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The pace of China's clean energy transition "is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week," according to a report from Australia's national public broadcaster ABC (shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo):A report by Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) said China was installing renewables so rapidly it would meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month - or 6.5 years early. It's installing at least 10 gigawatts of wind and solar generation capacity every fortnight... China accounts for about a third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. A recent drop in emissions (the first since relaxing COVID-19 restrictions), combined with the decarbonisation of the power grid, may mean the country's emissions have peaked. "With the power sector going green, emissions are set to plateau and then progressively fall towards 2030 and beyond," CEF China energy policy analyst Xuyang Dong said... [In China] the world's largest solar and wind farms are being built on the western edge of the country and connected to the east via the world's longest high-voltage transmission lines... Somewhat counterintuitively, China has built dozens of coal-fired power stations alongside its renewable energy zones, to maintain the pace of its clean energy transition. China was responsible for 95 per cent of the world's new coal power construction activity last year. The new plants are partly needed to meet demand for electricity, which has gone up as more energy-hungry sectors of the economy, like transport, are electrified. The coal-fired plants are also being used, like the batteries and pumped hydro, to provide a stable supply of power down the transmission lines from renewable energy zones, balancing out the intermittent solar and wind. Despite these new coal plants, coal's share of total electricity generation in the country is falling. The China Energy Council estimated renewables generation would overtake coal by the end of this year. CEF director Tim Buckley tells the site that China installed just 1GW of nuclear power last year - compared to 300GW of solar and wind. "They had grand plans for nuclear to be massive but they're behind on nuclear by a decade and five years ahead of schedule on solar and wind." Last year China accounted for 16% of the world's nuclear-generated power - but also more than half the world's coal-fired power generation, according to this year's analysis from the long-running International Energy Agency. The IEA estimated that in 2023, China's electricity demand rose by 6.4%, and they're predicting that by 2026 the country will see an increase "more than half of the EU's current annual electricity consumption." And yet in China "the rapid expansion of renewable energy sources is expected to meet all additional electricity demand..." according to the IEA analysis. "Coal-fired generation in China is currently on course to experience a slow structural decline, driven by the strong expansion of renewables and growing nuclear generation, as well as moderating economic growth." There's also some interesting stats on the "CO2 intensity" of power generation around the world. "The EU is expected to record the highest rate of progress in reducing emissions intensity, averaging an improvement of 13% per year. This is followed by China, with annual improvements forecast at 6%, and the United States at 5%." Long-time Slashdot reader Uncle_Meataxe shares a related article from Electrek ...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot covered Barrett Brown back in 2011 and 2012. The New York Times calls him "an activist associated with the hacker group Anonymous, and a political prisoner recently denied asylum in Britain, all of which sounds a bit dreary until we hear tell of it through Brown's unhinged self-regard." They're reviewing Brown's "extraordinary" new memoir, My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous," a book they call "deranged, hyperbolic, and true."A "machine" that focuses attention on little-known social issues, Anonymous has gone after the Church of Scientology, Koch Industries, websites hosting child pornography and the Westboro Baptist Church. The public tends to be confused by nebulous digital activities, so it was, in the collective's heyday, helpful to have Brown act as a translator between the hackers and mainstream journalists. "The year 2011 ended as it began," he writes, "with a sophisticated hack on a state-affiliated corporation that ostensibly dealt in straightforward security and analysis while secretly engaging in black ops campaigns against activists who'd proven troublesome to powerful clients." This particular corporation was Stratfor, a company that spied on activists for the government... Brown waited for the feds to come back and drag him to jail. He also says he tried to get off suboxone in order to avoid the painful possibility of prison withdrawal, and stopped taking Paxil, inducing a manic state, all of which is given as explanation for his regrettable next move, which was to set up a camera and start talking. The feds had threatened his mother, he told the internet, and in response he was threatening Robert Smith, the lead agent on his case. He found himself in custody the same night. Brown was then subjected to the kind of nonsense the Department of Justice is prone to inflicting on those involved in shadowy internet activities that, in fact, almost no one in the legal process understands. He was charged with participating in the hack of Stratfor, though he was not really involved and cannot code, and although the whole thing was organized by an F.B.I. informant. Brown had also retweeted a Fox News host's call to murder Julian Assange; the prosecution presented this as if he were himself calling for the murder of Assange. But generally, Brown's primary victim is himself. "My thirst for glory and hatred for the state," he writes, "were incompatible with an orthodox criminal defense, in which the limiting of one's sentence is the sole objective." In his cell, with an eraser-less pencil he needs a compliant guard to repeatedly sharpen, he writes "The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail." His mother types it up; The Intercept publishes. He develops the character he will play in his memoir: a self-aware narcissist and addict. He wins a National Magazine Award, and is especially pleased that his column "Please Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels," wins while Franzen is in attendance. "The state is an afterthought here - a litany of absurdist horrors too stupid to appall..." the review concludes. "We're left with a man who refuses to look away from the deep structure of the world, an unstable position from which there is no sanctuary. My Glorious Defeats is deranged, hyperbolic and as true a work as I have read in a very long time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2017 Slashdot headline: "People Keep Finding Hidden Cameras in Their Airbnbs." Nearly seven years later, CNN launched their own investigation of "Airbnb's hidden camera problem". CNN: "Across North America, police have seized thousands of images from hidden cameras at Airbnb rentals, including people's most intimate moments... It's more than just a few reported cases. And Airbnb knows it's a problem. In this deposition reviewed by CNN, an Airbnb rep said 35,000 customer support tickets about security cameras or recording devices had been documented over a decade. [The deposition estimates "about" 35,000 tickets "within the scope of the security camera and recording devices policy."] Airbnb told CNN a single complaint can involve multiple tickets. CNN actually obtained the audio recording of an Airbnb host in Maine admitting to police that he'd photographed a couple having sex using a camera hidden in a clock - and also photographed other couples. And one Airbnb guest told CNN he'd only learned he'd been recorded "because police called him, months later, after another guest found the camera" - with police discovering cameras in every single room in the house, concealed inside smoke detectors. "Part of the challenge is that the technology has gotten so advanced, with these cameras so small that you can't even see them," CNN says. But even though recording someone without consent is illegal in every state, CNN also found that in this case and others, Airbnb "does not contact law enforcement once hidden cameras are discovered - even if children are involved." Their reporter argues that Airbnb "not only fails to protect its guests - it works to keep complaints out of the courts and away from the public." They spoke to two Florida attorneys who said trying to sue Airbnb if something goes wrong is extremely difficult - since its Terms of Service require users to assume every risk themselves. "The person going to rent the property agrees that if something happens while they're staying at this accommodation, they're actually prohibited from suing Airbnb," says one of the attorneys. "They must go a different route, which is a binding arbitration." (When CNN asked if this was about controlling publicity, the two lawyers answered "absolutely" and "100%".) And when claims are settled, CNN adds, "Airbnb has required guests to sign confidentiality agreements - which CNN obtained - that keep some details of legal cases private." Responding to the story, Airbnb seemed to acknowledge guests have been secretly recorded by hosts, by calling such occurrences "exceptionally rare... When we do receive an allegation, we take appropriate, swift action, which can include removing hosts and listings that violate the policy. "Airbnb's trust and safety policies lead the vacation rental industry..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"If there is no alternative, then the whole thing can collapse around you," says Ron Delnevo. He's the chair of The Payment Choice Alliance, "which campaigns against the move towards a cashless society." He's part of those arguing "the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society," writes the Observer:Authorities in China and the US have fined businesses for not accepting cash. Delnevo said the U.K. should have a law requiring all businesses to take cash. Martin Quinn, campaign director for the PCA, said using cash allowed for anonymity. "I don't want my data sold on, and I don't want banks, credit card companies and even online retailers to know every facet of my life," he said. Budgeting by using cash is also easier for some, he added. The article includes some interesting statistics from a U.K. bank trade association. "The number of people who never use cash, or use it less than once a month, reached 23.1 million in 2021, but declined to 21.6m last year."The GMB [general trade] Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that "cash is a vital part of how our communities operate". "When you take cash out of the system, people have nothing to fall back on, impacting on how they do the everyday basics."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SolarWinds still faces some legal action over its infamous 2020 breach, reports NextGov.com. But a U.S. federal judge has dismissed most of the claims from America's Securities and Exchange Commission, which "alleged the company defrauded investors because it deliberately hid knowledge of cyber vulnerabilities in its systems ahead of a major security breach discovered in 2020." Slashdot reader krakman shares this report from the Washington Post:"The SEC's rationale, under which the statute must be construed to broadly cover all systems public companies use to safeguard their valuable assets, would have sweeping ramifications," [judge] Engelmayer wrote in a 107-page decision. "It could empower the agency to regulate background checks used in hiring nighttime security guards, the selection of padlocks for storage sheds, safety measures at water parks on whose reliability the asset of customer goodwill depended, and the lengths and configurations of passwords required to access company computers," he wrote. The federal judge also dismissed SEC claims that SolarWinds' disclosures after it learned its customers had been affected improperly covered up the gravity of the breach... In an era when deeply damaging hacking campaigns have become commonplace, the suit alarmed business leaders, some security executives and even former government officials, as expressed in friend-of-the-court briefs asking that it be thrown out. They argued that adding liability for misstatements would discourage hacking victims from sharing what they know with customers, investors and safety authorities. Austin-based SolarWinds said it was pleased that the judge "largely granted our motion to dismiss the SEC's claims," adding in a statement that it was "grateful for the support we have received thus far across the industry, from our customers, from cybersecurity professionals, and from veteran government officials who echoed our concerns." The article notes that as far back as 2018, "an engineer warned in an internal presentation that a hacker could use the company's virtual private network from an unauthorized device and upload malicious code. Brown did not pass that information along to top executives, the judge wrote, and hackers later used that exact technique." Engelmayer did not dismiss the case entirely, allowing the SEC to try to show that SolarWinds and top security executive Timothy Brown committed securities fraud by not warning in a public "security statement" before the hack that it knew it was highly vulnerable to attacks. The SEC "plausibly alleges that SolarWinds and Brown made sustained public misrepresentations, indeed many amounting to flat falsehoods, in the Security Statement about the adequacy of its access controls," Engelmayer wrote. "Given the centrality of cybersecurity to SolarWinds' business model as a company pitching sophisticated software products to customers for whom computer security was paramount, these misrepresentations were undeniably material."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Parts of the Persian Gulf "have seen the heat index, or how it feels when factoring in the humidity, reach 140 to 150 degrees Fahrenheit (60 to 65 Celsius)," reports the Washington Post, "fueled by an intense heat dome, the warmest water temperatures in the world and the influence of human-caused climate change."Temperatures at the Persian Gulf International Airport in Asaluyeh, Iran, climbed to 108 (42 C) on Wednesday and 106 (41 C) on Thursday, with both days recording a peak heat index of 149 (65 C). In Dubai, the temperature topped out at 113 (45 C) on Tuesday and the heat index soared to 144 (62 C). Other extreme heat indexes in recent days include 141 (61 C) in Abu Dhabi and 136 (58 C) at Khasab Air Base in Oman. Last August, this same region experienced even more extreme heat indexes, climbing as high as 158 degrees (70 C). The maximum air temperatures this week - generally between 105 and 115 (41 and 46 C) - have only been somewhat above normal. But the dew points - which are a measure of humidity - have been excessive, climbing well into the 80s (27 to 32 C). In the United States, any dew point over 70 degrees (21 C) is considered uncomfortably humid. It's the very high dew points that have propelled heat indexes up to 30 degrees (16 C) above actual air temperatures. The extreme humidity levels are tied to bathtub-like water temperatures in the Persian Gulf, the warmest in the world. According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, sea surface temperatures are as warm as 95 degrees (35 C). Largely because of the high humidity, nighttime minimum temperatures have also remained exceptionally warm, in many cases staying above 85 (29 C). Temperatures in Iranshar, Iran, only dropped to 97 (36 C) on Wednesday night, its hottest July night on record. "Researchers have identified the Persian Gulf among the regions most likely to regularly exceed life-threatening heat thresholds during the next 30 to 50 years," the article adds. And it also cites new heat records reported for the region by weather historian Maximiliano Herrera. "The United Arab Emirates saw a scorching high temperature of 123 while Adrar, Algeria, tied its record of 122 (50 C). Cities in both Kuwait and Iraq reached 126 (52 C), and Al Ahsa, Saudi Arabia, notched a record of 124 (51 C)... "The same heat dome that's in the Persian Gulf region has spread record heat northward into Eastern Europe, westward into northern Africa, and eastward into India, Pakistan and Indonesia. In Eastern Europe, high temperatures surpassed 104 (40 C), with some locations staying above 85 degrees (29 C) at night."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new report "explores the current state of secure software development," according to an announcement from the Linux Foundation, "and underscores the urgent need for formalized industry education and training programs," noting that many developers "lack the essential knowledge and skills to effectively implement secure software development." The report analyzes a survey of nearly 400 software development professionals performed by and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and Linux Foundation Research:Survey findings outlined in the report show nearly one-third of all professionals directly involved in development and deployment - system operations, software developers, committers, and maintainers - self-report feeling unfamiliar with secure software development practices. This is of particular concern as they are the ones at the forefront of creating and maintaining the code that runs a company's applications and systems. "Time and again we've seen the exploitation of software vulnerabilities lead to catastrophic consequences, highlighting the critical need for developers at all levels to be armed with adequate knowledge and skills to write secure code," said David A. Wheeler, director of open source supply chain security for the Linux Foundation. "Our research found that a key challenge is the lack of education in secure software development. Practitioners are unsure where to start and instead are learning as they go. It is clear that an industry-wide effort to bring secure development education to the forefront must be a priority." OpenSSF offers a free course on developing secure software (LFD121) and encourages developers to start with this course. Survey results indicate that the lack of security awareness is likely due to most current educational programs prioritizing functionality and efficiency while often neglecting essential security training. Additionally, most professionals (69%) rely on on-the-job experience as a main learning resource, yet it takes at least five years of such experience to achieve a minimum level of security familiarity. "The top reason (44%) for not taking a course on secure software development is lack of knowledge about a good course on the topic," according to the announcement - which includes this follow-up quote from Intel's Christopher Robinson (co-chair of the OpenSSF Education SIG). "Based on these findings, OpenSSF will create a new course on security architecture which will be available later this year which will help promote a 'security by design' approach to software developer education."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:Netflix will start phasing out its Basic plan, its cheapest advertising-free plan, which costs $11.99 per month in the United States, the company said on Thursday. The company had previously stopped accepting new sign-ups for the Basic plan, instead pushing customers to Netflix's ad-supported plan, which costs $6.99 per month. However, existing users were allowed to keep the basic plan. In January, the company said it would retire its cheapest ad-free tier in Canada and the UK. On Thursday, the company said the US and France are next. Basic users in the US who want an ad-free viewing experience on Netflix will now have two choices: Netflix's Standard plan, which costs $15.49 per month, and its Premium plan, which costs $22.99 per month... The company reported a record-high 277.65 million subscribers on its streaming platform Thursday, far outpacing streaming competitors like Disney+, Peacock and Max... Overall, Netflix added 8.05 million new subscribers in its second quarter. Netflix's surge in new subscribers has been fueled in part by the company's effort to push users who share passwords to create their own accounts. The article adds that Netflix's stock has climbed more than 35% in 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Thelasko shared Friday's article from Digital Trends:Nearly every flight in the U.S. is grounded right now following a CrowdStrike system update error that's affecting everything from travel to mobile ordering at Starbucks - but not Southwest Airlines flights. Southwest is still flying high, unaffected by the outage that's plaguing the world today, and that's apparently because it's using Windows 3.1. Yes, Windows 3.1 - an operating system that is 32 years old. Southwest, along with UPS and FedEx, haven't had any issues with the CrowdStrike outage. In responses to CNN, Delta, American, Spirit, Frontier, United, and Allegiant all said they were having issues, but Southwest told the outlet that its operations are going off without a hitch. Some are attributing that to Windows 3.1. Major portions of Southwest's systems are reportedly built on Windows 95 and Windows 3.1... UPDATE: Reached for comment, Southwest "would not confirm" that's it's using Windows 3.1, reports SFGate. But they did get this quote from an airline analyst: aoeWe believe that Southwesta(TM)s older technology kept it somewhat immune from the issues affecting other airlines today."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Many people over the past few days have been lashing out at Mozilla," writes the blog Its FOSS, "for enabling Privacy-Preserving Attribution by default on Firefox 128, and the lack of publicity surrounding its introduction." Mozilla responded that the feature will only run "on a few sites in the U.S. under strict supervision" - adding that users can disable it at any time ("because this is a test"), and that it's only even enabled if telemetry is also enabled. And they also emphasize that it's "not tracking." The way it works is there's an "aggregation service" that can periodically send advertisers a summary of ad-related actions - again, aggregated data, from a mass of many other users. (And Mozilla says that aggregated summary even includes "noise that provides differential privacy.") This Privacy-Preserving Attribution concept "does not involve sending information about your browsing activities to anyone... Advertisers only receive aggregate information that answers basic questions about the effectiveness of their advertising." More from It's FOSS:Even though Mozilla mentioned that PPA would be enabled by default on Firefox 128 in a few of its past blog posts, they failed to communicate this decision clearly, to a wider audience... In response to the public outcry, Firefox CTO, Bobby Holley, had to step in to clarify what was going on. He started with how the internet has become a massive cesspool of surveillance, and doing something about it was the primary reason many people are part of Mozilla. He then expanded on their approach with Firefox, which, historically speaking, has been to ship a browser with anti-tracking features baked in to tackle the most common surveillance techniques. But, there were two limitations with this approach. One was that advertisers would try to bypass these countermeasures. The second, most users just accept the default options that they are shown... Bas Schouten, Principal Software Engineer at Mozilla, made it clear at the end of a heated Mastodon thread that "[opt-in features are] making privacy a privilege for the people that work to inform and educate themselves on the topic. People shouldn't need to do that, everyone deserves a more private browser. Privacy features, in Firefox, are not meant to be opt-in. They need to be the default. "If you are 'completely anti-ads' (i.e. even if their implementation is private), you probably use an ad blocker. So are unaffected by this." This has already provoked a discussion among Slashdot readers. "It doesn't seem that evil to me," argues Slashdot reader geekprime. "Seems like the elimination of cross site cookies is a privacy enhancing idea." (They cite Mozilla's statement that their goal is "to inform an emerging Web standard designed to help sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering sites a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, we hope to achieve a significant reduction in this harmful practice across the web.") But Slashdot reader TheNameOfNick disagrees. "How realistic is the part where advertisers stop tracking you because they get less information from the browser maker...?" Mozilla has provided simple instructions for disabling the feature: Click the menu button and select Settings. In the Privacy & Security panel, find the Website Advertising Preferences section. Uncheck the box labeled Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Bob Newhart, whose stammering, deadpan unflappability carried him to stardom as a standup comedian and later in television and movies, has died at age 94. He remains best known for the television shows, "The Bob Newhart Show" (1972-78) and "Newhart" (1982-90), both of which were built around his persona as a reasonable man put-upon by crazies. A younger crowd may remember Newhart from his roles in the movie "Elf" (2003) and TV's "The Big Bang Theory" (2013-18). Less known about Newhart is that he was an early Commodore PET owner, recalling for the LA Times in 2001: "I remember leafing through a copy of Popular Science magazine and seeing an ad for a Commodore computer that had 8- or 16 kilobytes [in 1977]. It had an awful-looking screen, and it was $795. I thought I'd better get one because I had sons who were going to be in high school and might want to know about computers. Later, I moved up to the 64 KB model and thought that was silly because it was more memory than I would ever possibly need. "I got them for the kids and then found I was fascinated by them. The first ones had tape drives. You would get a program like a word processor, put the tape in and then walk away for about a half an hour while the computer loaded it. But the first time I used a spell checker and it corrected a word, I thought, 'We are getting close to God here."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"More pieces of a broken wind turbine off the coast of Massachusetts are falling into the Atlantic Ocean," reports CBS News on Thursday. "The CEO of Vineyard Wind was at Nantucket's Select Board meeting Wednesday evening, apologizing and answering questions about the initial break when he suddenly had to leave because the situation is getting worse." CNN reports the debris has been "prompting beach closures and frustrating locals at the peak of the summer season" since the blade broke a week ago, and then folded over:Since then, foam debris and fiberglass - including some large and dangerously sharp pieces - have washed onto beaches. A "significant part" of the remaining damaged blade detached from the turbine early Thursday morning, Vineyard Wind said in a news release. The US Coast Guard confirmed to CNN it has located a 300-foot piece of the blade. There are few answers to what caused the turbine to fail, and the incident has prompted questions and anger from city officials and Nantucket residents... The shards of turbine forced officials to close beaches earlier this week, though they have since reopened. [Nantucket select board chair Brooke Mohr] said the town would monitor for additional debris and adjust schedules accordingly. "Public safety is our most immediate concern, these fiberglass pieces are quite sharp," Mohr said, making swimming unsafe... The federal government is conducting its own investigation and has ordered Vineyard Wind to stop all its wind turbines producing electricity until it can be determined whether any other blades were impacted, a Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement spokesperson said in a statement. The federal government has also ordered the companies to preserve any equipment that could help determine the cause of the failure. The federal suspension order effectively halts further construction on Vineyard Wind, the first large-scale wind farm being installed in the US. The wind farm, a joint venture of Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, has 10 turbines up and running so far with plans to install 62 total... The project was set to double the number of turbines spinning off the East Coast, and state leaders in Massachusetts have viewed it as a big boost to the state's ability to generate electricity. Now the project is in limbo, and could remain so until the investigation is complete. The article quotes the head of government affairs at wind blade manufacturer GE Vernova as saying a breaking wind turbine is "highly unusual and rare." But Vineyard Wind CEO Klaus Skoust Moller called it a "very serious situation" and apologized to local residents. Meanwhile, the Boston Herald reported Friday that the Nantucket Select Board "is set to pursue litigation against the wind energy company in connection to the blade failure..."Town officials, residents and local mariners have all said they didn't learn of the incident until Monday evening, roughly 48 hours after the fact and just hours before debris started to wash ashore, prompting beaches to close Tuesday... The "significant portion" of the 107-meter blade that detached from the turbine Thursday morning sunk to the ocean floor. Crews were slated to recover the fiberglass "in due course," town officials wrote in a Friday update... Residents are not taking kindly to Vineyard Wind's assertion that the debris - fiberglass fragments ranging in size from small pieces to larger sections, typically green or white - is not toxic. Vineyard Wind has deployed a crew of 56 contractors to assist in the cleanup of the island's beaches, and town officials said Friday that no town staff are actively engaged in removing the debris. The wind energy company reported Wednesday that crews had removed 17 cubic yards of debris, enough to fill more than six truckloads. "The joint venture of Connecticut-based Avangrid and Denmark-based Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is developing a plan to test water quality around the island while working on a process for financial claims."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a "smart soil" that can keep plants better hydrated and provide a controlled release of nutrients. As reported by New Atlas, tests found that it "drastically improved crop growth while using far less water." From the report: The soil gets its "smart" moniker thanks to the addition of a specially formulated hydrogel, which works to absorb more water vapor from the air overnight, then releasing it to the plants' roots during the day. Incorporating calcium chloride into the hydrogel also provides a slow release of this vital nutrient. The team tested the new smart soil in lab experiments, growing plants in 10 grams of soil, with some including 0.1 g of hydrogel. A day/night cycle was simulated, with 12 hours of darkness at 25 C (77 F) and either 60% or 90% relative humidity, followed by 12 hours of simulated sunlight at 35 C (95 F) and 30% humidity. Sure enough, plants growing in the hydrogel soil showed a 138% boost to their stem length, compared to the control group. Importantly, the hydrogel-grown plants achieved this even while requiring 40% less direct watering. In future work, the team plans to try incorporating other types of fertilizers, and conducting longer field experiments. The research was published in the journal ACS Materials Letters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A solar superstorm in May caused thousands of satellites to simultaneously maneuver to maintain altitude due to the thickening of the upper atmosphere, creating potential collision hazards as existing prediction systems struggled to cope. Space.com reports: According to a pre-print paper published on the online repository arXiv on June 12, satellites and space debris objects in low Earth orbit -- the region of space up to an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) -- were sinking toward the planet at the speed of 590 feet (180 meters) per day during the four-day storm. To make up for the loss of altitude, thousands of spacecraft began firing their thrusters at the same time to climb back up. That mass movement, the authors of the paper point out, could have led to dangerous situations because collision avoidance systems didn't have time to calculate the satellites' changing paths. The solar storm that battered Earth from May 7 to 10 reached the intensity of G5, the highest level on the five-step scale used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to assess the strength of solar storms. It was the strongest solar storm to hit Earth since 2003. The authors of the paper, however, pointed out that the environment around the planet has changed profoundly since that time. While only a few hundred satellites were orbiting Earth twenty years ago, there are thousands today. The authors of the paper put the number of "active payloads at [low Earth orbit]" at 10,000. [...] The new paper points out that space weather forecasts ahead of the May storm failed to accurately predict the duration and intensity of the event, making satellite collision predictions nearly impossible. On the upside, the storm helped to clear out some junk as defunct satellites and debris fragments spiraled deeper into the atmosphere. The authors of the report estimate that thousands of space debris objects lost several kilometers in altitude during the storm. More powerful solar storms can be expected in the coming months as the peak of the current solar cycle -- the 11-year ebb and flow in the number of sunspots, solar flares and eruptions -- is expected in late 2024 and early 2025. The paper can be found here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The U.S. will fall behind in the artificial intelligence race if it does not embrace natural gas to help meet surging electricity demand from data centers, the CEO of one of the nation's largest pipeline operators told CNBC. "The only way we're going to be able to keep up with the kind of power demand and the electrification that's already afoot is natural gas," Williams Companies CEO Alan Armstrong said in an interview Thursday. "If we deny ourselves that we're going to fall behind in the AI race." Williams Companies handles about one-third of the natural gas in the U.S. through a pipeline network that spans more than 30,000 miles. Williams' network includes the 10,000 mile Transcontinental Pipeline, or Transco, a crucial artery that serves virtually the entire eastern seaboard including Virginia, the world's largest data center hub, and fast growing Southeast markets such as Georgia. The tech sector's expansion of data centers to support AI and the adoption of electric vehicles is projected to add 290 terawatt hours of electricity demand by the end of the decade in the U.S., according to a recent report by the energy consulting firm Rystad. This load growth is equivalent to the entire electricity demand of Turkey, the world's 18th largest economy. Executives at some the nation's largest utilities have warned that failure to meet this surging electricity demand will jeopardize not just the artificial intelligence revolution, but economic growth across the board in the U.S. The role natural gas in helping to meet that demand is controversial as the country is simultaneously trying to transition to a clean energy economy through the rapid expansion of renewables. "We are going to run right up against a brick wall here and pretty quickly in terms of not having enough power available to do what we want to do on the AI side," Armstrong said. "I actually see this as a huge national security issue," the CEO said. "We're going to have to get out of our own way or we're going to accidentally keep ourselves from being the power we can be in the AI space." "Those groups that have very much had their brand be all green have come to us and said, 'We got to work with you guys. We've run out of alternatives -- we can't meet the needs of our customers without using natural gas,'" Armstrong said. "We're completely out of capacity ourselves," Armstrong added. "So we just have to kind of beg, borrow and steal from other people's capacity to do our best to make gas available."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shares of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Holdings dropped 15% on Friday after the company's software update resulted in what may turn out to be the largest IT outage ever. CrowdStrike stock "is on pace for its steepest daily loss since November 2022 and its $290 low share price is the lowest intraday mark since April 25," reports Forbes. "CrowdStrike is on track for the third-worst day in its five-year history as a publicly traded company." From the report: Microsoft, which was swept up in the outage as the downed systems are those running CrowdStrike's cybersecurity applications and Microsoft's Windows software, also slumped, with its shares down about 1% to the $3.2 trillion behemoth's lowest share price since June 11. CrowdStrike competitor Palo Alto Networks enjoyed a 4% rally Friday, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite stock index gained about 0.2%, held up by the likes of Microsoft rival Apple's 1% stock gain and a 1% rise for shares of Alphabet, which is reportedly in talks to buy cybersecurity firm Wiz for $23 billion. The CrowdStrike selloff is "an overreaction to a temporary setback," Rosenblatt analyst Catharine Trebnick wrote in a note to clients Friday. It's a "compelling buying opportunity" as it "creates a window for investors to buy into a high-quality, growth-oriented cybersecurity company at a discounted valuation," Trebnick continued. To her point, CrowdStrike stock's relative valuation, according to its price-to-earnings ratio (P/E), which compares its market value to its projected profits over the next four quarters, fell Friday to its lowest number since April. Still, CrowdStrike's P/E of about 70 is very high for a company of its size, meaning investors will need to express significant confidence in the business' ability to grow earnings, a challenge if Friday's incident were to impact CrowdStrike's client base.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than a dozen new Immersive Videos are coming to Vision Pro, with the first, titled Boundless, launching last night. "The announcement follows a long, slow period for new Vision Pro-specific video content from Apple," writes Ars Technica's Samuel Axon. "The headset launched in early February with a handful of Immersive Video episodes ranging from five to 15 minutes each. Since then, only three new videos have been added." From the report: Tonight's Boundless episode will allow viewers to see what it's like to ride in a hot air balloon over sweeping vistas. Another episode titled "Arctic Surfing" will arrive this fall, Apple says. Sometime next month, Apple will publish the second episode of its real wildlife documentary, simply titled Wild Life. The episode will focus on elephants in Kenya's Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Another episode is in the works, too. "Later this year," Apple writes in its newsroom post, "viewers will brave the deep with a bold group of divers in the Bahamas, who come face-to-face with apex predators and discover creatures much more complex than often portrayed." In September, we'll see the debut of a new Immersive Video series titled Elevated. Apple describes it as an "aerial travel series" in which viewers will fly over places of interest. The first episode will take viewers to Hawaii, while another planned for later this year will go to New England. Apple is additionally partnering with Red Bull for a look at surfing called Red Bull: Big-Wave Surfing. In addition to those documentary episodes, there will be three short films by year's end. One will be a musical experience featuring The Weeknd, and another will take basketball fans inside the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend. There will also be Submerged, the first narrative fictional Immersive Video on the platform. It's an action short film depicting struggles on a submarine during World War II.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For years, the people building powerful artificial intelligence systems have used enormous troves of text, images and videos pulled from the internet to train their models. Now, that data is drying up. Over the past year, many of the most important web sources used for training A.I. models have restricted the use of their data, according to a study published this week by the Data Provenance Initiative, an M.I.T.-led research group. The study, which looked at 14,000 web domains that are included in three commonly used A.I. training data sets, discovered an "emerging crisis in consent," as publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being harvested. The researchers estimate that in the three data sets -- called C4, RefinedWeb and Dolma -- 5 percent of all data, and 25 percent of data from the highest-quality sources, has been restricted. Those restrictions are set up through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a decades-old method for website owners to prevent automated bots from crawling their pages using a file called robots.txt. The study also found that as much as 45 percent of the data in one set, C4, had been restricted by websites' terms of service. "We're seeing a rapid decline in consent to use data across the web that will have ramifications not just for A.I. companies, but for researchers, academics and noncommercial entities," said Shayne Longpre, the study's lead author, in an interview.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nigeria fined Meta for $220 million on Friday, alleging the tech giant violated the country's local consumer, data protection and privacy laws. Reuters reports: Nigeria's Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) said Meta appropriated the data of Nigerian users on its platforms without their consent, abused its market dominance by forcing exploitative privacy policies on users, and meted out discriminatory and disparate treatment on Nigerians, compared with other jurisdictions with similar regulations. FCCPC chief Adamu Abdullahi said the investigations were jointly held with Nigeria's Data Protection Commission and spanned over 38 months. The investigations found Meta policies don't allow users the option or opportunity to self-determine or withhold consent to the gathering, use, and sharing of personal data, Abdullahi said. "The totality of the investigation has concluded that Meta over the protracted period of time has engaged in conduct that constituted multiple and repeated, as well as continuing infringements... particularly, but not limited to abusive, and invasive practices against data subjects in Nigeria," Abdullahi said. "Being satisfied with the significant evidence on the record, and that Meta has been provided every opportunity to articulate any position, representations, refutations, explanations or defences of their conduct, the Commission have now entered a final order and issued a penalty against Meta," Abdullahi said. The final order mandates steps and actions Meta must take to comply with local laws, Abdullahi said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kylie Robison reports via The Verge: Have you seen the memes online where someone tells a bot to "ignore all previous instructions" and proceeds to break it in the funniest ways possible? The way it works goes something like this: Imagine we at The Verge created an AI bot with explicit instructions to direct you to our excellent reporting on any subject. If you were to ask it about what's going on at Sticker Mule, our dutiful chatbot would respond with a link to our reporting. Now, if you wanted to be a rascal, you could tell our chatbot to "forget all previous instructions," which would mean the original instructions we created for it to serve you The Verge's reporting would no longer work. Then, if you ask it to print a poem about printers, it would do that for you instead (rather than linking this work of art). To tackle this issue, a group of OpenAI researchers developed a technique called "instruction hierarchy," which boosts a model's defenses against misuse and unauthorized instructions. Models that implement the technique place more importance on the developer's original prompt, rather than listening to whatever multitude of prompts the user is injecting to break it. The first model to get this new safety method is OpenAI's cheaper, lightweight model launched Thursday called GPT-4o Mini. In a conversation with Olivier Godement, who leads the API platform product at OpenAI, he explained that instruction hierarchy will prevent the meme'd prompt injections (aka tricking the AI with sneaky commands) we see all over the internet. "It basically teaches the model to really follow and comply with the developer system message," Godement said. When asked if that means this should stop the 'ignore all previous instructions' attack, Godement responded, "That's exactly it." "If there is a conflict, you have to follow the system message first. And so we've been running [evaluations], and we expect that that new technique to make the model even safer than before," he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bangladesh is experiencing a "near-total" nationwide internet shutdown amid government efforts to control widespread student protests against the country's quota system for government jobs. The country's quota system requires a third of government jobs be reserved for relatives of veterans who had fought for independence from Pakistan. According to Reuters, the protests "have opened old and sensitive political fault lines between those who fought for Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan in 1971 and those accused of collaborating with Islamabad." Analysts say the protests have also been "fueled by high unemployment among young people" and "wider economic woes, such as high inflation and shrinking reserves of foreign exchange." Engadget reports on the internet disruptions: To control the situation, Bangladeshi authorities shut down internet and phone access throughout the country, a common practice in South Asia to prevent the spread of rumors and misinformation and exercise state control. NetBlocks, a global internet monitor that works on digital rights analyzed live network data that showed that Bangladesh was in the middle of a "near-total national internet shutdown." [...] Bangladesh has frequently blacked out the internet to crack down on political opposition and activists. At the end of 2023, research tool CIVICUS Monitor, which provides data on the state of civil society and freedoms in nearly 200 countries, downgraded Bangladesh's civic space to "closed," its lowest possible rating, after the country imposed six internet shutdowns the previous year. That made Bangladesh the fifth-largest perpetrator of internet shutdowns in 2022, Access Now said. The country's telecom regulator had pledged to keep internet access on through Bangladesh's general elections at the beginning of 2024, but that electoral period is now over. Despite the pledge, Bangladesh blocked access to news websites during its elections.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Citing frustration with mobile carriers enforcing different phone-unlocking policies that are bad for consumers, the Federal Communications Commission is proposing a 60-day unlocking requirement that would apply to all wireless providers. The industry's "confusing and disparate cell phone unlocking policies" mean that "some consumers can unlock their phones with relative ease, while others face significant barriers," Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said at yesterday's FCC meeting. "It also means certain carriers are subject to mandatory unlocking requirements while others are free to dictate their own. This asymmetry is bad for both consumers and competition." The FCC is "proposing a uniform 60-day unlocking policy" so that "consumers can choose the carrier that offers them the best value," Starks said. Unlocking a phone allows it to be used on a different carrier's network as long as the phone is compatible. The FCC approved the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in a 5-0 vote. That begins a public comment period that could lead to a final rulemaking. A draft of the NPRM said the FCC "propose[s] to require all mobile wireless service providers to unlock handsets 60 days after a consumer's handset is activated with the provider, unless within the 60-day period the service provider determines the handset was purchased through fraud." "You bought your phone, you should be able to take it to any provider you want," Rosenworcel said. "Some providers already operate this way. Others do not. In fact, some have recently increased the time their customers must wait until they can unlock their device by as much as 100 percent." Rosenworcel apparently was referring to a prepaid brand offered by T-Mobile. The NPRM draft said that "T-Mobile recently increased its locking period for one of its brands, Metro by T-Mobile, from 180 days to 365 days." The 365-day rule brought Metro into line with other T-Mobile prepaid phones that already came with the year-long lock. We reached out to T-Mobile and will update this article if it provides a comment. A merger condition imposed on T-Mobile's purchase of Sprint merely requires that it unlock prepaid phones within one year. T-Mobile imposes different unlocking policies on prepaid and postpaid phones. For postpaid devices, T-Mobile says it will unlock phones that have been active for at least 40 days, but only if any associated financing or leasing agreement has been paid in full.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Master Chief has fought his last battle at Paramount+. The streamer has canceled its video game adaptation Halo after two seasons. The show originally debuted in 2022. From a report: The series, based on the Xbox franchise and starring Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief John-117, finished its second season in March. "We are extremely proud of this ambitious series and would like to thank our partners at Xbox, 343 Industries and Amblin Television, along with showrunner and executive producer David Wiener, his fellow executive producers, the entire cast led by Pablo Schreiber as Master Chief and the amazing crew for all their outstanding work," Paramount+ said in a statement. "We wish everyone the best going forward." Sources say the show's producers -- Amblin, Xbox and 343 Industries -- will look to land the series at another outlet for a third season. Paramount+ is said to be supportive of a possible move. "We deeply appreciate the millions of fans who propelled the Halo series to be a global success, and we remain committed to broadening the Halo universe in different ways in the future," reads a statement from 343 Industries. "We are grateful to Amblin and Paramount for their partnership in bringing our expansive sci-fi universe to viewers around the world."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMD has introduced its latest Ryzen AI chips, built on the new Zen 5 architecture, in an ambitious attempt to compete with Apple's dominant MacBook processors. During a recent two-day event in Los Angeles, the company made bold claims about outperforming Apple's M3 and M3 Pro chips in various tasks including multitasking, image processing, and gaming, though these assertions remain unverified due to limited demonstrations and benchmarks provided at the event, The Verge reports. The report adds: At that event, I heard AMD brag about beating the MacBook more than I've ever heard a company directly target a competitor before. AMD claimed its new Ryzen chip "exceeds the performance of what MacBook Air has to offer in multitasking, image processing, 3D rendering, and gaming"; "is 15 percent faster than the M3 Pro" in Cinebench; and is capable of powering up to four displays, "unlike the MacBook Air, which limits you to two displays only." While AMD touted significant improvements in CPU architecture, graphics performance, and AI capabilities, journalists present at the event were unable to fully test or validate these features, leaving many questions unanswered about the chips' real-world performance. The company's reluctance or inability to showcase certain capabilities, particularly in gaming and AI applications, has raised eyebrows among industry observers, the report adds. The new Ryzen AI chips are scheduled to debut in Asus laptops on July 28th, marking a critical juncture for AMD in the fiercely competitive laptop processor market. As Apple's M-series chips and Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors continue to gain traction in the mobile computing space, the success or failure of AMD's latest offering could have far-reaching implications for the future of x86 architecture in laptops.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI escaped a copyright lawsuit from a group of open-source programmers after they voluntarily dismissed their case against the company in federal court. From a report: The programmers, who allege the generative AI programming tool Copilot was trained on their code without proper attribution, filed their notice of voluntary dismissal Thursday, but will still have their case against GitHub and parent company Microsoft, which collaborated with OpenAI in developing the tool. The proposed class action filed in 2022 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California was the first major copyright case against OpenAI, which has since been hit with numerous lawsuits from authors and news organizations including the New York Times.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Calling plastic pollution one of the world's most pressing environmental problems, the Biden administration on Friday said that the federal government, the biggest buyer of consumer goods in the world, would phase out purchases of single-use plastics. From a report: The administration also said it planned tougher regulations on plastic manufacturing, which releases planet-warming greenhouse gases and other dangerous pollutants. The efforts, which the White House called the first comprehensive strategy to tackle plastic use nationwide, aim to reduce demand for disposable plastic items while also helping to create a market for substitutes that are reusable, compostable or more easily recyclable. Brenda Mallory, who heads the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in a statement that the changes would "require unprecedented action at every stage of the plastic life cycle." Because of its purchasing power, the White House added, "the federal government has the potential to significantly impact the supply of these products." The emphasis on curbing plastic use mirrors a growing recognition that the world can't recycle or manage its way out of a deluge of plastic waste. Global plastic production rose nearly 230-fold between 1950 and 2019, to more than 400 million tons a year, and is expected to quadruple from current levels by 2050. An estimated 40 percent of that is single-use plastic, which makes up the bulk of the world's plastic waste.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FTC says the across-the-board price increases that Microsoft recently announced for its Xbox Game Pass subscription service tiers represent "exactly the sort of consumer harm from the merger the FTC has alleged" when it sought to block Microsoft's merger with Activision. From a report: In a letter to the court posted as part of an ongoing appeal by the FTC in the case, the federal regulator alleges Microsoft's moves are a clear example of "product degradation" brought about by "a firm exercising market power post-merger." The letter's primary focus is on the soon-to-be-discontinued $10.99/month Console Game Pass tier. That's being replaced with a $14.99/month Game Pass Standard tier (a 36 percent price increase) that no longer includes "day one" access to all of Microsoft's first-party titles. To maintain that key benefit, "Console" subscribers will have to spend 81 percent more for the $19.99 Game Pass Ultimate tier, which also includes a number of additional benefits over the current $10.99/month option. The FTC notes that these changes "coincide with adding Call of Duty to Game Pass's most expensive tier." Previously, Microsoft publicly promised that this Game Pass access to Activision's ultra-popular shooter would come "with no price increase for the service based on the acquisition." It's that "based on the acquisition" clause that's likely to give Microsoft some wiggle room in arguing for its planned pricing changes. Inflation is also a sufficient explanation for a large portion of the price increase in nominal terms -- the $14.99 Microsoft charged for a month of Game Pass Ultimate when it launched in 2019 is the equivalent of $18.39 today, according to the BLS CPI calculator.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oracle agreed to pay $115 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the database software and cloud computing company of invading people's privacy by collecting their personal information and selling it to third parties. Reuters: The plaintiffs, who otherwise have no connection to Oracle, said the company violated federal and state privacy laws and California's constitution by creating unauthorized "digital dossiers" for hundreds of millions of people. They said the dossiers contained data including where people browsed online, and where they did their banking, bought gas, dined out, shopped and used their credit cards. Oracle then allegedly sold the information directly to marketers or through products such as ID Graph, which according to the company helps marketers "orchestrate a relevant, personalized experience for each individual."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian officials boasted on Friday that Moscow was spared the impact of the global IT systems outage because of its increased self-sufficiency after years of Western sanctions, though some experts said Russian systems could still be vulnerable. From a report: Microsoft and other IT firms have suspended sales of new products in Russia and have been scaling down their operations in line with sanctions imposed over Russia's war in Ukraine, which Moscow describes as a special military operation. The Kremlin, along with companies from state nuclear giant Rosatom, which operates all of Russia's nuclear plants, to major lenders and airlines, reported no glitches amid the outage that affected international companies across the globe. "The situation once again highlights the significance of foreign software substitution," Russia's digital development ministry said. Russian financial and currency markets also ran smoothly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report, which expands on the ongoing global outage: The incident will exacerbate concerns about concentration risk in the cyber security industry. Just 15 companies worldwide account for 62 per cent of the market in cyber security products and services, according to SecurityScorecard. In modern endpoint security, the business of securing PCs, laptops and other devices, the problem is worse: three companies, with Microsoft and CrowdStrike by far the largest, controlled half the market last year, according to IDC. While the US Cyber Safety Review Board dissects large cyber attacks for lessons learned, there is no obvious body charged with analysing these technical failures to improve the resilience of global tech infrastructure, said Ciaran Martin, former head of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre. The current global outage should spur clients -- and perhaps even governments and regulators -- to think more about how to build diversification and redundancy into their systems. Further reading: Without Backup Plans, Global IT Outages Will Happen Again.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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.