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In response to studies that relate high rates of female attrition from biomedical research fields to the obligations of motherhood, researchers concerned about inclusivity are now debating the issue of weekend conference duties. Nature: Because published findings are often old news in the rapidly changing biomedical fields, in-person conferences offer a crucial opportunity for scientists to stay current on trends that shape projects and funding outcomes. Yet fields often expect rock-star-like travel schedules on an economy-class budget in addition to long, irregular weekday hours at the laboratory. This is why early-career scientists with children say that they must seek alternative childcare or risk being scooped or excluded from a collaboration simply because they missed a weekend conference. International meetings are often scheduled over weekends because that's the only time venues have availability. Few cities have both suitable venues and enough hotel space to welcome 21,000 people from around the world, and even meetings for 3,000 researchers must be booked many years in advance. Because local businesses and regional associations tend to book venues during the working week, large meetings that span three to five days often need to start or end over a weekend. Women who continue to break the glass ceiling in biomedicine are now pitching this timing as an example of unnecessary conflict between work and family.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Spread across four computer monitors arranged in a grid, a blue and green interface shows the location of more than 50 different surveillance cameras. Ordinarily, these cameras and others like them might be disparate, their feeds only available to their respective owners: a business, a government building, a resident and their doorbell camera. But the screens, overlooking a pair of long conference tables, bring them all together at once, allowing law enforcement to tap into cameras owned by different entities around the entire town all at once. This is a demonstration of Fusus, an AI-powered system that is rapidly springing up across small town America and major cities alike. Fusus' product not only funnels live feeds from usually siloed cameras into one central location, but also adds the ability to scan for people wearing certain clothes, carrying a particular bag, or look for a certain vehicle. 404 Media has obtained a cache of internal emails, presentations, memos, photos, and more which provide insight into how Fusus teams up with police departments to sell its surveillance technology. All around the country, city councils are debating whether they want to have a system that qualitatively changes what surveillance cameras mean for a town's residents and public agencies. While many have adopted Fusus, others have pushed back, and refused to have the hardware and software installed in their neighborhoods. In some ways, Fusus is deploying smart camera technology that historically has been used in places like South Africa, where experts warned about it creating an ever present blanket of surveillance. Now, tech with some of the same capabilities is being used across small town America. Rather than selling cameras themselves, Fusus' hardware and software latches onto existing installations, which can include government-owned surveillance cameras as well as privately owned cameras at businesses and homes. It turns dumb cameras into smart ones. "In essence, the Fusus solution puts a brain into every camera connected with the system," one memorandum obtained by 404 Media reads. In addition to integrating with existing surveillance installations, Fusus' hardware, called SmartCORE, can turn cameras into automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). It can reportedly offer facial recognition features, too, although Fusus hasn't provided clear clarification on this matter. The report says the system has been adopted by numerous police departments across the United States, with approximately 150 jurisdictions using Fusus. Orland Park police have called it a "game-changer." It's also being used internationally, launching in the United Kingdom. Here's what Beryl Lipton, investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), had to say about it: "The lack of transparency and community conversation around Fusus exacerbates concerns around police access of the system, AI analysis of video, and analytics involving surveillance and crime data, which can influence officer patrols and priorities. In the absence of clear policies, auditable access logs, and community transparency about the capabilities and costs of Fusus, any community in which this technology is adopted should be concerned about its use and abuse."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot readers schwit1 and Another Random Kiwi share the breaking news that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been found guilty of fraud. From the Associated Press: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried's spectacular rise and fall in the cryptocurrency industry -- a journey that included his testimony before Congress, a Super Bowl advertisement and dreams of a future run for president -- hit a new bottom Thursday when a New York jury convicted him of fraud in a scheme that cheated customers and investors of at least $10 billion. After the monthlong trial, jurors rejected Bankman-Fried's claim during four days on the witness stand in Manhattan federal court that he never committed fraud or meant to cheat customers before FTX, once the world's second-largest crypto exchange, collapsed into bankruptcy a year ago. "His crimes caught up to him. His crimes have been exposed," Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon told the jury of the onetime billionaire just before they were read the law by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan and began deliberations. Sassoon said Bankman-Fried turned his customers' accounts into his "personal piggy bank" as up to $14 billion disappeared. [...] U.S. Attorney Damian Williams told reporters after the verdict that Bankman-Fried "perpetrated one of the biggest financial frauds in American history, a multibillion dollar scheme designed to make him the king of crypto." "But here's the thing: The cryptocurrency industry might be new. The players like Sam Bankman-Fried might be new. This kind of fraud, this kind of corruption is as old as time and we have no patience for it," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Shepardson reports via Reuters: The top members of a U.S. House committee on China are introducing a bill that seeks to ban the U.S. government from buying Chinese drones. Mike Gallagher, the Republican chair of the committee, and Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking Democrat, are introducing the "American Security Drone Act" on Wednesday, the lawmakers said in a statement to Reuters. "This bill would prohibit the federal government from using American taxpayer dollars to purchase this equipment from countries like China," Gallagher said. "It is imperative that Congress pass this bipartisan bill to protect U.S. interests and our national security supply chain." The bill would also bar local and state governments from purchasing Chinese drones using federal grants and require a federal report detailing the amount of foreign commercial off-the-shelf drones and covered unmanned aircraft systems procured by federal departments and agencies from China. Krishnamoorthi said the bill "helps protect against any vulnerabilities posed by our government agencies' reliance on foreign-manufactured drone technology and will encourage growth in the U.S. drone industry." Separately, the U.S. Senate on Tuesday unanimously approved an amendment proposed by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn and Democrat Mark Warner that would prohibit the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) from operating or providing federal funds for drones produced in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela or Cuba. "Taxpayer dollars should never fund drones manufactured in regions that are hostile toward our nation," Blackburn said. China recently announced export controls on some drones and drone-related equipment, saying it wanted to safeguard "national security and interests." The U.S. Commerce Department in 2020 added dozens of Chinese companies to a trade blacklist, including the country's top chipmaker SMIC and Chinese drone giant DJI.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has changed the terms and conditions for its online services to include a warning that "excessive" users of its generative AI services will have their access restricted. From a report: The new language appeared in a November 1 update to Microsoft's legalese spotted by licensing-watchers Cloudy With A Chance Of Licensing. The restrictions are described in a new clause of the document titled "Capacity Limitations," is: "Excessive use of a Microsoft Generative AI Service may result in temporary throttling of Customer's access to the Microsoft Generative AI Service." The document does not, however, define "excessive use", how long a "temporary" restriction might last, or exactly what happens during "throttling."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emma Roth reports via The Verge: Mint, the budgeting app owned by Intuit, is shutting down. Intuit announced on Tuesday that Mint will get absorbed into Intuit's other service, Credit Karma, when it officially goes away on January 1st, 2024 (via Bloomberg). But it's still not clear whether Credit Karma will get the budgeting features that Mint is known for. [...] Mint had 3.6 million monthly active users as of 2021, Bloomberg reports, but the app's development has slowed down considerably in recent years, with the last major updates being new categorization features and the ability to connect the Apple Card to Mint. [...] Intuit first acquired Mint in 2009, an app that has offered a free way for users to track their budgets, manage expenses, negotiate bills, and keep tabs on subscriptions. Now, Intuit is inviting users to Credit Karma, a service that the company acquired in 2020. While Credit Karma offers similar features, like the ability to view transactions, track spending, aggregate financial accounts, and credit monitoring, it still doesn't come with the same budget tracking tool that many people specifically use Mint for, and it's not clear whether Credit Karma will ever adopt it. On a support page on Credit Karma's website, Intuit says "the new experience in Credit Karma does not offer the ability to set monthly and category budgets," adding that the app instead "offers a simplified way for you to build awareness of your spending, and track your savings."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Back in July, Google's work on a Web Integrity API emerged and many equated it to DRM. While prototyped, it was only at the proposal stage and the company announced today it's not going ahead with it. With this proposal, Google wanted to give websites a way to confirm the authenticity of the user and their device/browser. The Web Integrity API would let websites "request a token that attests key facts about the environment their client code is running in." It's not all too different from the Play Integrity API (SafetyNet) on Android that Google Wallet and other banking apps use to make sure a device hasn't been tampered with (rooted).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon used a secret algorithm to boost prices to U.S. households by more than $1 billion, says the FTC in ia new court filing. "The FTC lawsuit was filed in September but many details were withheld until Thursday when a version of the lawsuit with fewer redactions was made public in U.S. District Court in Seattle," notes Reuters. From the report: Amazon, which has 1 billion items in its online superstore, created a "secret algorithm internally code named 'Project Nessie' to identify specific products for which it predicts other online stores will follow Amazon's price increases. ... Amazon used Project Nessie to extract more than a billion dollars directly from Americans' pocketbooks," the FTC said. Amazon began testing the pricing algorithm in 2010 to see if other online retailers tracked its prices and to raise prices for products that were likely to be tracked by competitors, the complaint said. After outside retailers began matching or increasing their own prices, Amazon would continue to sell the product at an inflated price, the FTC alleged, which resulted in $1 billion in excess profit. Amazon paused the algorithm during its Prime Day sales events and the holiday shopping season when there was more media and customer attention on the online retailer, the FTC said. "After the public's focus turned elsewhere, Amazon turned Project Nessie back on and ran it more widely to make up for the pause," the lawsuit said. Amazon in April 2018 used it to set prices for more than 8 million items purchased by customers that collectively cost almost $194 million, the complaint said, before pausing it in 2019. Amazon retail executive Doug Herrington in January 2022 asked about using "old friend Nessie, perhaps with some new targeting logic" to boost profits for Amazon's retail arm, the complaint said. The FTC complaint also accuses Amazon of seeking to hide information about operations from antitrust enforcers by using the Signal messaging app's disappearing message feature and said the company destroyed communications from June 2019 to early 2022. Amazon also required sellers using its Prime feature to utilize its logistics and delivery services, leading to increased fees for sellers who used its fulfillment services from 27% in 2014 to 39.5% in 2018, as per the FTC. Furthermore, the complaint mentioned that Amazon treated Walmart.com differently, not allowing it to sell on its platform and allegedly deterring Walmart from offering discounts to shoppers who picked up their purchases from Walmart stores. Further reading: Amazon Boosted Junk Ads and Deleted Messages To Thwart Antitrust Probe, FTC SaysRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Coming out of the ongoing Google antitrust trial, an internal Apple presentation has surfaced (via The Verge) in which the company called Android a "massive tracking device." The presentation in question was regarding a push within Apple to start "Competing on Privacy." The slides, made in January 2013, dove into how Apple's competitors (Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft primarily) handled privacy matters and user data. A "privacy timeline" includes some 2000s and 2010s events that made headlines regarding privacy, such as Google's Street View cars recording private Wi-Fi networks and Instagram's aim to use user photos in its ads, as well as Google's privacy policy move to combining user data across services. Apple went on to compare how its products handle privacy differently from Google and others. The presentation culminates in the full-page statement [...] where Apple says that "Android is a massive tracking device." The slideshow is partially redacted and abridged, which leaves out the context of this statement, but it's certainly a bold way to talk about a competitor. Of course, all mobile devices do a whole lot of tracking, whether it's Android or iOS.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Brave browser is rolling out a privacy-focused AI assistant named Leo, which the company claims provides "unparalleled privacy" compared to AI chatbot services likes Bing Chat, ChatGPT, Google Bard and others. The Verge reports: Following several months of testing, Leo is now available to use for free by all Brave desktop users running version 1.60 of the web browser. Leo is rolling out "in phases over the next few days" and will be available on Android and iOS "in the coming months." The core features of Leo aren't too dissimilar from other AI chatbots like Bing Chat and Google Bard: it can translate, answer questions, summarize webpages, and generate new content. Brave says the benefits of Leo over those offerings are that it aligns with the company's focus on privacy -- conversations with the chatbot are not recorded or used to train AI models, and no login information is required to use it. As with other AI chatbots, however, Brave claims Leo's outputs should be "treated with care for potential inaccuracies or errors." The standard version of Leo utilizes Meta's Llama 2 large language model and is free to use by default. For users who prefer to access a different AI language model, Brave is also introducing Leo Premium, a $15 monthly subscription that features Anthropic's AI assistant, Claude Instant -- a faster and cheaper version of Anthropic's Claude 2 large language model. Brave says that additional models will be available to Leo Premium users alongside access to higher-quality conversations, priority queuing during peak usage, higher rate limits, and early access to new features.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader Shakrai writes: Continuing the seemingly industry-wide trend towards enshitification of the Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) marketplace, Max today announced that it will be making changes to the current Ad-Free plan. To wit, 4K HDR with Dolby Atmos will be removed and concurrent streams will decrease from three to two. In other words, you are paying the same price for less features. If you wish to keep the features you've had all along, all you have to do is upgrade to Ultimate Ad-Free at a 33% premium for the annual plan or 25% increase for monthly. No news yet on a crackdown of password sharing, however, that seems inevitable as the industry races to the bottom. Meet the new cable boss, same as the old, except, they bring death by several small cuts instead of a single large one.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A relatively new venture founded by Navneet Dalal, an ex-Google research scientist, Matic, formerly known as Matician, is developing robots that can navigate homes to clean "more like a human," as Dalal puts it. Matic today revealed that it has raised $29.5 million, inclusive of a $24 million Series A led by a who's who of tech luminaries, including GitHub co-founder Nat Friedman, Stripe co-founders John and Patrick Collison, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo and Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey. Dalal co-founded Matic in 2017 with Mehul Nariyawala, previously a lead product manager at Nest, where he oversaw Nest's security camera portfolio. [...] Early on, Matic focused on building robot vacuums -- but not because Dalal, who serves as the company's CEO, saw Matic competing with the iRobots and Ecovacs of the world. Rather, floor-cleaning robots provided a convenient means to thoroughly map indoor spaces, he and Nariyawala believed. "Robot vacuums became our initial focus due to their need to cover every inch of indoor surfaces, making them ideal for mapping," Dalal said. "Moreover, the floor-cleaning robot market was ripe for innovation." [...] "Matic was inspired by busy working parents who want to live in a tidy home, but don't want to spend their limited free time cleaning," Dalal said. "It's the first fully autonomous floor cleaning robot that continuously learns and adapts to users' cleaning preferences without ever compromising their privacy." There are a lot of bold claims in that statement. But on the subject of privacy, Matic does indeed -- or at least claims to -- ensure data doesn't leave a customer's home. All processing happens on the robot (on hardware "equivalent to an iPhone 6," Dalal says), and mapping and telemetry data is saved locally, not in the cloud, unless users opt in to sharing. Matic doesn't even require an internet connection to get up and running -- only a smartphone paired over a local Wi-Fi network. The Matic vacuum understands an array of voice commands and gestures for fine-grained control. And -- unlike some robot vacuums in the market -- it can pick up cleaning tasks where it left off in the event that it's interrupted (say, by a wayward pet). Dalal says that Matic can also prioritize areas to clean depending on factors like the time of day and nearby rooms and furniture. Dalal insists that all this navigational lifting can be accomplished with cameras alone. "In order to run all the necessary algorithms, from 3D depth to semantics to ... controls and navigation, on the robot, we had to vertically integrate and hyper-optimize the entire codebase," Dalal said, "from the modifying kernel to building a first-of-its-kind iOS app with live 3D mapping. This enables us to deliver an affordable robot to our customers that solves a real problem with full autonomy." The robot won't be cheap. It starts at $1,795 but will be available for a limited time at a discounted price of $1,495.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rishi Sunak convened this week's AI summit in an effort to position the UK at the forefront of global efforts to stave off the risks presented by the rapidly-advancing technology -- which in the prime minister's own words, could extend as far as human extinction. From a report: But the reality exposed during the 2-day gathering of politicians and industry experts at Bletchley Park, north of London, is the US is reluctant to cede much of a leadership role on artificial intelligence to its close ally. Sunak last week said the UK would set up the "world's first AI safety institute," designed to test new forms of the technology. At the summit on Wednesday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo announced the US would create its own institute. Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a speech on US efforts away from the conference to allow for more press attention. "The US definitely cut across the summit," said Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank. He called the timing of the US announcements "insensitive because this was Rishi Sunak's attempt to show the world that the UK is in the lead." US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told the summit Wednesday that while countries must work together to find global solutions to global problems, "we will compete as nations." Nevertheless, the US and UK were quick to damp down any sense of tension, with a British official saying the US told Britain of its plans to open its own institute months ago, with the announcement planned to coincide with the event.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 50 years after the Beatles broke up, John, Paul, George and Ringo are back together, reunited for one final track that was released Thursday, officially closing the final chapter in the band's musical output and legacy. From a report: The song, titled "Now and Then," was played on BBC radio just after 2 p.m. local time (10 a.m. ET) and simultaneously released on streaming platforms. With the help of digital technology, it features both John Lennon, who was shot dead in 1980, and George Harrison, who died from lung cancer in 2001. With new contributions from Paul McCartney, 81, and Ringo Starr, 83, the song will be the final music released by possibly the most influential and bestselling musical group of the 20th century.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An ongoing Cloudflare outage has taken down many of its products, including the company's dashboard and related application programming interfaces (APIs) customers use to manage and read service configurations. From a report: The complete list of services whose functionality is wholly or partially impacted includes the Cloudflare dashboard, the Cloudflare API, Logpush, WARP / Zero Trust device posture, Stream API, Workers API, and the Alert Notification System. "This issue is impacting all services that rely on our API infrastructure including Alerts, Dashboard functionality, Zero Trust, WARP, Cloudflared, Waiting Room, Gateway, Stream, Magic WAN, API Shield, Pages, Workers," Cloudflare said. "Customers using the Dashboard / Cloudflare APIs are impacted as requests might fail and/or errors may be displayed." Customers currently have issues when attempting to log into their accounts and are seeing 'Code: 10000' authentication errors and internal server errors when trying to access the Cloudflare dashboard. Cloudflare says the service issues don't affect the cached file delivery via the Cloudflare CDN or Cloudflare Edge security features.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arm today announced that it has made a strategic investment, a minority stake in Raspberry Pi -- the arm of Raspberry Pi responsible for the new Raspberry Pi 5 and past Raspberry Pi products. From a report: Arm's minority stake extends the long-term partnership between Arm and Raspberry Pi, which has seen Arm CPUs feature in all of the Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Pico SoC. The partnership began way before the Raspberry Pi was available for sale, in 2008 -- when the original board was still just a dream. Fast-forward to 2023 and we have a generation of learners who have taken their first steps with coding, science and electronics thanks to the Raspberry Pi.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon doubled the number of junk ads to boost profits and deleted internal communications to thwart a federal antitrust probe, according to fresh details released by the US Federal Trade Commission in a less redacted complaint against the online retail giant Thursday. From a report: Amazon's founder and former Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos personally ordered executives to accept more ads, even ones the company had internally labeled as "defects," indicating they weren't relevant to user searches, according to the new version of the complaint. The FTC alleges that Amazon's increased use of ads boosts profits while it harms sellers and consumers, making it harder for shoppers to find products they are searching for. "We'd be crazy not to" increase the number of advertisements shown to shoppers," the FTC quoted Amazon executives as saying. One executive compiled a number of the defective ads showing "buck urine" showing up in response to searches for "water bottles" or T-shirts for the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team in response to queries for the Seattle Seahawks football team merchandise. In third quarter 2023 earnings announced last week, Amazon reported advertising revenue of $12.1 billion, making the company's ad unit its fastest-growing business. The company also deleted internal communications using the "disappearing message" feature of Signal and destroyed more than two years' worth of such communications, from June 2019 to at least early 2022, the FTC alleged.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has had a rough few years of cybersecurity incidents. It found itself at the center of the SolarWinds attack nearly three years ago, one of the most sophisticated cybersecurity attacks we've ever seen. Then, 30,000 organizations' email servers were hacked in 2021 thanks to a Microsoft Exchange Server flaw. If that weren't enough already, Chinese hackers breached US government emails via a Microsoft cloud exploit earlier this year. Something had to give. Microsoft is now announcing a huge cybersecurity effort, dubbed the Secure Future Initiative (SFI). This new approach is designed to change the way Microsoft designs, builds, tests, and operates its software and services today. It's the biggest change to security efforts inside Microsoft since the company announced its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) in 2004 after Windows XP fell victim to a huge Blaster worm attack that knocked PCs offline in 2003. That push came just two years after co-founder Bill Gates had called on a trustworthy computing initiative in an internal memo. Microsoft now plans to use automation and AI during software development to improve the security of its cloud services, cut the time it takes to fix cloud vulnerabilities, enable better security settings out of the box, and harden its infrastructure to protect against encryption keys falling into the wrong hands. In an internal memo to Microsoft's engineering teams today, the company's leadership has outlined its new cybersecurity approach. It comes just months after Microsoft was accused of "blatantly negligent" cybersecurity practices related to a major breach that targeted its Azure platform. Microsoft has faced mounting criticism of its handling of a variety of cybersecurity issues in recent years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PayPal received a subpoena from the US Securities and Exchange Commission's division of enforcement related to its work on a dollar-linked stablecoin. From a report: The subpoena asked PayPal to produce documents tied to the project, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday. The company is cooperating with the probe, the filing said. PayPal unveiled the stablecoin, known as PayPal USD (PYUSD), in August. The coin is pegged to the dollar and fully backed by US dollar deposits, short-term Treasuries and similar cash equivalents, the San Jose, California-based payments company said at the time. The coin has a market capitalization of about $158 million, according to CoinGecko data. For years, US regulators have been scrutinizing stablecoins. Their concerns are twofold: They worry that if a stablecoin crashes, it could trigger fire sales of other assets as their backers try to maintain a peg. They also fear that if stablecoins prove their worth, they could undermine the power of central banks and more easily enable criminals to engage in money laundering.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla Foundation's decision to switch the search engine built into its Firefox browser to Yahoo from Google was a "failed" bet that degraded the user experience, the company's chief executive said. From a report: Chief Executive Officer Mitchell Baker said Mozilla decided to switch to Yahoo's technology in 2014 after CEO Marissa Mayer took over and promised "to make a big bet on us." "That bet failed," Baker said in a videotaped interview from 2022 played Wednesday in Google's defense during the Justice Department's antitrust trial. "The search experience that Yahoo was providing to Firefox users deteriorated." The Mozilla example -- the only situation in which a browser has switched the default search engine provider -- has been cited by both Google and the Justice Department to support their arguments in the case. [...] Yahoo agreed to pay Mozilla a minimum of $375 million -- more than the $276 million a year that Google was offering, Baker said. It also agreed to reduce the number of ads and offer less user tracking than Google, but over time Yahoo reneged on that and began showing more advertising, she added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Disney will acquire Comcast's one-third stake in Hulu for an expected $8.61 billion, the company said Wednesday, in a deal that will put the streaming service entirely inside the Magic Kingdom when the transaction closes later this year. "The acquisition of Comcast's stake in Hulu at fair market value will further Disney's streaming objectives," the company said in a short statement. Wednesday's deal brings to an end long-running speculation about the fate of Hulu, but still requires an appraisal process that is expected to be completed in 2024 to further assess the streaming service's fair value before a final sale price tag is agreed upon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

quonset shares a report from CNN: If you try to place an order through the DoorDash app without leaving a tip, you may get this pop-up: "Orders with no tip might take longer to get delivered -- are you sure you want to continue?" The note goes on: "Dashers can pick and choose which orders they want to do. Orders that take longer to be accepted by Dashers tend to result in a slower delivery." In other words, tip your drivers, or prepare to wait a long time for a cold meal. Customers are then given the option to add a tip, or continue without one. The message is just a test, DoorDash spokesperson Jenn Rosenberg told CNN in an email. "This reminder screen is something that we're currently testing to help create the best possible experience for all members of our community," she said. "As with anything we pilot, we look forward to closely analyzing the results and feedback." Rosenberg noted that Dashers, the people who deliver orders, are "independent contractors" who "have full freedom to accept or reject offers based on what they view as valuable and rewarding." Tips go directly to Dashers, according to the company. So if an order comes in without a tip, they're more likely to let it linger.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Earlier this month, the California Department of Food and Agriculture quarantined 69 square miles of metro L.A. after invasive and destructive Mediterranean fruit flies were found at a home in the Leimert Park neighborhood," notes The Hill. Officials are now planning to use small planes to drop millions of fruit flies over Los Angeles in an effort to eradicate an invasive and destructive species of the insects. From the report: Jay Van Rein, a spokesperson for the CDFA, told SFGATE that officials plan to drop approximately 250,000 sterile male fruit flies per square mile in the quarantine area every week for six months, or perhaps longer. The sterile males mate with the females, which fail to produce offspring, reducing the population over time. Van Rein says the Preventative Release Program (PRP), as it's called, has been used effectively to manage invasive species since 1996. The quarantine radius includes parts of downtown and South L.A., Hyde Park, Baldwin Hills, Culver City, Inglewood, Pico-Robertson and Mid-Wilshire. Those who live within the zone are urged not to transport any fruits or vegetables from their property and to double-bag them in plastic before tossing them in the trash. The Mediterranean fruit fly is very tiny -- only about 1/4 inch in length -- but they can potentially cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to crops if left unchecked, officials said. When a female lays eggs in a fruit or vegetable, they hatch into maggots that tunnel through it and cause rot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Pennsylvania cannot enforce a regulation to make power plant owners pay for their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, a state court ruled Wednesday, dealing another setback to the centerpiece of former Gov. Tom Wolf's plan to fight global warming. The Commonwealth Court last year temporarily blocked Pennsylvania from becoming the first major fossil fuel-producing state to adopt a carbon-pricing program, and the new ruling makes that decision permanent. The ruling is a victory for Republican lawmakers and coal-related interests that argued that the carbon-pricing plan amounted to a tax, and therefore would have required legislative approval. Wolf, a Democrat, had sought to get around legislative opposition by unconstitutionally imposing the requirement through a regulation, they said. The court agreed in a 4-1 decision. The regulation written by Wolf's administration had authorized Pennsylvania to join the multistate Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which imposes a price and declining cap on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. It would be up to Wolf's successor, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, to decide whether to appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court. Shapiro's administration had no comment Wednesday on whether it would appeal, and Shapiro himself hasn't said publicly whether he would follow through on the plan to join the consortium, should the courts allow it. Still, Shapiro is "focused on addressing climate change, reducing emissions, and protecting public health while creating jobs and protecting consumers," Shapiro's administration said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Orsted, a Danish offshore wind company, canceled its plans to build two wind farms off the coast of New Jersey -- "a blow to the state's efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the latest shakeout in the U.S. wind industry," reports the New York Times. From the report: The move, which will force Orsted, a Danish company, to write off as much as $5.6 billion, will crimp the Biden administration's plans to make the wind industry a critical component of plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. High inflation and soaring interest rates are making planned projects that looked like winners several years ago no longer profitable. "The world has in many ways, from a macroeconomic and industry point of view, turned upside down," Mads Nipper, Orsted's chief executive, said on a call with reporters on Wednesday. The two projects, known as Ocean Wind 1 and 2, were destined to provide green energy to New Jersey. They were strongly backed by the state's governor, Phil Murphy, a Democrat with national ambitions who stresses his environmental credentials but who has lately drawn scorn for falling short in combating climate change. On Wednesday he suggested that Orsted was a dishonest broker and insisted that the "future of offshore wind" along the state's 130-mile coastline remained strong. Mr. Nipper said Orsted thought that losses on the New Jersey projects would rise over time, so "the only sensible thing is to draw a line in the sand." Offshore wind and other parts of the renewable industry have hit some snags in Europe, especially in Britain. But Mr. Nipper said the problems were more acute in the United States because early contracts lacked protection from inflation and developers incurred high costs because of delays in approvals during the Trump administration. The company's stock price fell nearly 26 percent on Wednesday after it reported a loss of about $3.2 billion for the third quarter and warned that the write-downs -- essentially a reduction in the value of the company's investments -- would affect Orsted's finances. Orsted is writing off 28.4 billion krone, or about $4 billion, now. The company estimates that it may take another charge of up to 11 billion krone later in the year. The report notes that Orsted still plans to move forward with a $4 billion project called Revolution Wind intended to supply power to consumers in Rhode Island. Other projects are under construction, too, "like Vineyard Wind, which will eventually have 62 turbines in the waters off Martha's Vineyard, Mass."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ivan Mehta reports via TechCrunch: Instagram head Adam Mosseri said today that a Threads API is in the works. This will give developers a chance to create different apps and experiences around Threads. Mosseri was responding to journalist Casey Newton, who was conversing with a user about a TweetDeck-like experience for Threads. The Instagram head expressed apprehension about publishers posting a bunch of content and in turn, overshadowing creator content. "We're working on it. My concern is that it'll mean a lot more publisher content and not much more creator content, but it still seems like something we need to get done," Mosseri said in a post. Later, an engineer working on Threads said that the team would start with endpoints for publishing content for the API. [...] While Mosseri is concerned about publishers pushing an overwhelming amount of content through API integration, creators also need different tools to post various types of content. It also makes it easier for developers to design features suited for a specific platform if there is the option for an API integration.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joe Rossignol reports via MacRumors: The first benchmark results for the standard M3 chip surfaced in the Geekbench 6 database today, providing a closer look at the chip's CPU performance improvements. Based on the results so far, the M3 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of around 3,000 and 11,700, respectively. The standard M2 chip has single-core and multi-core scores of around 2,600 and 9,700, respectively, so the M3 chip is up to 20% faster than the M2 chip, as Apple claimed during its "Scary Fast" event on Monday. It's unclear if the results are for the new 14-inch MacBook Pro or iMac, both of which are available with the standard M3 chip, but performance should be similar for both machines. The results have a "Mac15,3" identifier, which Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously reported was for a laptop with the same display resolution as a 14-inch MacBook Pro. We have yet to see any Geekbench results for the higher-end M3 Pro and M3 Max chips available in most new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GamesRadar: For years now, fans have been using mods to alter games in weird and wonderful ways. Some developers are happy to let fans play around with their creations, while others aren't so keen on the idea. Capcom, the company behind many iconic game series, including Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Devil May Cry, is seemingly in the latter camp. This was evidenced in a presentation shared on the Capcom R&D YouTube channel. In the video, the company talks about cheating and piracy in PC games and the impact they can have. As Capcom sees it, mods are part of this problem. During the presentation (around the 14-minute mark), Capcom suggests that mods are "no different" than cheats. "All mods are defined as cheats, except when they are officially supported," it says. "What they are doing internally is no different than cheating." It's not that the company is staunchly against players using mods to enhance or switch up the experience; it does acknowledge that "the majority of mods can have a positive impact on the game." Still, from a business perspective, it warns that they "can be detrimental", both in terms of the reputational damage that offensive mods can cause and the extra workload players who've installed buggy mods can generate for a support team. This, the company argues, can ultimately lead to delays in a game's production and higher development costs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple will start introductory production on the standard iPhone 17 in India, marking the first time the company begins development of a new iPhone outside of China. MacRumors reports: Apple will opt to assemble the standard iPhone 17 in India because it has a "lower difficulty" design that will minimize risk. Apple has been manufacturing older iPhones and other devices in India since for several years now in an effort to move more of its manufacturing out of China. Apple has slowly started giving factories in India more responsibility, and began iPhone 14 production in the country just a few weeks after the device launched in September 2022. iPhone 15 production started even earlier, with factories in the country assembling the base iPhone 15 model prior to launch, but assembly still started in China first. As of now, Kuo believes that 12 to 14 percent of global iPhone shipments are made in India, with that proportion to increase to 20 to 25 percent by 2024. In addition to allowing Apple to move manufacturing away from China, increasing production in India provides Apple with an opportunity to strengthen its relationship with the Indian government. India is a key market for Apple due to growing demand for Apple products in the country.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Speed reports via The Register: Asahi Linux, a project to port Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, has reported a combination of bugs in Apple's macOS that could leave users with hardware in a difficult-to-recover state. The issues revolve around how recent versions of macOS handle refresh rates, and MacBook Pro models with ProMotion displays (the 14 and 16-inch versions) are affected. According to the Asahi team, the bugs lurk in the upgrade and boot process and, when combined, can create a condition where a machine always boots to a black screen, and a Device Firmware Update (DFU) recovery is needed. Asahi Linux's techies have looked into the issue, having first suspected it had something to do with either having an Asahi Linux installation on a Mac and then upgrading to macOS Sonoma or installing Asahi Linux after a Sonoma upgrade. However, the issue appears to be unconnected to the project. The team said: "As far as we can tell, ALL users who upgraded to Sonoma the normal way have an out-of-date or even broken System RecoveryOS, and in particular MacBook Pro 14" and 16" owners are vulnerable to ending up with a completely unbootable system." While this might sound alarming, the team was at pains to assure users that data was not at risk and only certain versions of macOS were affected -- Sonoma 14.0+ and Ventura 13.6+. The first bug is related to macOS Sonoma using the previously installed version as System Recovery, which can cause problems when an older RecoveryOS runs into newer firmware. The second occurs if a display is configured to a refresh rate other than ProMotion. According to the Asahi Linux team, the system will no longer be able to boot into old macOS installs or Asahi Linux. "This includes recovery mode when those systems are set as the default boot OS, and also System Recovery at least until the next subsequent OS upgrade." The team noted: "Even users with just 13.6 installed single-boot are affected by this issue (no Asahi Linux needed). "We do not understand how Apple managed to release an OS update that, when upgraded to normally, leaves machines unbootable if their display refresh rate is not the default. This seems to have been a major QA oversight by Apple."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: More and more companies are running large language models, which require access to GPUs. The most popular of those by far are from Nvidia, making them expensive and often in short supply. Renting a long-term instance from a cloud provider when you only need access to these costly resources for a single job, doesn't necessarily make sense. To help solve that problem, AWS launched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Capacity Blocks for ML today, enabling customers to buy access to these GPUs for a defined amount of time, typically to run some sort of AI-related job such as training a machine learning model or running an experiment with an existing model. The product gives customers access to NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs instances in cluster sizes of one to 64 instances with 8 GPUs per instance. They can reserve time for up to 14 days in 1-day increments, up to 8 weeks in advance. When the timeframe is over, the instances will shut down automatically. The new product enables users to sign up for a the number of instances they need for defined block of time, just like reserving a hotel room for a certain number of days (as the company put it). From the customer's perspective, they will know exactly how long the job will run, how many GPUs they'll use and how much it will cost up front, giving them cost certainty. As a users sign up for the service, its displays the total cost for the timeframe and resources. Users can dial that up or down, depending on their resource appetite and budgets before agreeing to buy. The new feature is generally available starting today in the AWS US East (Ohio) region.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Inhaling polluted air increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, the first study of its kind in India has found. Research conducted in Delhi and the southern city of Chennai found that inhaling air with high amounts of PM2.5 particles led to high blood sugar levels and increased type 2 diabetes incidence. From a report: When inhaled, PM2.5 particles -- which are 30 times thinner than a strand of hair -- can enter the bloodstream and cause several respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. The study [PDF] is part of ongoing research into chronic diseases in India that began in 2010. It is the first to focus on the link between exposure to ambient PM2.5 and type 2 diabetes in India, one of the worst countries in the world for air pollution. The average annual PM2.5 levels in Delhi was 82-100ug/m3 and in Chennai was 30-40ug/m3, according to the study, many times the WHO limits of 5ug/m3. Indiaa(TM)s national air quality standards are 40ug/m3. There is also a high burden of non-communicable diseases, including diabetes, hypertension and heart disease in India; 11.4% of the population -- 101 million people -- are living with diabetes, and about 136 million are pre-diabetic, according to a paper published in the Lancet in June. The average diabetes prevalence in the European Union was 6.2% in 2019, and 8.6% in the UK in 2016. The Lancet study found India's diabetes prevalence to be higher than previous estimations and showed a higher number of diabetics in urban than rural India.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple on Wednesday lost a bid to block a mass London lawsuit worth up to $2 billion which accuses the tech giant of hiding defective batteries in millions of iPhones. From a report: The lawsuit was brought by British consumer champion Justin Gutmann on behalf of around 24 million iPhone users in the United Kingdom. Gutmann is seeking damages from Apple on their behalf of up to 1.6 billion pounds ($1.9 billion) plus interest, with the claim's midpoint range being 853 million pounds. His lawyers argued Apple concealed issues with batteries in certain phone models by "throttling" them with software updates and installed a power management tool which limited performance. Apple, however, said the lawsuit was "baseless" and strongly denied batteries in iPhones were defective, apart from in a small number of iPhone 6s models for which it offered free battery replacements. The company sought to get the case thrown out of court, but the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) said Gutmann's case can proceed in a written ruling on Wednesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The former head of search at Alphabet's Google told colleagues in February 2019 that his team was "getting too involved with ads for the good of the product and company," according to emails shown at the Justice Department's landmark antitrust trial against the search giant. Google maintains a firewall between its ads and search teams so that its engineers can innovate on Google's search engine, unsullied by the influence of the team whose goal is to maximize advertising revenue. But in February 2019, testimony at the antitrust trial revealed Tuesday, Google internally declared a "Code Yellow" amid concerns the company might not meet its goals for search revenue for the quarter. As part of the emergency, which lasted for seven weeks, engineers from Google's search and Chrome browser teams were reassigned to figure out why user queries had slowed, according to the documents. Ben Gomes, Google's former head of search, was called by the company in its defense to show that it had made various advancements in search, particularly in mobile. However, cross examination by Justice Department lawyer David Dahlquist revealed the tensions between Gomes' search team and its advertising counterparts. The questioning sought to undermine Google's contentions that its search team focuses solely on improving the user experience and has sometimes been pulled into the advertising side, where the Justice Department alleges Google has been able to raise prices without pushback.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has decided to axe the Windows Insider MVP program, which is now scheduled to be discontinued at the end of the year. From a report: A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register: "In an effort to consolidate MVP-style programs across Microsoft, we have decided to retire the Windows Insider MVP Program effective December 31, 2023. All our existing Windows Insider MVPs will be nominated to participate in the Microsoft MVP Program which has similar benefits and opportunities to continue networking with us and interacting with many other Microsoft MVPs globally." The Windows Insider MVPs are usually enthusiasts of Microsoft's wares who are rewarded for their loyalty with access to the engineering teams, complimentary subscriptions to products such as Visual Studio Enterprise and Office 365, as well as the odd paperweight or two. A nomination must come from another MVP or a Microsoft employee to achieve this coveted status. An application is then scrutinized, and if one has demonstrated sufficient passion for all things Microsoft, the nod is given. Microsoft has plenty of Insider programs where users can play with pre-release versions of the company's software.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the world's top bullion banks is bringing blockchain to the antiquated London gold market. From a report: HSBC has launched a platform that uses distributed ledger technology to tokenize ownership of physical gold held in its London vault, Mark Williamson, global head of FX and commodities partnerships and propositions, said in an interview. The new system creates digital tokens that represent gold bars, which can then be traded through the bank's single-dealer platform. [...] What sets HSBC apart is its clout in the bullion market. It is one of the world's largest custodians of precious metals and one of four clearers on the London gold market, where over $30 billion of the metal changes hands every day. Around 698,000 gold bars are stored in vaults in the Greater London area, valued at around $525 billion, according to the London Bullion Market Association. Despite its vast size, London's gold market still relies heavily on manual record keeping and trades entirely over-the-counter. Using blockchain technology makes the process "quicker and less cumbersome" as clients can more easily track the gold they own through the platform, down to the serial number of each bar, Williamson said. HSBC plans to eventually expand its system to include other precious metals, he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Not all Google searches make Google money. Google often says that it only shows ads on about 20 percent of queries, the ones it calls "commercial queries." This week, during the US v. Google antitrust trial, we got a rare glimpse at a closely guarded secret: which search terms make the most money. The list is only for the week of September 22nd, 2018, and it is the list of top queries ordered by revenue and nothing else. Still, we've never seen anything quite like this before, and the list was only made public after long deliberations from Judge Amit Mehta, who has, over the course of the trial, begun to push both sides to be more public with information and data like this. Okay, here are the top 20 queries for that week ordered by revenue: iphone 8, iphone 8 plus, auto insurance, car insurance, cheap flights, car insurance quotes, direct tv, online colleges, at&t, hulu, iphone, uber, spectrum, comcast, xfinity, insurance quotes, free credit report, cheap car insurance, aarp, and lifelock.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twenty-eight countries including the US, UK and China have agreed to work together to ensure artificial intelligence is used in a "human-centric, trustworthy and responsible" way, in the first global commitment of its kind. From a report: The pledge forms part of a communique signed by major powers including Brazil, India and Saudi Arabia, at the inaugural AI Safety Summit. The two-day event, hosted and convened by British prime minister Rishi Sunak at Bletchley Park, started on Wednesday. Called the Bletchley Declaration, the document recognises the "potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm" to be caused by advanced AI models, but adds such risks are "best addressed through international co-operation." Other signatories include the EU, France, Germany, Japan, Kenya and Nigeria. The communique represents the first global statement on the need to regulate the development of AI, but at the summit there are expected to be disagreements about how far such controls should go. Country representatives attending the event include Hadassa Getzstain, Israeli chief of staff at the ministry of innovation, science and technology, and Wu Zhaohui, Chinese vice minister for technology. Gina Raimondo, US commerce secretary, gave an opening speech at the summit and announced a US safety institute to evaluate the risks of AI. This comes on the heels of a sweeping executive order by President Joe Biden, announced on Monday, and intended to curb the risks posed by the technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LinkedIn, the business-focused social network owned by Microsoft, on Wednesday said it now has more than 1 billion members and is adding more AI features for paying users. From a report: Crossing the billion-users mark puts LinkedIn -- where members maintain a resume-like profile of their education, work experience and professional skills -- in the top-tier of social media networks that include rivals such as Meta Platforms. About 80% of recent members are signing up from outside of the United States, the company has said. LinkedIn has a free tier of membership but also offers subscriptions. Members of its $39.99-a-month tier will get new AI features that can tell a user, who may be plowing through dozens of job postings, whether they're a good candidate based on the information in their profile. The system can also recommend profile changes to make the user more competitive for a job.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WeWork plans to file for bankruptcy as early as next week, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing a source familiar with the matter, as the SoftBank Group-backed company struggles with a massive debt pile and hefty losses. From the report: Shares of the flexible workspace provider fell 32% in extended trading after the Wall Street Journal first reported the news. They have fallen roughly 96% this year. [...] The company had net long-term debt of $2.9 billion as of June end and more than $13 billion in long-term leases, at a time when rising borrowing costs are hurting the commercial real estate sector. WeWork's filing for bankruptcy would mark a stunning reversal of fortune for the company that was privately valued at $47 billion in 2019 and a black spot for investor SoftBank that sunk billions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Peru's Kimberly Garcia set a world record in her gold-medal winning turn at the women's 20 kilometer race walk event at the Pan American Games this weekend. Until she didn't. Once the race was over, organizers determined there was a serious "measuring problem" with the track, making the race times of Garcia, fellow medal winners Glenda Morejon of Ecuador and Peru's Evelyn Inga, and their competitors null and void. The athletes guessed the track had been drawn up roughly 3 kilometers (about 1.9 miles) shorter than it was supposed to be. Garcia crossed the finish line in 1 hour, 12 minutes and 26 seconds. The world record of 1 hour, 23 minutes and 49 seconds is held by China's Jiayu Yang. The athletes suspected something was amiss mid-race, according to the Associated Press. The Santiago 2023 Corporation, the group in charge of the 2023 Pan American Games, placed the blame on the Pan American Athletics Association, which reportedly chose the person who measured the race course. In a statement following the race, Santiago 2023 said the official who measured the course "did not take accurate measurements of the route the athletes took during the race." The group continued, "We deeply regret the inconvenience for the athletes, their coaches, the public and the attending press, but this situation cannot be attributed to the Organizing Committee."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Milmo reports via The Guardian: The Guardian has accused Microsoft of damaging its journalistic reputation by publishing an AI-generated poll speculating on the cause of a woman's death next to an article by the news publisher. Microsoft's news aggregation service published the automated poll next to a Guardian story about the death of Lilie James, a 21-year-old water polo coach who was found dead with serious head injuries at a school in Sydney last week. The poll, created by an AI program, asked: "What do you think is the reason behind the woman's death?" Readers were then asked to choose from three options: murder, accident or suicide. Readers reacted angrily to the poll, which has subsequently been taken down -- although highly critical reader comments on the deleted survey were still online as of Tuesday morning. A reader said one of the Guardian reporters bylined on the adjacent story, who had nothing to do with the poll, should be sacked. Another wrote: "This has to be the most pathetic, disgusting poll I've ever seen." The chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, Anna Bateson, outlined her concerns about the AI-generated poll in a letter to Microsoft's president, Brad Smith. She said the incident was potentially distressing for James's family and had caused "significant reputational damage" to the organization as well as damaging the reputation of the journalists who wrote the story. "This is clearly an inappropriate use of genAI [generative AI] by Microsoft on a potentially distressing public interest story, originally written and published by Guardian journalists," she wrote. Bateson added that it had demonstrated "the important role that a strong copyright framework plays in enabling publishers to be able to negotiate the terms on which our journalism is used." A Microsoft spokesperson said: "We have deactivated Microsoft-generated polls for all news articles and we are investigating the cause of the inappropriate content. A poll should not have appeared alongside an article of this nature, and we are taking steps to help prevent this kind of error from reoccurring in the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tanay Tanay has developed a smart vertical farming system using a Raspberry Pi 4 as the central controller, with features such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support for remote plant monitoring, precise automated watering based on moisture levels, and environmental factor tracking. Tom's Hardware reports: The end result is a Pi-powered system with tons of cool goodies to take your plant care to the next level. Tanay is able to monitor all sorts of environmental factors like how much light is available, how moist the air is, how much water is in the soil, what the temperature is and much more. The icing on the cake is a user-friendly interface that can be used to manually water the plants. The main board for this project is a Raspberry Pi 4 B. It's connected to an Arduino Nano R3 which is assigned to a specific plant. Some of the sensors confirmed in the design are a soil moisture sensor, an ambient light sensor as well as a water level depth detection sensor. You could always add more or take away modules depending on what you want to do with your vertical farm. For example, a camera could be used to log plant growth progress over time. Tanay explains that ThingSpeak, an IoT platform, was used in the project design. You can learn more about this Raspberry Pi project at Hackster.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. But when it comes to tackling a tricky task, researchers have found that getting angry can also be a powerful motivator. The experiments suggest people who are angry perform better on a set of challenging tasks than those who are emotionally neutral. "These findings demonstrate that anger increases effort toward attaining a desired goal, frequently resulting in greater success," said Dr Heather Lench, the first author of the study. The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (PDF), details how researchers at Texas A&M University conducted experiments involving more than 1,000 people, and analyzed survey data from more than 1,400 people, to explore the possible impact of anger on people in various circumstances. In one experiment, students were shown images previously found to elicit anger, desire, amusement, sadness or no particular emotion at all. Participants were subsequently asked to solve a series of anagrams. The results reveal that for a challenging set of anagrams, those who were angry did better than those in the other possible emotional states -- although no difference was seen for easy anagrams. The researchers say one explanation could be down to a link between anger and greater persistence, with the team finding those who were angry spent more time on the difficult set of anagrams. In another experiment, participants who were angry did better at dodging flags in a skiing video game than those who were neutral or sad, and were on a par with those who felt amusement or desire. "This pattern could indicate that general physical arousal had a benefit for game scores, as this would be greater in anger, amused, and desire conditions compared to the sad and neutral conditions," the researchers write. However, no such differences in performance was found when it came to an easier video game.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: For a period of two years between September 2019 and September 2021, two Americans and two Russians allegedly compromised the taxi dispatch system at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to sell cabbies a place at the front of the dispatch line. The two Russian nationals, Aleksandr Derebenetc and Kirill Shipulin, were indicted by a grand jury for conspiring to commit computer intrusions, the US Justice Department said on Tuesday. They remain at large. In early October, the two American nationals, Daniel Abayev and Peter Leyman, who were indicted last year, pleaded guilty, each to one count of conspiring to commit computer intrusions. The scheme represented an attempt to monetize the demand among taxi drivers for lucrative airport fares -- the current flat rate for JFK to Manhattan is $70 plus additional charges. As described in the indictment (PDF), taxi drivers are required to wait in a holding lot at JFK, often for several hours, before being dispatched in the order of their arrival to airport terminals. And because time spent waiting in line is not paid, drivers have a financial incentive to avoid waiting in line. The conspirators allegedly developed a plan to hack the dispatch system around September 2019. The indictment describes several approaches that were tried, "including bribing someone to insert a flash drive containing malware into computers connected to the dispatch system, obtaining unauthorized access to the dispatch system via a Wi-Fi connect, and stealing computer tablets connected to the dispatch system." The government's filing suggests that the group gained and lost access to the dispatch system several times. When they did have access, the alleged conspirators offered to move drivers to the front of the dispatch queue for a $10 fee, and waived the fee for those who found other drivers willing to pay to play. Many drivers took advantage of the service. According to the Justice Department, the group booked 2,463 queue cuts in a single week around December 2019. The scheme allegedly enabled as many as 1,000 trips per day that skipped the queue at JFK. The American conspirators are said to have collected the money from participating drivers and to have sent payments to the alleged Russian conspirators, describing the money transfers as "payment for software development" or "payment for services rendered." The indictment indicates that the Russians received more than $100,000 for their work. If apprehended -- which appears unlikely given current US relations with Russia -- the Russians face charges that carry a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. Abayev and Leyman each face up to five years in prison. They're scheduled to be sentenced early next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Registry has added domains ending in ".ing" -- "a situation seem/ing ripe for exceed.ing amounts of wordplay," reports 9to5Google. From the report: Google Registry -- which is different from Google Domains, the service Google is sell.ing off to SquareSpace -- tries to push the boundaries of domain names by launch.ing options like ".dev," ".app," and ".meme" (soon). After first be.ing announced in August, Google Registry is officially open.ing registration of .ing domains through partner companies like GoDaddy and 101Domain. As you might expect, the new domain end.ing is meant to inspire a sense of action, as exemplified by the first wave of companies debut.ing new domain names: If you want a .ing domain of your own, you can do so from the official ".ing" site, but you'll be pay.ing an extra one-time fee dur.ing the Early Access Period, which runs until December 5, 2023, with fees decreas.ing on a "daily schedule." Register.ing during "Phase 1" will set you back over $1 million -- quite a lot of cha-ch.ing -- while "Phase 9" drops down as low as $144.99.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emma Roth reports via The Verge: YouTube is broadening its efforts to crack down on ad blockers. The platform has "launched a global effort" to encourage users to allow ads or try YouTube Premium, YouTube communications manager Christopher Lawton says in a statement provided to The Verge. If you run into YouTube's block, you may see a notice that says "video playback is blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled." It also includes a prompt to allow ads or try YouTube Premium. You may get prompts about YouTube's stance on ad blockers but still be able to watch a video, though, for one Verge staffer, YouTube now fully blocks them nearly every time. YouTube confirmed that it was disabling videos for users with ad blockers in June, but Lawton described it as only a "small experiment globally" at the time. Now, YouTube has expanded this effort. Over the past several weeks, more users with ad blockers installed have found themselves unable to watch YouTube videos, with a post from Android Authority highlighting the increase in reports. Lawton maintains that the "use of ad blockers" violates the platform's terms of service, adding that "ads support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The head of the Russian department responsible for identifying threats to the "stability, security and integrity" of the internet, has revealed the extent of the Kremlin's VPN crackdown. Former FSO officer Sergei Khutortsev, a central figure in Russia's 'sovereign internet' project, confirmed that 167 VPN services are now blocked along with over 200 email services. Russia is also reported as stepping up measures against protocols such as OpenVPN, IKEv2 and WireGuard. [...] An in-depth report published by TheIns.ru has details of the monitoring/blocking system reportedly deployed in Russia, how much it costs (4.3 billion rubles/$43 million in 2020, 24.7 billion rubles/$247 million for 2022-2024), and the names of the companies supplying the components. The publication also obtained original documents that apparently show some of the protocols Russia initially intended to block. They include older VPN protocols IPSec, L2TP, and PPTP, plus the BitTorrent protocol still widely used today. The full report on the system, which reveals the use of Intel chips/chipsets in 965 servers manufactured by Huawei and already purchased by Russia, plus another 2400+ servers for 2023/24, is available here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's popular social media platforms are requiring "self-media" accounts with over 500,000 followers to disclose real-name information, prompting concerns over increased doxxing and privacy among some users. Reuters reports: China's most popular social media platforms on Tuesday announced that "self-media" accounts with more than 500,000 followers will be asked to display real-name information, a controversial measure that has prompted concerns over doxxing and privacy among some users. "Self-media" includes news and information not necessarily approved by the government, a genre of online content regulators have cracked down on in recent years to "purify" China's cyberspace. [...] Rumors of the new policy had prompted lively debate among users. Some, like former state media editor Hu Xijin, have defended the measure as necessary in order to force influential accounts to use more responsible speech. Others, however, have expressed concerns that the measure would make doxxing easier and platforms would further remove online users' anonymity in the future. The new measures will remove the anonymity of thousands of influencers on social media platforms that are used daily by hundreds of millions of Chinese. Several of the platforms said that accounts with over 1 million followers would be affected first and those that do not comply would face restrictions in their online traffic and income as a consequence.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The new open-source, copy-on-write file system known as Bcachefs has been successfully merged into the Linux 6.7 kernel. "Given the past struggles to get Bcachefs mainlined, I certainly didn't expect to see Linus Torvalds act so soon on merging it," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel. "But after it spent all of the 6.6 cycle within Linux-Next, overnight Linus Torvalds did in fact land this new file-system developed by Kent Overstreet." From a Slashdot story published on Friday August 21, 2015: Bcachefs is a new open-source file-system derived from the bcache Linux kernel block layer cache. Bcachefs was announced by Kent Overstreet, the lead Bcache author. Bcachefs hopes to provide performance like XFS/EXT4 while having features similar to Btrfs and ZFS. The bachefs on-disk format hasn't yet been finalized and the code isn't yet ready for the Linux kernel. That said, initial performance results are okay and "It probably won't eat your data -- but no promises." Features so far for Bcachefs are support for multiple devices, built-in caching/tiering, CRC32C checksumming, and Zlib transparent compression. Support for snapshots is to be worked on.Read more of this story at Slashdot.