Slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Android is slowly entering the RISC-V era. So far we've seen Google say it wants to give the up-and-coming CPU architecture "tier-1" support in Android, putting RISC-V on equal footing with Arm. Qualcomm has announced the first mass-market RISC-V Android chip, a still-untitled Snapdragon Wear chip for smartwatches. Now Google has announced a timeline for developer tools via the Google Open Source Blog. The last post is titled "Android and RISC-V: What you need to know to be ready." Getting the Android OS and app ecosystem to support a new architecture is going to take an incredible amount of work from Google and developers, and these tools are laying the foundation for that work. First up, Google already has the "Cuttlefish" virtual device emulator running, including a gif of it booting up. This isn't the official "Android Emulator" -- which is targeted at app developers doing app development -- Cuttlefish is a hardware emulator for Android OS development. It's the same idea as the Android Emulator but for the bottom half of the tech stack -- the kernel, framework, and hardware bits. Cuttlefish lets Google and other Android OS contributors work on a RISC-V Android build without messing with an individual RISC-V device. Google says it's working well enough now that you can download and emulate a RISC-V device today, though the company warns that nothing is optimized yet. The next step is getting the Android Emulator (for app developers) up and running, and Google says: "By 2024, the plan is to have emulators available publicly, with a full feature set to test applications for various device form factors!" The nice thing about Android is that most app code is written with no architecture in mind -- it's all just Java/Kotlin. So once the Android RunTime starts spitting out RISC-V code, a lot of app code should Just Work. That means most of the porting work will need to go into things written in the NDK, the native developer kit, like libraries and games. The emulator will still be great for testing, though.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple could be forced to scale back its App Store fees for developers after one of the European Union's antitrust watchdogs said its commissions violate the bloc's rules. From a report: In the latest twist in a long-running clash between the Dutch Authority for Consumers & Markets and the US tech giant, officials ruled that Apple's commission on certain app subscriptions are an abuse of the company's market power. In a confidential decision seen by Bloomberg, the Dutch regulator said Apple's rules unfairly target companies that offer subscription services, such as Match Group's dating app Tinder, which has to pay high commission rates on app sales, unlike ones that don't have paid digital content. Apple harms such companies "by charging them an additional and inexplicably higher fee," according to the Dutch decision, which was sent in July. Apple had earlier offered to reduce app sale commission in the Netherlands from 30% to 27%, but the ACM's confidential findings state this offer doesn't go far enough. The decision could pave the wave for greater antitrust scrutiny across the 27-nation EU on the fairness of Apple's fee structure for different apps. The European Commission in Brussels is already investigating how Apple restricts apps from informing users of cheaper subscriptions outside the app store.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nokia sued Amazon in courts across three continents, alleging the e-commerce giant uses its technologies in streaming services and devices without authorization. From a report: The suits were filed in the US, Germany, India, the UK, and the European Unified Patent Court, Arvin Patel, Nokia's Chief Licensing Officer said in a statement on the company's website. Separately, a suit was also filed against HP in the US over video-related technologies, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Security reporter Brian Krebs: The top-level domain for the United States -- .US -- is home to thousands of newly-registered domains tied to a malicious link shortening service that facilitates malware and phishing scams, new research suggests. The findings come close on the heels of a report that identified .US domains as among the most prevalent in phishing attacks over the past year. Researchers at Infoblox say they've been tracking what appears to be a three-year-old link shortening service that is catering to phishers and malware purveyors. Infoblox found the domains involved are typically three to seven characters long, and hosted on bulletproof hosting providers that charge a premium to ignore any abuse or legal complaints. The short domains don't host any content themselves, but are used to obfuscate the real address of landing pages that try to phish users or install malware. Infoblox says it's unclear how the phishing and malware landing pages tied to this service are being initially promoted, although they suspect it is mainly through scams targeting people on their phones via SMS. A new report says the company mapped the contours of this link shortening service thanks in part to pseudo-random patterns in the short domains, which all appear on the surface to be a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers. "This came to our attention because we have systems that detect registrations that use domain name generation algorithms," said Renee Burton, head of threat intelligence at Infoblox. "We have not found any legitimate content served through their shorteners."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In September, a "bespoke AI nutrition" store opened in beleaguered downtown San Francisco to much fanfare, promising smoothie concoctions generated by AI and a much-needed boost to the area. Less than two months later, it has seemingly closed without explanation. From a report: BetterBlends advertised "Your Smoothie, powered by AI" and received positive press upon its opening, ginning up excitement for a new business and a novel use of artificial intelligence. Its AI model would take customer orders and preferences to generate a smoothie recipe that would then be blended by hand by co-founders Michael Parlato and Clayton Reynolds, who worked in the shop. But now the storefront sits empty. On Friday 20 October, the locked doors to BetterBlends featured a sign that read "temporarily closed," stating the shop would reopen in one hour -- but sources in the neighborhood said the storefront had been closed for more than three weeks. By the following Monday, the sign had been removed, and the inside of the shop was largely cleared of blenders, fruit, vegetables and other supplies -- anything you might need to make a smoothie, with or without AI. Only a trashcan and a few plants remained. The store's Google Maps listing speaks to both problems in the physical world and its roots in AI. A Google Maps review posted two weeks ago accompanied by a picture of the sign read: "I was hopeful for this business. The owners however did not understand the discipline to run a restaurant. It was often open late and closed early. They changed their hours after a week of being open. And then 1 day they put up a sign, 'Temporarily closed, be back in an hour.' They have not been back in over two weeks." Other reviews were positive, awarding BetterBlends four or five stars. The shop owners themselves uploaded pictures of their smoothies to the Google Maps page as well as an image of happy customers that bears the hallmarks of generative AI. The light on their smiling faces is soft and glossy like a photoshoot. The fruits in the store window are, on closer inspection, unrecognizable blobs of fruit-colored things. The clear plastic cups are branded with gibberish characters that don't spell anything and filled with lumpy smoothie-ish mixtures. They are cartoonishly large in the customers' hands, one of which has only three too-long fingers. AI image generators have a documented history of failing to produce text within images or realistic human hands.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The group behind the radical open-access initiative Plan S has announced its next big plan to shake up research publishing -- and this one could be bolder than the first. From a report: It wants all versions of an article and its associated peer-review reports to be published openly from the outset, without authors paying any fees, and for authors, rather than publishers, to decide when and where to first publish their work. The group of influential funding agencies, called cOAlition S, has over the past five years already caused upheaval in the scholarly publishing world by pressuring more journals to allow immediate open-access publishing. Its new proposal, prepared by a working group of publishing specialists and released on 31 October, puts forward an even broader transformation in the dissemination of research. It outlines a future "community-based" and "scholar-led" open-research communication system in which publishers are no longer gatekeepers that reject submitted work or determine first publication dates. Instead, authors would decide when and where to publish the initial accounts of their findings, both before and after peer review. Publishers would become service providers, paid to conduct processes such as copy-editing, typesetting and handling manuscript submissions. [...] If the vision comes to pass, it would mark a revolution in science publishing. Each element has already been endorsed and trialled on a small scale. But as a whole, the proposal "is describing a system that is completely different from today's mainstream forms of scholarly communication," says Andrea Chiarelli, a consultant at Research Consulting in Nottingham, UK. cOAlition S is launching a six-month process, co-led by Research Consulting, to collect feedback from members of the global research community on whether the plan will meet their needs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's latest M3 Pro chip in the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro has 25% less memory bandwidth than the M1 Pro and M2 Pro chips used in equivalent models from the two previous generations. From a report: Based on the latest 3-nanometer technology and featuring all-new GPU architecture, the M3 series of chips is said to represent the fastest and most power-efficient evolution of Apple silicon thus far. For example, the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro with M3 Pro chip is up to 40% faster than the 16-inch model with M1 Pro, according to Apple. However, looking at Apple's own hardware specifications, the M3 Pro system on a chip (SoC) features 150GB/s memory bandwidth, compared to 200GB/s on the earlier M1 Pro and M2 Pro. As for the M3 Max, Apple says it is capable of "up to 400GB/s." This wording is because the less pricey scaled-down M3 Max with 14-core CPU and 30-core GPU has only 300GB/s of memory bandwidth, whereas the equivalent scaled-down M2 Max with 12-core CPU and 30-core GPU featured 400GB/s bandwidth, just like its more powerful 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU version. Notably, Apple has also changed the core ratios of the higher-tier M3 Pro chip compared to its direct predecessor. The M3 Pro with 12-core CPU has 6 performance cores (versus 8 performance cores on the 12-core M2 Pro) and 6 efficiency cores (versus 4 efficiency cores on the 12-core M2 Pro), while the GPU has 18 cores (versus 19 on the equivalent M2 Pro chip).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Forty countries in a U.S.-led alliance plan to sign a pledge never to pay ransom to cybercriminals and to work toward eliminating the hackers' funding mechanism, a senior White House official said on Tuesday. From a report: The International Counter Ransomware Initiative comes as the number of ransomware attacks grows worldwide. The United States is by far the worst hit, with 46% of such attacks, Anne Neuberger, U.S. deputy national security adviser in the Biden administration for cyber and emerging technologies, told reporters on a virtual briefing. "As long as there is money flowing to ransomware criminals, this is a problem that will continue to grow," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AV1 -- a next-generation, royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium including tech giants like Google, Mozilla, Cisco, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, Intel, and Apple -- is finally making inroads. From a report: We are finally seeing more hardware support for this codec. The new M3 chips from Apple support AV1 decode. The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max also feature an AV1 hardware decoder. The official Android 14 Compatibility Definition makes support for AV1 mandatory. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, widely used by Android phones released in 2023, supports AV1. With the exception of Microsoft Edge, all browsers support AV1.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Winter has come early for Apple, and it might last a while. From a report: The world's largest company by market value has become worth considerably less over the past three months. Apple's share price has slid 11% since the company reported its fiscal third-quarter results on Aug. 3, erasing nearly $400 billion in market value. It is hardly a typical swing given the fact that the company has long used the fall season to launch its biggest products for every year, including new iPhones. This is the first year since 2015 that Apple shares have lost ground between the company's key Worldwide Developers Conference in June and its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report that typically takes place in late October. That report is expected Thursday afternoon, and it will be the first to reflect sales of the iPhone 15 family that was launched in late September. Investors are worried that Apple's largest business is now facing new and potentially long-term threats. The growing geopolitical rift between the U.S. and China has finally caught Apple in its vortex, spurring reports of Chinese authorities considering a ban on the use of iPhones and other Apple devices by government employees. To make matters worse, Apple's old China-based rival Huawei appears to have made a comeback. The company launched a new smartphone called the Mate 60 Pro in September that reportedly is capable of 5G speeds, even though U.S. sanctions were supposed to deny the company the chips necessary for such an accomplishment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has warned over a half dozen Indian lawmakers from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's main opposition of their iPhones being targets of state-sponsored attacks, these people said Tuesday, in a remarkable turn of events just months before the general elections in the South Asian nation. From a report: Rahul Gandhi, Indian opposition leader, said in a media briefing Tuesday that his team had received the said alert from Apple. Shashi Tharoor, a key figure from the Congress party; Akhilesh Yadav, the head of the Samajwadi Party; Mahua Moitra, a national representative from the All India Trinamool Congress; Priyanka Chaturvedi of Shiv Sena, a party with notable influence in Maharashtra reported that they too had been notified by Apple regarding a potential security attack on their iPhones. Asaduddin Owaisi, the leader of the All-India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM); Raghav Chadha from AAP, originating from an anti-corruption crusade a decade prior and later securing a political foothold in the national capital region; Sitaram Yechury, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India; alongside Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera were also impacted, they said. Journalists Siddharth Varadarajan and Sriram Karri, along with Observer Research Foundation (ORF) India President Samir Saran shared that they had been served with identical warnings from Apple.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: In a surprising development on Monday that is spooking the cybersecurity community, the SEC filed charges against SolarWinds and its Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Timothy G. Brown, alleging that the software company misled investors about its cybersecurity practices and known risks. The charges stem from alleged fraud and internal control failures related to known cybersecurity weaknesses that took place between the company's October 2018 initial public offering (IPO) and its December 2020 revelation of the infamous supply chain cyberattack dubbed "SUNBURST." [...] The SEC's complaint also points to internal communications among SolarWinds employees, including Brown, in 2019 and 2020, which raised questions about the company's ability to protect its critical assets from cyberattacks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google says it'll issue a system update to fix a major storage bug in Android 14 that has caused some users to be locked out of their devices. Ars Technica reports: Apparently one more round of news reports was enough to get the gears moving at Google. Over the weekend the Issue tracker bug has been kicked up from a mid-level "P2" priority to "P0," the highest priority on the issue tracker. The bug has been assigned to someone now, and Googlers have jumped into the thread to make official statements that Google is looking into the matter. Here's the big post from Google on the bug tracker [...]. The highlights here are that Google says the bug affects devices with multiple Android users, not multiple Google accounts or (something we thought originally) users with work profiles. Setting up multiple users means going to the system settings, then "Multiple users," then "Allow multiple users," and you can add a user other than the default one. If you do this, you'll have a user switcher at the bottom of the quick settings. Multiple users all have separate data, separate apps, and separate Google accounts. Child users are probably the most popular reason to use this feature since you can lock kids out of things, like purchasing apps. Shipping a Google Play system update as a quick Band-Aid is an interesting solution, but as Google's post suggests, this doesn't mean the problem is fixed. Play system updates (these are alternatively called Project Mainline or APEX modules) allow Google to update core system components via the Play Store, but they are really not meant for critical fixes. The big problem is that the Play system updates don't aggressively apply themselves or even let you know they have been downloaded. They just passively, silently wait for a reboot to happen so they can apply. For Pixel users, it feels like the horse has already left the barn anyway -- like most Pixel phones have automatically applied the nearly 13-day-old update by now. Users can force Play system updates to happen themselves by going to the system settings, then "Security & Privacy," then "System & updates," then "Google Play system update." If you have an update, you'll be prompted to reboot the phone. Also note that this differs from the usual OS update checker location, which is in system settings, then "System," then "System update." The system update screen will happily tell you "Your system is up to date" even if you have a pending Google Play system update. It would be great to have a single location for OS updates, Google Play System/Mainline updates, and app updates, but they are scattered everywhere and give conflicting "up to date" messages.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Around 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid caused a mass extinction event, killing three-quarters of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs. A new study suggests that fine silicate dust from the asteroid, which remained in the atmosphere for up to 15 years, played a more significant role in causing the impact winter and extinction than previously thought. Phys.Org reports: Fine silicate dust from pulverized rock would have stayed in the atmosphere for 15 years, dropping global temperatures by up to 15 degrees Celsius, researchers said in a study in the journal Nature Geoscience. [...] For the study, the international team of researchers was able to measure dust particles thought to be from right after the asteroid struck. The particles were found at the Tanis fossil site in the US state of North Dakota. Though 3,000 kilometers (1,865 miles) away from the crater, the site has preserved a number of remarkable finds believed to be dated from directly after the asteroid impact in sediment layers of an ancient lake. The dust particles were around 0.8 to 8.0 -- micrometers -- just the right size to stick around in the atmosphere for up to 15 years, the researchers said. Entering this data into climate models similar to those used for current-day Earth, the researchers determined that dust likely played a far greater role in the mass extinction than had previously been thought. Out of all the material that was shot into the atmosphere by the asteroid, they estimated that it was 75 percent dust, 24 percent sulfur and one percent soot. The dust particles "totally shut down photosynthesis" in plants for at least a year, causing a "catastrophic collapse" of life, [said Ozgur Karatekin, a researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: GSK will pay 23andMe $20 million for access to the genetic-testing company's vast trove of consumer DNA data, extending a five-year collaboration that's allowed the drugmaker to mine genetic data as it researches new medications. Under the new agreement, 23andMe will provide GSK with one year of access to anonymized DNA data from the approximately 80% of gene-testing customers who have agreed to share their information for research, 23andMe said in a statement Monday. The genetic-testing company will also provide data-analysis services to GSK. 23andMe is best known for its DNA-testing kits that give customers ancestry and health information. But the DNA it collects is also valuable, including for scientific research. With information from more than 14 million customers, the only data sets that rival the size of the 23andMe library belong to Ancestry.com and the Chinese government. The idea for drugmakers is to comb the data for hints about genetic pathways that might be at the root of disease, which could significantly speed up the long, slow process of drug development. GSK and 23andMe have already taken one potential medication to clinical trials: a cancer drug that works to block CD96, a protein that helps modulate the body's immune responses. It entered that testing phase in four years, compared to an industry average of about seven years. Overall, the partnership between GSK and 23andMe has produced more than 50 new drug targets, according to the statement. The new agreement changes some components of the collaboration. Any discoveries GSK makes with the 23andMe data will now be solely owned by the British pharmaceutical giant, while the genetic-testing company will be eligible for royalties on some projects. In the past, the two companies pursued new drug targets jointly. GSK's new deal with 23andMe is also non-exclusive, leaving the genetic-testing company free to license its database to other drugmakers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Apple's "Scary Fast" event today, the company unveiled a refreshed 24-inch iMac, entry-evel MacBook Pro that ditches the Touch Bar, and its latest "M3" in-house chips. The Verge reports: As expected, Apple's M3 chips took the spotlight during this month's event. The new lineup includes the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips, which Apple says mark the "first personal computer chips" made using the more efficient 3-nanometer process. In addition to offering a "faster and more efficient CPU," the trio of chips comes with an updated GPU that supports ray tracing, mesh shading, and Dynamic Caching -- a feature that optimizes the amount of memory the device uses during tasks. Apple's M3 chips offer up to 128GB of unified memory, with the most powerful M3 Max chip coming with up to 92 billion transistors, a 40-core GPU, and a 16-core CPU. The new 24-inch iMac is getting an M3-flavored upgrade that Apple says offers two times faster performance than its M1-equipped predecessor. Along with the new chip, the refreshed iMac features a 4.5K Retina display with more than 1 billion colors, support for Wi-Fi 6E, and a 1080p webcam. The iMac also offers up to 24GB of unified memory and comes in seven colors: green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. There are also color-matched accessories that come with the iMac, but they still feature Lightning connectors. The 24-inch iMac costs $1,299 with an eight-core CPU or $1,499 with a 10-core chip. You can preorder it starting today, with availability starting on November 7th. Alongside the M3 Pro and M3 Max-equipped MacBook Pro models, Apple is releasing a cheaper 14-inch MacBook Pro that comes with the base M3 chip and starts at $1,599. The device replaces the 13-inch MacBook Pro with an M2 chip that Apple released last year and offers performance that's up to 60 percent faster. The Touch Bar model is being discontinued, which means it's all physical keys from here out. There are some drawbacks to this entry-level model, though: it features a meager 8GB of RAM and comes in just silver and space gray variations -- the black color is exclusive to the higher-end MacBook Pros. The device is available to preorder today and officially launches on November 7th.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Windows 11's last major update, 22H2 introduced native support for managing RAR archives, eliminating the need for third-party software," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "This enhancement is part of the OS's broader capability improvements for handling various archive file formats." TechSpot reports: Microsoft finally introduced native support for RAR archives earlier this year, just three decades after the format's official introduction in 1993. Windows 11 development is now progressing at an accelerated pace, therefore support for a whole lot of new (ancient) archive formats is coming soon. Microsoft recently released KB5031455, an optional, feature-rich preview cumulative update for Windows 11, refreshing the list of archive formats natively supported in the OS. Windows 11 22H2 and later versions can now manage files compressed in the following archive types: .rar, .7z, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.zst, .tar.xz, .tgz, .tbz2, .tzst, .txz. Support for password-encrypted archives is not available yet. Redmond programmers added support for the aforementioned archive files thanks to the libarchive library, an open source project designed to develop a portable, efficient C library that can "read and write streaming archives" in a variety of formats. Libarchive supports additional archive types (Lzh, Xar) that could eventually come to Windows 11 as well.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blake Brittain reports via Reuters: A judge in California federal court on Monday trimmed a lawsuit by visual artists who accuse Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt of misusing their copyrighted work in connection with the companies' generative artificial intelligence systems. U.S. District Judge William Orrick dismissed some claims from the proposed class action brought by Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, including all of the allegations against Midjourney and DeviantArt. The judge said (PDF) the artists could file an amended complaint against the two companies, whose systems utilize Stability's Stable Diffusion text-to-image technology. Orrick also dismissed McKernan and Ortiz's copyright infringement claims entirely. The judge allowed Andersen to continue pursuing her key claim that Stability's alleged use of her work to train Stable Diffusion infringed her copyrights. "Even Stability recognizes that determination of the truth of these allegations -- whether copying in violation of the Copyright Act occurred in the context of training Stable Diffusion or occurs when Stable Diffusion is run -- cannot be resolved at this juncture," Orrick said. Orrick agreed with all three companies that the images the systems actually created likely did not infringe the artists' copyrights. He allowed the claims to be amended but said he was "not convinced" that allegations based on the systems' output could survive without showing that the images were substantially similar to the artists' work. The judge also dismissed other claims from the artists, including that the companies violated their publicity rights and competed with them unfairly, with permission to refile. Orrick dismissed McKernan and Ortiz's copyright claims because they had not registered their images with the U.S. Copyright Office, a requirement for bringing a copyright lawsuit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Brazil's telecoms regulator Anatel claims that during an operation last week, it successfully blocked around 80% of pirate 'TV boxes' in the country. Estimates from early 2023 suggest that seven million were active in Brazil. The operation, claimed to be the most significant ever carried out, arrives just weeks after Google & Cisco were criticized for "turning a blind eye" to the IPTV piracy problem. [...] Whatever the approach, if Anatel had somehow managed to prevent 80% of all TV boxes receiving pirated content in the space of a year, that would be an extraordinary achievement. Even a week would be astonishing but the claim of millions in a day seems either incredible, non-credible, or entirely dependent on more important information or nuance that isn't being reported. Another angle is that disruption on a large scale tends to register in search results and Google data on various related search terms doesn't seem to reflect millions of TV boxes suddenly going dark in Brazil last week. At least, not for any significant length of time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pete Syme reports via Insider: A British software company is giving Meta 30 days to stop using the name Threads in the UK because it owns the trademark. Threads Software Limited says its lawyers wrote to the Facebook and Instagram parent company on Monday. If Meta doesn't stop using the name Threads, Threads Software Limited says it will seek an injunction from the courts. The British company trademarked Threads in 2012 for its intelligent messaging hub, which can store a company's emails, tweets, and voice over internet protocol phone calls in a cloud database. In a press release, it said it had declined the four offers that Meta's lawyers made to purchase its domain name "threads.app." Then when Meta launched Threads, its social media app designed to compete with Elon Musk's X, the British company says it was removed from Facebook. John Yardley, the managing director of Threads Software Limited, said the business "faces a serious threat from one of the largest technology companies in the world." "We recognize that this is a classic 'David and Goliath' battle with Meta," said Yardley. "And whilst they may think they can use whatever name they want, that does not give them the right to use the Threads brand name."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Citing an "unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security," Canada banned Chinese messaging application WeChat and Russian antivirus program Kaspersky on government-issued mobile devices. Reuters reports: The ban was announced after an assessment by Canada's chief information officer that Tencent-owned WeChat and applications made by Moscow-based Kaspersky "present an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security," the Treasury Board of Canada, which oversees public administration, said in a statement. Kaspersky said it was surprised and disappointed, and that the decision was made without warning or an opportunity for the firm to address the government's concerns. "As there has been no evidence or due process to otherwise justify these actions, they are highly unsupported and a response to the geopolitical climate rather than a comprehensive evaluation of the integrity of Kaspersky's products and services," the company said in a statement. The Treasury Board said it has no evidence that government information has been compromised, but the collection methods of the applications provide considerable access to a device's contents, and risks of using them were "clear." "The decision to remove and block the WeChat and the Kaspersky applications was made to ensure that government of Canada networks and data remain secure and protected and are in line with the approach of our international partners," the statement said. The applications will be removed from government-issued mobile devices on Monday, and users will be blocked from downloading them in the future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After a weekend of almost complete internet blackout, connectivity in Gaza has been partially restored. On Friday, internet monitoring firms and experts reported that access to the internet had significantly degraded in the Palestinian enclave. The local internet service NetStream "collapsed," according to NetBlocks, a firm that tracks internet access across the world. At the same time, IODA, another internet monitoring system, showed outages and degradation across several Palestinian internet providers. The lack of internet communications caused emergency lines to stop ringing, made it hard for paramedics to locate the wounded, and for family members to reach relatives and friends, according to The New York Times. On Sunday, IODA reported "marginal restoration" of internet connectivity in Gaza. Abdulmajeed Melhem, chief executive of the Palestinian main telecommunications company Paltel Group, told The Times that the internet had come back even though the company had not made any repairs. Then on Monday, Gaza had roughly the same access to internet connectivity as before Friday, according to several experts and firms that are monitoring the internet in the region, including Doug Madory, an expert who for years has focused on monitoring networks across the world. "There was the 34 hour complete blackout from Friday to Sunday -- a first for Gaza. Then there was last night's partial outage in northern Gaza," Madory, who is the director of internet analysis at Kentik, told TechCrunch on Monday. "The situation is still very precious: no power, little water. Service could potentially drop out again at any time." [...] It's unclear what caused the internet outages in Gaza on Friday and what caused the improvements on Sunday and Monday. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the U.S. government put pressure on the Israeli government to switch the internet back on in Gaza, citing an unnamed U.S. official. "We made it clear they had to be turned back on," the official said. "The communications are back on. They need to stay on," The Post quoted the official as saying. Also on Sunday, The Times reported that the U.S. government believed that the Israeli government was responsible for the near-blackout of the internet in Gaza.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Users have been reporting that their iPhone 15's NFC chips were failing after using BMW's in-car wireless charging, but until now, Apple hasn't addressed the complaints. That seems to have changed as MacRumors reported this week that an Apple internal memo to third-party repair providers says a software update later this year should prevent a "small number" of in-car wireless chargers from "temporarily" disabling iPhone 15 NFC chips. Apple reportedly says that until the fix comes out, anyone who experiences this should not use the wireless charger in their car. Users have been complaining about BMW wireless chargers breaking Apple Pay and the BMW digital key feature in posts on Reddit, Apple's Support community, and MacRumors' own forums.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers to ditch 26 over-the-counter eye drop products found at big retailers -- including CVS, Rite Aid, and Target -- due to a risk of infection. Consumers should not buy any of the products and should immediately stop using them if they've already purchased them. From a report: The products include Target's branded Up & Up Dry Eye Relief Lubricant Eye Drops and Up & Up Extreme Relief Dry Eye, as well as Lubricant Eye Drops and Lubricant Gel Drops branded by CVS Health and Rite Aid. The warning also includes eye drop products branded as Rugby and Leader (both from Cardinal Health) and Velocity Pharma. A full list can be found here, as can links to report adverse events. In an advisory posted Friday, the FDA reported that no infections or adverse events have been linked to the products so far. But the agency said it "found insanitary conditions in the manufacturing facility and positive bacterial test results from environmental sampling of critical drug production areas in the facility."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Russian-speaking hacking group obtained access to the email addresses of about 632,000 US federal employees at the departments of Defense and Justice as part of the sprawling MOVEit hack last summer, according to a report on the wide-ranging attack obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. From a report: The report, by the US Office of Personnel Management, provides new details about a cyberattack in which hackers exploited flaws in MOVEit, a popular file-transfer tool. Federal cybersecurity officers previously confirmed that government agencies were compromised by the attack but have provided little information on the scope of the attack, nor did they name the agencies affected. The Office of Personnel Management, in a July report on the incident submitted to a congressional committee, said an unauthorized actor obtained access to government email addresses, links to government employee surveys administered by OPM and internal OPM tracking codes. The impacted employees were at the Department of Justice and various parts of the Defense Department: the Air Force, Army, US Army Corps of Engineers, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff and Defense Agencies and Field Activities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's dedicated OS for embedded and pocket devices, Windows CE, has reached the end of its support lifetime. From a report: Windows CE -- and there's never been an official explanation of what the WinCE-inducing name stood for -- debuted in November 1996, just a few months after Windows NT 4, the first version of NT with the Explorer desktop from Windows 95. Earlier this month, as reported by HPC Factor, the last ever version, CE 8, branded Compact Embedded 2013, reached its end of support. In 2011, Microsoft said it would be replaced by a unified platform based on Windows 8, but we know how well that went down. By 2020, the official migration path was set -- to a container on top of Win10 IoT. Its fortunes have always fluctuated. In 1999, we asked does MS care about WinCE? By 2003, we reported that eTForecasts said it would outship PCs. Indirectly, the researchers were right -- smartphones did end up massively outselling PCs. They just weren't Microsoft ones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a significant development for Xbox users, the era of tinkering with your console to use unapproved accessories is drawing to a close. From a report: Xbox has taken a definitive stance by instituting a new policy that will block the use of unauthorized accessories with its consoles, effective as of November 17. This decision has already begun to reverberate amongst the gaming community, and many have already had a warning about it on their consoles in the form of error message 0x82d60002. The error message states: "A connected accessory is not authorized. Using unauthorized accessories compromises your gaming experience. For this reason, the unauthorized accessory will be blocked from use on 11/12/2023. For help returning it, check with the store it came from or contact the manufacturer. To see authorized accessories, go to www.xbox.com/accessories. (0x82d60002)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Western Digital said on Monday it would spin off its flash memory business that has been grappling with a supply glut after talks of merging the unit with Japan's Kioxia stalled. From a report: The split will leave the data storage products maker with its traditional hard-disk drive business and create two publicly traded firms, giving into demands from activist investor Elliott. The move clears years of uncertainty over Western Digital's flash memory unit that was built through its $19 billion purchase of SanDisk in 2016 and caters to the smartphone and computer industries. Demand for flash chips has slumped after the pandemic, leaving the market awash in supply and increasing the pressure on chipmakers to consolidate. Since 2021, Western Digital and its manufacturing partner Kioxia have been in talks for a merger that would create a company that controls a third of the global NAND flash market.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai took the stand Monday in the tech giant's antitrust trial, a pivotal moment in a case that could result in major changes to the company's search engine. From a report: Pichai described Google's search dominance as the result of its innovation and early investment in its Chrome browser. "We realized early on that browsers are critical to how people are able to navigate and use the web," Pichai said during questioning by Google lawyer John Schmidtlein. "It became very clear early on that if you make the user's experience better, they would use the web more, they would enjoy using the web more, and they would search more in Google as well," Pichai said. [...] The nonjury trial is being heard by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who could ultimately order a breakup or other changes to Google's business practices. Schmidtlein, Google's lead counsel, questioned Pichai about the deal at the heart of the case: the search giant's contract with Apple that makes it the default search engine on Apple's Safari web browser. The Apple deal "makes it very, very seamless and easy for users to use our services," Pichai said. "We know that making it the default will lead to increased usage of our products and services, particularly Google search in this case. So there is clear value in that and that's what we were looking for."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: PFAS stands for "per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances," a family of upwards of 15,000 or more human-made and incredibly durable chemical compounds that have been used in countless industrial and consumer applications for decades. Firefighting foams, waterproof hiking boots, raincoats, nonstick frying pans, dental floss, lipstick, and even the ink used to label packaging -- all can contain PFAS. The compounds are ubiquitous in drinking water and soil, even migrating to Arctic sea ice. PFAS are called forever chemicals because once present in the environment, they do not degrade or break down. They accumulate, are transferred throughout the watershed, and ultimately persist. The quest to reduce the amount of PFAS in the environment is what led me to an industrial park in a southern suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The jar of PFAS concentrate in my hand is part of a demonstration arranged by my hosts, Revive Environmental, during a tour of the company's PFAS destruction site, one of the first in the country to operate commercially and at scale. A few yards in front of me sits the company's PFAS "Annihilator" in a white shipping container. The Annihilator represents just one of several technologies now vying to break down and destroy PFAS. These span the gamut from established processes like electrochemical oxidation and supercritical water oxidation to emerging techniques relying on ultraviolet light, plasma, ultrasound, or catalyst-driven thermal processes. Some are deployed in field tests. Other companies are actively running pilot programs, many with various divisions of the US Department of Defense and other government agencies. And many other technologies are still undergoing laboratory research. There's good reason for this. Not only are PFAS everywhere around us; they're also in us. Humans can't break down PFAS, and our bodies struggle to clear them from our systems. Studies suggest they're in my blood and yours -- the majority of Americans,' in fact -- and they have been linked to increased risks of kidney and testicular cancer, decreased infant birthweights, and high blood pressure. And that's only what we know about now: researchers continue to grapple with the full impacts of PFAS on human and environmental health.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is rolling out new beta features for ChatGPT Plus members right now. Subscribers have reported that the update includes the ability to upload files and work with them, as well as multimodal support. From a report: Basically, users won't have to select modes like Browse with Bing from the GPT-4 dropdown -- it will instead guess what they want based on context. The new features bring a dash of the office features offered by its ChatGPT Enterprise plan to the standalone individual chatbot subscription. I don't seem to have the multimodal update on my own Plus plan, but I was able to test out the Advanced Data Analysis feature, which seems to work about as expected. Once the file is fed to ChatGPT, it takes a few moments to digest the file before it's ready to work with it, and then the chatbot can do things like summarize data, answer questions, or generate data visualizations based on prompts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK government confirmed plans to regulate cryptoasset activities more strictly, bringing them under the same regime as traditional financial services. From a report: The government intends to proceed with legislation in 2024 to implement the changes, according to a Treasury announcement on Monday, responding to a consultation it launched earlier this year. The plans include a mandate for crypto exchanges to write detailed requirements on admission standards and disclosures for token issuers when listing new assets. This could include information about a token's underlying code, known vulnerabilities and risks. The UK's push to regulate crypto is part of a wider effort by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to attract more digital-asset businesses and investment to the country, while at the same time protecting consumers. Crypto firms have long complained that a lack of clear rules has made it hard for them to operate in the UK. "We must make the UK a place where cryptoasset firms have the clarity needed to invest and innovate, and where customers have the protections necessary for confidently using these technologies," said City Minister Andrew Griffith. "The UK is the obvious choice for starting and scaling a cryptoasset business."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta, in a blog post: To comply with evolving European regulations, we are introducing a new subscription option in the EU, EEA and Switzerland. In November, we will be offering people who use Facebook or Instagram and reside in these regions the choice to continue using these personalised services for free with ads, or subscribe to stop seeing ads. While people are subscribed, their information will not be used for ads. People in these countries will be able to subscribe for a fee to use our products without ads. Depending on where you purchase it will cost $10.5/month on the web or $13.75/month on iOS and Android. Regardless of where you purchase, the subscription will apply to all linked Facebook and Instagram accounts in a user's Accounts Center. As is the case for many online subscriptions, the iOS and Android pricing take into account the fees that Apple and Google charge through respective purchasing policies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Joe Biden signed a wide-ranging executive order on artificial intelligence Monday, setting the stage for some industry regulations and funding for the U.S. government to further invest in the technology. From a report: The order is broad, and its focuses range from civil rights and industry regulations to a government hiring spree. In a media call previewing the order Sunday, a senior White House official, who asked to not be named as part of the terms of the call, said AI has so many facets that effective regulations have to cast a wide net. "AI policy is like running into a decathlon, and there's 10 different events here," the official said. "And we don't have the luxury of just picking 'we're just going to do safety' or "we're just going to do equity' or 'we're just going to do privacy.' You have to do all of these things." The official also called for "significant bipartisan legislation" to further advance the country's interests with AI. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., held a private forum in September with industry leaders but has yet to introduce significant AI legislation. Some of the order builds on a previous nonbinding agreement that seven of the top U.S. tech companies developing AI agreed to in July, like hiring outside experts to probe their systems for weaknesses and sharing their critical findings. The order leverages the Defense Production Act to legally require those companies to share safety test results with the federal government.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal reports that more than three million Americans have now had a total of $127 billion in student loans flagged for cancellation. (Which for 3 million would average out to over $40,000 apiece). Interestingly, the article notes this happened despite a set back for forgiveness in America's highest court this June:The high court ruled that the Biden administration couldn't cancel hundreds of billions of dollars for tens millions of student-loan holders, reasoning that the authority for such a broad-based policy doesn't exist under the law. While that closed one path, Biden tapped a variety of different tools that no previous president had ever used to this extent. Since taking office in 2021, the Biden administration has arranged to cancel loans equal to around 30% of the total projected cost of its blocked mass cancellation plan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wikipedia defines LIGO as "a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves." (It stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory - that is, measuring the interference caused by superimposed waves.) Now Science Alert reports:A technique for squeezing light in the arms of LIGO's interferometer has allowed its measurements to cross the quantum barrier. For LIGO, it's a bold new realm of sensitivity, giving the gravitational wave detector the ability to find 60% more dead star mergers than the rate of its previous run, which was around one or two detections every week or so... "Now that we have surpassed this quantum limit, we can do a lot more astronomy," says physicist Lee McCuller of Caltech... LIGO's sensitivity was already absolutely jaw-dropping. The interferometer works by detecting ripples in space-time that are generated by colliding black holes and neutron stars, millions of billions to light-years away. These cause gravitational waves, like ripples in a pond. We can't feel them; but they can be detected in miniscule deviations in the path of light down a long, long tunnel. These deviations are incredibly small, down to trillions of times smaller than a human hair. But once you get into subatomic scales - the quantum realm - LIGO's abilities are hobbled. That's because, on those unimaginably small scales, particles randomly pop in and out of space, creating a constant background hiss of quantum noise that's louder than any signal. Frequency-dependent squeezing is a way of amplifying the signals to be 'louder' than the quantum noise... If you pinch a property of light, such as amplitude (or power), other properties, such as frequency, can be measured more accurately... [T]he light can be squeezed in multiple ways to amplify the frequency of the gravitational waves the scientists are looking for... "We've known for a while how to write down the equations to make this work, but it was not clear that we could actually make it work until now. It's like science fiction," says physicist Rana Adhikari of Caltech... This means we're likely to see a significant uptick in the number of black hole and neutron star collisions we observe out there in the wider Universe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"More developers are looking for or are open to a new job now compared to the last two years," writes Stack Overflow's senior analyst for market research and insights - citing the results of their latest survey of developers in 107 different countries. "More than 1,000 developers responded to this year's survey about jobs and 79% are at least considering new opportunities if not actively looking."New insights from these survey results show that new tech talent and late-career developers are both more likely to be looking. New developers have increasingly switched jobs compared to early- and mid-career developers in the last three years... Interest in looking for a new job drops as developers get older for new to mid-career (44 and younger) respondents (86% to 74%), but picks back up for those 55 to 64 (88%). Late-career developers acknowledge curiosity about other companies as their second top reason to look for a new job this year behind "better salary," which all age groups rank as their top reason. Curiosity grew in importance for late-career developers since last year more than all other age groups (32% vs. 22%) and is more important to this group than reasons other groups ranked higher such as working with new technology and growth opportunities... In our 2023 Developer Survey, we started asking about AI and the sentiment around it in our developer community; results were very similar when we checked in again through this pulse survey (70% are using AI or planning to). Developers may also feel less enthusiastic about learning opportunities now that AI tools are rapidly developing to help many be more productive in their jobs (30% cite this as the top benefit). Other interesting findings from the survey: Compared to the 2023 Developer Survey, 8% of developers have exited the technology industry and are increasingly filling roles in manufacturing and supply chain companies (11% vs. 7%) Technology is the industry most developers currently work in (46%), followed by manufacturing/supply chain (14%) and financial services (13%) New tech talent is onboarding at as many jobs by 24 as those up to 10 years their senior and this rapid experience cycle could rival the knowledge and experience of those they report to.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Are face masks effective in stopping virus transmissions? CBS News re-visited the question Sunday on its news show 60 Minutes by sending their chief medical correspondent to interview Linsey Marr, a professor who specializes in aerosol science at Virginia Tech University. Here's a transcript from an excerpt posted on YouTube: 60 Minutes: Is there any doubt in your mind that masks prevent the person who's wearing it from getting Covid - or at least, are helpful? Professor Marr: I would say they are very helpful in reducing the chances that the person will get Covid. Because it's reducing the amount of virus that you would inhale from the air around you. It's not going to guarantee that it's going to protect you, because are masks are not 100% effective - we talk about N-95's being 95% efficient at filtering out particles, if they're properly fitted and everything, and so that's in an ideal world. But even so, if you - instead of breathing in 100 virsues, I'm breathing in 20, because my mask was 80% effective? That's a huge reduction, and that greatly reduces the chance that I'm going to become infected. On the CBS News web site, they highlight this excerpt from the interview:Early in the pandemic, some guidance from health professionals suggested that wearing a mask might actually lead to infection: A person might encounter a contaminated mask and then touch their eyes, nose, or mouth. But research in the ensuing years has shown that fear to be misplaced. "There wasn't any evidence really that that happens," Marr said. Marr said her team aerosolized the coronavirus, pulled it through a mask, and then examined how much virus survived on the mask. The study reported some viral particle remained on some cloth masks, but no virus survived on the N95s or surgical masks. Marr's team also touched artificial skin to masks and looked at how many virus particles transferred to the artificial skin. No infectious virus transferred. "I hope the study kind of shows that it's something we don't need to worry about as much as we were told," Marr said. CBS gave their video interview the headline "Face mask effectiveness: What we know now" - and asked professor Marr for a definitive answer: 60 Minutes: There was a lot of controversy over whether or not masks worked at all. Were you able to show that they worked scientifically? Professor Marr: We were able to show that they block particles that are the same size as those that carry the virus... What happens is the virus is being carried in the air, and it's not just going straight through those holes. It has to weave around all these layers of fibers in there. As the air is going around the curves, the virus may crash into one of those fibers, and so then it's trapped, or maybe it comes up close to the fiber and brushes against it. And the really small particles, like the virus by itself if it were by itself, would be small enough that it undergoes these random motions, because it's getting bounced around by the gas molecules, and it ends up crashing into the fibers of the mask too. So there was accumulating evidence - and there had been kind of a handful of papers before that, too, showing the same thing. That masks - even cloth masks - do something.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: In 1994 the TV show Friends premiered, and its first season's high ratings made it the 8th most-popular show. The next year Microsoft released Windows 95 - and filmed a promotional video for it with 25-year-old Matthew Perry and 26-year-old Jennifer Aniston. "They'll be taking you on an adventure in computing that takes place in the office of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates," explains the video's narrator, adding "Along the way, they meet a wacky bunch of propellor-heads.... And are introduced the top 25 features of Windows 95!" It's a journey back in time. (At one point the video refers to Windows as the operating system "with tens of millions of users.") Their 30-minute segment - billed as "the world's first cyber sitcom" - appears in an hour-long video introducing revolutionary features like the new "Start" button. Also demonstrated in Excel are the new minimize and maximize "features" in "the upper right-side of the window". And the two actors marvel at the ability to type a filename that was longer than eight characters... Watch for reminders that The Microsoft Windows 95 Video Guide was filmed nearly three decades ago. When the desktop appears after waking from screensaver mode, Perry notes that there's "no messy DOS build-up." And later the video reminds viewers that Windows 95 is compatible "with DOS games like Flight Simulator." There's also a brand new feature called "Windows Explorer" (which is described as "File Manager on steroids"), as well as a new "Find" option, and a brand new icon named "My Computer". And near the end they pay a visit to the Microsoft Network - which was mostly a "walled garden" online service - described in the video as "your on-ramp to the information superhighway". The video even explains how Windows 95 "uses the right mouse button for what Microsoft calls power users." And by the end of it, Jennifer Anniston finds herself playing Space Cadet 3D pinball.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The seven industrial countries known as the "G7" - America, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, and Britain - will agree on a code of conduct Monday for companies developing advanced AI systems, reports Reuters. The news comes "as governments seek to mitigate the risks and potential misuse of the technology," Reuters reports - citing a G7 document.The 11-point code "aims to promote safe, secure, and trustworthy AI worldwide and will provide voluntary guidance for actions by organizations developing the most advanced AI systems, including the most advanced foundation models and generative AI systems", the G7 document said. It "is meant to help seize the benefits and address the risks and challenges brought by these technologies". The code urges companies to take appropriate measures to identify, evaluate and mitigate risks across the AI lifecycle, as well as tackle incidents and patterns of misuse after AI products have been placed on the market. Companies should post public reports on the capabilities, limitations and the use and misuse of AI systems, and also invest in robust security controls.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The work started on Wayland," the Linux Mint project announced in their monthly newsletter. An anonymous reader shared this report from 9to5Linux about an upcoming new option in the Ubuntu-based distro:Linux Mint 21.3 [planned for Christmas of 2023] will be the first Linux Mint release to offer a Wayland session, but in an experimental state. The default session will still be the X11 one, but users who want to try Wayland can do so by selecting the "Cinnamon on Wayland" session from the login screen. "The Wayland session won't be as stable as the default one. It will lack features and it will come with its own limitations. We won't recommend it but you'll be able to give it a shot if you want to and it'll be there for interested people if they want to give us feedback," said Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre. I said that "2024 is the year of the Wayland desktop", but Clement Lefebvre doesn't think Linux Mint needs Wayland support before 2026... By that time, I believe Xfce will also be fully Wayland compatible so that Linux Mint can fully switch to Wayland by default. The newsletter says the 2026 target "leaves us two years to identify and to fix all the issues. It's something we'll continue to work on. "Whenever it happens, assuming it does, we'll consider switching defaults. We'll use the best tools to do the job and provide the best experience. Today that means Xorg. Tomorrow it might mean Wayland. We'll be ready and compatible with both."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post's editorial board looks at America's "net neutrality" debate. But first they note that America's communications-regulating FCC has "limited authority to regulate unless broadband is considered a 'common carrier' under the Telecommunications Act of 1996."The FCC under President Barack Obama moved to reclassify broadband so it could regulate broadband companies; the FCC under President Donald Trump reversed the change. Dismayed advocates warned the world that, without the protections in place, the internet would break. You'll never guess what happened next: nothing. Or, at least, almost nothing. The internet did not break, and internet service providers for the most part did not block and they did not throttle. All the same, today's FCC, under Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, has just moved to re-reclassify broadband. The interesting part is that her strongest argument doesn't have much to do with net neutrality, but with some of the other benefits the country could see from having a federal watchdog keeping an eye on the broadband business... Broadband is an essential service... Yet there isn't a single government agency with sufficient authority to oversee this vital tool. Asserting federal authority over broadband would empower regulation of any blocking, throttling or anti-competitive paid traffic prioritization that they might engage in. But it could also help ensure the safety and security of U.S. networks. The FCC has, on national security grounds, removed authorization for companies affiliated with adversary states, such as China's Huawei, from participating in U.S. telecommunications markets. The agency can do this for phone carriers. But it can't do it for broadband, because it isn't allowed to. Or consider public safety during a crisis. The FCC doesn't have the ability to access the data it needs to know when and where there are broadband outages - much less the ability to do anything about those outages if they are identified. Similarly, it can't impose requirements for network resiliency to help prevent those outages from occurring in the first place - during, say, a natural disaster or a cyberattack. The agency has ample power to police the types of services that are becoming less relevant in American life, such as landline telephones, and little power to police those that are becoming more important every day. The FCC acknowledges this power would also allow them to prohibit "throttling" of content. But the Post's editorial also makes the argument that here in 2023 that's "unlikely to have any major effect on the broadband industry in either direction... Substantial consequences have only become less likely as high-speed bandwidth has become less limited."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Scientists recently fired up the world's smallest particle accelerator for the first time," reports Space.com. "The tiny technological triumph, which is around the size of a small coin, could open the door to a wide range of applications, including using the teensy particle accelerators inside human patients."The new machine, known as a nanophotonic electron accelerator (NEA), consists of a small microchip that houses an even smaller vacuum tube made up of thousands of individual "pillars." Researchers can accelerate electrons by firing mini laser beams at these pillars. The main acceleration tube is approximately 0.02 inches (0.5 millimeter) long, which is 54 million times shorter than the 16.8-mile-long (27 kilometers) ring that makes up CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland - the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator... The inside of the tiny tunnel is only around 225 nanometers wide. For context, human hairs are 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers thick, according to the National Nanotechnology Institute. In a new study, published Oct. 18 in the journal Nature, researchers from the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) in Germany used the tiny contraption to accelerate electrons from an energy value of 28.4akiloelectron volts to 40.7akeV, which is an increase of around 43%. It is the first time that a nanophotonic electron accelerator, which was first proposed in 2015, has been successfully fired, the researchers wrote in a statement... "For the first time, we really can speak about a particle accelerator on a [micro]chip," study co-author Roy Shiloh, a physicist at FAU, said in the statement. What they accomplished "was demonstrated almost simultaneously by colleagues at Stanford University," according to the researchers' statement. "Their results are currently under review, but can be viewed on a repository. The two teams are working together on the realization of the 'Accelerator on a chip' in a project funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation" in 2015.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader CJSHayward shares "an attempt at Python virtual shell." The home-brewed project "mixes your native shell with Python with the goal of letting you use your regular shell but also use Python as effectively a shell scripting language, as an alternative to your shell's built-in scripting language... I invite you to explore and improve it!" From the web site:The Python Virtual Shell (pvsh or 'p' on the command line) lets you mix zsh / bash / etc. built-in shell scripting with slightly modified Python scripting. It's kind of like Brython [a Python implementation for client-side web programming], but for the Linux / Unix / Mac command line... The core concept is that all Python code is indented with tabs, with an extra tab at the beginning to mark Python code, and all shell commands (including some shell builtins) have zero tabs of indentation. They can be mixed line-by-line, offering an opportunity to use built-in zsh, bash, etc. scripting or Python scripting as desired. The Python is an incomplete implementation; it doesn't support breaking a line into multiple lines. Nonetheless, this offers a tool to fuse shell- and Python-based interactions from the Linux / Unix / Mac command line.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet reports an interesting static from Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella. "We have over 1 million paid Copilot users in more than 37,000 organizations that subscribe to Copilot for business, with significant traction outside the United States." And Microsoft's quarterly results also "showed early signs that the company's investments in generative AI were beginning to bolster sales, most notably reversing what had been slowing growth of the company's important cloud computing product," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.)The company had $56.5 billion in sales in the three months that ended in September, up 13% from a year earlier. Profit hit $22.3 billion, up 27%. The results beat analyst expectations and Microsoft's own estimates. Microsoft had told investors that A.I. wouldn't start producing meaningful results until after the start of 2024, when more products became widely available. The company and its competitors are racing to put generative A.I. into nearly every product they offer. Microsoft is seen by many companies as a leading A.I. provider, thanks to its partnership with - and $13 billion investment in - the start-up OpenAI, which introduced the chatbot ChatGPT almost a year ago. Microsoft's flagship cloud computing product, Azure, grew 29%, up from 26% in the previous quarter. About three percentage points of Azure's growth came from generative A.I. products, including the access Microsoft provides to OpenAI's GPT-4 language model, more than the company had told investors to expect. More than 18,000 organizations are using Microsoft's Azure OpenAI services, Satya Nadella, the company's chief executive, said in a call with investors. He said that included customers who had not used Azure before. "Azure again took share as organizations took their workloads to our cloud," Mr. Nadella said... The company said that sales could increase as much as 8.7% in the current quarter, exceeding investor expectations, and that it was investing in building data centers to support the demand for A.I. and cloud computing... Microsoft's personal computing business grew just 3%, to $13.7 billion, reflecting how consumer behaviors have shifted since the laptop-buying binges of the pandemic. The revenue of the Windows operating system installed on new computers was up 4%. Gaming provided a consumer bright spot, with Xbox content and services up 13%. Next month Microsoft integrates its Copilot AI product into its Excel/Word/Teams "productivity suite" - but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 40% of Fortune 100 companies have already been testing the feature during its "limited preview", and "so far, so good." Yet the article notes it isn't all good news for Microsoft. Investment bank UBS has told investors that while Microsoft integrated an AI-powered chatbot into its Bing search engine, there is "no evidence" that Bing has actually gained any search market share.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bloomberg reports that Comcast's stock price took its biggest drop in over a year on Thursday, "after reporting drops in broadband and cable subscribers, and predicting more losses to come."Cord-cutting and increasing competition have eroded Comcast's traditional customer base. The company, which owns Xfinity, the NBCUniversal media empire and SkyTV, lost 490,000 cable-TV customers in the third quarter, better than analysts expected but part of an ongoing trend as consumers switch to streaming services like Netflix. It also lost 18,000 broadband subscribers in the quarter, with nearly all of those residential customers. Analysts had predicted Comcast would instead gain 10,900 residential broadband customers. Shares fell as much as 8% on the news Thursday, their biggest intraday decline since July 2022. "Growth has halted for Comcast - the largest US broadband provider, with 32 million homes," said Bloomberg Intelligence senior media analyst Geetha Ranganathan. "The company derives 80% of profit from cable, where, even after a pandemic-demand surge, broadband has been hurt by fierce competition and low-move activity among customers." Comcast expects "somewhat higher subscriber losses" in the fourth quarter due to pullback on promotional offers that targeted lower-end customers, Chief Financial Officer Jason Armstrong said on a call with investors. Revenue per customer climbed, however, in part because of price increases and promotions of higher-rate plans. Broadband is becoming increasingly competitive as mobile providers move into the market with improved wireless internet offerings. In the past week, the Big Three - T-Mobile US Inc., AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. - all reported subscriber gains.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The SF Standard reports that a San Francisco man whose car was stolen in the middle of the night "managed to track down the vehicle using his car insurance app and retrieve the stolen vehicle the following morning within half an hour of noticing it was gone."Harris realized he could track his phone using his app from MetroMile, a San Francisco-based digital pay-per-mile car insurance company that tracks a car's location and charges a rate based on how much it's driven. "I opened the app and found it was in Mission Bay," he said, adding that the person who stole it drove it all night before parking. "I rode my bike down there and picked it up...." Before picking up his car, Harris didn't consult with the San Francisco Police Department and said officers were confused about why he wanted to report a stolen car that was already back in his possession. He said his driver's side window had been smashed, but there wasn't any other damage, just a mess of marijuana paraphernalia and blunt wraps inside... "If a vehicle owner locates their stolen vehicle prior to the police locating it, we highly recommend that they alert us to the vehicle's location and do not move the car prior to reporting it recovered," Sgt. Kathryn Winters wrote in an email. "Additionally, if they locate the vehicle occupied, they should not approach the vehicle or suspects and should call law enforcement immediately." There were 274 motor vehicle theft reports in the Western Addition neighborhood, which includes Alamo Square, in the 12 months leading up to Oct. 21 compared with 219 during the same period the previous year, according to police data. Citywide, the problem has also gotten worse in recent years. The number of car thefts has risen from 60 incidents per 10,000 residents in 2019 to 101 incidents this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To explore America's "transition to a post-quantum world," the Washington Post interviewed U.S. federal official Nick Polk, who is focused on national security issues including quantum computing and is also a senior advisor to a White House federal chief information security officer): The Washington Post: The U.S. is in the early stages of a major shift focused on bolstering government network defenses, pushing federal agencies to adopt a new encryption standard known as post-quantum cryptography that aims to prevent systems from being vulnerable to advanced decryption techniques enabled by quantum computers in the near future... Nick Polk: We've been using asymmetric encryption for a very long time now, and it's been ubiquitous since about 2014, when the U.S. government and some of the large tech companies decided that they're going to make it a default on most web browsers... Interestingly enough, regarding the post-quantum cryptographic standards being developed, the only thing that's quantum about them is that it has "quantum" in the name. It's really just a different type of math that's much more difficult for a quantum computer to be able to reverse-engineer. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is looking at different mathematical models to cover all their bases. The interesting thing is that these post-quantum standards are actually being used to protect classical computers that we have now, like laptops... Given the breadth of the U.S. government and the amount of computing power we use, we really see ourselves and our role as a steward of the tech ecosystem. One of the things that came out of [this week's Inside Quantum Technology conference in New York City] was that we are very quickly moving along with the private sector to migrate to post-quantum cryptography. I think you're gonna see very shortly a lot of very sensitive private sector industries start to migrate or start to advertise that they're going to migrate. Banks are a perfect example. That means meeting with vendors regularly, and testing their algorithms to ensure that we can accurately and effectively implement them on federal systems... The administration and national security memorandum set 2035 as our deadline as a government to migrate our [national security] systems to post-quantum cryptography. That's supposed to time with the development of operational quantum computers. We need to ensure that we start now, so that we don't end up not meeting the deadline before computers are operational... This is a prioritized migration for the U.S. government. We're going to start with our most critical systems - that includes what we call high-value assets, and high-impact systems. So for example, we're gonna prioritize systems that have personal health information. That's our biggest emphasis - both when we talk to private industry and when we encourage agencies when they talk to their contractors and vendors - to really think about where your most sensitive data is and then prioritize those systems for migration.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The creator economy is probably bigger than you think. The Washington Post reports it's "now a global industry valued at $250 billion, with tens of millions of workers, hundreds of millions of customers and its own trade association and work-credentialing programs."Millions have ditched traditional career paths to work as online creators and content-makers, using their computers and phones to amass followers and build businesses whose influence now rivals the biggest names in entertainment, news and politics... In the United States, the video giant YouTube estimated that roughly 390,000 full-time jobs last year were supported by its creators' work - four times the number of people employed by General Motors, America's biggest automaker... This spring, analysts at Goldman Sachs said that 50 million people now work as creators around the world. The analysts expect the industry's "total addressable market," an estimate of consumer demand, will jump from $250 billion this year to $480 billion by 2027. For comparison, the global revenue from video games, now at about $227 billion, is expected to climb to roughly $312 billion by 2027, analysts at the financial giant PwC estimated in June. YouTube's report estimated that its creators contributed $35 billion to [U.S.] gross domestic product last year, a figure that would rank the group's combined output ahead of U.S. furniture manufacturing but behind rail transportation, according to industry data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.... Payments from advertisers to creators in the United States have more than doubled since 2019, to $5 billion, estimates from the market research firm Insider Intelligence show... Megan Pollock, a branding executive at Panasonic North America, said that the company now devotes about 10 percent of its marketing budget to creators and that she expects further increases amid a long-term shift away from traditional ad campaigns. Other interesting details from the article:Last month people watched 53 million hours of video a day just on Twitch. But 74% of that went to the top 10,000 streamers (according to data from the analytics firm StreamElements)."Creators' incomes are determined by giant tech and advertising companies that can change the rules in an instant, and a single mistake can unravel their careers."When America's youth are asked what they want to be when they grow up, "Influencer" is now one of the most popular answers - ranking higher than "astronaut" and "professional athlete"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bloomberg thinks they've identified the source of the advanced chips in Huawei's newest smartphone, citing to "people familiar with the matter".In a suggestion that export restrictions on Europe's most valuable tech company may have come too late to stem China's advances in chipmaking, ASML's so-called immersion deep ultraviolet machines were used in combination with tools from other companies to make the Huawei Technologies Co. chip, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing information that's not public. ASML declined to comment. There is no suggestion that their sales violated export restrictions... ASML has never been able to sell its EUV machines to China because of export restrictions. But less advanced DUV models can be retooled with deposition and etching gear to produce 7-nanometer and possibly even more advanced chips, according to industry analysts. The process is much more expensive than using EUV, making it very difficult to scale production in a competitive market environment. In China, however, the government is willing to shoulder a significant portion of chipmaking costs. Chinese companies have been legally stockpiling DUV gear for years - especially after the U.S. introduced its initial export controls last year before getting Japan and the Netherlands on board... According to an investor presentation published by the company last week, ASML experienced a jump in business from China this year as chipmakers there boosted orders ahead of the export controls taking full effect in 2024. China accounted for 46% of ASML's sales in the third quarter, compared with 24% in the previous quarter and 8% in the three months ending in March. Another article from Bloomberg includes this prediction:The U.S. won't be able to stop Huawei and SMIC from making progress in chip technology, Burn J. Lin, a former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. vice president, told Bloomberg News. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp should be able to advance to the next generation at 5 nanometers with machines from ASML Holding NV that it already operates, said Lin, who at TSMC championed the lithography technology that transformed chipmaking. The end result is that Huawei's profit "more than doubled during the quarter it revealed its biggest achievement in chip technology," the article reports, "adding to signs the Chinese tech leader is steadying a business rocked by US sanctions."The Shenzhen company reported a 118% surge in net profit to 26.4 billion yuan ($3.6 billion) in the September quarter, and a slight rise in sales to 145.7 billion yuan, according to Bloomberg News calculations from nine-month results released Friday. Those numbers included initial sales of the vastly popular Mate 60 Pro, which began shipping in late August... The gadget sold out almost instantly, spurring expectations it could rejuvenate Huawei's fortunes and potentially cut into Apple Inc.'s lead in China, given signs of a disappointing debut for the iPhone 15... A resurgent Huawei would pose problems not just for Apple but also local brands from Xiaomi Corp. to Oppo and Vivo, all of which are fighting for sales in a shrinking market.Read more of this story at Slashdot.