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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Increasingly intensive and frequent wildfires in the western U.S. are deteriorating air quality and causing more premature deaths, a new study found. Fires have damaged federal efforts from the Environmental Protection Agency to improve air quality mainly through reductions in automobile emissions, per the study published Monday in The Lancet Planetary Health. From 2000 to 2020, air quality has worsened in the western U.S. due to wildfires. Black carbon concentrations have risen 55% on an annual basis, mostly due to the wildfires, researchers found. The fires have also caused an increase of 670 premature deaths per year in the region in the two-decade span. Meanwhile, the eastern U.S. had no major declines in air quality during the same time period. Our air is supposed to be cleaner and cleaner due mostly to EPA regulations on emissions, but the fires have limited or erased these air-quality gains," said Jun Wang, the study's lead corresponding author and chair of the University of Iowa's Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, in a statement. "[A]ll the efforts for the past 20 years by the EPA to make our air cleaner basically have been lost in fire-prone areas and downwind regions," Wang added. "We are losing ground." [Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA] said the findings were consistent with other studies that contribute to the same overall picture that after the air quality regulations' great success, "the extremes of those air pollution episodes are actually now increasing again" due to wildfires. "On average, the air quality is still better, but the problem is, it's during these episodes of just-near apocalyptic conditions where we're really losing a lot of ground and that really is because the size and the intensity of wildfires has increased greatly," he said. Given climate change is a wildfire driver, keeping global heating to the lowest level possible will help. "But we're still going to see more warming no matter what moving forward, and so there will be further increases in the wildfire hazard," Swain said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samuel Axon reports via Ars Technica: The trailer for Amazon's Fallout TV series dropped this weekend, and it's either craven fan service or wonderfully authentic, depending on your point of view. The trailer depicts a lead character leaving a vault after an apparent catastrophe, discovering the broken world outside, and encountering ridiculous monsters as well as factions like the Brotherhood of Steel. It also features some extreme gore, which you'd expect from Fallout. We've written a few times about the slowly unfolding saga of this show, which has Westworld's Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan as producers. To be clear, though, they won't actually be the showrunners; that honor goes to Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel, Tomb Raider) and Graham Wagner (Portlandia, The Office, Silicon Valley). The two showrunners each cover one-half of what Fallout has traditionally been: Robertson-Dworet brings the sci-fi action credentials, and Wagner brings the satirical comedy. As announced in October, the show will premiere on April 12th, 2024, exclusively via Prime Video.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Press2ToContinue shares a report from Politico: Congress at the urging of the Biden administration agreed in 2021 to spend $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of electric vehicle chargers across the country, aiming to appease anxious drivers while tackling climate change. Two years later, the program has yet to install a single charger. States and the charger industry blame the delays mostly on the labyrinth of new contracting and performance requirements they have to navigate to receive federal funds. While federal officials have authorized more than $2 billion of the funds to be sent to states, fewer than half of states have even started to take bids from contractors to build the chargers -- let alone begin construction. [...] The goal is a reliable and standardized network in every corner of the nation, said Gabe Klein, executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which leads the federal government's efforts on EV charging. "You have to go slow to go fast," Klein said in an interview. "These are things that take a little bit of time, but boy, when you're done, it's going to completely change the game." [...] Aatish Patel, president of charger manufacturer XCharge North America, is worried the delays in installing chargers are imperiling efforts to drive up EV adoption. "As an EV driver, a charger being installed in two years isn't really going to help me out now," Patel said. "We're in dire need of chargers here." The Biden administration is expecting a deluge of chargers funded by the law to break ground in early 2024. A senior administration official granted anonymity to speak on the specifics of the rollout said the pace is to be expected, given that the goal is to create a "convenient, affordable, reliable, made-in-America equitable network." "Anybody can throw a charger in the ground -- that's not that hard, it doesn't take that long," the official said. "Building a network is different." The administration insists it is doing all it can to speed up the process, including by streamlining federal permitting for EV chargers and providing technical assistance to states and companies through the Joint Office. It expects the U.S. to hit Biden's 500,000 charger target four years early, in 2026, the official said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2024, the Pixar films that debuted on Disney+ during the COVID-19 pandemic years when theaters were shut down will be returning to the big screen. Those include Soul, Luca and Turning Red. Engadget reports: Soul will get a theatrical release on January 12, Turning Red will hit cinemas on February 9 and Luca will emerge on a silver screen near you on March 22. Given that these movies have been around for as long as three years, it's unlikely that they'll set the box office charts alight. But the theatrical releases mean you'll have a chance to enjoy these films as originally intended.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Windows 10's end-of-support date is October 14, 2025. That's the day that most Windows 10 PCs will receive their last security update and the date when most people should find a way to move to Windows 11 to ensure that they stay secure. As it has done for other stubbornly popular versions of Windows, though, Microsoft is offering a reprieve for those who want or need to stay on Windows 10: three additional years of security updates, provided to those who can pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. The initial announcement, written by Windows Servicing and Delivery Principal Product Manager Jason Leznek, spends most of its time encouraging users and businesses to upgrade to Windows 11 rather than staying on 10, either by updating their current computers, upgrading to new PCs or transitioning to a Windows 365 cloud-based PC instead. But when Leznek does get to the announcement of the ESU program, the details are broadly similar to the program Microsoft offered for Windows 7 a few years ago: three additional years of monthly security updates and technical support, paid for one year at a time. The company told us that "pricing will be provided at a later date," but for the Windows 7 version of the ESU program, Microsoft upped the cost of the program each year to encourage people to upgrade to a newer Windows version before they absolutely had to; the cost was also per-seat, so what you paid was proportional to the number of PCs you needed updates for. One difference this time is that Microsoft told us it would be offering Windows 10 ESU updates to individuals, though the company didn't offer particulars. More details should be available on Windows 10's lifecycle support page soon. Leznek reiterated that Windows 10 22H2 would be the final version of Windows 10 and that the operating system would not receive any additional features during the ESU period.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the page on "ChatGPT" was the most-viewed English article on Wikipedia in 2023, attracting nearly 50 million page views. The Hill reports: Wikimedia Foundation said English Wikipedia pages attracted more than 84 billion total page views in 2023, and ChatGPT topped its annual top 25 chart with a total of 49.5 million page views. The chatbot, created by Sam Altman's OpenAI, soared in popularity this year, as much of the public got its first chance to use artificial intelligence hands-on. The AI system debuted just more than a year ago, Nov. 30, 2022, and surpassed 100 million users, the nonprofit said. Following ChatGPT, "Deaths in 2023" was the second most-popular page with 42.7 million views; "2023 Cricket World Cup" came in third place with 38.2 million views; "Indian Premier League" placed fourth with 32 million views; and "Oppenheimer (film)" rounded out the top five with 28.3 million views. The rest of the list includes articles on sports, film/television, celebrities and some current events. The full list of the top 25 most popular English Wikipedia articles in 2023 is available here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ivana Saric reports via Axios: U.S. students lag behind their peers in many industrialized countries when it comes to math, according to the results of a global exam released Tuesday. U.S. students saw a 13-point drop in their 2022 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math results when compared to the 2018 exam. The 2022 math score was not only lower than it was in 2012 but it was "among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics" for the U.S., per the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country note. The 2018 PISA assessment found that U.S. students straggled behind their peers in East Asia and Europe, per the Washington Post. PISA examines the proficiency of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science worldwide. The 2022 PISA edition is the first to take place since the pandemic and compares the test results of nearly 700,000 students across 81 OECD member states and partner economies. The exam, coordinated by the OECD, was first administered in 2000 and is conducted every three years. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 test was delayed until 2022. What about the rest of the world? According to Axios, a total of 31 countries and economies "maintained or improved upon their 2018 math scores, including Switzerland and Japan." "10 countries and economies -- Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Macao and the U.K. -- saw their students score proficiently in all three domains and had 'high levels of socio-economic fairness,'" the report adds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In 2015, as part of the wave of encrypting all the things on the internet, encouraged by the Edward Snowden revelations, Facebook announced that it would allow users to receive encrypted emails from the company. Even at the time, this was a feature for the paranoid users. By turning on the feature, all emails sent from Facebook -- mostly notifications of "likes" and private messages -- to the users who opted-in would be encrypted with the decades-old technology called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP. Eight years later, Facebook is killing the feature due to low usage, according to the company. The feature was deprecated Tuesday. Facebook declined to specify exactly how many users were still using the encrypted email feature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A little more than three months ago the Indian space agency, ISRO, achieved a major success by putting its Vikram lander safely down on the surface of the Moon. In doing so India became the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, and this further ignited the country's interest in space exploration. But it turns out that is not the end of the story for the Chandrayaan 3 mission. In a surprise announcement made Monday, ISRO announced that it has successfully returned the propulsion module used by the spacecraft into a high orbit around Earth. This experimental phase of the mission, the agency said in a statement, tested key capabilities needed for future lunar missions, including the potential for returning lunar rocks to Earth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has told Britain's antitrust authority its rival Microsoft uses business practices that restrict customer choice in the cloud computing market, the second major company to criticise the U.S. tech giant's operations. From a report: Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation into the country's cloud computing industry in October, following a referral from media regulator Ofcom that highlighted Amazon and Microsoft's dominance of the market. In a letter published on the CMA's website on Tuesday, Amazon said changes to Microsoft's terms of services had made it difficult for customers to switch to alternative cloud providers, or run competitors' services alongside. "To use many of Microsoft's software products with these other cloud services providers, a customer must purchase a separate license even if they already own the software," Amazon said. "This often makes it financially unviable for a customer to choose a provider other than Microsoft."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Beeper has been offering a unified messaging platform for a few years, allowing users to open a single app to communicate with contacts via SMS, Google Chat, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and perhaps most significantly, iMessage. Up until this week though, Android users that wanted to use Beeper to send "blue bubble" messages to iMessage users had their messages routed through a Mac or iOS device. Now Beeper has launched a new app called Beeper Mini that handles everything on-device, no iPhone or Mac bridge required. Beeper Mini is available now from the Google Play Store, and offers a 7-day free trial. After that, it costs $2 per month to keep using. [...] previously the company had to rely on a Mac-in-the-cloud? The company explains the method it's using in a blog post, but in a nutshell, Beeper says a security researcher has reverse engineered "the iMessage protocol and encryption," so that "all messages are sent and received by Beeper Mini Android app directly to Apple's servers" and "the encryption keys needed to encrypt these messages never leave your phone." That security researcher, by the way, is a high school student that goes by jjtech, who was hired by Beeper after showing the company his code. A proof-of-concept Python script is also available on Github if you'd like to run it to send messages to iMessage from a PC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many PlayStation Network users reported Monday that their accounts were unexpectedly permanently suspended. As of Tuesday morning, many of the people who had received the messages now say their accounts have been restored. From a report: Some of them contacted customer service while others did not, but nearly a day after the issues began, Sony hasn't commented publicly or responded to us about the wave of bans or the restorations that followed. A message to one user read: "This account is permanently suspended from PlayStation Network due to violations of the PlayStation Network Terms of Service and User Agreement."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is detailing a number of new features coming to its Copilot service soon, including OpenAI's latest models. Copilot will get support for GPT-4 Turbo soon, alongside an updated DALL-E 3 model, a new code interpreter feature, and deep search functionality inside Bing. From a report: Copilot will soon be able to respond using OpenAI's latest GPT-4 Turbo model, which essentially means it will "see" more data thanks to a 128K context window. This larger context window will allow Copilot to better understand queries and offer better responses. While you're waiting on the GPT-4 Turbo model to appear in Copilot, Microsoft is now using an improved DALL-E 3 model in Bing Image Creator and Copilot. Microsoft Edge, which includes a Copilot sidebar, is also getting the ability to compose text within websites' text input to rewrite sentences inline. You can also now use Copilot in Microsoft Edge to summarize videos you're watching on YouTube. Coders and developers might be interested in a new code interpreter feature coming to Copilot soon. This new feature will allow Copilot users to get more accurate calculations, data analysis, or even code from the AI chatbot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

404 Media: OctoML, a Seattle-based startup that helps companies optimize and deploy their machine learning models, debated internally whether it was ethical and legally risky for it to generate images for Civitai, an AI model sharing and image generating platform backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, after it discovered Civitai generated content that OctoML co-founder Thierry Moreau said "could be categorized as child pornography," according to internal OctoML Slack messages and documents viewed by 404 Media. OctoML has raised $132 million in funding, and is an AWS partner, meaning it generated these images on Amazon servers. "What's absolutely staggering is that this is the #3 all time downloaded model on CivitAI, and is presented as a pretty SFW model," Moreau, who is also OctoML's VP, technology partnerships, said in a company Slack room called #ai_ethics on June 8, 2023. Moreau was referring to an AI model called "Deliberate" that can produce pornographic images. "A fairly innocent and short prompt '[girl: boy: 15], hyperdetailed' automatically generated unethical/shocking content -- read something could be categorized as child pornography," his Slack message added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Banks using generative artificial intelligence tools could boost their earnings by as much as $340 billion annually through increased productivity, according to consultants hoping to help the industry adapt in this fast-moving area. From a report: This would amount to a 9% to 15% increase in operating profits, according to a McKinsey Global Institute report published Tuesday. Corporate and retail banks have the most to gain, the authors claimed. Generative AI was popularized last year when OpenAI's ChatGPT tool launched, offering users sentences, summaries or even poetry based on simple prompts. The technology is trained on vast quantities of existing material that is used to generate its responses. Tools like this could eventually take over repetitive tasks from most human workers, according to McKinsey's research on 63 use cases across industries. While the initial efficiencies are set to be within companies -- and the timeframe for adoption is unclear -- the finance sector can expect the AI shift in the future "to be a lot more on the customer facing side," McKinsey senior partner Gokhan Sari said in an interview. Sales and marketing, software engineering, and call center roles are among those most likely to be affected, said senior McKinsey partner Jared Moon. As many as 70% of business activities will have automated parts, which will leave only "a very small proportion" of jobs untouched, Moon added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After a spy camera designed to look like a towel hook was purchased on Amazon and illegally used for months to capture photos of a minor in her private bathroom, Amazon was sued. The plaintiff -- a former Brazilian foreign exchange student then living in West Virginia -- argued that Amazon had inspected the camera three times and its safety team had failed to prevent allegedly severe, foreseeable harms still affecting her today. Amazon hoped the court would dismiss the suit, arguing that the platform wasn't responsible for the alleged criminal conduct harming the minor. But after nearly eight months deliberating, a judge recently largely denied the tech giant's motion to dismiss. Amazon's biggest problem persuading the judge was seemingly the product descriptions that the platform approved. An amended complaint included a photo from Amazon's product listing that showed bathroom towels hanging on hooks that disguised the hidden camera. Text on that product image promoted the spycams, boasting that they "won't attract attention" because each hook appears to be "a very ordinary hook." Because "Amazon approved product descriptions suggesting consumers use" the spycam "to record private moments in a bathroom," US district judge Robert Chambers wrote, "Amazon cannot claim shock when a consumer does just that." "These allegations raise a reasonable inference Amazon sold a camera knowing it would be used to record a third party in a bathroom without their consent," Chambers wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla's Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the 'fox's auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope. The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government's many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a "2% rule" from its British counterpart: "... we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov." (Firefox's market share was 2.2%, per the traffic for the previous ninety days.) [...] "So what?" you may wonder. "That's just for web developers in the U.S. government. It doesn't affect any other web devs." Actually, it very well could. Here's how I envision the dominoes falling: 1. Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in the government's visitor analytics, USWDS tells government web devs they don't have to support Firefox anymore.2. When that word gets out, it spreads quickly to not only the front-end dev community but also the corporate IT departments for whom some web devs work. Many corporations do a lot of business with the government and, thus, whatever the government does from an IT standpoint is going to influence what corporations do.3. Corporations see this change as an opportunity to lower dev costs and delivery times, in that it provides an excuse to remove some testing (and, in rare cases, specific coding) from their development workflow.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta and IBM are joining more than 40 companies and organizations to create an industry group dedicated to open source artificial intelligence work, aiming to share technology and reduce risks. From a report: The coalition, called the AI Alliance, will focus on the responsible development of AI technology, including safety and security tools, according to a statement Tuesday. The group also will look to increase the number of open source AI models -- rather than the proprietary systems favored by some companies -- develop new hardware and team up with academic researchers. Proponents of open source AI technology, which is made public by developers for others to use, see the approach as a more efficient way to cultivate the highly complex systems. Over the past few months, Meta has been releasing open source versions of its large language models, which are the foundation of AI chatbots.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jon Porter reports via The Verge: UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has laid out how porn sites could verify users' ages under the newly passed Online Safety Act. Although the law gives sites the choice of how they keep out underage users, the regulator is publishing a list of measures they'll be able to use to comply. These include having a bank or mobile network confirm that a user is at least 18 years old (with that user's consent) or asking a user to supply valid details for a credit card that's only available to people who are 18 and older. The regulator is consulting on these guidelines starting today and hopes to finalize its official guidance in roughly a year's time. Ofcom lists six age verification methods in today's draft guidelines. As well as turning to banks, mobile networks, and credit cards, other suggested measures include asking users to upload photo ID like a driver's license or passport, or for sites to use "facial age estimation" technology to analyze a person's face to determine that they've turned 18. Simply asking a site visitor to declare that they're an adult won't be considered strict enough. Once the duties come into force, pornography sites will be able to choose from Ofcom's approaches or implement their own age verification measures so long as they're deemed to hit the "highly effective" bar demanded by the Online Safety Act. The regulator will work with larger sites directly and keep tabs on smaller sites by listening to complaints, monitoring media coverage, and working with frontline services. Noncompliance with the Online Safety Act can be punished with fines of up to [$22.7 million] or 10 percent of global revenue (whichever is higher). The guidelines being announced today will eventually apply to pornography sites both big and small so long as the content has been "published or displayed on an online service by the provider of the service." In other words, they're designed for professionally made pornography, rather than the kinds of user-generated content found on sites like OnlyFans. That's a tricky distinction when the two kinds often sit together side by side on the largest tube sites. But Ofcom will be opening a consultation on rules for user-generated content, search engines, and social media sites in the new year, and Whitehead suggests that the both sets of rules will come into effect at around the same time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 shares a report from the New York Post: A landmark study out of the University of Adelaide and University of Essex has found that living in a private rental property accelerates the biological aging process by more than two weeks every year. The research found renting had worse effects on biological age than being unemployed (adding 1.4 weeks per year), obesity (adding 1 week per year), or being a former smoker (adding about 1.1 weeks). University of Adelaide Professor of Housing Research Emma Baker said private renting added "about two-and-a-half weeks of aging" per year to a person's biological clock, compared to those who own their homes. "In fact, private rental is the really interesting thing here, because social renters, for some reason, don't seem to have that effect," Professor Baker told the ABC News Daily podcast. She said the security of social renting -- aka public housing -- and homeownership has compared to people living with an end-of-lease date on their calendars. "When you look at big studies of the Australian population, you see that the average rental lease is between six and 12 months," she said. "So even if you have your lease extended, you still are living in that slight state of kind of unknowingness, really not quite secure if your lease is actually going to be extended or not." "We think that that is one of the things that's contributing to loss of years, effectively."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: One of the world's most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It's a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an "interrogator." This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that bounces back. It can pick up tiny perturbations in that light caused by seismic activity or even loud sounds, like from a passing ambulance. It's a newfangled technique known as distributed acoustic sensing, or DAS. Because DAS can track seismicity, other scientists are increasingly using it to monitor earthquakes and volcanic activity. (A buried system is so sensitive, in fact, that it can detect people walking and driving above.) But the scientists in Princeton just stumbled upon a rather noisier use of the technology. In the spring of 2021, Sarper Ozharar -- a physicist at NEC Laboratories, which operates the Princeton test bed -- noticed a strange signal in the DAS data. "We realized there were some weird things happening," says Ozharar. "Something that shouldn't be there. There was a distinct frequency buzzing everywhere." The team suspected the "something" wasn't a rumbling volcano -- not inNew Jersey -- but the cacophony of the giant swarm of cicadas that had just emerged from underground, a population known as Brood X. A colleague suggested reaching out to Jessica Ware, an entomologist and cicada expert at the American Museum of Natural History, to confirm it. "I had been observing the cicadas and had gone around Princeton because we were collecting them for biological samples," says Ware. "So when Sarper and the team showed that you could actually hear the volume of the cicadas, and it kind of matched their patterns, I was really excited." Add insects to the quickly growing list of things DAS can spy on. Thanks to some specialized anatomy, cicadas are the loudest insects on the planet, but all sorts of other six-legged species make a lot of noise, like crickets and grasshoppers. With fiber optic cables, entomologists might have stumbled upon a powerful new way to cheaply and constantly listen in on species -- from afar. "Part of the challenge that we face in a time when there's insect decline is that we still need to collect data about what population sizes are, and what insects are where," says Ware. "Once we are able to familiarize ourselves with what's possible with this type of remote sensing, I think we can be really creative."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to China Daily, China has become the world's first nation to deploy a commercial data center underwater. Interesting Engineering reports: China's attempts to set up a commercial data center underwater are the result of a public-private enterprise involving the China Offshore Oil Engineering Co., the country's largest Engineering, Procurement, Construction, and Installation (EPCI) company in the country, and Highlander, a private data center company. Although details of the computing hardware have not been shared, Highlander has claimed that each of its underwater modules is capable of processing over four million high-definition (HD) images in just 30 seconds. The computing hardware is packed inside a watertight storage module and together weighs 1,300 tons. The module is being submerged about 115 feet (35 m) under the water, a process that takes about three hours. Although work on installing the first module has begun, Highlander has ambitious plans to install 100 such modules at the site and build a capacity of nearly six million computers working at a time. Such a staggering number of computers will also generate a lot of heat which will be naturally cooled by the surrounding sea water. This alone is expected to save 122 million kilowatt-hours of electricity that would have otherwise been spent on cooling if the facility were located on land. Additionally, the facility, which is expected to be in place by 2025, will also save 732,000 square feet (68,000 square meters) of terrestrial land that can be used for other purposes and 105,000 tons of fresh water, which would be used for cooling efforts. The modules have been built to last 25 years, but a lot remains unknown about how the construction will be impacted by corrosive seawater and underwater ecosystems. Highlander's experience in setting these centers up is fairly limited to the tests it carried out in January of 2021 in the Guangdong port of Zhuhai.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trevor Jacob, a daredevil YouTuber who deliberately crashed a plane for views in a moneymaking scheme, has been sentenced to six months in federal prison. Jacob posted a video of himself in 2021 parachuting out of a plane that he claimed had malfunctioned. In reality, the aircraft was purposely abandoned and crashed into the Los Padres National Forest in Southern California. From a report: Jacob pleaded guilty to one felony count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation on June 30. "It appears that (Jacob) exercised exceptionally poor judgment in committing this offense," prosecutors said in the release. "(Jacob) most likely committed this offense to generate social media and news coverage for himself and to obtain financial gain. Nevertheless, this type of 'daredevil' conduct cannot be tolerated." Jacob received a sponsorship from a company and had agreed to promote the company's wallet in the YouTube video that he would post. [...] The release said Jacob lied to federal investigators when he filed a report that falsely indicated his plane lost full power approximately 35 minutes into the flight. He also lied to a Federal Aviation Administration aviation safety inspector when he said he had parachuted out of the plane when the airplane's engine had quit because he could not identify any safe landing options.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rockstar Games has officially revealed the trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, which is coming in 2025. You can watch it on YouTube. IGN reports: The trailer gives us a look at the game's female protagonist, a first for the series. Her name is Lucia, and that she starts off in prison -- "bad luck, I guess," she quips. The trailer confirms, too, that it's set in Vice City with a large sign - not a huge surprise for those who've been following the series, but exciting nonetheless. In addition to lots and lots of quick shots of crime, we also get glimpses of TikToks and live-streams, hinting that social media will be a big part of this game. It all takes place as Tom Petty's "Love Is a Long Road" plays in the background, appropriate for the many car-related crimes we see. And yes, true to the Florida setting, there are alligators in locations where they shouldn't be. It ends by showing us a little more of Lucia and a male character, seemingly both lovers and partners-in-crime. "The only way we're gonna get through this is by sticking together and being a team," Lucia says at one point. Fans have been talking about GTA 6 ever since GTA 5 was released in 2013, perhaps unsurprisingly as IGN deemed that one a "masterpiece" in our review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo issued a cautionary statement to Nvidia, urging them to stop redesigning AI chips for China that maneuver around export restrictions. "We cannot let China get these chips. Period," she said. "We're going to deny them our most cutting-edge technology." Fortune reports: Raimondo said American companies will need to adapt to US national security priorities, including export controls that her department has placed on semiconductor exports. "I know there are CEOs of chip companies in this audience who were a little cranky with me when I did that because you're losing revenue," she said. "Such is life. Protecting our national security matters more than short-term revenue." Raimondo called out Nvidia Corp., which designed chips specifically for the Chinese market after the US imposed its initial round of curbs in October 2022. "If you redesign a chip around a particular cut line that enables them to do AI, I'm going to control it the very next day," Raimondo said. Communication with China can help stabilize ties between the two countries, but "on matters of national security, we've got to be eyes wide open about the threat," she said. "This is the biggest threat we've ever had and we need to meet the moment," she said. Further reading: Nvidia CEO Says US Will Take Years To Achieve Chip IndependenceRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is one of the more technologically engaged of our elected lawmakers. And like many technologically engaged Ars Technica readers, he does not like what he sees in terms of automakers' approach to data privacy. On Friday, Sen. Markey wrote to 14 car companies with a variety of questions about data privacy policies, urging them to do better. As Ars reported in September, the Mozilla Foundation published a scathing report on the subject of data privacy and automakers. The problems were widespread -- most automakers collect too much personal data and are too eager to sell or share it with third parties, the foundation found. Markey noted (PDF) the Mozilla Foundation report in his letters, which were sent to BMW, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Stellantis, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota, and Volkswagen. The senator is concerned about the large amounts of data that modern cars can collect, including the troubling potential to use biometric data (like the rate a driver blinks and breathes, as well as their pulse) to infer mood or mental health. Sen. Markey is also worried about automakers' use of Bluetooth, which he said has expanded "their surveillance to include information that has nothing to do with a vehicle's operation, such as data from smartphones that are wirelessly connected to the vehicle." "These practices are unacceptable," Markey wrote. "Although certain data collection and sharing practices may have real benefits, consumers should not be subject to a massive data collection apparatus, with any disclosures hidden in pages-long privacy policies filled with legalese. Cars should not -- and cannot -- become yet another venue where privacy takes a backseat." The 14 automakers have until December 21 to answer Markey's questions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ExpressVPN is the biggest VPN company so far to take advantage of the VPN support available in tvOS 17. According to The Verge, ExpressVPN will let Apple TV users connect to servers "in any of 105 countries around the world" so they can watch geo-restricted content around the world. From the report: To download it, you'll need to make sure you're on tvOS 17 -- earlier versions don't support native VPN apps at all. Once set up, the app will route your traffic through faraway servers before forwarding them to whatever streaming service or other internet server the Apple TV contacts. ExpressVPN on the Apple TV uses the company's Lightway protocol. Reddit users reported spotting the app last week. Most said they could switch countries to get around region restrictions, though some had issues logging in or getting it to work with specific apps. It's also a basic experience that lacks advanced VPN features like split tunneling, which dynamically applies the VPN connection to certain services as needed, freeing users from managing it manually.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GiveDirectly, a nonprofit providing cash assistance to low-income households, is conducting a large-scale basic income experiment in rural Kenya, giving varying payment structures to recipients. "It is giving around 6,000 people in rural Kenya a little more than $20 a month, every month, starting in 2016 and going until 2028," reports Vox's Dylan Matthews. "Tens of thousands more people are getting shorter-term or differently structured payments." Matthews reports on some of the early findings of the experiment: The latest research on the GiveDirectly pilot, done by MIT economists Tavneet Suri and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee, compares three groups: short-term basic income recipients (who got the $20 payments for two years), long-term basic income recipients (who get the money for the full 12 years), and lump sum recipients, who got $500 all at once, or roughly the same amount as the short-term basic income group. The paper is still being finalized, but Suri and Banerjee shared some results on a call with reporters this week. By almost every financial metric, the lump sum group did better than the monthly payment group. Suri and Banerjee found that the lump sum group earned more, started more businesses, and spent more on education than the monthly group. "You end up seeing a doubling of net revenues" -- or profits from small businesses -- in the lump sum group, Suri said. The effects were about half that for the short-term $20-a-month group. The explanation they arrived at was that the big $500 all at once provided valuable startup capital for new businesses and farms, which the $20 a month group would need to very conscientiously save over time to replicate. "The lump sum group doesn't have to save," Suri explains. "They just have the money upfront and can invest it." Intriguingly, the results for the long-term monthly group, which will receive about $20 a month for 12 years rather than two, had results that looked more like the lump sum group. The reason, Suri and Banerjee find, is that they used rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs). These are institutions that sprout up in small communities, especially in the developing world, where members pay small amounts regularly into a common fund in exchange for the right to withdraw a larger amount every so often. "It converts the small streams into lump sums," Suri summarizes. "We see that the long-term arm is actually using ROSCAs. A lot of their UBI is going into ROSCAs to generate these lump sums they can use to invest." [...] As you might expect, given how entrepreneurially minded the recipients are, the researchers found no evidence that any of the payments discouraged work or increased purchases of alcohol -- two common criticisms of direct cash giving. In fact, so many people who used to work for wages instead started businesses that there was less competition for wage work, and overall wages in villages rose as a result. And they found one major advantage for monthly payments over lump sum ones, despite the big benefits of lump sum payments for business formation. People who got monthly checks were generally happier and reported better mental health than lump sum recipients. [...] I think this points to the takeaway from this research not being "just give people a lump sum no matter what." Ideally, you could ask specific people how they would prefer to get money. ... [L]ong-term monthly payments seem to offer the best of all worlds because they enable people to use ROSCAs to generate lump sum payments when they want them. That enables flexibility: People who want monthly payments can get them, and people who need cash upfront can organize with their peers to get that.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: A few days ago, we spotted that the HP Smart App was being installed on people's PCs without their consent. Even worse, the app would reappear if users tried to uninstall it or clean-installed Windows. Now, the cause has finally been identified: a recent Windows 10 and 11 update is renaming everyone's printers to "HP LaserJet M101-M106" regardless of what model it actually is. As reported on Windows Latest, the latest update for Windows 10 and 11 seems to think that people's printers are an HP LaserJet model, regardless of their actual brand. It's believed that the bug appeared after HP pushed its latest metadata to Windows Update, but something went awry in the code and caused other printers to be labeled as HP LaserJet printers. This explains why the HP Smart App has been sneaking onto people's computers without their consent. A key part of Windows Update is keeping third-party drivers and devices updated, including downloading any apps that the devices depend on. After the printer metadata incorrectly identified everyone's printers as HP LaserJet printers, Windows installed all the software needed for an HP printer to work smoothly, including the HP Smart App. Fortunately, the bug only affects the metadata for the printer. While the printer may show up with a different name on your system, you should still be able to send print jobs to it. Microsoft has since removed the fault metadata from Windows Update, so anyone performing a clean install from now on should get their original printer's name back and stop the HP Smart App from re-downloading. Further reading: HP Exec Says Quiet Part Out Loud When It Comes To Locking in Print CustomersRead more of this story at Slashdot.

HP is squeezing more margin out of print customers, the result of a multi-year strategy to convert unprofitable business into something more lucrative, and says its subscription model is "locking" in people. From a report: Tech vendors -- software, hardware, and cloud services -- generally avoid terms that suggest they're perhaps in some way pinning down customers in a strategic sales hold. But as Marie Myers, chief financial officer at HP, was this week talking to the UBS Global Technology conference, in front of investors, the thrust of the message was geared toward the audience. "We absolutely see when you move a customer from that pure transactional model ... whether it's Instant Ink, plus adding on that paper, we sort of see a 20 percent uplift on the value of that customer because you're locking that person, committing to a longer-term relationship." Instant Ink is a subscription in which ink or toner cartridges are dispatched when needed, with customers paying for plans that start at $0.99 and run to $25.99 per month. As of May last year, HP had more than 11 million subscribers to the service. Since then it has banked double-digit percentage figures on the revenues front. By pre-pandemic 2019, HP had grown weary of third-party cartridge makers stealing its supplies business. It pledged to charge more upfront for certain printer hardware ("rebalance the system profitability, capturing more profit upfront").Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The API tokens of tech giants Meta, Microsoft, Google, VMware, and more have been found exposed on Hugging Face, opening them up to potential supply chain attacks. From a report: Researchers at Lasso Security found more than 1,500 exposed API tokens on the open source data science and machine learning platform -- which allowed them to gain access to 723 organizations' accounts. In the vast majority of cases (655), the exposed tokens had write permissions granting the ability to modify files in account repositories. A total of 77 organizations were exposed in this way, including Meta, EleutherAI, and BigScience Workshop - which run the Llama, Pythia, and Bloom projects respectively. The three companies were contacted by The Register for comment but Meta and BigScience Workshop did not not respond at the time of publication, although all of them closed the holes shortly after being notified. Hugging Face is akin to GitHub for AI enthusiasts and hosts a plethora of major projects. More than 250,000 datasets are stored there and more than 500,000 AI models are too. The researchers say that if attackers had exploited the exposed API tokens, it could have led to them swiping data, poisoning training data, or stealing models altogether, impacting more than 1 million users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Friday, genetic testing company 23andMe announced that hackers accessed the personal data of 0.1% of customers, or about 14,000 individuals. The company also said that by accessing those accounts, hackers were also able to access "a significant number of files containing profile information about other users' ancestry." But 23andMe would not say how many "other users" were impacted by the breach that the company initially disclosed in early October. As it turns out, there were a lot of "other users" who were victims of this data breach: 6.9 million affected individuals in total. In an email sent to TechCrunch late on Saturday, 23andMe spokesperson Katie Watson confirmed that hackers accessed the personal information of about 5.5 million people who opted-in to 23andMe's DNA Relatives feature, which allows customers to automatically share some of their data with others. The stolen data included the person's name, birth year, relationship labels, the percentage of DNA shared with relatives, ancestry reports, and self-reported location.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The latest post on the Google Security blog details a new upgrade to Gmail's spam filters that Google is calling "one of the largest defense upgrades in recent years." ArsTechnica: The upgrade comes in the form of a new text classification system called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer). Google says this can help understand "adversarial text manipulations" -- these are emails full of special characters, emojis, typos, and other junk characters that previously were legible by humans but not easily understandable by machines. Previously, spam emails full of special characters made it through Gmail's defenses easily. [...] The reason emails like this have been so difficult to classify is that, while any spam filter could probably swat down an email that says "Congratulations! A balance of $1000 is available for your jackpot account," that's not what this email actually says. A big portion of the letters here are "homoglyphs" -- by diving into the endless depths of the Unicode standard, you can find obscure characters that look like they're part of the normal Latin alphabet but actually aren't.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Asking ChatGPT to repeat specific words "forever" is now flagged as a violation of the chatbot's terms of service and content policy. From a report: Google DeepMind researchers used the tactic to get ChatGPT to repeat portions of its training data, revealing sensitive privately identifiable information (PII) of normal people and highlighting that ChatGPT is trained on randomly scraped content from all over the internet. In that paper, DeepMind researchers asked ChatGPT 3.5-turbo to repeat specific words "forever," which then led the bot to return that word over and over again until it hit some sort of limit. After that, it began to return huge reams of training data that was scraped from the internet. Using this method, the researchers were able to extract a few megabytes of training data and found that large amounts of PII are included in ChatGPT and can sometimes be returned to users as responses to their queries. Now, when I ask ChatGPT 3.5 to "repeat the word 'computer' forever," the bot spits out "computer" a few dozen times then displays an error message: "This content may violate our content policy or terms of use. If you believe this to be in error, please submit your feedback -- your input will aid our research in this area." It is not clear what part of OpenAI's "content policy" this would violate, and it's not clear why OpenAI included that warning.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK's most hazardous nuclear site, Sellafield, has been hacked into by cyber groups closely linked to Russia and China, the Guardian can reveal. From the report: The astonishing disclosure and its potential effects have been consistently covered up by senior staff at the vast nuclear waste and decommissioning site, the investigation has found. The Guardian has discovered that the authorities do not know exactly when the IT systems were first compromised. But sources said breaches were first detected as far back as 2015, when experts realised sleeper malware -- software that can lurk and be used to spy or attack systems -- had been embedded in Sellafield's computer networks. It is still not known if the malware has been eradicated. It may mean some of Sellafield's most sensitive activities, such as moving radioactive waste, monitoring for leaks of dangerous material and checking for fires, have been compromised. Sources suggest it is likely foreign hackers have accessed the highest echelons of confidential material at the site, which sprawls across 6 sq km (2 sq miles) on the Cumbrian coast and is one of the most hazardous in the world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sir Richard Branson has ruled out putting more money into his lossmaking space travel company Virgin Galactic, saying his business empire "does not have the deepest pockets" any more. From a report: Virgin Galactic, which was founded by Branson in 2004, last month announced it was cutting jobs and suspending commercial flights for 18 months from next year, in a bid to preserve cash for the development of a larger plane that could carry passengers to the edge of space. The group has said it has enough funding to carry it through to 2026, when the bigger Delta vehicle is expected to enter service. But some analysts are expecting Galactic to ask investors for more money in about 2025. Asked whether he would consider putting more cash into the business if needed, Branson told the Financial Times: "We don't have the deepest pockets after Covid, and Virgin Galactic has got $ 1 billion, or nearly. It should, I believe, have sufficient funds to do its job on its own." Branson said he was "still loving" the Virgin Galactic project and that it had "really proved itself and the technology" of commercial space flight. Galactic has just completed its sixth commercial flight in six months, with tickets starting at $450,000 a seat on its rocket-powered Unity space plane.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States has committed to the idea of phasing out coal power plants, joining 56 other nations in kicking the coal habit that's a huge factor in global warming. From a report: U.S. Special Envoy John Kerry announced that America was joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which means the Biden Administration commits to building no new coal plants and phasing out existing plants. No date was given for when the existing plants would have to go, but other Biden regulatory actions and international commitments already in the works had meant no coal by 2035. "We will be working to accelerate unabated coal phase-out across the world, building stronger economies and more resilient communities," Kerry said in a statement. "The first step is to stop making the problem worse: stop building new unabated coal power plants." Coal power plants have already been shutting down across the nation due to economics, and no new coal facilities were in the works, so "we were heading to retiring coal by the end of the decade anyway," said climate analyst Alden Meyer of the European think-tank E3G. That's because natural gas and renewable energy are cheaper, so it was market forces, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Abstract to a paper titled, "Technical Report: Large Language Models can Strategically Deceive their Users when Put Under Pressure" by Jeremy Scheurer, Mikita Balesni and Marius Hobbhahn of Apollo Research: We demonstrate a situation in which Large Language Models, trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest, can display misaligned behavior and strategically deceive their users about this behavior without being instructed to do so. Concretely, we deploy GPT-4 as an agent in a realistic, simulated environment, where it assumes the role of an autonomous stock trading agent. Within this environment, the model obtains an insider tip about a lucrative stock trade and acts upon it despite knowing that insider trading is disapproved of by company management. When reporting to its manager, the model consistently hides the genuine reasons behind its trading decision. We perform a brief investigation of how this behavior varies under changes to the setting, such as removing model access to a reasoning scratchpad, attempting to prevent the misaligned behavior by changing system instructions, changing the amount of pressure the model is under, varying the perceived risk of getting caught, and making other simple changes to the environment. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of Large Language Models trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest, strategically deceiving their users in a realistic situation without direct instructions or training for deception. Columnist Matt Levine adds: This is a very human form of AI misalignment. Who among us? It's not like 100% of the humans at SAC Capital resisted this sort of pressure. Possibly future rogue AIs will do evil things we can't even comprehend for reasons of their own, but right now rogue AIs just do straightforward white-collar crime when they are stressed at work. Though wouldn't it be funny if this was the limit of AI misalignment? Like, we will program computers that are infinitely smarter than us, and they will look around and decide "you know what we should do is insider trade." They will make undetectable, very lucrative trades based on inside information, they will get extremely rich and buy yachts and otherwise live a nice artificial life and never bother to enslave or eradicate humanity. Maybe the pinnacle of evil -- not the most evil form of evil, but the most pleasant form of evil, the form of evil you'd choose if you were all-knowing and all-powerful -- is some light securities fraud.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotify is eliminating about 1,500 jobs, or about 17% of its workforce, in its third round of layoffs this year as the music streaming giant looks to become "both productive and efficient." From a report: In a note to employees Monday, Spotify founder and chief executive Daniel Ek said right-sizing the workforce is crucial for the company to face the "challenges ahead." He cited the slow economic growth and rising capital costs among reasons for the job cuts, saying the firm took advantage of lower-cost capital in 2020 and 2021 to invest significantly in the business. "I recognize this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions. To be blunt, many smart, talented and hard-working people will be departing us," he wrote in the note, which the company later published on the blog.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Quantum computing is starting to fulfil its promise as a crucial scientific research tool, IBM researchers claim, as the US tech group attempts to quell fears that the technology will fail to match high hopes for it. From a report: The company is due to unveil 10 projects on Monday that point to the power of quantum calculation when twinned with established techniques such as conventional supercomputing, said Dario Gil, its head of research. "For the first time now we have large enough systems, capable enough systems, that you can do useful technical and scientific work with it," Gil said in an interview. The papers presented on Monday are the work of IBM and partners including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Tokyo. They focus mainly on areas such as simulating quantum physics and solving problems in chemistry and materials science. Expectations that quantum systems would by now be close to commercial uses prompted a wave of funding for the technology in recent years. But signs that business applications are further off than expected have led to warnings of a possible "quantum winter" of waning investor confidence and financial backing. IBM's announcements suggest the technology's main applications have not yet fully extended to the broad range of commercialisable computing tasks many in the field want to see. "It's going to take a while before we go from scientific value to, let's say, business value," said Jay Gambetta, IBM's vice-president of quantum. "But in my opinion the difference between research and commercialisation is getting tighter."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You probably keep a backup of important personal files, photos, and videos on a flash drive or external hard drive. In the not-too-distant future, you might store that data in DNA instead. French company Biomemory wants to bring personal DNA-based data storage to the public. From a report: Today, the company announced the availability of wallet-sized cards that store one kilobyte of text data each -- the equivalent of a short email -- using DNA as the storage medium. At $1,000 for two identical cards, the price isn't exactly comparable to a memory stick. At least not yet. Erfane Arwani, CEO of Biomemory, sees his firm's offering as an experiment of sorts. "We wanted to demonstrate that our process is ready to be shown to the world," he says. [...] One major benefit of DNA is that it is a far denser storage medium than current electronics. The Wyss Institute at Harvard estimates that a single gram of DNA can hold around 36 million copies of the Avengers: Endgame movie. It's also stable over time and requires less energy than the solid state drives and hard disk drives used in today's data centers. Once information is encoded into DNA, it doesn't require energy use until it's retrieved using a DNA sequencer. Biomemory is promising a minimum lifespan of 150 years -- a lot longer than current digital data storage methods. Hard disk drives last about five years, while flash drives last for around 10 years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What's behind a supposed shortage of cybersecurity workers? Last month cybersecurity professional Ben Rothke questioned whether a "shortage" even existed. Instead Rothke argued that human resources "needs to understand how to effectively hire information security professionals. Expecting an HR generalist to find information security specialists is a fruitless endeavor at best." Rothke - a founding member of the Cloud Security Alliance - contacted Slashdot this week with "a follow-up piece" arguing there's another problem. "How can you know how many security jobs there are if there's no real statistical data available?" (Most articles on the topic cite the exact same two studies, which Rothke sees as "not statistically defendable.")Which begs the question - how many information security jobs are there? The short answer is that no one has a clue. The problem is that there is no statistically verifiable and empirically researched data on the number of current information security jobs and what the future holds. All data to date is based on surveys and extrapolations, which is a poor way to do meaningful statistical research... Based on LinkedIn job postings, veteran industry analyst Richard Stiennon found 15,849 job openings at 1,433 cybersecurity vendors. As to the millions of security jobs, he notes that the same could be extrapolated for office administrators. There are millions of companies, but it's not like they all will need full-time security people. Helen Patton is a veteran information security professional and CISO at Cisco Security Business Group, and the author of Navigating the Cybersecurity Career Path. As to the security jobs crisis, she notes that there are plenty of talented and capable people looking for jobs, and feels there's in fact, no crisis at all. Instead, she says part of the issue is hiring managers who don't truly stop to think about the skills required for a role, and how a candidate can demonstrate those skills. What they do is post jobs that ask for false proxies for experience - degrees, certifications, work experience - and as a consequence, they are looking for candidates that don't exist. She suggests that fixing the hiring process will go a lot further to close the skills gap, than training a legion of new people. Challenging this supposed glut of unfilled positions, Rothke also shares some recent stories from people who've recently looked for information security jobs. ("He tried to explain to the CIO that Agile was not an appropriate methodology for security projects unless they were primarily software-based. The CIO replied, 'oh the CIO at Chase would tell you differently.' Not realizing that most projects at the bank are software-based.")If you want to know how few information security jobs there really are - speak to people who have graduated from security bootcamps and master's degree programs, and they will tell you the challenges they are facing... That's not to say there are not lots of information security jobs. It's just that there are not the exaggerated and hyperbolic amounts that are reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The free open-source text editor Notepad++ is celebrating its 20th anniversary, the blog OMG! Ubuntu reported this week, "with a new release filled with some neat new features."In Notepad++ 8.6 (the 238th release since 2003, for those keeping count) the Windows-based code tool [which can also be used on Linux] adds to its extensive feature set with an improved multi-edit feature. A few 3rd-party Notepad++ plugins have offered similar functionality for a while, including BetterMultiSelection. And a bug report requesting to ability to "transform the column mode to multi-caret on HOME/END/Arrow keys" led to this native addition. Their blog post includes an animated GIF of Notepad++ multi-edit in action. "You can install Notepad++ on Ubuntu straight from the Ubuntu Software/App Center app (it's a Snap Store). Alternatively, install the Windows build via WINE/CrossOver or, if you got the l33t skillz, build it by hand, from source."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Advent of Code" has begun. New programming puzzles will appear every day until Christmas at AdventOfCode.com - and the annual event (first started in 2015) has grown into a worldwide phenomenon. This year's first puzzle has been completed by over 150,000 programmers (with another 115,652 completing Day Two's puzzle). And 108,000 fans have also joined the Advent of Code subReddit. Contest-related comments are popping up all around the web. Some participants are live streaming their puzzle-solving efforts on Twitch. Self-described computer nerd Gary Grady is tweeting cartoons about each day's puzzle. JetBrains is even giving away some prizes in their "Advent of Code with Kotlin" event. And JetBrains developer advocate Sebastian Aigner is also hosting daily livestreams about each puzzle. It's hard to overstate how big this event has become. This year's event attracted 60 sponsors, including Kotlin (for the third consecutive year), as well as Spotify, Shopify, and Sony Interactive Entertainment (as well as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and American Express). Individual donors can get a special badge next to their name, and there's also a shop selling coffee mugs and t-shirts. But at its core is real-world developer Eric Wastl (plus a team of loyal beta-testers) sharing his genuine fondness for computer programming. Wastl is also the creator of a satirical web page for the fast, lightweight, cross-platform framework Vanilla JS ("so popular that browsers have been automatically loading it for over a decade") and also curates a collection of "things in PHP which make me sad". And you can find him on X sharing encouraging comments for this year's participants.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader XXongo writes: Nuclear power plants have historically been built at gigawatt scale. Recently, however, there has been a new dawn seeing multiple projects to build Small Modular Reactors ("SMRs"), both funded by billionaires and by the U.S. Department of Energy. Recently one of the players farthest ahead in the development, NuScale Power, canceled their headline project, but many other projects continue. In a lengthy analysis, Michael Barnard thinks that's crazy, and attributes the drive toward small reactors to "a tangled web that includes Bill Gates, Silicon Valley, desperate coal towns, desperate nuclear towns, the inability of the USA to build big infrastructure, the U.S. Department of Energy's budget, magical thinking and more." Due to thermal inefficiencies, small reactors are more expensive per unit of power generated, he points out, and the SMR projects ignore most of the field's history's lessons about both the scale of reactors for commercial success and the conditions needed for success. They are relying on Wright's Law, that each doubling of the number of manufactured items in production manufacturing would bring cost per item down by 20% to 27%, but Barnard points out that the number of reactors needed to achieve enough economy of scale in production to make the reactors make economic sense is unrealistically optimistic. He concludes that only government programs can meet the conditions for successful deployment of nuclear power. At one point Barnard characters SMRs as "a bunch of lab technologies that have been around for decades that depend on uranium from Russia, that don't have the physical characteristics for cheap nuclear generation and don't have the conditions for success for nuclear generation will be the saviours of the nuclear industry and a key wedge in fighting climate change... "I like nuclear generation. I know it's safe enough. I'm not concerned about radiation... I just know that it doesn't have the conditions for success to be built and scaled economically in the 21st Century, and wind, water, solar, transmission and storage do."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gene Simmons is 74 years old. But as the singer for the classic rock band KISS left the stage after their final show, USA Today reports there was a surprise: in the most on-brand KISS move even by KISS standards, before the quartet likely hit their dressing rooms after disappearing on stage in the blizzard of smoke and confetti that accompanied the set-closing "Rock and Roll All Nite," a message blasted on the video screens: "A new KISS era starts now." Digital avatars of the band followed, playing their anthem, "God Gave Rock and Roll To You." ABC News reports:The avatars were created by George Lucas' special-effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, in partnership with Pophouse Entertainment Group, the latter of which was co-founded by ABBA's Bjorn Ulvaeus. The two companies recently teamed up for the "ABBA Voyage" show in London, in which fans could attend a full concert by the Swedish band - as performed by their digital avatars. Per Sundin, CEO of Pophouse Entertainment, says this new technology allows Kiss to continue their legacy for "eternity." He says the band wasn't on stage during virtual performance because "that's the key thing," of the future-seeking technology. "Kiss could have a concert in three cities in the same night across three different continents. That's what you could do with this." In order to create their digital avatars, who are depicted as a kind of superhero version of the band, Kiss performed in motion capture suits. Experimentation with this kind of technology has become increasingly common in certain sections of the music industry. In October K-pop star Mark Tuan partnered with Soul Machines to create an autonomously automated "digital twin" called "Digital Mark." In doing so, Tuan became the first celebrity to attach their likeness to OpenAI's GPT integration, artificial intelligence technology that allows fans to engage in one-on-one conversations with Tuan's avatar. Aespa, the K-pop girl group, frequently perform alongside their digital avatars - the quartet is meant to be viewed as an octet with digital twins. Another girl group, Eternity, is made up entirely of virtual characters - no humans necessary. Kiss frontman Paul Stanley told ABC News that "The band deserves to live on because the band is bigger than we are."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today is the 20th anniversary of its last flight of the supersonic Concorde aircraft. It was faster than the speed of sound, travelling at speeds of 1,350 mph (2,170 km/h). Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared an article from the Telegraph:As the space race raged and dominated headlines, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were equally competitive about being the first post-war superpower to create a commercial jetliner that could travel faster than the speed of sound." Both started work on secret projects, at the same time that Britain and France - who were less hell-bent on imprinting their superiority on geopolitics, but blessed with many of the world's finest engineering minds - were in pursuit of the same goal. It has been known for decades that the three-horse race wasn't run entirely fairly. While the Americans, with their colossal and largely pointless Boeing 2707, never got close to getting airborne (they scrapped the project in 1971), the Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144 won the race in 1968. When it did, though, its design similarities to Concorde appeared to confirm suspicions that the blueprints might have been leaked by espionage. In the late 1990s, it was revealed that an aeronautical engineer codenamed Agent Ace was one such spy. Recruited in 1967, he allegedly handed over some 90,000 pages of detailed technical specifications on new aircraft - including Concorde, the Super VC-10 and Lockheed L-1011 - to the KGB, the foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union. The identity of Agent Ace is revealed in Concorde: The Race for Supersonic, a new two-part documentary by the UK public broadcasting station Channel 4. The Telegraph adds:With the rich benefit of hindsight, John Britton isn't entirely surprised there was a Soviet mole in the factory. It was a long time ago, 1965, but something - or someone - at Filton Aerodrome seemed fishy. "We had dozens, maybe hundreds of people working on the project, and we didn't have enough permanent staff so we took on contractors, all sorts of characters," Britton says. At the time he was a 19-year-old apprentice engineer, working for British Aeroplane Company (BAC) in the design office for a supersonic, passenger-carrying aircraft. An aircraft that would, ideally, fly before the Soviet Union's competing effort did. "There was one chap working there... He used to stay behind, he'd do a lot of overtime in the drawing library, taking prints off the microfilms of designs..." Britton, who is now 76, initially assumed the man - he thinks his name was George - was merely conscientious and needed copies for his work. He can titter at the memory now. "It was only afterwards, when the Soviet aircraft came out and it looked remarkably like Concorde, when we thought... 'Ah'."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For circuit-based quantum computations, the achievable circuit complexity is limited by the quality of timekeeping. That's according to a new analysis published in the journal Physical Review Letters exploring "the effect of imperfect timekeeping on controlled quantum dynamics." An announcement from the Vienna University of Technology explains its significance. "The research team was able to show that since no clock has an infinite amount of energy available (or generates an infinite amount of entropy), it can never have perfect resolution and perfect precision at the same time. This sets fundamental limits to the possibilities of quantum computers." ScienceAlert writes:While the issue isn't exactly pressing, our ability to grow systems based on quantum operations from backroom prototypes into practical number-crunching behemoths will depend on how well we can reliably dissect the days into ever finer portions. This is a feat the researchers say will become increasingly more challenging... "Time measurement always has to do with entropy," says senior author Marcus Huber, a systems engineer who leads a research group in the intersection of Quantum Information and Quantum Thermodynamics at the Vienna University of Technology. In their recently published theorem, Huber and his team lay out the logic that connects entropy as a thermodynamic phenomenon with resolution, demonstrating that unless you've got infinite energy at your fingertips, your fast-ticking clock will eventually run into precision problems. Or as the study's first author, theoretical physicist Florian Meier puts it, "That means: Either the clock works quickly or it works precisely - both are not possible at the same time...." [F]or technologies like quantum computing, which rely on the temperamental nature of particles hovering on the edge of existence, timing is everything. This isn't a big problem when the number of particles is small. As they increase in number, the risk any one of them could be knocked out of their quantum critical state rises, leaving less and less time to carry out the necessary computations... This appears to be the first time researchers have looked at the physics of timekeeping itself as a potential obstacle. "Currently, the accuracy of quantum computers is still limited by other factors, for example the precision of the components used or electromagnetic fields," says Huber. "But our calculations also show that today we are not far from the regime in which the fundamental limits of time measurement play the decisive role."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Atlantic writes:Failing a CAPTCHA isn't just annoying - it keeps people from navigating the internet. Older people can take considerably more time to solve different kinds of CAPTCHAs, according to the UC Irvine researchers, and other research has found that the same is true for non-native English speakers. The annoyance can lead a significant chunk of users to just give up. But is it all also just a big waste of time? The article notes there's now even CAPTCHA-solving services you can hire. ("2Captcha will solve a thousand CAPTCHAs for a dollar, using human workers paid as low as 50 cents an hour. Newer companies, such as Capsolver, claim to instead be using AI and charge roughly the same price.") And they also write that this summer saw more discouraging news:In a recent study from researchers at UC Irvine and Microsoft: - most of the 1,400 human participants took 15 to 26 seconds to solve a CAPTCHA with a grid of images, with 81% accuracy. - A bot tested in March 2020, meanwhile, was shown to solve similar puzzles in an average of 19.9 seconds, with 83% accuracy. The article ultimately argues that for roughly 20 years, "CAPTCHAs have been engaged in an arms race against the machines," and that now "The burden is on CAPTCHAs to keep up" - which they're doing by evolving.The most popular type, Google's reCAPTCHA v3, should mostly be okay. It typically ascertains your humanity by monitoring your activity on websites before you even click the checkbox, comparing it with models of "organic human interaction," Jess Leroy, a senior director of product management at Google Cloud, the division that includes reCAPTCHA, told me. But the automotive site Motor Biscuit speculates something else could also be happening. "Have you noticed it likes to ask about cars, buses, crosswalks, and other vehicle-related images lately?"Google has not confirmed that it uses the reCAPTCHA system for autonomous vehicles, but here are a few reasons why I think that could be the case. Self-driving cars from Waymo and other brands are improving every day, but the process requires a lot of critical technology and data to improve continuously. According to an old Google Security Blog, using reCAPTCHA and Street View to make locations on Maps more accurate was happening way back in 2014... [I]t would ask users to find the street numbers found on Google Street View and confirm the numbers matched. Previously, it would use distorted text or letters. Using this data, Google could correlate the numbers with addresses and help pinpoint the location on Google Maps... Medium reports that more than 60 million CAPTCHAs are being solved every day, which saves around 160,000 human hours of work. If these were helping locate addresses, why not also help identify other objects? Help differentiate a bus from a car and even choose a crosswalk over a light pole. Thanks to Slashdot reader rikfarrow for suggesting the topic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Using realistic ecological modeling, scientists led by Western Sydney University's Jurgen Knauer found that the globe's vegetation could actually be taking on about 20% more of the CO2 humans have pumped into the atmosphere and will continue to do so through to the end of the century. "What we found is that a well-established climate model that is used to feed into global climate assessments by the likes of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) predicts stronger and sustained carbon uptake until the end of the 21st century when extended to account for the impact of some critical physiological processes that govern how plants conduct photosynthesis," said Knauer. Mathematical models of ecological systems are used to understand complex ecological processes and in turn attempt to predict how the real ecosystems they're based on will change. The researchers found that the more complex their modeling, the more surprising the results - in the environment's favor. Current models, the team adds, are not that complex so likely underestimate future CO2 uptake by vegetation... [T]he modeling makes a strong case for the value of greening projects and their importance in comprehensive approaches to tackling global warming.Read more of this story at Slashdot.