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Dirty air killed more than half a million people in the EU in 2021, estimates show, and about half of the deaths could have been avoided by cutting pollution to the limits recommended by doctors. From a report: The researchers from the European Environment Agency attributed 253,000 early deaths to concentrations of fine particulates known as PM2.5 that breached the World Health Organization's maximum guideline limits of 5ug/m3. A further 52,000 deaths came from excessive levels of nitrogen dioxide and 22,000 deaths from short-term exposure to excessive levels of ozone. "The figures released today by the EEA remind us that air pollution is still the number one environmental health problem in the EU," said Virginijus Sinkevicius, the EU's environment commissioner. Doctors say air pollution is one of the biggest killers in the world but death tolls will drop quickly if countries clean up their economies. Between 2005 and 2021, the number of deaths from PM2.5 in the EU fell 41%, and the EU aims to reach 55% by the end of the decade. The WHO, which tightened its air quality guidelines in 2021, warns that no level of air pollution can be considered safe but has set upper limits for certain pollutants. The European parliament voted in September to align the EU's air quality rules with the WHO's but decided to delay doing so until 2035.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, is far more harmful to human health than previously thought, according to a new report, which found that coal emissions are associated with double the mortality risk compared with fine airborne particles from other sources. From a report: The research, published Thursday in the journal Science, linked coal pollution to 460,000 deaths among Medicare recipients aged 65 and older between 1999 and 2020. Yet the study also found that during that period the shuttering of coal plants in the United State, coupled with the installation of scrubbers in the smokestacks to "clean" coal exhaust, has had salubrious effects. Deaths attributable to coal plant emissions among Medicare recipients dropped from about 50,000 a year in 1999 to 1,600 in 2020, a decrease of more than 95 percent, the researchers found. "Things were bad, it was terrible," Lucas Henneman, the study's lead author, and an assistant professor in environmental engineering at George Mason University, said in an interview. "We made progress, and that's really good." Researchers from six universities collected emissions data from 480 coal power plants between 1999 and 2020. They used atmospheric modeling to track how sulfur dioxide converted into particulate matter and where it was carried by wind, and then examined millions of Medicare patient deaths by ZIP code. Though the researchers could not identify exact causes of death, the statistical model showed that areas with more airborne coal particulates had higher death rates. Some 138 coal plants each contributed to at least 1,000 excess deaths, and 10 plants were linked to more than 5,000 deaths apiece, the researchers found. While fine particulate matter, known as P.M. 2.5, is frequently examined for its health risks, the researchers found that inhaling those fine particles from coal exhaust was especially deadly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia has told customers in China it is delaying the launch of a new AI chip it designed to comply with U.S. export rules until the first quarter of next year, Reuters reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The delayed chip is the H20, the most powerful of three China-focused chips Nvidia has developed to comply with fresh U.S. export restrictions, the sources said, and could complicate its efforts to preserve market share in China against local rivals like Huawei. The California-based AI chip giant had been expected to launch the new products as early as Nov. 16, chip industry newsletter SemiAnalysis reported this month. However, the H20 launch has now been pushed back until the first quarter of next year, the sources said, with one saying they were advised it could take place in February or March. The sources said they were told that the H20 was being delayed due to issues server manufacturers were having in integrating the chip.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some Pixel 8 Pro owners have noticed circular bumps in several places on the screen that look to be the result of something pressing up against the underside, which is soft and fragile, of the 6.7-inch OLED panel. From a report: A statement from the company today acknowledges how "some users may see impressions from components in the device that look like small bumps" in specific conditions. Google says there is "no functional impact to Pixel 8 performance or durability," which does line up with all current reports.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The British Library has confirmed that personal data stolen in a cyber-attack has appeared online, apparently for sale to the highest bidder. From a report: The attack was carried out in October by a group known for such criminal activity, said the UK's national library, which holds about 14m books and millions of other items. This week, Rhysida, a known ransomware group, claimed it was responsible for the attack. It posted low-resolution images of personal information online, offering stolen data for sale with a starting bid of 20 bitcoins (about $750,000). Rhysida said the data was "exclusive, unique and impressive" and that it would be sold to a single buyer. It set a deadline for bids of 27 November. The images appear to show employment contracts and passport information. The library said it was "aware that some data has been leaked, which appears to be from files relating to our internal HR information." It did not confirm that Rhysida was responsible for the attack, nor that the data offered for sale was information on personnel. Academics and researchers who use the library have been told that disruption to the institution's services after the serious ransomware attack was likely to continue for months. This week, the library advised its users to change any logins also used on other sites as a precaution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The office sector's credit crunch is intensifying. By one measure, it's now worse than during the 2008-09 global financial crisis. From a report: Only one out of every three securitized office mortgages that expired during the first nine months of 2023 was paid off by the end of September, according to Moody's Analytics. That is the smallest share for the first nine months of any year since at least 2008 and well below the nadir reached in 2009, when 47% of these loans got paid off. That share is also well below the rate before the pandemic, when more than eight out of every 10 maturing securitized office mortgages were paid back in some years. While the numbers cover only office mortgages packaged into bonds -- so-called commercial mortgage-backed securities -- they reflect a broader freeze in the lending market for office buildings. Many office owners can't pay back their old loans because they can't get new mortgages. Remote work and rising vacancies have hit building profits, making it harder to pay interest. Higher interest rates have pushed debt costs up and building values down. That combination is fueling a rise in defaults. The share of office CMBS loans that are delinquent has tripled over the past year to 5.75%, according to Trepp. It doesn't help that many banks no longer issue new office loans and that many insurance companies and debt funds have become more cautious.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India is drafting rules to detect and limit the spread of deepfake content and other harmful AI media, a senior lawmaker said Thursday, following reports of proliferation of such content on social media platforms in recent weeks. From a report: Ashwini Vaishnaw, India's IT Minister, said the ministry held meetings with all large social media companies, industry body Nasscom and academics earlier in the day and has reached a consensus that a regulation is needed to better combat spread of deepfake videos as well as apps that facilitate their creations. "The companies share our concerns and they understood that it's [deepfakes] are not free speech. They understood that it's something that's very harmful to the society," he said. "They understood the need for much heavier regulation on this, so we agree that we will start drafting the regulation today itself." The ministry will be ready with "clear actionable items" on how to combat deepfakes in 10 days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have detected the most powerful cosmic ray seen in more than three decades. But the exact origin of this turbocharged particle from outer space remains a mystery, with some suggesting that it could have been generated by unknown physics. From a report: The puzzling cosmic ray had an estimated energy of 240 exa-electron volts (EeV; 10^18 volts), making it comparable to the most powerful cosmic ray ever detected, aptly named the Oh-My-God particle, which measured at around 320 EeV when it was discovered in 1991. The findings were published today in Science. "It's amazing because you have to think of what could produce such high energy," says Clancy James, an astronomer at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. A cosmic ray, despite its name, is actually a high-energy subatomic particle -- often a proton -- that zips through space at close to the speed of light. In their ultra-high energy form, cosmic rays have energy levels that exceed one EeV, which is around one million times greater than those reached by the most powerful human-made particle accelerators. Cosmic rays with energies of more than 100 EeV are rarely spotted -- fewer than one of these particles arrive on each square kilometre of Earth each century.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At 26, nurse Benzor Vidal moved from the Philippines to America for work, but quit his unsafe, understaffed nursing home job after 14 weeks. His employment contract stipulated he could owe $20,000+ in damages if he resigned early. The New York Times Magazine digs deeper: This type of contract provision is known as a "stay or pay" clause, and it used to be common only for certain high-paying roles or in certain specialized industries. For airline pilots and software engineers, for example, it has been a longstanding practice at some companies to require employees to stay at their jobs for a defined period of time in order to recoup costs related to hiring and training. But the line between recouping costs and penalizing workers for leaving can be blurry, and companies have increasingly taken advantage of that ambiguity. Workers' rights advocates say that, in many cases, stay-or-pay clauses no longer accurately reflect the company's costs but instead appear to be inflated financial penalties designed to discourage quitting. The use of stay-or-pay clauses has grown rapidly over the past decade, and it has seemingly exploded since the start of the pandemic, as companies try to retain workers in a tight labor market. The clauses have spread far beyond the handful of roles and industries where they originated and are now used by thousands of mid- and low-wage employers -- something that came to light when workers began filing lawsuits challenging the practice. These contract terms have been applied to bank workers, salespeople, dog groomers, police officers, aestheticians, firefighters, mechanics, nurses, federal employees, electricians, roofers, social workers, paramedics, truckers, mortgage brokers, teachers and metal polishers. Legal experts believe stay-or-pay clauses might now be in industries that employ a third of all American workers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter Kiddo 9000 writes: Dbrand, a company known best for making cases for phones, game consoles, and laptops, has filed a lawsuit against case manufacturer CASETiFY over their "Inside Out" case lineup. Dbrand alleges that CASETiFY copied the designs from their Teardown skins and put them on their own products without permission. In a video published by JerryRigEverything, several easter eggs placed in the Teardown skins were found in the CASETiFY designs, alongside numerous tweaks and layout changes, and even Dbrand's logo.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have used the technology behind the AI chatbot ChatGPT to create a fake clinical-trial data set to support an unverified scientific claim. From a report: In a paper published in JAMA Ophthalmology on 9 November, the authors used GPT-4 -- the latest version of the large language model on which ChatGPT runs -- paired with Advanced Data Analysis (ADA), a model that incorporates the programming language Python and can perform statistical analysis and create data visualizations. The AI-generated data compared the outcomes of two surgical procedures and indicated -- wrongly -- that one treatment is better than the other. "Our aim was to highlight that, in a few minutes, you can create a data set that is not supported by real original data, and it is also opposite or in the other direction compared to the evidence that are available," says study co-author Giuseppe Giannaccare, an eye surgeon at the University of Cagliari in Italy. The ability of AI to fabricate convincing data adds to concern among researchers and journal editors about research integrity. "It was one thing that generative AI could be used to generate texts that would not be detectable using plagiarism software, but the capacity to create fake but realistic data sets is a next level of worry," says Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and independent research-integrity consultant in San Francisco, California. "It will make it very easy for any researcher or group of researchers to create fake measurements on non-existent patients, fake answers to questionnaires or to generate a large data set on animal experiments."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The founder of Chipotle is opening a new endeavor called Kernel, a vegetarian fast-casual restaurant that will be operated mostly by robots. Steve Ells is opening at least 15 locations of Kernel, the first by early 2024; the remainder are on track for NYC in the next two years, a spokesperson confirms. From a report: Kernel will serve vegetarian sandwiches, salads, and sides, made in a space that's around 1,000 square-feet or smaller. Each location would employ three workers, the Wall Street Journal reported, "rather than the dozen that many fast-casual eateries have working." The menu pricing will be on par with Chipotle's, and, Ells says, the company will pay more and offer better benefits for actual humans working than other chains. As you'd expect from the former CEO of Chipotle -- which had at least five foodborne illness outbreaks between 2015 and 2018, costing the company $25 million per the Justice Department -- "the new system's design helps better ensure food safety," Ells told the Journal. It has taken $10 million in his personal funds to start Kernel, along with $36 million from investors. The company suggests customers may not want much interaction with other people -- and neither do CEOs. "We've taken a lot of human interaction out of the process and left just enough," he told the Journal. Yet in a 2022 study on the future of dining out conducted by commerce site, PYMNTS, of 2,500 people surveyed, 63 percent of diners believe restaurants are becoming increasingly understaffed, and 39 percent said that they are becoming less personal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthony Levandowski, a tech entrepreneur and self-driving car pioneer, said he's rebooting his AI church in a renewed attempt at creating a religious movement focused on the worship and understanding of artificial intelligence. From a report: Levandowski's so-called Way of the Future was founded in 2015 but shut its doors a few years later. The congregation at the new church, which shares the original's name, has "a couple thousand people" coming together to build a spiritual connection between humans and AI, its founder said. Levandowski made the remarks during an interview for the latest episode of the Bloomberg Originals series AI IRL, available to stream now. "How does a person in rural America relate to this? What does this mean for their job?" he said. "Way of the Future is a mechanism for them to understand and participate and shape the public discourse as to how we think technology should be built to improve you." The existence of the original church became public in 2017, years before the viral success of ChatGPT brought AI into mainstream consciousness. Levandowski's idea raised eyebrows, both because of the church's focus on "the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence developed through computer hardware and software," and because of Levandowski himself. At the time, he was at the center of a high-profile legal battle related to the theft of trade secrets, sentenced to 18 months in prison, then pardoned by former President Donald Trump.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ian Hickson, a software engineer at Google who left the company after 18 years, reflects on his time at the firm in a blog post and why he thinks the firm lost its way. He joined in 2005 when its culture genuinely prioritized doing good, but over time he saw that culture erode into one focused on profits over users, he writes. The recent layoffs have damaged trust and morale across the company, he writes. An excerpt from the post: Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google. A symptom of this is the spreading contingent of inept middle management. Take Jeanine Banks, for example, who manages the department that somewhat arbitrarily contains (among other things) Flutter, Dart, Go, and Firebase. Her department nominally has a strategy, but I couldn't leak it if I wanted to; I literally could never figure out what any part of it meant, even after years of hearing her describe it. Her understanding of what her teams are doing is minimal at best; she frequently makes requests that are completely incoherent and inapplicable. She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set. She is completely unable to receive constructive feedback (as in, she literally doesn't even acknowledge it). I hear other teams (who have leaders more politically savvy than I) have learned how to "handle" her to keep her off their backs, feeding her just the right information at the right time. Having seen Google at its best, I find this new reality depressing. There are still great people at Google. [...] In recent years I started offering career advice to anyone at Google and through that met many great folks from around the company. It's definitely not too late to heal Google. It would require some shake-up at the top of the company, moving the centre of power from the CFO's office back to someone with a clear long-term vision for how to use Google's extensive resources to deliver value to users. I still believe there's lots of mileage to be had from Google's mission statement (to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful). Someone who wanted to lead Google into the next twenty years, maximising the good to humanity and disregarding the short-term fluctuations in stock price, could channel the skills and passion of Google into truly great achievements. I do think the clock is ticking, though. The deterioration of Google's culture will eventually become irreversible, because the kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same kinds of people who don't join an organisation without a moral compass.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Cloudflare is a content-neutral Internet infrastructure service. The company aims not to interfere with the traffic of its clients and users but, in some cases, it has to take action. This means responding to DMCA subpoenas and takedown requests for hosted content, for example. In addition, Cloudflare now reports it has blocked access to 'abusive' content on its Ethereum gateway. [...] In its most recent transparency report, Cloudflare further notes that it has implemented access restrictions on its public Ethereum gateway. The company doesn't store any content on the Ethereum network, nor can it remove any. However, it can block access through its service. If Cloudflare receives valid abuse reports or copyright infringement complaints, it will take appropriate action. The same applies to the gateway for the decentralized IPFS network. In its previous transparency report, Cloudflare already mentioned more than 1,000 IPFS actions a figure that increased slightly in the second half of last year. At the same time, Cloudflare also restricted access to 99 'items' on the Ethereum network. Since these are 'gateway' related restrictions there's no impact on the content hosted on IPFS or Ethereum. Instead, it will only make it impossible to access content through Cloudflare's service. It's not clear how many of these restrictions are abuse or copyright-related, as not much context is provided. The Ethereum actions are, at least in part, a response to the U.S. Department of Treasury's sanctions against the cryptocurrency tumbler Tornado Cash. "Those sanctions raise significant legal questions about the extent to which particular computer software, rather than individuals or entities that use that software, can be subject to sanctions," Cloudflare writes. "Nonetheless, to comply with legal requirements, Cloudflare has taken steps to disable access through the Cloudflare-operated Ethereum Gateway to the digital currency addresses identified in the designation." The report notes that the volume of valid DMCA notices Cloudflare received has increased, "up from 18 to 972 in the span of a year." Meanwhile, the number of civil subpoenas it's received, including those issued under the DMCA, has decreased. "In the second half of last year, the company received 20 civil subpoenas which targeted 57 domain names," reports TorrentFreak. "That's the lowest number since Cloudflare first disclosed this statistic five years ago, signaling a downward trend." Cloudflare's latest Transparency Report is available here (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA selected Blue Origin in February to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, a pair of smallsats that will study the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere of Mars. The space agency now expects the mission will be on the first launch of Blue Origin's New Glenn launch vehicle next year. SpaceNews reports: Neither Blue Origin nor NASA disclosed exactly where in the manifest of New Glenn launches ESCAPADE would take place. "It will be an early New Glenn mission and we're going to be ready," one Blue Origin executive, Ariane Cornell, said at the Satellite 2023 conference in March. At a Nov. 20 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's human exploration and operations committee, Bradley Smith, director of NASA's Launch Services Office, said he was "incredibly excited" about the ESCAPADE launch, which he said was scheduled for about one year. His charts, though, and past presentations, listed an August 2024 launch for ESCAPADE. "It's an incredibly ambitious first launch for New Glenn and we really appreciate the partnership," he said. Later in the committee meeting, he confirmed that NASA expected ESCAPADE to be on the inaugural New Glenn launch. "We will very likely be the very first launch of New Glenn," he said. That is acceptable, Smith said, since ESCAPADE is what NASA characterizes as a "class D" mission with a higher tolerance for risk. "We're willing to take a little bit of risk with a price tag and a mission assurance model that reflects that risk." Besides the inherent technical risks in the first launch of a new rocket, there are also schedule risks. New Glenn development is years behind the original schedule Blue Origin put forward. The company has not provided recent updates about progress towards a first launch of the rocket, although Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn at Blue Origin, said at World Satellite Business Week in September that the first flight vehicle would arrive at a Florida integration facility by the end of the year, with the company planning "multiple" launches of New Glenn in 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GameMaker announced that it will be free to use for noncommercial, non-console projects, breaking away from Unity and its massive pricing controversy that saw game developers boycotting the engine. The company is also "eliminating its indie / creator tier monthly subscription fee in favor of a one-time paid licensing fee of $99," reports The Verge. "Additionally, if you're currently enrolled at the indie / creator tier and wish to pay the licensing fee, the subscription fees you've paid will be discounted from the price." The Verge: Russell Kay, head of GameMaker, said that the changes were a way for the company to express its thanks to users, explaining that, since 2021, GameMaker has seen its user base triple in size. Kay also had some subtle but effective shade for GameMaker's competitors. "We have seen other platforms making awkward moves with their pricing and terms, so we thought, what if we did the opposite, something that could actually be good for developers?" Kay wrote in the announcement. Though customers currently enrolled in an enterprise-level subscription will see no changes to their plans, it seems like GameMaker is counting on the pricing update to draw more people to the software. "Our success is measured by the number of people making games!" Kay wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's four days in exile, several staff researchers sent the board of directors a letter warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The previously unreported letter and AI algorithm was a key development ahead of the board's ouster of Altman, the poster child of generative AI, the two sources said. Before his triumphant return late Tuesday, more than 700 employees had threatened to quit and join backer Microsoft in solidarity with their fired leader. The sources cited the letter as one factor among a longer list of grievances by the board that led to Altman's firing. Reuters was unable to review a copy of the letter. According to one of the sources, long-time executive Mira Murati mentioned the project, called Q*, to employees on Wednesday and said that a letter was sent to the board prior to this weekend's events. After the story was published, an OpenAI spokesperson said Murati told employees what media were about to report, but she did not comment on the accuracy of the reporting. The maker of ChatGPT had made progress on Q* (pronounced Q-Star), which some internally believe could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as AI systems that are smarter than humans. Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, the person said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*'s future success, the source said. Researchers consider math to be a frontier of generative AI development. Currently, generative AI is good at writing and language translation by statistically predicting the next word, and answers to the same question can vary widely. But conquering the ability to do math -- where there is only one right answer -- implies AI would have greater reasoning capabilities resembling human intelligence. This could be applied to novel scientific research, for instance, AI researchers believe. Unlike a calculator that can solve a limited number of operations, AGI can generalize, learn and comprehend. In their letter to the board, researchers flagged AI's prowess and potential danger, the sources said without specifying the exact safety concerns noted in the letter. There has long been discussion among computer scientists about the danger posed by superintelligent machines, for instance if they might decide that the destruction of humanity was in their interest. Last night, OpenAI announced it reached an agreement for Sam Altman to return as CEO. Under an "agreement in principle," Altman will serve under the supervision of a new board of directors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brian Silvestro reports via Motor1.com: New Jersey announced a new rule set on Wednesday laying out plans to transition sales of light-duty vehicles in the state to 100-percent zero-emission by 2035. According to a statement released by the office of governor Phil Murphy, the law, titled the Advanced Clean Cars II rule, will come into effect starting in 2027, where manufacturers must ensure that zero-emissions vehicles represent 42 percent of sales in the state. That percentage will climb with each year until 2035, when it reaches 100 percent. Currently, EVs represent roughly 12 percent of all new vehicle sales, according to the governor's office. The new law will also put more stringent standards in place for traditional ICE-powered vehicles, with the goal of improving air quality in New Jersey communities and high-traffic corridors. While the announcement does not directly mention investment into charging infrastructure, the governor's office points out its continued dedication to providing adequate charging locations across the state, claiming it has helped fund the installment of 2,980 charging stations with 5,271 ports at 680 locations. New Jersey is the ninth state to enact a ban on future ICE car sales, joining California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lenovo has filed a lawsuit against Asus, claiming that the company's laptops infringe on four of their patents. "Lenovo is seeking damages and for Asus to stop selling Zenbook laptops and other allegedly infringing products in the U.S.," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The lawsuit [PDF] centers on four patents. The first, entitled "Methods and apparatus for transmitting in resource blocks" was issued in 2021 and relates to minimizing the delay experienced during an uplink package transmission by reducing the number of steps for a wireless device to upload data. Lenovo's lawsuit, which uses Asus' Zenbook Pro 14 OLED (UX6404) as an example of an allegedly infringing product, also claims Asus is selling laptops that violate the wireless wake-on-LAN power management patent issued to Lenovo in 2010. Another patent Lenovo is suing over was issued in 2010 and entitled "Touchpad diagonal scrolling." It allows users to "initiate a diagonal scroll at any location on a touchpad by using two fingers," the lawsuit says. Finally, Lenovo is upset about Asus' purported infringing of its "Dual shaft hinge with angle timing shaft mechanism" patent rewarded in 2014. Lenovo describes it as a hinge block enabling 2-in-1 laptops to go from clamshell mode to tablet mode. For this accused patent infringement, Lenovo's lawsuit points to Asus' Zenbook Flip 14 UX461, which Asus advertises as having a 360-degree "ErgoLift" hinge that "lifts and tilts the keyboard into the perfect typing position when the display is rotated into laptop mode." As noted by The Register today, in a letter to the ITC dated November 15 [PDF], Lenovo said it wants Asus to "cease and desist from marketing, advertising, distributing, offering for sale, selling, or otherwise transferring, including the movement or shipment of inventory" products that infringe upon the four patents in question. In a further dig, Lenovo added that a limited exclusion order wouldn't harm US consumers or competition, due to Asus' smaller market share. According to the IDC, Asus represented about 7.1 percent of the PC market (which includes laptops and desktops) in Q3 2023. Lenovo led at 23.5 percent.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Robinson reports via The Register: Nvidia is facing legal action in the U.S. for theft of trade secrets from a German automotive company, which alleges its ex-employee made an epic blunder of showing something he shouldn't have when minimizing a Powerpoint slide at a joint Microsoft Teams meeting both companies were attending. The automotive firm, Valeo Schalter und Sensoren, claims the flashing of its source code for the assisted parking app on the call is evidence to support its accusations that the ex-staffer stole the IP before leaving to join Nvidia. The two tech companies were both on the call as they were each suppliers on contract for a parking and driving assistance project with a major automotive OEM that was not named in the suit. Under the terms of the contract with the OEM, the suit states, engineers from both Valeo and Nvidia had to schedule collaboration meetings so that "Nvidia employees could ask Valeo employees questions about Valeo's ultrasonic hardware and data associated with the hardware." The complaint [PDF], filed by Valeo in the US District Court for Northern California, goes on to allege misappropriation of trade secrets by Nvidia, through which the company claims the GPU-maker attempted to take a shortcut into the automotive marketplace by using its stolen software. Nvidia is a relative newcomer to the automotive market, introducing its Nvidia Drive platform at the CES trade show in 2015. Valeo says that it only discovered the theft during a conference call on March 8, 2022 between its engineers and those of Nvidia to collaborate on work for an automotive OEM, a customer of both companies. Valeo develops automotive hardware such as cameras and sensors, in addition to software to processes the data from the hardware. The court filing states that Valeo previously provided the OEM in question with both hardware and software for its autonomous vehicle technology, but in this instance, it asked Valeo to provide ultrasonic hardware only. For the software side, the OEM instead chose Nvidia. One of the Nvidia engineers on the call, named as Mohammad Moniruzzaman, was a former employee of Valeo, and during the call, made using Microsoft's Teams software, he shared his screen in order to give a presentation containing questions for the Valeo participants. Yet also visible on his screen after the presentation finished - or so the complaint alleges - was a window of source code, which the Valeo participants recognized as belonging to their company. According to the filing, one of the Valeo engineers succeeded in capturing a screenshot as evidence. According to Valeo, the source code file names that were allegedly visible in the screenshot were identical to those used in its source code, and it also claims the source code appeared to be identical to proprietary code maintained in Valeo's repositories. The company says in the suit that it then conducted a comprehensive internal forensic IT audit, and alleges it discovered that Moniruzzaman had copied four repositories containing the code for Valeo's parking and driving assistance software, prior to leaving the company in May 2021. [...] The claim is that Valeo's source code and documentation has been used in the development of Nvidia's software, and this provided the GPU giant and its engineers with a shortcut in the development of its parking assistance code, saving Nvidia perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in development costs. According to the court filing, Nvidia said it removed Moniruzzaman's additions to its code. However, those additions underwent "a peer review process of 10-30 iterations of feedback loops" before the code was fully merged into Nvidia's database. Valeo contends that this process of extensive edits by others means it is not realistic that Nvidia could have fully remove Moniruzzaman's contributions. Valeo claims it has suffered competitive harm as a result of Nvidia's action and as a result is seeking damages, to be determined at trial, as well as an injunction prohibiting Nvidia or its employees from using or disclosing Valeo's trade secrets. A date for jury trial has yet to be announced.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Sam Altman may have been asked to leave OpenAI, but his involvement in crypto project Tools for Humanity, which is building Worldcoin, remains uninterrupted, a source close to the project told TechCrunch. Altman has "consistent and valuable" engagement with Tools for Humanity and "that is not expected to change," the source said. The source added that Altman is still chairman and co-founder of the project, confirming that the information on the project's website is up to date. News of Altman's ouster sent the Worldcoin token, WLD, plummeting to a low of $1.84 on Saturday, but the token recovered over the weekend and is currently trading on par with previous levels at $2.40, per CoinMarketCap data. Worldcoin raised $115 million in May in a Series C round led by Blockchain Capital. As of March, Altman was on the project's board, but was not involved in day-to-day operations. "Proof of personhood is becoming increasingly important in the rapidly advancing age of AI," The Worldcoin Foundation told TechCrunch late on Monday. The team supporting Worldcoin is still focused on the project's mission, "building a more human internet and a more accessible global economy through World ID, a privacy-enhancing way to verify humanness and uniqueness online," the company said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI's "ChatGPT with voice" feature announced in September is now rolling out to all free users on mobile. Engadget reports: When the company first introduced voice chats, it admitted that the capability to create "realistic synthetic voices from just a few seconds of real speech" presents new risks. It could, for instance, allow bad actors to impersonate public figures or anybody they want. As a result, it decided that ChatGPT's voice feature will focus on conversations. It's powered by a text-to-speech model that can generate "human-like audio from just text and a few seconds of sample speech." OpenAI worked with voice actors to create the capability and offers five different voices to choose from.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia's fiscal third-quarter results surpassed Wall Street's predictions, with revenue growing 206% year over year. However, Nvidia shares are down after the company called for a negative impact in the next quarter due to export restrictions affecting sales in China and other countries. CNBC reports: Nvidia's revenue grew 206% year over year during the quarter ending Oct. 29, according to a statement. Net income, at $9.24 billion, or $3.71 per share, was up from $680 million, or 27 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago. The company's data center revenue totaled $14.51 billion, up 279% and more than the StreetAccount consensus of $12.97 billion. Half of the data center revenue came from cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon, and the other from consumer internet entities and large companies, Nvidia said. Healthy uptake came from clouds that specialize in renting out GPUs to clients, Kress said on the call. The gaming segment contributed $2.86 billion, up 81% and higher than the $2.68 billion StreetAccount consensus. With respect to guidance, Nvidia called for $20 billion in revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter. That implies nearly 231% revenue growth. [...] Nvidia faces obstacles, including competition from AMD and lower revenue because of export restrictions that can limit sales of its GPUs in China. But ahead of Tuesday report, some analysts were nevertheless optimistic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Miscreants are actively exploiting two new zero-day vulnerabilities to wrangle routers and video recorders into a hostile botnet used in distributed denial-of-service attacks, researchers from networking firm Akamai said Thursday. Both of the vulnerabilities, which were previously unknown to their manufacturers and to the security research community at large, allow for the remote execution of malicious code when the affected devices use default administrative credentials, according to an Akamai post. Unknown attackers have been exploiting the zero-days to compromise the devices so they can be infected with Mirai, a potent piece of open source software that makes routers, cameras, and other types of Internet of Things devices part of a botnet that's capable of waging DDoSes of previously unimaginable sizes. Akamai researchers said one of the zero-days under attack resides in one or more models of network video recorders. The other zero-day resides in an "outlet-based wireless LAN router built for hotels and residential applications." The router is sold by a Japan-based manufacturer, which "produces multiple switches and routers." The router feature being exploited is "a very common one," and the researchers can't rule out the possibility it's being exploited in multiple router models sold by the manufacturer. Akamai said it has reported the vulnerabilities to both manufacturers, and that one of them has provided assurances security patches will be released next month. Akamai said it wasn't identifying the specific devices or the manufacturers until fixes are in place to prevent the zero-days from being more widely exploited. The Akamai post provides a host of file hashes and IP and domain addresses being used in the attacks. Owners of network video cameras and routers can use this information to see if devices on their networks have been targeted. [...] In an email, Akamai researcher Larry Cashdollar wrote: "The devices don't typically allow code execution through the management interface. This is why getting RCE through command injection is needed. Because the attacker needs to authenticate first they have to know some login credentials that will work. If the devices are using easy guessable logins like admin:password or admin:password1 those could be at risk too if someone expands the list of credentials to try." He said that both manufacturers have been notified, but only one of them has so far committed to releasing a patch, which is expected next month. The status of a fix from the second manufacturer is currently unknown. Cashdollar said an incomplete Internet scan showed there are at least 7,000 vulnerable devices. The actual number of affected devices may be higher.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bard, Google's AI chatbot, has steadily been getting more useful after a lackluster introduction. Now the bot's YouTube integration is getting a handy upgrade so it can analyze individual videos to surface specific information for you -- like key points or recipe ingredients -- without ever pressing play. From a report: That's potentially a hugely useful tool, but could spell more worry about generative AI for creators. To try it out, I turned Bard on a YouTube video I regularly reference for spiritual guidance: America's Test Kitchen's recipe for an Espresso Martini. Seriously, it's really good. I often find myself in my kitchen with half the ingredients in a cocktail shaker trying to remember how much Benedictine I'm supposed to add, then re-watching the video to find out. But with Bard on the case, all I have to do is type a few prompts and viola -- I have the full list of ingredients and some step-by-step instructions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OLED monitors risk burn-in, especially with static images. Newer models combat this using improved materials, algorithms, efficiencies, features, and heat management. However, long-term data is minimal as quality selection is recent. An unexpected quirk applies to ultrawides: playing 16:9 content creates brighter center areas versus darker sides, quickening OLED degradation. In an extreme test by RTINGS, Samsung ultrawides developed heavy differential wear in just 700 hours. ArsTechnica adds: Even OLED monitors that have already been released can see their capabilities change in a way that could impact burn-in risk. For example, the Odyssey G8 monitor got a firmware update in August that removed the ability to use the Peak Brightness setting in SDR mode. While this is just one specific mode that, again, some users might not use, it's worth noting how this could change the amount of wear an OLED monitor could see. RTINGS' review said that after the firmware update, the monitor's max luminance "when displaying a bright highlight in an SDR scene" went from 331 nits to 230 nits. Samsung hasn't confirmed the reasons for this change, but such changes highlight how OLED monitor burn-in risk can change from use to use and from update to update, across different products.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HP CEO Enrique Lores is betting a sprinkle of AI dust can regenerate the flagging PC market -- and with shipments still in decline across the industry, he can't afford to tease Wall Street. From a report: The world's second largest seller of desktop computing hardware has reported a 15 percent year-on-year decline in revenue to $53.7 billion for fiscal 2023 ended 31 October. Profit before tax was $2.93 billion versus $4.32 billion in the prior year. [...] Orders picked up in recent months. Analyst data indicates the rate of decline is slowing after resellers began clearing inventory they'd amassed in the latter stage of the pandemic, when the frenzied buying patterns seen in prior years vanished. For Q4, HP reported revenue of $13.8 billion, down 6.5 percent year-on-year. Personal Systems was down 8 percent to $9.4 billion and Printing was down 3 percent to $4.4 billion. Profit before tax was $852 million, better than the $647 million brought in a year earlier, helped by a reduction in structural costs. HP expects business PC refresh cycles to kick in next year, with more corporate customers shifting their estate to Windows 11 -- yet it is the advent of the AI PC that Lores thinks signal better times.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's not your imagination: Airlines are piling on more fees and extra charges, driving up the cost of air travel. From a report: Across the industry, revenue from what's known as ancillary sales -- fees for selecting seats, checking bags, and buying food, to name a few -- will reach a record $117.9 billion in 2023. That's a 7.7% increase from pre-pandemic records, according to a recent study from airline consultancy firm IdeaWorks and B2B car rental company CarTrawler. As plane ticket prices have become more competitive, airlines have turned to ancillary sales to boost profits. And where these fees were once largely confined to low-cost carriers, practices like charging customers for seats and checked luggage are now widespread across all airlines. As the IdeaWorks study points out, carriers like British Airways, Air France, and KLM are now even charging fliers to secure 'better' business class seats. It's not simply the fees that are raising hackles. It's also how they're sold online. Due to the time sensitive nature of airfares, as well as the dozens of upgrades and extras offered as you click through the sales process, airline websites can be ripe environments for what's known as dark patterns. Coined in 2010 by Harry Brignull, a UX designer with a doctorate in cognitive science, dark patterns are design strategies used to trick consumers during their purchasing experience and guide them to decisions they would not make otherwise. Airlines employ a range of tactics on their websites, ranging from manipulation to deception, Bringull says. "People need to be aware of their tactics if we want to see changes in the way they operate."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australia will give cyber health checks for small businesses, increase cyber law enforcement funding and introduce mandatory reporting of ransomware attacks under a security overhaul announced on Wednesday after a spate of attacks. From a report: The federal government said it will also subject telecommunications firms to tougher cyber reporting rules which apply to critical infrastructure, seek migrants to build up the cyber security workforce and set limits on inter-agency data sharing to encourage people to report incidents. The A$587 million ($382 million) plan shows the centre-left Labor government trying to get on the front foot after a year in which nearly half the country's 26 million population had personal information stolen in just two data breaches at companies, while a cyber attack at its biggest port operator this month brought supply chains to a standstill.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Large earthquakes are always followed by aftershocks -- a series of smaller but still potentially damaging quakes produced as the ground readjusts. But how long does it take for the aftershocks to die out? A new study suggests some areas can experience aftershocks decades or even centuries after the original earthquake. From a report: In earthquake-prone areas it is hard to tell the difference between aftershocks and ordinary background seismicity. But recognising aftershocks is an important part of assessing a region's disaster risk. To understand how long aftershocks can persist, researchers turned to the stable continental interior of North America, where earthquakes are uncommon. Using statistical analysis they assessed the timing and clustering of quakes that followed three large magnitude 6.5 to 8 historical earthquakes: one near south-east Quebec in Canada in 1663; a trio of quakes around the Missouri-Kentucky border from 1811 to 1812; and an earthquake in Charleston in South Carolina in 1886. Their results, published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, suggest that the Quebec quake in 1663 has likely shaken itself out, but to their surprise nearly a third of modern quakes in the Missouri-Kentucky area were most likely to be aftershocks from the 1811-12 event, and about 16% of recent quakes in the Charleston region are probably aftershocks from the 1886 quake.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2018, director Carl Rinsch was courted by multiple studios due to high demand for content, despite his first film being a flop. He pitched a sci-fi series about artificial humans providing aid worldwide, but who are eventually rejected by humans. After a bidding war, Netflix signed an $61 million deal for the unnamed project, giving Rinsch final cut privilege and rights to future seasons - highly unusual moves. Soon after, Rinsch's behavior grew concerning as he claimed to discover COVID's transmission and predict lightning, and he gambled away millions from Netflix on stocks and crypto, The New York Times reported Wednesday. His wife Gabriela Roses worried about his amphetamine use and tried intervening, but he refused rehab. In 2020, Netflix gave Rinsch another $11 million, which he also lost much of on risky bets. By mid-2021, Roses informed Netflix executives about Rinsch's state and filed for divorce, the Times reported. Netflix consulted police about Rinsch's behavior before deciding to stop funding the project in March 2021, though he could shop it elsewhere. Rinsch made $27 million on crypto bets, which he used to buy Rolls-Royces and luxury items. He claims Netflix owes him $14 million more, while Netflix says he never delivered the project milestones to receive additional funding. The confidential arbitration case over the contract dispute concluded this month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As if homesickness, wasting muscles, thinner bones, an elevated cancer risk, the inescapable company of overachievers and the prospect of death in the endless vacuum of space were not enough to contend with, male astronauts may return from deep space prone to erectile dysfunction, scientists say. From a report: In what is claimed to be the first study to assess the impact of galactic radiation and weightlessness on male sexual health, Nasa-funded researchers found that galactic cosmic rays, and to a lesser extent microgravity, can impair the function of erectile tissues, with effects lasting potentially for decades. Raising their concerns in a report on Wednesday, the US researchers said they had identified "a new health risk to consider with deep space exploration." They called for the sexual health of astronauts to be closely monitored on their return from future deep space missions, noting that certain antioxidants may help to counteract the ill-effects by blocking harmful biological processes. "While the negative impacts of galactic cosmic radiation were long-lasting, functional improvements induced by acutely targeting the redox and nitric oxide pathways in the tissues suggest that the erectile dysfunction may be treatable," said Dr Justin La Favor, an expert in neurovascular dysfunction at Florida State University and a senior author on the study. The warning comes amid a renewed focus on deep space missions, with Nasa and other major space agencies preparing for long-term expeditions to the moon and more ambitious voyages to Mars. Nasa's Artemis programme aspires to send astronauts to the moon as early as next year, with crewed missions to Mars tentatively lined up for as early as 2040.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's Windows Hello fingerprint authentication has been bypassed on laptops from Dell, Lenovo, and even Microsoft. From a report: Security researchers at Blackwing Intelligence have discovered multiple vulnerabilities in the top three fingerprint sensors that are embedded into laptops and used widely by businesses to secure laptops with Windows Hello fingerprint authentication. Microsoft's Offensive Research and Security Engineering (MORSE) asked Blackwing Intelligence to evaluate the security of fingerprint sensors, and the researchers provided their findings in a presentation at Microsoft's BlueHat conference in October. The team identified popular fingerprint sensors from Goodix, Synaptics, and ELAN as targets for their research, with a newly-published blog post detailing the in-depth process of building a USB device that can perform a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack. Such an attack could provide access to a stolen laptop, or even an "evil maid" attack on an unattended device. A Dell Inspiron 15, Lenovo ThinkPad T14, and Microsoft Surface Pro X all fell victim to fingerprint reader attacks, allowing the researchers to bypass the Windows Hello protection as long as someone was previously using fingerprint authentication on a device. Blackwing Intelligence researchers reverse engineered both software and hardware, and discovered cryptographic implementation flaws in a custom TLS on the Synaptics sensor. The complicated process to bypass Windows Hello also involved decoding and reimplementing proprietary protocols.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A group of Russian-state hackers known for almost exclusively targeting Ukranian entities has branched out in recent months either accidentally or purposely by allowing USB-based espionage malware to infect a variety of organizations in other countries. The group -- known by many names, including Gamaredon, Primitive Bear, ACTINIUM, Armageddon, and Shuckworm -- has been active since at least 2014 and has been attributed to Russia's Federal Security Service by the Security Service of Ukraine. Most Kremlin-backed groups take pains to fly under the radar; Gamaredon doesn't care to. Its espionage-motivated campaigns targeting large numbers of Ukrainian organizations are easy to detect and tie back to the Russian government. The campaigns typically revolve around malware that aims to obtain as much information from targets as possible. One of those tools is a computer worm designed to spread from computer to computer through USB drives. Tracked by researchers from Check Point Research as LitterDrifter, the malware is written in the Visual Basic Scripting language. LitterDrifter serves two purposes: to promiscuously spread from USB drive to USB drive and to permanently infect the devices that connect to such drives with malware that permanently communicates with Gamaredon-operated command and control servers. "Gamaredon continues to focus on [a] wide variety [of] Ukrainian targets, but due to the nature of the USB worm, we see indications of possible infection in various countries like USA, Vietnam, Chile, Poland and Germany," Check Point researchers reported recently. "In addition, we've observed evidence of infections in Hong Kong. All this might indicate that much like other USB worms, LitterDrifter [has] spread beyond its intended targets." The image [here], tracking submissions of LitterDrifter to the Alphabet-owned VirusTotal service, indicates that the Gamaredon malware may be infecting targets well outside the borders of Ukraine. VirusTotal submissions usually come from people or organizations that encounter unfamiliar or suspicious-looking software on their networks and want to know if it's malicious. The data suggests that the number of infections in the US, Vietnam, Chile, Poland, and Germany combined may be roughly half of those hitting organizations inside Ukraine.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rahul Rao reports via Space.com: On Nov. 14, NASA picked up a laser signal fired from an instrument that launched with the Psyche spacecraft, which is currently more than 10 million miles (16 million kilometers) from Earth and heading toward a mysterious metal asteroid. (The spacecraft is at more than 40 times the average distance of Earth's moon, and still voyaging afar.) The moment marked the first successful test of NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) system, a next-generation comms link that sends information not by radio waves but instead by laser light. It's part of a series of tests NASA is doing to speed up communications in deep space, on different missions. "Achieving first light is a tremendous achievement. The ground systems successfully detected the deep space laser photons from DSOC," Abi Biswas, the system's project technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in an agency statement. "And we were also able to send some data, meaning we were able to exchange 'bits of light' from and to deep space," Biswas added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Batteries used to store power produced by renewables are becoming cheap enough to make developers abandon scores of projects for gas-fired generation worldwide. Reuters reports: The long-term economics of gas-fired plants, used in Europe and some parts of the United States primarily to compensate for the intermittent nature of wind and solar power, are changing quickly, according to Reuters' interviews with more than a dozen power plant developers, project finance bankers, analysts and consultants. They said some battery operators are already supplying back-up power to grids at a price competitive with gas power plants, meaning gas will be used less. The shift challenges assumptions about long-term gas demand and could mean natural gas has a smaller role in the energy transition than posited by the biggest, listed energy majors. In the first half of the year, 68 gas power plant projects were put on hold or cancelled globally, according to data provided exclusively to Reuters by U.S.-based non-profit Global Energy Monitor. [...] "In the early 1990s, we were running gas plants baseload, now they are shifting to probably 40% of the time and that's going to drop off to 11%-15% in the next eight to 10 years," Keith Clarke, chief executive at Carlton Power, told Reuters. Developers can no longer use financial modelling that assumes gas power plants are used constantly throughout their 20-year-plus lifetime, analysts said. Instead, modellers need to predict how much gas generation is needed during times of peak demand and to compensate for the intermittency of renewable sources that are hard to anticipate. The cost of lithium-ion batteries has more than halved from 2016 to 2022 to $151 per kilowatt hour of battery storage, according to BloombergNEF. At the same time, renewable generation has reached record levels. Wind and solar powered 22% of the EU's electricity last year, almost doubling their share from 2016, and surpassing the share of gas generation for the first time, according to think tank Ember's European Electricity Review. "In the early years, capacity markets were dominated by fossil fuel power stations providing the flexible electricity supply," said Simon Virley, head of energy at KPMG. Now batteries, interconnectors and consumers shifting their electricity use are also providing that flexibility, Virley added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI said today it reached an agreement for Sam Altman to return as CEO days after his ouster, capping a marathon discussion about the future of the startup at the center of the artificial intelligence boom. From a report: In addition to Altman's return, the company agreed in principle to partly reconstitute the board of directors that had dismissed him. Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will join Quora CEO and current director Adam D'Angelo, OpenAI said. Under an "agreement in principle," Altman will serve under the supervision of a new board of directors. "I love OpenAI, and everything I've done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together," Altman wrote on the social media site X in response to the announcement. "When I decided to join Microsoft on Sunday evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team." Microsoft chief Satya Nadella hired Altman after he was sacked. With the "support" of the new OpenAI board and Nadella, Altman said, he looked forward to "returning to OpenAI, and building on our strong partnership with Microsoft." Nadella said he was "encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board" and believed that the decision was the "first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: The richest one percent of the global population are responsible for the same amount of carbon emissions as the world's poorest two-thirds, or five billion people, according to an analysis published Sunday by the nonprofit Oxfam International. [...] Among the key findings of this study are that the richest one percent globally -- 77 million people -- were responsible for 16 percent of global emissions related to their consumption. That is the same share as the bottom 66 percent of the global population by income, or 5.11 billion people. The income threshold for being among the global top one percent was adjusted by country using purchasing power parity -- for example in the United States the threshold would be $140,000, whereas the Kenyan equivalent would be about $40,000. Within country analyses also painted very stark pictures. For example, in France, the richest one percent emit as much carbon in one year as the poorest 50 percent in 10 years. Excluding the carbon associated with his investments, Bernard Arnault, the billionaire founder of Louis Vuitton and richest man in France, has a footprint 1,270 times greater than that of the average Frenchman. The key message, according to Lawson, was that policy actions must be progressive. These measures could include, for example, a tax on flying more than ten times a year, or a tax on non-green investments that is much higher than the tax on green investments. While the current report focused on carbon linked only to individual consumption, "the personal consumption of the super-rich is dwarfed by emissions resulting from their investments in companies," the report found. Nor are the wealthy invested in polluting industries at a similar ratio to any given investor -- billionaires are twice as likely to be invested in polluting industries than the average for the Standard & Poor 500, previous Oxfam research has shown.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel today outlined a new proposal that would ban cable and satellite companies from charging subscribers early termination fees. Deadline reports: Some subscribers who sign contracts with cable and satellite operators face paying early termination fees if they want out of the agreement before the expiration date. The companies put such fees in place to reduce churn. The FCC proposal also would target requirements that subscribers pay for the entire billing cycle when they end their service before that date. The proposal would require that the video providers grant a pro-rated credit for the remaining days in a billing cycle. The proposal applies only to cable and satellite providers, not streaming services. The FCC will vote at its Dec. 13 meeting whether to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking for public comment. Rosenworcel said in a statement: "No one wants to pay junk fees for something they don't want or can't use. When companies charge customers early termination fees, it limits their freedom to choose the service they want. In an increasingly competitive media market, we should make it easier for Americans to use their purchasing power to promote innovation and expand competition within the industry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Laura Snapes reports via The Guardian: Spotify is to phase out its service in Uruguay after the passing of a new music copyright bill requiring "fair and equitable remuneration" for authors, composers, performers, directors and screenwriters. In October, the country's parliament voted on a budget bill that included two new articles: per article 284, social networks and the internet are to be added "as formats for which, if a song is reproduced, the performer is entitled to financial remuneration" -- namely if a link to a song is shared online. Article 285 will put into copyright law the "right to a fair and equitable remuneration" for all "agreements entered into by authors, composers, performers, directors and screenwriters with respect to their faculty of public communication and making available to the public of phonograms and audiovisual recordings." In response, Spotify said in a statement on November 20 that without changes to the 2023 Rendicion de Cuentas law, the streaming platform "will, unfortunately, begin to phase out its service in Uruguay effective January 1, 2024" and cease trading in the market in February 2024. The Swedish company seeks confirmation on whether additional costs to be paid to musicians are the responsibility of rights holders or the streaming platforms, arguing that the latter means that it would be required "to pay twice for the same music," Music Business Worldwide reports. The statement continued: "Spotify already pays nearly 70% of every dollar it generates from music to the record labels and publishers that own the rights for music, and represent and pay artists and songwriters. Any additional payments would make our business untenable." The platform claimed that it had contributed to a 20% growth in Uruguay's music industry in 2022. That year, the South American nation was the 53rd largest market for music.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Connor Jones reports via The Register: The government of Canada has confirmed its data was accessed after two of its third-party service providers were attacked. The third parties both provided relocation services for public sector workers and the government is currently analyzing a "significant volume of data" which could date back to 1999. No formal conclusions have yet been made about the number of workers impacted due to the large-scale task of analyzing the relevant data. However, the servers impacted by the breach held data related to current and former Canadian government staff, members of the Canadian armed forces, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police workers -- aka Mounties. "At this time, given the significant volume of data being assessed, we cannot yet identify specific individuals impacted; however, preliminary information indicates that breached information could belong to anyone who has used relocation services as early as 1999 and may include any personal and financial information that employees provided to the companies," a government statement read. Those who think they may be affected are advised to update any login details that may be similar to those used to access BGRS or Sirva's systems. Enabling MFA across all accounts that are used for online transactions is also advised, as is the manual monitoring of personal accounts for any potential malicious activity. Work is currently being carried out to identify and address any vulnerabilities that may have led to the incident, according to the statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Matteo Franceschetti, the CEO of Eight Sleep, which makes the $2,295 smart mattress topper "The Pod" tweeted: "Breaking news: The OpenAI drama is real. We checked our data and last night, SF saw a spike in low-quality sleep. There was a 27 percent increase in people getting under 5 hours of sleep. We need to fix this. Source: @eightsleep data." Franceschetti's tweet reminds us that The Pod is essentially a mattress with both a privacy policy and a terms of service, and that the data Eight Sleep collects about its users can and is used to further its business goals. It's also a reminder that many apps, smart devices, and apps for smart devices collect a huge amount of user data that they can then directly monetize or deploy for marketing or Twitter virality purposes whenever they feel like it. The Pod does "intelligent cooling and heating for any bed," and learns and adjusts the temperature of the bed based on your sleep habits, tracks your sleep and vital signs while you sleep, and gives you a "Sleep Fitness Score" based on your quality, routine, and time of sleep. As someone who often does not sleep well, The Pod is a compelling product that I cannot currently afford. Quickly, to get it out of the way: Eight Sleep's data does not and cannot actually show that "San Francisco" had a spike in low-quality sleep. What it shows is that people in San Francisco who have purchased a $2,295 smart mattress topper and have not successfully opted out of Eight Sleep's analytics -- a group that surely overindexes on tech workers -- slept less Sunday night. The top of Eight Sleep's terms of service states "At Eight Sleep we pledge to respect your privacy and to keep your data safe. We only collect data that helps us improve our products and services." Both Eight Sleep's privacy policy and terms of service then go on to note that the company collects a huge amount of data that can be used for a wide variety of purposes, including marketing, retargeting, and scientific studies. It can also, apparently, be used by the CEO for commenting on the day's tech news. Specifically, the company notes that "data about your sleep activity is transferred from your Device to our servers" every time the Pod's app syncs with the Pod. Certain features on the device also require location data "including GPS signals, device sensors, Wi-Fi access points, and cell tower IDs." This data is then used to give users personalized sleep recommendations, but they are also "used in research to understand and improve the Eight Device and Eight Service," "to enforce the Eight Terms of Service," and, critically, "de-identified data that does not identify you may be used to inform the health and scientific community about trends; for marketing and promotional use; or for sale to interested audiences." The terms of service add that it "may share or sell" this data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Polish news channel TVN24, a secret cryptomining rig was found under the floors of a Polish court, stealing thousands of Polish Zlotys worth of energy per month (the equivalent of roughly $250 per 1,000 Zlotys). "It's currently unknown how long the rig was running because the illegal operation went undetected, partly because the computers used were connected to the Internet through their own modems rather than through the court's network," reports Ars Technica. From the report: While no one has been charged yet with any crimes, the court seemingly has suspects. Within two weeks of finding the rig, the court terminated a contract with a company responsible for IT maintenance in the building, TVN24 reported. Before the contract ended, the company fired two employees that it said were responsible for maintenance in the parts of the building where the cryptomine was hidden. Poland's top law enforcement officials, the Internal Security Agency, have been called in to investigate. The Warsaw District Prosecutor's Office has hired IT experts to help determine exactly how much electricity was stolen from Poland's Supreme Administrative Court in Warsaw, TVN24 reported. The Supreme Administrative Court is the last resort for sensitive business and tax disputes, but no records seem to have been compromised. Judge Sylwester Marciniak -- the chairman of the Judicial Information Department of the Supreme Administrative Court -- told TVN24 that the discovery of the cryptomine "did not result in any threat to the security of data stored" in the court.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Winston Cho writes via The Hollywood Reporter: A federal judge has dismissed most of Sarah Silverman's lawsuit against Meta over the unauthorized use of authors' copyrighted books to train its generative artificial intelligence model, marking the second ruling from a court siding with AI firms on novel intellectual property questions presented in the legal battle. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria on Monday offered a full-throated denial of one of the authors' core theories that Meta's AI system is itself an infringing derivative work made possible only by information extracted from copyrighted material. "This is nonsensical," he wrote in the order. "There is no way to understand the LLaMA models themselves as a recasting or adaptation of any of the plaintiffs' books." Another of Silverman's arguments that every result produced by Meta's AI tools constitutes copyright infringement was dismissed because she didn't offer evidence that any of the outputs "could be understood as recasting, transforming, or adapting the plaintiffs' books." Chhabria gave her lawyers a chance to replead the claim, along with five others that weren't allowed to advance. Notably, Meta didn't move to dismiss the allegation that the copying of books for purposes of training its AI model rises to the level of copyright infringement. In July, Silverman and two authors filed a class action lawsuit against Meta and OpenAI for allegedly using their content without permission to train AI language models.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: OpenAI's board of directors is reportedly in talks with Sam Altman, ex-Y Combinator president and an OpenAI co-founder, to return to OpenAI as CEO as soon as this week. That's according to Bloomberg, which in a brief this morning -- citing sources close to the matter -- said that discussions are happening between Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, one current member of the OpenAI board, and Altman -- and possibly other board members as well. Per Bloomberg, the board member (or members) and Altman are discussing a number of possible scenarios that could play out. In one, Altman would return as a director on a transitional board. In another -- or perhaps the same -- former Salesforce Inc. co-CEO Bret Taylor could serve as a director on a new board. (Taylor's name was floated as a potential future OpenAI board member in some reporting over the weekend.) Investors are also in on the talks, Bloomberg reports, with Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital aggressively pushing for Altman's return. The hope is to resolve the management crisis before Thanksgiving, so as to give OpenAI employees less uncertainty around the state of the company -- and stem the broader bleeding. Were Altman to return to OpenAI, he'd presumably renege on his acceptance of Microsoft's offer to head up a new AI research lab at the tech giant with Greg Brockman, OpenAI's former president, who resigned in protest with Altman on Friday. Altman is said to have demanded "significant" managerial and governance changes at OpenAI as a condition of returning, a demand which many OpenAI backers -- including Microsoft -- share. Today's developments follow a memo sent by OpenAI VP of global affairs Anna Makanju late Monday indicating that OpenAI's management had been in "intense discussions" with the board, Altman and interim CEO Emmett Shear, who took over from OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, to attempt to re-unify the company. Shear has reportedly been left in the dark for the most part, indicating to Bloomberg sources that he doesn't plan to stick around if the board can't clearly communicate its reasoning for Altman's abrupt dismissal. Shear previously said in a note to employees Sunday that his first order of business would be to "hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In recent years, lots of American companies have gotten behind a potential climate solution called carbon capture and storage, and the Biden administration has backed it with billions of dollars in tax incentives and direct investments. The idea is to trap planet-heating carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of factories and power plants and transport it to sites where it is injected underground and stored. But the idea is controversial, in large part because the captured carbon dioxide would be shipped to storage sites via thousands of miles of new pipelines. Communities nationwide are pushing back against these pipeline projects and underground sites, arguing they don't want the pollution running through their land. Now the U.S. Forest Service is proposing to change a rule to allow storing this carbon dioxide pollution under the country's national forests and grasslands. "Authorizing carbon capture and storage on NFS lands would support the Administration's goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent below the 2005 levels by 2030," the proposed rule change says. But environmental groups and researchers have concerns. Carbon dioxide pollution will still need to be transported to the forests via industrial pipeline for storage, says June Sekera, a research fellow with Boston University. "To get the CO2 to the injection site in the midst of our national forest, they've got to build huge pipelines," Sekera says. "All this huge industrial infrastructure that's going to go right through." Sekera says building those CO2 pipelines may require clearing a lot of trees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The chief executive of Binance, the largest global cryptocurrency exchange, plans to step down and plead guilty to violating criminal U.S. anti-money laundering requirements, in a deal that may preserve the company's ability to continue operating, WSJ reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Changpeng Zhao is scheduled to appear in Seattle federal court Tuesday afternoon and enter his plea, the people said. Binance, which Zhao owns, will also plead guilty to a criminal charge and agree to pay fines totaling $4.3 billion, which includes amounts to settle civil allegations made by regulators, the people said. The deal would end long-running investigations of Binance. [...] The deal would allow Zhao to retain his majority ownership of Binance, although he won't be able to have an executive role at the company. He would face sentencing at a later date.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: Christopher Nolan made headlines earlier this month when he took a playful jab at streaming platforms while discussing the upcoming home release of "Oppenheimer." The atomic bomb drama, which grossed a staggering $950 million in theaters worldwide, is hitting Blu-ray and other digital platforms this month. Nolan said at a recent "Oppenheimer" screening that it's important to own the film on Blu-ray so that "no evil streaming service can come steal it from you." He told The Washington Post in a follow-up interview: "It was a joke when I said it. But nothing's a joke when it's transcribed onto the internet. There is a danger, these days, that if things only exist in the streaming version they do get taken down, they come and go," the director added. Streamers have become notoriously known in the last year for pulling original titles from their platforms in order to license them out elsewhere and open up potential revenue streams. When such titles are streaming-only offerings, their removal makes it impossible to view the films elsewhere. Such was the case this year with the Disney+ movie "Crater," for instance. The streaming-only family adventure was pulled from Disney+ in June and could not be viewed anywhere until it was reissued as a digital release months later in September. For Nolan, owning physical media is the only way to combat such streaming trends. Guillermo del Toro agrees, having shared Nolan's recent quotes on X (formerly Twitter) and adding his own commentary on the issue. "Physical media is almost a Fahrenheit 451 (where people memorized entire books and thus became the book they loved) level of responsibility," del Toro wrote to his followers. "If you own a great 4K HD, Blu-ray, DVD etc etc of a film or films you love...you are the custodian of those films for generations to come."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer science teachers around the globe have been left scrambling to find an alternative IDE for their students, after Replit announced it was shuttering its Teams for Education plan. From a report: "To focus on improving the Replit experience for all users, we have made the difficult decision to deprecate Teams for Edu ... Teams for Edu will no longer receive new features or bug fixes, and we will suspend the creation of new Teams and Orgs," a statement from Replit, shared with educators and brought to our attention on Monday by Reg readers, declared last week. The platform provided a collaborative integrated development environment (IDE) tailored toward classrooms. It allowed students to work together on projects at the same time, similar to Google Docs, as well as automating code evaluation to streamline assessments carried out by teachers. The decision has sparked frustration among many educators who'd invested heavily in the platform since Replit made the plan available for free in early 2022. "Computer science teachers in the last 48 hours have had to scramble to try to find alternatives as soon as possible and it will be the students that suffer," a teacher based in Asia-Pacific told The Register. "Replit was the only organization we are aware of providing online coding with instant assessment and so it was a hugely popular choice with computer science teachers." In a Xeet last week, CEO Amjad Masad acknowledged the pain the decision to shut down Teams for Education was likely to cause, but said the current system had become economically nonviable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.