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A Nobel Prize-winning labor market economist has cautioned younger generations against piling into studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects, saying as "empathetic" and creative skills may thrive in a world dominated by artificial intelligence. From a report: Christopher Pissarides, professor of economics at the London School of Economics, said that workers in certain IT jobs risk sowing their "own seeds of self-destruction" by advancing AI that will eventually take the same jobs in the future. While Pissarides is an optimist on AI's overall impact on the jobs market, he raised concerns for those taking STEM subjects hoping to ride the coattails of the technological advances. He said that despite rapid growth in the demand for STEM skills currently, jobs requiring more traditional face-to-face skills, such as in hospitality and healthcare, will still dominate the jobs market. "The skills that are needed now -- to collect the data, collate it, develop it, and use it to develop the next phase of AI or more to the point make AI more applicable for jobs -- will make the skills that are needed now obsolete because it will be doing the job," he said in an interview. "Despite the fact that you see growth, they're still not as numerous as might be required to have jobs for all those graduates coming out with STEM because that's what they want to do." He added, "This demand for these new IT skills, they contain their own seeds of self destruction."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple broke from its 12-year tradition of annual iPad updates, releasing no new models in 2023 - a first since the product line debuted in 2010 when it rapidly became the tablet market leader. The last launch was in October 2022, with the only 2023 iPad-related release being a USB-C Apple Pencil.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steam: As of January 1 2024, Steam has officially stopped supporting the Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 operating systems. After that date, existing Steam Client installations on these operating systems will no longer receive updates of any kind including security updates. Steam Support will be unable to offer users technical support for issues related to the old operating systems, and Steam will be unable to guarantee continued functionality of Steam on the unsupported operating system versions. In order to ensure continued operation of Steam and any games or other products purchased through Steam, users should update to a more recent version of Windows. We expect the Steam client and games on these older operating systems to continue running for some time without updates after January 1st, 2024, but we are unable to guarantee continued functionality after that date. The Verge adds: 95.57 percent of surveyed Steam users are already on Windows 10 and 11, with nearly 2 percent of the remainder on Linux and 1.5 percent on Mac -- so we may be talking about fewer than 1 percent of users on these older Windows builds. Older versions of MacOS will also lose support on February 15th, just a month and a half from now.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple faces mounting regulatory scrutiny that threatens over $85 billion in annual services revenue. An antitrust trial against Google in the U.S. revealed multi-billion dollar payments to Apple to be the iPhone's default search engine. A plaintiff victory may halt the payments, estimated at one-quarter of Apple's services income. Meanwhile, Apple's App Store dominance draws Biden administration and EU oversight, with the EU enforcing changes. The landmark Google case and actions across Apple's two biggest markets represent growing legal and regulatory headwinds challenging the company's services growth strategy. FT adds: In the EU, Apple is preparing to allow "sideloading," which enables iPhone users to bypass its store and download apps from elsewhere. This will breach, for the first time, the walled-off ecosystem that the company has protected since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007. Apple has dragged its feet on this issue, since it maintains the practice will create security risks to its system. Sideloading could have an impact on the App Store, where Apple charges developers as much as a 30 per cent fee on digital purchases. Games account for more than half of that revenue. Google's Play Store, which charges a similar fee, is also in the spotlight after it lost a landmark trial against Epic Games in California in December. Apple draws between $6bn and $7bn in commission fees from the App Store globally each quarter, according to Sensor Tower estimates. Competitors are pushing to earn some of that share and launch rival app stores and payment methods on Apple devices. Microsoft is talking to partners about launching its own mobile store.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nikon, Sony Group and Canon are developing camera technology that embeds digital signatures in images so that they can be distinguished from increasingly sophisticated fakes. From a report: Nikon will offer mirrorless cameras with authentication technology for photojournalists and other professionals. The tamper-resistant digital signatures will include such information as date, time, location and photographer. Such efforts come as ever-more-realistic fakes appear, testing the judgment of content producers and users alike. An alliance of global news organizations, technology companies and camera makers has launched a web-based tool called Verify for checking images free of charge. If an image has a digital signature, the site displays date, location and other credentials. The digital signatures now share a global standard used by Nikon, Sony and Canon. Japanese companies control around 90% of the global camera market. If an image has been created with artificial intelligence or tampered with, the Verify tool flags it as having "No Content Credentials."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every large smartphone maker except Apple is betting that "foldable" phones will help revive a lacklustre mobile market, despite the devices still largely failing to attract mainstream consumers. From a report: Foldables, which have a screen that opens like a book or compact mirror, barely exceed a 1 per cent market share of all smartphones sold globally almost five years after they were first introduced. But Samsung has doubled down on the product, investing heavily in marketing this year. In July, the Korean group released its 5G Galaxy Z series. The world's largest smartphone manufacturer points to estimates from Counterpoint Research that foldable devices may surpass a third of all smartphones costing more than $600 by 2027. Other handset makers such as Motorola, China's Huawei and its spin-off Honor are also pinning their hopes on the product helping to revive a market that suffered its worst year for more than a decade. "This is the year people [in the industry] really dived in," said Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight. "Everybody now is betting on this, except Apple." The iPhone-maker has yet to show any interest in the category, though patent filings suggest it may one day introduce an iPad that folds in half. Every other big smartphone maker has followed Samsung into the market, including Google's Pixel Fold and Chinese alternatives from Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI represents a mixed blessing for the legal field, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said in a year-end report published on Sunday, urging "caution and humility" as the evolving technology transforms how judges and lawyers go about their work. From a report: Roberts struck an ambivalent tone in his 13-page report. He said AI had potential to increase access to justice for indigent litigants, revolutionize legal research and assist courts in resolving cases more quickly and cheaply while also pointing to privacy concerns and the current technology's inability to replicate human discretion. "I predict that human judges will be around for a while," Roberts wrote. "But with equal confidence I predict that judicial work - particularly at the trial level - will be significantly affected by AI." The chief justice's commentary is his most significant discussion to date of the influence of AI on the law, and coincides with a number of lower courts contending with how best to adapt to a new technology capable of passing the bar exam but also prone to generating fictitious content, known as "hallucinations." Roberts emphasized that "any use of AI requires caution and humility." He mentioned an instance where AI hallucinations had led lawyers to cite non-existent cases in court papers, which the chief justice said is "always a bad idea." Roberts did not elaborate beyond saying the phenomenon "made headlines this year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India launched its first satellite on Monday to study black holes as it seeks to deepen its space exploration efforts ahead of an ambitious crewed mission next year. From a report: The spacecraft, named X-ray Polarimeter Satellite, was propelled into an orbit of 350 kilometers from an island near India's main spaceport of Sriharikota, off the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, according to S. Somanath, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation. The satellite, weighing about 470 kilograms, will carry out research on X-rays emanating from around 50 celestial objects with the help of two payloads built by ISRO and a Bengaluru-based research institute. NASA launched a similar mission, the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, in 2021 to answer questions such as why black holes spin and build on the findings of its flagship telescope Chandra X-ray Observatory that blasted off more than two decades ago. China's National Space Administration launched the country's first X-ray space telescope to observe black holes, pulsars and gamma-ray bursts in 2017.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hope Thelps writes: A number of films including the earliest ones featuring Mickey and Minnie Mouse finally enterd the public domain today.The BBC reports:Steamboat Willie, a 1928 short film featuring early non-speaking versions of Mickey and Minnie, is widely seen as the moment that transformed Disney's fortunes and made cinema history. Their images are now available to the public in the US, after Disney's copyright expired. It means creatives like cartoonists can now rework and use the earliest versions of Mickey and Minnie. In fact, anyone can use those versions without permission or cost. But Disney warned that more modern versions of Mickey are still covered by copyright. 'We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright,' the company said. US copyright law says the rights to characters can be held for 95 years, which means the characters in Steamboat Willie entered the public domain on Monday, 1 January 2024. Those works can now legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled. The early versions of Mickey and Minnie are just two of the works entering the public domain in the US on New Year's Day. Other famous films, books, music and characters from 1928 are now also available to the American public. They include Charlie Chaplin's silent romantic comedy The Circus; English author AA Milne's book The House at Pooh Corner, which introduced the character Tigger; Virginia Woolf's Orlando; and DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The number of 18-year-olds in Japan totaled a record low of 1.06 million as of Monday, a government estimate showed, as the country continues to grapple with a falling birthrate. From a report: The number of those that have reached Japan's legal adult age fell by 60,000 from 2023 and accounted for 0.86% of Japan's total population, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said Sunday. The year 2005, when the new adults were born, had seen the country's total fertility rate -- the average number of children a woman is estimated to bear in her lifetime -- fall to a record-low 1.26, later matched by that of 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vizio has agreed to $3 million settlement over allegations it misled consumers on TV refresh rates. The TV maker denies wrongdoing but will cease advertising on "effective" refresh rates. Eligible buyers have until March 2024 to file claims and submit proof of purchase. Settlement includes enhanced one-year warranties. The Verge adds: TV makers often use marketing terms like "effective refresh rate" to refer to motion smoothing features, often called the "soap opera effect," that are intended to reduce motion blur on modern TVs. Motion smoothing is already controversial enough on its own, but companies like Vizio can be frustratingly casual with refresh rate terminology in their marketing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the country's most influential courts has asked the nation's top securities regulator for its views on an uncomfortable subject: whether audit reports by outside accounting firms actually matter. From a report: The court already ruled that, at least in one case, they didn't. That case, where an insurer overstated profits and an auditor signed off on its books, led to an investor lawsuit against the auditor that was dismissed. In its ruling, the court said the audit report was so general an investor wouldn't have relied on it. The decision could have broad ramifications for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees corporate financial disclosures, and for the auditing industry, which charged about $17 billion last year for blessing the books of publicly listed companies in the U.S. The ruling, by a three-judge panel of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, prompted three former SEC officials to tell the court it got the answer wrong. They asked the court to reconsider its decision, noting that the SEC in a previous enforcement case had said that "few matters could be more important to investors" than whether a company's financial statements had been subjected to a properly conducted annual audit. The court responded by inviting the SEC to file a brief expressing its views on the former officials' arguments. The SEC in a court filing said that "the commission has an interest in ensuring its views on this issue are considered by the court." Its brief is due Feb. 16. The court ruling involved a lawsuit by investors over an audit gone wrong. AmTrust Financial Services, an insurance company, had overstated its profit, and BDO USA, its outside accounting firm, had blessed the numbers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The events of 2023 showed that A.I. doesn't need to be that good in order to do damage," argues novelist Lincoln Michel in the New Republic:This March, news broke that the latest artificial intelligence models could pass the LSAT, SAT, and AP exams. It sparked another round of A.I. panic. The machines, it seemed, were already at peak human ability. Around that time, I conducted my own, more modest test. I asked a couple of A.I. programs to "write a six-word story about baby shoes," riffing on the famous (if apocryphal) Hemingway story. They failed but not in the way I expected. Bard gave me five words, and ChatGPT produced eight. I tried again, specifying "exactly six words," and received eight and then four words. What did it mean that A.I. could best top-tier lawyers yet fail preschool math? A year since the launch of ChatGPT, I wonder if the answer isn't just what it seems: A.I. is simultaneously impressive and pretty dumb. Maybe not as dumb as the NFT apes or Zuckerberg's Metaverse cubicle simulator, which Silicon Valley also promised would revolutionize all aspects of life. But at least half-dumb. One day A.I. passes the bar exam, and the next, lawyers are being fined for citing A.I.-invented laws. One second it's "the end of writing," the next it's recommending recipes for "mosquito-repellant roast potatoes." At best, A.I. is a mixed bag. (Since "artificial intelligence" is an intentionally vague term, I should specify I'm discussing "generative A.I." programs like ChatGPT and MidJourney that create text, images, and audio. Credit where credit is due: Branding unthinking, error-prone algorithms as "artificial intelligence" was a brilliant marketing coup).... The legal questions will be settled in court, and the discourse tends to get bogged down in semantic debates about "plagiarism" and "originality," but the essential truth of A.I. is clear: The largest corporations on earth ripped off generations of artists without permission or compensation to produce programs meant to rip us off even more. I believe A.I. defenders know this is unethical, which is why they distract us with fan fiction about the future. If A.I. is the key to a gleaming utopia or else robot-induced extinction, what does it matter if a few poets and painters got bilked along the way? It's possible a souped-up Microsoft Clippy will morph into SkyNet in a couple of years. It's also possible the technology plateaus, like how self-driving cars are perpetually a few years away from taking over our roads. Even if the technology advances, A.I. costs lots of money, and once investors stop subsidizing its use, A.I. - or at least quality A.I. - may prove cost-prohibitive for most tasks.... A year into ChatGPT, I'm less concerned A.I. will replace human artists anytime soon. Some enjoy using A.I. themselves, but I'm not sure many want to consume (much less pay for) A.I. "art" generated by others. The much-hyped A.I.-authored books have been flops, and few readers are flocking to websites that pivoted to A.I. Last month, Sports Illustrated was so embarrassed by a report they published A.I. articles that they apologized and promised to investigate. Say what you want about NFTs, but at least people were willing to pay for them. "A.I. can write book reviews no one reads of A.I. novels no one buys, generate playlists no one listens to of A.I. songs no one hears, and create A.I. images no one looks at for websites no one visits. "This seems to be the future A.I. promises. Endless content generated by robots, enjoyed by no one, clogging up everything, and wasting everyone's time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This summer 80 million Americans were experiencing 105-degree heat. And tonight the Washington Post identifies what was unique about 2023's weather: "the heat's all-consuming relentlessness. "It went day by day, continent by continent, until people all over the map, whether in the Amazon or the Pacific islands or rural Greece, had glimpsed a climate future for which they are not prepared..."Even if its extremes are ultimately eclipsed, as seems inevitable, 2023 will mark a point when humanity crossed into a new climate era - an age of "global boiling," as United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called it. The year included the hottest single day on record (July 6) and the hottest ever month (July), not to mention the hottest June, the hottest August, the hottest September, the hottest October, the hottest November, and probably the hottest December. It included a day, November 17, when global temperatures, for the first time ever, reached 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial levels. Discomfort, destruction, and death are the legacy of those records. In Phoenix, a heat wave went on for so long, with 31 consecutive days above 110 Fahrenheit, that one NASA atmospheric scientist called it "mind-boggling." The surrounding county recorded a record number of heat deaths, nearly 600. In Brazil, drought sapped the normally lush Amazon, causing towns to ration drinking water, contributing to the deaths of endangered pink dolphins, and choking off the river-based system of travel and commerce... At one point the coastal Florida Keys waters reached 100 degrees, comparable to a hot tub... One explanation for 2023's extreme heat is El Nino - a recurring oceanic phenomenon that warms the waters in the Pacific and causes a global ripple of consequences. But the scale of this year's heat - amplified by human-caused factors and the burning of fossil fuels - is still well beyond what most scientists had thought possible. Some have theorized that planetary warming may be accelerating. Others have said there's not enough evidence. What they agree upon, though, is that the earth is trending toward more extreme heat. That means that the experiences of 2023 can seem astonishing in the short-term but will one day look tame. This year, then, will wind up as the first - and almost surely not the last - in which temperatures were at or near 1.5 Celsius above preindustrial levels, a threshold the Paris agreement has aimed to avoid. The article includes two more sobering statistics:"The University of Maine's Climate Change Institute logs daily global temperatures going back to 1940. From this July on, almost without fail, every daily temperature in 2023 topped the daily temperature from the same date in any of the prior 83 years.""In Brazil, the Rio Negro, one of the Amazon's main tributaries, fell to its lowest level since record keeping began more than a century earlier."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot's 10 most-visited stories of 2023 seemed to touch on all the themes of the year, with a story about AI, two about electric cars, two stories about Linux, and two about the Rust programming language. And at the top of this list, the #1 story of the year drew over 100,000 views... Can California's Power Grid Handle a 15x Increase in Electric Cars? Linux Desktop Powers Consider Uniting For an App Store Conservatives Bombarded With Facebook Misinformation Far More Than Liberals In 2020 Election, Study Suggests 'sudo' and 'su' Are Being Rewritten In Rust For Memory Safety Ask Slashdot: Where Can You Buy a Desktop PC That Makes Linux Easy to Install? Unix Pioneer Ken Thompson Announces He's Switching From Mac To Linux Rust Safety Is Not Superior To C++, Bjarne Stroustrup Says 'Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need To Shut It All Down' Truck Thief Gunned Down by Owner After AirTag Gives Away Location Symbolic Wyoming Proposal Urges Voluntary Phase-out of EV Purchases by 2035 Interestingly, a story that ran on New Year's Eve of 2022 attracted so much traffic, it would've been the second-most visited story for all of 2023 - if it had run just a few hours later. That story? Systemd's Growth Over 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"This year has been a major turning point in American health care," reports USA Today, "and patients can anticipate several major developments in the new year," including the beginning of a CRISPR "revolution" and "a new reckoning with drug prices that could change the landscape of the U.S. health care system for decades to come."Health care officials expect 2024 to bring a wave of innovation and change in medicine, treatment and public health... Many think 2024 could be the year more people have the tools to follow through on New Year's resolutions about weight loss. If they can afford them and manage to stick with them, people can turn to a new generation of remarkably effective weight-loss drugs, also called GLP-1s, which offer the potential for substantial weight loss... In 2023, mental health issues became among the nation's most deadly, costly and pervasive health crises... The dearth of remedies has also paved the way for an unsuspecting class of drugs: psychedelics. MDMA, a party drug commonly known as "ecstasy," could win approval for legal distribution in 2024, as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Another psychedelic, a ketamine derivative eskatemine, sold as Spravato, was approved in 2019 to treat depression, but it is being treated like a conventional therapy that must be dosed regularly, not like a psychedelic that provides a long-lasting learning experience, said Matthew Johnson, an expert in psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University. MDMA (midomafetamine capsules) would be different, as the first true psychedelic to win FDA approval. In a late-stage trial of patients with moderate or severe post-traumatic stress disorder, close to 90% showed clinically significant improvements four months after three treatments with MDMA and more than 70% no longer met the criteria for having the disorder, which represented "really impressive results," according to Matthew Johnson, an expert in psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Psilocybin, known colloquially as "magic mushrooms," is also working its way through the federal approval process, but it likely won't come up before officials for another year, Johnson said. Psychedelics are something to keep an eye on in the future, as they're being used to treat an array of mental health issues: eskatimine for depression, MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for addiction. Johnson said his research suggests that psychedelics will probably have a generalizable benefit across many mental health challenges in the years to come. 2024 will also be the first year America's drug-makers face new limits on how much they can increase prices for drugs covered by the federal health insurance program Medicare.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On December 15 GitHub declared end-of-life for its "hackable text editor" Atom. But Long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM wants to remind everyone that after the announcement of Atom's sunset, "the community came together to keep Atom alive." First there was the longstanding fork Atom-Community. But "due to differences in long-term goals for the editor, a new version was born: Pulsar." From the Pulsar web site:Pulsar [sometimes referred to as Pulsar-Edit] aims to not only reach feature parity with the original Atom, but to bring Pulsar into the 21st century by updating the underlying architecture, and supporting modern features. With many new features on the roadmap, once Pulsar is stable, it will be a true, Community-Based, Hackable, Text Editor. "Of course, the user interface is much of the same," writes the blog Its FOSS, and it's cross-platform (supporting Linux, macOS, and Windows). "The essentials seem to be there with the documentation, packages, and features like the ability to install packages from Git repositories..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren has asked NASA to delay a scheduled launch to the Moon that could include cremated remains," reports Arizona Public Radio station KNAU:Nygren says he recently learned of the January 8 launch of the Vulcan Centaur carrying the Peregrine Mission One. The lander will carry some payloads from a company known to provide memorial services by shipping human cremated remains to the Moon. Nygren wants the launch delayed and the tribe consulted immediately. He noted the Moon is sacred to numerous Indigenous cultures and that depositing human remains on it is "tantamount to desecration." NASA previously came under fire after the ashes of former geologist and planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker were sent to the Moon in 1998. Then-Navajo Nation President Albert Hale said the action was a gross insensitivity to the beliefs of many Native Americans. NASA later apologized and promised to consult with tribes before authorizing any similar missions in the future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"For several years, thousands more high-earning, well-educated workers have left California than have moved in," reports the Los Angeles Times:Even though California has experienced lopsided out-migration for decades, the financial blow has been cushioned by the kinds of people moving into the state: The newcomers were generally better educated and earned more money than those who left. Not now: That long-standing trend has reversed... The reversal, largely in response to the state's high taxes and soaring cost of living, has begun to damage California's overall economy. And, by cutting into tax revenues, has delivered punishing blows to state and local governments. State budget analysts recently projected a record $68 billion deficit in the next fiscal year because of a 25% drop in personal income tax collection in 2023. Some city, county and other local taxing authorities, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, have also recorded revenue declines. With investors and high-income taxpayers receiving substantial compensation in the form of stocks, last year's sluggish stock market accounted for a major share of the decline in state income tax revenues. So did layoffs and financial weakness in the tech sector. But rising unemployment in the state and the growing flight of professionals, business operators and others making good salaries were also notable contributors. And those factors will be harder to reverse, at least in the foreseeable future. "There's a price to pay for the movement of middle- and upper-income people and corporations," said Joel Kotkin, a fellow at Chapman University who has researched the flight from California and the resulting threat to the state's fiscal outlook. "People who are leaving are taking their tax dollars with them." The accelerating exodus from California in recent years, of both companies and people, has been well documented. The pandemic-induced rise in remote work, inflated housing prices and changing social conditions have spurred more Californians to pull up stakes... Moody's Analytics economist Mark Zandi analyzed moves in and out of California for The Times using Equifax credit data, to zero in on the age of the movers. He found that since the pandemic in early 2020, California has lost residents in every age group, but by a significant margin the biggest net out-migration came from those 35 to 44 years old. "This is probably motivated by the severe housing affordability crisis in California," Zandi said. "It's all but impossible for them to become homeowners in the state." Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, who has written about demographic trends in migration, thinks the increased loss of higher-educated Californians to other states in recent years can be traced in significant part to the rise of remote work since the pandemic. As more employers call workers back to the office, and the share of fully remote work appears to have settled at around 10% of all employees, McGhee expects the net out-migration from California to slow... Even if the outflow of residents reverts to pre-pandemic levels, the broader economic climate doesn't bode well for the state's budget and economic outlook, at least in the immediate future. The U.S. economy is slowing, and California's economy is decelerating faster than the nation's, with the state's unemployment rate, most recently at 4.8%, already a full point higher than nationwide. The article clarifies that "it's not just the sheer numbers of people who have left. What's different is that in each of the prior two years, more than 250,000 Californians with at least a bachelor's degree moved out, while an average of 175,000 college graduates from other states settled in California, according to an analysis of census data by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. In prior periods over the last two decades, that balance was about even or slightly in California's favor." And besides billionaires, "There's been a broader exodus of ordinary Californians in the upper-income spectrum as well. In the tax filing years 2020 and 2021, the average gross income of taxpayers who had moved from California to another state was about $137,000. That was up from $75,000 in 2015 and 2016, according to migration and personal income data from the Internal Revenue Service."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"For several years, thousands more high-earning, well-educated workers have left California than have moved in," reports the Los Angeles Times:Even though California has experienced lopsided out-migration for decades, the financial blow has been cushioned by the kinds of people moving into the state: The newcomers were generally better educated and earned more money than those who left. Not now: That long-standing trend has reversed... The reversal, largely in response to the state's high taxes and soaring cost of living, has begun to damage California's overall economy. And, by cutting into tax revenues, has delivered punishing blows to state and local governments. State budget analysts recently projected a record $68 billion deficit in the next fiscal year because of a 25% drop in personal income tax collection in 2023. Some city, county and other local taxing authorities, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, have also recorded revenue declines. With investors and high-income taxpayers receiving substantial compensation in the form of stocks, last year's sluggish stock market accounted for a major share of the decline in state income tax revenues. So did layoffs and financial weakness in the tech sector. But rising unemployment in the state and the growing flight of professionals, business operators and others making good salaries were also notable contributors. And those factors will be harder to reverse, at least in the foreseeable future. "There's a price to pay for the movement of middle- and upper-income people and corporations," said Joel Kotkin, a fellow at Chapman University who has researched the flight from California and the resulting threat to the state's fiscal outlook. "People who are leaving are taking their tax dollars with them." The accelerating exodus from California in recent years, of both companies and people, has been well documented. The pandemic-induced rise in remote work, inflated housing prices and changing social conditions have spurred more Californians to pull up stakes... Moody's Analytics economist Mark Zandi analyzed moves in and out of California for The Times using Equifax credit data, to zero in on the age of the movers. He found that since the pandemic in early 2020, California has lost residents in every age group, but by a significant margin the biggest net out-migration came from those 35 to 44 years old. "This is probably motivated by the severe housing affordability crisis in California," Zandi said. "It's all but impossible for them to become homeowners in the state." Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, who has written about demographic trends in migration, thinks the increased loss of higher-educated Californians to other states in recent years can be traced in significant part to the rise of remote work since the pandemic. As more employers call workers back to the office, and the share of fully remote work appears to have settled at around 10% of all employees, McGhee expects the net out-migration from California to slow... Even if the outflow of residents reverts to pre-pandemic levels, the broader economic climate doesn't bode well for the state's budget and economic outlook, at least in the immediate future. The U.S. economy is slowing, and California's economy is decelerating faster than the nation's, with the state's unemployment rate, most recently at 4.8%, already a full point higher than nationwide. The article clarifies that "it's not just the sheer numbers of people who have left. What's different is that in each of the prior two years, more than 250,000 Californians with at least a bachelor's degree moved out, while an average of 175,000 college graduates from other states settled in California, according to an analysis of census data by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. In prior periods over the last two decades, that balance was about even or slightly in California's favor." And besides billionaires, "There's been a broader exodus of ordinary Californians in the upper-income spectrum as well. In the tax filing years 2020 and 2021, the average gross income of taxpayers who had moved from California to another state was about $137,000. That was up from $75,000 in 2015 and 2016, according to migration and personal income data from the Internal Revenue Service."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Forbes writes: "I am not sure there could have been a more ignominious end to the DCEU."Aquaman 2 opened with $27.7 million domestically, well under half the $67.8 million opening for the original Aquaman. But it's the overall box office totals that are especially dire, as the film has made just over $138.5 million worldwide. That is about 12% of Aquaman 1's final total of $1.1 billion in 2018, where it is the DCEU's highest grossing entry. The counter to this is that it perhaps is too soon to run these numbers, as it just came out right? Well, a few extra factors to consider. It is already out in a ton of major markets, so there are relatively few potential surges that can still happen outside places like Korea and New Zealand, which can only add so much. Most importantly Aquaman 2 has already launched in China, where it made $30 million in its opening, again, far below the original's opening at $93 million there, doing even worse there than domestically, in context. Aquaman 1 went on to make $292 million in China, a figure Aquaman 2 will not come within a mile of. Next, what DC, and many blockbusters, have been doing lately are these incredibly short theatrical windows, so the clock is ticking quickly... Of course this is not exclusive to DC, as we have an extremely direct comparison over at Marvel with The Marvels, which at a $205.6 million global gross, the final figure, that is 18% of Captain Marvel's $1.13 billion total. Aquaman 2 has the advantage of being a true sequel, not a team-up piece from other TV shows you theoretically needed to watch beforehand, but it also has the disadvantage of being the last dying gasp of the DCEU coming after a string of other high profile box office failures from Shazam 2 to Blue Beetle. There was really no way it was going to avoid its fate, even if it did review well (which it didn't, as at 35% on Rotten Tomatoes, it's one of the DCEU's lowest rated films).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time tech entrepreneur Anil Dash predicts a big shift in the digital landscape in 2024. And "regular internet users - not just the world's tech tycoons - may be the ones who decide how it goes."The first thing to understand about this new era of the internet is that power is, undoubtedly, shifting. For example, regulators are now part of the story - an ironic shift for anyone who was around in the dot com days. In the E.U., tech giants like Apple are being forced to hold their noses and embrace mandated changes like opening up their devices to allow alternate app stores to provide apps to consumers. This could be good news, increasing consumer choice and possibly enabling different business models - how about mobile games that aren't constantly pestering gamers for in-app purchases? Back in the U.S., a shocking judgment in Epic Games' (that's the Fortnite folks') lawsuit against Google leaves us with the promise that Android phones might open up in a similar way. That's not just good news for the billions of people who own smartphones. It's part of a sea change for the coders and designers who build the apps, sites, and games we all use. For an entire generation, the imagination of people making the web has been hemmed in by the control of a handful of giant companies that have had enormous control over things like search results, or app stores, or ad platforms, or payment systems. Going back to the more free-for-all nature of the Nineties internet could mean we see a proliferation of unexpected, strange new products and services. Back then, a lot of technology was created by local communities or people with a shared interest, and it was as likely that cool things would be invented by universities and non-profits and eccentric lone creators as they were to be made by giant corporations.... In that era, people could even make their own little social networks, so the conversations and content you found on an online forum or discussion were as likely to have been hosted by the efforts of one lone creator than to have come from some giant corporate conglomerate. It was a more democratized internet, and while the world can't return to that level of simplicity, we're seeing signs of a modern revisiting of some of those ideas. Dash's article (published in Rolling Stone) ends with examples of "people who had been quietly keeping the spirit of the human, personal, creative internet alive...seeing a resurgence now that the web is up for grabs again. "Digital artist Everest Pipkin The School for Poetic Computation (which Dash describes as "an eccentric, deeply charming, self-organized school for people who want to combine art and technology and a social conscience.") Mask On Zone, "a collaboration with the artist and coder Ritu Ghiya, which gives demonstrators and protesters in-context guidance on how to avoid surveillance."There's projects and tools from makers like Stefan Bohacek, Darius Kazemi, and Elan Kiderman Ullendorff (including Youtune ("a stream of relatively unviewed original songs posted to YouTube.")Dash concludes that "We're seeing the biggest return to that human-run, personal-scale web that we've witnessed since the turn of the millennium, with enough momentum that it's likely that 2024 is the first year since then that many people have the experience of making a new connection or seeing something go viral on a platform that's being run by a regular person instead of a commercial entity. "It's going to make a lot of new things possible..." A big thank-you for submitting the article to long-time Slashdot reader, DrunkenTerror.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While Gentoo Linux is best-known as source-based Linux distribution, "our package manager, Portage, already for years also has support for binary packages," according to its web page. It notes that source- and binary-based package installations can be freely mixed. But now...To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we're now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates - not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we've got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy! "We have a rather neat binary package guide on our Wiki that goes into much more detail..." the announcement points out. The packages are cryptographically signed with the same key as the stages. Thanks to Heraklit (Slashdot reader #29,346) for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Digital twin technology is one of the most significant disruptors of global manufacturing seen this century," argues Motor Trend, "and the automobile industry is embracing it in a big way."Roughly three-quarters of auto manufacturers are using digital twins as part of their vehicle development process, evolving not only how they design and develop new cars but also the way they monitor them, fix them, and even build them... Nvidia, best known for its consumer graphics cards, also has a digital twin solution, called Omniverse, which manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz are using to design their manufacturing processes. "Their factory planners now have every single element in the factory that they can then put in that virtual digital twin first, lay it all out, and then operate it," Danny Shapiro, VP of automotive at Nvidia said. At that point, those planners can run the entire manufacturing process virtually, ensuring every conveyor feeds the next step in the process, identifying and addressing factory floor headaches long before production begins... Software developers can run their solutions within digital twins. That includes the code at the lowest level, basic stuff that controls ignition timing within the engine for example, all the way up to the highest level, like touchscreens responding to user inputs. "We're not just simulating the operation outside the car, but the user experience," Nvidia's Shapiro said. "We can simulate and basically run the real software that would be running in that car and display it on the screens." By bringing all these systems together virtually, developers can find and solve issues earlier, preventing costly development delays or, worse yet, buggy releases... Using unique identifiers, manufacturers can effectively create internal digital copies of vehicles that have been produced. Those copies can be used for ongoing tests and verifications, helping to anticipate things like required maintenance or susceptibility to part failures. By using telematics, in-car services that remotely communicate a car's status back to the manufacturer in real-time, these digital twins can be updated to match the real thing. "By monitoring tire health, tire grip, vehicle weight distribution, and other critical parameters, engineers can anticipate potential problems and schedule maintenance proactively, reducing downtime and extending the vehicle's lifespan," Tactile Mobility's Tzur said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roy Longbottom worked for the U.K. covernment's Central Computer Agency from 1960 to 1993, and "from 1972 to 2022 I produced and ran computer benchmarking and stress testing programs..." Known as the official design authority for the Whetstone benchmark), Longbottom writes that "In 2019 (aged 84), I was recruited as a voluntary member of Raspberry Pi pre-release Alpha testing team." And this week - now at age 87 - Longbottom has created a web page titled "Cray 1 supercomputer performance comparisons with home computers, phones and tablets." And one statistic really captures the impact of our decades of technological progress. "In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader bobdevine for sharing the link.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What would happen if we built a concert venue in near-Earth orbit? A science policy journalist explores the question in the Washington Post:Forget U2 in the Las Vegas Sphere. Take me to a real concert in the round, where I can float 360 degrees around the stage, watching a guitarist shred from the perspective of a fly and inventing dance moves that Earth's gravity would forbid. Before you dismiss this as a hallucination, consider that we're on the cusp of a new era of space travel. Engineer and space architect Ariel Ekblaw, founder of MIT's Space Exploration Initiative, says that within a decade, a trip off the planet could become as accessible as a first-class airline ticket - and that, in 15 or 20 years, we can expect space hotels in near-Earth orbit. She's betting on it, having founded a nonprofit to design spherical, modular habitats that can assemble themselves in space so as to be lightweight and compact at launch, much like the James Webb Space Telescope that NASA vaulted into deep space two years ago. "The first era of space travel was about survival," she told me as I recently toured her lab. "We're transitioning now to build spaces that are friendlier and more welcoming so that people can thrive in space as opposed to just survive." There's no reason, Ekblaw said, that a concert hall can't be one of those structures. The article ultimately calls this "an impulse for space travel I can get behind: curiosity about who we are and what more we can create when we reach beyond Earth. This is the realm of not just scientists and engineers but of all kinds of dreamers. It's a rendition of space exploration that can engage anyone to imagine what's possible."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the year comes to a close, "one constant, reliable source of awe and beauty is the sky over our head..." writes astronomer Phil Plait in Scientific America "And every year we see new things, or old things in new ways, and I've been set the wonderful task of selecting my favorites and relaying them and their import to you."End-of-year lists, especially those displaying astronomical imagery, tend to be splashy and colorful. That's understandable, but what they sometimes miss are the more subtle photographs, those that hide momentous discoveries in minor visual details or offer fresh perspectives on familiar objects. They may not leap off the page, but they still have an impact. That's what I've kept in mind while sorting through this year's celestial treasure trove. This gallery is by no means complete, but it shows what I think are some of the most interesting astronomical portraits to have emerged in 2023. No gallery such as this would be complete without something from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), our newest infrared eye on the sky. This monster observatory has already brought so many small revolutions to astronomy that picking one from the past year is no small task. Should it be a baby star throwing an immense tantrum or a massive old star shedding material at colossal rates before it inevitably explodes as a supernova? Or should it be a map of a mind-stomping 100,000 galaxies? Well, how about something very, very different - such as the skeletal structure of a nearby galaxy's intricate web of dust [also displayed at the top of Scientiic American's article]...? [I]t has a beautiful spiral structure and shows the effects of a smaller galaxy colliding with it. In the phenomenally sharp and decidedly eerie false-color view from JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument, we see countless clouds of cosmic dust in a skeletonlike pattern. Each of these clouds is made up of small grains of rocky and sooty carbon-based molecules expelled by dying stars... Astronomers captured this image to better understand how stars are born in stellar nurseries and how they evolve over time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was a half a century ago that America passed legislation to protect vanishing species and their habitats - and since then, more than five dozen species have recovered. Just one example: In 1963 only 417 nesting pairs of bald eagles were found in the lower 48 states. But today there's more than 300,000 bald eagles, writes USA Today. "[T]hough its future remains uncertain, many experts say it remains one of the nation's crowning achievements." But 1,252 species are still listed as endangered in the U.S. - 486 animals, and 766 plants - with 417 more species categorized as "threatened."The perils of the changing climate add urgency to calls for increased funding and more protection. In North Carolina, for example, the rising sea steadily creeps over a refuge that's home to the sole remaining wild red wolf population. Off New England, warming waters forced changes in the foraging habits of the endangered North Atlantic right whale, putting the massive marine mammals in harm's way more often... One in 5 plant and animal species in the nation remain at risk of extinction, says Susan Holmes, executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition. "Loss of habitat and climate change are absolutely some of the most important threats that we have." "We are at what I would say is a pivotal moment with the threats of climate change," she said. "We have to act faster than ever in order to ensure that these species are going to thrive."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Electric cars are already upending America," argues a new article in the Atlantic, citing booming sales and new models that are "finally starting to push us into the post-gas age."Americans are on track to buy a record 1.44 million of them in 2023, according to a forecast by BloombergNEF, about the same number sold from 2016 to 2021 total. "This was the year that EVs went from experiments, or technological demonstrations, and became mature vehicles," Gil Tal, the director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, told me.... Nearly 40 new EVs have debuted since the start of 2022, and they are far more advanced than their ancestors. For $40,000, the Hyundai Ioniq 6, released this year, can get you 360 miles on a single charge; in 2018, for only a slightly lower cost, a Nissan Leaf couldn't go half that distance.... All of these EVs are genuinely great for the planet, spewing zero carbon from their tailpipes, but that's only a small part of what makes them different. In the EV age, cars are no longer just cars. They are computers... The million-plus new EVs on the road are ushering in a fundamental, maybe existential, change in how to even think about cars - no longer as machines, but as gadgets that plug in and charge like all the others in our life. The wonderful things about computers are coming to cars, and so are the terrible ones: apps that crash. Subscription hell. Cyberattacks... If cars are gadgets now, then carmakers are also now tech companies. An industry that has spent a century perfecting the internal combustion engine must now manufacture lithium-ion batteries and write the code to govern them. Imagine if a dentist had to pivot from filling cavities to performing open-heart surgery, and that's roughly what's going on here. "The transition to EVs is completely changing everything," Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me. "It's changing the people that automotive companies have to hire and their skills. It's changing their suppliers, their factories, how they assemble and build them. And lots of automakers are struggling with that...." Job cuts are already happening, and more may come - even after the massive autoworker strike this year that largely hinged on electrification. Such a big financial investment is needed to electrify the car industry that from July to September, Ford lost $60,000 for every EV it sold. Or peel back one more onion layer to car dealerships: Tesla, Rivian, and other EV companies are selling directly to consumers, cutting them out. EVs also require little service compared with gas vehicles, a reality that has upset many dealers, who could lose their biggest source of profit. None of this is the future. It is happening right now.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Since the 1960s engineers around the world have been fiddling with a novel type of jet called a rotating detonation engine (RDE), but it has never got beyond the experimental stage," reports the Economist. "That could be about to change."GE Aerospace, one of the world's biggest producers of jet engines, recently announced it was developing a working version. Earlier this year America's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded a $29m contract to Raytheon, part of RTX, another big aerospace group, to develop an RDE called Gambit. Both engines would be used to propel missiles, overcoming the range and speed limitations of current propulsion systems, including rockets and existing types of jet engines. However, if the companies are successful in getting them to work, RDEs might have a much broader role in aviation - including the possibility of helping revive supersonic air travel. In a nutshell, an RDE "replaces fire with a controlled explosion", explains Kareem Ahmed, an expert in advanced aerospace engines at the University of Central Florida. In technical terms, this is because a jet engine relies on the combustion of oxygen and fuel, which is a subsonic reaction that scientists call deflagration. Detonation, by comparison, is a high-energy explosion that takes place at supersonic speeds. As a result it is a more powerful and potentially a more efficient way of producing thrust, the force that drives an aircraft forward... By modifying an aircraft's fuselage and wings, engineers believe they can reduce the boom's impact on the ground below. Such work will help to determine whether or not future supersonic passenger planes will, like Concorde, be restricted to flying beyond the speed of sound only over oceans. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechCrunch argues that in 2023, "established technologies relied on by millions hit a chaos curve, making people realize how beholden they are to a proprietary platform they have little control over."The OpenAI fiasco in November, where the ChatGPT hit-maker temporarily lost its co-founders, including CEO Sam Altman, created a whirlwind five days of chaos culminating in Altman returning to the OpenAI hotseat. But only after businesses that had built products atop OpenAI's GPT-X large language models (LLMs) started to question the prudence of going all-in on OpenAI, with "open" alternatives such as Meta's Llama-branded family of LLMs well-positioned to capitalize. Even Google seemingly acknowledged that "open" might trump "proprietary" AI, with a leaked internal memo penned by a researcher that expressed fears that open source AI was on the front foot. "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI," the memo noted. Elsewhere, Adobe's $20 billion megabucks bid to buy rival Figma - a deal that eventually died due to regulatory headwinds - was a boon for open source Figma challenger Penpot, which saw signups surge amid a mad panic that Adobe might be about to unleash a corporate downpour on Figma's proverbial parade. And when cross-platform game engine Unity unveiled a controversial new fee structure, developers went berserk, calling the changes destructive and unfair. The fallout caused Unity to do a swift about turn, but only after a swathe of the developer community started checking out open source rival Godot, which also now has a commercial company driving core development. Thanks to wiggles (Slashdot reader #30,088) for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechCrunch reports:Apple's warnings in late October that Indian journalists and opposition figures may have been targeted by state-sponsored attacks prompted a forceful counterattack from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government. Officials publicly doubted Apple's findings and announced a probe into device security. India has never confirmed nor denied using the Pegasus tool, but nonprofit advocacy group Amnesty International reported Thursday that it found NSO Group's invasive spyware on the iPhones of prominent journalists in India, lending more credibility to Apple's early warnings. "Our latest findings show that increasingly, journalists in India face the threat of unlawful surveillance simply for doing their jobs, alongside other tools of repression including imprisonment under draconian laws, smear campaigns, harassment, and intimidation," said Donncha A" Cearbhaill, head of Amnesty International's Security Lab, in the blog post. Cloud security company Lookout has also published "an in-depth technical look" at Pegasus, calling its use "a targeted espionage attack being actively leveraged against an undetermined number of mobile users around the world."It uses sophisticated function hooking to subvert OS- and application-layer security in voice/audio calls and apps including Gmail, Facebook, WhatsApp, Facetime, Viber, WeChat, Telegram, Apple's built-in messaging and email apps, and others. It steals the victim's contact list and GPS location, as well as personal, Wi-Fi, and router passwords stored on the device... According to news reports, NSO Group sells weaponized software that targets mobile phones to governments and has been operating since 2010, according to its LinkedIn page. The Pegasus spyware has existed for a significant amount of time, and is advertised and sold for use on high-value targets for multiple purposes, including high-level espionage on iOS, Android, and Blackberry. Thanks to Slashdodt reader Mirnotoriety for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Remote-work numbers have dwindled over the past few years as employers issue return-to-office mandates," reports USA Today. "But will that continue in 2024?"The numbers started to slide after spring 2020, when more than 60% of days were worked from home, according to data from WFH Research, a scholarly data collection project. By 2023, that number had dropped to about 25% a' much lower than its peak but still a fivefold increase from 5% in 2019. But work-from-home numbers have held steady throughout most of 2023. And according to remote-work experts, they're expected to rebound in the years to come as companies adjust to work-from-home trends. "Return-to-office died in '23," said Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University and work-from-home expert. "There's a tombstone with 'RTO' on it...." Though a number of companies issued return-to-work mandates this year, most are allowing employees to work from home at least part of the week. That makes 2024 the year for employers to figure out the hybrid model. "We're never going to go back to a five-days-in-the-office policy," said Stephan Meier, professor of business at Columbia University. "Some employers are going to force people to come back, but I think over the next year, more and more firms will actually figure out how to manage hybrid well." Thirty-eight percent of companies require full-time in-office work, down from 39% one quarter ago and 49% at the start of the year, according to software firm Scoop Technologies... [Stanford economics professor] Bloom called remote-work numbers in 2023 "pancake-flat." Yes, large companies like Meta and Zoom made headlines by ordering workers back to the office. But, Bloom said, just as many other companies were quietly reducing office attendance to cut costs. Bloom thinks holograms and VR devices are possible within five years. "In the long run, the thing that really matters is technology." One paper estimates that currently 37% of America's jobs can be done entirely at home, according to the article, and ZipRecruiter's chief economist seems to agree, predicting as much as 33% America's work days will eventually be completed from home. "I think the numbers will gradually go up as this becomes more of an accepted norm as future generations grow up with it being so widely available, and as the technology for for doing it gets better." And the article notes that the ZipRecruiter economist sees another factor fueling the trend. "Reluctant leaders aging out of the workforce will help, too, she said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

They create a dedicated desktop icon for your favorite web-based application - a simplified browser that opens to that single URL. Yet while Linux usually offers the same functionality as other operating systems, "Peppermint OS's Ice and its successor Kumo are the only free software versions of Site-Specific Browsers available on Linux," according to Linux magazine. "Fortunately for those who want this functionality, Peppermint OS is a Debian derivative, and both can be installed on Debian and most other derivatives."Since SSBs first appeared in 2005, they have been available on both Windows and macOS. On Linux, however, the availability has come and gone. On Linux, Firefox once had an SSB mode, but it was discontinued in 2020 on the grounds that it had multiple bugs that were time-consuming to fix and there was "little to no perceived user benefit to the feature." Similarly, Chromium once had a basic SSB menu item, Create Application Shortcut, which no longer appears in recent versions. As for GNOME Web's (Epiphany's) Install Site as Web Application, while it still appears in the menu, it is no longer functional. Today, Linux users who want to try SSBs have no choices except Ice or Kumo. Neither Ice or Kumo appears in any repository except Peppermint OS's. But because Peppermint OS installs packages from Debian 12 ("bookworm"), either can be installed to Debian or a derivative... To install successfully, at least one of Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, or Vivaldi also must be installed... Because both Ice and Kumo are written in Python, they can be run on any desktop. The article concludes that Site-Specific Browsers might make more sense "on a network or in a business where their isolation provides another layer of security. Or perhaps the time for SSBs is past and there's a reason browsers have tried to implement them, and then discarded them."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"[F]or years it was written off," writes CNN. " 'The economics were just way out,' said Martin Soltau, CEO of the UK-based company Space Solar. "That may now be changing as the cost of launching satellites falls sharply, solar and robotics technology advances swiftly, and the need for abundant clean energy to replace planet-heating fossil fuels becomes more urgent." There's a "nexus of different technologies coming together right now just when we need it," said Craig Underwood, emeritus professor of spacecraft engineering at the University of Surrey in the U.K. The problem is, these technologies would need to be deployed at a scale unlike anything ever done before... "The big stumbling block has been simply the sheer cost of putting a power station into orbit." Over the last decade, that has begun to change as companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin started developing reusable rockets. Today's launch costs at around $1,500 per kilogram are about 30 times less than in the Space Shuttle era of the early 1980s. And while launching thousands of tons of material into space sounds like it would have a huge carbon footprint, space solar would likely have a footprint at least comparable to terrestrial solar per unit of energy, if not a smaller, because of its increased efficiency as sunlight is available nearly constantly, said Mamatha Maheshwarappa, payload systems lead at UK Space Agency. Some experts go further. Underwood said the carbon footprint of space-based solar would be around half that of a terrestrial solar farm producing the same power, even with the rocket launch... There is still a huge gulf between concept and commercialization. We know how to build a satellite, and we know how to build a solar array, Maheshwarappa said. "What we don't know is how to build something this big in space..." Scientists also need to figure out how to use AI and robotics to construct and maintain these structures in space. "The enabling technologies are still in a very low technology readiness," Maheshwarappa said. Then there's regulating this new energy system, to ensure the satellites are built sustainably, there's no debris risk, and they have an end-of-life plan, as well as to determine where rectenna sites should be located. Public buy-in could be another huge obstacle, Maheshwarappa said. There can be an instinctive fear when it comes to beaming power from space. But such fears are unfounded, according to some experts. The energy density at the center of the rectenna would be about a quarter of the midday sun. "It is no different than standing in front of a heat lamp," Hajimiri said. The article argues that governments and companies around the world "believe there is huge promise in space-based solar to help meet burgeoning demand for abundant, clean energy and tackle the climate crisis." And they cite several specific examples:In 2020 the U.S. Naval Research Lab launched a module on an orbital test vehicle, to test solar hardware in space conditions. This year Caltech electrical engineering professor led a team that successfully launched a 30-centimeter prototype equipped with transmitters - and successfully beamed detectable energy down to earth.In June the U.K. government announced over $5 million in funding to universities and tech companies "to drive forward innovation" in the space-based solar sector. The U.S. Air Force Research Lab plans to launch a small demonstrator in 2025.Europe's its Solaris program aims to prove "the technical and political viability of space-based solar, in preparation for a possible decision in 2025 to launch a full development program."One Chinese spacecraft designer and manufacturer hopes to send a solar satellite into low orbit in 2028 and high orbit by 2030, according to a 2022 South China Morning News report.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Billions of people" uses social media every month, notes the Wall Street Journal.. But "fewer and fewer are actually posting." Instead they're favoring "a more passive experience, surveys of users and research from data-analytics firms say."In an October report from data-intelligence company Morning Consult, 61% of U.S. adult respondents with a social-media account said they have become more selective about what they post. The reasons are varied: People say they feel they can't control the content they see. They have become more protective about sharing their lives online. They also say the fun of social media has fizzled. This lurker mentality is widespread, across Meta Platforms' Instagram and Facebook along with X and TikTok.... In a survey conducted in the U.S. this summer, research firm Gartner found more than half of respondents believed the quality of social media has declined in the past five years. They cited misinformation, toxicity and the proliferation of bots as reasons it has gotten worse. "The less you trust social-media brands, the less of a good experience you're having," says Gartner analyst Emily Weiss. Users are less likely to share opinions or insight into their lives since the community they are looking for isn't there, she adds. Ads and suggested posts have also sucked the joy out of apps, some users say... The algorithmic spotlight on creators and their hyper-curated content has made some users feel insecure and less likely to share their own photos and videos, says Kevin Tran, media and entertainment analyst at Morning Consult. In turn, some now think of social apps more as sources of entertainment, like YouTube or Netflix. Gartner estimates that 50% of users will either abandon or significantly limit their interactions with social media in the next two years. Any threat to interacting is a threat to business, the article notes, adding "The companies are responding."They are investing in more private user experiences like messaging, and making interactions more secure. And encouraging people to post to a more intimate audience - as with Instagram's recently expanded Close Friends feature... Meta responded to user complaints, saying it would continue to work on improving recommendations to help creators reach more people. The company added a snooze button that pauses suggested posts for 30 days at a time, and chronological feeds that temporarily only show posts from accounts people follow... Meta began shifting its resources toward messaging, including efforts to enable end-to-end encryption by default across all of its messaging services... TikTok has also shown signs of investing more in the messaging portion of its app, nudging users to chat with people they haven't messaged in a while. When the Wall Street Journal posted their article on Threads, Adam Mosseri (head of Instagram) responded that "People are sharing to feeds less, but to Stories more," and "even more still" in Messages ("even photos and videos"). Mosseri also said that Instagram's Notes feature - basically a post where you cab specify a smaller subset of your followers to see it - "have quickly become a big thing, particularly for young people. "So it's no so much that people are sharing less," Mosseri argued, "but rather than they're sharing differently."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN describes them as "towering waves," driven into California's coastline by powerful storms and "posing a significant risk to people and structures along the coast." Monstrous, 20-foot-plus waves on Thursday crashed over seawalls and swept away and injured several people, forced rescues and sent a damaging surge of water through coastal California streets. Dangerous waves continued to slam the coast on Friday, forcing beaches to close. All Ventura County beaches will be closed through New Year's Eve because of the 15- to 20-foot waves expected along the central and Southern California coasts through Saturday evening... Sea levels have risen along most of the California coastline over the past century, NOAA data shows, as global temperatures climb and melt glaciers and ice sheets. Higher sea levels are making coastal flooding events worse and will continue to do so in the future. The first round of dangerous waves hit alongside high tide Thursday morning. Several people were injured by a huge wave that slammed into Pierpont in the Ventura Beach area... Nearly 20 people were briefly swept away in the incident and eight people were taken to the hospital, Ventura officials said. One bystander even filmed what CNN calls a"monster" wave, "the surge sweeping people and vehicles down the street... The massive waves pummeling the coastline, reeking havoc, flooding streets and businesses." CNN's report also includes footage from nearly 300 miles north, showing a wave flooding a beachfront restaurant's courtyard in Santa Cruz, California. ("I just feel bad for the restaurants," says one local. "I know they just went through renovations from the last time this happened.") CNN's original article notes the sheriff's office there briefly issued an evacuation warning for some areas for part of Thursday, including one "where seawater filled beachside roadways and pushed against some homes, CNN affiliate KION reported." And CNN's video report concludes by noting that "Parts of the California coast could see towering waves through the weekend, coastal flood and high surf alerts stretching from the southern border to the Bay Area."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NBC News reports that the Chinese spy balloon that flew across the U.S. in February "used an American internet service provider to communicate, according to two current and one former U.S. official familiar with the assessment." it used the American ISP connection "to send and receive communications from China, primarily related to its navigation."Officials familiar with the assessment said it found that the connection allowed the balloon to send burst transmissions, or high-bandwidth collections of data over short periods of time. The Biden administration sought a highly secretive court order from the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect intelligence about it while it was over the U.S., according to multiple current and former U.S. officials. How the court ruled has not been disclosed. Such a court order would have allowed U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance on the balloon as it flew over the U.S. and as it sent and received messages to and from China, the officials said, including communications sent via the American internet service provider... The previously unreported U.S. effort to monitor the balloon's communications could be one reason Biden administration officials have insisted that they got more intelligence out of the device than it got as it flew over the U.S. Senior administration officials have said the U.S. was able to protect sensitive sites on the ground because they closely tracked the balloon's projected flight path. The U.S. military moved or obscured sensitive equipment so the balloon could not collect images or video while it was overhead. NBC News is not naming the internet service provider, but says it denied that the Chinese balloon had used its network, "a determination it said was based on its own investigation and discussions it had with U.S. officials." The balloon contained "multiple antennas, including an array most likely able to collect and geolocate communications," according to reports from a U.S. State Depratment official cited by NBC News in February. "It was also powered by enormous solar panels that generated enough power to operate intelligence collection sensors, the official said. Reached for comment this week, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington told NBC News that the balloon was just a weather balloon that had accidentally drifted into American airspace.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Researchers have developed a new, lightweight foam made from carbon nanotubes that, when used as a helmet liner, absorbed the kinetic energy caused by an impact almost 30 times better than liners currently used in US military helmets. The foam could prevent or significantly reduce the likelihood of concussion in military personnel and sportspeople. Among sportspeople and military vets, traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the major causes of permanent disability and death. Injury statistics show that the majority of TBIs, of which concussion is a subtype, are associated with oblique impacts, which subject the brain to a combination of linear and rotational kinetic energy forces and cause shearing of the delicate brain tissue. To improve their effectiveness, helmets worn by military personnel and sportspeople must employ a liner material that limits both. This is where researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison come in. Determined to prevent -- or lessen the effect of -- TBIs caused by knocks to the body and head, they've developed a new lightweight foam material for use as a helmet liner. For the current study, Thevamaran built upon his previous research into vertically aligned carbon nanotube (VACNT) foams -- carefully arranged layers of carbon cylinders one atom thick -- and their exceptional shock-absorbing capabilities. Current helmets attempt to reduce rotational motion by allowing a sliding motion between the wearer's head and the helmet during impact. However, the researchers say this movement doesn't dissipate energy in shear and can jam when severely compressed following a blow. Instead, their novel foam doesn't rely on sliding layers. VACNT foam sidesteps this shortcoming via its unique deformation mechanism. Under compression, the VACNTs undergo collective sequentially progressive buckling, from increased compliance at low shear strain levels to a stiffening response at high strain levels. The formed compression buckles unfold completely, enabling the VACNT foam to accommodate large shear strains before returning to a near initial state when the load is removed. The researchers found that at 25% precompression, the foam exhibited almost 30 times higher energy dissipation in shear -- up to 50% shear strain -- than polyurethane-based elastomeric foams of similar density. The study has been published in the journal Experimental Mechanics.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Predating even Toy Story, ReBoot was the first 3D animated television show," writes longtime Slashdot reader sandbagger, sharing a new report from Global News. "The master tapes have been located in storage but the hardware needed to play the 1990s-era media has yet to be located." From the report: Produced in Vancouver by Mainframe Entertainment, it aired on YTV between 1994 and 2001, and decades later still has a committed fan base. Among those super fans are Jacob Weldon and Raquel Lin, a B.C. duo now crafting a documentary about the creation of the show and its impact in the film and TV world. Weldon said he wants to see ReBoot recognized for its place in the evolution of computer animation -- recognition he said it rarely gets. When ReBoot was finally cancelled -- cut short in its fourth and final season -- its protagonists were left in peril and the show ended on a cliffhanger. It's another factor that Lin and Weldon say has helped immortalize the show and has helped fans hoping for a revival that might finally explain the characters' fate. Earlier this month, the documentary also got a potential major boost. Mainframe allowed Lin and Weldon to come to the studio to look for the show's original master tapes, recordings some believed might have been permanently lost. They struck gold. "They had boxes upon boxes upon boxes, hundreds of tapes," Lin said. "It's original resolution, original frame rate, uncompressed. If we could get a deck to play these, they would look beautiful," Weldon said. Finding that deck, however, is the pair's next major challenge. The recordings are on a rare digital tape format called D1, a technology that Weldon said was cutting edge and rare when Mainframe was using it. It's even harder to find today, and even Mainframe doesn't have the equipment to play the tapes back. Weldon and Lin have since put out a call on social media for a working Bosch BTS D1 deck that would allow them to play the tapes, and incorporate them into their documentary. "I can't tell you how many people have called us, DM'd us, emailed us -- people from all over the world," Lin said. While the pair still haven't secured the deck, they're aiming to release their documentary by next summer. They're hoping it will help renew interest in the show, introduce it to new generations and perhaps see it get new life on a streaming platform.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX on Thursday launched two rockets into orbit, only three hours apart, bringing its total number of launches to 98 in 2023. Space.com reports: The first SpaceX mission to take to the skies Thursday (Dec. 28) was a Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the U.S. military's secretive X-37B space plane, designed mission USSF-52. That blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8:07 p.m. EST (0107 GMT on Dec. 29). This marked the second Falcon Heavy flight of 2023. Second up on the launch docket for Thursday, hours later, was a Falcon 9 liftoff carrying 23 SpaceX Starlink units to low Earth orbit from nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This launch took place at 11:01 p.m. EST (0401 GMT on Dec. 29). This was SpaceX's 98th and final launch of 2023, and the 96th flight for a Falcon 9 rocket this year. SpaceX's 97th launch overall for this year marked the seventh flight for X-37B, but the first time the space plane hitched a lift atop a Falcon Heavy rocket. The X-37B/Falcon Heavy launch had been scrubbed several times previously due to bad weather and an issue with ground equipment. The launch of 23 Starlink broadband satellites from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida that capped off 2023 was also the 96th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket during this year. SpaceX's next launch is targeted for Jan. 2, 2024 and will see a further 21 Starlink satellites lift to orbit to join the over 5,500 internet supplying units currently orbiting Earth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Pink-haired Aitana Lopez is followed by more than 200,000 people on social media. She posts selfies from concerts and her bedroom, while tagging brands such as haircare line Olaplex and lingerie giant Victoria's Secret. Brands have paid about $1,000 a post for her to promote their products on social media -- despite the fact that she is entirely fictional. Aitana is a "virtual influencer" created using artificial intelligence tools, one of the hundreds of digital avatars that have broken into the growing $21 billion content creator economy. Their emergence has led to worry from human influencers their income is being cannibalized and under threat from digital rivals. That concern is shared by people in more established professions that their livelihoods are under threat from generative AI -- technology that can spew out humanlike text, images and code in seconds. But those behind the hyper-realistic AI creations argue they are merely disrupting an overinflated market. "We were taken aback by the skyrocketing rates influencers charge nowadays. That got us thinking, 'What if we just create our own influencer?'" said Diana Nunez, co-founder of the Barcelona-based agency The Clueless, which created Aitana. "The rest is history. We unintentionally created a monster. A beautiful one, though." Over the past few years, there have been high-profile partnerships between luxury brands and virtual influencers, including Kim Kardashian's make-up line KKW Beauty with Noonoouri, and Louis Vuitton with Ayayi. Instagram analysis of an H&M advert featuring virtual influencer Kuki found that it reached 11 times more people and resulted in a 91 per cent decrease in cost per person remembering the advert, compared with a traditional ad. "It is not influencing purchase like a human influencer would, but it is driving awareness, favorability and recall for the brand," said Becky Owen, global chief marketing and innovation officer at Billion Dollar Boy, and former head of Meta's creator innovations team. "Influencers themselves have a lot of negative associations related to being fake or superficial, which makes people feel less concerned about the concept of that being replaced with AI or virtual influencers," said Rebecca McGrath, associate director for media and technology at Mintel. "For a brand, they have total control versus a real person who comes with potential controversy, their own demands, their own opinions," McGrath added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2021, Philips pulled its popular sleep apnea machines and ventilators off the shelves after discovering that an industrial foam built into the devices to reduce noise could release toxic particles and fumes into the masks worn by patients. "But as Philips publicly pledged to send out replacements, supervisors inside the company's headquarters near Pittsburgh were quietly racing to manage a new crisis that threatened the massive recall and posed risks to patients all over again," reports ProPublica. "Tests by independent laboratories retained by Philips had found that a different foam used by the company -- material fitted inside the millions of replacement machines -- was also emitting dangerous chemicals, including formaldehyde, a known carcinogen." "Though Philips has said the machines are safe, ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obtained test results and other internal records that reveal for the first time how scientists working for the company grew increasingly alarmed and how infighting broke out as the new threat reached the highest levels of the Pittsburgh operation. The findings also underscore an unchecked pattern of corporate secrecy that began long before Philips decided to use the new foam." From the report: The company had previously failed to disclose complaints about the original foam in its profitable breathing machines, a polyester-based polyurethane material that was found to degrade in heat and humidity. Former patients and others have described hundreds of deaths and thousands of cases of cancer in government reports. After the introduction of the new foam in 2021, this one made of silicone, the company again held back details about the problem from the public even as it sent out replacement machines with the new material to customers around the world. One of the devices was the DreamStation 2, a newly released continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, machine promoted as one of the company's primary replacements. Federal regulators were alerted to the concern more than two years ago but said in a news release at the time that the company was carrying out additional tests on the foam and that patients should keep using their replacements until more details were available. The Food and Drug Administration has not provided new information on the test results since then, and it is still unclear whether the material is safe. That leaves millions of people in the United States alone caught in the middle, including those with sleep apnea, which causes breathing to stop and start through the night and can lead to heart attacks, strokes and sudden death. The new foam isn't the only problem: An internal investigation at Philips launched in the months after the recall found that water was condensing in the circuitry of the DreamStation 2, creating a new series of safety risks. "Loss of therapy, thermal events, and shock hazards," the investigation concluded. The FDA issued an alert about overheating last month, warning that the devices could produce "fire, smoke, burns, and other signs of overheating" and advising patients to keep the machines away from carpet, fabric and "other flammable materials." Philips has said that customers could continue using the devices if they followed safety instructions. ...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deliveries of the world's first mass-produced electric vehicle equipped with a sodium-ion battery will begin in January 2024. According to CarNewsChina, they're being produced by JAC Motors, a Volkswagen-backed Chinese automaker, through its new Yiwei EV brand. From the report: The Yiwei EV hatchback will have a cylindrical sodium-ion pack from Beijing-based HiNa Battery and adopt JAC's UE (Unitized Encapsulation) module technology. UE is also known as a honeycomb design because of its appearance. It is another battery structure concept like CATL's CTP (cell-to-pack) or BYD's Blade battery. Yiwei is a new EV brand under Anhui Jianghuai Automobile (JAC), established in 2023. JAC's parent company, Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group Holdings (JAG), is 50% state-owned, and 50% belongs to Volkswagen Group. The German automotive giant acquired its stake in 2020 in an unprecedented move to invest in China's state-owned car maker. [...] In February 2023, JAC announced they were the first automaker to put the lithium-free sodium-ion battery on an electric vehicle. That EV was a Sehol E10X hatchback, and the Na+ battery had the following specifications: 25 kWh capacity, 120 Wh/kg energy density (single cell 140 Wh/kg), 3C to 4C charging (10% - 80% in 20 minutes), 252 km (157 miles) range for E10X, and HiNa NaCR32140 cell. Sehol was a brand under Volkswagen Anhui JV, which VW transferred to JAC in 2021. When the Yiwei brand was launched in May 2023, JAC announced that it would ditch the Sehol brand, and all vehicles are being rebadged to JAC or Yiwei. The pictures JAC released today tell us that the new sodium-ion-powered EV is the Sehol E10X. JAC hasn't yet confirmed the name of the new car under the Yiwei brand; it could be Yiwei E10X, but we have to wait for JAC's confirmation. JAC recently pushed a lot into sodium-ion batteries R&D. During the Shanghai Auto Show in April 2023, the company showcased its first car under the Yiwei brand called Yiwei 3, which was equipped with a sodium-ion battery. However, the EV launched later in June, only with a classic LFP lithium battery, and promised the Na+ variant would come later. The Yiwei 3 is a compact hatchback that competes with Wuling Bingo, BYD Seagull, or ORA Funky Cat. It has two power train options, both front-wheel drive: 70 kW and 100 kW motor. The maximum cruising range is 505 km CLTC with a 51.5 kWh battery.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chemists at a lab in Gloucertershire have developed a low carbon jet fuel made entirely from human sewage. James Hygate, Firefly Green Fuels CEO, said: "We wanted to find a really low-value feedstock that was highly abundant. And of course poo is abundant." The BBC reports: Independent tests by international aviation regulators found it was nearly identical to standard fossil jet fuel. Firefly's team worked with Cranfield University to examine the fuel's life cycle carbon impact. It concluded that Firefly's fuel has a 90% lower carbon footprint than standard jet fuel. Mr Hygate, who has been developing low-carbon fuels in Gloucestershire for 20 years, said although the new fuel was chemically just like fossil-based kerosene, it "has no fossil carbon, it's a fossil-free fuel." "Of course energy would be used (in production), but when looking at the fuel's life cycle, a 90% saving is mind-blowing, so yes, we have to use energy but it is much lower compared to the production of fossil fuels," he added. [...] First, they create what they call "bio-crude." It looks like oil: thick, black, gloopy. Most importantly, it behaves like crude oil chemically. Dr Sergio Lima, who is also research director at Firefly Green Fuels, said: "What we are producing here is a fuel which is net zero." [...] The bio-kerosene is now being tested independently at the DLR Institute of Combustion Technology at the German Aerospace Center, working with Washington State University. Further future testing will also be carried out by the UK SAF (Sustainable Aviation Fuels) clearing House, based at University of Sheffield. First results have confirmed the fuel has near-identical chemical composition to A1 fossil jet fuel. The UK Department of Transport has awarded the team a 2 million pound research grant. So they can make a test tube of kerosene in the lab. That is a long way from replacing kerosene in the world's airports. Mr Hygate has done his maths. Each human, he calculates, makes enough sewage in a year to produce 4-5 liters of bio jet fuel. To fly a passenger jet from London to New York would need the annual sewage of 10,000 people. And another 10,000 to come back. Put another way, the UK's total sewage supply would meet about 5% of the country's total aviation fuel demand. It may sound small, but he insists: "That's pretty exciting." "There's a 10% sustainable aviation fuel requirement, that's a legal mandate. And we could meet half of that with poo."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by Naomi Kresge: In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of scientists from all over the world banded together in an open-source effort to develop an antiviral that would be available for all. They could never have anticipated the many roadblocks they would face along the way, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which made refugees out of a group of Kyiv chemists who were doing important work for the project. The group, which called itself Covid Moonshot, hasn't given up on its effort to introduce a more affordable, patent-free treatment for the virus. Their open-source Covid antiviral, now funded by Wellcome, is on track to be ready for human testing within the next year and a half, according to Annette von Delft, a University of Oxford scientist and one of the Moonshot group's leaders. More early discovery work on a range of potential inhibitors for other viruses is also still going on and being funded by a US government grant. "It's a bit like a proof of concept," von Delft says, for bringing a patent-free experimental drug into the clinic, a model that could be repurposed as a tool to fight neglected tropical diseases or antimicrobial resistance, or prepare for future pandemics. "Can we come up with a strategic model that can help those kinds of compounds with less of a business case along?" Of course, there was definitely a business case for a Covid antiviral, and some of the biggest drugmakers rushed to develop them. In 2022, Pfizer Inc.'s Paxlovid was one of the world's best-selling medicines with $18.9 billion in revenue. Demand has since cratered for the pill, which needs to be given shortly after infection and can't be taken alongside a number of other commonly prescribed medicines. Analysts expect the Paxlovid revenue to plunge just shy of $1 billion this year. However, there is still a need for a better Covid antiviral, particularly in countries where access to the Pfizer pill is limited, according to von Delft. Covid cases have surged again this holiday season, with the rise of a new variant called JN.1 reminding us that the virus is still changing to evade the immunity we've built up so far. Just before Christmas, UK authorities said about one in every 24 people in England and Scotland had the disease. An accessible antiviral could help people return to work more quickly, and it could also be tested as a potential treatment for long Covid. "We know from experience in viral disease that there will be resistance variants evolving over time," von Delft said. "We'll need more than one."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After launching a limited beta test in July and a beta version for individual developers in September, GitHub's Copilot Chat chatbot feature is now generally available for all users. TechCrunch reports: As of today, Copilot Chat is available in the sidebar in Microsoft's IDEs, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio -- included as a part of GitHub Copilot paid tiers and free for verified teachers, students and maintainers of certain open source projects. Little else about Copilot Chat has changed since the beta. The chatbot's still powered by GPT-4, OpenAI's flagship generative AI model, fine-tuned specifically for dev scenarios. Developers can prompt Copilot Chat in natural language to get real-time guidance, for example asking Copilot Chat to explain concepts, detect vulnerabilities or write unit tests.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After losing more than $5 billion in the past year, the world's largest traditional entertainment companies -- Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Comcast and Paramount -- are contemplating cuts and possible mergers to ultimately help better compete with Netflix. The Financial Times reports (via Ars Technica): Shari Redstone, Paramount's billionaire controlling shareholder, has effectively put the company on the block in recent weeks. She has held talks about selling the Hollywood studio to Skydance, the production company behind Top Gun: Maverick, people familiar with the matter say. Paramount chief executive Bob Bakish also discussed a possible combination over lunch with Warner CEO David Zaslav in mid-December. In both cases the discussions were said to be at an early stage and people familiar with the talks cautioned that a deal might not materialize. Beyond their streaming losses, the traditional media groups are facing a weak advertising market, declining television revenues and higher production costs following the Hollywood strikes. Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, said Paramount's deal discussions were a reflection of the "complete and utter panic" in the industry. "TV advertising is falling far short, cord-cutting is continuing to accelerate, sports costs are going up and the movie business is not performing," he said. "Everything is going wrong that can go wrong. The only thing [the companies] know how to do to survive is try to merge and cut costs." But as the traditional media owners struggle, Netflix, the tech group that pioneered the streaming model over a decade ago, has emerged as the winner of the battle to reshape video distribution. "For much of the past four years, the entertainment industry spent money like drunken sailors to fight the first salvos of the streaming wars," analyst Michael Nathanson wrote in November. "Now, we are finally starting to feel the hangover and the weight of the unpaid bar bill." For companies that have been trying to compete with Netflix, Nathanson added, "the shakeout has begun." After a bumpy 2022, Netflix has set itself apart from rivals -- most notably by being profitable. Earnings for its most recent quarter soared past Wall Street's expectations as it added 9 million new subscribers -- the strongest rise since early 2020, when Covid-19 lockdowns led to a jump. "Netflix has pulled away," says John Martin, co-founder of Pugilist Capital and former chief executive of Turner Broadcasting. For its rivals, he said, the question is "how do you create a viable streaming service with a viable business model? Because they're not working." The leading streaming services aggressively raised prices in 2023. Now, analysts, investors and executives predict that consolidation could be ahead next year as some of the smaller services combine or bow out of the streaming wars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Social media companies collectively made over $11 billion in U.S. advertising revenue from minors last year, according to a study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health published on Wednesday. The researchers say the findings show a need for government regulation of social media since the companies that stand to make money from children who use their platforms have failed to meaningfully self-regulate. They note such regulations, as well as greater transparency from tech companies, could help alleviate harms to youth mental health and curtail potentially harmful advertising practices that target children and adolescents. To come up with the revenue figure, the researchers estimated the number of users under 18 on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube in 2022 based on population data from the U.S. Census and survey data from Common Sense Media and Pew Research. They then used data from research firm eMarketer, now called Insider Intelligence, and Qustodio, a parental control app, to estimate each platform's U.S. ad revenue in 2022 and the time children spent per day on each platform. After that, the researchers said they built a simulation model using the data to estimate how much ad revenue the platforms earned from minors in the U.S. The platforms themselves don't make public how much money they earn from minors. [...] According to the Harvard study, YouTube derived the greatest ad revenue from users 12 and under ($959.1 million), followed by Instagram ($801.1 million) and Facebook ($137.2 million). Instagram, meanwhile, derived the greatest ad revenue from users aged 13-17 ($4 billion), followed by TikTok ($2 billion) and YouTube ($1.2 billion). The researchers also estimate that Snapchat derived the greatest share of its overall 2022 ad revenue from users under 18 (41%), followed by TikTok (35%), YouTube (27%), and Instagram (16%). "As concerns about youth mental health grow, more and more policymakers are trying to introduce legislation to curtail social media platform practices that may drive depression, anxiety, and disordered eating in young people," said senior author Bryn Austin, professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. "Although social media platforms may claim that they can self-regulate their practices to reduce the harms to young people, they have yet to do so, and our study suggests they have overwhelming financial incentives to continue to delay taking meaningful steps to protect children."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has again disabled the MSIX ms-appinstaller protocol handler after multiple financially motivated threat groups abused it to infect Windows users with malware. From a report: The attackers exploited the CVE-2021-43890 Windows AppX Installer spoofing vulnerability to circumvent security measures that would otherwise protect Windows users from malware, such as the Defender SmartScreen anti-phishing and anti-malware component and built-in browser alerts cautioning users against executable file downloads. Microsoft says the threat actors use both malicious advertisements for popular software and Microsoft Teams phishing messages to push signed malicious MSIX application packages. "Since mid-November 2023, Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed threat actors, including financially motivated actors like Storm-0569, Storm-1113, Sangria Tempest, and Storm-1674, utilizing the ms-appinstaller URI scheme (App Installer) to distribute malware," the company said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.