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After 151 years, Popular Science will no longer be available to purchase as a magazine. "Cathy Hebert, the communications director for PopSci owner Recurrent Ventures, says the outlet needs to 'evolve' beyond its magazine product, which published its first all-digital issue in 2021," reports The Verge. From the report: PopSci, which covers a whole range of stories related to the fields of science, technology, and nature, published its first issue in 1872. Things have changed a lot over the years, with the magazine switching to a quarterly publication schedule in 2018 and doing away with the physical copies altogether after 2020. In a post on LinkedIn, former PopSci editor Purbita Saha commented on the magazine's discontinuation, stating she's "frustrated, incensed, and appalled that the owners shut down a pioneering publication that's adapted to 151 years worth of changes in the space of a five-minute Zoom call." "PopSci is a phenomenal brand, and as consumer trends shift it's important we prioritize investment in new formats," Herbert tells The Verge. "We believe that the content strategy has to evolve beyond the digital magazine product. A combination of its news team, along with commerce, video, and other initiatives, will produce content that naturally aligns with PopSci's mission." PopSci will continue to offer articles on its website, along with its PopSci Plus subscription, which offers access to exclusive content and the magazine's archive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, Stability AI released Stable Video Diffusion, a new free AI research tool that can turn any still image into a short video -- with mixed results. It's an open-weights preview of two AI models that use a technique called image-to-video, and it can run locally on a machine with an Nvidia GPU. [...] Right now, Stable Video Diffusion consists of two models: one that can produce image-to-video synthesis at 14 frames of length (called "SVD"), and another that generates 25 frames (called "SVD-XT"). They can operate at varying speeds from 3 to 30 frames per second, and they output short (typically 2-4 second-long) MP4 video clips at 576x1024 resolution. In our local testing, a 14-frame generation took about 30 minutes to create on an Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics card, but users can experiment with running the models much faster on the cloud through services like Hugging Face and Replicate (some of which you may need to pay for). In our experiments, the generated animation typically keeps a portion of the scene static and adds panning and zooming effects or animates smoke or fire. People depicted in photos often do not move, although we did get one Getty image of Steve Wozniak to slightly come to life. Given these limitations, Stability emphasizes that the model is still early and is intended for research only. "While we eagerly update our models with the latest advancements and work to incorporate your feedback," the company writes on its website, "this model is not intended for real-world or commercial applications at this stage. Your insights and feedback on safety and quality are important to refining this model for its eventual release." Notably, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the Stable Video Diffusion research paper (PDF) does not reveal the source of the models' training datasets, only saying that the research team used "a large video dataset comprising roughly 600 million samples" that they curated into the Large Video Dataset (LVD), which consists of 580 million annotated video clips that span 212 years of content in duration.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Simon Sharwood reports via The Register: Amazon Web Services has announced the WorkSpaces Thin Client -- a device dedicated to connecting to its WorkSpaces desktop-as-a service offering and based on Amazon's own "Fire Cube" smart TV box. The $195 machine has the same hardware as the Fire Cube: the eight-core Arm-powered Amlogic POP1-G SoC, plus 2GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 10/100 ethernet, and a single USB-A 2.0 port. Bluetooth is included to connect other peripherals. A second HDMI output can be added by acquiring an $85 hub that also offers four more USB ports. Like the Fire TV Cube, the Thin Client also runs a modified cut of Android. But there the similarities end. AWS created custom firmware and ripped out anything remotely related to running a consumer device, replacing it with software designed solely to create a secure connection between the device and desktops running in the Amazonian cloud. Amazon Business -- the B2B version of Jeff Bezos's digital souk -- will ship the device to your door, and charge it to your AWS bill. At least if you are in the USA. Europe will get the Thin Client in early 2024, and it'll eventually migrate elsewhere. AWS decided to base the box on the Fire Cube because, according to a corporate blog post, AWS customers expressed a desire for cheaper and easier-to-maintain client devices. As AWS execs searched for a well-priced box, they considered the Fire TV Cube, found it fit the bill and noted it was already being made at scale. Keeping things in-house made sense, too. And so we find ourselves with AWS taking on established thin client providers. The cloudy concern is also keen to have a crack at the thick wedge of the enterprise PC market: call centers, payment processing centers, and other environments with lots of users and high staff turnover due to factors like seasonal demand for workers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After acquiring VMware for $69 billion, Broadcom is eliminating several positions at the virtualization technology company. Business Insider reports: Employees whose positions were eliminated received an email on Monday, viewed by Business Insider, that read: "Broadcom recently completed its acquisition of VMware. As part of integration planning, and following an organizational needs assessment, we identified go-forward roles that will be required within the combined company. We regret to inform you that your position is being eliminated and your employment will be terminated." "We would like to thank you for your dedication and service. We want to make this transition as smooth as possible, including offering you a generous severance package and providing you a non-working paid notice period," the email continued. Currently, it's unclear exactly how many employees will be affected by the cuts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [L]ast week, researchers at Blackwing Intelligence published an extensive document showing how they had managed to work around some of the most popular fingerprint sensors used in Windows PCs. Security researchers Jesse D'Aguanno and Timo Teras write that, with varying degrees of reverse-engineering and using some external hardware, they were able to fool the Goodix fingerprint sensor in a Dell Inspiron 15, the Synaptic sensor in a Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and the ELAN sensor in one of Microsoft's own Surface Pro Type Covers. These are just three laptop models from the wide universe of PCs, but one of these three companies usually does make the fingerprint sensor in every laptop we've reviewed in the last few years. It's likely that most Windows PCs with fingerprint readers will be vulnerable to similar exploits. Blackwing's post on the vulnerability is also a good overview of exactly how fingerprint sensors in a modern PC work. Most Windows Hello-compatible fingerprint readers use "match on chip" sensors, meaning that the sensor has its own processors and storage that perform all fingerprint scanning and matching independently without relying on the host PC's hardware. This ensures that fingerprint data can't be accessed or extracted if the host PC is compromised. If you're familiar with Apple's terminology, this is basically the way its Secure Enclave is set up. Communication between the fingerprint sensor and the rest of the system is supposed to be handled by the Secure Device Connection Protocol (SCDP). This is a Microsoft-developed protocol that is meant to verify that fingerprint sensors are trustworthy and uncompromised, and to encrypt traffic between the fingerprint sensor and the rest of the PC. Each fingerprint sensor was ultimately defeated by a different weakness. The Dell laptop's Goodix fingerprint sensor implemented SCDP properly in Windows but used no such protections in Linux. Connecting the fingerprint sensor to a Raspberry Pi 4, the team was able to exploit the Linux support plus "poor code quality" to enroll a new fingerprint that would allow entry into a Windows account. As for the Synaptic and ELAN fingerprint readers used by Lenovo and Microsoft (respectively), the main issue is that both sensors supported SCDP but that it wasn't actually enabled. Synaptic's touchpad used a custom TLS implementation for communication that the Blackwing team was able to exploit, while the Surface fingerprint reader used cleartext communication over USB for communication. "In fact, any USB device can claim to be the ELAN sensor (by spoofing its VID/PID) and simply claim that an authorized user is logging in," wrote D'Aguanno and Teras."Though all of these exploits ultimately require physical access to a device and an attacker who is determined to break into your specific laptop, the wide variety of possible exploits means that there's no single fix that can address all of these issues, even if laptop manufacturers are motivated to implement them," concludes Ars. Blackwing recommends all Windows Hello fingerprint sensors enable SCDP, the protocol Microsoft developed to try to prevent this exploit. PC makers should also "have a qualified expert third party audit [their] implementation" to improve code quality and security.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia has added the spokesman of U.S. technology company Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to a wanted list, according to an online database maintained by the country's interior ministry. From a report: Russian state agency Tass and independent news outlet Mediazona first reported that Meta communications director Andy Stone was included on the list Sunday, weeks after Russian authorities in October classified Meta as a "terrorist and extremist" organization, opening the way for possible criminal proceedings against Russian residents using its platforms. The interior ministry's database doesn't give details of the case against Stone, stating only that he is wanted on criminal charges. According to Mediazona, an independent news website that covers Russia's opposition and prison system, Stone was put on the wanted list in February 2022, but authorities made no related statements at the time and no news media reported on the matter until this week. In March this year, Russia's federal Investigative Committee opened a criminal investigation into Meta.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rooting out manipulation should not depend on dedicated amateurs who take personal legal risks for the greater good. From a story on Financial Times: As the Oxford university psychologist Dorothy Bishop has written, we only know about the ones who get caught. In her view, our "relaxed attitude" to the scientific fraud epidemic is a "disaster-in-waiting." The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, a data sleuth who specialises in spotting suspect images, might argue the disaster is already here: her Patreon-funded work has resulted in over a thousand retractions and almost as many corrections. That work has been mostly done in Bik's spare time, amid hostility and threats of lawsuits. Instead of this ad hoc vigilantism, Bishop argues, there should be a proper police force, with an army of scientists specifically trained, perhaps through a masters degree, to protect research integrity. It is a fine idea, if publishers and institutions can be persuaded to employ them (Spandidos, a biomedical publisher, has an in-house anti-fraud team). It could help to scupper the rise of the "paper mill," an estimated $1bn industry in which unscrupulous researchers can buy authorship on fake papers destined for peer-reviewed journals. China plays an outsize role in this nefarious practice, set up to feed a globally competitive "publish or perish" culture that rates academics according to how often they are published and cited. Peer reviewers, mostly unpaid, don't always spot the scam. And as the sheer volume of science piles up -- an estimated 3.7mn papers from China alone in 2021 -- the chances of being rumbled dwindle. Some researchers have been caught on social media asking to opportunistically add their names to existing papers, presumably in return for cash.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A modern-day rush prospecting frenzy for lithium, a crucial battery metal, is unfolding across remote Western Australian deserts. The arid outback that previously supplied gold, nickel and iron now hosts fierce competition between miners racing to stake claims on lithium resources needed for the global green energy transition. Lithium giants U.S.'s Albemarle and Chile's SQM have sparred with Australian billionaires Gina Rinehart and Chris Ellison over contested acquisitions of unproven explorers there. With demand surging, the harsh outback has become the modern El Dorado as pioneers and corporations scramble to tap into lithium, the "white gold," before rivals beat them to the punch. The deal frenzy has also come at a time when the lithium price has crashed as much as 70% compared with highs seen last year, as expectations of electric vehicle demand in key markets such as China have been lowered, Financial Times adds. The report adds: Western Australia already supplies about half of the world's raw lithium and is seen as a stable place to invest compared with parts of Africa, where there has been political instability, and Chile, where the state has moved to take control of lithium projects. Local expectations are high. A report by Australia's chief economist said lithium product exports should exceed A$20bn in the year to June 2023, up from A$5bn in the previous year. The report added that by 2028, the value of lithium exports should exceed those of coal, a staple of Australia's economy for decades. Australia has ambitions to step up its efforts to refine spodumene to keep more of the value onshore rather than shipping all of its resources to China, which has a commanding share of the refining process.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has grabbed the crown of biggest delivery business in the U.S., surpassing both UPS and FedEx in parcel volumes. From a report: The Seattle e-commerce giant delivered more packages to U.S. homes in 2022 than UPS, after eclipsing FedEx in 2020, and it is on track to widen the gap this year, according to internal Amazon data and people familiar with the matter. The U.S. Postal Service is still the biggest parcel service by volume; it handles hundreds of millions of packages for all three companies. A decade ago Amazon was a major customer for UPS and FedEx, and some executives from the incumbents and analysts mocked the notion that it could someday supplant them. Amazon's outsize growth combined with strategy shifts at FedEx and UPS have changed the balance. Before Thanksgiving this year, Amazon had already delivered more than 4.8 billion packages in the U.S., and its internal projections predict that it will deliver around 5.9 billion by the end of the year, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Last year Amazon shipped 5.2 billion packages. Amazon's figures include only packages that Amazon shipped from beginning to end. UPS and FedEx include packages they hand off to the postal service for final delivery in their tallies. UPS has said that its domestic volume this year is unlikely to exceed last year's 5.3 billion, which includes packages delivered to customers through the postal service. In the first nine months this year, UPS handled around 3.4 billion parcels domestically.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States, Britain and more than a dozen other countries on Sunday unveiled what a senior U.S. official described as the first detailed international agreement on how to keep AI safe from rogue actors, pushing for companies to create AI systems that are "secure by design." From a report: In a 20-page document unveiled Sunday, the 18 countries agreed that companies designing and using AI need to develop and deploy it in a way that keeps customers and the wider public safe from misuse. The agreement is non-binding and carries mostly general recommendations such as monitoring AI systems for abuse, protecting data from tampering and vetting software suppliers. Still, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Jen Easterly, said it was important that so many countries put their names to the idea that AI systems needed to put safety first. "This is the first time that we have seen an affirmation that these capabilities should not just be about cool features and how quickly we can get them to market or how we can compete to drive down costs," Easterly told Reuters, saying the guidelines represent "an agreement that the most important thing that needs to be done at the design phase is security."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Drive users are reporting files mysteriously disappearing from the service, with some posters on the company's support forums claiming six or more months of work have unceremoniously vanished. From a report: The issue has been rumbling for a few days, with one user logging into Google Drive and finding things as they were in May 2023. According to the poster, almost everything saved since then has gone, and attempts at recovery failed. Others chimed in with similar experiences, and one claimed that six months of business data had gone AWOL. There is little information regarding what has happened; some users reported that synchronization had simply stopped working, so the cloud storage was out of date. Others could get some of their information back by fiddling with cached files, although the limited advice on offer for the affected was to leave things well alone until engineers come up with a solution. A message purporting to be from Google support also advised not to make changes to the root/data folder while engineers investigate the issue. Some users speculated that it might be related to accounts being spontaneously dropped. We've asked Google for its thoughts and will update should the search giant respond.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fast Company published some thoughts about porch piracy from Rohan Shah, the cofounder of the shipment-insurance platform Extend:In New York City, where as many as 90,000 packages are stolen every day, the Department of Transportation has launched a pilot program, LockerNYC, in which consumers can collect their online purchases at various storefront or sidewalk locations. Amazon Locker has 900 locations across the U.S. and recently launched Amazon Key, allowing consumers to throw privacy to the wind and give delivery persons access to their homes and cars. Amazon also has pick up kiosks at Whole Foods and Kohl's and The U.S. Postal Service has set up after-hours pick-up locations in many states. All of that said, for consumers who simply wanted convenient, free two-day shipping, the time spent driving and waiting in line for a package doesn't seem like the best fix, nor a differentiated digital experience. AI to the rescue... This year, the fastest path to progress is simply reinventing shipping protection for the digital era and AI can do that at scale, for pennies on the dollar... My company, Extend, for example, leverages AI to process 98% of shipping claims in 90 seconds, with a replacement product shipped to the customer the same day... The new approach is a type of no-fault insurance, which the consumer purchases at checkout for around 2% of the purchase price. For a $200 pair of shoes, the cost to protect against shipping issues would be just $4.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"On a typical day 1,300 planes take off and land at Heathrow Airport, and keeping that going requires around 20 million litres of jet fuel every day," reports the BBC. "That's the equivalent of filling up your car around 400,000 times. "But, when it comes to fuel, airports around the world are having to have a major rethink..."To be of any use to the aviation industry, hydrogen needs to be in its liquid form, which involves chilling it to minus 253C. Handling a liquid at that kind of temperature is immensely challenging. Given the chance, liquid hydrogen will "boil-off" and escape as a gas - potentially becoming a hazard. So tanks, pipes and hoses all have to be extra-insulated to keep the liquid cold. France's Air Liquide has a lot of experience in this area. For around 50 years it has been supplying cryogenic hydrogen to the Ariane rockets of the European Space Agency (ESA)... Over the past three years, in partnership with Airbus and France's biggest airport operator, Group ADP, Air Liquide has been investigating the potential of hydrogen in the aviation business. It is also part of the H2Fly consortium which this summer successfully flew an aircraft using liquid hydrogen. For Air Liquide, it was an opportunity to test systems for fuelling a hydrogen aircraft... However, installing the equipment needed to store and distribute hydrogen at airports will not be cheap. The consultancy Bain & Company estimates it could cost as much as a billion dollars per airport. One start-up, Universal Hydrogen, says it has a solution... The company has developed special tanks to hold liquid hydrogen (UH calls them modules), which can then be trucked to the airport. The modules are designed to slot straight into the aircraft, where they can be plugged into the propulsion system. No need for pipes, hoses and pumps. The modules are extremely well insulated and can keep the hydrogen in its liquid form for four days. Two modules would hold 360kg of hydrogen and would be able to fly an aircraft 500 miles, plus an extra 45 minutes of flight time in reserve.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Hill published this warning from an Information Sciences assistant professor:Since 1980, more than 40,000 scientific publications have been retracted. They either contained errors, were based on outdated knowledge or were outright frauds... Yet these zombie publications continue to be cited and used, unwittingly, to support new arguments. Why? Almost always it's because nobody noticed they had been retracted... Just by citing a zombie publication, new research becomes infected: A single unreliable citation can threaten the reliability of the research that cites it, and that infection can cascade, spreading across hundreds of papers. A 2019 paper on childhood cancer, for example, cites 51 different retracted papers, making its research likely impossible to salvage. For the scientific record to be a record of the best available knowledge, we need to take a knowledge maintenance perspective on the scholarly literature... And we need to build on that knowledge, not on the errors and fraud... Slow science, living articles and reducing the pressure to publish are among the interventions that could help. We need a healthy, trustworthy ecosystem that rewards effort, not just results... Individuals and organizations that do the work of science must ensure that the work doesn't end at publication. Sometimes, it is just the beginning.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's census bureau looked at how many people relocated into each state from another state, compared to the total number of people making a move in that state. The state with the lowest "inmigration" ratio? California. From 2021 through 2022, "California's inmigration rate was 11.1% last year..." reports SFGate. "For comparison, nearby Oregon had a inmigration rate of 21%." But the census bureau cautions that California - America's most populous state - "also had a relatively large base of movers overall" - over 4 million - which could help explain its low ratio in several statistics. SFGate reports:California's outmigration rate - defined as the "number of people moving out of a state as a share of that state's total number of movers" - was also below the national migration average. Texas had the country's lowest outmigration rate, at 11.7%, according to the Census Bureau's analysis. California and Texas are America's two most populous states. (The total population of California is 39 million - roughly 11.7% of America's population - while Texas has another 30 million. Oregon's population is just 4,240,137.) Interestingly, most people moving to California arrived from... Texas. (44,279). At the same time, 102,422 people moved from California to Texas, with another 74,157 moving from California to Arizona. New York state also lost 91,201 people to Florida, and another 75,103 people to New Jersey.The second-highest number of people (31,225) who moved from a different state to California came from New York... According to the San Francisco Chronicle, California saw a net loss of 340,000 residents between 2021 and 2022, with most of the people who left heading to Florida or Arizona.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI employed by the U.S. military "has piloted pint-sized surveillance drones in special operations forces' missions and helped Ukraine in its war against Russia," reports the Associated Press. But that's the beginning. AI also "tracks soldiers' fitness, predicts when Air Force planes need maintenance and helps keep tabs on rivals in space."Now, the Pentagon is intent on fielding multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable AI-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026 to keep pace with China. The ambitious initiative - dubbed Replicator - seeks to "galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many," Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in August. While its funding is uncertain and details vague, Replicator is expected to accelerate hard decisions on what AI tech is mature and trustworthy enough to deploy - including on weaponized systems.' There is little dispute among scientists, industry experts and Pentagon officials that the U.S. will within the next few years have fully autonomous lethal weapons. And though officials insist humans will always be in control, experts say advances in data-processing speed and machine-to-machine communications will inevitably relegate people to supervisory roles. That's especially true if, as expected, lethal weapons are deployed en masse in drone swarms. Many countries are working on them - and neither China, Russia, Iran, India or Pakistan have signed a U.S.-initiated pledge to use military AI responsibly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Government-funded investment accounts for children could be on the horizon," writes CNBC, "and if tech investor Brad Gerstner has his way, corporate America will match the funds..." Gerstner been working with lawmakers to promote a legislative program known as Invest America that would create an investing account seeded with $1,000 for each child that's born in the U.S., but it's still too early in the process to publicly name supporters. He's aiming, however, to have legislation passed before the next presidential election. At the same time, he's working with corporate America to encourage businesses to offer matching funds to help employees further their savings. "The vision is simple - that corporations would include an Invest America match of $1,000 into the Invest America account of children of their employees," Gerstner, founder and chief executive of Altimeter Capital, said in an email. "We have talked with companies ranging from Zillow to Dell to Uber and, subject to details, the response has been overwhelmingly positive," he said. Rich Barton, co-founder and chief executive of Zillow, said it's a "no-brainer" for his company to fully support and match the type of program Gerstner is proposing. "A 401(k)-style investment account from birth seems like a great way to tackle the growing divide around financial literacy and wealth," he said in an email. "It is a small investment to help parents achieve more peace of mind." Representatives for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Michael Dell and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, other companies Gerstner cited in a recent CNBC interview as being receptive to his pitch, did not respond to email requests for comment... Certainly, there can be tangible - and intangible - benefits to companies that participated in a matching program. For instance, the government would have to provide tax incentives to companies that would presumably function similarly to how deductions are handled for 401(k) contributions, said Jeffrey Sharp, executive vice president at HUB International, a global insurance broker that provides employee benefits, and other products and services. Someone with $1,000 in her account at birth could expect a balance of about $107,000 by age 67, provided the portfolio grew at an annualized rate of 7%, according to CNBC Make It's compounding interest calculator. With a company match, a $2,000 investment could grow to around $215,000, under the same conditions. The outcome could be even more beneficial if parents contribute additional funds. The article also hedges that companies "would have to consider the advisability of paying for this type of benefit that not all employees could take advantage of. They might decide, for instance, they'd be better off upping their 401(k) match so more employees could benefit." But "I think we have a historic moment right now to get everybody into the game of capitalism," Gerstner says in an interview, noting it would cost just $3.7 billion to fund 50 million accounts -- "less than 1/100th of 1% of the national budget" -- and that he hopes to see the legislation introduced next year "in the spring."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader sysadminafterdark writes:Released on November 26, 2020, PHP 8 brought many optimizations and powerful features to the language.Fast forward to today, and PHP 8 is getting the boot in favor of 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 with 8.4 in development. This leaves some websites at risk of breaking and potential security issues. Hearing of this news, I upgraded my own blog and wrote an article on how to add the Remi repository and update. I run Enterprise Linux (The best distro out there) so if you are standing up new boxes, just keep in mind the PHP in the repo is deprecated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Several of your films have explored artificial intelligence," Rolling Stone pointed out to 85-year-old Ridley Scott, before asking: "Does AI worry you?"Ridley Scott: I always thought the world would end up being run by two corporations, and I think we're headed in that direction. Tyrell Corp in Blade Runner probably owned 45-50% of the world, and one of his playthings was creating replication through DNA. Tyrell thinks he's god and in the first Blade Runner has made a Nexus female. And the Nexus female will have a limited lifespan because AI will get dangerous. We have to lock down AI. And I don't know how you're gonna lock it down. They have these discussions in the government, "How are we gonna lock down AI?" Are you fucking kidding? You're never gonna lock it down. Once it's out, it's out. If I'm designing AI, I'm going to design a computer whose first job is to design another computer that's cleverer than the first one. And when they get together, then you're in trouble, because then it can take over the whole electrical-monetary system in the world and switch it off. That's your first disaster. It's a technical hydrogen bomb. Think about what that would mean? Rolling Stone: I wanted to ask you about what effect you think AI will have on Hollywood as it was a big sticking point in the writers' strike, in particular. One fear is that studios will plug a book into AI, have it crap out an "adaptation," and then pay actual screenwriters day rates to punch it up. Ridley Scott: Yeah. They really have to not allow this, and I don't know how you can control it. Another AI expert said, "We are way over-panicking. Of course, I have a computer that can defeat a chess master in an hour because we can feed him every conceivable move from data, and it'll process 1,900 conceivable moves on what the person will do next in seconds, and the guy is in trouble." There's something non-creative about data. You're gonna get a painting created by a computer, but I like to believe - and I'm saying this without confidence - it won't work with anything particularly special that requires emotion or soul. With that said, I'm still worried about it. The article also looks back more than 40 years, to when Ridley Scott was going to direct Dune in between filming Alien and Blade Runner. Scott says he had "a really good screenplay, had all the sets to go" - but the producer had wanted to save money by filiming it in Mexico City, and Scott "didn't love" the idea of spending a year there.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's long-standing Advanced Research Projects Agency (or ARPA) developing the foundational technologies for the internet. This week its energy division announced $42 million for projects enabling a "more secure and reliable" energy grid, "allowing it to utilize more solar, wind, and other clean energy." But specifically, they funded 15 projects across 11 states to improve the reliability, resiliency, and flexibility of the grid "through the next-generation semiconductor technologies."Streamlining the coordinated operation of electricity supply and demand will improve operational efficiency, prevent unforeseen outages, allow faster recovery, minimize the impacts of natural disasters and climate-change fueled extreme weather events, and redcude grid operating costs and carbon intensity. Some highlights:The Georgia Institute of Technology will develop a novel semiconductor switching device to improve grid control, resilience, and reliability.Michigan's Great Lakes Crystal Technologies (will develop a diamond semiconductor transistor to support the control infrastructure needed for an energy grid with more distributed generation sources and more variable loadsLawrence Livermore National Laboratory will develop an optically-controlled semiconductor transistor to enable future grid control systems to accommodate higher voltage and current than state-of-the-art devices.California's Opcondys will develop a light-controlled grid protection device to suppress destructive, sudden transient surges on the grid caused by lightning or electromagnetic pulses.Albuquerque's Sandia National Laboratories will develop novel a solid-state surge arrester protecting the grid from very fast electromagnetic pulses that threaten grid reliability and performance.America's Secretary of Energy said the new investment "will support project teams across the country as they develop the innovative technologies we need to strengthen our grid security and bring reliable clean electricity to more families and businesses - all while combatting the climate crisis."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The cornerstone of the open-source philosophy is that the recipients of technology should have access to all its building blocks..." writes the European Organization for Nuclear Research, "in order to study it, modify it and redistribute it to others." This includes mechanical designs, schematics for electronics, and software code.Ever since releasing the World Wide Web software under an open-source model in 1994, CERN has continuously been a pioneer in this field, supporting open-source hardware (with the CERN Open Hardware Licence), open access (with the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics - SCOAP3) and open data (with the Open Data Portal for the LHC experiments). The CERN Open Data portal is a testimony to CERN's policy of Open Access and Open Data. The portal allows the LHC experiments to share their data with a double focus: for the scientific community, including researchers outside the CERN experimental teams, as well as citizen scientists, and for the purposes of training and education through specially curated resources. The first papers based on data from the CERN Open Data portal have been published. Several CERN technologies are being developed with open access in mind. Invenio is an open-source library management package, now benefiting from international contributions from collaborating institutes, typically used for digital libraries. Indico is another open-source tool developed at CERN for conference and event management and used by more than 200 sites worldwide, including the United Nations. INSPIRE, the High Energy Physics information system, is another example of open source software developed by CERN together with DESY, Fermilab and SLAC. And on Wednesday the European Organization for Nuclear Research launches its new Open Source Program Office "to help you with all issues relating to the release of your software and hardware designs."Sharing your work with collaborators in research and industry has many advantages, but it may also present some questions and challenges... The OSPO will support you, whether you are a member of the personnel or a user, to find the best solution by giving you access to a set of best practices, tools and recommendations. With representatives from all sectors at CERN, it brings together a broad range of expertise on open source practices... As well as supporting the CERN internal community, the OSPO will engage with external partners to strengthen CERN's role as a promoter of open source. Open source is a key pillar of open science. By promoting open source practices, the OSPO thus seeks to address one of CERN's core ambitions: sharing our knowledge with the world. Ultimately, the aim is to increase the reach of open source projects from CERN to maximise their benefits for the scientific community, industry and society at large. For Wednesday's launch event "We will host distinguished open source experts and advocates from Nvidia, the World Health Organization and the Open Source Hardware Association to discuss the impact and future of open source." There will be a live webcast of the event.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: In 2024, a new spacecraft will hurtle toward Jupiter in a bid to learn whether its moon Europa is capable of supporting life. The craft will carry more than high-tech sensors: It also will bear a poem and hundreds of thousands of human names. Yours could be one of them. NASA is asking people to submit their names ahead of the mission's October 2024 launch. Those submitted by the end of 2023 will go into space on the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which should enter Jupiter's orbit in 2030... They'll eventually be stenciled onto a dime-sized microchip in microscopic writing, then attached to a metal plate engraved with the poem that will accompany the craft. 700,000 names have been submitted so far - and they'll all be carried a distance of over 1.8 billion miles. They'll travel through space with a poem that ends by describing what we humans on earth are made of - including "a need to call out through the dark."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Maps has added "a fresh color scheme, including a different look for parks and city blocks," writes SFGate. "But it's the changes to the app's all-important road maps that are rankling online commentators..."Previously, highways and freeways were depicted in bright yellow, which stood out against a stark white grid. Now, the app shows every road in various shades of gray, with major thoroughfares like Interstate 80 and Highway 1 showing up darker and thicker than other roadways. Raynell Cooper, an employee at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, called the new look "cartographically disappointing" in a Monday post to X, formerly known as Twitter. He added, "major local roads and limited-access highways (freeways) are basically indistinguishable." TechRadar has a side-by-side comparison of the old and new color schemes, quoting one Reddit who says the new one is a bit harder to read quickly. "The toned down look is cute but not practical."And the Evening Standard shares more negative reactions, including one user who complained the new color scheme is "shockingly bad.""Hate it hate it hate it hate it. Yellow roads were so good, and everything was bright and cheery," states another person on Reddit. "Now it's depressing and the roads are hard to see when not fairly zoomed in, they just don't pop like the yellow did. One Reddit user offered another complaint. "I think the water is a fairly significant change, it's a much closer shade to the green of the land which makes it a little harder to differentiate at a quick glance." And another criticism came from a post on X. "15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps..." wrote designer Elizabeth Laraki. "Last week, the team dramatically changed the map's visual design. I don't love it."It feels colder, less accurate and less human. But more importantly, they missed a key opportunity to simplify and scale... Google Maps should have cleaned up the crud overlaying the map. So much stuff has accumulated on top of the map. Currently there are ~11 different elements obscuring it. Tech blogger John Gruber writes, "This is a very long way of saying that Google Maps's app design should be like Apple Maps."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's yet another technological revolution happening, reports the Los Angeles Times. Bowling alleys across America "are ditching traditional pinsetters - the machines that sweep away and reset pins - in favor of contraptions that employ string. "Think of the pins as marionettes with nylon cords attached to their heads. Those that fall are lifted out of the way, as if by levitation, then lowered back into place after each frame... European bowling alleys have used string pinsetters for decades because they require less energy and maintenance. "All you need is someone at the front counter to run back when the strings tangle."String pinsetters mean big savings, maybe salvation, for an industry losing customers to video games and other newfangled entertainment. That is why the U.S. Bowling Congress recently certified them for tournaments and league play. But there is delicate science at play here. Radius of gyration, coefficient of restitution and other obscure forces cause tethered pins to fly around differently than their free-fall counterparts. They don't even make the same noise. Faced with growing pushback, the bowling congress published new research this month claiming the disparity isn't nearly as great as people think. Using a giant mechanical arm, powered by hydraulics and air pressure, they rolled "thousands of test balls from every angle, with various speeds and spins, on string-equipped lanes," according to the article:They found a configuration that resulted in 7.1% fewer strikes and about 10 pins fewer per game as compared to bowling with traditional pinsetters... Officials subsequently enlisted 500 human bowlers for more testing and, this time, reported finding "no statistically significant difference." But hundreds of test participants commented that bowling on strings felt "off." The pins seemed less active, they said. There were occasional spares whereby one pin toppled another without making contact, simply by crossing strings. Nothing could be done about the muted sound. It's like hearing a drum roll - the ball charging down the lane - with no crashing cymbal at the end. Still, one Northern California bowling alley spent $1 million to install the technology, and believes it will save them money - partly by cutting their electric bill in half. "We had a full-time mechanic and were spending up to $3,000 a month on parts." The article also remembers that once upon a time, bowling alleys reset their pins using pinboys, "actual humans - mostly teenagers... scrambling around behind the lanes, gathering and resetting by hand," before they were replaced by machines after World War II.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times:AI that can generate text, images and other content could help improve state programs but also poses risks, according to a report released by the governor's office on Tuesday. Generative AI could help quickly translate government materials into multiple languages, analyze tax claims to detect fraud, summarize public comments and answer questions about state services. Still, deploying the technology, the analysis warned, also comes with concerns around data privacy, misinformation, equity and bias. "When used ethically and transparently, GenAI has the potential to dramatically improve service delivery outcomes and increase access to and utilization of government programs," the report stated... AI advancements could benefit California's economy. The state is home to 35 of the world's 50 top AI companies and data from Pitchfork says the GenAI market could reach $42.6 billion in 2023, the report said. Some of the risks outlined in the report include spreading false information, giving consumers dangerous medical advice and enabling the creation of harmful chemicals and nuclear weapons. Data breaches, privacy and bias are also top concerns along with whether AI will take away jobs. "Given these risks, the use of GenAI technology should always be evaluated to determine if this tool is necessary and beneficial to solve a problem compared to the status quo," the report said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times reports:Meta has received more than 1.1 million reports of users under the age of 13 on its Instagram platform since early 2019 yet it "disabled only a fraction" of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint against the company brought by the attorneys general of 33 states. Instead, the social media giant "routinely continued to collect" children's personal information, like their locations and email addresses, without parental permission, in violation of a federal children's privacy law, according to the court filing. Meta could face hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, in civil penalties should the states prove the allegations. "Within the company, Meta's actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed," the complaint said, "and zealously protected from disclosure to the public...." It also accused Meta executives of publicly stating in congressional testimony that the company's age-checking process was effective and that the company removed underage accounts when it learned of them - even as the executives knew there were millions of underage users on Instagram... The lawsuit argues that Meta elected not to build systems to effectively detect and exclude such underage users because it viewed children as a crucial demographic - the next generation of users - that the company needed to capture to assure continued growth. More from the Wall Street Journal:An internal 2020 Meta presentation shows that the company sought to engineer its products to capitalize on the parts of youth psychology that render teens "predisposed to impulse, peer pressure, and potentially harmful risky behavior," the filings show... "Teens are insatiable when it comes to 'feel good' dopamine effects," the Meta presentation shows, according to the unredacted filing, describing the company's existing product as already well-suited to providing the sort of stimuli that trigger the potent neurotransmitter. "And every time one of our teen users finds something unexpected their brains deliver them a dopamine hit...." "In December 2017, an Instagram employee indicated that Meta had a method to ascertain young users' ages but advised that 'you probably don't want to open this pandora's box' regarding age verification improvements," the states say in the suit. Some senior executives raised the possibility that cracking down on underage usage could hurt Meta's business... The states say Meta made little progress on automated detection systems or adequately staffing the team that reviewed user reports of underage activity. "Meta at times has a backlog of 2-2.5 million under-13 accounts awaiting action," according to the complaint... The unredacted material also includes allegations that Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg instructed his subordinates to give priority to boosting its platforms' usage above the well being of users... Zuckerberg also repeatedly dismissed warnings from senior company officials that its flagship social-media platforms were harming young users, according to unsealed allegations in a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts earlier this month... The complaint cites numerous other executives making public claims that were allegedly contradicted by internal documents. While Meta's head of global safety, Antigone Davis, told Congress that the company didn't consider profitability when designing products for teens, a 2018 internal email stated that product teams should keep in mind that "The lifetime value of a 13 y/o teen is roughly $270" when making product decisions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The abolition of third-party cookies will make it possible to protect privacy-related data such as what sites users visit and what pages they view from advertising companies," notes the Japan-based site Gigazine. And this month "Google has confirmed that it is on track to start disabling third-party cookies across its Chrome browser in a matter of weeks," writes TechRadar:An internal email published online sees Google software engineer Johann Hofmann share with colleagues the company's plan to switch off third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users from Q1 2024 - a plan that was shared months ago and that, surprisingly, remains on track, given the considerable pushbacks so far... Hofmann explains that Google is still awaiting a UK Competition and Markets Authority consultation in order to address any final concerns before "Privacy Sandbox" gets the go-ahead. The Register explores Google's "Privacy Sandbox" idea: Since 2019 - after it became clear that European data protection rules would require rethinking how online ads work - Google has been building a set of ostensibly privacy-preserving ad tech APIs known as the Privacy Sandbox... One element of the sandbox is the Topics API: that allows websites to ask Chrome directly what the user is interested in, based on their browser history, so that targeted ads can be shown. Thus, no need for any tracking cookies set by marketers following you around, though it means Chrome squealing on you unless you tell it not to... Peter Snyder, VP of privacy engineering at Brave Software, which makes the Brave browser, told The Register in an email that the cookie cutoff and Privacy Sandbox remains problematic as far as Brave is concerned. "Replacing third-party cookies with Privacy Sandbox won't change the fact that Google Chrome has the worst privacy protections of any major browser, and we're very concerned about their upcoming plans," he said. "Google's turtle-paced removal of third-party cookies comes along with a large number of other changes, which when taken together, seriously harm the progress other browsers are making towards a user-first, privacy-protecting Web. "Recent Google Chrome changes restrict the ability for users to modify, make private, and harden their Web experience (Manifest v3), broadcasting users' interests to websites they visit (Topics), dissolving privacy boundaries on the Web (Related Sites), offloading the battery-draining costs of ad auctions on users (FLEDGE/Protected Audience API), and reducing user control and Web transparency (Signed Exchange/WebBundles)," Snyder explained. "And this is only a small list of examples from a much longer list of harmful changes being shipped in Chrome." Snyder said Google has characterized the removal of third-party cookies as getting serious about privacy, but he argued the truth is the opposite. "Other browsers have shown that a more private, more user-serving Web is possible," he said. "Google removing third-party cookies should be more accurately understood as the smallest possible change it can make without harming Google's true priority: its own advertising business." The Register notes that other browser makers such as Apple, Brave, and Mozilla have already begun blocking third-party cookies by default, while Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge "provide that option, just not out of the box." EFF senior staff technologist Jacob Hoffman-Andrews told The Register that "When Google Chrome finishes the project on some unspecified date in the future, it will be a great day for privacy on the web. According to the announcement, the actual phased rollout is slated to begin in Q3 2024, with no stated deadline to reach 100 percent. Let's hope Google's advertising wing does not excessively delay these critical privacy improvements." TechRadar points out that after the initial testing period in 2024, Google will begin its phased rollout of the cookie replacement program - starting in June. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Three out of four of the world's most popular websites are failing to meet minimum requirement standards" for password security, reports Georgia Tech's College of Computing. Which means three out of four of the world's most popular web sites are "allowing tens of millions of users to create weak passwords." Using a first-of-its-kind automated tool that can assess a website's password creation policies, researchers also discovered that 12% of websites completely lacked password length requirements. Assistant Professor Frank Li and Ph.D. student Suood Al Roomi in Georgia Tech's School of Cybersecurity and Privacy created the automated assessment tool to explore all sites in the Google Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), a database of one million websites and pages. Li and Al Roomi's method of inferring password policies succeeded on over 20,000 sites in the database and showed that many sites: - Permit very short passwords- Do not block common passwords- Use outdated requirements like complex characters The researchers also discovered that only a few sites fully follow standard guidelines, while most stick to outdated guidelines from 2004... More than half of the websites in the study accepted passwords with six characters or less, with 75% failing to require the recommended eight-character minimum. Around 12% of had no length requirements, and 30% did not support spaces or special characters. Only 28% of the websites studied enforced a password block list, which means thousands of sites are vulnerable to cyber criminals who might try to use common passwords to break into a user's account, also known as a password spraying attack. Georgia Tech describes the new research as "the largest study of its kind." ("The project was 135 times larger than previous works that relied on manual methods and smaller sample sizes.") "As a security community, we've identified and developed various solutions and best practices for improving internet and web security," said assistant professor Li. "It's crucial that we investigate whether those solutions or guidelines are actually adopted in practice to understand whether security is improving in reality." The Slashdot community has already noticed the problem, judging by a recent post from eggegick. "Every site I visit has its own idea of the minimum and maximum number of characters, the number of digits, the number of upper/lowercase characters, the number of punctuation characters allowed and even what punctuation characters are allowed and which are not."The limit of password size really torques me, as that suggests they are storing the password (they need to limit storage size), rather than its hash value (fixed size), which is a real security blunder. Also, the stupid dots drive me bonkers, especially when there is no "unhide" button. For crying out loud, nobody is looking over my shoulder! Make the "unhide" default. "The 'dots' are bad security," agrees long-time Slashdot reader Spazmania. "If you're going to obscure the password you should also obscure the length of the password." But in their comment on the original submission, they also point out that there is a standard for passwords, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology:Briefly: * Minimum 8 characters* Must allow at least 64 characters.* No constraints on what printing characters can be used (including high unicode)* No requirements on what characters must be used or in what order or proportion This is expected to be paired with a system which does some additional and critical things: * Maintain a database of known compromised passwords (e.g. from public password dictionaries) and reject any passwords found in the database.* Pair the password with a second authentication factor such as a security token or cell phone sms. Require both to log in.* Limit the number of passwords which can be attempted per time period. At one attempt per second, even the smallest password dictionaries would take hundreds of years to try... Someone attempting to brute force a password from outside on a rate-limited system is limited to the rate, regardless of how computing power advances. If the system enforces a rate limit of 1 try per second, the time to crack an 8-character password containing only lower case letters is still more than 6,000 years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The Linux Foundation recently funded a new "security developer in residence" position for Python. (It's funded through the Linux Foundation's own "Open Software Security foundation", which has a stated mission of partnering with open source project maintainers "to systematically find new, as-yet-undiscovered vulnerabilities in open source code, and get them fixed to improve global software supply chain security.") The position went to the lead maintainer for the HTTP client library urllib3, the most downloaded package on the Python Package Index with over 10 billion downloads. But he hopes to create a ripple effect by demonstrating the impact of security investments in critical communities - ultimately instigating a wave of improvements to all software supply chains. (And he's also documenting everything for easy replication by other communities...) So far he's improved the security of Python's release processes with signature audits and security-hardening automation. But he also learned that CVE numbers were being assigned to newly-discovered vulnerabilities by the National Cyber Security Division of the America's Department of Homeland Security - often without talking to anyone at the Python project. So by August he'd gotten the Python Software Foundation authorized as a CVE Numbering Authority, which should lead to more detailed advisories (including remediation information), now reviewed and approved by Python's security response teams. "The Python Software wants to help other Open Source organizations, and will be sharing lessons learned," he writes in a blog post. And he now says he's already been communicating with the Curl program about his experiences to help them take the same step, and even authored a guide to the process for other open source projects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech journalist Kara Swisher disagrees that Sam Altman's (temporary) firing stemmed from a conflict between the "go-faster" people pushing for commercialization and a rival contingent wanting more safety-assuring guardrails. "He's being talking about the problems," Swisher said on CNN. "Compared to a lot of tech people, he's talking about the problems. I think that's a false dichotomy." At the same time, NPR argues, the firing and re-hiring of Sam Altman "didn't come out of nowhere. In fact, the boardroom drama represented the boiling over of tensions that have long simmered under the surface of the company."The chaos at OpenAI can be traced back to the unusual way the company was structured. OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Altman, Elon Musk and others as a non-profit research lab. It was almost like an anti-Big Tech company; it would prioritize principles over profit. It wanted to, as OpenAI put it back then, develop AI tools that would "benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." But in 2018, two things happened: First, Musk quit the board of OpenAI after he said he invested $50 million, cutting the then-unknown company off from more of the entrepreneur's crucial financial backing. And secondly, OpenAI's leaders grew increasingly aware that developing and maintaining advanced artificial intelligence models required an immense amount of computing power, which was incredibly expensive. A year after Musk left, OpenAI created a for-profit arm. Technically, it is what's known as a "capped profit" entity, which means investors' possible profits are capped at a certain amount. Any remaining money is re-invested in the company. Yet the nonprofit's board and mission still governed the company, creating two competing tribes within OpenAI: adherents to the serve-humanity-and-not-shareholders credo and those who subscribed to the more traditional Silicon Valley modus operandi of using investor money to release consumer products into the world as rapidly as possible in hopes of cornering a market and becoming an industry pacesetter... The question was, did Altman abandon OpenAI's founding principles to try to scale up the company and sign up customers as fast as possible? And, if so, did that make him unsuited to helm a nonprofit created to develop AI products "free from financial obligations"? Microsoft's stock price hit an all-time high this week, reports the Wall Street Journal. (They also note that when OpenAI employees considered moving to Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella "assured their potential colleagues that they wouldn't even have to use Microsoft's workplace-communications app Teams.") "But the ideal outcome for Microsoft was Altman going back to OpenAI as CEO, according to a person familiar with Nadella's thinking. By opening Microsoft's doors to the OpenAI team, Nadella increased Altman's leverage to get his position back..."Even after investing $13 billion, Microsoft didn't have a board seat or visibility into OpenAI's governance, since it worried that having too much sway would alarm increasingly aggressive regulators. That left Microsoft exposed to the risks of OpenAI's curious structure... Microsoft has had to strike a tricky balance with OpenAI: safeguarding its investment while ensuring that its ownership stake remained below 50% to avoid regulatory pitfalls... AI is wildly expensive, and Microsoft's spending is expected to soar as the company builds out the necessary computing infrastructure. And it's unclear when or if it will be able to make back these upfront costs in added new revenue... Nadella is banking on OpenAI's independence leading to innovations that benefit Microsoft as much as humanity. But the uncertainty of the past week has shown the risks in one of the world's most valuable companies outsourcing the future to a startup beyond its control. When Chris Wallace asked Swisher if he should be more concerned about the dangers of AI now - and of its potential to take jobs - Swisher had a different answer. "One of the concerns you should have is the consolidation of this into bigger companies. Microsoft really want to win here..." But she didn't let the conversation end without wryly underscoring the potential for AI. "I'd be concerned that there's not enough innovation... It could be a good thing, Chris. Trust me, it could be a good thing. But it could also, you know, kill you." Thanks to Slashdot reader Tony Isaac for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was November 23rd of the year 1963 that Doctor Who first premiered on the BBC. And the many years since then have wrought their changes, writes the BBC:Events on screen and off have shaped the character's personality, their face changing to reflect Britain itself, and every version building on what has gone before. To truly understand Who, you have to know your history... [T]he series was originally intended to teach children history as much as thrill them... [T]he Daleks were shouty miniaturised tanks, terrifying to a nation that had lived through World War 2... Scripts by the likes of Douglas Adams (who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) leaned into the show's inherent strangeness... Interestingly, the new specials and series involve Marvel-owner Disney, who will stream it outside the UK and Ireland, in turn helping boost the budget. The article handily summarizes the last 60 years. ("Perhaps the most shocking revelation of [2010 showrunner Steven Moffat's] tenure was a hitherto unseen, past version of the Doctor, played by John Hurt. Other writers would take this idea and run with it...") The article ends with the words, "Only time will tell." And elsewhere another BBC article notes that today "the TARDIS is set to return to BBC One and iPlayer."With David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor and Catherine Tate reprising her role as Donna Noble the popular duo will make their spectacular return to mark the show's 60th anniversary with three special episodes running each Saturday from the 25th November... Neil Patrick Harris as the Toymaker [is] set to cause all kinds of mayhem. It's going to be an unmissable cosmic adventure, all before Ncuti Gatwa gets the keys to the TARDIS over the festive season. Thanks to Alain Williams (Slashdot reader #2,972) for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America celebrates "Small Business Saturday" today with special celebrations everywhere from Houston, Texas to Buffalo, New York NBC News reports:Sandwiched between Black Friday and Cyber Monday - historically the biggest and busiest retail days of the year - there's another standout shopping event: Small Business Saturday. Started by American Express in 2010 and co-sponsored by the U.S. Small Business Administration since 2011, Small Business Saturday aims to create awareness about the impact shoppers have when they buy "small" year round, whether they physically visit stores or shop online. This year, 85% of consumers say they're likely to shop "small" during the holiday season, according to the American Express 2023 Shop Small Impact Study. That represents a multibillion dollar opportunity - consumers are expected to spend an estimated $125 billion at small businesses this holiday season, up 42% from $88 billion in 2022, as reported by Intuit QuickBooks. Like CBS News, NBC has compiled its list of small businesses that can ship their products to you - and suggests leaving positive reviews online for your favorite small businesses. ("Amazon, for example, now adds badges to product pages on its site if items are sold by small businesses.")They also recommend interacting with your favorite small businesses on social media - while "the American Express small-business map allows you to input your zip code so it can recommend local shops in your area and beyond. Google also has a 'small business' filter on desktop and mobile, and one for Google Maps on mobile." The UK's "Small Business Saturday" will happen next week, on the first Saturday in December.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last January the Register reported that the Budgie desktop environment was planning to switch from using GNOME to Enlightenment. But this week Budgie's project lead David Mohammed and packaging guru Sam Lane "passed on news of a rift - and indeed possible divorce - between Budgie and Enlightenment," the Register reported. "And it's caused by Wayland."The development team of the Budgie desktop is changing course and will work with the Xfce developers toward Budgie's Wayland future... While Enlightenment does have some Wayland support, in the project's own words this is "still considered experimental and not for regular end users." Mohammed told us... "Progress though towards a full implementation currently doesn't fit into the deemed urgent nature to move to Wayland (Red Hat dropping further X11 development, and questions as to any organisation stepping up, etc.)" So, instead, Budgie is exploring different ways to build a Wayland-only environment. For now, as we mentioned when looking at Ubuntu's 23.10 release, there's a new windowing library, Magpie. Magpie 0.9 is what the project describes as "a soft-fork of GNOME's mutter at version 43" - the term soft fork meaning it's a temporary means to an end, rather than intended to form an on-going independent continuation. For the future, though, Mohammed told us... "[T]he Budgie team has been evaluating options to move forward. XFCE are doing some really great work in this area with libxfce4windowing - a compatibility layer bridging Wayland and X11, allowing the move in a logical direction without needing a big-bang approach. To date, most of the current codebase has already been reworked and is ready for a Wayland-only approach without impacting further development and enhancements." Mohammed later told the Register, "It makes sense for the more dynamic smaller projects to work together where there are shared aims."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The popular party game "Cards Against Humanity" continued their tradition of practical jokes on Black Friday. They created a new social network where users can perform only one action: posting the word "yowza." Then announced it on their official social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and X... Regardless of what words you type into the window, they're replaced with the word yowza. "For just $0.99, you'll get an exclusive black check by your name," reads an announcement on the site, "and the ability to post a new word: awooga." It's a magical land where "yowfluencers" keep "reyowzaing" the "yowzas" of other users. And there's also a tab for trending hashtags. (Although, yes, they all seem to be "yowza".) But they've already gotten a write up in the trade industry publication Advertising Age. "With every bad thing happening in the world, social media is always right there, making it worse," a spokesperson said.... "[W]e asked ourselves: Is there a way we could make a social network that doesn't suck? At first, the answer was 'no.' The content moderation problem is just too hard. And then we thought, why not solve the content moderation problem by having no content? That's Yowza...." When creating your profile on the network there's a dropdown menu for specifying your age and location - although all of the choices are yowza. More details from Advertising Age: The company said the word "yowza" was the first that came to mind when its creative teams were brainstorming-and it just stuck. "It's dumb, it's ridiculous, it means nothing. It's perfect," the rep said. And the service is still evolving, with fresh user upgrades. The official Yowza store will now also sell you the ability to also post the word Shazam - for $29.99. (Also on sale are 100,000 followers - for 99 cents.) But there's also an official FAQ which articulates the service's deep commitment to protecting their users' privacy. Do you promise you won't share my private information with the Chinese Communist Party, like TikTok? Yowza.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America passed a climate bill in August of 2022 with incentives to build wind and solar energy in regions that historically relied on fossil fuels. And sure enough, since then "a disproportionate amount of wind, solar, battery and manufacturing investment is going to areas that used to host fossil fuel plants," reports the Washington Post. They cite a new analysis of investment trends from independent research firm Rhodium Group and MIT's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research:In Carbon County, Wyo. - a county named for its coal deposits - a power company is building hundreds of wind turbines. In Mingo County, W.Va., where many small towns were once coal towns, the Adams Fork Energy plant will sit on a former coal mining site and produce low-carbon ammonia... While communities that once hosted coal, oil or gas infrastructure make up only 18.6 percent of the population, they received 36.8 percent of the clean energy investment in the year after the Inflation Reduction Act's passage. "We're talking about in total $100 billion in investment in these categories," said Trevor Houser, a partner at Rhodium Group. "So $37 billion investment in a year for energy communities - that's a lot of money...." Most significantly, 56.6 percent of investment in U.S. wind power in the past year has gone to energy communities, as well as 45.5 percent of the storage and battery investment... The analysis also found that significant amounts of clean energy investment were going to disadvantaged communities, defined as communities with environmental or climate burdens, and low-income communities. Many of the states benefiting are solidly Republican... Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the center-left think tank Third Way, is not sure whether the clean energy investments will make a difference for next year's election. But in the long term, he argues, rural Republican areas will become more dependent on clean energy - potentially shifting party alliances and shifting the position of the Republican Party itself. "It's going to change these fossil fuel communities," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Every car we were driving with was heading that direction..." Shelby Easler says in a TikTok video, "so we assumed this was going somewhere..." But SFGate reports that instead of a handy "alternate route," Google Maps was leading her and her two passengers "far off the major highway and into Nevada's fierce deserts on an off-roading trail."Easler's car were not the only bushwackers. In Shelby's viral TikTok, a trail of cars closely follows behind them. "The first driver that turned around talked to us to tell us that the road gets washed out the higher into the mountain you get, and we have to turn around since the path leads nowhere. He was in a huge truck and was just driving straight through the bushes and shrubs to let people know to turn around," Easler said. 1.5 million people have viewed Easler's earlier footage of their road to nowhere. The off-roading trail was apparently only wide enough for traffic in one direction, and attempting to return in that other direction, "We were driving over bushes and rocks and alot of the cars couldn't even make it," Easler says in the second video. "Which is kind of why our car broke down." They told SFGate that ultimately "We had to leave the car in Vegas, and it got towed to the service center of a dealership. They said the rear, right tire was coming off, and the alignment was messed up too. Low-key a pretty expensive fix." They eventually called the highway patrol to shut down the road that Google Maps was sending people to, because "With every car coming in, every single car was getting trapped."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Regulators in the European Union, China and France have asked for information on Nvidia's graphic cards, with more requests expected in the future, the U.S. chip giant said in a regulatory filing. From a report: Nvidia is the world's largest maker of chips used both for artificial intelligence and for computer graphics. Demand for its chips jumped following the release of the generative AI application ChatGPT late last year. The California-based company has a market share of around 80% via its chips and other hardware and its powerful software that runs them. Its graphics cards are high-performance devices that enable powerful graphics rendering and processing for use in video editing, video gaming and other complex computing operations. The company said this has attracted regulatory interest around the world. "For example, the French Competition Authority collected information from us regarding our business and competition in the graphics card and cloud service provider market as part of an ongoing inquiry into competition in those markets," Nvidia said in a regulatory filing dated Nov. 21.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FFmpeg 6.1's codename is a tribute to the great 19th century mathematician Oliver Heaviside. This version includes support for multi-threaded hardware-accelerated video decoding of H.264, HEVC, and AV1 video using the cross-platform Vulkan API, the next-gen replacement for OpenGL, which was added to the codebase in May. The Register adds: The pace of development of FFmpeg has been speeding up slightly in recent years, given that it took 13 years to get to version 2.0. We can't help but wonder if that's connected with the departure of the former project lead in 2015. The developers are planning to release version 7.0 in about February next year. Even so, the "Heaviside" release, which has been refactored to support even more formats and introduce new methods for faster performance or reduced processor utilization, is smaller than previous releases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brazil has signed onto an agreement to triple renewable energy globally by 2030 and shift away from using coal, the country's Foreign Ministry said on Friday, joining a prospective deal backed by the European Union, U.S. and United Arab Emirates. From a report: South America's largest country is now one of roughly 100 countries that have signed onto the deal, according to a European official familiar with the matter. Sources told Reuters earlier this month the aim is for the deal to be officially adopted by leaders attending the United Nation's COP28 climate negotiations that begins next week in Dubai. Brazil's embassy in Abu Dhabi said in a letter to the United Arab Emirates' Foreign Ministry that it would join the deal titled the "Global Renewables and Energy Efficiency Targets Pledge." A spokesperson for Brazil's Foreign Ministry confirmed the country has decided to join the pact. Brazil is already a major player in renewable energy. More than 80% of the country's electricity comes from renewable sources, led by hydropower with solar and wind energy expanding rapidly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TorrentFreak: File-sharing and hosting giant Uloz has announced a radical change to its business model. The Czech site has been under fire for some time and was recently branded a 'notorious market' by the MPA. However, Uloz says that an imminent ban on file-sharing in favor of a private, cloud-based storage model, is due to the strict conditions imposed by the EU's Digital Services Act.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

No one is a prophet in their own land, including European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, who admitted on Friday that her son lost "almost all" of his investments in crypto assets, despite copious warnings. From a report: Lagarde has long railed against cryptocurrencies, calling them speculative, worthless and a tool often used by criminals for illicit activity. "He ignored me royally, which is his privilege," Lagarde told a town hall with students in Frankfurt. "And he lost almost all the money that he had invested." "It wasn't a lot but he lost it all, he lost about 60% of it," Lagarde added. "So when I then had another talk with him about it, he reluctantly accepted that I was right." The ECB chief has two sons in their mid-30s but did not say which one she was referring to. The ECB has called for global regulation of crypto assets both to protect consumers who are unaware of the risk and to close a loophole that can be used to channel funding to terrorists or lets criminals launder cash.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia President Vladimir Putin on Friday warned that the West should not be allowed to develop a monopoly in the sphere of AI, and said that a much more ambitious Russian strategy for the development of AI would be approved shortly. From a report: China and the United States are leading the development of AI, which many researchers and global leaders think will transform the world and revolutionise society in a way similar to the introduction of computers in the 20th century. Moscow has ambitions to be an AI power too, but its efforts have been set back due to the war in Ukraine which prompted many talented specialists to leave Russia and triggered Western sanctions that have hindered the country's high-tech imports. Speaking to an AI conference in Moscow beside Sberbank CEO German Gref, Putin said that trying to ban AI was impossible despite the sometimes troubling ethical and social consequences of new technologies. "You cannot ban something - if we ban it then it will develop somewhere else and we will fall behind," Putin said of AI, though he said ethical questions should be resolved with reference to "traditional" Russian culture. Putin cautioned that some Western online search systems and generative models ignored or even cancelled Russian language and culture. Such Western algorithms, he said, essentially thought Russia did not exist. "Of course, the monopoly and domination of such systems, such alien systems is unacceptable and dangerous," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year, the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi (an entity blacklisted in the U.S.) launched its new supercomputer based on the enhanced China-designed Sunway SW26010 Pro processors with 384 cores. Sunway's SW26010 Pro CPU not only packs more cores than its non-Pro SW26010 predecessor, but it more than quadrupled FP64 compute throughput due to microarchitectural and system architecture improvements, according to Chips and Cheese. However, while the manycore CPU is good on paper, it has several performance bottlenecks. The first details of the manycore Sunway SW26010 Pro CPU and supercomputers that use it emerged back in 2021. Now, the company has showcased actual processors and disclosed more details about their architecture and design, which represent a significant leap in performance, recently at SC23. The new CPU is expected to enable China to build high-performance supercomputers based entirely on domestically developed processors. Each Sunway SW26010 Pro has a maximum FP64 throughput of 13.8 TFLOPS, which is massive. For comparison, AMD's 96-core EPYC 9654 has a peak FP64 performance of around 5.4 TFLOPS. The SW26010 Pro is an evolution of the original SW26010, so it maintains the foundational architecture of its predecessor but introduces several key enhancements. The new SW26010 Pro processor is based on an all-new proprietary 64-bit RISC architecture and packs six core groups (CG) and a protocol processing unit (PPU). Each CG integrates 64 2-wide compute processing elements (CPEs) featuring a 512-bit vector engine as well as 256 KB of fast local store (scratchpad cache) for data and 16 KB for instructions; one management processing element (MPE), which is a superscalar out-of-order core with a vector engine, 32 KB/32 KB L1 instruction/data cache, 256 KB L2 cache; and a 128-bit DDR4-3200 memory interface.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese health authorities have provided the requested data on an increase in respiratory illnesses and reported clusters of pneumonia in children, and have not detected any unusual or novel pathogens, the World Health Organization (WHO) said. From a report: The WHO had asked China for more information on Wednesday after groups including the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases reported clusters of undiagnosed pneumonia in children in north China. As per the rule, China responded to the WHO within 24 hours. The WHO had sought epidemiologic and clinical information as well as laboratory results through the International Health Regulations mechanism. Epidemiologists have warned that as, China heads into its first winter since the lifting of zero-Covid restrictions, natural levels of immunity to respiratory viruses may be lower than normal, leading to an increase in infections. Several countries, including the US and the UK, experienced large waves of respiratory viral infections in the first winter after Covid restrictions were lifted as people had lower natural levels of immunity. For young children, lockdowns delayed the age at which they were first exposed to common bugs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia has swung from fourth to first place in an assessment of chip industry revenue published today. From a report: Taipei-based financial analyst Dan Nystedt noted that the green team took the revenue crown from contract chip-making titan TSMC as Q3 financials came into view. Those keeping an eye on the world of investing and finance will have seen our report about Nvidia's earnings explosion, evidenced by the firm's publishing of its Q3 FY23 results. Nvidia charted an amazing performance, with a headlining $18.12 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 206% year-over-year (YoY). The firm's profits were also through the roof, and Nystedt posted a graph showing Nvidia elbowed past its chip industry rivals by this metric in Q3 2023, too. Nvidia's advance is supported by multiple highly successful operating segments, which have provided a multiplicative effect on its revenue and income. Again, we saw clear evidence of a seismic shift in revenue, with the latest set of financials shared with investors earlier this week.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world's biggest iceberg is on the move after more than 30 years being stuck to the ocean floor. From a report: The iceberg, called A23a, split from the Antarctic coastline in 1986. But it swiftly grounded in the Weddell Sea, becoming, essentially, an ice island. At almost 4,000 sq km (1,500 sq miles) in area, it's more than twice the size of Greater London. The past year has seen it drifting at speed, and the berg is now about to spill beyond Antarctic waters. A23a is a true colossus, and it's not just its width that impresses. This slab of ice is some 400m (1,312 ft) thick. For comparison, the London Shard, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, is a mere 310m tall. At the time, it was hosting a Soviet research station, which just illustrates how long ago its calving occurred. Moscow despatched an expedition to remove equipment from the Druzhnaya 1 base, fearing it would be lost. But the tabular berg didn't move far from the coast before its deep keel anchored it rigidly to the Weddell's bottom-muds. So, why, after almost 40 years, is A23a on the move now?"I asked a couple of colleagues about this, wondering if there was any possible change in shelf water temperatures that might have provoked it, but the consensus is the time had just come," said Dr Andrew Fleming, a remote sensing expert from the British Antarctic Survey. "It was grounded since 1986 but eventually it was going to decrease (in size) sufficiently to lose grip and start moving. I spotted first movement back in 2020." A23a has put on a spurt in recent months, driven by winds and currents, and is now passing the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI models can find patterns and make predictions, but their reasoning is often inscrutable. This "black box" issue makes AI less reliable and less scientifically useful. However, a team led by Dion Hafner (a computer scientist at the University of Copenhagen) devised a clever neural network to predict rogue waves. By restricting inputs to meaningful wave measurements and tracing how they flowed through the network, the team extracted a simple five-part equation encapsulating the AI's logic. Economist adds: To generate a human-comprehensible equation, the researchers used a method inspired by natural selection in biology. They told a separate algorithm to come up with a slew of different equations using those five variables, with the aim of matching the neural network's output as closely as possible. The best equations were mixed and combined, and the process was repeated. The result, eventually, was an equation that was simple and almost as accurate as the neural network. Both predicted rogue waves better than existing models. The first part of the equation rediscovered a bit of existing theory: it is an approximation of a well-known equation in wave dynamics. Other parts included some terms that the researchers suspected might be involved in rogue-wave formation but are not in standard models. There were some puzzlers, too: the final bit of the equation includes a term that is inversely proportional to how spread out the energy of the waves is. Current human theories include a second variable that the machine did not replicate. One explanation is that the network was not trained on a wide enough selection of examples. Another is that the machine is right, and the second variable is not actually necessary.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As 2023 slowly comes to an end I wondered what your picks are for the best movies and TV shows that came out this year. What films or series did you enjoy the most? Share your favorites and why you think they stand out above the rest.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ubisoft is blaming an unspecified "technical error" for a fullscreen pop-up ad that appeared in Assassin's Creed Odyssey this week. From a report: Reddit users say they spotted the pop-up on Xbox and PlayStation versions of the game, with an ad appearing just when you navigate to the map screen. "This is disgusting to experience while playing," remarked one Reddit user, summarizing the general feeling against such pop-ups in the middle of gameplay. "We have been made aware that some players encountered pop-up ads while playing certain Assassin's Creed titles yesterday," says Ubisoft spokesperson Fabien Darrigues, in a statement to The Verge. "This was the result of a technical error that we addressed as soon as we learned of the issue."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At a time when some are calling for a pause on the development of generative AI, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, has an argument for accelerating the work: AI advances are going to provide tools to better understand the technology and to make it safer, Huang said in a discussion with Goldman Sachs Asset Management. From a report: "We need to accelerate the development of AI as fast as possible, and the reason for that is because safety requires technology," Huang said in an interview at The Forum with Sung Cho, co-head of Tech Investing for Fundamental Equity in GSAM. Consider how much safer today's passenger cars are compared with those of earlier generations, Huang suggested, because the technology has advanced. He cited as an example how OpenAI's ChatGPT uses reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to create guardrails that make its responses more relevant, accurate, and appropriate. The RLHF is itself an AI model that sits around the core AI model. Huang lists examples of other AI technologies that hold promise for making the models safer and more effective. These range from retrieval augmented generation, in which the model gets information from a defined knowledge base or set of documents, to physics-informed reinforcement learning, which grounds the model in physical principles and constraints. "We need a bunch more technology like that," Huang said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.