Slashdot

Multi-link operations and the 6-GHz band promise more reliability than before. From a report: The key to a future Wi-Fi you can depend on is something called multi-link operations (MLO). "It is the marquee feature of Wi-Fi 7," says Kevin Robinson, president and CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance. MLO comes in two flavors. The first -- and simpler -- of the two is a version that allows Wi-Fi devices to spread a stream of data across multiple channels in a single frequency band. The technique makes the collective Wi-Fi signal more resilient to interference at a specific frequency. Where MLO really makes Wi-Fi 7 stand apart from previous generations, however, is a version that allows devices to spread a data stream across multiple frequency bands. For context, Wi-Fi utilizes three bands-2.5 gigahertz, 5 GHz, and as of 2020, 6 GHz. Whether MLO spreads signals across multiple channels in the same frequency band or channels across two or three bands, the goals are the same: dependability and reduced latency. Devices will be able to split up a stream of data and send portions across different channels at the same time -- which cuts down on the overall transmission time -- or beam copies of the data across diverse channels, in case one channel is noisy or otherwise impaired. MLO is hardly the only feature new to Wi-Fi 7, even if industry experts agree it's the most notable. Wi-Fi 7 will also see channel size increase from 160 megahertz to a new maximum of 320 MHz. Bigger channels means more throughput capacity, which means more data in the same amount of time. That said, 320-MHz channels won't be universally available. Wi-Fi uses unlicensed spectrum -- and in some regions, contiguous 320-MHz chunks of unlicensed spectrum don't exist because of other spectrum allocations. In cases where full channels aren't possible, Wi-Fi 7 includes another feature, called puncturing. "In the past, let's say you're looking for 320 MHz somewhere, but right within, there's a 20-MHz interferer. You would need to look at going to either side of that," says Andy Davidson, senior director of technology planning at Qualcomm. Before Wi-Fi 7, you'd functionally be stuck with about a 160-MHz channel either above or below that interference.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael D. Cohen, the onetime fixer for former President Donald J. Trump, said in newly unsealed court papers that he had mistakenly given his lawyer bogus legal citations after the AI program Google Bard cooked them up for him. From a report: The fictitious citations were then used in a motion provided to a Manhattan federal judge. Mr. Cohen, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations and served time in prison, had asked for an early end to court supervision of his case now that he was out of prison and had complied with the conditions of his release. In a sworn declaration made public on Friday, Mr. Cohen explained that he had not kept up with "emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like ChatGPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not." He also said he did not realize that the lawyer filing the motion on his behalf, David M. Schwartz, "would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming that they existed." The revelation could have serious implications for the Manhattan criminal case against Mr. Trump, in which Mr. Cohen is expected to serve as the star witness. The former president's lawyers have long attacked Mr. Cohen as a serial fabulist; now, they will have a brand-new example.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LG just announced its latest 4K projector, the CineBeam Qube. It'll officially unveil the projector at CES 2024 in early January, but the company's giving curious consumers an early look. From a report: The CineBeam Qube has plenty of high-tech bells and whistles, but with a stylish design that LG calls "minimalist." There's also a handle that resembles a crank. Yeah this thing has an actual handle. The CineBeam Qube is built for portability. It's lightweight, at around three pounds, and the square form factor makes it easy to place just about anywhere. The 360-degree rotatable handle also helps with placement. LG's calling it "one of the smallest projectors available." Of course, the most important part of any projector is, well, the projection. The Qube projects 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160) resolution images that measure up to 120 inches. There's an RGB laser light source, a 450,000:1 contrast ratio and 154 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut. With these specs, that episode of Reacher will really pop. Speaking of streaming content, the projector runs on LG webOS 6.0 and offers access to all of the big streaming services, including Prime Video, Disney+, Netflix and YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Daihatsu, the Japanese automaker owned by Toyota, has halted domestic production after admitting it forged the results of safety tests for its vehicles for more than 30 years. From a report: The brand, best known for manufacturing small passenger cars, has stopped output at all four of its Japanese factories as of Tuesday, including one at its headquarters in Osaka, a spokesperson told CNN. The shutdown will last through at least the end of January, affecting roughly 9,000 employees who work in domestic production, according to the representative. The move comes as Daihatsu grapples with a deepening safety scandal that Toyota says "has shaken the very foundations of the company." Last week, Daihatsu announced an independent third-party committee had found evidence of tampering with safety tests on as many as 64 vehicle models, including those sold under the Toyota brand. As a result, Daihatsu said it would temporarily suspend all domestic and international vehicle shipments and consult with authorities on how to move forward. The scandal is another blow to the automaker, which had admitted in April to violating standards on crash tests on more than 88,000 cars, mostly sold under the Toyota brand in countries such as Malaysia and Thailand. In that case, "the inside lining of the front seat door was improperly modified" for some checks, while Daihatsu did not comply with regulatory requirements for certain side collision tests, it said in a statement at the time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boeing instructed customer airlines to inspect their 787 Max jets for loose bolts, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced this week. From a report: The request comes after the manufacturer discovered two aircraft with missing bolts in the rudder control system, raising concerns about faults across all aircraft. "The issue identified on the particular airplane has been remedied," Boeing told CNN in a statement. "Out of an abundance of caution, we are recommending operators inspect their 737 Max airplanes and inform us of any findings." The inspection request entails a two-hour probe of the aircraft's safety-critical parts for each of the approximately 1,300 787 Max jets in service, the FAA said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After falsified records for spare aircraft parts set off a frantic global search for suspect pieces, the aviation industry now faces another daunting task: adapting the archaic paperwork for 100 million components to the digital age. From a report: Since the middle of the year, maintenance shops and aerospace manufacturers have found thousands of engine parts with falsified records linked to a distributor called AOG Technics. Airlines from China to the US and Europe have had to pull planes from service and extract the dubious components, leaving jets grounded and racking up millions of dollars in costs. The episode has prodded carriers and maintenance shops to bolster scrutiny of their vendors and the parts they receive. And it's given fresh weight to an ongoing push to digitize the paper-based records still prevalent in the industry to document the lifespan of every piece of an aircraft from the time that it's made to when it lands in a scrap heap. But any structural reforms to thwart would-be copycats of the scheme of which AOG is suspected are likely years away. The industry is accustomed to following standardized methods and only making fundamental changes after a detailed and often lengthy examination of potential safety risks -- and costs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan's nuclear power regulator this week lifted an operational ban imposed on Tokyo Electric Power's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant two years ago, allowing it to work towards gaining local permission to restart. From a report: Tepco has been eager to bring the world's largest atomic power plant back online to slash operating costs, but a resumption still needs consent from the local governments of Niigata prefecture, Kashiwazaki city and Kariwa village, where it is located. When that might happen is unknown. With capacity of 8,212 megawatts (MW), the plant has been offline since 2012 after the Fukushima disaster a year earlier led to the shutdown of all nuclear power plants in Japan at the time. In 2021, the Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) barred Tepco from operating Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, its only operable atomic power station, due to safety breaches including the failure to protect nuclear materials and missteps that saw an unauthorised staff member accessing sensitive areas of the plant.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. Energy Information Administration, in a press release: A new reactor at Georgia's Vogtle nuclear power plant is now in commercial operation, according to an announcement from Georgia Power, one of the plant's owners. It is the first new nuclear reactor to start up in the United States since the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar 2 was commissioned in 2016. The new 1,114 megawatt (MW) Unit 3 reactor joins two existing reactors at Plant Vogtle, which is jointly owned by Georgia Power and three other electric utility companies. The plant's first two reactors, with a combined 2,430 MW of nameplate capacity, came online in the late 1980s. Georgia Power expects another similar-sized fourth reactor, Vogtle Unit 4, to begin operation sometime between November 2023 and March 2024. The two new reactors will make Plant Vogtle the largest nuclear power plant in the country, surpassing the 4,210 MW Palo Verde plant in Arizona. Construction at the two new reactor sites began in 2009. Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. The total cost of the project is now estimated at more than $30 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Korea will start issuing new "digital nomad" visas starting Monday, which will allow some foreign residents to stay for up to two years while maintaining a job back home, officials said Friday. From a report: "To make remote work and vacation of foreigners in Korea smoother, we have decided to launch a new digital nomad visa," the Justice Ministry said, highlighting the rise of the "workcation" trend, where employees work remotely from a different location. "So far, foreigners were required to apply for tourist visas or just stay for less than 90 days without a visa for workcation in Korea. The new system will allow employees and employers in overseas firms to tour and work remotely in Korea for a longer period of time," it added. Those seeking to apply must submit documents to the Korean embassy in their respective country proving that they earn an annual income of over 84.96 million won ($65,860). The figure is double the amount of Korea's gross national income per capita as of 2022, which stood at 42.48 million won. Applicants must submit additional documents including verification of employment, details of their criminal record and proof of private health insurance. They are required to hold private health insurance with coverage of at least 100 million won to ensure the ability to travel back home in an emergency situation. Applicants must also be 18 or older and have worked in their current field for at least a year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EU's competition and digital chief has defended the bloc's landmark law on AI, saying the move would create "legal certainty" for tech start-ups building the technology, even as it comes under fire from critics including French President Emmanuel Macron. From a report: Margrethe Vestager told the Financial Times that the EU's proposed AI Act would "not harm innovation and research, but actually enhance it." That is because the legislation, for the first time, provides a clear set of rules for those building so-called foundation models -- the technology that underpins generative AI products such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, which can churn out humanlike text, images and code in seconds. "[The AI Act] creates predictability and legal certainty in the market when things are put to use," said Vestager, the commission's executive vice-president who oversees competition and the EU's strategy dubbed "Europe fit for the digital age." She added: "If you do foundational models, but also if you want to apply foundational models, you know exactly what you are going to look for once it is put into use. It is important that you do not have any regulatory over-reach, that innovation and research is promoted again." Her defence of the AI Act comes after Macron argued the legislation risks leaving European tech companies lagging behind those based in the US and China.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Albania's Parliament said on Tuesday that it had suffered a cyberattack with hackers trying to get into its data system, resulting in a temporary halt in its services. A statement said Monday's cyberattack had not "touched the data of the system," adding that experts were working to discover what consequences the attack could have. It said the system's services would resume at a later time. Local media reported that a cellphone provider and an air flight company were also targeted by Monday's cyberattacks, allegedly from Iranian-based hackers called Homeland Justice, which could not be verified independently. Albania suffered a cyberattack in July 2022 that the government and multinational technology companies blamed on the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Believed to be in retaliation for Albania sheltering members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, the attack led the government to cut diplomatic relations with Iran two months later. The Iranian Foreign Ministry denied Tehran was behind an attack on Albanian government websites and noted that Iran has suffered cyberattacks from the MEK. In June, Albanian authorities raided a camp for exiled MEK members to seize computer devices allegedly linked to prohibited political activities. [...] In a statement sent later Tuesday to The Associated Press, MEK's media spokesperson Ali Safavi claimed the reported cyberattacks in Albania "are not related to the presence or activities" of MEK members in the country.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Melbourne-based developer xssfox has championed a unique "diagonal mode" for monitors by utilizing Linux's xrandr (x resize and rotate) tool, finding a 22-degree tilt to the left to be the ideal angle for software development on her 32:9 aspect ratio monitor. As Tom's Hardware notes, Linux is the "only OS to support a diagonal monitor mode, which you can customize to any tilt of your liking." It begs the question, could 2024 be the year of the Linux diagonal desktop? From the report: Xssfox devised a consistent method to appraise various screen rotations, working through the staid old landscape and portrait modes, before deploying xrandr to test rotations like the slightly skewed 1 degree and an indecisive 45 degrees. These produced mixed results of questionable benefits, so the search for the Goldilocks solution continued. It turns out that a 22-degree tilt to the left was the sweet spot for xssfox. This rotation delivered the best working screen space on what looks like a 32:9 aspect ratio monitor from Dell. "So this here, I think, is the best monitor orientation for software development," the developer commented. "It provides the longest line lengths and no longer need to worry about that pesky 80-column limit." If you have a monitor with the same aspect ratio, the 22-degree angle might work well for you, too. However, people with other non-conventional monitor rotation needs can use xssfox's javascript calculator to generate the xrandr command for given inputs. People who own the almost perfectly square LG DualUp 28MQ780 might be tempted to try 'diamond mode,' for example. We note that Windows users with AMD and Nvidia drivers are currently shackled to applying screen rotations using 90-degree steps. MacOS users apparently face the same restrictions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andy Maxwell reports via TorrentFreak: As the crew of Artemis 2 prepare to become the first humans to fly to the moon since 1972, the possibilities of space travel are once again igniting imaginations globally. More than 92% of internet users who want to learn more about this historic mission and the program in general are statistically likely to use Google search. Behind the scenes, however, the ability to find relevant content is under attack. Blundering DMCA takedown notices sent by a company calling itself DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. claim to protect the rights of an OnlyFans/Instagram model working under the name 'Artemis'. Instead, keyword-based systems that fail to discriminate between copyright-infringing content and that referencing the word Artemis in any other context, are flooding towards Google. They contain demands to completely deindex non-infringing, unrelated content, produced by innocent third parties all over the world. A recent deindexing demand dated December 13, 2022, lists DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. of Canada as the sender. The name of the content owner is redacted but the notice itself states that the company represents a content creator performing under the name Artemis. The notice demands the removal of 3,617 URLs from Google search. If successful, those URLs would be completely unfindable by more than 92% of the world's population who use that search engine. [...] At least 9 of the first 20 URLs in the notice demand the removal of non-infringing articles and news reports referencing the Artemis space program. None have anything to do with the content the sender claims to protect. [...] Theories as to who might own and/or operate DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. aren't hard to find but the company does exist and is registered as a corporate entity in Canada. Registered at the same address is a company with remarkably similar details. BranditScan is a corporate entity operating in exactly the same market offering similar if not identical services. BranditScan has sent DMCA takedown notices to Google under three different notifier accounts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Just before the holiday break, the US Energy Information Agency released data on the country's electrical generation. Because of delays in reporting, the monthly data runs through October, so it doesn't provide a complete picture of the changes we've seen in 2023. But some of the trends now seem locked in for the year: wind and solar are likely to be in a dead heat with coal, and all carbon-emissions-free sources combined will account for roughly 40 percent of US electricity production. [...] At this point last year, coal had produced nearly 20 percent of the electricity in the US. This year, it's down to 16.2 percent, and only accounts for 15.5 percent of October's production. Wind and solar combined are presently at 16 percent of year-to-date production, meaning they're likely to be in a dead heat with coal this year and easily surpass it next year. Year-to-date, wind is largely unchanged since 2022, accounting for about 10 percent of total generation, and it's up to over 11 percent in the October data, so that's unlikely to change much by the end of the year. Solar has seen a significant change, going from five to six percent of the total electricity production (this figure includes both utility-scale generation and the EIA's estimate of residential production). And it's largely unchanged in October alone, suggesting that new construction is offsetting some of the seasonal decline. Hydroelectric production has dropped by about six percent since last year, causing it to slip from 6.1 percent to 5.8 percent of the total production. Depending on the next couple of months, that may allow solar to pass hydro on the list of renewables. Combined, the three major renewables account for about 22 percent of year-to-date electricity generation, up about 0.5 percent since last year. They're up by even more in the October data, placing them well ahead of both nuclear and coal. Nuclear itself is largely unchanged, allowing it to pass coal thanks to the latter's decline. Its output has been boosted by a new, 1.1 Gigawatt reactor that come online this year (a second at the same site, Vogtle in Georgia, is set to start commercial production at any moment). But that's likely to be the end of new nuclear capacity for this decade; the challenge will be keeping existing plants open despite their age and high costs. If we combine nuclear and renewables under the umbrella of carbon-free generation, then that's up by nearly 1 percent since 2022 and is likely to surpass 40 percent for the first time. "The only thing that's keeping carbon-free power from growing faster is natural gas, which is the fastest-growing source of generation at the moment, going from 40 percent of the year-to-date total in 2022 to 43.3 percent this year," notes Ars. "Outside of natural gas, however, all the trends in US generation are good, especially considering that the rise of renewable production would have seemed like an impossibility a decade ago. Unfortunately, the pace is currently too slow for the US to have a net-zero electric grid by the end of the decade."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following policy adjustments by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in January, more foreign-born workers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields are able to live and work permanently in the United States. "The jump comes after USCIS in January 2022 tweaked its guidance criteria relating to two visa categories available to STEM workers," reports Science Magazine. "One is the O-1A, a temporary visa for 'aliens of extraordinary ability' that often paves the way to a green card. The second, which bestows a green card on those with advanced STEM degrees, governs a subset of an EB-2 (employment-based) visa." From the report: The USCIS data, reported exclusively by ScienceInsider, show that the number of O-1A visas awarded in the first year of the revised guidance jumped by almost 30%, to 4570, and held steady in fiscal year 2023, which ended on 30 September. Similarly, the number of STEM EB-2 visas approved in 2022 after a "national interest" waiver shot up by 55% over 2021, to 70,240, and stayed at that level this year. "I'm seeing more aspiring and early-stage startup founders believe there's a way forward for them," says Silicon Valley immigration attorney Sophie Alcorn. She predicts the policy changes will result in "new technology startups that would not have otherwise been created." President Joe Biden has long sought to make it easier for foreign-born STEM workers to remain in the country and use their talent to spur the U.S. economy. But under the terms of a 1990 law, only 140,000 employment-based green cards may be issued annually, and no more than 7% of those can go to citizens of any one country. The ceiling is well below the demand. And the country quotas have created decades-long queues for scientists and high-tech entrepreneurs born in India and China. The 2022 guidance doesn't alter those limits on employment-based green cards but clarifies the visa process for foreign-born scientists pending any significant changes to the 1990 law. The O-1A work visa, which can be renewed indefinitely, was designed to accelerate the path to a green card for foreign-born high-tech entrepreneurs. Although there is no cap on the number of O-1A visas awarded, foreign-born scientists have largely ignored this option because it wasn't clear what metrics USCIS would use to assess their application. The 2022 guidance on O-1As removed that uncertainty by listing eight criteria -- including awards, peer-reviewed publications, and reviewing the work of other scientistsa"and stipulating that applicants need to satisfy at least three of them. The second visa policy change affects those with advanced STEM degrees seeking the national interest waiver for an EB-2. Under the normal process of obtaining such a visa, the Department of Labor requires employers to first satisfy rules meant to protect U.S. workers from foreign competition, for example, by showing that the company has failed to find a qualified domestic worker and that the job will pay the prevailing wage. That time-consuming exercise can be waived if visa applicants can prove they are doing "exceptional" work of "substantial merit and national importance." But once again, the standard for determining whether the labor-force requirements can be waived was vague, so relatively few STEM workers chose that route. The 2022 USCIS guidance not only specifies criteria, which closely track those for the nonimmigrant, O-1A visa, but also allows scientists to sponsor themselves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia has throttled the performance of its GeForce RTX 4090 GPU by roughly 11%, allowing it to comply with U.S. sanctions and be sold in China. The Register reports: Dubbed the RTX 4090D, the device appeared on Nvidia's Chinese-market website Thursday and boasts performance roughly 10.94 percent lower than the model Nvidia announced in late 2022. This shows up in the form of lower core count, 14,592 CUDA cores versus 16,384 on versions sold outside of China. Nvidia also told The Register today the card's tensor core count has also been been cut down by a similar margin from 512 to 456 on the 4090D variant. Beyond this the card is largely unchanged, with peak clock speeds rated at 2.52 GHz, 24 GB of GDDR6x memory, and a fat 384-bit memory bus. As we reported at the time, the RTX 4090 was the only consumer graphics card barred from sale in the Middle Kingdom following the October publication of the Biden Administration's most restrictive set of export controls. The problem was the card narrowly exceeded the performance limits on consumer cards with a total processing performance (TPP) of more than 4,800. That number is calculated by doubling the max number of dense tera-operations per second -- floating point or integer -- and multiplying by the bit length of the operation. The original 4090 clocked a TPP of 5,285 performance, which meant Nvidia needed a US government-issued license to sell the popular gaming card in China. Note, consumer cards aren't subject to the performance density metric that restricts the sale of much less powerful datacenter cards like the Nvidia L4. As it happens, cutting performance by 10.94 percent is enough to bring the card under the metrics that trigger the requirement for the USA's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) to consider an export license. Nvidia notes that the 4090D can be overclocked by end users, effectively allowing customers to recover some performance lost by the lower core count. "In 4K gaming with ray tracing and deep-learning super sampling (DLSS), the GeForce RTX 4090D is about five percent slower than the GeForce RTX 4090 and it operates like every other GeForce GPU, which can be overclocked by end users," an Nvidia spokesperson said in an email.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A group of clowns is suing their former employer Clowns.com for multiple labor law violations, according to recently filed court records. Four people -- Brayan Angulo, Cameron Pille, Janina Salorio, and Xander Black -- filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday alleging Adolph Rodriguez and Erica Barbuto, owners of Clowns.com and their former bosses, misclassified them as independent workers for years, and failed to pay them for their time. The Long Island-based company, which provides entertainers for events, violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and the New York Labor Law, the lawsuit claims. The owners of Clowns.com didn't give employees detailed pay statements as required by New York law, the lawsuit alleges. "As a result, Plaintiffs did not know how precisely their weekly pay was being calculated, and were thus deprived of information that could be used to challenge and prevent the theft of their wages," it says. The clowns weren't paid for time "spent at the warehouse gathering and loading equipment and supplies into vehicles," or for travel time between parties, or when parties went on for longer than expected, they claim. Pille said she's "proud to join with my clown colleagues" to stand up to wage theft and misclassification. "For years, Clowns.com has treated clowns, who are largely young actors with no prior training in clowning who sign up for this job to make ends meet, as independent contractors."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is reinvesting in gaming with advanced Mac hardware, improvements to Apple silicon, and gaming-focused software, aiming not to repeat its past mistakes and capture a larger share of the gaming market. In an article for Inverse, Raymond Wong provides an in-depth overview of this endeavor, including commentary from Apple's marketing managers Gordon Keppel, Leland Martin, and Doug Brooks. Here's an excerpt from the report: Gaming on the Mac in the 1990s until 2020, when Apple made a big shift to its own custom silicon, could be boiled down to this: Apple was in a hardware arms race with the PC that it couldn't win. Mac gamers were hopeful that the switch from PowerPC to Intel CPUs starting in 2005 would turn things around, but it didn't because by then, GPUs started becoming the more important hardware component for running 3D games, and the Mac's support for third-party GPUs could only be described as lackluster. Fast forward to 2023, and Apple has a renewed interest in gaming on the Mac, the likes of which it hasn't shown in the last 25 years. "Apple silicon has changed all that," Keppel tells Inverse. "Now, every Mac that ships with Apple silicon can play AAA games pretty fantastically. Apple silicon has been transformative of our mainstream systems that got tremendous boosts in graphics with M1, M2, and now with M3." Ask any gadget reviewer (including myself) and they will tell you Keppel isn't just drinking the Kool-Aid because Apple pays him to. Macs with Apple silicon really are performant computers that can play some of the latest PC and console games. In three generations of desktop-class chip design, Apple has created a platform with "tens of millions of Apple silicon Macs," according to Keppel. That's tens of millions of Macs with monstrous CPU and GPU capabilities for running graphics-intensive games. Apple's upgrades to the GPUs on its silicon are especially impressive. The latest Apple silicon, the M3 family of chips, supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and mesh shading, features that only a few years ago didn't seem like they would ever be a priority, let alone ones that are built into the entire spectrum of MacBook Pros. The "magic" of Apple silicon isn't just performance, says Leland Martin, an Apple software marketing manager. Whereas Apple's fallout with game developers on the Mac previously came down to not supporting specific computer hardware, Martin says Apple silicon started fresh with a unified hardware platform that not only makes it easier for developers to create Mac games for, but will allow for those games to run on other Apple devices. "If you look at the Mac lineup just a few years ago, there was a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs," Martin says. "That can add complexity when you're developing games. Because you have multiple different hardware permutations to consider. Today, we've effectively eliminated that completely with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Once a game is designed for one platform, it's a straightforward process to bring it to the other two. We're seeing this play out with games like Resident Evil Village that launched first [on Mac] followed by iPhone and iPad." "Gaming was fundamentally part of the Apple silicon design,a Doug Brooks, also on the Mac product marketing team, tells Inverse. "Before a chip even exists, gaming is fundamentally incorporated during those early planning stages and then throughout development. I think, big picture, when we design our chips, we really look at building balanced systems that provide great CPU, GPU, and memory performance. Of course, [games] need powerful GPUs, but they need all of those features, and our chips are designed to deliver on that goal. If you look at the chips that go in the latest consoles, they look a lot like that with integrated CPU, GPU, and memory." [...] "One thing we're excited about with this most recent launch of the M3 family of chips is that we're able to bring these powerful new technologies, Dynamic Caching, as well as ray-tracing and mesh shading across our entire line of chips," Brook adds. "We didn't start at the high end and trickle them down over time. We really wanted to bring that to as many customers as possible."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is working on significant updates to its Surface Pro and Surface Laptop lines. According to Windows Central, new devices "will be announced in the spring and will be marketed as Microsoft's first true next-gen AI PCs." From the report: For the first time, both Surface Pro and Surface Laptop will be available in Intel and Arm flavors, and both will have next-gen NPU (neural processing unit) silicon. Sources are particularly excited about the Arm variants, which I understand will be powered by a custom version of Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Series chips. Internally, Microsoft is calling next-generation Arm devices powered by Qualcomm's new chips "CADMUS" PCs. These PCs are purpose-built for the next version of Windows, codenamed Hudson Valley, and will utilize many of the upcoming next-gen AI experiences Microsoft is building into the 2024 release of Windows. Specifically, Microsoft touts CADMUS PCs as being genuinely competitive with Apple Silicon, sporting similar battery life, performance, and security. The next Surface Pro and Surface Laptop are expected to be some of the first CADMUS PCs to ship next year in preparation for the Hudson Valley release coming later in 2024. So, what's changing with the Surface Laptop 6? I'm told this new Surface Laptop will finally have an updated design with thinner bezels, rounded display corners, and more ports. This will be the first time that Microsoft's Surface Laptop line is getting a design refresh, which is well overdue. The Surface Laptop 6 will again be available in two sizes. However, I'm told the smaller model will have a slightly larger 13.8-inch display, up from 13.5 inches on the Surface Laptop 5. Sources say the larger model remains at 15-inches. I'm told Surface Laptop 6 will also have an expanded selection of ports, including two USB-C ports and one USB-A port, along with the magnetic Surface Connect charging port. Microsoft is also adding a haptic touchpad (likely with Sensel technology) and a dedicated Copilot button on the keyboard deck for quick access to Windows Copilot. The next Surface Pro is also shaping into a big update, although not as drastic as the Surface Laptop 6. According to my sources, the most significant changes coming to Surface Pro 10 are mostly related to its display, which sources say is now brighter with support for HDR content, has a new anti-reflective coating to reduce glare, and now also sports rounded display corners. I've also heard that Microsoft is testing a version of Surface Pro 10 with a slightly lower-resolution 2160 x 1440 display, down from the 2880 x 1920 screen found on previous Surface Pro models. Sources say this lower-resolution panel is only being considered for lower-tier models, meaning the more expensive models will continue to ship with the higher-resolution display. Lastly, I also hear Microsoft is equipping the next Surface Pro with an NFC reader for commercial customers and a wider FoV webcam, which will be enhanced with Windows Studio Effects. It should also be available in new colors. I've also heard we may get an updated Type Cover accessory with a dedicated Copilot button for quick access to Windows Copilot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple's AirTags are meant to help you effortlessly find your keys or track your luggage. But the same features that make them easy to deploy and inconspicuous in your daily life have also allowed them to be abused as a sinister tracking tool that domestic abusers and criminals can use to stalk their targets. Over the past year, Apple has taken protective steps to notify iPhone and Android users if an AirTag is in their vicinity for a significant amount of time without the presence of its owner's iPhone, which could indicate that an AirTag has been planted to secretly track their location. Apple hasn't said exactly how long this time interval is, but to create the much-needed alert system, Apple made some crucial changes to the location privacy design the company originally developed a few years ago for its "Find My" device tracking feature. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, San Diego, say, though, that they've developed (PDF) a cryptographic scheme to bridge the gap -- prioritizing detection of potentially malicious AirTags while also preserving maximum privacy for AirTag users. [...] The solution [Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matt Green] and his fellow researchers came up with leans on two established areas of cryptography that the group worked to implement in a streamlined and efficient way so the system could reasonably run in the background on mobile devices without being disruptive. The first element is "secret sharing," which allows the creation of systems that can't reveal anything about a "secret" unless enough separate puzzle pieces present themselves and come together. Then, if the conditions are right, the system can reconstruct the secret. In the case of AirTags, the "secret" is the true, static identity of the device underlying the public identifier that is frequently changing for privacy purposes. Secret sharing was conceptually useful for the researchers to employ because they could develop a mechanism where a device like a smartphone would only be able to determine that it was being followed around by an AirTag with a constantly rotating public identifier if the system received enough of a certain type of ping over time. Then, suddenly, the suspicious AirTag's anonymity would fall away and the system would be able to determine that it had been in close proximity for a concerning amount of time. Green notes, though, that a limitation of secret sharing algorithms is that they aren't very good at sorting and parsing inputs if they're being deluged by a lot of different puzzle pieces from all different puzzles -- the exact scenario that would occur in the real world where AirTags and Find My devices are constantly encountering each other. With this in mind, the researchers employed a second concept known as "error correction coding," which is specifically designed to sort signal from noise and preserve the durability of signals even if they acquire some errors or corruptions. "Secret sharing and error correction coding have a lot of overlap," Green says. "The trick was to find a way to implement it all that would be fast, and where a phone would be able to reassemble all the puzzle pieces when needed while all of this is running quietly in the background." The researchers published (PDF) their first paper in September and submitted it to Apple. More recently, they notified the industry consortium about the proposal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British households will benefit from improved routes for recycling electronic goods from 2026, under government plans to have producers and retailers pay for household and in-store collections. From a report: Consumers would be able to have electrical waste (e-waste) -- from cables to toasters and power tools -- collected from their homes or drop items off during a weekly shop, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said in a consultation published on Thursday. The ambition is for retailers, rather than the taxpayer, to pick up the tab for these new ways of disposing of defunct, often toxic products safely. The measures are due to come into force in two years' time. Almost half a billion small electrical items ended up in landfill last year, according to data from the not-for-profit Material Focus. This problem was particularly acute during Christmas, when 500 tonnes of Christmas lights were thrown away, the government said. [...] Measures aimed at easing the problem of electronic waste now include requiring larger retailers to create "collection drop points for electrical items in-store" for free, and without the need to exchange this with a new purchase. From 2026 onward, bricks-and-mortar retailers and online sellers would have to collect any broken or rejected large electrical goods including fridges or cookers when they are delivering a replacement product, Defra said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is making plans to produce hydrogen fuel at its fulfillment centers. The retail behemoth partnered with hydrogen company Plug Power to install the first electrolyzer -- equipment that can split water molecules to produce hydrogen -- at a fulfillment center in Aurora, Colorado. From a report: The electrolyzer will make fuel for around 225 fork lift trucks at the site, although Plug says it has the capacity to fuel up to 400 hydrogen fuel cell-powered forklifts. This is the first time Amazon has tried to make its own hydrogen on site, and it's not likely to be the last. "On-site production will make the use of hydrogen even more energy efficient for certain locations and types of facilities," Asad Jafry, Amazon's director of global hydrogen economy, said in a press release announcing the installation of the first electrolyzer yesterday. "Hydrogen is an important tool in our efforts to decarbonize our operations by 2040." [...] Hydrogen produces water vapor instead of greenhouse gas emissions during combustion, a trait that's made it more attractive to companies and governments working to meet climate goals. The big problem they need to tackle is cleaning up the process of making hydrogen in the first place. Today, most of it is made using fossil fuels, primarily through a reaction between steam and methane. The process releases planet-heating carbon dioxide. Methane leaks are another problem since methane -- also called natural gas -- is an even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Plug tries to solve those problems by using electrolyzers to produce hydrogen. Instead of using methane, it uses electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. If that electricity is generated by renewable sources of energy like wind or solar, it's called green hydrogen.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Web software firm 37Signals has migrated off the cloud after spending $3.2 million on Amazon Web Services last year, said co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson, who is also the creator of Ruby on Rails. The Basecamp project management software-maker bought $600,000 of Dell servers and expects to save over $7 million in five years by running operations in-house. From a report: DHH likened clouds to "merchants of complexity" where they are incentivized to make things as complex as possible to keep customers hooked. He compared that to the original Internet, which was not built on complex cloud services geared for multi-tenancy, but rather on simpler tools such as Linux and PHP, which anyone could use without cost. This is not to say cloud has zero value for all use cases, [Kelsey] Hightower and DHH agreed. Clouds make perfect sense in many cases, for start-ups that do not know how much infrastructure they will need, and also for enterprises with a lack of expertise and money to burn. For many companies in the middle, though a lot of profit margin can be recovered by reducing cloud costs and running things in-house instead, the two argued.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Financial Intelligence Unit, an Indian government agency which scrutinizes financial transactions, said Thursday nine global crypto exchanges -- including Binance, Kraken, Kucoin and Mexc -- are operating "illegally" in the country without complying with the local anti-money laundering act and asked the IT Ministry to block their websites. From a report: FIU said it has issued show cause notices to all nine firms. Global crypto exchanges are required to comply with India's anti-money laundering rules and cannot evade the guidelines just because they don't have physical presence in the country, the government agency said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recent video poked fun at the newly announced Legend of Zelda movie by referencing the checkered history of video game adaptations. However, 2023 brought critical and commercial success for games-based projects like The Last of Us and The Super Mario Bros Movie, while several comic book films such as The Flash and Ant-Man 3 underperformed. This shift comes as Disney CEO Bob Iger admitted Marvel may have oversaturated the market. While caped crusaders aren't finished yet, their golden era may be ending. Meanwhile, Mario earned over $1 billion, topping all superhero films this year. Video game movies have struggled in the past, but their time may have finally come. Wired adds: Mario's success will lead to a "deluge" of video game adaptations, argues Joost van Druenen, a New York University business professor and author of One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games. Van Dreunen reckons that superheroes are "going the way of the cowboy," referring to the shifts in Hollywood's dominant genres (think: the rise of zombies a few years back, all the Home Alone-esque family movies in the 1990s). Even a show like The Boys, he argues, with its anti-superheroes, looks like a kind of turning point, akin to the revisionist Westerns, exemplified by Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, that began to dominate the genre at the end of the '60s and into the '70s. Provided audiences are as tired of superheroes as pundits think, video game protagonists could profitably fill the gap. They come from well-known franchises and have large, engaged fan bases -- two things studios appreciate. Cast your eyes down the development list: God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Assassin's Creed, continued expansion on The Witcher, among others. Nintendo, which has traditionally resisted film spinoffs, is planning a movie a year; Arcane, widely considered the first title (before The Last of Us) to break the curse of such adaptations, is finally getting a second season. Amazon's forthcoming Fallout series is being helmed by the same team as Westworld. [...] Back to superheroes, artist fatigue is one under-explored factor. Inspiration is lacking. Some are undoubtedly tired of the whole enterprise, but many are just tired of poor films: And clearly, these two factors entwine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi has revealed its first electric car, a sharp-looking sedan called the SU7. Slated to roll out in China next year, it's another entry into an increasingly crowded market for EVs. It's also another attempt in this software-obsessed world to match up the technology people find in their phones to what goes on inside their car. From a report: Xiaomi might have a shot. That's because the car will run Xiaomi's "HyperOS," a new architecture the company has been working on for more than six years that's supposed to be dynamic enough to power everything including phones, smart home systems and cars. The goal is a more seamless experience, one where your apps and preferences are ready to go no matter where you are. [...] As for the specs, they look impressive on paper. The company is claiming as much range on a full charge as 800 km, or just shy of 500 miles, though that's on China's rosy test cycle. That is on the higher-end model, which is built atop a 101kWh battery pack from Chinese giant CATL. A base model with just 73.6kWh of capacity will allegedly get closer to 668 km, or 415 miles, on a charge. They will charge fast (220 km in five minutes) and will be fast (0-100 km/h in just 2.78 seconds). Pricing will come at a later date.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FDA, in a letter to Amazon CEO: This letter concerns your firm's distribution of products that violate the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the "FD&C Act"). The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) purchased on your website, www.amazon.com, products that are labeled as energy enhancing supplements or food, but laboratory analyses confirmed that they contained undeclared and potentially harmful active pharmaceutical ingredients. As discussed further below, your firm is responsible for introducing or delivering for introduction into interstate commerce products that are unapproved new drugs under section 505(a) of the FD&C Act, 21 U.S.C. 355(a). Furthermore, the products are misbranded drugs under section 502 of the FD&C Act, 21 U.S.C. 352. As explained further below, introducing or delivering these products for introduction into interstate commerce is prohibited under sections 301(a), 301(d), and 505(a) of the FD&C Act, 21 U.S.C. 331(a), 331(d), and 355(a). Your firm is also responsible for introducing or delivering for introduction into interstate commerce a food that is prohibited under section 301(ll) of the FD&C Act, 21 U.S.C. 331(ll). [...]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Times is targeting various companies under the OpenAI umbrella, as well as Microsoft, an OpenAI partner that both uses it to power its Copilot service and helped provide the infrastructure for training the GPT Large Language Model. But the suit goes well beyond the use of copyrighted material in training, alleging that OpenAI-powered software will happily circumvent the Times' paywall and ascribe hallucinated misinformation to the Times. The suit notes that The Times maintains a large staff that allows it to do things like dedicate reporters to a huge range of beats and engage in important investigative journalism, among other things. Because of those investments, the newspaper is often considered an authoritative source on many matters. All of that costs money, and The Times earns that by limiting access to its reporting through a robust paywall. In addition, each print edition has a copyright notification, the Times' terms of service limit the copying and use of any published material, and it can be selective about how it licenses its stories. In addition to driving revenue, these restrictions also help it to maintain its reputation as an authoritative voice by controlling how its works appear. The suit alleges that OpenAI-developed tools undermine all of that. [...] The suit seeks nothing less than the erasure of both any GPT instances that the parties have trained using material from the Times, as well as the destruction of the datasets that were used for the training. It also asks for a permanent injunction to prevent similar conduct in the future. The Times also wants money, lots and lots of money: "statutory damages, compensatory damages, restitution, disgorgement, and any other relief that may be permitted by law or equity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years, and very likely the past 125,000. From a report: Unyielding heat waves broiled Phoenix and Argentina. Wildfires raged across Canada. Flooding in Libya killed thousands. Wintertime ice cover in the dark seas around Antarctica was at unprecedented lows. This year's global temperatures did not just beat prior records. They left them in the dust. From June through November, the mercury spent month after month soaring off the charts. December's temperatures have largely remained above normal: Much of the Northeastern United States is expecting springlike conditions this week. That is why scientists are already sifting through evidence -- from oceans, volcanic eruptions, even pollution from cargo ships -- to see whether this year might reveal something new about the climate and what we are doing to it. One hypothesis, perhaps the most troubling, is that the planet's warming is accelerating, that the effects of climate change are barreling our way more quickly than before. "What we're looking for, really, is a bunch of corroborating evidence that all points in the same direction," said Chris Smith, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds. "Then we're looking for causality. And that will be really interesting."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Baidu's ChatGPT-like Ernie Bot has garnered more than 100 million users, chief technology officer of the Chinese internet company Wang Haifeng said on Thursday. From a report: The user base milestone comes after Baidu opened Ernie Bot to the public in August. This was preceded by a partial unveiling and more than five-month trial period where select users could test the chatbot's capabilities. Analysts said that while the partial unveiling in March was underwhelming, it still gave the company a valuable first-mover advantage in a market that has since become crowded with dozens of players, as Chinese tech companies, large and small, look to develop their own chatbots powered by generative AI.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: According to Modvion, the Swedish start-up that has just built the world's tallest wooden turbine tower, using wood for wind power is the future. "It's got great potential," Otto Lundman, the company's chief executive, says as we gaze upwards at the firm's brand new turbine, a short drive outside Gothenburg. It's 150m (492ft) to the tip of the highest blade and we are the first journalists to be invited to have a look inside. The 2 megawatt generator on top has just started supplying electricity to the Swedish grid, providing power for about 400 homes. The dream of Lundman and Modvion is to take the wood and wind much higher. On the horizon near the Modvion project, several very similar-looking turbines are turning. Steel, not wood, is the key material for them, as it is for almost all of the world's turbine towers. Strong and durable, steel has enabled huge turbines and wind farms to be constructed on land and at sea. But steel is not without its limitations, particularly for projects on land. As demand has grown for taller turbines that harvest stronger winds with larger generators, the diameter of the cylindrical steel towers to support them has had to grow too. In a world of road tunnels, bridges and roundabouts, many in the wind industry say getting those huge pieces of metal to turbine sites has become a real headache, in effect limiting how tall new steel turbines can be. From the outside, there is little obvious difference between the Modvion wooden turbine and its steel cousins. Both have a thick white coating to protect them from the elements and blades made primarily from fiberglass attached to a generator, which produces electricity when it turns. It is only when we go inside the tower that the differences becomes clear. The walls have a curved raw wood finish, not unlike a sauna. The 105m (345ft) tower's strength comes from the 144 layers of laminated veneer lumber (LVL) that make its thick walls. By varying the grain of each of the 3mm-thick layers of spruce, Modvion says it has been able to control the wall's strength and flexibility. "It's our secret recipe," says company co-founder -- and former architect and boat builder -- David Olivegren, with a smile. [...] Lundman and Olivegren tell me their turbine's big selling point is that, by using wood and glue, towers can be built in smaller, more easily transported modules. That will make it much easier to build really tall towers, they say, and to take the pieces to challenging locations. However, Dr Maximilian Schnippering, head of sustainability at Siemens Gamesa -- one of the worlds largest turbine manufacturers -- says more pieces are likely to mean more trucks, more people and more time to complete the installation. He considers the modular system "an advantage" and that wooden towers can "nicely complement" steel towers. [...] Though wind power is cheaper and cleaner than almost all other forms of electricity generation, making steel involves extremely hot furnaces and almost always the burning of fossil fuels. That means CO2 emissions -- the main driver of climate change. Modvion says using wood instead of steel eliminates the wind turbines' carbon footprint entirely, making them carbon negative. That's because the trees take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere when they are alive and, when they are chopped down, the carbon is stored in the wood. As long as the wood doesn't end up rotting or being burned, the carbon is not released. About 200 trees went into Modvion's turbine tower. They were the same species -- spruce -- that is used for Christmas trees and the company says they are farmed sustainably, meaning when they are harvested more are planted. Modvion hopes to build another even taller turbine soon with plans to open a facility that will produce 100 wooden modular turbines a year in 2027. "The industry is currently putting up 20,000 turbines a year," Lundman says. "Our ambition is that in 10 years time 10% of those turbines -- about 2,000 -- will be wooden."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists discovered a way to break apart the membranes of cancer cells by stimulating aminocyanine molecules with near-infrared light. Slashdot reader Baron_Yam shares a report from ScienceAlert: The research team from Rice University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Texas, says the new approach is a marked improvement over another kind of cancer-killing molecular machine previously developed, called Feringa-type motors, which could also break the structures of problematic cells. "It is a whole new generation of molecular machines that we call molecular jackhammers," says chemist James Tour from Rice University. "They are more than one million times faster in their mechanical motion than the former Feringa-type motors, and they can be activated with near-infrared light rather than visible light." In tests on cultured, lab-grown cancer cells, the molecular jackhammer method scored a 99 percent hit rate at destroying the cells. The approach was also tested on mice with melanoma tumors, and half the animals became cancer-free. The structure and chemical properties of aminocyanine molecules mean they stay in sync with the right stimulus -- such as near-infrared light. When in motion, the electrons inside the molecules form what's known as plasmons, collectively vibrating entities that drive movement across the whole of the molecule. The plasmons have an arm on one side, helping to connect the molecules to the cancer cell membranes while the movements of the vibrations bash them apart. It's still early days for the research, but these initial findings are very promising. The research has been published in Nature Chemistry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In October, Apple issued notifications warning over a half dozen India lawmakers of their iPhones being targets of state-sponsored attacks. According to a new report from the Washington Post, the Modi government responded by criticizing Apple's security and demanding explanations to mitigate political impact (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). From the report: Officials from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) publicly questioned whether the Silicon Valley company's internal threat algorithms were faulty and announced an investigation into the security of Apple devices. In private, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, senior Modi administration officials called Apple's India representatives to demand that the company help soften the political impact of the warnings. They also summoned an Apple security expert from outside the country to a meeting in New Delhi, where government representatives pressed the Apple official to come up with alternative explanations for the warnings to users, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. "They were really angry," one of those people said. The visiting Apple official stood by the company's warnings. But the intensity of the Indian government effort to discredit and strong-arm Apple disturbed executives at the company's headquarters, in Cupertino, Calif., and illustrated how even Silicon Valley's most powerful tech companies can face pressure from the increasingly assertive leadership of the world's most populous country -- and one of the most critical technology markets of the coming decade. The recent episode also exemplified the dangers facing government critics in India and the lengths to which the Modi administration will go to deflect suspicions that it has engaged in hacking against its perceived enemies, according to digital rights groups, industry workers and Indian journalists. Many of the more than 20 people who received Apple's warnings at the end of October have been publicly critical of Modi or his longtime ally, Gautam Adani, an Indian energy and infrastructure tycoon. They included a firebrand politician from West Bengal state, a Communist leader from southern India and a New Delhi-based spokesman for the nation's largest opposition party. [...] Gopal Krishna Agarwal, a national spokesman for the BJP, said any evidence of hacking should be presented to the Indian government for investigation. The Modi government has never confirmed or denied using spyware, and it has refused to cooperate with a committee appointed by India's Supreme Court to investigate whether it had. But two years ago, the Forbidden Stories journalism consortium, which included The Post, found that phones belonging to Indian journalists and political figures were infected with Pegasus, which grants attackers access to a device's encrypted messages, camera and microphone. In recent weeks, The Post, in collaboration with Amnesty, found fresh cases of infections among Indian journalists. Additional work by The Post and New York security firm iVerify found that opposition politicians had been targeted, adding to the evidence suggesting the Indian government's use of powerful surveillance tools. In addition, Amnesty showed The Post evidence it found in June that suggested a Pegasus customer was preparing to hack people in India. Amnesty asked that the evidence not be detailed to avoid teaching Pegasus users how to cover their tracks. "These findings show that spyware abuse continues unabated in India," said Donncha O Cearbhaill, head of Amnesty International's Security Lab. "Journalists, activists and opposition politicians in India can neither protect themselves against being targeted by highly invasive spyware nor expect meaningful accountability."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The United States and the state of California have reached an agreement in principle with the truck engine manufacturer Cummins on a $1.6 billion penalty to settle claims that the company violated the Clean Air Act by installing devices to defeat emissions controls on hundreds of thousands of engines, the Justice Department announced on Friday. The penalty would be the largest ever under the Clean Air Act and the second largest ever environmental penalty in the United States. Defeat devices are parts or software that bypass, defeat or render inoperative emissions controls like pollution sensors and onboard computers. They allow vehicles to pass emissions inspections while still emitting high levels of smog-causing pollutants such as nitrogen oxide, which is linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses. The Justice Department has accused the company of installing defeat devices on 630,000 model year 2013 to 2019 RAM 2500 and 3500 pickup truck engines. The company is also alleged to have secretly installed auxiliary emission control devices on 330,000 model year 2019 to 2023 RAM 2500 and 3500 pickup truck engines. "Violations of our environmental laws have a tangible impact. They inflict real harm on people in communities across the country," Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. "This historic agreement should make clear that the Justice Department will be aggressive in its efforts to hold accountable those who seek to profit at the expense of people's health and safety." In a statement, Cummins said that it had "seen no evidence that anyone acted in bad faith and does not admit wrongdoing." The company said it has "cooperated fully with the relevant regulators, already addressed many of the issues involved, and looks forward to obtaining certainty as it concludes this lengthy matter. Cummins conducted an extensive internal review and worked collaboratively with the regulators for more than four years." Stellantis, the company that makes the trucks, has already recalled the model year 2019 trucks and has initiated a recall of the model year 2013 to 2018 trucks. The software in those trucks will be recalibrated to ensure that they are fully compliant with federal emissions law, said Jon Mills, a spokesman for Cummins. Mr. Mills said that "next steps are unclear" on the model year 2020 through 2023, but that the company "continues to work collaboratively with regulators" to resolve the issue. The Justice Department partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency in its investigation of the case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: Among the 45 winners of this year's Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program competitions is Creative Coders: Middle School CS Pathways Through Game Design (PDF). The U.S. Dept. of Education is providing the national nonprofit Urban Arts with $3,999,988 to "use materials and learning from its School of Interactive Arts program to create an engaging, game-based, middle school CS course using [Microsoft] Minecraft tools" for 3,450 middle schoolers (6th-8th grades) in New York and California with the help of "our industry partner Microsoft with the utilization of Minecraft Education." From Urban Arts' winning proposal: "Because a large majority of children play video games regularly, teaching CS through video game design exemplifies CRT [Culturally Responsive Teaching], which has been linked to 'academic achievement, improved attendance, [and] greater interest in school.' The video game Minecraft has over 173 million users worldwide and is extremely popular with students at the middle school level; the Minecraft Education workspace we utilize in the Creative Coders curriculum is a familiar platform to any player of the original game. By leveraging students' personal interests and their existing 'funds of knowledge', we believe Creative Coders is likely to increase student participation and engagement." Speaking of UA's EIR grant partner Microsoft, Urban Arts' Board of Directors includes Josh Reynolds, the Director of Modern Workplace for Microsoft Education, whose Urban Arts bio notes "has led some of the largest game-based learning activations worldwide with Minecraft." Urban Arts' Gaming Pathways Educational Advisory Board includes Reynolds and Microsoft Sr. Account Executive Amy Brandt. And in his 2019 book Tools and Weapons, Microsoft President Brad Smith cited $50 million K-12 CS pledges made to Ivanka Trump by Microsoft and other Tech Giants as the key to getting Donald Trump to sign a $1 billion, five-year presidential order (PDF) "to ensure that federal funding from the Department of Education helps advance [K-12] computer science," including via EIR program grants.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft quietly launched a dedicated Copilot app on Android, giving users a way to access Copilot's AI features without the Bing mobile app. "Spotted by @technosarusrex on X, it is now available for download from the Google Play Store, and the app's listing suggests it arrived in the marketplace about a week ago," reports Neowin. From the report: The new Copilot app for Android is not entirely a new thing. At first sight, it looks similar to the Bing Chat app, which still lets you access the same chat features. In addition, you can use Copilot within the Microsoft Edge browser for Android, SwiftKey, Skype, and more. Copilot for Android supports plenty of features (you can also toggle between light and dark themes) that are already available on desktop. You can ask complex questions, generate images using DALL-E 3, draft documents or emails, or just have a casual conversation about anything. In addition, the app lets you turn off or on the recently added GPT-4.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Agence France-Press reports: The world of Chinese chess is in uproar over rumors of cheating and a bad behavior scandal that saw the national champion stripped of his title on Monday after a victory celebration ended with him defecating in a hotel bathtub. Xiangqi, or Chinese chess, has been hugely popular for hundreds of years across Asia -- and 48-year-old Yan Chenglong beat dozens of contenders last week to win the title of "Xiangqi King" at a national tournament hosted by the Chinese Xiangqi Association. But his joy was short-lived, with the CXA on Monday announcing that Yan would have his title revoked and prize money confiscated after had been caught "disrupting public order" and displaying "extremely bad character." The association was also forced to address rumors circulating online that Yan had cheated during the competition by using anal beads equipped with wireless transmitters to send and receive signals. Yan allegedly clenched and unclenched rhythmically to communicate information about the chess board via code to a computer, which then sent back instructions on what moves to make in the form of vibrations, according to reports circulating on the Chinese social site Weibo. "Based on our understanding of the situation, it is currently impossible to prove that Yan engaged in cheating via 'anal beads' as speculated on social media," the CXA said. But he was still stripped of his title and banned from playing for a year after his celebrations went wayward. "Yan consumed alcohol with others in his room on the night of the 17th, and then he defecated in the bathtub of the room he was staying in on the 18th, in an act that damaged hotel property, violated public order and good morals, had a negative impact on the competition and the event of Xiangqi, and was of extremely bad character," the association said. The association did not disclose the amount of prize money Yan was forfeiting, but Xiangqi tournaments often promise winners tens of thousands of yuan (thousands of dollars).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the Open Source movement, is ready for what comes next: the Post-Open Source movement. "I've written papers about it, and I've tried to put together a prototype license," Perens explains in an interview with The Register. "Obviously, I need help from a lawyer. And then the next step is to go for grant money." Perens says there are several pressing problems that the open source community needs to address. "First of all, our licenses aren't working anymore," he said. "We've had enough time that businesses have found all of the loopholes and thus we need to do something new. The GPL is not acting the way the GPL should have done when one-third of all paid-for Linux systems are sold with a GPL circumvention. That's RHEL." RHEL stands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which in June, under IBM's ownership, stopped making its source code available as required under the GPL. Perens recently returned from a trip to China, where he was the keynote speaker at the Bench 2023 conference. In anticipation of his conversation with El Reg, he wrote up some thoughts on his visit and on the state of the open source software community. One of the matters that came to mind was Red Hat. "They aren't really Red Hat any longer, they're IBM," Perens writes in the note he shared with The Register. "And of course they stopped distributing CentOS, and for a long time they've done something that I feel violates the GPL, and my defamation case was about another company doing the exact same thing: They tell you that if you are a RHEL customer, you can't disclose the GPL source for security patches that RHEL makes, because they won't allow you to be a customer any longer. IBM employees assert that they are still feeding patches to the upstream open source project, but of course they aren't required to do so. This has gone on for a long time, and only the fact that Red Hat made a public distribution of CentOS (essentially an unbranded version of RHEL) made it tolerable. Now IBM isn't doing that any longer. So I feel that IBM has gotten everything it wants from the open source developer community now, and we've received something of a middle finger from them. Obviously CentOS was important to companies as well, and they are running for the wings in adopting Rocky Linux. I could wish they went to a Debian derivative, but OK. But we have a number of straws on the Open Source camel's back. Will one break it?" Another straw burdening the Open Source camel, Perens writes, "is that Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. For the most part, if they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company's systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary. The common person doesn't know about Open Source, they don't know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest. Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them." Free Software, Perens explains, is now 50 years old and the first announcement of Open Source occurred 30 years ago. "Isn't it time for us to take a look at what we've been doing, and see if we can do better? Well, yes, but we need to preserve Open Source at the same time. Open Source will continue to exist and provide the same rules and paradigm, and the thing that comes after Open Source should be called something else and should never try to pass itself off as Open Source. So far, I call it Post-Open." Post-Open, as he describes it, is a bit more involved than Open Source. It would define the corporate relationship with developers to ensure companies paid a fair amount for the benefits they receive. It would remain free for individuals and non-profit, and would entail just one license. He imagines a simple yearly compliance process that gets companies all the rights they need to use Post-Open software. And they'd fund developers who would be encouraged to write software that's usable by the common person, as opposed to technical experts. Pointing to popular applications from Apple, Google, and Microsoft, Perens says: "A lot of the software is oriented toward the customer being the product -- they're certainly surveilled a great deal, and in some cases are actually abused. So it's a good time for open source to actually do stuff for normal people." The reason that doesn't often happen today, says Perens, is that open source developers tend to write code for themselves and those who are similarly adept with technology. The way to avoid that, he argues, is to pay developers, so they have support to take the time to make user-friendly applications. Companies, he suggests, would foot the bill, which could be apportioned to contributing developers using the sort of software that instruments GitHub and shows who contributes what to which products. Merico, he says, is a company that provides such software. Perens acknowledges that a lot of stumbling blocks need to be overcome, like finding an acceptable entity to handle the measurements and distribution of funds. What's more, the financial arrangements have to appeal to enough developers. "And all of this has to be transparent and adjustable enough that it doesn't fork 100 different ways," he muses. "So, you know, that's one of my big questions. Can this really happen?" Perens believes that the General Public License (GPL) is insufficient for today's needs and advocates for enforceable contract terms. He also criticizes non-Open Source licenses, particularly the Commons Clause, for misrepresenting and abusing the open-source brand. As for AI, Perens views it as inherently plagiaristic and raises ethical concerns about compensating original content creators. He also weighs in on U.S.-China relations, calling for a more civil and cooperative approach to sharing technology. You can read the full, wide-ranging interview here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Vision Pro, Apple's first "spatial computing" device that costs $3,499, is expected to have a "late-January/early-February" release date, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. "The analyst says that the first wave of Vision Pros are being shipped to Apple in about a month, with total shipments numbering around 500,000 for the full year," adds TechCrunch. From the report: The company's precise target for the year remains an open-ended question. About a month after the device was revealed, reports suggested that Apple has scaled back expectations from around one million to "fewer than 400,000." Even the updated 500,000 figure is small for a company of Apple's massive size and influence. Keep in mind that the company should be shipping more than 200 million iPhones this calendar year. The Vision Pro, however, is widely regarded as the biggest gambit of Tim Cook's 12-year tenure as CEO. Not only is it an entirely new category and form factor for the company, it's also prohibitively priced, even for customers accustomed to shelling out extra for apple products. Add to that VR's decades-long failure to live up to expectations, and you've got a big uphill fight on your hands. Kuo refers to Vision Pro as "Apple's most important product of 2024." Given the years of speculation and all the time and money the company has no doubt poured into the headset, it's a tough statement to argue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: The 12VO power standard (PDF), developed by Intel, is designed to reduce the number of power cables needed to power a modern PC, ultimately reducing cost. While industry uptake of the standard has been slow, a new slew of products from MSI indicates that 12VO is gaining traction. MSI is gearing up with two 12VO-compliant motherboards, covering both Intel and AMD platforms, and a 12VO Power Supply that it's releasing simultaneously: The Pro B650 12VO WiFi, Pro H610M 12VO, and MSI 12VO PSU power supply are all 'coming soon,' which presumably means they'll officially launch at CES 2024. HardwareLux got a pretty good look at MSI's offerings during its EHA (European Hardware Awards) tech tour, including the 'Project Zero' we covered earlier. One of the noticeable changes is the absence of a 24-pin ATX connector, as the ATX12VO connectors use only ten-pin connectors. The publications also saw a 12VO-compliant FSP power supply in a compact system with a thick graphics card. A couple of years ago, we reported on FSP 650-watt and 750-watt SFX 12VO power supply. Apart from that, there is a 1x 6-pin ATX12VO termed 'extra board connector' according to its manual and a 1x 8-pin 12V power connector for the CPU. There are two smaller 4-pin connectors that will provide the 5V power needed for SATA drives. It is likely each of these connectors provides power to two SATA-based drives. Intel proposed the ATX12VO standard several years ago, but adoption has been slow until now. This standard is designed to provide 12v exclusively, completely removing a direct 3.3v and 5v supply. The success of the new standard will depend on the wide availability of the motherboard and power supplies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Infosys has lost a ten-year, $1.5 billion deal it announced just three months ago in September 2023. From a report: The Indian services giant advised investors of the deal on September 14th, describing it as "a Memorandum of Understanding with a global company to provide enhanced digital experiences, along with modernization and business operations services, leveraging Infosys platforms & AI solutions" with a total client target spend of $1.5 billion over 15 years. That announcement included the caveat that Infosys and the unnamed company would have to conclude a Master Agreement to seal the deal. A December 23rd filing revealed that didn't happen. "The global company has now elected to terminate the Memorandum of Understanding and the parties will not be pursuing the Master Agreement," the statement revealed. Infosys's annual revenue topped $18 billion last year, so losing this deal won't cause massive pain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An appeals court on Wednesday temporarily stopped the import ban on Apple's latest Apple Watches, allowing the company to continue selling the wearables. CNBC reports: Apple stopped selling its Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches last week in response to an International Trade Commission order in October that found the blood oxygen sensor in the devices had infringed on intellectual property from Masimo, a medical technology company that sells to hospitals. "The motion for an interim stay is granted to the extent that the Remedial Orders are temporarily stayed," a court filing Wednesday said. On Monday, the Biden administration declined to pause the ITC ban. Apple filed the appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Tuesday. The company continues to seek a longer stay. The ITC will need to reply by Jan. 10. The stay means Apple may be able to sell the latest models of one of its most important products during the busiest time of the year. Apple Watch sales are reported as part of Apple's wearables business, which reported $39.8 billion in sales in Apple's fiscal 2023, which ended in September.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AstroForge, a private company, wants to mine a space rock, but it doesn't want the competition to find out which one. From a report: For generations, Western space missions have largely occurred out in the open. We knew where they were going, why they were going there and what they planned to do. But the world is on the verge of a new era in which private interests override such openness, with big money potentially on the line. Sometime in the coming year, a spacecraft from AstroForge, an American asteroid-mining firm, may be launched on a mission to a rocky object near Earth's orbit. If successful, it will be the first wholly commercial deep-space mission beyond the moon. AstroForge, however, is keeping its target asteroid secret. The secret space-rock mission is the latest in an emerging trend that astronomers and other experts do not welcome: commercial space missions conducted covertly. Such missions highlight gaps in the regulation of spaceflight as well as concerns about whether exploring the cosmos will continue to benefit all humankind. "I'm very much not in favor of having stuff swirling around the inner solar system without anyone knowing where it is," said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. "It seems like a bad precedent to set." But for AstroForge, the calculation is simple: If it reveals the destination, a competitor may grab the asteroid's valuable metals for itself. "Announcing which asteroid we are targeting opens up risk that another entity could seize that asteroid," said Matt Gialich, AstroForge's chief executive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers on Wednesday presented intriguing new findings surrounding an attack that over four years backdoored dozens if not thousands of iPhones, many of which belonged to employees of Moscow-based security firm Kaspersky. Chief among the discoveries: the unknown attackers were able to achieve an unprecedented level of access by exploiting a vulnerability in an undocumented hardware feature that few if anyone outside of Apple and chip suppliers such as ARM Holdings knew of. ArsTechnica: "The exploit's sophistication and the feature's obscurity suggest the attackers had advanced technical capabilities," Kaspersky researcher Boris Larin wrote in an email. "Our analysis hasn't revealed how they became aware of this feature, but we're exploring all possibilities, including accidental disclosure in past firmware or source code releases. They may also have stumbled upon it through hardware reverse engineering." Other questions remain unanswered, wrote Larin, even after about 12 months of intensive investigation. Besides how the attackers learned of the hardware feature, the researchers still don't know what, precisely, its purpose is. Also unknown is if the feature is a native part of the iPhone or enabled by a third-party hardware component such as ARM's CoreSight. The mass backdooring campaign, which according to Russian officials also infected the iPhones of thousands of people working inside diplomatic missions and embassies in Russia, according to Russian government officials, came to light in June. Over a span of at least four years, Kaspersky said, the infections were delivered in iMessage texts that installed malware through a complex exploit chain without requiring the receiver to take any action. With that, the devices were infected with full-featured spyware that, among other things, transmitted microphone recordings, photos, geolocation, and other sensitive data to attacker-controlled servers. Although infections didn't survive a reboot, the unknown attackers kept their campaign alive simply by sending devices a new malicious iMessage text shortly after devices were restarted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the depths of the Amazon rainforest to the deserts of Antarctica, huge questions remain unanswered about life on Earth. The Guardian asked leading scientists and conservationists: what is the one thing you would like to know about the planet that remains a mystery? TLDR, the questions/wishes are:1. How many species are there on Earth?2. I'd go back 540m years to see the 'biological big bang'3. Could some of the smallest life forms help avert climate crisis?4. What is the full biodiversity of the Amazon or Congo basin rainforests?5. How do animals influence the functioning of Earth?6. What will happen to the Gulf Stream?7. Do universal rules govern how plants and animals evolve?8. How many humans could Earth support?9. Which species will adapt to the climate crisis -- and which will not?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More workers feeling anxious, stressed or blue have a new place to go for mental-health help: a digital app. Chatbots that hold therapist-like conversations and wellness apps that deliver depression and other diagnoses or identify people at risk of self-harm are snowballing across employers' healthcare benefits. From a report: "The demand for counselors is huge, but the supply of mental-health providers is shrinking," said J. Marshall Dye, chief executive officer of PayrollPlans, a Dallas-based provider of benefits software used by small and medium-size businesses, which began providing access to a chatbot called Woebot in November. PayrollPlans expects about 9,400 employers will use Woebot in 2024. Amazon about a year ago gave employees free access to Twill, an app that uses artificial intelligence to track the moods of users and create a personalized mental-health plan. The app offers games and other activities that the workers can play, as well as live chats with a human "coach." The app "allows you to address mental health concerns the moment they arise and can be used as a supplement to your daily well-being routine," the company said in a blog post. Amazon declined to comment. About a third of U.S. employers offer a "digital therapeutic" for mental-health support, according to a survey of 457 companies this past summer by professional services company WTW. An additional 15% of the companies were considering adding such an offering in 2024 or 2025. Supporters say the mental-health apps alleviate symptoms such as anxiety, loneliness and depression. Because they are available at any time, the apps can also reach people who might not be able to fit traditional therapy into their schedules or can't find a therapist who has an opening. Yet some researchers say there isn't sufficient evidence the programs work, and the varied security and safety practices create a risk that private information could be leaked or sold.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paying extra for service has inspired rebellions, swivelling iPads, and irritation from Trotsky and Larry David. Post-pandemic, the practice has entered a new stage. The New Yorker: Tips have long provided a convenient way to foist payment obligations onto others. Kerry Segrave, the author of the comprehensive history "Tipping," identified the gratuity's potential origins, in Europe during the late Middle Ages. By the seventeenth century, visitors to aristocratic estates were expected to pay "vails" to the staff. This might have lowered payroll for the estate itself. At least one aristocrat helped himself to some of this new income stream; he threw frequent parties to increase revenues. The system spread. English coffeehouses were said to set out urns inscribed with "To Insure Promptitude." Customers tossed in coins. Eventually, the inscription was shortened to "tip." By the end of the nineteenth century, some business owners demanded their employees' tips. Some cafes charged waiters a fee for the privilege of working there. In France, tips were placed directly into a wooden box called le tronc, controlled by the proprietor. French waiters went on strike in 1907, identifying two of the great evils of their profession: le tronc, and a ban on mustaches. They eventually prevailed on both counts. American visitors to Europe brought tipping back to the United States. Perhaps no entity did more to spread the practice than the Pullman Company. George Pullman preferred hiring formerly enslaved Black men as railroad porters. He paid them as little as possible, and used tips as a subsidy. The system spread as far as the train lines. By the nineteen-twenties, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters estimated that the policy had saved the Pullman Company a hundred and fifty million dollars. The porters had long fought to eliminate tipping. Their efforts had been rebuffed by the Pullman Company's president and, later, chairman, Robert Todd Lincoln. Once the practice gets its hooks in, it can be hard to dislodge. In New York, at the turn of the twentieth century, some enterprising concessionaires paid restaurants thousands of dollars a year to run their coatrooms. These concessionaires became known as the tip trust. At least one dressed young women in theatrical French-maid outfits to collect coats, hats, and tips; the young women turned over all revenues to the trust. (When skimming was discovered, the trusts banned pockets.) Men joked that they bought a hat for five dollars and paid seventy-three dollars a year to wear it. A hat manufacturer sold roll-up models that men could hide inside their coats. The greatest of the tip-trust barons, known as the Hatcheck King, brought in the equivalent of sixty million dollars a year. The trusts were powerful politically. Today, businesses in New York are not allowed to take their employees' tips, with one exception: hat-and-coat checks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's hiring of a key engineer 10 years ago helped spark a fight that led its watch to be banned from the US. From a report: At about 1 a.m. California time in 2013, a scientist emailed Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook with an irresistible pitch. "I strongly believe that we can develop the new wave of technology that will make Apple the No. 1 brand in the medical, fitness and wellness market," he wrote in the email, which was later included in legal documents. Some 10 hours after the message was sent, an Apple recruiter was in touch. And just weeks after that, the engineer was working at the tech company on a smartwatch with health sensors. A flurry of activity began. Within a few months at Apple, the employee asked the company to file about a dozen patents related to sensors and algorithms for determining a person's blood-oxygen level from a wearable device. But this wasn't just any engineer. He had been the chief technical officer of Cercacor Laboratories, the sister company of Masimo, which went on to get to the US to ban the Apple Watch. Apple's decision to hire this technical whiz -- a Stanford engineering Ph.D. named Marcelo Lamego -- is seen as the spark that sent Masimo's lawyers after Apple. While the iPhone maker denies it did anything wrong, Masimo cited the poaching of employees as part of claims that the iPhone maker infringed its patents. The dispute culminated this month in Apple having to pull its latest watches from the company's US stores, hobbling a business that generates roughly $17 billion in annual sales. On Wednesday, Apple scored a victory as a U.S. appeals court paused a government commission's import ban on some of its popular Apple smartwatches.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is grappling with the imminent threats of climate change. Rising seas and increasing storms threaten the fragile coral atolls that are home to 11,000 people. A recent agreement allowing 280 Tuvaluans to migrate to Australia each year moved the nation closer to a managed retreat, but at that pace it would take decades to relocate everyone. Tuvalu could be uninhabitable much sooner, according to projections. In parallel, the government is asserting it will maintain its statehood even without land. It also aims to digitally preserve Tuvalu's culture and history in the metaverse, as the physical place faces being drowned under rising waters. Tuvalu is strategizing for adaptation while also trying to drive global action on emissions reductions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hundreds of students from leading UK universities have launched a "career boycott" of Barclays over its climate policies, warning that the bank will miss out on top talent unless it stops financing fossil fuel companies. From a report: More than 220 students from Barclays' top recruitment universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, and University College London, have sent a letter to the high street lender, saying they will not work for Barclays and raising the alarm over its funding for oil and gas firms including Shell, TotalEnergies, Exxon and BP. "Your ambitious decarbonisation targets are discredited by your absence of action and the roster of fossil fuel companies on your books," the letter said. "You may say you're working with them to help them transition, but Shell, Total and BP have all rowed back." Large oil firms have started to water down climate commitments, including BP, which originally pledged to lower emissions by 35% by 2030 but is now aiming for a 20% to 30% cut instead. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil quietly withdrew funding for plans to use algae to create low-carbon fuel, while Shell announced it would not increase its investments in renewable energy this year, despite earlier promises to slash its emissions. The letter calls on Barclays to end all financing and underwriting of oil and gas companies -- not only their projects -- and to boost funding of firms behind wind and solar energy significantly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.