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A web caching issue resulted in some Wyze security camera owners being able to see webcam feeds that weren't theirs. The Verge reports: Earlier on Friday, users on Reddit made posts about the issue. "Went to check on my cameras and they are all gone be replaced with a new one... and this isn't mine!" wrote one user. "Apologies if this is your house / dog... I don't want it showing up as much as you don't want it!" "I am able to click the events tab and see ALL the events on this random person's camera INSIDE their house," wrote another. "I don't know why, but I can see someone else's camera," wrote another. Each thread has comments from other Reddit users reporting similar issues. Shockingly, I even saw some instances of people claiming they saw the same cameras that other people did. The user reports indicated that they were seeing the other feeds through Wyze's web viewer at view.wyze.com.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dennis Austin, the principal software developer of PowerPoint, passed away from lung cancer on Sept. 1. He was 76. The Washington Post reports: Released in 1987 by Forethought, a small software firm, PowerPoint was the digital successor to overhead projectors, transforming the labor-intensive process of creating slides -- a task typically assigned to design departments or outsourced -- to one where any employee with a computer could point, click and rearrange information with a mouse. "Our users were familiar with computers, but probably not graphics software," Mr. Austin wrote in an unpublished history of the software's development. "They were highly motivated to look their best in front of others, but they weren't savvy in graphics design." Working alongside Robert Gaskins, the Forethought executive who conceived the software, it was Mr. Austin's job as the software engineer to make PowerPoint (originally called Presenter) easy to operate. He accomplished this with a "direct-manipulation interface," he wrote, meaning that "what you are editing looks exactly like the final product." Originally targeted for Macintosh computers, which had a graphical interface, Presenter included ways for users to incorporate graphics, clip art and multiple fonts. In addition, the slides could be uniform with graphic borders, corporate logos and slide numbers. The goal, Mr. Austin wrote, was "to create presentations -- not simply slides." In his book "Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint" (2012), Gaskins wrote that "Dennis came up with at least half of the major design ideas," and was "completely responsible for the fluid performance and the polished finish of the implementation." "It's a good bet," Gaskins added, "that if Dennis had not been the person designing PowerPoint, no one would ever have heard of it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Historically, video game preservation efforts usually cover two types of games. The most common are very old or "retro" games from the 16-bit era or earlier, which are trapped on cartridges until they're liberated via downloadable ROMs. The other are games that rely on a live service, like Enter the Matrix's now unplugged servers or whatever games you can only get by downloading them via Nintendo's Wii Shop Channel, which shut down in 2019. But time keeps marching on and a more recent era of games now needs to be attended to if we still want those games to be accessible: indies from the late aughts to mid twenty-teens. That's right. Fez, an icon of the era and indie games scene, is now more than a decade old. And while we don't think of this type of work until we need it, Fez, which most PC players booted on Windows 7 when it first came out, is not going to magically run on your Windows 11 machine today without some maintenance. The person doing that maintenance, as well as making sure that about 70 of the best known indie games from the same era keep running, is Ethan Lee. He's not as well known as Fez's developer Phil Fish, who was also the subject of the documentary Indie Game: The Movie, but this week Lee started publicly marketing the service he's been quietly providing for over 11 years: maintenance of older games. "The way that I've been pitching it is more of like, the boring infrastructure," he said. "Let's make sure the current build works, whereas a lot of times, people feel like the only way to bring a game into a new generation is to do a big remaster. That's cool, but wouldn't have been cool if Quake II just continued to work between 1997 and now without all the weird stuff in between? That's sort of why I've been very particular about the word maintenance, because it's a continuous process that starts pretty much from the moment that you ship it." As he explains in his pitch to game developers: "the PC catalog alone has grown very large within the last 15 years, and even small independent studios now have an extensive back catalog of titles that players can technically still buy and play today! This does come at a cost, however: The longer a studio exists, the larger their catalog grows, and as a result, the maintenance burden also grows." Just a few of the other indie games Lee ported include Super Hexagon, Proteus, Rogue Legacy, Dust: An Elysian Tail, TowerFall Ascension, VVVVVV, Transistor, Wizorb, Mercenary Kings, Hacknet, Shenzhen I/O, and Bastion. [...] With the PC, people assume that once a game is on Windows, it can live on forever with future versions of Windows. "In reality, what makes a PC so weird is that there's this big stack of stuff. You have an x86 processor, the current-ish era of like modern graphics processors, and then you have the operating system running on top of that and its various drivers," Lee said. A change to any one of those layers can make a game run badly, or not at all.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The SEC has approved the Nasdaq's request to operate the first exchange AI-driven order type. CoinTelegraph reports: Called the dynamic midpoint extended life order (M-ELO), the new system expands on the M-ELO automated order type by making it "dynamic," meaning it will use artificial intelligence to update and, essentially, recalibrate itself in real-time. Order types are a set of software instructions that execute specific trade pairs at exact market pricing thresholds. This form of automation has been around for a while, but the new AI-driven order type is the first of its kind to use real-time reinforcement learning AI to execute orders This should have the follow-on effect of substantially speeding up orders placed with the system. In a blog post accompanying the approval announcement, Nasdaq states that dynamic M-ELO demonstrated a "20.3% increase in fill rates and an 11.4% reduction in mark-outs" during its research and testing. According to a data sheet published by Nasdaq: "Calculated on a symbol-by-symbol basis, this new functionality analyzes 140+ data points every 30 seconds to detect market conditions and optimize the holding period prior to which a trade is eligible to execute." By adjusting the holding periods for orders in real time, as opposed to the traditional system that simply applies static timeouts to orders, fill rates should increase without a significant increase in market impact.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Android specialist Mishaal Rahman, Android miscalculates the storage space taken up by system components, leading to inflated system storage utilization and potentially misleading users. Chandraveer Mathur writes via Android Police. From the report: We usually rely on Android's storage utilization utility to find apps and files eating up storage space, so we can uninstall or delete them if required. However, Android specialist Mishaal Rahman discovered that Google's calculation of the space consumed by Android system components is flawed. He executed shell commands to create a 3GB file in the /data/media/0 storage directory, which isn't a file path used for Android system files. However, the phone's storage breakdown showed a marked 3GB increase under the System heading, suggesting the OS suddenly became bigger. This happens because Android calculates system storage as the space used up by anything other than what's covered by other categories in the storage breakdown, including audios, videos, images, documents, trash, and games. This means the System heading in the break doesn't just include Android system files. Android 14 also uses this dangerously flawed logic for calculating storage usage. Moreover, the Files app by Google also shows similar storage utilization by Android system components, perhaps because it uses the same incredulous attribution logic. By association, all other Android skins use flawed calculation of used storage space, but Samsung reportedly fixed this issue with the One UI 6 update. After running similar ADB commands as in the previous experiment, Rahman could confirm the increased utilization showed up under the Other files heading in the storage breakdown, instead of the System heading.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indonesia has awarded OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman its first "Golden Visa" -- a week after the program was launched to attract foreign investment to Southeast Asia's largest economy. CNBC reports: "There are several categories of golden visas apart from those based on investment/capital investment, one of which is the golden visa which is given to figures who have an international reputation and can provide benefits for Indonesia," Silmy Karim, Indonesia's director general of immigration, said in a statement. "With this golden visa, the hope is that Altman can contribute towards the development and use of AI in Indonesia," Karim said. Altman's Golden Visa is for 10 years. As a holder of the visa, the American entrepreneur will get to enjoy priority screening at airports across the country's vast archipelago, along with longer periods of stay, and ease of entry and exit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple released security updates on Thursday that patch two zero-day exploits -- meaning hacking techniques that were unknown at the time Apple found out about them -- used against a member of a civil society organization in Washington, D.C., according to the researchers who found the vulnerabilities. Citizen Lab, an internet watchdog group that investigates government malware, published a short blog post explaining that last week they found a zero-click vulnerability -- meaning that the hackers' target doesn't have to tap or click anything, such as an attachment -- used to target victims with malware. The researchers said the vulnerability was used as part of an exploit chain designed to deliver NSO Group's malware, known as Pegasus. "The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim," Citizen Lab wrote. Once they found the vulnerability, the researchers reported it to Apple, which released a patch on Thursday, thanking Citizen Lab for reporting them. Based on what Citizen Lab wrote in the blog post, and the fact that Apple also patched another vulnerability and attributed its finding to the company itself, it appears Apple may have found the second vulnerability while investigating the first. Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton says Apple's Lockdown Mode would have blocked the exploits found in this case. Lockdown Mode is an opt-in feature introduced in iOS 16 that gives users the option to temporarily switch off or limit features for security purposes. According to Apple, it "should be used only if you believe you may be targeted by a highly sophisticated cyberattack, such as by a private company developing state-sponsored mercenary spyware."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cerabyte, a technology startup pioneering ceramic nanolayer-based storage, claims it will usher in the "Yottabyte Era" and disrupt the $500 billion storage market in the process. Tom's Hardware reports: More specifically, its roadmaps sketch out CeraMemory cartridges (2025-30) storing between 10 PB and 100 PB, and its CeraTape (2030-35) with up to 1 EB capacity per tape. According to the startup, these new formats are poised to address density, performance, and access paradigms, as well as the cost and sustainability demands of datacenters. Cerabyte, a German storage startup, has published an abstract from its upcoming presentation at the 2023 Storage Developer Conference in Fremont, California (h/t Blocks and Files). Here, for the first time, it will detail how it will introduce CeraMemory with inorganic nanolayers, using 50-100 atoms thick ceramics to store information. Scaling ceramic data storage technology from 100nm to 3nm bit sizes will scale the corresponding data density from GB/cm2 to units measured in TB/cm2, reckons Cerabyte. To record data to CeraMemory, Cerabyte says that a laser beam or particle beam structures data matrices similar to QR codes. Data reading can be done with equipment using high-resolution microscopic imaging techniques or electron beam microscopy. Initially, there will be no need for particle beams/electron microscopy, as those technologies will only be required later in the roadmaps at the highest densities. In its abstract from the 'Ceramic Nano Memory -- Data Storage for the Yottabyte Era' presentation, Cerabyte says its technology can read and write data at GB/s class speeds. These read/write technologies are "low power," according to the storage startup. Another seemingly excellent inherent property of ceramic storage is the touted media durability and longevity. On its website, Cerabyte says that its media can last "5,000+ years" and that the data stored can ensure through "a wide temperature range of -273C (-460F) to 300C (570F)." We have used quotes here, as those are extraordinary figures. Additionally, it is boasted that CeraMemory is resistant to corrosive, acidic, radioactive environments and EMP disruption.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FTC's chief administrative law judge (ALJ) ruled that Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax, "deceived consumers" and "engaged in deceptive advertising" by advertising its "Free Edition" tax filing service as free when users ultimately had to pay. The Verge reports: The ruling (PDF) includes several pages of commercials and online ads where Intuit advertised its "Free Edition" software. While the name implies that the service is, well, free, people wound up having to pay to use it -- sparking a lawsuit from the FTC and a $141 million payout to affected users. Meanwhile, Intuit's actually no-cost Free File version, which it launched in partnership with the IRS, remained exceedingly difficult to find. In 2021, Intuit exited the program after the IRS stopped letting companies hide their free filing services from search engines. The FTC's ALJ determined that there is a "cognizant danger of a recurring violation" by Intuit and issued a cease-and-desist order that prohibits the company from "engaging in deceptive practices in the future." The ruling prevents Intuit from representing a product as free unless it actually is free for everyone to use and "clearly and conspicuously discloses any terms that would limit the offer." In a statement, Intuit called the FTC's investigation process "flawed and highly questionable," noting "Intuit already adheres to most of the advertising practices in the FTC's erroneous decision." The company adds that it has "been clear, fair, and transparent" with customers and remains "committed to free tax preparation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, AI-maker and OpenAI competitor Anthropic launched Claude Pro, a subscription-based version of its Claude.ai web-based AI assistant, which functions similarly to ChatGPT. It's available for $20/month in the US or 18 pounds/month in the UK, and it promises five-times-higher usage limits, priority access to Claude during high-traffic periods, and early access to new features as they emerge. Like ChatGPT, Claude Pro can compose text, summarize, do analysis, solve logic puzzles, and more. Claude.ai is what Anthropic offers as its conversational interface for its Claude 2 AI language model, similar to how ChatGPT provides an application wrapper for the underlying models GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. In February, OpenAI chose a subscription route for ChatGPT Plus, which for $20 a month also gives early access to new features, but it also unlocks access to GPT-4, which is OpenAI's most powerful language model. What does Claude have that ChatGPT doesn't? One big difference is a 100,000 token context window, which means it can process about 75,000 words at once. Tokens are fragments of words used while processing text. That means Claude can analyze longer documents or hold longer conversations without losing its memory of the subject at hand. ChatGPT can only process about 8,000 tokens in GPT-4 mode. Anthropic's primary selling point for the Claude Pro subscription is "5x more usage," but the company doesn't clearly communicate what Claude's free-tier usage limits actually are. Dropping clues like cryptic breadcrumbs, the company has written a support document about the topic that says, "If your conversations are relatively short (approximately 200 English sentences, assuming your sentences are around 15-20 words), you can expect to send at least 100 messages every 8 hours, often more depending on Claude's current capacity. Over two thirds of all conversations on claude.ai (as of September 2023) have been within this length." In another somewhat cryptic statement, Anthropic writes, "If you upload a copy of The Great Gatsby, you may only be able to send 20 messages in that conversation within 8 hours." We're not attempting the math, but if you know the precise word count of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic, it may be possible to glean Claude's actual limits. We reached out to Anthropic for clarification yesterday and have not received a response by press time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is teaming up with digital pathology provider Paige to build the world's largest image-based artificial intelligence model for identifying cancer. From a report: The AI model is training on an unprecedented amount of data that includes billions of images, according to a release. It can identify both common cancers and rare cancers that are notoriously difficult to diagnose, and researchers hope it will eventually help doctors who are struggling to contend with staffing shortages and growing caseloads. Paige develops digital and AI-powered solutions for pathologists, which are doctors who carry out lab tests on bodily fluids and tissues to make a diagnosis. It's a specialty that often operates behind the scenes, and it's crucial for determining a patient's path forward. "You don't have cancer until the pathologist says so. That's the critical step in the whole medical edifice," Thomas Fuchs, co-founder and chief scientist at Paige, told CNBC in an interview. But despite pathologists' essential role in medicine, Fuchs said their workflow has not changed much in the last 150 years. To diagnose cancer, for instance, pathologists usually examine a piece of tissue on a glass slide under a microscope. The method is tried and true, but if pathologists miss something, it can have dire consequences for patients.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The days of signing on the dotted line may be numbered -- at least in Australia. From a report: The federal government has announced it is taking statutory declarations into the digital age, saying it will accept electronic signatures and video link witnessing from next year. It makes permanent a change introduced during the pandemic, when attending a justice of the peace (JP) for a statutory declaration -- a practice that goes back to the 19th century -- was forbidden under lockdown restrictions. Legislation introduced this week by the federal attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, will also allow people to digitally execute a statutory declaration using the online platform myGov and the myGovID Digital ID. Dreyfus says the bill is intended to keep with the changing ways of Australians. "This bill will respond to how Australians want and expect to engage and communicate digitally with government by providing options to make commonwealth statutory declarations facilitated by technology," he says. "This bill is an important milestone in driving the digitisation of government services."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple might be the king of tech. But in the growing cold economic war between the world's two biggest economies, it is becoming just another game piece -- albeit a big one. WSJ: Still the world's largest public company by market value, Apple has seen that value take a notable hit this week on increasing signs that its business in China might be coming under threat. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the Chinese government is banning the iPhone and other foreign-branded devices from use by workers at central government agencies. Bloomberg reported Thursday that such a ban might also be extended to state-owned enterprises and other government-backed entities. That could amount to a significant swath of people in a state-led economy with a population totaling more than 1.4 billion. According to China's National Bureau of Statistics, about 56.3 million urban workers were employed by "state-owned units" in 2021. Those jobs commanded an average wage about 8% above the national urban average -- an attractive segment for a company specializing in premium devices. And because Apple now ships roughly 230 million iPhones globally every year, 56 million would be a notable chunk to take out of the pool of potential buyers -- especially in a mature global smartphone market with low growth prospects. [...] Apple's stock price has thus slumped nearly 7% over the past two days, costing the company about $194 billion in market value. That might seem excessive considering the many unknowns about the reported iPhone bans and how they could ultimately play out. Also, China has at least some interest in not overly harming a major local employer during a time of growing unemployment. One Chinese city alone reportedly has more than one million workers building Apple products or employed in related jobs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Governments are failing to cut greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to meet the goals of the Paris agreement and to stave off climate disaster, a major report by the UN has found. From a report: Meeting the goals will require "phasing out all unabated fossil fuels," the report says, in an acknowledgment that some oil-producing countries may find hard to take. The need to phase out fossil fuels has not been explicitly adopted by the UN before, under successive rounds of climate talks, and language over "phasing out" or "phasing down" fossil fuels has caused controversy at the annual UN climate talks. There is a "rapidly narrowing window" for governments to move faster, according to the report, as global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025 at the latest, and be rapidly reduced from there, to limit temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Emissions are still rising, however, and there is a gap of 20 to 23 gigatonnes of CO2 between the cuts needed by 2030 to limit global temperatures to 1.5C and the world's current emissions trajectory. The report, which was expected next week but was published hurriedly in draft by the UN on Friday, will form the basis of the first "global stocktake" under the 2015 Paris agreement. That process is meant to track countries' efforts to meet the goals of the treaty.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York law enforcement agencies have spent millions of dollars to expand their capabilities to track and analyze social media posts, new documents show, including by contracting with a surveillance firm accused of improperly scraping social media platforms for data. From a report: Documents obtained by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (Stop), a privacy advocacy non-profit and shared with the Guardian, reveal the New York police department in 2018 entered a nearly $9m contract with Voyager Labs, a surveillance company that has been sued by Meta for allegedly using nearly 40,000 fake Facebook accounts to collect data on an estimated 600,000 users. NYPD purchased Voyager Labs products that the company claims can use artificial intelligence to analyze online human behavior and detect and predict fraud and crimes, the documents show. A separate document reveals a contract between the Queens district attorney and Israeli firm Cobwebs Technologies, which also offers social network mapping products, as well as tools to track location information through phones. It's unclear how much that contract is worth. Law enforcement across the United States have worked with social media analytics companies for years, hoping to more effectively and efficiently collect and make sense of the hordes of personal information available on the internet. But experts have argued the practice can cross ethical and legal lines, particularly when used to access private information, make inferences or predict future criminality based on the content posted on social media, or otherwise help law enforcement skip obtaining subpoenas and warrants before gathering information on someone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at digital watchdog group Citizen Lab say they found spyware they linked to Israeli firm NSO that exploited a newly discovered flaw in Apple devices. From a report: While inspecting the Apple device of an employee of a Washington-based civil society group last week, Citizen Lab said it found the flaw had been used to infect the device with NSO's Pegasus spyware, it said in a statement. Bill Marczak, senior researcher at Citizen Lab, said the attacker likely made a mistake during the installation which is how Citizen Lab found the spyware. Citizen Lab said Apple confirmed to them that using the high security feature "Lockdown Mode" available on Apple devices blocks this particular attack. The flaw allowed compromise of iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim, the digital watchdog said. The new update fixes this vulnerability.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI recently shared guidelines for educators on using ChatGPT as an educational tool in a blog post, also noting in a related FAQ the ineffectiveness of AI writing detectors often resulting in false positives against students. ArsTechnica: In a section of the FAQ titled "Do AI detectors work?", OpenAI writes, "In short, no. While some (including OpenAI) have released tools that purport to detect AI-generated content, none of these have proven to reliably distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated content."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Internal Revenue Service has started using artificial intelligence to investigate tax evasion at multibillion-dollar partnerships as it looks for ways to better police hedge funds, private equity groups, real estate investors and large law firms. From a report: The announcement on Friday demonstrated how a more muscular I.R.S. is using some of the $80 billion allocated through last year's Inflation Reduction Act to target the wealthiest Americans and tackle the kinds of cases that had become too complex and cumbersome for the beleaguered agency to handle. The agency's new funding is intended to help the I.R.S. raise more federal revenue by cracking down on tax cheats and others who use sophisticated accounting maneuvers to avoid paying what they owe. But the allocation has been politically contentious, with Republicans claiming that the I.R.S. will use the funding to harass small businesses and middle-class taxpayers. Earlier this year, Republicans succeeded in clawing back $20 billion as part of an agreement to raise the nation's borrowing cap. That political fight has put the onus on Democrats and the Biden administration to show that the funding is primarily enabling the I.R.S. to target the rich. "These are complex cases for I.R.S. teams to unpack," Daniel Werfel, the I.R.S. commissioner, said in a briefing with reporters. "The I.R.S. has simply not had enough resources or staffing to address partnerships; in a real sense, we've been overwhelmed in this area for years."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A special commission within Poland's Senate concluded that the government's use of spyware, like the one made by NSO Group, is illegal. From a report: The commission announced on Thursday the conclusion of its 18-month-long investigation into allegations that the Polish government used NSO's spyware, known as Pegasus, to spy on an opposition politician and other politicians around the time of the country's 2019 elections. "Pegasus cannot be used under Polish law," the report read, according to a machine translation. "This is because the Polish legal system does not allow the use of programs in which acquired operational data is transferred through transmission channels uncontrolled by the relevant services, as this creates the risk of violating its integrity and does not ensure its confidentiality, as required by law." In other words, NSO's spyware is not designed in a way that respects Polish law, collects too much information, and cannot guarantee that that information is secured properly, according to the report. The commission also concluded that the Polish government used Pegasus to retaliate against opposition figures, and that these surveillance operations negatively influenced the 2019 elections in the country. The commission compared these abuses with Russian government hackers activities in the 2016 elections in the United States.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Siddharth Vikram Philip, Sabah Meddings, and Supriya Singh, reporting for Bloomberg News: As chief commercial officer of aircraft-parts supplier AOG Technics, Ray Kwong can look back on a well-rounded career at A-list companies including All Nippon Airways, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Nissan Motor. That, at least, is Kwong's two-decade corporate journey on what appears to be his LinkedIn profile, from which the self-proclaimed executive beams with a broad smile and striped tie in blue hues. Trouble is that -- much like the company for which Kwong now claims to work -- not all is as it seems. Kwong, if he even exists, was never employed at Nissan, or at ANA for that matter. Neither company has records of him as a former worker, they said in response to queries by Bloomberg News. His employment history could also not be verified at Mitsubishi. What is used as his profile picture turns out to be a stock photo that's also washed up elsewhere on the Internet, from promotional material for a German textile startup to a clinic in Northbrook, Illinois. After Bloomberg reported on the case of bogus jet-engine repair parts being investigated by regulators, a deeper dive into AOG revealed that the fabrication not only concerned components, but extended to major aspects of the company behind the scandal. The proliferation of undocumented parts has sent shock waves through an industry where every component requires verification to ensure aircraft safety, leaving manufacturers, operators and authorities scrambling to determine the fallout. The parts supplied by AOG went into engines that power many older-generation Airbus SE A320 and Boeing 737 planes, by far the most widely flown category of commercial aircraft. These single-aisle jets are used by millions of passengers each day and by most airlines, mainly on short-haul flights. Airbus said it's aware of media reports surrounding AOG, while Boeing said it will defer to regulators on the topic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Faruk Fatih Ozer, the founder of the collapsed Turkish crypto exchange Thodex, his sister Serap Ozer and his brother Guven Ozer have been sentenced to 11,196 years, 10 months and 15 days in prison, according to local media. A judicial fine of 135 million liras ($5 million approx.) was also imposed. From a report: Thodex was one of Turkey's largest crypto exchanges before it suddenly went offline in April 2021 and Ozer went missing. Over 400,000 members were left in the dark without access to deposits of $2 billion in cryptocurrencies. Ozer had fled to Albania but was arrested in August 2022 after an Interpol red notice against him. By April 2023, Ozer was extradited to Turkey, and detained by police upon arrival on seven charges, including establishing and managing an organization with the purpose of committing a crime, being a member of an organization, fraud by using information systems as a tool of banks or credit institutions, fraud of merchants or company executives and cooperative managers, and laundering the value of assets resulting from crime.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Founders of Rario, the cricket NFT startup in which India's Dream11 led a $120 million funding round last year, are leaving the two-year-old firm, TechCrunch reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Ankit Wadhwa, who serves as Rario CEO, and Sunny Bhanot, Rario CTO, are being pushed out as investors at the startup, including largest backer Dream11, exert greater control, the people said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. [...] Just last year, Rario raised a $120 million funding round and aggressively sought to win rights to sell several cricket NFTs on its platform. It was valued at about $250 million in the previous funding and founders sold some stake as part of it, according to others familiar with the deal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: For years, some cybersecurity defenders and advocates have called for a kind of Geneva Convention for cyberwar, new international laws that would create clear consequences for anyone hacking civilian critical infrastructure, like power grids, banks, and hospitals. Now the lead prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at the Hague has made it clear that he intends to enforce those consequences -- no new Geneva Convention required. Instead, he has explicitly stated for the first time that the Hague will investigate and prosecute any hacking crimes that violate existing international law, just as it does for war crimes committed in the physical world. In a little-noticed article released last month in the quarterly publication Foreign Policy Analytics, the International Criminal Court's lead prosecutor, Karim Khan, spelled out that new commitment: His office will investigate cybercrimes that potentially violate the Rome Statute, the treaty that defines the court's authority to prosecute illegal acts, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. "Cyber warfare does not play out in the abstract. Rather, it can have a profound impact on people's lives," Khan writes. "Attempts to impact critical infrastructure such as medical facilities or control systems for power generation may result in immediate consequences for many, particularly the most vulnerable. Consequently, as part of its investigations, my Office will collect and review evidence of such conduct." When WIRED reached out to the International Criminal Court, a spokesperson for the office of the prosecutor confirmed that this is now the office's official stance. "The Office considers that, in appropriate circumstances, conduct in cyberspace may potentially amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and/or the crime of aggression," the spokesperson writes, "and that such conduct may potentially be prosecuted before the Court where the case is sufficiently grave." Neither Khan's article nor his office's statement to WIRED mention Russia or Ukraine. But the new statement of the ICC prosecutor's intent to investigate and prosecute hacking crimes comes in the midst of growing international focus on Russia's cyberattacks targeting Ukraine both before and after its full-blown invasion of its neighbor in early 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bitcoin mining outfit Riot Platforms earned $31.7 million from Texas power authorities last month for curtailing operations -- far more than the value of the Bitcoin it mined in the same period. The Register reports: In a press release yesterday, Riot said it produced 333 Bitcoin at its mining operations in Rockdale, Texas, which would have been worth just shy of $9 million on August 31. All the cash earned from those energy credits, on the other hand, equates to around 1,136 Bitcoin, Riot CEO Jason Les said in the company's monthly update. "August was a landmark month for Riot in showcasing the benefits of our unique power strategy," Les said. "Riot achieved a new monthly record for Power and Demand Response Credits ... which surpassed the total amount of all Credits received in 2022. "These credits significantly lower Riot's cost to mine Bitcoin and are a key element in making Riot one of the lowest cost producers of Bitcoin in the industry," Les said. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) operates a demand response program that allows big energy consumers, like Riot, to earn power credits for using less of it for operations and selling power back to the grid, as well as additional credit for being enrolled in its demand response programs. As we reported in August of last year, the company earned $9.5 million in credits during a July 2022 heatwave as well -- still far less than it earned in Texas's hottest August on record this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have grown humanized kidneys in pigs, raising the prospect of human organs being grown inside animals. The Guardian reports: The research involved creating human-pig chimeric embryos containing a combination of human and pig cells. When transferred into surrogate pig mothers, the developing embryos were shown to have kidneys that contained mostly human cells, marking the first time that scientists have grown a solid humanized organ inside another animal. The kidneys were not entirely human as they included vasculature and nerves made mostly from pig cells, meaning they could not be used for transplantation in their current form. It is not clear whether the challenge of making a wholly human organ would be achievable with current genetic engineering techniques. Aside from the kidneys, the embryos were dominated by pig cells, with very few human cells in the brain or central nervous system. The potential for a humanized brain is a serious ethical concern for research involving hybrid embryos and one of the reasons for tight legal restrictions on research in many countries. [...] After being cultivated in the lab, the chimeric embryos were transferred to 13 surrogate sows. After either 25 or 28 days, the gestation was terminated and embryos were extracted and assessed. The embryos had structurally normal kidneys for their stage of development, showing the tubules that would eventually connect the kidney to the bladder, and were composed of 50-60% human cells. Very human neural cells were found in the brain and spinal cord. The research has been published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The financial services platform Square is experiencing a widespread outage, causing many small businesses around the country to switch to cash only. From a report: In a statement posted to their website, Square said it began investigating a service disruption linked to its data center at 11:47 a.m. As of 4:48 p.m., the San Francisco-based company said it was still working on a fix. Aaron Bergh, owner of Calwise Spirits Co. in Paso Robles, said he noticed the disruption around noon. In the three hours following, his business did about $1,000 in sales -- all without being able to process credit card payments. Instead employees have been writing down credit card numbers to charge later or done business in cash, which has limited how much customers can spend, he said. In the five years he's been doing business, Bergh said he'd never experienced a Square outage lasting more than half-an-hour. Even in those cases, the platform would still allow businesses to record credit card information. This time, he can't even log into his account, he said. Square is posting updates at issquareup.com.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Thousands of Airbnbs and short-term rentals are about to be wiped off the map in New York City. Local Law 18, which came into force Tuesday, is so strict it doesn't just limit how Airbnb operates in the city -- it almost bans it entirely for many guests and hosts. From now on, all short-term rental hosts in New York must register with the city, and only those who live in the place they're renting -- and are present when someone is staying -- can qualify. And people can only have two guests. Gone are the days of sleek downtown apartments outfitted for bachelorette parties, cozy two- and three-bedroom apartments near museums for families, and even the option for people to rent out their apartment on weekends when they're away. While Airbnb, Vrbo, and others can continue to operate in New York, the new rules are so tight that Airbnb sees it as a "de facto ban" on its business. The rules "are a blow to its tourism economy and the thousands of New Yorkers and small businesses in the outer boroughs who rely on home sharing and tourism dollars to help make ends meet," says Theo Yedinsky, global policy director for Airbnb. "The city is sending a clear message to millions of potential visitors who will now have fewer accommodation options when they visit New York City: You are not welcome." According to Inside Airbnb, there are currently more than 40,000 Airbnbs in New York -- 22,434 of those are short-term rentals. "While the number of rentals may be small compared to New York City's population of 8 million people, Murray Cox, founder of Inside Airbnb, says some desirable neighborhoods are overly burdened by short-term rentals, which can result in housing shortages and higher rents," reports Wired. "The new law, in theory, could open these homes to local residents." The implementation of the law shows "very clearly you can cut down on short-term rentals," says Cox, who was part of the Coalition Against Illegal Hotels, a group that advocated for the registration law. "You can make these platforms accountable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a deal that could be worth $200 million, Microsoft announced that it is purchasing 315,000 metric tons of carbon removal over a multi-year period from climate tech startup Heirloom Carbon. It's one of the biggest deals of its kind, reports The Wall Street Journal (paywalled). GeekWire reports: San Francisco-based Heirloom is harnessing a geologic approach to catching and holding carbon dioxide. Limestone naturally binds to carbon, but Heirloom's technology dramatically speeds up the process, cutting it from years to days. The startup operates the only U.S. facility permanently capturing carbon. Even more important than the volume of carbon to be removed is the deal's ability to unlock additional funding and investments to grow Heirloom's business and the sector more broadly. Microsoft previously invested in Heirloom through its $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund. The new deal represents a financially empowering "bankable agreement," said Heirloom CEO Shashank Samala. "Bankable agreements of this magnitude enable Heirloom to raise project finance for our rapid scale-up, fueling exponential growth like what we've seen in the renewable energy industry," Samala said in a statement. The guaranteed cash flow can facilitate financing needed to build Heirloom's next two commercial sites. The deal is also "an example of the impact of the Biden administration's 2021 infrastructure bill," notes the report. "[T]he purchase was tied to Heirloom being selected by the U.S. Department of Energy as one of the nation's direct air capture (DAC) hubs. It will receive $600 million of matching funding thanks to the designation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ryan Salame, a top FTX executive who played a key role in the exchange's political fundraising operations, will forfeit $1.5 billion after pleading guilty on Thursday to federal criminal charges tied to the exchange. CoinDesk reports: Salame, who was co-CEO of FTX's Bahamas entity FTX Digital Markets, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to make unlawful contributions and defraud the Federal Election Commission and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transferring business. "I made political contributions in my name that were funded by transfers from an Alameda subsidiary," Salame told Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is also overseeing Bankman-Fried's trial, as he entered his guilty plea. The transfers were "categorized as loans," Salame said, but "it was understood that the would not be repaid." The donations, according to Salame, "were for the benefit of initiatives introduced by others but supported by Sam Bankman-Fried." As part of his plea agreement with the government, Salame has been ordered to forfeit more than $1.5 billion dollars. He agreed to forfeit $6 million before his sentencing, expected in March of next year. To help cover this amount, Salame has already agreed to give the government a "2021 Porsche automobile" and multiple properties, including two Massachusetts homes and ownership of the East Rood Farm Corporation, an entity Salame owns. Additionally, Salame was ordered to pay more than $5.5 million in restitution to FTX debtors. According to a DOJ document (PDF), the $1.5 billion Salame will forfeit represents "property involved in" the unlicensed money transmitter charge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is rolling out a new feature to Windows Insiders that lets you remove an image's background in Paint with a single click. The Verge reports: To use the tool, testers can open an image with Paint and then hit the background removal button on the left side of Paint's toolbar. From there, Paint will automatically detect the subject of an image and cut away the background. Microsoft notes that you can also manually select the portion of the background that you want to remove.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Clubhouse, the invite-only social audio app that went viral during the pandemic, is trying to make a comeback by rebranding itself as a better alternative for group texting. Engadget reports: The audio app is pivoting from its signature "drop-in" audio conversations to friend-centric voice chats, the company said in an update. Instead of sprawling rooms where users host live-streamed conversations open to any and all of the app's users, the new Clubhouse will instead encourage users to join groups with people they know. The groups are, somewhat confusingly, called "chats," and allow friends and friends-of-friends to exchange voice messages. There's still a "drop-in" element, but it's less focused on real-time talking and geared more toward something like an Instagram Story -- a destination for checking in and sharing quick updates. The app is also ditching text-based direct messages in favor of private audio messages which, yes, it's calling voicemails or VMs. The biggest shift, however, isn't just the format of the conversations but that Clubhouse is now positioning itself as more of a Snapchat, where smaller groups of friends communicate privately or semi-privately, than a Twitter, where all the app's users are shouting into the void. "It's not about passively listening to people speaking," the company wrote in an update. "You can listen to great conversations on podcasts, YouTube, TikTok, and a lot of other platforms. It's about talking with people ... and becoming real-life friends with your friends' friends, and people you never would have met otherwise."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Google's Privacy Sandbox, a controversial set of tools and settings meant to replace third-party cookies, is now on almost every single Chrome browser, according to a company blog post published Thursday. Google says Privacy Sandbox is now available to around 97% of Chrome users, and that number will reach 100% in the next few months. The news comes on the heels of the browser's 15th anniversary, which Google is celebrating by redesigning Chrome to make it look and feel more closely aligned with the design paradigm of Android and the rest of the Google suite. The final step in this process comes in 2024, when Google will disable third-party cookies in Chrome for good, marking the end of their decades-long reign of privacy-violating terror. Back in 2019, Google said the cookie era was coming to a close. In place of third-party cookies, Privacy Sandbox will implement a long list of new tools for the ad industry. Google, after all, makes all of its money by spying on you and turning the insights into ads, so it's not about to put itself out of business. In fairness, this new system is really more private, though it's private on Google's terms. The biggest change is "Ad Topics," a.k.a. the Topics API if you're a huge nerd who's been following this stuff for years. With Topics, Chrome will keep track of all the websites you're looking at and sort you into a variety of categories. This tracking happens in your browser and the data stays on your device. Neither Google nor anyone else gets to see your browsing history or learn anything about you as an individual throughout this process. Websites and advertising companies will know there's a person interested in a certain Topic, but they won't be able to tell who you are specifically. There's also an extremely complicated technique websites can use to tag you with subjects they want you to see ads about, called "Site Suggested Ads." Google is also rolling out a tool called "Ad Measurement," which helps companies keep track of how well their ads are working through metrics such as the time of day you saw an ad and whether you clicked on it. Google gives users some control over how these tools are implemented. With the rollout of Privacy Sandbox comes new settings listed as "Ad privacy controls," which you can adjust in Chrome's preferences. Further reading: Chrome is About To Look a Bit DifferentRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Nearly half of LGBTQ dating app Grindr's workforce has quit after the company enacted a strict two-day-per-week in-office requirement -- and furious staffers claim the mandate was in retaliation for their campaign to unionize. From a report: Last month, Grindr informed employees that they had two weeks to decide whether they would relocate to a "hub" office location and work on site two days per week or terminate their employment, according to the labor group Communications Workers of America. Through the end of August, about 80 employees -- roughly 45% of Grindr's 180-person workforce -- had left the company due to the mandate, union organizers said. Grindr offered a severance package for employees who could not or would not comply with the relocation requirement -- a move that the group described as an attempt "to silence workers from speaking out about their working conditions." "These decisions have left Grindr dangerously understaffed and raises questions about the safety, security and stability of the app for users," said Erick Cortez, a member of Grindr United-CWA. "It is clear Grindr wants workers to be silenced and deterred from exercising our right to organize, regardless of the expense." Grindr employees had announced their intent to unionize on July 20 through CWA, but the labor drive has yet to receive formal recognition. The company announced its return-to-office mandate on Aug. 4. The CWA has filed a formal complaint on behalf of Grindr employees with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the company's actions amounted to unlawful retaliation. "It is unimaginably disappointing that dozens of our colleagues have had to leave their jobs because Grindr management did not want to sit down with workers and respect our right to organize," Cortez added. A Grindr spokesperson said in a statement: "We have full confidence in our team and their ability to continue to drive the business forward and make the world and lives of our users freer, more tolerant, and more just. We are looking forward to returning to the office in a hybrid model in October and further improving productivity and collaboration for our entire team."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Morgan Stanley is rolling out a generative AI chatbot this month to help bankers quickly find research or forms without needing to sift through hundreds of thousands of documents. According to Reuters, it's being developed with OpenAI. From the report: The bank is also developing technology which eventually, with clients' permission, could create a meeting summary of the conversation, draft a follow-up email suggesting next steps, update the bank's sales database, schedule a follow-up appointment, and learn how to help advisers manage clients' finances on areas such as taxes, retirement savings and inheritances. The details of the program have not yet been reported. While the bot will give insights and administrative support to financial advisers, investment advice will remain the purview of humans. "The adviser is still at the center," said [Sal Cucchiara, Morgan Stanley's chief information officer of wealth and investment management, who is among the executives driving the bank's push into AI]. For now, employees view the technology as a helpful tool and aren't worried that they'll be replaced by bots, he said. The AI initiative is part of Morgan Stanley's strategy to drive its wealth division, where net revenue surged 16% to a record in the second quarter and new client assets grew $90 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Chinese state-aligned influence and disinformation campaigns are impersonating U.S. voters and targeting political candidates on multiple social media platforms with improved sophistication, Microsoft said in a threat analysis report Thursday. Chinese Communist Party-affiliated "covert influence operations have now begun to successfully engage with target audiences on social media to a greater extent than previously observed," according to the report, which focused on the rise in "digital threats from East Asia." The Microsoft report also cautioned that some Chinese influence campaigns are now using generative artificial intelligence to create visual content that's "already drawn higher levels of engagement from authentic" users, a trend the company said began around March. Chinese influence campaigns have historically struggled to gain traction with intended targets, who in this case are U.S. voters and residents. But since the 2022 midterm elections, those efforts have become more effective, Microsoft warned. Microsoft found content from Chinese influence campaigns on multiple apps, including Meta's Facebook and Instagram, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, and X. In August, Facebook parent Meta announced it had disrupted the largest ever identified disinformation campaign and linked it to China state-affiliated actors. Microsoft's report included screenshots of two different X posts in April that were identified as CCP-affiliated disinformation. Both were about the Black Lives Matter movement and had the same graphic. The first came from an automated CCP-affiliated account. The second, Microsoft said, was uploaded by an account impersonating a conservative U.S. voter seven hours later.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson has removed TypeScript from the forthcoming version 8 of the Turbo framework, saying he has "never been a fan," but many Turbo users have protested that the decision was rushed and the change is unwelcome. From a report: A comment on the GitHub pull request that removes TypeScript states that this "is a step back, for both library users and contributors." This comment has -- at the time of writing -- 357 likes and just 8 downvotes, suggesting wide support. Turbo is a framework for delivering HTML pages intended to "dramatically reduce the amount of custom JavaScript," and is sponsored by Hannson's company 37signals, whose products include the Basecamp project management platform and the Hey messaging system. Turbo is the engine of Hotwire, short for "HTML over the wire," because it prefers sending HTML itself rather than JSON data and JavaScript code. Although Turbo itself is not among the most popular frameworks, Ruby on Rails is well-known and used by major web sites including GitHub and Shopify. Hansson posted that TypeScript "pollutes the code with type gymnastics that add ever so little joy to my development experience, and quite frequently considerable grief. Things that should be easy become hard." The community around the open source Turbo project though is for the most part perplexed and disappointed, not only by the change itself, but also by the manner in which it was made.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI's ChatGPT, the wildly popular artificial intelligence chatbot launched in November, saw monthly website visits decline for the third month in a row in August, though there are signs the decline is coming to an end, according to analytics firm Similarweb. Reuters: Worldwide desktop and mobile website visits to the ChatGPT website decreased by 3.2% to 1.43 billion in August, following approximately 10% drops from each of the previous two months. The amount of time visitors spent on the website has also been declining monthly since March, from an average of 8.7 minutes on site to 7 minutes on site in August. But August worldwide unique visitors ticked up to 180.5 million users from 180 million. School coming back into session in September may help ChatGPT's traffic and usage, and some schools have begun to embrace it. U.S. ChatGPT traffic in August rose slightly, in concert with American schools being back in session. "Students seeking homework help appears to be part of the story: the percentage of younger users of the website dropped over the summer and is now starting to bounce back," said David F. Carr of Similarweb, who regularly tracks ChatGPT and its competitors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Artificial intelligence, according to Nicolai Tangen, head of Norway's huge $1.4tn oil fund, is like being "in a rocket on the way into space ... It's hugely exciting, but it's also scary." Stretching the metaphor to its limits, the head of the world's largest sovereign wealth fund adds: "We hope we're in Apollo 11, not Challenger. The mission statement is to return safely." All this might just seem to be a glib soundbite, but the Norwegian fund is among the most advanced of any of the world's big traditional investors in publicly articulating its thoughts on AI. This is not just on the balance between risk and opportunity from AI but also what it thinks the companies it invests in should be doing. As the importance of AI only grows, the oil fund's stance is going to be well worth following. [...] The first is ensuring boards are accountable for the responsible development and use of AI. Here, Tangen is damning. "Boards are absolutely not on top of this," he says. Given how many companies have long struggled to get enough expertise on cyber security, AI is likely to be an even tougher ask. The oil fund could vote against those that do nothing, Tangen adds. The second relates to how transparent companies are on how they use AI and how they explain how those systems have been designed and tested. As well as the tech industry itself, the fund is paying particular attention to those sectors using AI with consumers such as healthcare, financial and consumer goods. The final element is risk management. The fund argues that companies should be proactive, and ensure outside verification and auditing of their AI systems and risk management processes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Senate today approved a nominee to fill the vacant, fifth seat on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The Senate voted 55 to 43 to approve Anna Gomez as the fifth FCC Commissioner. Her term will be for five years from July 1, 2021, so effectively about three years. From a report: Gomez most recently has served as a senior advisor on communications policy at the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy. She was also deputy administrator at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) from 2009 to 2013. The NTIA is not only important as the advisor to the President on national spectrum policy, but the agency is also currently overseeing the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft says it will defend buyers of its artificial intelligence products from copyright infringement lawsuits, an effort by the software giant to ease concerns customers might have about using its AI "Copilots" to generate content based on existing work. From a report: The Microsoft Copilot Copyright Commitment will protect customers as long as they've "used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products" Hossein Nowbar, General Counsel, Corporate Legal Affairs and Corporate Secretary at Microsoft, said in a blog post Thursday. Microsoft also pledged to pay related fines or settlements and said it has taken steps to ensure its Copilots respect copyright. "We believe in standing behind our customers when they use our products," Nowbar said. "We are charging our commercial customers for our Copilots, and if their use creates legal issues, we should make this our problem rather than our customers' problem." Generative AI applications scoop up existing content such as art, articles and programming code and use it to generate new material that can simplify or automate a range of tasks. Microsoft is baking the technology, developed with partner OpenAI, into many of its biggest products, including Office and Windows, potentially putting customers in legal jeopardy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is killing off the last vestiges of Google Play Movies & TV, a service that sold premium Hollywood films and TV shows as part of Google's once-cohesive string of Google Play content stores. From a report: The company emailed users of Android TV to say that the "Google Play Movies & TV app will no longer be available on your Android TV device from 05 October 2023. You can continue to buy or rent movies directly through the Shop tab on your Android TV." Play Movies has been going through a slow death as Google shuffles around its media content. The smartphone Play Movies app became "Google TV" in 2022, and that same year, the Play Store app was stripped of movie and TV sales. On third-party smart TVs (this is a different category than today's Android TV announcement) the app was killed in 2021. On Android TV, the new "Shop" tab seems to just be an OS-integrated Google TV content store. If you think this sounds confusing, you're not alone. Google's support page reflects the ridiculous state of Google's video apps, instructing users that "in Your Library, you can find content that you bought from: Google Play Movies & TV, YouTube, Android TV, Google TV." How any normal person is supposed to understand that pile of Google media brands, and how it works across phones, the web, and various smart TV OSes, is beyond me.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new report says that a PR firm has been paying Rotten Tomatoes critics for positive reviews for over five years. From a report: Moviegoers, critics, and the average internet user have all used the aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes at one point or another. The website categorizes films and shows from "fresh" to "rotten," with rotten being those with lower ratings. Now it looks like the site's scores have been manipulated for more than five years. As noted by Vulture, it looks like a PR firm has manipulated movie scores on Rotten Tomatoes by paying the critics directly. This has been happening for years. The PR firm, named Bunker 15, is said to pay as much as $50.00 for a single Rotten Tomatoes review. The payments, which aren't typically disclosed, are usually given to obscure critics who happen to be part of a pool tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. Though it's worth noting that the aggregation site's rules prohibit "Reviewing based on a financial incentive." Director Paul Schrader, also a critic, spoke out against Rotten Tomatoes which he says is part of a "broken" system. "The system is broken. Audiences are dumber. Normal people don't go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do." The site responded by delisting a variety of Bunker 15 films from their website. Furthermore, they issued a warning to any critics that reviewed them. The warning emphasizes that they do not tolerate manipulation on their platform.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In Cologne last month, Nintendo's public Gamescom showfloor booth let you play Pikmin 4 and Super Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. But behind the scenes, the company had more up its sleeves. Developer presentations for Switch 2 took place behind closed doors, Eurogamer understands, with partners shown tech demos of how well the system is designed to run. One Switch 2 demo is a souped up version of Switch launch title Zelda: Breath of the Wild, designed to hit the Switch 2's beefier target specs. (To be clear, though - this is just a tech demo. There's no suggestion the game will be re-released.) Nintendo is yet to publicly discuss plans for its inevitable Switch successor, though its new hardware is widely-expected to launch at some point in 2024. Word that it is now being shown to external developers comes as details have begun to emerge around when we may see the system launch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chrome on the desktop is about to get a new look. From a report: Google's widely used browser is getting an update based on its Material You design language in the coming weeks, and in this case, that will include refreshed icons with "a focus on legibility" and new color palettes that "better complement your tabs and toolbar," according to a blog post from Chrome VP Parisa Tabriz.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BMW has made a U-turn on a controversial subscription service that saw drivers pay a fee to activate the heated seats already fitted to their car. From a report: First announced in 2020, the subscription was intended to be one of many ways to offer flexibility to customers, who could opt in to pay for vehicle functions when it suited them, then stop paying when they were no longer wanted. But instead of options like increased electric car performance -- as was later offered by Mercedes -- or other technology-driven functions like autonomous parking or a 5G data connection, BMW drew criticism for charging a subscription for heated seats already installed at the factory. Now though, BMW will no longer offer such a service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Scientists have grown an entity that closely resembles an early human embryo, without using sperm, eggs or a womb. The Weizmann Institute team say their "embryo model", made using stem cells, looks like a textbook example of a real 14-day-old embryo. It even released hormones that turned a pregnancy test positive in the lab. The ambition for embryo models is to provide an ethical way of understanding the earliest moments of our lives. This research, published in the journal Nature, is described by the Israeli team as the first "complete" embryo model for mimicking all the key structures that emerge in the early embryo. Instead of a sperm and egg, the starting material was naive stem cells which were reprogrammed to gain the potential to become any type of tissue in the body. Chemicals were then used to coax these stem cells into becoming four types of cell found in the earliest stages of the human embryo: epiblast cells, which become the embryo proper (or foetus); trophoblast cells, which become the placenta; hypoblast cells, which become the supportive yolk sac; and extraembryonic mesoderm cells. A total of 120 of these cells were mixed in a precise ratio -- and then, the scientists step back and watch. About 1% of the mixture began the journey of spontaneously assembling themselves into a structure that resembles, but is not identical to, a human embryo. The embryo models were allowed to grow and develop until they were comparable to an embryo 14 days after fertilization. In many countries, this is the legal cut-off for normal embryo research. The hope is embryo models can help scientists explain how different types of cell emerge, witness the earliest steps in building the body's organs or understand inherited or genetic diseases. Already, this study shows other parts of the embryo will not form unless the early placenta cells can surround it. There is even talk of improving in vitro fertilization (IVF) success rates by helping to understand why some embryos fail or using the models to test whether medicines are safe during pregnancy.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists are reporting that this year's summer was the hottest on record -- and by a significant margin. CNN reports: June to August was the planet's warmest such period since records began in 1940, according to data from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service. The global average temperature this summer was 16.77 degrees Celsius (62.19 Fahrenheit), according to Copernicus, which is 0.66 degrees Celsius above the 1990 to 2020 average -- beating the previous record, set in August 2019, by nearly 0.3 degrees Celsius. Typically these records, which track the average air temperature across the entire world, are broken by hundredths of a degree. This is the first set of scientific data to confirm what many had believed was inevitable. The planet experienced its hottest June on record, followed by the hottest July -- both breaking previous records by large margins. August was also the warmest such month on record, according to the new Copernicus data, and warmer than every other month this year except for July. The global average temperature for the month was 16.82 degrees Celsius -- 0.31 degrees warmer than the previous record set in 2016. Both July and August are estimated to have been 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels, according to Copernicus, a key threshold scientists have long warned the world must stay under to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. With four months of the year remaining, 2023 currently ranks as the second warmest on record, according to Copernicus, only 0.01 degrees Celsius below 2016, which is currently the warmest year on record.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The App Store for Apple's Vision Pro headset will include all compatible iPhone and iPad apps "by default." The Verge reports: In an update on Tuesday, Apple said it will release the new App Store with the developer beta of visionOS this fall. Both iPad and iPhone apps will appear alongside visionOS apps in the new App Store. As Apple has said previously, it will automatically import iOS and iPadOS apps to its new mixed reality operating system "with no additional work required." Developers can still optimize their apps if needed. "By default, your iPad and/or iPhone apps will be published automatically on the App Store on Apple Vision Pro," Apple notes. "Most frameworks available in iPadOS and iOS are also included in visionOS, which means nearly all iPad and iPhone apps can run on visionOS, unmodified." Developers also have the option of building an app for Vision Pro using Apple's visionOS software development kit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, has declared itself in financial distress after troubled Oracle project costs ballooned from $25 million to around $125.5 million. The Register reports: Contributing to the publication of a legal Section 114 Notice, which says the $4.3 billion revenue organization is unable to balance the books, is a bill of up to $954 million to settle equal pay claims. In a statement today, councillors John Cotton and Sharon Thompson, leader and deputy leader respectively, said the authority was also hit by financial stress owing to issues with the implementation of its Oracle IT system. The council has made a request to the Local Government Association for additional strategic support, the statement said. In May, Birmingham City Council said it was set to pay up to $125.5 million for its Oracle ERP system -- potentially a fourfold increase on initial estimated expenses -- in a project suffering from delays, cost over-runs, and a lack of controls. After grappling with the project to replace SAP for core HR and finance functions since 2018, the council reviewed the plan in 2019, 2020, and again in 2021, when the total implementation cost for the project almost doubled to $48.5 million. The project, dubbed Financial and People, was "crucial to an organisation of Birmingham City Council's size," a spokesperson said at the time. Cotton said the system had a problem with how it was "tracking our financial transactions and HR transactions issues as well. That's got to be fixed," he said. Earlier this year, one insider told The Register that Oracle Fusion, the cloud-based ERP system the council is moving to, "is not a product that is suitable for local authorities, because it's very much geared towards a manufacturing/trading organization." They said the previous SAP system had been heavily customized to meet the council's needs and it was struggling to recreate these functions in Oracle.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Due to confidence issues and difficulties interviewing, neurodivergent individuals often face higher unemployment rates than their non-neurodivergent counterparts. However, they may possess specialized skills that can enhance team productivity by up to 30% in suitable work settings. A startup backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman aims to help these job seekers find suitable employment opportunities, leveraging technology and assessments to match individuals with roles that best align with their abilities and skills. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from TechCrunch: Enter Mentra. The Charlotte, N.C.-based startup, whose three co-founders are all autistic is building what it describes as an AI-powered "neuroinclusive employment network." Specifically, its tech platform leverages artificial intelligence to help large enterprises hire employees with cognitive differences such as autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The startup's unique premise caught the early attention of OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, who first invested in the company with a $1 million pre-seed investment in February 2022 through his venture firm, Hydrazine Capital. Mentra also won an AI for accessibility grant from Microsoft. Shine Capital led its $3.5 million seed round this year, which also included participation from Altman's fund, Verissimo, Full Circle, Charlotte Fund, as well as angel investors including David Apple and Dawn Dobras. What sets Mentra apart is its approach to job fit, maintains Mentra co-founder and CEO Jhillika Kumar. The startup goes beyond keywords in resumes to match employers with talent, she said, considering factors around a person's neurotype, aptitude, environmental sensitivities. To date, its one-year retention rate has remained at an impressive 97.5%. [...] One way Mentra uses AI is to parse through job descriptions to make sure they are cognitively accessible and broken down in a consistent format that is not exclusionary. "Then we are able to use an algorithm to go through the jobseekers on our platform to identify who's the best fit based on mostly neuro type," Kumar told TechCrunch. "One person might be extremely good at hyper focusing, very detail-oriented, very process-oriented or very strategic, and you have specific skills that map to their strengths in the role." Over 70% of the data Mentra collects is not collected by an Indeed or a traditional job-finding platform. It uses that holistic data to make the match between the job and the individual. The startup's current revenue model is free for neurodivergent jobseekers, and it charges an annual subscription for enterprise companies to access the platform. It is also building out a neuroinclusion marketplace for service providers such as consultancies and training firms to provide hands-on services to companies that accompany Mentra's core platform. "In the future, we plan to have a similar marketplace available for neurodivergents to access tailored services as well throughout the life of their career such as bootcamps and job coaches," Kumar added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.