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The demand for software developers has declined sharply from the peak seen in 2021 and 2022, according to independent analysis by job portal Indeed and research firm ADP, reflecting a broader slowdown in high-paying white-collar job opportunities across tech, marketing, and finance sectors. Nick Bunker, an economist at Indeed, identified these positions as the labor market's current weak point. The shift follows a period of intense recruitment during the pandemic, when tech workers could command premium salaries. ADP Research adds: Employment of software developers in fact has been slowing since 2020, the year pandemic lockdowns first hit the United States. In January 2024, the U.S. employed fewer software developers than it did six years ago. [...] The ADP Research Institute tracked employees at 6,500 companies, including more than 75,000 software developers and engineers in 10 industries, between January 2018 and January 2024. Using this data, we built an index to track the employment of software developers beginning in January 2018. Developer employment grew from January 2018 to November 2019, then began to fall. The index dropped sharply in January 2022 (down 4.6 percentage points), May 2022 (down 3.5 percentage points), and January 2023 (down 3.4 percentage points). Despite intermediate increases in August 2021 and October 2022, the developer employment index has been falling since 2020.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has a suggested solution for individual customers affected by what may turn out to be the largest IT outage that has ever happened: Just reboot it a lot. From a report: Customers can delete a specific file called C00000291*.sys, which is seemingly tied to the bug, Microsoft said in a status update published Friday. But in some cases, people can't even get to a spot where they can delete that file. In an update posted Friday morning, Microsoft told users that they should simply reboot Virtual Machines (VMs) experiencing a BSoD over and over again until they can fix the issue. [...] "We have received reports of successful recovery from some customers attempting multiple Virtual Machine restart operations on affected Virtual Machines," Microsoft told users. "We have received feedback from customers that several reboots (as many as 15 have been reported) may be required, but overall feedback is that reboots are an effective troubleshooting step at this stage."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has revised its Play Store policies, aiming to eliminate subpar and potentially harmful Android apps. The updated Spam and Minimum Functionality policy, set to take effect on August 31, 2024, targets apps that crash frequently, lack substantial content, or provide minimal utility to users, the company said. This policy shift follows Google's ongoing efforts to enhance Play Store security, with the company having blocked over 2 million policy-violating apps and rejected around 200,000 submissions in 2023 alone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A widespread IT outage, caused by a defective software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, is affecting businesses worldwide, causing significant disruptions across various sectors. The issue has primarily impacted computers running Windows, resulting in system crashes and "blue screen of death" errors. The travel industry appears to be among the hardest hit, with airlines and airports in multiple countries reporting problems with check-in and ticketing systems, leading to flight delays. Other affected sectors include banking, retail, and healthcare. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz confirmed the outage was due to a "defect" in a content update for Windows hosts, ruling out a cyberattack. The company is working on a fix. CrowdStrike said the crash reports were "related to the Falcon Sensor" -- its cloud-based security service that it describes as "real-time threat detection, simplified management, and proactive threat hunting." A Microsoft spokesperson told TechCrunch that the previous Microsoft 365 service disruption overnight July 18-19 was unrelated to the widespread outage triggered by the CrowdStrike update. Editor's note: The story has been updated throughout the day and moved higher on the front page.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: When Florida real estate professional Susan Hicks discovered the app Forewarn over a year ago, she was shocked to learn that for a service costing about $20 a month she could instantly retrieve detailed data on prospective clients with only their phone number. "For anybody who's had exposure to this, usually the first time they see it, it blows their mind," Hicks told Recorded Future News, adding that she enthusiastically recommends the tool to the brokers she manages. "It's incredible that there's that amount of information out there that you can just access with one click." "It can be real creepy and you have to swear that you're not going to use it in a wrong manner," Hicks added, referring to Forewarn rules which say real estate agents can't share data from the app publicly or with third parties, or use the app to pull information on non-professional contacts. Forewarn is primarily marketed to and used by the real estate industry, and it has been penetrating that market at a rapid clip. Although some real estate agents say the financial information it returns saves time when finding clients most likely to have the budget for the houses they're looking at, most agents and associations tout it primarily as a safety tool because it also supplies criminal records. In addition to those records, the product -- owned by the data broker red violet -- also supplies a given individual's address history; phone, vehicle and property records; bankruptcies; and liens and judgements, including foreclosure histories. Although such data could generally be gleaned from public records, Forewarn delivers it at the press of a button -- a function real estate agents say allows them to gather publicly available information without having to visit courthouses and municipal offices, a process which would normally take days. The power of Forewarn's technology has led to rapid adoption, but the company is still largely unknown outside the real estate industry. Several fair housing and civil rights advocates interviewed by Recorded Future News weren't aware of its existence. The individuals whose data it sells also have no idea their information is being shared with real estate agents, who potentially might choose not to work with them because of what they discover on the app. Forewarn did not respond to multiple requests for comment, however, statements made by one of its executives suggest that the company intentionally keeps a low profile. "Do not tell the prospect that they are not permitted or unqualified to purchase or sell property because of information you obtained from Forewarn," a company executive said at a recent training webinar with Illinois real estate agents. She emphasized that potential buyers "do not get notified" when they are screened with the app, a question she said many real estate agents ask. Real estate agents who, for example, discover a client has a lien filed against them, should consider telling the prospect they "obtained this information from a confidential service that bases their information on available public record information," the executive added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft said in a statement Friday that it was aware of the global outage that was affecting Windows devices, and attributed the problem to a third-party software. The company said it anticipates a fix to the issue -- impacting companies across various sectors, from airlines, banks, food chains and brokerage houses, to news organizations, and railway networks -- is "forthcoming."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft grappled with a major service outage, leaving users across the world unable to access its cloud computing platforms and causing airlines to cancel flights. From a report: Thousands of users across the world reported problems with Microsoft 365 apps and services to Downdetector.com, a website that tracks service disruptions. "We're investigating an issue impacting users' ability to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services," Microsoft 365 Status said on X early Friday. On its status page for Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform, the company said the issue began just before 10 p.m. ET Thursday, affecting systems across the central U.S. In an update, Microsoft said it had determined the cause and was working to restore access to its users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA reports in an article for Phys.Org: Scientists were stunned on May 30 when a rock that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover drove over cracked open to reveal something never seen before on the Red Planet: yellow sulfur crystals. Since October 2023, the rover has been exploring a region of Mars rich with sulfates, a kind of salt that contains sulfur and forms as water evaporates. But where past detections have been of sulfur-based minerals -- in other words, a mix of sulfur and other materials -- the rock Curiosity recently cracked open is made of elemental (pure) sulfur. It isn't clear what relationship, if any, the elemental sulfur has to other sulfur-based minerals in the area. While people associate sulfur with the odor from rotten eggs (the result of hydrogen sulfide gas), elemental sulfur is odorless. It forms in only a narrow range of conditions that scientists haven't associated with the history of this location. And Curiosity found a lot of it -- an entire field of bright rocks that look similar to the one the rover crushed. "Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert," said Curiosity's project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "It shouldn't be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A group of researchers, academics, and hackers are trying to make it easier to break AI companies' terms of service to conduct "good faith research" that exposes biases, inaccuracies, and training data without fear of being sued. The U.S. government is currently considering an exemption to U.S. copyright law that would allow people to break technical protection measures and digital rights management (DRM) on AI systems to learn more about how they work, probe them for bias, discrimination, harmful and inaccurate outputs, and to learn more about the data they are trained on. The exemption would allow for "good faith" security and academic research and "red-teaming" of AI products even if the researcher had to circumvent systems designed to prevent that research. The proposed exemption has the support of the Department of Justice, which said "good faith research can help reveal unintended or undisclosed collection or exposure of sensitive personal data, or identify systems whose operations or outputs are unsafe, inaccurate, or ineffective for the uses for which they are intended or marketed by developers, or employed by end users. Such research can be especially significant when AI platforms are used for particularly important purposes, where unintended, inaccurate, or unpredictable AI output can result in serious harm to individuals." Much of what we know about how closed-sourced AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and others work are from researchers, journalists, and ordinary users purposefully trying to trick these systems into revealing something about the data they were trained on (which often includes copyrighted material indiscriminately and secretly scraped from the internet), its biases, and its weaknesses. Doing this type of research can often violate the terms of service users agree to when they sign up for a system. For example, OpenAI's terms of service state that users cannot "attempt to or assist anyone to reverse engineer, decompile or discover the source code or underlying components of our Services, including our models, algorithms, or systems (except to the extent this restriction is prohibited by applicable law)," and adds that users must not "circumvent any rate limits or restrictions or bypass any protective measures or safety mitigations we put on our Services." Shayne Longpre, an MIT researcher who is part of the team pushing for the exemption, told me that "there is a lot of apprehensiveness about these models and their design, their biases, being used for discrimination, and, broadly, their trustworthiness." "But the ecosystem of researchers looking into this isn't super healthy. There are people doing the work but a lot of people are getting their accounts suspended for doing good-faith research, or they are worried about potential legal ramifications of violating terms of service," he added. "These terms of service have chilling effects on research, and companies aren't very transparent about their process for enforcing terms of service." The exemption would be to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a sweeping copyright law. Other 1201 exemptions, which must be applied for and renewed every three years as part of a process through the Library of Congress, allow for the hacking of tractors and electronic devices for the purpose of repair, have carveouts that protect security researchers who are trying to find bugs and vulnerabilities, and in certain cases protect people who are trying to archive or preserve specific types of content. Harley Geiger of the Hacking Policy Council said that an exemption is "crucial to identifying and fixing algorithmic flaws to prevent harm or disruption," and added that a "lack of clear legal protection under DMCA Section 1201 adversely affect such research."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FBI was given access to unreleased technology to access the phone of the man identified as the shooter of former President Donald Trump, Bloomberg reported late Thursday, citing people familiar with the investigation. From the report: As the FBI struggled to gain access on Sunday morning to the phone, they appealed directly to Cellebrite, a digital intelligence company founded in Israel that supplies technology to several US federal agencies, according to the people, who requested anonymity to speak freely about the case. FBI agents wanted to pull data from the device to help decipher his motives for the shooting at a rally in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, where Trump suffered an injured ear and a spectator was killed. Authorities have identified the deceased shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks. The local FBI bureau in Pittsburgh held a license for Cellebrite software, which lets law enforcement identify or bypass a phone's passcode. But it didn't work with Crooks' device, according to the people, who said the deceased shooter owned a newer Samsung model that runs Android's operating system. The agents called Cellebrite's federal team, which liaises with law enforcement and government agencies, according to the people. Within hours, Cellebrite transferred to the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, additional technical support and new software that was still being developed. The details about the unsuccessful initial attempt to access the phone, and the unreleased software, haven't been previously reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

J. Michael Cline, the co-founder of Fandango, died from suicide this week after falling from the twentieth floor of a Manhattan hotel. The New York Times reports: Mr. Cline, who was 64, co-founded Fandango in 2000 and left the company in 2011, according to his LinkedIn profile. The company -- familiar to many from its splashy logo, an orange "F" in the shape of a ticket stub -- was later acquired by Comcast and is currently owned by NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. For years, the company dominated movie-ticket sales, handling ticketing for several major theater chains and making money by charging a processing fee for online ticket sales and by selling advertising on its site. At the time of its launch, Mr. Cline offered a pithy explanation for the company's name: "A Fandango is fast and fun," he told Variety. "Fandango is the perfect match to a service designed to make going to the movies easier and more enjoyable than ever before." Art Levitt, the co-founder and former chief operating officer and president of Fandango, remembered Mr. Cline as brilliant, creative and loyal, sticking it out even in "tough" times. TechCrunch provides additional information about Mr. Cline: He left the company in 2011, roughly four years after the company was acquired by Comcast. Some early investors in the online ticketing service were General Atlantic and TCV. Cline was also managing partner of Accretive, a venture capital firm he founded in 1999. He built startups throughout his career, including R1 RCM, Accumen, Accolade, Everspring, Dresr and Insureon. Starting in 2018, Cline served as the executive chairman at the venture firm Juxtapose, which invests in technology businesses. During his time there, Cline enjoyed investing in healthcare companies, according to his staff page. Some of Juxtapose's portfolio companies include Tend, Nectar and Great Jones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica, written by Scharon Harding: Since the acquisition closed in 2021, the Google-fication of Fitbit has largely meant a reduction in features and a focus from Google on getting people onto the Fitbit app. Long-time users have flocked to Fitbit -- sometimes upon Fitbit's request -- to share hundreds of complaints about recent changes. However, Google has been mostly unresponsive to customer feedback. [...] It's worth mentioning that users disgruntled with Fitbit are more likely to complain online. However, it's notable that Fitbit's announcement has been met with 1,523 (as of this writing) mostly negative replies, with new responses still coming in. Another thread on Fitbit's forum that requests to keep the web dashboard currently has 601 upvotes. You can find outraged users on Reddit, too. The most common complaints are around losing previously available features. "Change is fine. Removing key features is not," Community member Seymourh86 wrote in June. "Unless you want people to go to competitors..." Comments from this week show that users are not over the change. DebL555, for example, said today that they're "extremely disappointed and frustrated I cannot access my Dashboard on my PC." Yesterday, NessWeb dubbed the change "an incredibly bad decision," adding: "It's particularly awful for anyone with a visual disability or a finger dexterity issue. It's still bad for everyone else because you just can't see as much on a 3" screen as you can see on a real computer ... Bring back the web interface!!" As has been the case every time there have been problems with Fitbit post-acquisition, theories that Google is making Fitbit worse to push people toward the Pixel Watch run rampant. Others on the Community forum were upset because they felt like Google was ignoring feedback from longtime Fitbit customers. In June, a user going by jessicabilasano wrote: "I just hope Fitbit does not end up like any other Google purchase that turns into a nightmare product/company. Google, instead of removing things that users love about Fitbit features, why not improve them? Listen to your customers/consumers." However, a lack of response to public negative customer feedback has become commonplace for the Fitbit brand lately. "Users seek alternatives as Google is intent on app-centric focus," captions schwit1. "Google ruins everything, it's already ruined Google."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares an op-ed from Reason, written by Sen. Rand Paul: In America, we do not punish businesses for their success. We certainly do not punish businesses because their competitors are struggling to keep pace. Sadly, that is exactly what the Department of Justice (DOJ) is attempting to do in its recent lawsuit against Apple. In March, the DOJ, joined by 15 states and the District of Columbia, filed a lawsuit aimed at penalizing Apple for successfully competing in the market for smartphones. However, like much of the Biden administration's approach to antitrust enforcement, the DOJ's lawsuit is focused on punishing Apple for its success rather than addressing any real harm to consumers. Instead of fostering innovation and competition, this approach threatens to stifle the very progress that benefits Americans. In its lawsuit, the DOJ makes the unsubstantiated claim that Apple has "willfully monopolized" the smartphone market through "exclusionary" and "anticompetitive" conduct. In particular, it accuses Apple of exercising unwarranted control over the creation, distribution, and functioning of apps within the iPhone operating system. What the complaint ignores, however, is that this control is not simply a lawful business practice by a privately held company; it is an indispensable part of Apple's business model. Far from being an "anticompetitive" practice that harms consumers, Apple's careful approach to app integration is a pro-competitive way in which it meets its users' demands. Privacy, security, and seamless integration have been the core of Apple's operational strategy for years. Back in 2010, Steve Jobs explained that "when selling to people who want their devices to just work, we think integrated wins every time." That "open systems don't always work," and Apple was "committed to the integrated approach." What makes Apple products so unique is their ease of use and consistency over time. While no product will ever be perfect, Apple's goal is to deliver a seamless, integrated experience that users can rely on time after time without giving it a second thought. How does Apple do this? By carefully exercising the very control that the DOJ is trying to punish. As economist Alex Tabarrok explains in Marginal Revolution: "Apple's promise to iPhone users is that it will be a gatekeeper. Gatekeeping is what allows Apple to promise greater security, privacy, usability and reliability. Gatekeeping is Apple's brand promise. Gatekeeping is what the consumer's are buying." [...] "Digital markets do not need more government regulation; they need more companies willing to innovate and compete," concludes Sen. Paul. "The DOJ should not waste taxpayer-provided resources targeting a company that has earned its success through excellence in the marketplace. An Apple a day may keep the doctor away, but it seems that all of the pro-competitive justifications in the world cannot keep a politically motivated antitrust enforcer at bay."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia is ready to fully transition to open-source Linux GPU kernel drivers, starting with the R555 series and planning a complete shift with the R560 series. The open-source kernel modules will only be available for select newer GPUs, while older architectures like Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta must continue using proprietary drivers. TechSpot reports: According to Nvidia, the open-source GPU kernel modules have helped deliver "equivalent or better" application performance compared to its proprietary kernels. The company has also added new features like Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support, confidential computing, and the coherent memory architectures of the Grace platform to its open-source kernels. [...] For compatible GPUs, the default version of the driver installed by all methods is switching from proprietary to open-source. However, users will have the ability to manually select the closed-source modules if they are still available for their platform. Unfortunately, the open-source kernel modules are not available for GPUs from the older Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures, meaning people still running a GTX 980 or GTX 1080 will have to continue using Nvidia's proprietary drivers. For mixed deployments with older and newer GPUs in the same system, Nvidia recommends continuing to use the proprietary driver for full compatibility. "Nvidia has moved most of its proprietary functions into a proprietary, closed-source firmware blob," adds Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy. "The parts of Nvidia's GPUs that interact with the broader Linux system are open, but the user-space drivers and firmware are none of your or the OSS community's business."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2018, Google replaced its URL shortener service, goo.gl, with Firebase Dynamic Links, citing "the changes we've seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time." Although it stopped accepting new URLs to shorten, it continued to serve existing URLs that used their service. That's about to change on August 25th, 2025, when Google will turn off the service portion of Google URL Shortener. "Any developers using links built with the Google URL Shortener in the form https://goo.gl/* will be impacted, and these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25th, 2025," says Google in a blog post today. "Starting August 23, 2024, goo.gl links will start displaying an interstitial page for a percentage of existing links notifying your users that the link will no longer be supported after August 25th, 2025 prior to navigating to the original target page. Over time the percentage of links that will show the interstitial page will increase until the shutdown date." All links will return a 404 response after the shutdown date.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission today voted to lower price caps on prison phone calls and closed a loophole that allowed prison telecoms to charge high rates for intrastate calls. Today's vote will cut the price of interstate calls in half and set price caps on intrastate calls for the first time. The FCC said it "voted to end exorbitant phone and video call rates that have burdened incarcerated people and their families for decades. Under the new rules, the cost of a 15-minute phone call will drop to $0.90 from as much as $11.35 in large jails and, in small jails, to $1.35 from $12.10." The new rules are expected to take effect in January 2025 for all prisons and for jails with at least 1,000 incarcerated people. The rate caps would take effect in smaller jails in April 2025. Worth Rises, a nonprofit group advocating for prison reform, said it "estimates that the new rules will impact 83 percent of incarcerated people (about 1.4 million) and save impacted families at least $500 million annually." The nonprofit Prison Policy Institute said that prison phone companies charge ancillary fees for things "like making a deposit to fund an account." The ban on those fees "also effectively blocks a practice that we have been campaigning against for years: companies charging fees to consumers who choose to make single calls rather than fund a calling account, and deliberately steering new consumers to this higher-cost option in order to increase fee revenue," the group said. The ancillary fee ban is a "technical-sounding change," but will help "eliminate some of the industry's dirtiest tricks that shortchange both the families and the facilities," the group said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI on Thursday launched GPT-4o mini, a cost-efficient small AI model that will replace GPT-3.5 Turbo in ChatGPT. Reuters reports: Priced at 15 cents per million input tokens and 60 cents per million output tokens, the GPT-4o mini is more than 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo, OpenAI said. It currently outperforms the GPT-4 model on chat preferences and scored 82% on Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU), OpenAI said. MMLU is a textual intelligence and reasoning benchmark used to evaluate the capabilities of language models. A higher MMLU score signifies it can understand and use language better across a variety of domains, enhancing real-world usage. The GPT-4o mini model's score compared with 77.9% for Google's Gemini Flash and 73.8% for Anthropic's Claude Haiku, according to OpenAI. With the mini model currently supporting text and vision in the application programming interface, OpenAI said support for text, image, video and audio inputs and outputs would be made available in the future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Postal Service was sharing the postal addresses of its online customers with advertising and tech giants Meta, LinkedIn and Snap, TechCrunch has found. On Wednesday, the USPS said it addressed the issue and stopped the practice, claiming that it was "unaware" of it. TechCrunch found USPS was sharing customers' information by way of hidden data-collecting code (also known as tracking pixels) used across its website. Tech and advertising companies create this kind of code to collect information about the user -- such as which pages they visit -- every time a webpage containing the code loads in the customer's browser. In the case of USPS, some of that collected data included the postal addresses of logged-in USPS Informed Delivery customers, who use the service to see photos of their incoming mail before it arrives. It's not clear how many individuals had their information collected or for how long. Informed Delivery had more than 62 million users (PDF) as of March 2024. [...] The code also collected other data, such as information about the user's computer type and browser, which appeared as partly pseudonymized -- essentially scrambled in a way that makes it more difficult for humans to know where data came from, or who it relates to, by using randomized identifiers in place of real customer names. But researchers have long warned that pseudonymous data can still be used to re-identify seemingly anonymous individuals. TechCrunch also found that tracking numbers entered into the USPS website were also shared with advertisers and tech companies, including Bing, Google, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snap. Some in-transit tracking data was also shared, such as the real-world location of the mail in the postal system, even if the customer was not logged in to USPS' website. USPS spokesperson Jim McKean said in a statement: "The Postal Service leverages an analytics platform for our own internal purposes, so that we understand the usage of our products and services and which we use on an aggregated basis to market our products. The Postal Service does not sell or provide any personal information that is collected from this analytics platform to any third party, and we were unaware of any configuration of the platform that collected personal information from the URL and that shared it without our knowledge with social media." "We have taken immediate action to remediate this issue," the spokesperson added, without saying what action was taken.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RealPage says it isn't doing anything wrong by suggesting to landlords how much rent they could charge. From a report: In a move to reclaim its own narrative, the property management software company published a microsite and a digital booklet it's calling "The Real Story," as it faces multiple lawsuits and a reported federal criminal probe related to allegations of rental price fixing. RealPage's six-page digital booklet, published on the site in mid-June, addresses what it calls "false and misleading claims about its software" -- the myriad of allegations it faces involving price-fixing and rising rents -- and contends that the software benefits renters and landlords and increases competition. It also said landlords accept RealPage's price recommendations for new leases less than 50 percent of the time and that the software recommends competitive prices to help fill units. [...] But landlords are left without concrete answers, as questions around the legality of this software are ongoing as they continue renting properties. "I don't think we're seeing this as a RealPage issue but rather as a revenue management software issue," says Alexandra Alvarado, the director of marketing and education at the American Apartment Owners Association, the largest association of landlords in the US. Alvarado says some landlords are taking pause and asking questions before using the tech.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The energy giant Shell has quietly backed away from a pledge to rapidly increase its use of "advanced recycling," a practice oil and petrochemical producers have promoted as a solution to the plastics pollution crisis. From a report: "Advanced" or "chemical" recycling involves breaking down plastic polymers into tiny molecules that can be made into synthetic fuels or new plastics. The most common form, pyrolysis, does so using heat. Shell has invested in pyrolysis since 2019, touting it as a way to slash waste. That year, the company used oil made via pyrolysis in one of its Louisiana chemical plants for the first time. And it began publicizing a new goal for the technology: "Our ambition is to use 1m tonnes of plastic waste a year in our global chemicals plants by 2025." But recently, the company rolled back that promise with little fanfare: "[I]n 2023 we concluded that the scale of our ambition to turn 1m tonnes of plastic waste a year into pyrolysis oil by 2025 is unfeasible," it said in its 2023 sustainability report, published in March. Reached for comment, a Shell spokesperson, Curtis Smith, said: "Our ambition, regardless of regulation, is to increase circularity and move away from a linear economy to one where products and materials are reused, repurposed and recycled."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta says it won't be launching its upcoming multimodal AI model -- capable of handling video, audio, images, and text -- in the European Union, citing regulatory concerns. From a report: The decision will prevent European companies from using the multimodal model, despite it being released under an open license. Just last week, the EU finalized compliance deadlines for AI companies under its strict new AI Act. Tech companies operating in the EU will generally have until August 2026 to comply with rules around copyright, transparency, and AI uses like predictive policing. Meta's decision follows a similar move by Apple, which recently said it would likely exclude the EU from its Apple Intelligence rollout due to concerns surrounding the Digital Markets Act.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia and French startup Mistral AI jointly announced today the release of a new language model designed to bring powerful AI capabilities directly to business desktops. From a report: The model, named Mistral-NeMo, boasts 12 billion parameters and an expansive 128,000 token context window, positioning it as a formidable tool for businesses seeking to implement AI solutions without the need for extensive cloud resources. Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning research at Nvidia, emphasized the model's accessibility and efficiency in a recent interview with VentureBeat. "We're launching a model that we jointly trained with Mistral. It's a 12 billion parameter model, and we're launching it under Apache 2.0," he said. "We're really excited about the accuracy of this model across a lot of tasks." The collaboration between Nvidia, a titan in GPU manufacturing and AI hardware, and Mistral AI, a rising star in the European AI scene, represents a significant shift in the AI industry's approach to enterprise solutions. By focusing on a more compact yet powerful model, the partnership aims to democratize access to advanced AI capabilities. Catanzaro elaborated on the advantages of smaller models. "The smaller models are just dramatically more accessible," he said. "They're easier to run, the business model can be different, because people can run them on their own systems at home. In fact, this model can run on RTX GPUs that many people have already."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following a comprehensive internal review, NASA announced Wednesday its intent to discontinue development of its VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) project. NASA: NASA stated cost increases, delays to the launch date, and the risks of future cost growth as the reasons to stand down on the mission. The rover was originally planned to launch in late 2023, but in 2022, NASA requested a launch delay to late 2024 to provide more time for preflight testing of the Astrobotic lander. Since that time, additional schedule and supply chain delays pushed VIPER's readiness date to September 2025, and independently its CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) launch aboard Astrobotic's Griffin lander also has been delayed to a similar time. Continuation of VIPER would result in an increased cost that threatens cancellation or disruption to other CLPS missions. NASA has notified Congress of the agency's intent.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Indian crypto exchange WazirX on Thursday confirmed it had suffered a security breach after about $230 million in assets were "suspiciously transferred" out of the platform earlier in the day. The Mumbai-based firm said one of its multisig wallets had suffered a security breach, and it was temporarily pausing all withdrawals from the platform. Lookchain, a third-party blockchain explorer, reported that more than 200 cryptocurrencies, including 5.43 billion SHIB tokens, over 15,200 Ethereum tokens, 20.5 million Matic tokens, 640 billion Pepe tokens, 5.79 million USDT, and 135 million Gala tokens were "stolen" from the platform. WazirX reported holdings of about $500 million in its June proof-of-reserves disclosure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Nearly a quarter of Japanese companies have adopted artificial intelligence (AI) in their businesses, while more than 40% have no plan to make use of the cutting-edge technology, a Reuters survey showed on Thursday. The survey, conducted for Reuters by Nikkei Research, pitched a range of questions to 506 companies over July 3-12 with roughly 250 firms responding, on condition of anonymity. About 24% of respondents said they have already introduced AI in their businesses and 35% are planning to do so, while the remaining 41% have no such plans, illustrating varying degrees of embracing the technological innovation in corporate Japan. Asked for objectives when adopting AI in a question allowing multiple answers, 60% of respondents said they were trying to cope with a shortage of workers, while 53% aimed to cut labour costs and 36% cited acceleration in research and development. As for hurdles to introduction, a manager at a transportation company cited "anxiety among employees over possible headcount reduction." Other obstacles include a lack of technological expertise, substantial capital expenditure and concern about reliability, the survey showed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A drug has been shown to extend the lifespan of laboratory mice by nearly 25%, with treated mice displaying fewer cancers and improved health and strength. It earned them the nickname "supermodel grannies" due to their youthful appearance. "The drug is already being tested in people, but whether it would have the same anti-ageing effect is unknown," reports the BBC. From the report: The team at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Science, Imperial College London and Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore were investigating a protein called interleukin-11. Levels of it increase in the human body as we get older, it contributes to higher levels of inflammation, and the researchers say it flips several biological switches that control the pace of ageing. The researchers performed two experiments. The first genetically engineered mice so they were unable to produce interleukin-11. The second waited until mice were 75 weeks old (roughly equivalent to a 55-year-old person) and then regularly gave them a drug to purge interleukin-11 from their bodies. The results, published in the journal Nature, showed lifespans were increased by 20-25% depending on the experiment and sex of the mice. Old laboratory mice often die from cancer, however, the mice lacking interleukin-11 had far lower levels of the disease. And they showed improved muscle function, were leaner, had healthier fur and scored better on many measures of frailty.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Astronomers say they've detected two gases that could indicate the presence of life forms lurking in the clouds of Venus. The Guardian reports: Findings presented at the national astronomy meeting in Hull on Wednesday bolster evidence for a pungent gas, phosphine, whose presence on Venus has been fiercely disputed. A separate team revealed the tentative detection of ammonia, which on Earth is primarily produced by biological activity and industrial processes, and whose presence on Venus scientists said could not readily be explained by known atmospheric or geological phenomena. "It could be that if Venus went through a warm, wet phase in the past then as runaway global warming took effect [life] would have evolved to survive in the only niche left to it -- the clouds," said Dr Dave Clements, a reader in astrophysics at Imperial College London, told the meeting. "Our findings suggest that when the atmosphere is bathed in sunlight the phosphine is destroyed," Clements said. "All that we can say is that phosphine is there. We don't know what's producing it. It may be chemistry that we don't understand. Or possibly life." In a second talk, Prof Jane Greaves, an astronomer at Cardiff University, presented preliminary observations from the Green Bank telescope indicating ammonia, which on Earth is made through either industrial processes or by nitrogen-converting bacteria. Greaves said: "Even if we confirmed both of these [findings], it is not evidence that we have found these magic microbes and they're living there today," adding that there were not yet "any ground truths." Dr Robert Massey, the deputy executive director at the Royal Astronomical Society, said in a statement: "These are very exciting findings but it must be stressed that the results are only preliminary and more work is needed to learn more about the presence of these two potential biomarkers in Venus's clouds. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to think that these detections could point to either possible signs of life or some unknown chemical processes. It will be interesting to see what further investigations unearth over the coming months and years."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The image, as it happens, comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who gave psilocybin, the compound in "magic mushrooms," to participants in a study before sending them into a functional M.R.I. scanner. The kaleidoscopic whirl of colors they recorded is essentially a heat map of brain changes, with the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity that occurs in the so-called functional networks, the neural communication pathways that connect different regions of the brain. The scans, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, offer a rare glimpse into the wild neural storm associated with mind-altering drugs. Researchers say they could provide a potential road map for understanding how psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA can lead to lasting relief from depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders. "Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we've tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected," said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a professor of neurology at Washington University and a senior author of the study. "It was quite shocking when we saw the effect size." Brian Mathur, a systems neuroscientist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, says these findings cannot show exactly what causes the therapeutic benefit of psilocybin, but "it's possible psilocybin is directly causing" the brain-network changes. That, or it is creating a psychedelic experience that in turn causes parts of the brain to behave differently. The next step is to determine whether psilocybin's blood-flow changes in the brain or its direct effects on neurons, or both, are responsible for the brain-network disruptions. "The best part of this work is that it's going to provide a means forward for the field to develop further hypotheses that can and should be tested," Mathur says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader Uncle_Meataxe shares a report from the Sacramento Bee: California's power grid handled a nearly three week long record-setting heat wave with few issues. The heat wave was the hottest 20-day period on record around Sacramento and set an all-time temperature record of 124 degrees in Palm Springs. Emergency alerts and calls for voluntary conservation were avoided this time around. Officials credit years of investment in renewable energy, especially battery storage that store solar power for use when the sun stops shining. CAISO last issued calls for voluntary conservation two years ago, during a 2022 bout of extreme heat. Since then, roughly 11,600 megawatts of new renewable energy sources have come onto California's electricity grid. That includes 10,000 megawatts of battery power, enough to power 10 million homes for a few hours. California is now home to the most grid batteries in the world outside of China, [said Elliot Mainzer, president and CEO of California Independent System Operator (CAISO)]. "Batteries performed very well in this event, they were charged and ready at the right times for optimization on the grid," he added. "That made a big, big difference." [...] Apart from battery storage, Mainzer also credited that success to less extreme temperatures in Southern California as well as noticeable slightly lower electricity consumption in the peak demand hours, from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the so-called "godmother of AI," is working on a startup focused on developing technology capable of human-like visual data processing and advanced reasoning. According to the Financial Times (paywalled), the startup is called World Labs and is already worth $1 billion. Quartz reports: "Curiosity urges us to create machines to see just as intelligently as we can, if not better," Li said during a Ted talk in April. "And if we want to advance AI beyond its current capabilities, we want more than AI that can see and talk. We want AI that can do." Andreessen Horowitz and the AI fund Radical Ventures are funders of World Labs. Li is renowned for her contributions to AI. She invented ImageNet, a dataset used for advancing computer vision that many see as a catalyst for the AI boom. She consults with policymakers as they work to set up guardrails for the technology, and was named one of 12 national AI research resource task force members by the U.S. White House in 2021.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Valve had its employee and payroll data leaked through a poorly redacted document in an antitrust lawsuit in May, offering a rare glimpse into the company's small but impactful workforce over the years. As first noticed by SteamDB's Pavel Djundik, Valve's significant influence in PC gaming transactions has been maintained by just a few hundred employees. Kyle Orland reports via Ars Technica: It's striking to consider just how small Valve is compared to other major players in the game industry. In 2021, Microsoft estimated Valve's annual revenue at $6.5 billion, roughly on the same scale as EA's $7.5 billion in 2024 revenue. But Steam achieved those numbers with around 350 employees, compared to well over 13,000 people employed by EA. The disparity highlights just how much money Valve brings in with a relatively small workforce. And a lot of that is thanks to the chunk of revenue Valve takes from every sale on Steam. The dominant PC gaming marketplace has seen a massive increase in the number of annual game releases since 2012 or so, thanks to initiatives like Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct. Yet, surprisingly, the size of the "Steam" department inside Valve has shrunk in recent years, from a peak of 142 employees in 2015 down to just 79 in 2021. From the outside, having just 79 employees keeping track of more than 11,000 Steam releases in 2021 is a pretty incredible ratio. Some readers may also be surprised that Valve's "Games" department has represented a majority of the company's headcount since 2003. That has remained true (though to a lesser extent) even in more recent years, as Valve's output of new games has become much more occasional. It seems likely a large number of those Games department employees are devoted to ultra-popular Valve games like Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2, which enjoy tens of millions of players and need significant support work. The leaked data also shows the slow rise of Valve's small Hardware department, which started with just three employees in 2011 as the company began work on its doomed Steam Machines initiative. Transitioning into the Valve Index era in the late 2010s, the hardware department still represented just a few dozen people and a paltry 3 to 4 percent of the company's annual payroll. By the time we hit 2021 and the run-up to the Steam Deck, the Hardware division still makes up just 12 percent of Valve's small total headcount. Looking back, it's impressive that such a small team was able to create a portable gaming device that quickly spawned a whole micro-industry of imitators. We can only hope the Hardware team got a little more employee support in the wake of the Steam Deck's market success.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: Now, after years of contentious relationships with academic researchers, Meta is opening a small pilot program that would allow a handful of them to access Instagram data for up to about six months in order to study the app's effect on the well-being of teens and young adults. The company will announce today that it is seeking proposals that focus on certain research areas -- investigating whether social-media use is associated with different effects in different regions of the world, for example -- and that it plans to accept up to seven submissions. Once approved, researchers will be able to access relevant data from study participants -- how many accounts they follow, for example, or how much they use Instagram and when. Meta has said that certain types of data will be off-limits, such as user-demographic information and the content of media published by users; a full list of eligible data is forthcoming, and it is as yet unclear whether internal information related to ads that are served to users or Instagram's content-sorting algorithm, for example, might be provided. The program is being run in partnership with the Center for Open Science, or COS, a nonprofit. Researchers, not Meta, will be responsible for recruiting the teens, and will be required to get parental consent and take privacy precautions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matthew Connatser reports via The Register: US government is granting GlobalWafers up to $400 million in CHIPS Act cash to help fund its 300mm wafer manufacturing facilities in Texas and Missouri. The Commerce Department said GlobalWafers' Texas plant is a significant milestone for the US as it's the country's first facility for manufacturing 300mm wafers, the kind that are used for modern processes. The Missouri site will produce a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) variant of 300mm wafers, which are more geared towards defense and aerospace applications where chips need to be less prone to failure. Plans to build the Texas wafer plant were first revealed just over two years ago by the Taiwanese chip biz. It was an alternative use of a few billion dollars that were originally earmarked for acquiring German wafer maker Siltronic, an acquisition which didn't go as hoped due to resistance from German regulators. The Missouri plant meanwhile was announced in 2021 as a partnership between GlobalWafers and GlobalFoundries, the chip fab spun off from AMD that now focuses on older nodes rather than the cutting edge. This fab seems to be the smaller of the two, considering that its budget when first announced was just $800 million, and that seems to also cover an expansion of a 200mm SOI wafer plant. In total, GlobalWafers' Texas and Missouri factories will cost around four billion dollars, which means the maximum award funded by the CHIPS Act would cover up to ten percent of the budget. The Commerce Department claims that facilities will create 1,700 jobs in construction and 880 in manufacturing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Axios, Meta will withhold future multimodel AI models from customers in the European Union "due to the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment." From the report: Meta plans to incorporate the new multimodal models, which are able to reason across video, audio, images and text, in a wide range of products, including smartphones and its Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. Meta says its decision also means that European companies will not be able to use the multimodal models even though they are being released under an open license. It could also prevent companies outside of the EU from offering products and services in Europe that make use of the new multimodal models. The company is also planning to release a larger, text-only version of its Llama 3 model soon. That will be made available for customers and companies in the EU, Meta said. Meta's issue isn't with the still-being-finalized AI Act, but rather with how it can train models using data from European customers while complying with GDPR -- the EU's existing data protection law. Meta announced in May that it planned to use publicly available posts from Facebook and Instagram users to train future models. Meta said it sent more than 2 billion notifications to users in the EU, offering a means for opting out, with training set to begin in June. Meta says it briefed EU regulators months in advance of that public announcement and received only minimal feedback, which it says it addressed. In June -- after announcing its plans publicly -- Meta was ordered to pause the training on EU data. A couple weeks later it received dozens of questions from data privacy regulators from across the region. The United Kingdom has a nearly identical law to GDPR, but Meta says it isn't seeing the same level of regulatory uncertainty and plans to launch its new model for U.K. users. A Meta representative told Axios that European regulators are taking much longer to interpret existing law than their counterparts in other regions. A Meta representative told Axios that training on European data is key to ensuring its products properly reflect the terminology and culture of the region.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from TechCrunch, written by Zack Whittaker: We're over halfway through 2024, and already this year we have seen some of the biggest, most damaging data breaches in recent history. And just when you think that some of these hacks can't get any worse, they do. From huge stores of customers' personal information getting scraped, stolen and posted online, to reams of medical data covering most people in the United States getting stolen, the worst data breaches of 2024 to date have already surpassed at least 1 billion stolen records and rising. These breaches not only affect the individuals whose data was irretrievably exposed, but also embolden the criminals who profit from their malicious cyberattacks. Travel with us to the not-so-distant past to look at how some of the biggest security incidents of 2024 went down, their impact and. in some cases, how they could have been stopped. These are some of the largest breaches highlighted in the report: AT&T's Data Breaches: AT&T experienced two data breaches in 2024, affecting nearly all its customers and many non-customers. The breaches exposed phone numbers, call records, and personal information, risking account hijacks for 7.6 million customers.Change Healthcare Hack: A ransomware attack on Change Healthcare resulted in the theft of sensitive medical data, affecting a substantial proportion of Americans. The breach caused widespread outages in healthcare services across the U.S. and compromised personal, medical, and billing information.Synnovis Ransomware Attack: The cyberattack on U.K. pathology lab Synnovis disrupted patient services in London hospitals for weeks, leading to thousands of postponed operations and the exposure of data related to 300 million patient interactions.Snowflake Data Theft (Including Ticketmaster): Cybercriminals stole hundreds of millions of records from Snowflake's corporate customers, including 560 million records from Ticketmaster. The breach affected data from multiple companies and institutions, exposing vast amounts of customer and employee information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major changes are coming to the ACT college admissions exam in the spring, the CEO of ACT announced Monday. From a report: The exam will be evolving to "meet the challenges students and educators face" -- and that will include shortening the core test and making the science section optional, chief executive Janet Godwin said in a post on the non-profit's website. The changes will begin with national online tests in spring 2025 and be rolled out for school-day testing in spring 2026, Godwin said in the post. The decision to alter the ACT follows changes made to the SAT earlier this year by the College Board, the non-profit organization that develops and administers that test. The SAT was shortened by a third and went fully digital. Science is being removed from the ACT's core sections, leaving English, reading and math as the portions that will result in a college-reportable composite score ranging from 1 to 36, Godwin wrote. The science section, like the ACT's writing section already was, will be optional."This means students can choose to take the ACT, the ACT plus science, the ACT plus writing, or the ACT plus science and writing," Godwin wrote. "With this flexibility, students can focus on their strengths and showcase their abilities in the best possible way."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lab-grown pet food is to hit UK shelves as Britain becomes the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat. From a report: The Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have approved the product from the company Meatly. It is thought there will be demand for cultivated pet food, as animal lovers face a dilemma about feeding their pets meat from slaughtered livestock. Research suggests the pet food industry has a climate impact similar to that of the Philippines, the 13th most populous country in the world. A study by the University of Winchester found that 50% of surveyed pet owners would feed their pets cultivated meat, while 32% would eat it themselves. The Meatly product is cultivated chicken. It is made by taking a small sample from a chicken egg, cultivating it with vitamins and amino acids in a lab, then growing cells in a container similar to those in which beer is fermented. The result is a pate-like paste.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Commerce Department plans to issue proposed rules on connected vehicles next month and expects to impose limits on some software made in China and other countries deemed adversaries, a senior official said Tuesday. From a report: "We're looking at a few components and some software - not the whole car - but it would be some of the key driver components of the vehicle that manage the software and manage the data around that car that would have to be made in an allied country," said export controls chief Alan Estevez at a forum in Colorado. In May, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said her department planned to issue proposed rules on Chinese-connected vehicles this autumn and had said the Biden administration could take "extreme action" and ban Chinese-connected vehicles or impose restrictions on them after the Biden administration in February launched a probe into whether Chinese vehicle imports posed national security risks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cellebrite, the well-known mobile forensics company, was unable to unlock a sizable chunk of modern iPhones available on the market as of April 2024, 404 Media reported Wednesday, citing leaked documents it obtained. From the report: Mobile forensics companies typically do not release details on what specific models their tools can or cannot penetrate, instead using vague terms in marketing materials. The documents obtained by 404 Media, which are given to customers but not published publicly, show how fluid and fast moving the success, or failure, of mobile forensic tools can be, and highlights the constant cat and mouse game between hardware and operating manufacturers like Apple and Google, and the hacking companies looking for vulnerabilities to exploit. [...] For all locked iPhones able to run 17.4 or newer, the Cellebrite document says "In Research," meaning they cannot necessarily be unlocked with Cellebrite's tools. For previous iterations of iOS 17, stretching from 17.1 to 17.3.1, Cellebrite says it does support the iPhone XR and iPhone 11 series. Specifically, the document says Cellebrite recently added support to those models for its Supersonic BF [brute force] capability, which claims to gain access to phones quickly. But for the iPhone 12 and up running those operating systems, Cellebrite says support is "Coming soon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Docs is adding Markdown support, finally. The update, rolling out over the next two weeks, allows users to import, export, copy, and paste Markdown-formatted text. This move comes a decade after Google consolidated its document editing tools into Drive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Britain's new Labour government has said it will explore how to effectively regulate AI models, but stopped short of proposing any specific laws. From a report: King Charles set out newly-elected Prime Minister Keir Starmer's legislative agenda in a speech on Wednesday to open the new session of parliament. It included more than 35 new bills covering everything from housing to cyber security measures. The government said it would seek to establish the appropriate legislation to place requirements on those working to develop "the most powerful artificial intelligence models."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A recent poll on TechPowerUp revealed that an overwhelming majority of PC users are not interested in paying extra for hardware with AI capabilities. According to the survey, 84% of respondents would not spend more for AI features, while only 7% said they would, and 9% were unsure. The poll data was already contributed by over 26K responders. This indicates that despite the PC market's shift toward integrating AI, most enthusiasts remain skeptical of its value. This suggests that hardware companies should pay attention to the preferences of their core user base. Currently, enthusiasts, who no doubt represent the majority of users on TechPowerUP, show little interest in AI features.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Costs associated with ransomware attacks on critical national infrastructure (CNI) organizations skyrocketed in the past year. From a report: According to Sophos' latest figures, released today, the median ransom payments rose to $2.54 million -- a whopping 41 times last year's sum of $62,500. The mean payment for 2024 is even higher at $3.225 million, although this represents a less dramatic 6x increase. IT, tech, and telecoms were the least likely to pay mega bucks to cybercriminals with an average payment of $330,000, while lower education and federal government orgs reported the highest average payments at $6.6 million. The numbers are based only on ransomware victims that were willing to disclose the details of their blunders, so do not present the complete picture. On the topic of ransom payments, only 86 CNI organizations of the total 275 involved in the survey offered data. There's a good chance that the numbers would be skewed if 100 percent of the total CNI ransomware victims polled were entirely transparent with their figures. Costs to recover from ransomware attacks are also significantly up compared to the researchers' report last year, with some CNI sectors' costs quadrupling to a median average of $3 million per incident. While the mean cost across oil, gas, energy, and utilities dropped slightly to $3.12 million from $3.17 million last year, the energy and water sectors saw the sharpest increase in recovery costs. The new average for just these two sectors is now four times greater than the global median cross-sector average of $750k, Sophos said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GitLab, a U.S. provider of cloud-based software development tools whose investors include Google parent Alphabet, is exploring a sale after attracting acquisition interest, Reuters is reporting. From the report: GitLab, which has a market value of about $8 billion, is working with investment bankers on a sale process that has attracted interest from peers, including cloud monitoring firm Datadog, the sources said. Any deal is still weeks away and no agreement is certain, the sources said, requesting anonymity because the matter is confidential.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Repairs have finally commenced on three subsea telecommunications cables that were damaged in the Red Sea in February, even as Houthi militants escalate their attacks on ships in the area. From a report: The AAE-1 cable, a 25,000-kilometer (15,500 miles) fiber optic link between Asia and Europe, was repaired by a ship owned by E-Marine, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi-based Emirates Telecommunications Group. The cable came online this week, a Yemeni government official said. The same ship, Niwa, remains in Yemeni waters to repair the remaining two cables, Seacom and EIG. The cables, among more than a dozen that run through the Red Sea, were severed by the anchor of a cargo ship sunk by Iran-backed Houthi militants in late February. Repairs to the cables have depended on gaining access to infrastructure in Yemen's waters, a task complicated by the country's split government and the fact the Red Sea is a conflict zone. It has taken months of negotiations involving the cable operators and the two factions that control Yemen -- the internationally-recognized government in the south and the Houthi-backed government in Sanaa -- to arrange for the repair mission.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bipartisan pair of U.S. senators pressed the leaders of AT&T and data storage company Snowflake on Tuesday for more information about the scope of a recent breach that allowed cybercriminals to steal records on "nearly all" of the phone giant's customers. From a report: "There is no reason to believe that AT&T's sensitive data will not also be auctioned and fall into the hands of criminals and foreign intelligence agencies," Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO), the leaders of the Judiciary Committee's privacy subpanel, wrote Tuesday in a letter to AT&T Chief Executive Officer John Stankey. The duo also sent a missive to Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy that said the theft of AT&T subscriber information "appears to be connected with an ongoing series of breaches" of the company's clients, including Ticketmaster, Advance Auto Parts, and Santander Bank. "Disturbingly, the Ticketmaster and AT&T breaches appears [sic] to have been easily preventable," they wrote to Ramaswamy. Blumenthal and Hawley have asked the corporate leaders to answer a series of questions about the lapses by July 29.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: CNBC spoke to three startups -- France-based Zephalto, Florida-based Space Perspective and Arizona-based World View -- that aim to hoist tourists to the stratosphere using pressurized capsules and massive gas-filled balloons. "The capsule itself is designed to to carry eight customers and two crew into the stratosphere," said Ryan Hartman, CEO of World View. "There will be a center bar where people can gather, and then, of course, there will be a bathroom aboard the capsule." The balloon rides will last around 6 hours, but will not take passengers all the way to space. Most will reach heights of 15 to 19 miles above the earth's surface, flying in an area known as the stratosphere. The start of space is generally accepted by the U.S. government to be around 80 kilometers, or about 50 miles, above the earth's surface. Jane Poynter, founder and co-CEO of Space Perspective, has a differing view. "There is no universal definition of space," Poynter said. "We are regulated as a spaceship. If we go over 98,000 feet, we are a spaceship. Outside the capsule, it's essentially a vacuum. We're above 99% of Earth's atmosphere, which is why the sky is so deep black." Compared to rocket-powered space tourism, the physical sensation that passengers will experience on a stratospheric balloon ride is more comparable to being on an airplane. Passengers will not experience weightlessness. "We don't need any physical requirements to board the balloon," said Vincent Farret d'Asties, the founder and chief pilot at Zephalto. "If you can board a standard plane, you can board the balloon." All three companies told CNBC that they were pleased with consumer interest. World Views says it sold 1,250 tickets so far while Space Perspective has sold 1,800. Zephalto did not tell CNBC how many tickets it sold, but said its initial flights were fully booked. Ticket prices range from $50,000 per seat with World View to around $184,000 with Zephalto. Space Perspective sells tickets to its experience for $125,000 per seat. That's all assuming commercial service gets off the ground. Only Zephalto has performed crewed tests so far, though not at the company's target altitude of about 15 miles above the earth's surface.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robin McKie writes via The Guardian: Scientists with Breakthrough Listen, the world's largest scientific research program dedicated to finding alien civilizations, say a host of technological developments are about to transform the search for intelligent life in the cosmos. These innovations will be outlined at the group's annual conference, which is to be held in the UK for the first time, in Oxford, this week. Several hundred scientists, from astronomers to zoologists, are expected to attend. "There are amazing technologies that are under development, such as the construction of huge new telescopes in Chile, Africa and Australia, as well as developments in AI," said astronomer Steve Croft, a project scientist with Breakthrough Listen. "They are going to transform how we look for alien civilizations." Among these new instruments are the Square Kilometer Array, made up of hundreds of radio telescopes now being built in South Africa and Australia, and the Vera Rubin Observatory that is being constructed in Chile. The former will become the world's most powerful radio astronomy facility while the latter, the world's largest camera, will be able to image the entire visible sky every three or four nights, and is expected to help discover millions of new galaxies and stars. Both facilities are set to start observations in the next few years and both will provide data for Breakthrough Listen. Using AI to analyze these vast streams of information for subtle patterns that would reveal evidence of intelligent life will give added power to the search for alien civilizations, added Croft. "Until now, we have been restricted to looking for signals deliberately sent out by aliens to advertise their existence. The new techniques are going to be so sensitive that, for the first time, we will be able to detect unintentional transmissions as opposed to deliberate ones and will be able to spot alien airport radar, or powerful TV transmitters -- things like that." [...] Croft remains optimistic that we will soon succeed in making contact. "We know that the conditions for life are everywhere, we know that the ingredients for life are everywhere. I think it would be deeply weird if it turned out we were the only inhabited planet in the galaxy or in the universe. But you know, it's possible."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Californian startup funded by Bill Gates is making rich, fatty "butter" using just carbon dioxide and hydrogen, with other dairy-free alternatives in the works. New Atlas reports: The San Jose company, Savor, uses a thermochemical process to create its animal-like fat, which is free of the environmental footprint of both the dairy industry and plant-based alternatives. "They started with the fact that all fats are made of varying chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms," Gates wrote in a blog post. "Then they set out to make those same carbon and hydrogen chains -- without involving animals or plants. They ultimately developed a process that involves taking carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heating them up, and oxidizing them to trigger the separation of fatty acids and then the formulation of fat." "The idea of switching to lab-made fats and oils may seem strange at first," Gates wrote. "But their potential to significantly reduce our carbon footprint is immense. By harnessing proven technologies and processes, we get one step closer to achieving our climate goals." Savor's 'butter' is easily produced and scalable, but convincing people to swap out butter and other dairy products for 'experimental' foods will remain a challenge for the foreseeable future. Gates is hoping, however, that his support will do more than start a conversation. "The process doesn't release any greenhouse gases, and it uses no farmland and less than a thousandth of the water that traditional agriculture does," he added. "And most important, it tastes really good -- like the real thing, because chemically it is." The research has been published in the journal Nature Sustainability.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Puerto Rico filed suit against fossil fuel companies this week, alleging that the oil and gas giants have misled the public about climate change and delayed a transition to clean energy. The suit seeks $1 billion in damages to help Puerto Rico defend itself against climate disasters. In a complaint (PDF) filed in San Juan yesterday, Puerto Rico's Department of Justice says that the companies violated trade law by promoting fossil fuels without adequately warning about the dangers. The defendants include ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and other energy companies. In the complaint, Puerto Rico says it expects to pay billions of dollars in the future to cope with catastrophes made worse by climate change -- including storms like Hurricane Maria, which killed thousands of people in 2017 and triggered monthslong power outages. The suit asks defendants to contribute to a fund that would be used to mitigate the consequences of climate change and pay for measures to strengthen Puerto Rico's infrastructure against future climate-related calamities. After Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, thirty-seven municipalities in Puerto Rico and the capital city of San Juan filed suit against fossil fuel companies, "seeking to hold them accountable for the devastation," notes The Verge. Last week, Portland's Multnomah County filed a lawsuit against several fossil fuel companies, blaming their emissions for the 2021 heat dome that resulted in the deaths of 69 people.Read more of this story at Slashdot.