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An anonymous reader writes: A massive storm has been raging on Jupiter for centuries, and, for the most part, has appeared very serious. A new series of detailed images, however, revealed that the famous red cyclone can get a little squiggly, bulging into different shapes and sizes over a short period of time. Astronomers used the Hubble space telescope to look at Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS) from December 2023 to March 2024, and they observed the massive storm changing dimensions over the 90-day period. The reason behind this unexpected shapeshifting is unknown, but it revealed that the famous red storm is not as stable as it seemed. The results of the Hubble observations are detailed in a study published Wednesday in The Planetary Science Journal. Using Hubble's observations, the team of astronomers behind the new study measured the Great Red Spot's size, shape, brightness, color, and vorticity over one full oscillation cycle. The combined images act like a time-lapse of the storm's changing behavior, revealing its famous red eye varying in size, while its core gets brighter when the Great Red Spot is at its largest during the 90-day cycle.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Retailers across the U.S. are grappling with the aftermath of Redbox's bankruptcy, tasked with removing 24,000 abandoned DVD-dispensing machines. CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, and others are facing logistical challenges and potential safety hazards, according to WSJ. The 890-pound kiosks, often hardwired into stores' electrical systems, require specialized removal. Further reading: Redbox App Axed, Dashing People's Hopes of Keeping Purchased Content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel has announced its new Arrow Lake desktop processors, marking a significant shift in the company's approach to chip design and power efficiency. The Core Ultra 200S series, set to launch on October 24, 2024, introduces a disaggregated architecture manufactured using TSMC's advanced nodes. The flagship Core Ultra 9 285K boasts 24 cores (8 performance, 16 efficiency) and can boost up to 5.7 GHz, priced at $589. Intel claims the new chips offer comparable performance to their predecessors while consuming significantly less power, with reductions of up to 136 watts in some gaming scenarios. Arrow Lake utilizes a tiled design, combining compute, GPU, SoC, and I/O components manufactured by TSMC and packaged using Intel's Foveros technology. The compute tile is built on TSMC's N3B process, while the GPU tile uses TSMC's N5P, and the I/O and SoC tiles are on TSMC's N6. Intel's Roger Chandler stated, "Arrow Lake picks up the mantle of Raptor Lake's top-end gaming performance and delivers parity performance at about half the power." Intel acknowledges that gaming performance may lag slightly behind the previous generation, with a 5% deficit in some benchmarks compared to the Core i9-14900K. The company is positioning Arrow Lake as a balanced solution, emphasizing power efficiency and content creation capabilities. The new processors require a new LGA 1851 socket and Z890 chipset, necessitating motherboard upgrades. Memory support extends to DDR5-6400, with XMP profiles potentially reaching DDR5-8000.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder and chief technology officer of Basecamp-maker 37signals, has criticized Automattic's demand for 8% of vendor WP Engine's revenues as a violation of open source principles and the GPL license. He argues this, among other things, undermines the clarity and certainty of open source licensing, threatening its integrity beyond WordPress. He writes: Ruby on Rails, the open-source web framework I created, has been used to create businesses worth hundreds of billions of dollars combined. Some of those businesses express their gratitude and self-interest by supporting the framework with dedicated developers, membership of The Rails Foundation, or conference sponsorships. But many also do not! And that is absolutely their right, even if it occasionally irks a little. That's the deal. That's open source. I give you a gift of code, you accept the terms of the license. There cannot be a second set of shadow obligations that might suddenly apply, if you strike it rich using the software. Then the license is meaningless, the clarity all muddled, and certainty lost. Look, Automattic can change their license away from the GPL any time they wish. The new license will only apply to new code, though, and WP Engine, or anyone else, are eligible to fork the project. That's what happened with Redis after Redis Labs dropped their BSD license and went with a commercial source-available alternative. Valkey was forked from the last free Redis version, and now that's where anyone interested in an open-source Redis implementation is likely to go. But I suspect Automattic wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want to retain WordPress' shine of open source, but also be able to extract their pound of flesh from any competitor that might appear, whenever they see fit. Screw that.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Porch pirates across the country for months have been snatching FedEx packages that contain AT&T iPhones -- within minutes or even seconds of delivery. From a report: The key to these swift crimes, investigators say: The thieves are armed with tracking numbers. Another factor that makes packages from AT&T particularly vulnerable is that AT&T typically doesn't require signature on delivery. Doorbell camera videos show the thefts in New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Michigan, Georgia, Florida and Texas. The details are similar: A FedEx driver drops off a box with an iPhone from AT&T. Then a person walks up -- sometimes wearing an Amazon delivery vest -- and plucks the package off the front step. The heist can be so quick that in some videos, the FedEx driver and thief cross paths. "They know what's getting delivered and the location," said Detective Lt. Matt Arsenault from the Gardner Police Department in Massachusetts, which is investigating several recent thefts. "They meet the delivery driver at the front door and take it." Since the pandemic, parcel carriers have reported a rise in porch thefts as workers have returned to offices and fewer people are home during the day to receive packages. Now, a spate of thefts that began a few months ago is targeting FedEx deliveries for AT&T. The two companies said they were working with law enforcement to investigate, and declined to disclose how many such packages have been stolen.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is fighting misinformation on top of a major storm cleanup in Florida as Hurricane Milton rapidly intensifies just after Hurricane Helene rocked the state. From a report: FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters on a call Tuesday that misinformation around the storms is "absolutely the worst I have ever seen," according to Politico. FEMA posted a rumor response page about the hurricane, and though it's not the first time it's taken that kind of approach, Criswell said, "I anticipated some of this, but not to the extent that we're seeing." FEMA's rumor response page includes fact-checks to claims made by former President Donald Trump, like that the agency will only provide $750 to disaster survivors. FEMA says that's just the amount provided quickly through "Serious Needs Assistance" for food and emergency supplies, but survivors could still be eligible for other types of funds, too. Other fact-checks include debunking the false claim that FEMA disaster response resources were diverted to border issues. FEMA says "Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alypius shares a report from 9to5Mac: It was revealed this weekend that Chinese hackers managed to access systems run by three of the largest internet service providers (ISPs) in the US. What's notable about the attack is that it compromised security backdoors deliberately created to allow for wiretaps by US law enforcement. [...] Apple famously refused the FBI's request to create a backdoor into iPhones to help access devices used by shooters in San Bernardino and Pensacola. The FBI was subsequently successful in accessing all the iPhones concerned without the assistance it sought. Our arguments against such backdoors predate both cases, when Apple spoke out on the issue in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris more than a decade ago: "Apple is absolutely right to say that the moment you build in a backdoor for use by governments, it will only be a matter of time before hackers figure it out. You cannot have an encryption system which is only a little bit insecure any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. Encryption systems are either secure or they're not -- and if they're not then it's a question of when, rather than if, others are able to exploit the vulnerability." This latest case perfectly illustrates the point. The law required ISPs to create backdoors that could be used for wiretaps by US law enforcement, and hackers have now found and accessed them. Exactly the same would be true if Apple created backdoors into iPhones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The rapid increases in life expectancy seen in the 20th century have slowed significantly, according to a new analysis published in the journal Nature. The Guardian reports: According to the study, children born recently in regions with the oldest people are far from likely to become centenarians. At best, the researchers predict 15% of females and 5% of males in the oldest-living areas will reach 100 this century. "If you're planning for retirement, it's probably not a good idea to assume you're going to make it to 100," said Jay Olshansky, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "You'd probably have to work for at least 10 years longer than you'd think. And you want to enjoy the last phase of your life, you don't necessarily want to spend it working to save for time you're not going to experience." Advances in public health and medicine sparked a longevity revolution in the 20th century. In the previous 2,000 years, life expectancy crept up, on average, one year every century or two. In the 20th century, average life expectancy rocketed, with people gaining an extra three years every decade. For the latest study, Olshansky delved into national statistics from the US and nine regions with the highest life expectancies, focusing on 1990 to 2019, before the Covid pandemic struck. The data from Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain showed that rises in life expectancy had slowed dramatically. In the US, life expectancy fell [T]he researchers describe how on average, life expectancy in the longest-living regions rose only 6.5 years between 1990 and 2019. They predict that girls born recently in the regions have only a 5.3% chance of reaching 100 years old, while boys have a 1.8% chance. "In the modern era we have, through public health and medicine, manufactured decades of life that otherwise would not exist," Olshansky said. "These gains must slow down. The longevity game we're playing today is different to the longevity game we played a century ago when we were saving infants and children and women of child-bearing age and the gains in life expectancy were large. Now the gains are small because we're saving people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s." Olshansky said it would take radical new treatments that slow ageing, the greatest risk factor for many diseases, to achieve another longevity revolution. Research in the field is afoot with a dozen or so drugs shown to increase the lifespan of mice.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Back in 2019, Google made waves by claiming it had achieved what has been called "quantum supremacy" -- the ability of a quantum computer to perform operations that would take a wildly impractical amount of time to simulate on standard computing hardware. That claim proved to be controversial, in that the operations were little more than a benchmark that involved getting the quantum computer to behave like a quantum computer; separately, improved ideas about how to perform the simulation on a supercomputer cut the time required down significantly. But Google is back with a new exploration of the benchmark, described in a paper published in Nature on Wednesday. It uses the benchmark to identify what it calls a phase transition in the performance of its quantum processor and uses it to identify conditions where the processor can operate with low noise. Taking advantage of that, they again show that, even giving classical hardware every potential advantage, it would take a supercomputer a dozen years to simulate things.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boston-based engineer and photographer Wenting Zhang built his own full-frame camera and open-sourced the project on GitLab for anyone else to build upon. The camera, named Sitina S1, features a 10MP CCD sensor, custom electronics, and a 3D-printed body. Digital Photography Review reports: Zhang says he started the project in 2017, and it's not finished yet. "Engineers are usually bad at estimating how long things will take. I am probably particularly bad at that. I expected this project to be challenging, so it would take a bit longer, like probably one year. Turned out my estimation was off," he says. He makes clear to point out that this is a hobby project, purely for fun, and that his camera isn't going to achieve the level of image quality found in commercially available products from established companies. Despite that, his project provides a fascinating look into what's involved in building a camera from the ground up. Although CMOS has become the dominant sensor technology in consumer cameras, owing to factors like speed, lower power consumption and cost, Zhang's camera is built around a 10MP Kodak KAI-11000CM CCD sensor with a global electronic shutter, which he selected for a rather pragmatic reason: it was easy to source. "Most manufacturers (like Sony) aren't going to just sell a sensor to a random hobbyist, so I have to buy whatever is available on eBay. This 10MP CCD turned out to be available," he explains. The choice of sensor has a useful benefit. As he explains in one of his videos, designing and building a mechanical shutter is complicated and beyond his area of expertise, so his DIY design is based on using an electronic shutter. For similar reasons, he chose to use an LCD screen as a viewfinder rather than a prism-based optical design, resulting in a mirrorless camera. Zhang wanted his design to be compatible with existing lenses. His mirrorless design, with a short flange distance, provided a great deal of flexibility to adapt different lenses to the camera, and he's currently using E-mount with active electrical contacts. And that's just the start. Zhang also needed to integrate a CCD signal processor with an ADC (analog to digital converter), a CPU, battery, an LCD screen and buttons. He also designed and built his own circuit board with a power-only USB port, flash sync terminal, power button and SD card slot, and create the software and user interface to tie it all together. Finally, everything fits inside a 3D-printed enclosure that, to my eye, looks rather attractive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TorrentFreak's Andy Maxwell reports: In August, New Zealand's Justice Minister authorized Kim Dotcom's immediate arrest and extradition. Dotcom's response to his followers on X was simple: "I'm not leaving." Another post mid-September -- "we are very close to disaster" -- led to Dotcom disappearing for three weeks. On his return, Dotcom said X had suspended his account, based on an extremely serious allegation. After accusing Elon Musk of failing to help, yesterday Dotcom warned that a Trump loss would see Musk indicted and "fighting for his life." Dotcom has a plan to avoid extradition; chaos like this provides the fuel. The details of Dotcom's "plan" to stay in New Zealand are yet to be revealed. Given Dotcom's history, exhausting the judiciary with every possible avenue of appeal is pretty much guaranteed, no matter how unlikely the prospects of success. At the same time, it's likely that Dotcom will use social media to preach to the existing choir. He will also try to appeal to those who loathe him, and those who merely hate him, by focusing on a common grievance. "People keep suggesting that I should leave this corrupt US colony like a fugitive on the run. Hell no," he told 1.7 million X followers recently. "Corrupt US colony" and the interchangeable "obedient" variant are clearly derogatory, catering to theories of joint complicity and sniveling weakness. This rhetoric has been visible on Dotcom's social media accounts for some time, but the main theme is Dotcom's belligerent, out-of-the-blue support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. [...] Some people believe that Dotcom genuinely supports Russia and, with his quotes regularly appearing on state-run news channels, arguing otherwise is a pretty tough ask. A different assessment starts with the things Dotcom values most -- his family, his wealth, and his freedom -- and applies that to a reputation of doing whatever it takes to protect and maintain those three, non-negotiable aspects of his life. Right now, his best chance is to tilt the chess board via a change at the White House, and then carefully exploit a change in policy. Dotcom's colleagues took a plea deal from the U.S. and New Zealand that Dotcom insists he would never accept; certainly not if Biden was in power. A Donald Trump win, on the other hand, would introduce an administration Dotcom could be seen to negotiate with, on previously unthinkable terms, without losing face. Previous reluctance to admit any wrongdoing could suddenly seem trivial after the prevention of World War 3. [Since 2022, Dotcom supported narratives more closely aligned with those of the Kremlin, in particular the claim that United States policy is the root cause of the current conflict. The amplification of anti-Ukraine rumors in the United States, strategically links alleged U.S. policy failures to billions of dollars in military aid, all at taxpayers' expense. This toxic mix, Dotcom insists, heralds the collapse of the dollar, the dismantling of the "US Empire," and ultimately a global human catastrophe; World War 3, no holds barred.]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Turkey has blocked access to Discord after the messaging platform refused to share potentially illegal information with authorities. Reuters reports: Justice minister Yilmaz Tunc said an Ankara court decided to block access to Discord from Turkey due to sufficient suspicion that crimes of "child sexual abuse and obscenity" had been committed by some using the platform. The block comes after public outrage in Turkey caused by the murder of two women by a 19-year-old man in Istanbul this month. Content on social media showed Discord users subsequently praising the killing. Transport and infrastructure minister Abdulkadir Uraloglu said the nature of the Discord platform made it difficult for authorities to monitor and intervene when illegal or criminal content is shared. "Security personnel cannot go through the content. We can only intervene when users complain to us about content shared there," he told reporters in parliament. "Since Discord refuses to share its own information, including IP addresses and content, with our security units, we were forced to block access." Russia also recently blocked Discord for violating Russian law, after previously fining the company for failing to remove banned content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Getting open-source and artificial intelligence (AI) on the same page isn't easy. Just ask the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The OSI, the open-source definition steward organization, has been working on creating an open-source artificial intelligence definition for two years now. The group has been making progress, though. Its Open Source AI Definition has now released its first release candidate, RC1. The latest definition aims to clarify the often contentious discussions surrounding open-source AI. It specifies four fundamental freedoms that an AI system must grant to be considered open source: the ability to use the system for any purpose without permission, to study how it works, to modify it for any purpose, and to share it with or without modifications. So far, so good. However, the OSI has opted for a compromise regarding training data. Recognizing it's not easy to share full datasets, the current definition requires "sufficiently detailed information about the data used to train the system" rather than the full dataset itself. This approach aims to balance transparency with practical and legal considerations. That last phrase is proving difficult for some people to swallow. From their perspective, if all the data isn't open, then AI large language models (LLM) based on such data can't be open-source. The OSI summarized these arguments as follows: "Some people believe that full, unfettered access to all training data (with no distinction of its kind) is paramount, arguing that anything less would compromise full reproducibility of AI systems, transparency, and security. This approach would relegate Open-Source AI to a niche of AI trainable only on open data." The OSI acknowledges that the definition of open-source AI isn't final and may need significant rewrites, but the focus is now on fixing bugs and improving documentation. The final version of the Open Source AI Definition is scheduled for release at the All Things Open conference on October 28, 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: OpenBSD 7.6 is out this evening as another major step forward for this BSD operating system with enhanced hardware support, security improvements, updating various user-space software, and enabling other kernel enhancements. There are a ton of changes to find with the just-released OpenBSD 7.6. Some of the new OpenBSD 7.6 features include: - OpenBSD 7.6 provides initial support for Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite (X1E80100) SoCs. The 7.6 release also has initial Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge boot support in ACPI mode with OpenBSD 7.6.- ARM64 has additional CPU security mitigations with Spectre-V4 now in place on ARM64 and adding Spectre-BHB for Cortex-A57 cores.- OpenBSD 7.6 on RISC-V now supports the Milk-V Pioneer board.- OpenBSD 7.6 on AMD64 has finally implemented support for AVX-512.- Various SMP kernel improvements. You can view the full list of features and download the OpenBSD 7.6 release via OpenBSD.org.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BleepingComputer's Lawrence Abrams: Internet Archive's "The Wayback Machine" has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records. News of the breach began circulating Wednesday afternoon after visitors to archive.org began seeing a JavaScript alert created by the hacker, stating that the Internet Archive was breached. "Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!," reads a JavaScript alert shown on the compromised archive.org site. The text "HIBP" refers to is the Have I Been Pwned data breach notification service created by Troy Hunt, with whom threat actors commonly share stolen data to be added to the service. Hunt told BleepingComputer that the threat actor shared the Internet Archive's authentication database nine days ago and it is a 6.4GB SQL file named "ia_users.sql." The database contains authentication information for registered members, including their email addresses, screen names, password change timestamps, Bcrypt-hashed passwords, and other internal data. Hunt says there are 31 million unique email addresses in the database, with many subscribed to the HIBP data breach notification service. The data will soon be added to HIBP, allowing users to enter their email and confirm if their data was exposed in this breach.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Fisker's Chapter 11 bankruptcy has hit a major snag, as the company buying the startup's remaining fleet of electric SUVs says it might not complete the purchase because of a surprising technical issue. The buyer, a New York-area leasing company called American Lease, says in a new filing that Fisker now believes there is no way to transfer the information connected to each SUV to a new server not owned by the bankrupt EV startup. Since American Lease needs that information to operate the vehicles after Fisker is dissolved, the leasing company has filed an emergency objection to the startup's liquidation plan. Fisker was expected to have that plan confirmed in bankruptcy court as early as this Wednesday. American Lease has already handed over "tens of millions of dollars" after the purchase agreement of the 3,000-plus Ocean SUVs was approved in July. These funds have been crucial because Fisker was using them to pay for the bankruptcy process. Fisker needed that money to keep itself alive long enough to settle its debts and also prepare to liquidate what it says is around $1 billion in assets that were, until recently, under control of an Austrian subsidiary that was going through its own insolvency process. [...] American Lease says in its filing that Fisker first brought up the possibility that it wouldn't be able to transfer the information to a new server on Friday, October 4, at 8 p.m. ET. And it says that this week, Fisker informed American Lease that it won't be possible at all. "[American Lease] cannot overstate the significance of this unwelcome news, conveyed to it only after it has paid [Fisker] tens of millions of dollars under the Purchase Agreement," the leasing company's lawyers write in the filing. "It is unclear at the present time what, if anything, Debtor representatives have known about the impossibility or impracticability of implementing Porting of the Purchased Vehicles, and when they learned or otherwise knew of that critical information." American Lease is asking to delay Wednesday's hearing and be allowed to perform "expedited and targeted discovery" of Fisker and its representatives to find out more about when Fisker learned of this problem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

80% of software engineers will need to upskill by 2027 to keep pace with generative AI's growing demands, according to Gartner. The consultancy predicts AI will transform the industry in three phases. Initially, AI tools will boost productivity, particularly for senior developers. Subsequently, "AI-native software engineering" will emerge, with most code generated by AI. Long-term, AI engineering will rise as enterprise adoption increases, requiring a new breed of professionals skilled in software engineering, data science, and machine learning.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Geoffrey Hinton accepted a Nobel Prize this week, recognizing the foundational work on artificial neural networks that earned him the nickname "godfather of AI." In a speech Tuesday, Professor Hinton praised one student -- alluding to OpenAI's former Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever -- for revolting against OpenAI's CEO. "I was particularly fortunate to have many very clever students -- much cleverer than me -- who actually made things work," said Hinton. "They've gone on to do great things. I'm particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Washington blames China's dominance of the solar industry on what are routinely dubbed "unfair trade practices." But that's just a comforting myth. China's edge doesn't come from a conspiratorial plot hatched by an authoritarian government. It hasn't been driven by state-owned manufacturers, subsidized loans to factories, tariffs on imported modules or theft of foreign technological expertise. Instead, it's come from private businesses convinced of a bright future, investing aggressively and luring global talent to a booming industry a" exactly the entrepreneurial mix that made the US an industrial powerhouse. The fall of America as a solar superpower is a tragedy of errors where myopic corporate leadership, timid financing, oligopolistic complacency and policy chaos allowed the US and Europe to neglect their own clean-tech industries. That left a yawning gap that was filled by Chinese start-ups, sprouting like saplings in a forest clearing. If rich democracies are playing to win the clean technology revolution, they need to learn the lessons of what went wrong, rather than just comfort themselves with fairy tales. To understand what happened, I visited two places: Hemlock, Michigan, a tiny community of 1,408 people that used to produce about one-quarter of the world's PV-grade polysilicon, and Leshan, China, which is now home to some of the world's biggest polysilicon factories. The similarities and differences between the towns tell the story of how the US won the 20th century's technological battle -- and how it risks losing its way in the decades ahead. [...] Meanwhile, the core questions are often almost impossible to answer. Is Tongwei's cheap electricity from a state-owned utility a form of government subsidy? What about Hemlock's tax credits protecting it from high power prices? Chinese businesses can often get cheap land in industrial parks, something that's often considered a subsidy. But does zoning US land for industrial usage count as a subsidy too? Most countries have tax credits for research and development and compete to lower their corporate tax rates to encourage investment. The factor that determines whether such initiatives are considered statist industrial policy (bad), or building a business-friendly environment (good), is usually whether they're being done by a foreign government, or our own.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cutting calorie intake can lead to a leaner body -- and a longer life, an effect often chalked up to the weight loss and metabolic changes caused by consuming less food. Now, one of the biggest studies of dietary restrictions ever conducted in laboratory animals challenges the conventional wisdom about how dietary restriction boosts longevity. From a report: The study, involving nearly 1,000 mice fed low-calorie diets or subjected to regular bouts of fasting, found that such regimens do indeed cause weight loss and related metabolic changes. But other factors -- including immune health, genetics and physiological indicators of resiliency -- seem to better explain the link between cutting calories and increased lifespan. "The metabolic changes are important," says Gary Churchill, a mouse geneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, who co-led the study. "But they don't lead to lifespan extension." To outside investigators, the results drive home the intricate and individualized nature of the body's reaction to caloric restriction. "It's revelatory about the complexity of this intervention," says James Nelson, a biogerontologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. The study was published today in Nature by Churchill and his co-authors, including scientists at Calico Life Sciences in South San Francisco, California, the anti-ageing focused biotech company that funded the study. Scientists have long known that caloric restriction, a regimen of long-term limits on food intake, lengthens lifespan in laboratory animals. Some studies have shown that intermittent fasting, which involves short bouts of food deprivation, can also increase longevity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The man identified as Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in a new HBO documentary has something to say: Wrong again, world. From a report: In the just-released HBO film on the history of the world's biggest digital currency -- Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery -- documentary filmmaker Cullen Hoback comes to the conclusion that the anonymous creator of Bitcoin was none other than a long-time member of the community and early Bitcoin developer Peter Todd. Todd dismissed the claim in the documentary, released yesterday, and denied it again when asked by The Register. "[Hoback's] evidence for me being Satoshi is the same kind of coincidence-based, circumstantial thinking that fuels conspiracies like QAnon," Todd told us in an email. "Which is ironic, given that [Hoback's] previous big project was a documentary on QAnon. He clearly didn't try to debunk his theories either." Hoback's previous project -- Q: Into the Storm -- aimed to unmask the person behind QAnon, perhaps giving him an interest in uncovering the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Todd, however, thinks Hoback was just trying to drum up interest in his new film. "I think [Hoback] only included the Satoshi claim as a marketing ploy: he was really creating a documentary about Bitcoin, and needed a hook to get media attention," Todd said. "He picked me to accuse mainly because I was an unlikely candidate, which helped drum up even more attention. I don't think he had any interest in finding the real truth."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zoom is getting one step closer to letting AI avatars attend meetings for you. As part of a broader AI expansion, Zoom announced it will soon let you create an AI avatar of yourself that you can use to send brief messages to your team. From a report: To create a digital avatar, you'll need to record an initial video of yourself that Zoom's AI will use to make an avatar that looks -- and even sounds -- like you. From there, you can write the message you want your AI avatar to say and then have it do all the talking for you. This feature will only work with Zoom's Clips feature, allowing you to record brief video updates for your colleagues.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

9to5Mac: Following apparent photos of an M4 MacBook Pro box and a subsequent unboxing video, the unreleased model has now been offered for sale on a Russian classified ads site -- at a highly inflated price, naturally. Multiple units were advertised before the listings were removed, and it does now seem increasingly likely that the leaks are real. Apple Pro tweeted a screengrab of one of the listing, which offered what appears to be the base model 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro, with the previously reported specs of 16GB unified memory, 512GB SSD, and three Thunderbolt 4 ports. We've also seen Geekbench results for a machine identified as "Mac 16,1" with performances in line with the reported specs. Rather than a one-off leak, it has been claimed that there are some 200 units out there. The ad on Avito was asking 720,000 rubles, which is around $7,400.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The greatest tennis players in the world will be left to rage against a machine after any tight line calls at Wimbledon next year as the All England Club will break with tradition by removing line judges from all courts during the championships for the first time in its 147-year history. From a report: From 2025 onwards live electronic line calling (ELC) will be used on all courts in both the main draw at the All England Club and the qualifying tournament off-site in Roehampton. The new technology was successfully tested during this year's championships. Wimbledon's chief executive, Sally Bolton, said: "The decision to introduce Live Electronic Line Calling at the championships was made following a significant period of consideration and consultation." Bolton added: "Having reviewed the results of the testing this year, we consider the technology to be sufficiently robust and the time is right to take this important step in seeking maximum accuracy in our officiating. For the players, it will offer them the same conditions they have played under at a number of other events on tour."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo has a new piece of game hardware coming in 2024. It's not the Switch 2, it's the Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo, a new motion-sensing alarm clock that will rouse you from sleep with the sounds of video games like Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and more. Polygon adds: The $99.99 alarm clock includes 35 wake-up "scenes" from Nintendo Switch games. Users will "experience immersive sounds and music" from those scenes, which are styled to match Nintendo's franchises. Alarmo will also track users' sleep and motion; Records will keep track of how much you move around, similar to the Pokemon Go Plus Plus sleep tracker that Nintendo released for Pokemon Go/Pokemon Sleep (and the long-promised, but seemingly abandoned QOL project). Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo will feature various alarm settings, Nintendo said in a news release. The clock's Steady Mode features an alarm that will gradually get more intense the longer you stay in bed. Gentle Mode offers "a more consistent intensity level." And Button Mode is a classic snooze button mode, where you've gotta smack Alarmo to shut it up. Nintendo's new interactive, motion-sensing alarm clock also features "sleepy sounds" -- soothing music that will hopefully lull you to sleep at night.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI said a group with apparent ties to China tried to carry out a phishing attack on its employees, reigniting concerns that bad actors in Beijing want to steal sensitive information from top US artificial intelligence companies. From a report: The AI startup said Wednesday that a suspected China-based group called SweetSpecter posed as a user of OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT earlier this year and sent customer support emails to staff. The emails included malware attachments that, if opened, would have allowed SweetSpecter to take screenshots and exfiltrate data, OpenAI said, but the attempt was unsuccessful. "OpenAI's security team contacted employees who were believed to have been targeted in this spear phishing campaign and found that existing security controls prevented the emails from ever reaching their corporate emails," OpenAI said. The disclosure highlights the potential cybersecurity risks for leading AI companies as the US and China are locked in a high-stakes battle for artificial intelligence supremacy. In March, for example, a former Google engineer was charged with stealing AI trade secrets for a Chinese firm.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AmiMoJo writes: A treaty finalized by the UK may bring about the end of the .io domain. Last week, the British government announced that it has agreed to give up ownership of the Chagos Islands, a territory in the Indian Ocean it has controlled since 1814 -- relinquishing the .io domain with it. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has a process for retiring old country code domains within five years (with the possibility for extensions). The IANA established this rule after the Soviet Union's .su domain lingered after its collapse, becoming a domain commonly used among cybercriminals. Since then, IANA has also had to retire the .yu domain previously used for Yugoslavia, but it remained operational for years following the country's breakup while government websites transitioned to new domains. And while the independent Solomon Islands does have the domain name .sb, where 'B' stands for how it used to be a British protectorate, that domain was registered decades after it achieved independence. The UK still has the inactive .gb domain as well, but it's considering getting rid of it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three scientists won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for their groundbreaking work in predicting and designing protein structures, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm. David Baker of the University of Washington shares the prize with Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind. Baker pioneered the creation of novel proteins, while Hassabis and Jumper developed AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts protein structures from amino acid sequences. The laureates will split the 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) award for their contributions to computational protein design and structure prediction. Baker's team has produced proteins with applications in medicine and materials science since his initial breakthrough in 2003. Hassabis and Jumper's AlphaFold, announced in 2020, has predicted structures for nearly all 200 million known proteins. "We glimpsed at the beginning that it might be possible to create a whole new world of proteins that address a lot of the problems faced by humans in the 21st century," Baker said at a press briefing. "Now it's becoming possible," Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel chemistry committee, called the discoveries "spectacular," noting they fulfilled a 50-year-old dream of predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences. The breakthroughs have wide-ranging implications, from understanding antibiotic resistance to developing enzymes that decompose plastic. Over 2 million researchers worldwide have already utilized AlphaFold in various applications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a new 32-page filing (PDF), the Department of Justice indicated that it was considering a possible breakup of Google as an antitrust remedy for its search and advertising monopoly. The remedies necessary to "prevent and restrain monopoly maintenance could include contract requirements and prohibitions; non-discrimination product requirements; data and interoperability requirements; and structural requirements," the department said in the filing. CNBC reports: The DOJ also said it was "considering behavioral and structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features -- including emerging search access points and features, such as artificial intelligence -- over rivals or new entrants." Additionally, the DOJ suggested limiting or prohibiting default agreements and "other revenue-sharing arrangements related to search and search-related products." That would include Google's search position agreements with Apple's iPhone and Samsung devices -- deals that cost the company billions of dollars a year in payouts. The agency suggested one way to do this is requiring a "choice screen," which could allow users to pick from other search engines. Such remedies would end "Google's control of distribution today" and ensure "Google cannot control the distribution of tomorrow."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at BitEnergy AI, Inc. have developed Linear-Complexity Multiplication (L-Mul), a technique that reduces AI model power consumption by up to 95% by replacing energy-intensive floating-point multiplications with simpler integer additions. This method promises significant energy savings without compromising accuracy, but it requires specialized hardware to fully realize its benefits. Decrypt reports: L-Mul tackles the AI energy problem head-on by reimagining how AI models handle calculations. Instead of complex floating-point multiplications, L-Mul approximates these operations using integer additions. So, for example, instead of multiplying 123.45 by 67.89, L-Mul breaks it down into smaller, easier steps using addition. This makes the calculations faster and uses less energy, while still maintaining accuracy. The results seem promising. "Applying the L-Mul operation in tensor processing hardware can potentially reduce 95% energy cost by element wise floating point tensor multiplications and 80% energy cost of dot products," the researchers claim. Without getting overly complicated, what that means is simply this: If a model used this technique, it would require 95% less energy to think, and 80% less energy to come up with new ideas, according to this research. The algorithm's impact extends beyond energy savings. L-Mul outperforms current 8-bit standards in some cases, achieving higher precision while using significantly less bit-level computation. Tests across natural language processing, vision tasks, and symbolic reasoning showed an average performance drop of just 0.07% -- a negligible tradeoff for the potential energy savings. Transformer-based models, the backbone of large language models like GPT, could benefit greatly from L-Mul. The algorithm seamlessly integrates into the attention mechanism, a computationally intensive part of these models. Tests on popular models such as Llama, Mistral, and Gemma even revealed some accuracy gain on certain vision tasks. At an operational level, L-Mul's advantages become even clearer. The research shows that multiplying two float8 numbers (the way AI models would operate today) requires 325 operations, while L-Mul uses only 157 -- less than half. "To summarize the error and complexity analysis, L-Mul is both more efficient and more accurate than fp8 multiplication," the study concludes. But nothing is perfect and this technique has a major achilles heel: It requires a special type of hardware, so the current hardware isn't optimized to take full advantage of it. Plans for specialized hardware that natively supports L-Mul calculations may be already in motion. "To unlock the full potential of our proposed method, we will implement the L-Mul and L-Matmul kernel algorithms on hardware level and develop programming APIs for high-level model design," the researchers say.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new HBO documentary claims Canadian developer Peter Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous founder of bitcoin. The documentary's director, Emmy-nominated filmmaker Cullen Hoback, "comes to the conclusion by stitching together old clues and new ones," reports Politico. In the film's finale, Hoback confronted Todd and said: "It seems like you had these deep insights into bitcoin at the time?" Todd replies: "Well, yeah, I'm Satoshi Nakamoto." From the report: The admission, however, is not necessarily a smoking gun. Todd, who is a vocal backer of Ukraine and Israel on his X feed, is known to invoke the claim "I am Satoshi" as an expression of solidarity with the creator's bid for privacy. In an email to CoinDesk prior to the documentary's release, Todd reportedly denied he was the bitcoin creator: "Of course I'm not Satoshi," he said. If Todd is widely accepted as bitcoin's creator, the revelation would end more than a decade of speculation over the identity of a person whose work spawned a global, multibillion-dollar craze for digital currencies: a mania that has pushed back the frontiers of finance but also enabled widespread fraud and other illicit activities. Todd is not unknown to enthusiasts of the stateless money system. As a longstanding bitcoin core developer known for communicating publicly with "Satoshi" before his disappearance from crypto forums in 2010, his name has always carried weight in the community. But he was rarely considered a prime suspect. A 39-year-old graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, Todd would have been 23 when the famous bitcoin white paper that first laid out the vision for the decentralized money system was being completed. Todd previously told a podcast he was about 15 years old when he first started communicating with key crypto influencers, known as the cypherpunks. "In investigations like these, digital forensics can only take you so far; they're like a compass," Hoback told POLITICO before the documentary aired. "Real answers can only be found offline."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Foxconn has chosen Mexico for the site of the world's largest manufacturing facility for Nvidia's GB200 superchips. These chips are a "key component of the U.S. firm's next-generation Blackwell family computing platform," notes Reuters. From the report: "We're building the largest GB200 production facility on the planet," said Benjamin Ting, Foxconn senior vice president for the cloud enterprise solutions business group. Nvidia said in August that it had started shipping Blackwell samples to its partners and customers after tweaking its design, and expected several billion dollars in revenue from these chips in the fourth quarter. Ting said the partnership between his company and Nvidia was very important and everyone was asking for Nvidia's Blackwell platform. "The demand is awfully huge," Ting said at the company's annual tech day in Taipei, standing next to Nvidia's vice president for AI and robotics, Deepu Talla. Speaking to reporters later, Foxconn Chairman Young Liu said the plant was being built in Mexico, and that the capacity there would be "very, very enormous". He did not elaborate. Foxconn already has a large manufacturing presence in Mexico and has invested more than $500 million to date in the state of Chihuahua. Liu said the company's supply chain was ready for the AI revolution, adding its manufacturing capabilities include the "advanced liquid cooling and heat dissipation technologies necessary to complement the GB200 server's infrastructure."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Alleged photos and videos of an unannounced 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 chip continue to surface on social media, in what could be the worst product leak for Apple since an employee accidentally left an iPhone 4 prototype at a bar in California in 2010," writes MacRumors' Joe Rossignol. From the report: The latest video of what could be a next-generation MacBook Pro was shared on YouTube Shorts today by Russian channel Romancev768, just one day after another Russian channel shared a similar video. The clip shows a box for a 14-inch MacBook Pro that is apparently configured with an M4 chip with a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, three Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a Space Black finish. According to the "About This Mac" software menu shown in the video, the MacBook Pro in the video is allegedly an unreleased November 2024 model. [...] Apple is well known for having a culture of secrecy, so this magnitude of leak is rarely seen for its products. As previously mentioned, this could be the most significant leak for Apple since Gizmodo obtained and shared photos of an iPhone 4 prototype that a then-employee of the company accidentally left behind at a bar in California. In that case, Apple got law enforcement involved, but how it acts this time around remains to be seen.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems," writes longtime Slashdot reader jrepin. "Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release, Plasma 6.2." From the report: Plasma 6.2 includes a smorgasbord of new features for users of drawing tablets. It implements more complete support for the Wayland color management protocol, and enables it by default. There is also improved brightness handling for HDR and ICC profiles, as well as HDR performance. A new tone mapping feature built into Plasma's KWin compositor will help improve the look of images with a brightness or set of colors greater than what the screen can display, thus reducing the "blown out" look such images can otherwise exhibit. You can now override misbehaving applications that block the system from going to sleep or locking the screen (and thus prevent saving power), and you can also adjust the brightness of each connected monitor machine separately. Plasma's built-in app store and software management tool, Discover, now supports PostmarketOS packages for your mobile devices, helps you write better reviews of apps, and presents apps' license information more accurately. In Plasma 6.2, we overhauled System Settings' Accessibility page and added colorblindness filters. They've also added support for the full "sticky keys" feature on Wayland. You can read more about what's new in the complete changelog.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Months ago, 13-year-old Willis "Blue Scuti" Gibson became the first person to "beat" NES Tetris, crashing the game after a 1,511-line, 157-level performance. Over the weekend, 16-year-old Michael "dogplayingtetris" Artiaga became the first to reach an even more impressive plateau in the game, looping past Level 255 and instantly rolling the game all the way back to the ultra-slow Level 0. It took Artiaga a bit over 80 minutes and a full 3,300 cleared lines to finally achieve the game's first near-mythical "rebirth" live in front of hundreds of Twitch viewers. And after a bit of celebration and recovery on the low levels, Artiaga managed to keep his rolled-over game going for another 40 minutes, finally topping out after a total of 4,216 lines and a record 29.4 million points. Artiaga's record does come with a small asterisk since he used a version of the game that was modified to avoid the crashes that stopped Blue Scuti's historic run. Still, NES Tetris' first-ever level rollover is a monumental achievement and a testament to just how far competitive classic Tetris has come in a short time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

X has been restored in Brazil after being shut down nationwide for over a month. According to court documents released today, X ultimately complied with all of Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes' demands. "They included blocking certain accounts from the platform, paying outstanding fines and naming a legal representative in the country," reports NPR. "Failure to do the latter had triggered the suspension." From the report: Elon Musk's X was blocked blocked on Aug. 30 in the highly online country of 213 million people -- and one of X's biggest markets, with estimates of its user base ranging from 20 to 40 million. De Moraes ordered the shutdown after a monthslong dispute with Musk over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. Musk had disparaged de Moraes, calling him an authoritarian and a censor, even though his rulings, including X's suspension, were repeatedly upheld by his peers. Brazilian law requires foreign companies to have a local legal representative to receive notifications of court decisions and swiftly take any requisite action -- particularly, in X's case, the takedown of accounts. Conceicao was first named X's legal representative in April and resigned four months later. The company named her to the same job on Sep. 20, according to the public filing with the Sao Paulo commercial registry. In an apparent effort to shield Conceicao from potential violations by X -- and risking arrest -- a clause has been written into Conceicao's new representation agreement that she must follow Brazilian law and court decisions, and that any legal responsibility she assumes on X's behalf requires prior instruction from the company in writing, according to the company's filing. There is nothing illegal or suspect about using a company like BR4Business for legal representation, but it shows that X is doing the bare minimum to operate in the country, said Fabio de Sa e Silva, a lawyer and associate professor of International and Brazilian Studies at the University of Oklahoma. "It doesn't demonstrate an intention to truly engage with the country. Take Meta, for example, and Google. They have an office, a government relations department, precisely to interact with public authorities and discuss Brazil's regulatory policies concerning their businesses," Silva added. [...] "The concern now is what comes next and how X, once back in operation, will manage to meet the demands of the market and local authorities without creating new tensions," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Investment firm Hindenburg Research claims Roblox is "consistently overstating the amount of people on its platform by 25 percent to 42 percent or more." The Verge reports: Roblox, which went public in 2021, reported having 79.5 million daily active users in its most recent earnings report. However, Hindenburg claims Roblox "intentionally conflates" actual people with daily users, as that number could also include alt accounts and bots. The research alleges that Roblox can separate alt accounts from single users, even though the company's disclosure says daily active users "are not a measure of unique individuals accessing Roblox." Hindenburg is an activist short-selling firm that infamously publishes research when it says it's identified something shady about a business, allowing it to make a profit as its share value declines. One example is from 2020, when Hindenburg accused the EV startup Nikola of fraud. Subsequently, an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) resulted in a four-year prison sentence for its founder, Trevor Milton. [...] The firm also claims Roblox isn't doing enough to protect children on the platform, alleging its "in-game research revealed an X-rated pedophile hellscape, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely abusive speech." Roblox shares dipped following the release of the report. Desiree Fish, Roblox's chief communications officer, said in a statement: "We totally reject the claims made in the report. The financial claims made by Hindenburg Research are simply misleading. The authors are, admittedly short sellers and have an agenda irrespective of the substance of Roblox's business model and results. Over the past four quarters our bookings, the amount of cash receipts, have grown over 22% from $780.7 million in Q2 2023 to $955.2 million in Q2 2024. Over the same time, cash provided by operating activities have totaled $646.3 million, free cash flow was $440.3 million, and we have guided to even higher numbers for fiscal 2024. An examination of our GAAP balance sheet and our GAAP cash flow statement makes that clear. The focus on cash bookings and cash flow are themes that we have focused on consistently with investors dating back to our days as a private company. The author made no attempt to highlight any of that because the positive facts simply don't support their agenda."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: U.S. money transfer giant MoneyGram has confirmed that hackers stole its customers' personal information and transaction data during a cyberattack last month. The company said in a statement Monday that an unauthorized third party "accessed and acquired" customer data during the cyberattack on September 20. The cyberattack -- the nature of which remains unknown -- sparked a week-long outage that resulted in the company's website and app falling offline. MoneyGram says it serves over 50 million people in more than 200 countries and territories each year. The stolen customer data includes names, phone numbers, postal and email addresses, dates of birth, and national identification numbers. The data also includes a "limited number" of Social Security numbers and government identification documents, such as driver's licenses and other documents that contain personal information, like utility bills and bank account numbers. MoneyGram said the types of stolen data will vary by individual. MoneyGram said that the stolen data also included transaction information, such as dates and amounts of transactions, and, "for a limited number of consumers, criminal investigation information (such as fraud)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fourteen years after it debuted on PS3 and Xbox 360, and endless rumors later, Red Dead Redemption is finally coming to PC. From a report: It will hit the Rockstar Store, Steam and the Epic Games Store on October 29 with the Undead Nightmare standalone expansion included. Developer Double Eleven helped Rockstar with the port, which has many of the bells and whistles you'd come to expect from a PC version of a classic. Rockstar says RDR will run at up to 144Hz (no unlocked framerates, sadly) in a native 4K resolution if you have capable hardware. There's support for HDR 10 along with Ultrawide (21:9) and Super Ultrawide (32:9) monitors. You'll be able to play with a keyboard and mouse too.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The District of Columbia and 13 states sued social media giant TikTok on Tuesday, accusing the company of knowingly creating an addictive product and getting children hooked with "digital nicotine." From a report: D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb brought Washington's suit in the Superior Court for the District of Columbia, asserting that the app's design -- including its algorithm, "infinite scroll," push notifications, filters and in-app currency -- boost the company's profits at the expense of children's health. "TikTok's platform, designed to be dangerously addictive, inflicts immense damage on an entire generation of young people," Schwalb said in a statement announcing the suit. "In addition to prioritizing its profits over the health of children, TikTok's unregulated and illegal virtual economy allows the darkest, most depraved corners of society to prey upon vulnerable victims." More than a dozen states brought similar suits against TikTok in their courts Tuesday, including New York, California, Kentucky and New Jersey. Each stems from a national investigation into the company that a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general launched in March 2022.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Veteran Microsoft engineer Larry Osterman is the latest to throw his hat into the "tabs versus spaces" ring. From a report: The debate has vexed engineers for decades -- is it best to indent code with tabs or spaces? Osterman, a four-decade veteran of Microsoft, was Team Tabs when storage was tight, but has since become Team Spaces with the advent of terabytes of relatively inexpensive storage. "Here's the thing," he said. "When you've got 512 kilobytes, and you're writing a program in Pascal with lots of indentation, if you're taking eight bytes for every one of those indentations, for eight spaces, you could save seven bytes in your program by using a tab character." It all added up, even when floppy disks were part of the equation. However, according to Osterman, things have changed. Storage is less of an issue, so why not use spaces? A cynic might wonder if that sort of attitude has led to the bloatware of today, where software requires ever-increasing amounts of storage in return for precious little extra functionality and a never-ending stream of patches. Any decent compiler should strip out any extraneous characters, assuming the code is indeed being compiled beforehand and not interpreted at run-time. For his part, Osterman is now a member of team spaces. "I like spaces simply because it always works and it's always consistent," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A long-shot congressional challenger in Virginia is so determined to debate the Democratic incumbent one more time that he created an AI chatbot to stand in for the candidate in case he's a no-show. From a report: Less than a month from election day, the race for Virginia's 8th congressional district is all but decided. The sitting congressman in this deeply Democratic district, Don Beyer, won handily in 2022 with nearly three-quarters of the vote.Bentley Hensel, a software engineer for good government group CivicActions, who is running as an independent, said he was frustrated by what he said was Beyer's refusal to appear for additional debates since September. So he hatched a unique plan that will test the bounds of both propriety and technology: a debate with Beyer's artificial intelligence likeness. And the candidate has created the AI chatbot himself -- without Beyer's permission. Call it the modern-day equivalent of the empty chair on stage. DonBot, as the AI is playfully known, is being trained on Beyer's official websites, press releases, and data from the Federal Election Commission. The text-based AI is based on an API from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. The bot is not intended to mislead anyone and is trained to provide accurate answers, said Hensel, who has raised roughly $17,000 in outside contributions and personal loans to his campaign, compared to Beyer's $1.5 million fund.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung has issued a rare apology after saying it expected to post just $6.78 billion in operating profit for the most recent quarter, about $900 million short of analyst expectations. From a report: "We have caused concerns about our fundamental technological competitiveness and the future of the company due to our performance falling short of the market's expectations," reads the statement attributed to Samsung Vice Chairman Jun Young-hyun. "Many people are talking about Samsung's crisis. We, who are leading the business, are responsible for all of this." Bloomberg adds: In another filing, Korea's largest company confessed to delays in delivering a key type of chip used with Nvidia processors for training AI -- allowing SK Hynix to dominate the so-called high-bandwidth memory arena. Apart from lagging SK Hynix in HBM, it's also shown little progress against Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. in the outsourced production of custom-made chips. Samsung warned about "inventory adjustments" by unspecified customers, as well as increasing competition from a legacy or less-advanced Chinese memory chipmaker.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Nintendo Switch modder has entered a legal battle against Nintendo without legal representation, Torrent Freak reports. Ryan Daly, alleged owner of Modded Hardware, denied all allegations in a lawsuit filed by Nintendo in July. Nintendo claims Modded Hardware offers hardware and firmware for creating and playing pirated games, as well as providing customers with pirated Nintendo titles. The company filed suit after Daly allegedly ignored warnings to cease operations in March and May 2024. Daly's court response denies wrongdoing and ownership of the business. His defenses include fair use, invalid copyrights, and unjust enrichment. The Modded Hardware website is now password-protected.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Wikipedia's "Timeline of the Far Future" is one of my favorite webpages from the internet's pre-slop era. A Londoner named Nick Webb created it on the morning of December 22, 2010. "Certain events in the future of the universe can be predicted with a comfortable level of accuracy," he wrote at the top of the page. He then proposed a chronological list of 33 such events, beginning with the joining of Asia and Australia 40 million years from now. He noted that around this same time, Mars's moon Phobos would complete its slow death spiral into the red planet's surface. A community of 1,533 editors have since expanded the timeline to 160 events, including the heat death of the universe. I like to imagine these people on laptops in living rooms and cafes across the world, compiling obscure bits of speculative science into a secular Book of Revelation. Like the best sci-fi world building, the Timeline of the Far Future can give you a key bump of the sublime. It reminds you that even the sturdiest-seeming features of our world are ephemeral, that in 1,100 years, Earth's axis will point to a new North Star. In 250,000 years, an undersea volcano will pop up in the Pacific, adding an extra island to Hawaii. In the 1 million years that the Great Pyramid will take to erode, the sun will travel only about 1/200th of its orbit around the Milky Way, but in doing so, it will move into a new field of stars. Our current constellations will go all wobbly in the sky and then vanish. Some aspects of the timeline are more certain than others. We know that most animals will look different 10 million years from now. We know that the continents will slowly drift together to form a new Pangaea. Africa will slam into Eurasia, sealing off the Mediterranean basin and raising a new Himalaya-like range across France, Italy, and Spain. In 400 million years, Saturn will have lost its rings. Earth will have replenished its fossil fuels. Our planet will also likely have sustained at least one mass-extinction-triggering impact, unless its inhabitants have learned to divert asteroids.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wired: Last spring, At an event in New York City, Robert Triefus, then Gucci's CEO of Vault -- the brand's virtual marketplace -- argued the recent deflation in hype around the metaverse was just a brief hiccup. "I see it more as a correction," he told the crowd. "We're now at a much more sensible place, where you've got individuals [and] companies ... who are very serious about what they're doing." When asked how buying real estate in The Sandbox aligned with Gucci's broader goals as a brand, he responded with quasi-mystical language: "The metaverse is an opportunity to embrace the digital self." The following month, Triefus left Gucci "abruptly," according to Vogue Business. He was off "to pursue other opportunities," the brand said at the time. A month later, Vogue Business revealed that Triefus was to be the new Stone Island CEO. Immediately there was speculation on whether Stone Island would enter the metaverse. So far it has not. Triefus' public zeal for all things virtual and his short-lived tenure as the head of Gucci's metaverse strategy are both part of a broader trend that briefly convulsed the private sector starting in late 2021: the hastily recruited "chief metaverse officer." Following a wave of excitement around the metaverse as a golden new opportunity for commerce, a legion of brands rushed to launch their own virtual storefronts. Three quarters of CEOs surveyed by Russell Reynolds in 2022 said they were hiring dedicated talent to lead in the space, or expanding current roles to cover it. While the actual titles varied, their main role seemed to involve helping their respective brands devise new strategies with then-buzzy technologies such as NFTs and crypto. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has quietly shifted focus from virtual reality to augmented reality, signaling a retreat from the company's ambitious metaverse plans. At Meta's recent developer conference, Zuckerberg mentioned "metaverse" only three times in his hour-long keynote, instead highlighting AR innovations like smart glasses. The move follows a broader cooling of corporate enthusiasm for the metaverse. Luxury brands that once rushed to establish virtual presences have scaled back efforts, with some chief metaverse officers pivoting to AI-focused roles. "Many brands were quick to experiment -- there was a sense of a land grab," said Matthew Ball, tech investor and author. "They didn't want to be last, and they were excited to try and be first." Wired notes that the shift reflects disappointing user engagement with existing metaverse platforms and growing interest in more accessible AR technologies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have called for people to go "urban mining" after a study revealed that old cables, phone chargers and other unused electrical goods thrown away or stored in cupboards or drawers could stave off a looming shortage of copper. From a report: The research found that in the UK there are approximately 823m unused or broken tech items hiding in "drawers of doom" containing as much as 38,449 tonnes of copper -- including 627m cables -- enough to provide 30% of the copper needed for the UK's planned transition to a decarbonised electricity grid by 2030. Copper is essential in the drive to decarbonise the economy -- being a crucial element of solar and wind developments as well as electric cars. The study found that unused electrical goods could contain as much as $349m worth of copper. Scott Butler, from Recycle Your Electricals, which produced the study, called on the public to start recycling their unwanted electrical goods. "We need to start 'urban mining' and help protect the planet and nature from the harmful impacts of mining for raw materials and instead value and use what we have already." Butler added that people often do not realise that cables and electricals contain valuable materials. "If binned or stashed, we lose everything inside them." The group is now urging everyone to check its "recycling locator" for their nearest facility.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Political polling, once hailed as a revolutionary tool for democracy, is facing a crisis of confidence amid high-profile failures and fundamental critiques. Data scientist G. Elliott Morris, Nate Silver's successor at FiveThirtyEight, has defended polling's relevance in a new book, arguing it remains crucial for revealing public opinion despite challenges like plummeting response rates and rising costs. But critics, including political scientist Lindsay Rogers and sociologist Leo Bogart, have long questioned polling's ability to capture the complexities of public sentiment, arguing it reduces nuanced political matters to simplistic yes/no questions and potentially records opinions that don't exist outside the survey context. Social media platforms, promising to transform democracy by facilitating constant public feedback, have further complicated the polling landscape. The story adds: Today that product remains overwhelmingly popular: polls saturate election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally fickle social forces. That isn't to say that polls don't have uses beyond entertainment: they can be a great asset to campaigns, helping candidates refine their messages and target their resources; they can provide breakdowns of election results that are far more illuminating than the overall vote count; and they can give us a sense -- a vague and sometimes misleading sense -- of what 300 million people or more think about an issue. But, pace Morris, the time for celebrating polls as a bastion of democracy or as a means of bringing elites closer to voters is surely over. The polling industry continues to boom. Democracy isn't faring quite so well. Silicon Valley ultimately peddled the same feel-good story about democracy as the polling industry: that the powerful are unresponsive to the wider public because they cannot hear their voices, and if only they could hear them, then of course they would listen and act. The virtue of this diagnosis is that structural inequalities in wealth and power are left intact -- all that matters in democracy is that everyone has a voice, regardless of background. In a very narrow, technical sense, their innovations have made this a reality. But the result is a loud, opinionated, and impotent public sphere, coarsened by social and economic divisions and made all the more disillusioned by the discovery that, in politics, it takes more than a voice to be heard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

John J. Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey E. Hinton of the University of Toronto were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for their groundbreaking work in machine learning. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized the scientists for developing artificial neural networks capable of recognizing patterns in large data sets, laying the foundation for modern AI applications like facial recognition and language translation. Hopfield, 91, created an associative memory system for storing and reconstructing data patterns. Hinton, 76, invented a method for autonomous data property identification. "This year's physics laureates' breakthroughs stand on the foundations of physical science," the Nobel Committee stated. "They have shown a completely new way for us to use computers to tackle many of society's challenges." The laureates will share the 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.1 million) prize.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The first scripted Immersive Video project for Apple's Vision Pro debuts on October 10. Called Submerged, the film "invites viewers onto a WWII-era submarine and follows its crew as they wrestle to combat a harrowing torpedo attack." 9to5Mac reports: The short film was written and directed by an Academy Award-winning filmmaker. That makes it stand out from other Immersive Video Apple has produced to this point. The filmmaker, Edward Berger, is best known for films like All Quiet on the Western Front and the upcoming Conclave. You can watch the trailer with commentary from the director here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.