss-based, so we can be champions of data sovereignty". What it does, they say, is separate the apps from the underlying architecture of the operating system and therefore prevent apps from accessing miscellaneous personal data, especially the all-important location data so beloved of surveillance capitalism... Apostrophy OS has its own app store, but also cleverly allows users to access the Google Play Store. If you think that is defeating the point, Apostrophy argues that those apps can't get to the vitals of your digital life. Apostrophy OS has "partitioned segments prioritising application integrity and personal data privacy". The service is free for one year with the purchase of the new MC02 phone from Swiss manufacturer Punkt, according to PC Magazine. "The phone costs $749 and is available for preorder now. It will ship at the end of January."Additional features include a built-in VPN called Digital Nomad based on the open-source Wireguard framework to secure your activity against outside snooping, which includes "exit addresses" in the US, Germany, and Japan with the base subscription.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Time:An AI customer service chatbot for international delivery service DPD used profanity, told a joke, wrote poetry about how useless it was, and criticized the company as the "worst delivery firm in the world" after prompting by a frustrated customer. Ashley Beauchamp, a London-based pianist and conductor, according to his website, posted screenshots of the chat conversation to X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday, the same day he said in a comment that the exchange occurred. At the time of publication, his post had gone viral with 1.3 million views, and over 20 thousand likes... The recent online conversation epitomizing this debate started mid-frustration as Beauchamp wrote "this is completely useless!" and asked to speak to a human, according to a recording of a scroll through the messages. When the chatbot said it couldn't connect him, Beauchamp decided to play around with the bot and asked it to tell a joke. "What do you call a fish with no eyes? Fsh!" the bot responded. Beauchamp then asked the chatbot to write a poem about a useless chatbot, swear at him and criticize the company--all of which it did. The bot called DPD the "worst delivery firm in the world" and soliloquized in its poem that "There was once a chatbot called DPD, Who was useless at providing help." "No closer to finding my parcel, but had an entertaining 10 minutes with this chatbot ," Beauchamp posted on X. (Beauchamp also quipped that "The future is here and it's terrible at poetry.") A spokesperson for DPD told the BBC, "We have operated an AI element within the chat successfully for a number of years," but that on the day of the chat, "An error occurred after a system update... The AI element was immediately disabled and is currently being updated."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2003, Hans Reiser answered questions from Slashdot's readers... Today Wikipedia describes Hans Reiser as "a computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer... Prior to his incarceration, Reiser created the ReiserFS computer file system, which may be used by the Linux kernel but which is now scheduled for removal in 2025, as well as its attempted successor, Reiser4." This week alanw (Slashdot reader #1,822), spotted a development on the Linux kernel mailing list. "Hans Reiser (imprisoned for the murder of his wife) has written a letter, asking it to be published to Slashdot." Reiser writes: I was asked by a kind Fredrick Brennan for my comments that I might offer on the discussion of removing ReiserFS V3 from the kernel. I don't post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006. I am very sorry for my crime - a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but available to any who ask. A detailed apology for how I interacted with the Linux kernel community, and some history of V3 and V4, are included, along with descriptions of what the technical issues were. I have been attending prison workshops, and working hard on improving my social skills to aid my becoming less of a danger to society. The man I am now would do things very differently from how I did things then. Click here for the rest of Reiser's introduction, along with a link to the full text of the letter... The letter is dated November 26, 2023, and ends with an address where Reiser can be mailed. Ars Technica has a good summary of Reiser's lengthy letter from prison - along with an explanation for how it came to be.With the ReiserFS recently considered obsolete and slated for removal from the Linux kernel entirely, Fredrick R. Brennan, font designer and (now regretful) founder of 8chan, wrote to the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser, asking if he wanted to reply to the discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Reiser, 59, serving a potential life sentence in a California prison for the 2006 murder of his estranged wife, Nina Reiser, wrote back with more than 6,500 words, which Brennan then forwarded to the LKML. It's not often you see somebody apologize for killing their wife, explain their coding decisions around balanced trees versus extensible hashing, and suggest that elementary schools offer the same kinds of emotional intelligence curriculum that they've worked through in prison, in a software mailing list. It's quite a document... It covers, broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to gain mindshare among Linux users, beyond the most obvious reason. This leads Reiser to detail the technical possibilities, his interpersonal and leadership failings and development, some lingering regrets about dealings with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux community at large, and other topics, including modern Russian geopolitics... Reiser asks that a number of people who worked on ReiserFS be included in "one last release" of the README, and to "delete anything in there I might have said about why they were not credited." He says prison has changed him in conflict resolution and with his "tendency to see people in extremes...." Reiser writes that he understood the difficulty ahead in getting the Linux world to "shift paradigms" but lacked the understanding of how to "make friends and allies of people" who might initially have felt excluded. This is followed by a heady discussion of "balanced trees instead of extensible hashing," Oracle's history with implementing balanced trees, getting synchronicity just right, I/O schedulers, block size, seeks and rotational delays on magnetic hard drives, and tails. It leads up to a crucial decision in ReiserFS' development, the hard non-compatible shift from V3 to Reiser 4. Format changes, Reiser writes, are "unwanted by many for good reasons." But "I just had to fix all these flaws, fix them and make a filesystem that was done right. It's hard to explain why I had to do it, but I just couldn't rest as long as the design was wrong and I knew it was wrong," he writes. SUSE didn't want a format change, but Reiser, with hindsight, sees his pushback as "utterly inarticulate and unsociable." The push for Reiser 4 in the Linux kernel was similar, "only worse...." He encourages people to "allow those who worked so hard to build a beautiful filesystem for the users to escape the effects of my reputation." Under a "Conclusion" sub-heading, Reiser is fairly succinct in summarizing a rather wide-ranging letter, minus the minutiae about filesystem architecture. I wish I had learned the things I have been learning in prison about talking through problems, and believing I can talk through problems and doing it, before I had married or joined the LKML. I hope that day when they teach these things in Elementary School comes. I thank Richard Stallman for his inspiration, software, and great sacrifices, It has been an honor to be of even passing value to the users of Linux. I wish all of you well. It both is and is not a response to Brennan's initial prompt, asking how he felt about ReiserFS being slated for exclusion from the Linux kernel. There is, at the moment, no reply to the thread started by Brennan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a country experiencing extreme cold - and where almost 1 in 4 cars are electric - a roadside assistance company says it's still gas-powered cars that are experiencing the vast majority of problems starting. Electrek argues that while extreme cold may affect chargers, "it mainly gets attention because it's a new technology and it fails for different reasons than gasoline vehicles in the cold."Viking, a road assistance company (think AAA), says that it responded to 34,000 assistance requests in the first 9 days of the year. Viking says that only 13% of the cases were coming from electric vehicles (via TV2 - translated from Norwegian) ["13 percent of the cases with starting difficulties are electric cars, while the remaining 87 percent are fossil cars..."] To be fair, this data doesn't adjust for the age of the vehicles. Older gas-powered cars fail at a higher rate than the new ones and electric vehicles are obviously much more recent on average. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The discovery of a second ultra-large structure in the remote universe has further challenged some of the basic assumptions about cosmology," writes SciTechDaily:The Big Ring on the Sky is 9.2 billion light-years from Earth. It has a diameter of about 1.3 billion light-years, and a circumference of about four billion light-years. If we could step outside and see it directly, the diameter of the Big Ring would need about 15 full Moons to cover it. It is the second ultra-large structure discovered by University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) PhD student Alexia Lopez who, two years ago, also discovered the Giant Arc on the Sky. Remarkably, the Big Ring and the Giant Arc, which is 3.3 billion light-years across, are in the same cosmological neighborhood - they are seen at the same distance, at the same cosmic time, and are only 12 degrees apart on the sky. Alexia said: "Neither of these two ultra-large structures is easy to explain in our current understanding of the universe. And their ultra-large sizes, distinctive shapes, and cosmological proximity must surely be telling us something important - but what exactly? "One possibility is that the Big Ring could be related to Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs). BAOs arise from oscillations in the early universe and today should appear, statistically at least, as spherical shells in the arrangement of galaxies. However, detailed analysis of the Big Ring revealed it is not really compatible with the BAO explanation: the Big Ring is too large and is not spherical." Other explanations might be needed, explanations that depart from what is generally considered to be the standard understanding in cosmology... And if the Big Ring and the Giant Arc together form a still larger structure then the challenge to the Cosmological Principle becomes even more compelling... Alexia said, "From current cosmological theories we didn't think structures on this scale were possible. " Possible explanations include a Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, or the effect of cosmic strings passing through... Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The cybersecurity site SC Media reports that NPM registry users "download deprecated packages an estimated 2.1 billion times weekly, according to a statistical analysis of the top 50,000 most-downloaded packages in the registry."Deprecated, archived and "orphaned" NPM packages can contain unpatched and/or unreported vulnerabilities that pose a risk to the projects that depend on them, warned the researchers from Aqua Security's Team Nautilus, who published their findings in a blog post on Sunday... In conjunction with their research, Aqua Nautilus has released an open-source tool that can help developers identify deprecated dependencies in their projects. Open-source software may stop receiving updates for a variety of reasons, and it is up to developers/maintainers to communicate this maintenance status to users. As the researchers pointed out, not all developers are transparent about potential risks to users who download or depend on their outdated NPM packages. Aqua Nautilus researchers kicked off their analysis after finding that one open-source software maintainer responded to a report about a vulnerability Nautilus discovered by archiving the vulnerable repository the same day. By archiving the repository without fixing the security flaw or assigning it a CVE, the owner leaves developers of dependent projects in the dark about the risks, the researchers said... Taking into consideration both deprecated packages and active packages that have a direct dependency on deprecated projects, the researchers found about 4,100 (8.2%) of the top 50,000 most-downloaded NPM packages fell under the category of "official" deprecation. However, adding archived repositories to the definition of "deprecated" increased the number of packages affected by deprecation and deprecated dependencies to 6,400 (12.8%)... Including packages with linked repositories that are shown as unavailable (404 error) on GitHub increases the deprecation rate to 15% (7,500 packages), according to the Nautilus analysis. Encompassing packages without any linked repository brings the final number of deprecated packages to 10,600, or 21.2% of the top 50,000. Team Nautilus estimated that under this broader understanding of package deprecation, about 2.1 billion downloads of deprecated packages are made on the NPM registry weekly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"What happens when a loser who needs to win faces a winner who refuses to lose?" That was the tagline for the iconic 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, chronicling a middle-school teacher's attempts to take the Donkey Kong record from reigning world champion Billy Mitchell. "Billy Mitchell always has a plan," says Billy Mitchell in the movie (who is also shown answering his phone, "World Record Headquarters. Can I help you?") By 1985, 30-year-old Mitchell was already listed in the "Guinness Book of World Records" for having the world's highest scores for Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong, Jr., Centipede, and Burger Time. But then, NME reports...In 2018, a number of Mitchell's Donkey Kong high-scores were called into question by a fellow gamer, who supplied a string of evidence on the Twin Galaxies forums suggesting Mitchell had used an emulator to break the records, rather than the official, unmodified hardware that's typically required to keep things fair. [Twin Galaxies is Guiness World Records' official source for videogame scores.] Following "an independent investigation," Mitchell's hi-scores were removed from video game database Twin Galaxies as well as the Guinness Book Of Records, though the latter reversed the decision in 2020. Forensic analysts also accused him of cheating in 2022 but Mitchell has fought the accusations ever since. This week, 58-year-old Billy Mitchell posted an announcement on X. "Twin Galaxies has reinstated all of my world records from my videogame career... I am relieved and satisfied to reach this resolution after an almost six-year ordeal and look forward to pursuing my unfinished business elsewhere. Never Surrender, Billy Mitchell." X then wrote below the announcement, "Readers added context they thought people might want to know... Twin Galaxies has only reinstated Michell's scores on an archived leaderboard, where rules were different prior to TG being acquired in 2014. His score remains removed from the current leaderboard where he continues to be ineligible by today's rules." The statement from Twin Galaxies says they'd originally believed they'd seen "a demonstrated impossibility of original, unmodified Donkey Kong arcade hardware" in a recording of one of Billy's games. As punishment they'd then invalidated every record he'd ever set in his life. But now an engineer (qualified as an expert in federal courts) says aging components in the game board could've produced the same visual artifacts seen in the videotape of the disputed game.Consistent with Twin Galaxies' dedication to the meticulous documentation and preservation of video game score history, Twin Galaxies shall heretofore reinstate all of Mr. Mitchell's scores as part of the official historical database on Twin Galaxies' website. Additionally, upon closing of the matter, Twin Galaxies shall permanently archive and remove from online display the dispute thread... as well as all related statements and articles. NME adds:Twin Galaxies' lawyer David Tashroudian told Ars Technica that the company had all its "ducks in a row" for a legal battle with Mitchell but "there were going to be an inordinate amount of costs involved, and both parties were facing a lot of uncertainty at trial, and they wanted to get the matter settled on their own terms." And the New York Times points out that while Billy scored 1,062,800 in that long-ago game, "The vigorous long-running and sometimes bitter dispute was over marks that have long since been surpassed. The current record, as reported by Twin Galaxies, belongs to Robbie Lakeman. It's 1,272,800." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"What happens when a loser who needs to win faces a winner who refuses to lose?" That was the tagline for the iconic 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, chronicling a middle-school teacher's attempts to take the Donkey Kong record from reigning world champion Billy Mitchell. "Billy Mitchell always has a plan," says Billy Mitchell in the movie (who is also shown answering his phone, "World Record Headquarters. Can I help you?") By 1985, 30-year-old Mitchell was already listed in the "Guinness Book of World Records" for having the world's highest scores for Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong, Jr., Centipede, and Burger Time. But then, NME reports...In 2018, a number of Mitchell's Donkey Kong high-scores were called into question by a fellow gamer, who supplied a string of evidence on the Twin Galaxies forums suggesting Mitchell had used an emulator to break the records, rather than the official, unmodified hardware that's typically required to keep things fair. [Twin Galaxies is Guiness World Records' official source for videogame scores.] Following "an independent investigation," Mitchell's hi-scores were removed from video game database Twin Galaxies as well as the Guinness Book Of Records, though the latter reversed the decision in 2020. Forensic analysts also accused him of cheating in 2022 but Mitchell has fought the accusations ever since. This week, 58-year-old Billy Mitchell posted an announcement on X. "Twin Galaxies has reinstated all of my world records from my videogame career... I am relieved and satisfied to reach this resolution after an almost six-year ordeal and look forward to pursuing my unfinished business elsewhere. Never Surrender, Billy Mitchell." X then wrote below the announcement, "Readers added context they thought people might want to know... Twin Galaxies has only reinstated Michell's scores on an archived leaderboard, where rules were different prior to TG being acquired in 2014. His score remains removed from the current leaderboard where he continues to be ineligible by today's rules." The statement from Twin Galaxies says they'd originally believed they'd seen "a demonstrated impossibility of original, unmodified Donkey Kong arcade hardware" in a recording of one of Billy's games. As punishment they'd then invalidated every record he'd ever set in his life. But now an engineer (qualified as an expert in federal courts) says aging components in the game board could've produced the same visual artifacts seen in the videotape of the disputed game.Consistent with Twin Galaxies' dedication to the meticulous documentation and preservation of video game score history, Twin Galaxies shall heretofore reinstate all of Mr. Mitchell's scores as part of the official historical database on Twin Galaxies' website. Additionally, upon closing of the matter, Twin Galaxies shall permanently archive and remove from online display the dispute thread... as well as all related statements and articles. NME adds:Twin Galaxies' lawyer David Tashroudian told Ars Technica that the company had all its "ducks in a row" for a legal battle with Mitchell but "there were going to be an inordinate amount of costs involved, and both parties were facing a lot of uncertainty at trial, and they wanted to get the matter settled on their own terms." And the New York Times points out that while Billy scored 1,062,800 in that long-ago game, "The vigorous long-running and sometimes bitter dispute was over marks that have long since been surpassed. The current record, as reported by Twin Galaxies, belongs to Robbie Lakeman. It's 1,272,800." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A Canonical engineer has been experimenting with implementing a Linux scheduler within the Rust programming language..." Phoronix reported Monday, "that works via sched_ext for implementing a scheduler using eBPF that can be loaded during run-time." The project was started "just for fun" over Christmas, according to a post on X by Canonical-based Linux kernel engineer Andrea Righi, adding "I'm pretty shocked to see that it doesn't just work, but it can even outperform the default Linux scheduler (EEVDF) with certain workloads (i.e., gaming)." Phoronix notes the a YouTube video accompanying the tweet shows "a game with the scx_rustland scheduler outperforming the default Linux kernel scheduler while running a parallel kernel build in the background." "For sure the build takes longer," Righi acknowledged in a later post. "This scheduler doesn't magically makes everything run faster, it simply prioritizes more the interactive workloads vs CPU-intensive background jobs." Righi followed up by adding "And the whole point of this demo was to prove that, despite the overhead of running a scheduler in user-space, we can still achieve interesting performance, while having the advantages of being in user-space (ease of experimentation/testing, reboot-less updates, etc.)" Wednesday Righi added some improvements, posting that "Only 19 lines of code (comments included) for ~2x performance improvement on SMT isn't bad... and I spent my lunch break playing Counter Strike 2 to test this patch..." And work seems to be continuing, judging by a fresh post from Righi on Thursday. "I fixed virtme-ng to run inside Docker and used it to create a github CI workflow for sched-ext that clones the latest kernel, builds it and runs multiple VMs to test all the scx schedulers. And it does that in only ~20min. I'm pretty happy about virtme-ng now."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Researchers at the University of Sydney Nano Institute have developed a small silicon semiconductor chip that combines electronic and photonic (light-based) elements," reports SciTechDaily. "This innovation greatly enhances radio-frequency (RF) bandwidth and the ability to accurately control information flowing through the unit."Expanded bandwidth means more information can flow through the chip and the inclusion of photonics allows for advanced filter controls, creating a versatile new semiconductor device. Researchers expect the chip will have applications in advanced radar, satellite systems, wireless networks, and the roll-out of 6G and 7G telecommunications and also open the door to advanced sovereign manufacturing. It could also assist in the creation of high-tech value-add factories at places like Western Sydney's Aerotropolis precinct. The chip is built using an emerging technology in silicon photonics that allows the integration of diverse systems on semiconductors less than 5 millimeters wide. Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Ben Eggleton, who guides the research team, likened it to fitting together Lego building blocks, where new materials are integrated through advanced packaging of components, using electronic 'chiplets'.... Dr Alvaro Casas Bedoya, Associate Director for Photonic Integration in the School of Physics, who led the chip design, said the unique method of heterogeneous materials integration has been 10 years in the making. "The combined use of overseas semiconductor foundries to make the basic chip wafer with local research infrastructure and manufacturing has been vital in developing this photonic integrated circuit," he said. "This architecture means Australia could develop its own sovereign chip manufacturing without exclusively relying on international foundries for the value-add process...." The photonic circuit in the chip means a device with an impressive 15 gigahertz bandwidth of tunable frequencies with spectral resolution down to just 37 megahertz, which is less than a quarter of one percent of the total bandwidth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post looks at "a small but growing group of commercial medium-to-heavy-duty truck drivers who use electric trucks." "These drivers - many of whom operate local or regional routes that don't require hundreds of miles on the road in a day - generally welcome the transition to electric, praising their new trucks' handling, acceleration, smoothness and quiet operation."Everyone who has had an EV has no aspirations to go back to diesel at this point," said Khari Burton, who drives an electric Volvo VNR in the Los Angeles area for transport company IMC. "We talk about it and it's all positivity. I really enjoy the smoothness ... and just the quietness as well." Mike Roeth, the executive director of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency, said many drivers have reported that the new vehicles are easier on their bodies - thanks to both less rocking off the cab, assisted steering and the quiet motor. "Part of my hypothesis is that it will help truck driver retention," he said. "We're seeing people who would retire driving a diesel truck now working more years with an electric truck." Most of the electric trucks on the road today are doing local or regional routes, which are easier to manage with a truck that gets only up to 250 miles of range... Trucking advocates say electric has a long way to go before it can take on longer routes. "If you're running very local, very short mileage, there may be a vehicle that can do that type of route," said Mike Tunnell, the executive director of environmental affairs for the American Trucking Association. "But for the average haul of 400 miles, there's just nothing that's really practical today." There's other concerns, according to the article. "[S]ome companies and trucking associations worry this shift, spurred in part by a California law mandating a switch to electric or emissions-free trucks by 2042, is happening too fast. While electric trucks might work well in some cases, they argue, the upfront costs of the vehicles and their charging infrastructure are often too heavy a lift." But this is probably the key sentence in the article: For the United States to meet its climate goals, virtually all trucks must be zero-emissions by 2050. While trucks are only 4 percent of the vehicles on the road, they make up almost a quarter of the country's transportation emissions. The article cites estimates that right now there's 12.2 million trucks on America's highways - and barely more than 1% (13,000) are electric. "Around 10,000 of those trucks were just put on the road in 2023, up from 2,000 the year before." (And they add that Amazon alone has thousands of Rivian's electric delivery vans, operating in 1,800 cities.) But the article's overall message seems to be that when it comes to the trucks, "the drivers operating them say they love driving electric." And it includes comments from actual truckers:49-year-old Frito-Lay trucker Gary LaBush: "I was like, 'What's going on?' There was no noise - and no fumes... it's just night and day."66-year-old Marty Boots: Diesel was like a college wrestler. And the electric is like a ballet dancer... You get back into diesel and it's like, 'What's wrong with this thing?' Why is it making so much noise? Why is it so hard to steer?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Hubble Space Telescope's discovery of GN-z11 in 2016 marked it as the most distant galaxy known at that time, notable for its unexpected luminosity despite its ancient formation just 400 million years after the Big Bang. Now, in a paper published in Nature, astrophysicist Roberto Maiolino proposes that this brightness could be due to a supermassive black hole, challenging current understanding of early black hole formation and growth. NPR reports: This wasn't just any black hole. First -- assuming that the black hole started out small -- it could be devouring matter at a ferocious rate. And it would have needed to do so to reach its massive size. "This black hole is essentially eating the [equivalent of] an entire Sun every five years," says Maiolino. "It's actually much higher than we thought could be feasible for these black holes." Hence the word "vigorous" in the paper's title. Second, the black hole is 1.6 million times the mass of our Sun, and it was in place just 400 million years after the dawn of the universe. "It is essentially not possible to grow such a massive black hole so fast so early in the universe," Maiolino says. "Essentially, there is not enough time according to classical theories. So one has to invoke alternative scenarios." Here's scenario one -- rather than starting out small, perhaps supermassive black holes in the early universe were simply born big due to the collapse of vast clouds of primordial gas. Scenario two is that maybe early stars collapsed to form a sea of smaller black holes, which could have then merged or swallowed matter way faster than we thought, causing the resulting black hole to grow quickly. Or perhaps it's some combination of both. In addition, it's possible that this black hole is harming the growth of the galaxy GN-z11. That's because black holes radiate energy as they feed. At such a high rate of feasting, this energy could sweep away the gas of the host galaxy. And since stars are made from gas, it could quench star formation, slowly strangling the galaxy. Not to mention that without gas, the black hole wouldn't have anything to feed on and it too would die.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's "a free and open-source, software-defined storage platform," according to Wikipedia, providing object storage, block storage, and file storage "built on a common distributed cluster foundation".The charter advisory board for Ceph included people from Canonical, CERN, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, Red Hat, SanDisk, and SUSE. And Nite_Hawk (Slashdot reader #1,304) is one of its core engineers - a former Red Hat principal software engineer named Mark Nelson. (He's now leading R&D for a small cloud systems company called Clyso that provides Ceph consulting.) And he's returned to Slashdot to share a blog post describing "a journey to 1 TiB/s". This gnarly tale-from-Production starts while assisting Clyso with "a fairly hip and cutting edge company that wanted to transition their HDD-backed Ceph cluster to a 10 petabyte NVMe deployment" using object-based storage devices [or OSDs]...) I can't believe they figured it out first. That was the thought going through my head back in mid-December after several weeks of 12-hour days debugging why this cluster was slow... Half-forgotten superstitions from the 90s about appeasing SCSI gods flitted through my consciousness... Ultimately they decided to go with a Dell architecture we designed, which quoted at roughly 13% cheaper than the original configuration despite having several key advantages. The new configuration has less memory per OSD (still comfortably 12GiB each), but faster memory throughput. It also provides more aggregate CPU resources, significantly more aggregate network throughput, a simpler single-socket configuration, and utilizes the newest generation of AMD processors and DDR5 RAM. By employing smaller nodes, we halved the impact of a node failure on cluster recovery.... The initial single-OSD test looked fantastic for large reads and writes and showed nearly the same throughput we saw when running FIO tests directly against the drives. As soon as we ran the 8-OSD test, however, we observed a performance drop. Subsequent single-OSD tests continued to perform poorly until several hours later when they recovered. So long as a multi-OSD test was not introduced, performance remained high. Confusingly, we were unable to invoke the same behavior when running FIO tests directly against the drives. Just as confusing, we saw that during the 8 OSD test, a single OSD would use significantly more CPU than the others. A wallclock profile of the OSD under load showed significant time spent in io_submit, which is what we typically see when the kernel starts blocking because a drive's queue becomes full... For over a week, we looked at everything from bios settings, NVMe multipath, low-level NVMe debugging, changing kernel/Ubuntu versions, and checking every single kernel, OS, and Ceph setting we could think of. None these things fully resolved the issue. We even performed blktrace and iowatcher analysis during "good" and "bad" single OSD tests, and could directly observe the slow IO completion behavior. At this point, we started getting the hardware vendors involved. Ultimately it turned out to be unnecessary. There was one minor, and two major fixes that got things back on track. It's a long blog post, but here's where it ends up: Fix One: "Ceph is incredibly sensitive to latency introduced by CPU c-state transitions. A quick check of the bios on these nodes showed that they weren't running in maximum performance mode which disables c-states." Fix Two: [A very clever engineer working for the customer] "ran a perf profile during a bad run and made a very astute discovery: A huge amount of time is spent in the kernel contending on a spin lock while updating the IOMMU mappings. He disabled IOMMU in the kernel and immediately saw a huge increase in performance during the 8-node tests."In a comment below, Nelson adds that "We've never seen the IOMMU issue before with Ceph... I'm hoping we can work with the vendors to understand better what's going on and get it fixed without having to completely disable IOMMU." Fix Three: "We were not, in fact, building RocksDB with the correct compile flags... It turns out that Canonical fixed this for their own builds as did Gentoo after seeing the note I wrote in do_cmake.sh over 6 years ago... With the issue understood, we built custom 17.2.7 packages with a fix in place. Compaction time dropped by around 3X and 4K random write performance doubled."The story has a happy ending, with performance testing eventually showing data being read at 635 GiB/s - and a colleague daring them to attempt 1 TiB/s. They built a new testing configuration targeting 63 nodes - achieving 950GiB/s - then tried some more performance optimizations...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The S&P 500 index tracks 500 of the largest companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges, according to Wikipedia. And Friday that index "hit an all-time closing high," reports the Washington Post, "reflecting the staggering gains of a coterie of Big Tech firms against the backdrop of a surprisingly stable economy."The broad-based index closed at 4,839.81 - up more than 1 percent for the day - surpassing the previous closing record set in January of 2022. The stock market surged upward in the final quarter of 2023 as evidence gathered that the [U.S.] economy has not tipped into recession territory, despite the Federal Reserve's campaign to raise interest rates. At the same time analysts point to an AI-driven frenzy on Wall Street that rivals the dot-com boom of the late '90s, when investors sought to capitalize on the transformative gains brought by the early internet. A booming S&P 500 is a welcome sign for the millions of Americans who invest in the index through retirement accounts. Investors in 2022 had about $5.7 trillion in assets passively indexed to the S&P 500 and another $5.7 trillion in funds that use it as a benchmark comparison, according to S&P Global. Voters' feelings about the stock market and economy could affect the 2024 election... Tech companies, including a few names heavily associated with artificial intelligence work, led the S&P 500's gains. Seven of the largest tech stocks known as the "Magnificent Seven" - Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla and Meta - increased 75 percent on average in 2023 and represented 30 percent of the index's total market value at the end of 2023. "AI is the new dot-com," said Michael Farr of Farr, Miller and Washington. "It's the new magic that is going to change the world that we don't really understand yet. But we all understand it's very powerful." Those seven stocks made up around half of the S&P 500's growth last year. Nvidia, whose high-performance chips have become popular for AI uses, had the best year of the bunch, at one point gaining nearly $190 billion in value overnight, a 24 percent gain. In the last 12 months, the index has risen 21.83%. The article notes that "Although the rest of the market has lagged Big Tech, analysts say promising economic data from recent months has boosted optimism about the broader economy."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inc. Magazine: Google's DeepMind division has long led the way on all sorts of AI breakthroughs, grabbing headlines in 2016, when one of its systems beat a world champion at the strategy game Go, then seen as an unlikely feat. So when one of DeepMind's co-founders makes a pronouncement about the future of AI, it's worth listening, especially if you're a startup entrepreneur. AI might be coming for your job! Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now CEO of Inflection AI -- a small, California-based machine intelligence company -- recently suggested this possibility could be reality in a half-decade or so. At the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos this week, Suleyman said he thinks AI tech will soon reach the point where it could dream up a company, project-manage it, and successfully sell products. This still-imaginary AI-ntrepreneur will certainly be able to do so by 2030. He's also sure that these AI powers will be "widely available" for "very cheap" prices, potentially even as open-source systems, meaning some aspects of these super smart AIs would be free. Whether an AI entrepreneur could actually beat a human at the startup game is something we'll have to wait to find out, but the mere fact that Suleyman is saying an AI could carry out the role is stunning. It's also controversial, and likely tangled in a forest of thorny legal matters. For example, there's the tricky issue of whether an AI can own or patent intellectual property. A recent ruling in the U.K. argues that an AI definitively cannot be a patent holder. Underlining how much of all of this is theoretical, Suleyman's musings about AI entrepreneurs came from an answer to a question about whether AIs can pass the famous Turing test. This is sometimes considered a gold standard for AI: If a real artificial general intelligence (AGI) can fool a human into thinking that it too is a human. Cunningly, Suleyman twisted the question around, and said the traditional Turing test wasn't good enough. Instead, he argued a better test would be to see if an AGI could perform sophisticated tasks like acting as an entrepreneur. No matter how theoretical Suleyman's thinking is, it will unsettle critics who worry about the destructive potential of AI, and it may worry some in the venture capital world, too. How exactly would one invest in a startup with a founder that's just a pile of silicon chips? Even Suleyman said he thinks that this sort of innovation would cause a giant economic upset.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It's the third all-private astronaut mission to the International Space Station," writes NASA - and they're expected to start boarding within the next hour! Watch it all on the official stream of NASA TV. More details from Ars Technica:The four-man team lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Thursday, kicking off a 36-hour pursuit of the orbiting research laboratory. Docking is scheduled for Saturday morning. This two-week mission is managed by Houston-based Axiom Space, which is conducting private astronaut missions to the ISS as a stepping stone toward building a fully commercial space station in low-Earth orbit by the end of this decade. Axiom's third mission, called Ax-3, launched at 4:49 pm EST (21:49 UTC) Thursday. The four astronauts were strapped into their seats inside SpaceX's Dragon Freedom spacecraft atop the Falcon 9 rocket. This is the 12th time SpaceX has launched a human spaceflight mission, and could be the first of five Dragon crew missions this year. NASA reports that the crew "will spend about two weeks conducting microgravity research, educational outreach, and commercial activities aboard the space station."NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said "During their time aboard the International Space Station, the Ax-3 astronauts will carry out more than 30 scientific experiments that will help advance research in low-Earth orbit. As the first all-European commercial astronaut mission to the space station, the Ax-3 crew is proof that the possibility of space unites us all...." The Dragon spacecraft will dock autonomously to the forward port of the station's Harmony module as early as 4:19 a.m. [EST] Saturday. Hatches between Dragon and the station are expected to open after 6 a.m. [EST], allowing the Axiom crew to enter the complex for a welcoming ceremony and start their stay aboard the orbiting laboratory....The Ax-3 astronauts are expected to depart the space station Saturday, February 3, pending weather, for a return to Earth and splashdown at a landing site off the coast of Florida.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Keith Cooper reports via Space.com: A European Space Agency (ESA) probe has found enough water to cover Mars in an ocean between 4.9 and 8.9 feet (1.5 and 2.7 meters) deep, buried in the form of dusty ice beneath the planet's equator. The finding was made by ESA's Mars Express mission, a veteran spacecraft that has been engaged in science operations around Mars for 20 years now. While it's not the first time that evidence for ice has been found near the Red Planet's equator, this new discovery is by far the largest amount of water ice detected there so far and appears to match previous discoveries of frozen water on Mars. "Excitingly, the radar signals match what we expect to see from layered ice and are similar to the signals we see from Mars' polar caps, which we know to be very ice rich," said lead researcher Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States in an ESA statement. The deposits are thick, extended 3.7km (2.3) miles underground, and topped by a crust of hardened ash and dry dust hundreds of meters thick. The ice is not a pure block but is heavily contaminated by dust. While its presence near the equator is a location more easily accessible to future crewed missions, being buried so deep means that accessing the water-ice would be difficult.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a regulatory filing today, Microsoft said that a Russian intelligence group hacked into some of the company's top executives' email accounts. CNBC reports: Nobelium, the same group that breached government supplier SolarWinds in 2020, carried out the attack, which Microsoft detected last week, according to the company. The announcement comes after new U.S. requirements for disclosing cybersecurity incidents went into effect. A Microsoft spokesperson said that while the company does not believe the attack had a material impact, it still wanted to honor the spirit of the rules. In late November, the group accessed "a legacy non-production test tenant account," Microsoft's Security Response Center wrote in the blog post. After gaining access, the group "then used the account's permissions to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior leadership team and employees in our cybersecurity, legal, and other functions, and exfiltrated some emails and attached documents," the corporate unit wrote. The company's senior leadership team, including finance chief Amy Hood and president Brad Smith, regularly meets with CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft said it has not found signs that Nobelium had accessed customer data, production systems or proprietary source code. The U.S. government and Microsoft consider Nobelium to be part of the Russian foreign intelligence service SVR. The hacking group was responsible for one of the most prolific breaches in U.S. history when it added malicious code to updates to SolarWinds' Orion software, which some U.S. government agencies were using. Microsoft itself was ensnared in the hack. Nobelium, also known as APT29 or Cozy Bear, is a sophisticated hacking group that has attempted to breach the systems of U.S. allies and the Department of Defense. Microsoft also uses the name Midnight Blizzard to identify Nobelium. It was also implicated alongside another Russian hacking group in the 2016 breach of the Democratic National Committee's systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite many questions going unanswered, a startup called Rabbit sold out of its pocket AI companion a day after it was debuted at CES 2024 last week. Now, the company finally shared more details about which large language model (LLM) will be powering the device. According to Engadget, the provider in question is Perplexity, "a San Francisco-based startup with ambitions to overtake Google in the AI space." From the report: Perplexity will be providing up-to-date search results via Rabbit's $199 orange brick -- without the need of any subscription. That said, the first 100,000 R1 buyers will receive one year of Perplexity Pro subscription -- normally costing $200 -- for free. This advanced service adds file upload support, a daily quota of over 300 complex queries and the ability to switch to other AI models (GPT-4, Claude 2.1 or Gemini), though these don't necessarily apply to the R1's use case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg (paywalled), OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly raising billions to develop a global network of chip fabrication factories, collaborating with leading chip manufacturers to address the high demand for chips required for advanced AI models. The Verge reports: A major cost and limitation for running AI models is having enough chips to handle the computations behind bots like ChatGPT or DALL-E that answer prompts and generate images. Nvidia's value rose above $1 trillion for the first time last year, partly due to a virtual monopoly it has as GPT-4, Gemini, Llama 2, and other models depend heavily on its popular H100 GPUs. Accordingly, the race to manufacture more high-powered chips to run complex AI systems has only intensified. The limited number of fabs capable of making high-end chips is driving Altman or anyone else to bid for capacity years before you need it in order to produce the new chips. And going against the likes of Apple requires deep-pocketed investors who will front costs that the nonprofit OpenAI still can't afford. SoftBank Group and Abu Dhabi-based AI holding company G42 have reportedly been in talks about raising money for Altman's project.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers at Georgia Tech, in Atlanta, have developed what they are calling the world's first functioning graphene-based semiconductor. This breakthrough holds the promise to revolutionize the landscape of electronics, enabling faster traditional computers and offering a new material for future quantum computers. The research, published on January 3 in Nature and led by Walt de Heer, a professor of physics at Georgia Tech, focuses on leveraging epitaxial graphene, a crystal structure of carbon chemically bonded to silicon carbide (SiC). This novel semiconducting material, dubbed semiconducting epitaxial graphene (SEC) -- or alternatively, epigraphene -- boasts enhanced electron mobility compared with that of traditional silicon, allowing electrons to traverse with significantly less resistance. The outcome is transistors capable of operating at terahertz frequencies, offering speeds 10 times as fast as that of the silicon-based transistors used in current chips. De Heer describes the method used as a modified version of an extremely simple technique that has been known for over 50 years. "When silicon carbide is heated to well over 1,000C, silicon evaporates from the surface, leaving a carbon-rich surface which then forms into graphene," says de Heer. This heating step is done with an argon quartz tube in which a stack of two SiC chips are placed in a graphite crucible, according to de Heer. Then a high-frequency current is run through a copper coil around the quartz tube, which heats the graphite crucible through induction. The process takes about an hour. De Heer added that the SEC produced this way is essentially charge neutral, and when exposed to air, it will spontaneously be doped by oxygen. This oxygen doping is easily removed by heating it at about 200C in vacuum. "The chips we use cost about [US] $10, the crucible about $1, and the quartz tube about $10," said de Heer. [...] De Heer and his research team concede, however, that further exploration is needed to determine whether graphene-based semiconductors can surpass the current superconducting technology used in advanced quantum computers. The Georgia Tech team do not envision incorporating graphene-based semiconductors with standard silicon or compound semiconductor lines. Instead, they are aiming for a paradigm shift beyond silicon, utilizing silicon carbide. They are developing methods, such as coating SEC with boron nitride, to protect and enhance its compatibility with conventional semiconductor lines. Comparing their work with commercially available graphene field-effect transistors (GFETs), de Heer explains that there is a crucial difference: "Conventional GFETs do not use semiconducting graphene, making them unsuitable for digital electronics requiring a complete transistor shutdown." He says that the SEC developed by his team allows for a complete shutdown, meeting the stringent requirements of digital electronics. De Heer says that it will take time to develop this technology. "I compare this work to the Wright brothers' first 100-meter flight. It will mainly depend on how much work is done to develop it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. lawmakers have banned the Defense Department from buying batteries produced by China's biggest manufacturers. "The rule implemented as part of the latest National Defense Authorization Act that passed on Dec. 22 will prevent procuring batteries from Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., BYD Co. and four other Chinese companies beginning in October 2027," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The measure doesn't extend to commercial purchases by companies such as Ford, which is licensing technology from CATL to build electric-vehicle batteries in Michigan. Tesla also sources some of its battery cells from BYD, which became the new top-selling EV maker globally in the fourth quarter. The four other manufacturers whose batteries will be banned are Envision Energy Ltd., EVE Energy Co., Gotion High Tech Co. and Hithium Energy Storage Technology Co. The decision still requires Pentagon officials to more clearly define the reach of the new rule. It adds to previous provisions outlined by the NDAA that decoupled the Defense Department's supply chain from China, including restrictions on use of Chinese semiconductors. While the Defense Department bans apply strictly to defense procurement, industries and lawmakers closely follow the rules as a guide for what materials, products and companies to trust in their own course of business.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jay Peters reports via The Verge: Plex, known for its media server software and as a place to watch ad-supported content, is going to launch a store for to buy and rent movies and TV shows in early February, executives told Lowpass' Janko Roettgers. "Most studios" are lined up for the store's launch, and there are "plans to complete the catalog soon after," Roettgers says. The store will also integrate with Plex features like its watchlists for movies. Roettgers points out that that Plex has announced plans in both 2020 and 2023 to launch a movie / TV store -- hopefully Plex is truly ready to do so this time. Plex chief product officer Scott Olechowski told Roettgers that more changes are coming to Plex down the line, including a "pretty major UX refresh" and more social features like public profiles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Geoffrey.landis writes: The Japan SLIM spacecraft has successfully landed on moon, but power problems mean it may be short mission. The good news is that the landing was successful, making Japan only the fifth nation to successfully make a lunar landing, and the ultra-miniature rover and the hopper both deployed. The bad news is that the solar arrays aren't producing power, and unless they can fix the problem in the next few hours, the batteries will be depleted and it will die. But, short mission or long, hurrah for Japan for being the fifth country to successfully land a mission on the surface of the moon (on their third try; two previous missions didn't make it). It's a rather amazing mission. I've never seen a spacecraft concept that lands under rocket power vertically but then rotates over to rest horizontally on the surface.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn't been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself. Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point. The sheer expanse of sameness was too shocking and new to be boring. Of course, there have been examples of such cultural globalisation going back as far as recorded civilisation. But the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as "authentic," an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere "authentic" to have a drink or eat a meal. If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds. In 2016, I wrote an essay titled Welcome to AirSpace, describing my first impressions of this phenomenon of sameness. "AirSpace" was my coinage for the strangely frictionless geography created by digital platforms, in which you could move between places without straying beyond the boundaries of an app, or leaving the bubble of the generic aesthetic. The word was partly a riff on Airbnb, but it was also inspired by the sense of vaporousness and unreality that these places gave me. They seemed so disconnected from geography that they could float away and land anywhere else. When you were in one, you could be anywhere. My theory was that all the physical places interconnected by apps had a way of resembling one another. In the case of the cafes, the growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content. One cafe owner's personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing. On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me -- who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram -- toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map. To court the large demographic of customers moulded by the internet, more cafes adopted the aesthetics that already dominated on the platforms. Adapting to the norm wasn't just following trends but making a business decision, one that the consumers rewarded. When a cafe was visually pleasing enough, customers felt encouraged to post it on their own Instagram in turn as a lifestyle brag, which provided free social media advertising and attracted new customers. Thus the cycle of aesthetic optimisation and homogenisation continued.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seagate this week unveiled the industry's first hard disk drive platform that uses heat-assisted media recording (HAMR). Tom's Hardware: The new Mozaic 3+ platform relies on several all-new technologies, including new media, new write and read heads, and a brand-new controller. The platform will be used for Seagate's upcoming Exos hard drives for cloud datacenters with a 30TB capacity and higher. Heat-assisted magnetic recording is meant to radically increase areal recording density of magnetic media by making writes while the recording region is briefly heated to a point where its magnetic coercivity drops significantly. Seagate's Mozaic 3+ uses 10 glass disks with a magnetic layer consisting of an iron-platinum superlattice structure that ensures both longevity and smaller media grain size compared to typical HDD platters. To record the media, the platform uses a plasmonic writer sub-system with a vertically integrated nanophotonic laser that heats the media before writing. Because individual grains are so small with the new media, their individual magnetic signatures are lower, whereas magnetic inter-track interference (ITI) effect is somewhat higher. As a result, Seagate had to introduce its new Gen 7 Spintronic Reader, which features the "world's smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors," according to the company. Because Seagate's new Mozaic 3+ platform deals with new media with a very small grain size, an all-new writer, and a reader that features multiple tiny magnetic field readers, it also requires a lot of compute horsepower to orchestrate the drive's work. Therefore, Seagate has equipped with Mozaic 3+ platform with an all-new controller made on a 12nm fabrication process.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's Huawei will not support Android apps on the latest iteration of its in-house Harmony operating system, domestic financial media Caixin reported, as the company looks to bolster its own software ecosystem. From a report: The company plans to roll out a developer version of its HarmonyOS Next platform in the second quarter of this year followed by a full commercial version in the fourth quarter, it said in a company statement highlighting the launch event for the platform in its home city of Shenzhen on Thursday. Huawei first unveiled its proprietary Harmony system in 2019 and prepared to launch it on some smartphones a year later after U.S. restrictions cut its access to Google's technical support for its Android mobile OS. However, earlier versions of Harmony allowed apps built for Android to be used on the system, which will no longer be possible, according to Caixin.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Organized crime is mining sand from rivers and coasts to feed demand worldwide, ruining ecosystems and communities. Can it be stopped? Scientific American reports: Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world's largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature's ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. The U.N. report confirms that sand mining at current rates is unsustainable. The greatest demand comes from China, which used more cement in three years (6.6 gigatons from 2011 through 2013) than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century (4.5 gigatons), notes Vince Beiser, author of The World in a Grain. Most sand gets used in the country where it is mined, but with some national supplies dwindling, imports reached $1.9 billion in 2018, according to Harvard's Atlas of Economic Complexity. Companies large and small dredge up sand from waterways and the ocean floor and transport it to wholesalers, construction firms and retailers. Even the legal sand trade is hard to track. Two experts estimate the global market at about $100 billion a year, yet the U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries indicates the value could be as high as $785 billion. Sand in riverbeds, lake beds and shorelines is the best for construction, but scarcity opens the market to less suitable sand from beaches and dunes, much of it scraped illegally and cheaply. With a shortage looming and prices rising, sand from Moroccan beaches and dunes is sold inside the country and is also shipped abroad, using organized crime's extensive transport networks, Abderrahmane has found. More than half of Morocco's sand is illegally mined, he says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A resident in Virginia has urged the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider canceling $886 million in federal funding for SpaceX's Starlink system. But rival satellite company Viasat has gone out of its way to oppose the citizen-led petition.APCMag: On Jan. 1, the FCC received a petition from the Virginia resident Greg Weisiger asking the commission to reconsider denying the $886 million to SpaceX. "Petitioner is at an absolute loss to understand the Commission's logic with these denials," wrote Weisiger, who lives in Midlothian, Virginia. "It is abundantly clear that Starlink has a robust, reliable, affordable service for rural and insular locations in all states and territories." The petition arrived a few weeks after the FCC denied SpaceX's appeal to receive $886 million from the commission's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which is designed to subsidize 100Mbps to gigabit broadband across the US. SpaceX wanted to use the funds to expand Starlink access in rural areas. But the FCC ruled that "Starlink is not reasonably capable of offering the required high-speed, low latency service throughout the areas where it won auction support."Weisiger disagrees. In his petition, he writes that the FCC's decision will deprive him of federal support to bring high-speed internet to his home. "Thousands of other Virginia locations were similarly denied support," he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is getting ready to place Teams meeting reminders on the Start menu in Windows 11. From a report: The software giant has started testing a new build of Windows 11 with Dev Channel testers that includes a Teams meeting reminder in the recommended section of the Start menu. Microsoft is also testing an improved way to instantly access new photos and screenshots from Android devices. [...] The Teams meeting reminders will be displayed alongside the regular recently used and recommended file list on the Start menu, and they won't be displayed for non-business users of Windows 11.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new survey of thousands of game development professionals finds a near-majority saying generative AI tools are already in use at their workplace. But a significant minority of developers say their company has no interest in generative AI tools or has outright banned their use. From a report: The Game Developers Conference's 2024 State of the Industry report, released Thursday, aggregates the thoughts of over 3,000 industry professionals as of last October. While the annual survey (conducted in conjunction with research partner Omdia) has been running for 12 years, this is the first time respondents were asked directly about their use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, GitHub Copilot, and Adobe Generative Fill. Forty-nine percent of the survey's developer respondents said that generative AI tools are currently being used in their workplace. That near-majority includes 31 percent (of all respondents) that say they use those tools themselves and 18 percent that say their colleagues do. The survey also found that different studio departments showed different levels of willingness to embrace AI tools. Forty-four percent of employees in business and finance said they were using AI tools, for instance, compared to just 16 percent in visual arts and 13 percent in "narrative/writing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The credibility of the Cop28 agreement to "transition away" from fossil fuels rides on the world's biggest historical polluters like the US, UK and Canada rethinking current plans to expand oil and gas production, according to the climate negotiator representing 135 developing countries. The Guardian: In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Pedro Pedroso, the outgoing president of the G77 plus China bloc of developing countries, warned that the landmark deal made at last year's climate talks in Dubai risked failing. "We achieved some important outcomes at Cop28 but the challenge now is how we translate the deal into meaningful action for the people," Pedroso said. "As we speak, unless we lie to ourselves, none of the major developed countries, who are the most important historical emitters, have policies that are moving away from fossil fuels, on the contrary, they are expanding," said Pedroso. These countries must also deliver adequate finance for poorer nations to transition -and adapt to the climate crisis. In Dubai, Sultan Al Jaber, Cop28 president and chief of the Emirates national oil company, was subject to widespread scrutiny -- understandable given that the UAE is the world's seventh biggest oil producer with the fifth largest gas reserves. Yet the US was by far the biggest oil and gas producer in the world last year -- setting a new record, during a year that was the hottest ever recorded. The US, UK, Canada, Australia and Norway account for 51% of the total planned oil and gas expansion by 2050, according to research by Oil Change International. "It's very easy to label some emerging economies, especially the Gulf states, as climate villains, but this is very unfair by countries with historic responsibilities -- who keep trying to scapegoat and deviate the attention away from themselves. Just look at US fossil fuel plans and the UK's new drilling licenses for the North Sea, and Canada which has never met any of its emission reduction goals, not once," said Pedroso, a Cuban diplomat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Rockmore, the director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Sciences at Dartmouth College, writing for The New Yorker: Recently, statistical modelling has taken on a new kind of importance as the engine of artificial intelligence -- specifically in the form of the deep neural networks that power, among other things, large language models, such as OpenAI's G.P.T.s. These systems sift vast corpora of text to create a statistical model of written expression, realized as the likelihood of given words occurring in particular contexts. Rather than trying to encode a principled theory of how we produce writing, they are a vertiginous form of curve fitting; the largest models find the best ways to connect hundreds of thousands of simple mathematical neurons, using trillions of parameters.They create a vast data structure akin to a tangle of Christmas lights whose on-off patterns attempt to capture a chunk of historical word usage. The neurons derive from mathematical models of biological neurons originally formulated by Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, in a landmark 1943 paper, titled "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity." McCulloch and Pitts argued that brain activity could be reduced to a model of simple, interconnected processing units, receiving and sending zeros and ones among themselves based on relatively simple rules of activation and deactivation. The McCulloch-Pitts model was intended as a foundational step in a larger project, spearheaded by McCulloch, to uncover a biological foundation of psychiatry. McCulloch and Pitts never imagined that their cartoon neurons could be trained, using data, so that their on-off states linked to certain properties in that data. But others saw this possibility, and early machine-learning researchers experimented with small networks of mathematical neurons, effectively creating mathematical models of the neural architecture of simple brains, not to do psychiatry but to categorize data. The results were a good deal less than astonishing. It wasn't until vast amounts of good data -- like text -- became readily available that computer scientists discovered how powerful their models could be when implemented on vast scales. The predictive and generative abilities of these models in many contexts is beyond remarkable. Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of understanding just how they do what they do. A new field, called interpretability (or X-A.I., for "explainable" A.I.), is effectively the neuroscience of artificial neural networks. This is an instructive origin story for a field of research. The field begins with a focus on a basic and well-defined underlying mechanism -- the activity of a single neuron. Then, as the technology scales, it grows in opacity; as the scope of the field's success widens, so does the ambition of its claims. The contrast with climate modelling is telling. Climate models have expanded in scale and reach, but at each step the models must hew to a ground truth of historical, measurable fact. Even models of covid or elections need to be measured against external data. The success of deep learning is different. Trillions of parameters are fine-tuned on larger and larger corpora that uncover more and more correlations across a range of phenomena. The success of this data-driven approach isn't without danger. We run the risk of conflating success on well-defined tasks with an understanding of the underlying phenomenon -- thought -- that motivated the models in the first place. Part of the problem is that, in many cases, we actually want to use models as replacements for thinking. That's the raison detre of modelling -- substitution. It's useful to recall the story of Icarus. If only he had just done his flying well below the sun. The fact that his wings worked near sea level didn't mean they were a good design for the upper atmosphere. If we don't understand how a model works, then we aren't in a good position to know its limitations until something goes wrong. By then it might be too late. Eugene Wigner, the physicist who noted the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics," restricted his awe and wonder to its ability to describe the inanimate world. Mathematics proceeds according to its own internal logic, and so it's striking that its conclusions apply to the physical universe; at the same time, how they play out varies more the further that we stray from physics. Math can help us shine a light on dark worlds, but we should look critically, always asking why the math is so effective, recognizing where it isn't, and pushing on the places in between.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Airbus cemented its position last week as the world's biggest plane maker for the fifth straight year, announcing that it had delivered more aircraft and secured more orders than Boeing in 2023. At the same time, Boeing was trying to put out a huge public-relations and safety crisis caused by a harrowing near disaster involving its 737 Max line of airliners. In the long-running duel between the two aviation rivals, Airbus has pulled far ahead. The New York Times: "What used to be a duopoly has become two-thirds Airbus, one-third Boeing," said Richard Aboulafia, the managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory in Washington, D.C. "A lot of people, whether investors, financiers or customers, are looking at Airbus and seeing a company run by competent people," he said. "The contrast with Boeing is fairly profound." The incident involving the 737 Max 9, in which a hole blew open in the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines flight in midair, was the latest in a string of safety lapses in Boeing's workhorse aircraft -- including two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 -- that are indirectly helping propel the fortunes of the European aerospace giant. As the Federal Aviation Administration widens its scrutiny of Max 9 production, Airbus's edge is likely to sharpen. Airlines are embarking on massive expansions of their fleets to meet a postpandemic surge in the demand for global air travel, and are considering which company to turn to.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple committed to address antitrust concerns posed by the European Commission surrounding its popular Apple Pay app, including allowing access to third-party mobile wallet and payment services. WSJ: The U.S. tech giant has agreed to allow companies' apps to make contactless payments on devices that use the iOS system, such as iPhones, for free without the need to use Apple Pay or Apple Wallet, the EU's executive arm said Friday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an essay: No one clicks a webpage hoping to learn which cat can haz cheeseburger. Weirdos, maybe. Sickos. No, we get our content from a For You Page now -- algorithmically selected videos and images made by our favorite creators, produced explicitly for our preferred platform. Which platform doesn't matter much. So long as it's one of the big five. Creators churn out content for all of them. It's a technical marvel, that internet. Something so mindblowingly impressive that if you showed it to someone even thirty years ago, their face would melt the fuck off. So why does it feel like something's missing? Why are we all so collectively unhappy with the state of the web? A tweet went viral this Thanksgiving when a Twitter user posed a question to their followers. (The tweet said: "It feels like there are no websites anymore. There used to be so many websites you could go on. Where did all the websites go?") A peek at the comments, and I could only assume the tweet struck a nerve. Everyone had their own answer. Some comments blamed the app-ification of the web. "Everything is an app now!," one user replied. Others point to the death of Adobe Flash and how so many sites and games died along with it. Everyone agrees that websites have indeed vanished, and we all miss the days we were free to visit them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.