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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has recommended easing restrictions on marijuana, a department spokesperson said on Wednesday, following a review request from the Biden Administration last year. Reuters reports: The scheduling recommendation for marijuana was provided to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) on Tuesday as part of President Biden's directive to HHS, the spokesperson said. "As part of this process, HHS conducted a scientific and medical evaluation for consideration by DEA. DEA has the final authority to schedule or reschedule a drug under the Controlled Substances Act. DEA will now initiate its review," a DEA spokesperson said. Marijuana is currently classified as a schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, meaning it has a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use, along with drugs like heroin and LSD. HHS is recommending reclassifying marijuana to say it has a moderate to low potential for dependence and a lower abuse potential, which would put it in a class with ketamine and testosterone. "If marijuana classification were to ease at the federal level, that could allow major stock exchanges to list businesses that are in the cannabis trade, and potentially allow foreign companies to begin selling their products in the United States," notes Reuters. While marijuana remains illegal on the federal level, nearly 40 U.S. states have legalized it in some form. According to a survey last year from the Pew Research Center, "an overwhelming share of U.S. adults (88%) say either that marijuana should be legal for medical and recreational use by adults (59%) or that it should be legal for medical use only (30%)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After 30 years of operations, the developer behind 2001's Red Faction and Saints Row, Volition, is being shut down. Its parent company Embracer broke the news on LinkedIn, attributing the decision to a "restructuring program." Game Developer reports: Founded in June 1993 by Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog, Volition was originally known as Parallax Software. Its debut title was 1995's Descent, which was followed by a sequel the following year. Starting with 1998's Descent: Freespace -- The Great War, the studio would go by its current name. Volition's "big break" game came in the form of 2001's Red Faction. That game spawned multiple sequels (ending with 2011's Red Faction: Armageddon) and a movie spinoff. Its other big franchise, Saints Row, began in 2006 and enjoyed the longer tenure: with several sequels, a soft reboot (2017's Agents of Mayhem), and 2022's full-on reboot, simply titled Saints Row. Other titles developed by the studio include 2002's Summoner 2 and The Punisher from 2004. During the 2010s, Volition was a key developer from THQ that survived the transition over to Deep Silver. That company later rebranded to Plaion (formerly Koch Media) and itself had a "small restructure" as of 2022. Saints Row 2022, the final game from Volition, will be available on PlayStation Plus' Extra tier starting September 6.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloombeg's Mark Gurman (paywalled), Apple is experimenting with a new 3D-printing manufacturing process for some device production, starting with the upcoming Apple Watch Series 9 models. MacRumors reports: The new manufacturing process that Apple is testing would use less material than the large slabs of metal that are needed for traditional CNC manufacturing, plus it would cut down on the time that it takes to make new devices. With a technique called "binder jetting," Apple is able to print a device's outline at close to its actual shape using a powdered substance. A second process uses heat and pressure to squeeze the material into a substance that feels like steel, and it is then refined with milling. Gurman's information echoes what we've already heard from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Back in July, Kuo said that the upcoming second-generation Apple Watch Ultra will include 3D printed mechanical parts. Specifically, he claimed that Apple is "actively adopting 3D printing technology," and that some of the titanium components in the new Apple Watch Ultra would be 3D printed. Gurman claims that Apple plans to use this new 3D printing method for the chassis of the stainless steel Apple Watch Series 9 models rather than components for the Ultra but either way, it sounds like Apple is more actively testing this manufacturing method as of 2023. Gurman says that Apple plans to 3D print titanium devices in 2024. The report notes that the shift to 3D printing would also "allow Apple to improve manufacturing times and potentially cut down on costs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: Magic Leap 1 AR headsets will 'cease to function' from December 31, 2024, the company announced. Magic Leap 1 launched in mid 2018 as the first transparent AR headset marketed and sold to consumers. The headset is powered by a tethered waist-mounted compute pack and came with a single tracked controller, though it got hand tracking support too. Content for the device included avatar chat, a floating web browser, a Wayfair app for seeing how furniture might look in your room, two games made by Insomniac Games, and a Spotify background app. But Magic Leap 1's eye-watering $2300 price and the limitations of transparent optics (even today) meant it reportedly fell significantly short of sales expectations. Transparent AR currently provides a much smaller field of view than the opaque display systems of VR-style headsets, despite costing significantly more. And Magic Leap 1's form factor wasn't suitable for outdoor use, so it didn't provide the out-of-home functionality AR glasses promise to one day like on-foot navigation, translation, and contextual information. The Information reported that Magic Leap's founder, the CEO at the time, originally expected it to sell over one million units in the first year. In reality it reportedly sold just 6000 units in the first six months.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An autonomous, artificial-intelligence-powered drone called Swift has beaten humanity's best drone racers. "The AI-equipped drone, developed by researchers at the University of Zurich, came out on top in 15 out of 25 races and recorded the single fastest lap time," reports Gizmodo. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. From the report: Swift beat the humans in the niche but growing sport of first-person view drone racing. Human competitors navigate using a headset connected to a camera on their drones to pilot a quadcopter through complex obstacle courses at extreme speeds, with the goal of finishing the race with the fastest time and avoiding taking too much damage in the process. Drones in these races can top 50 miles per hour when they're really buzzing. The [video here] shows Swift battling it out against the human-controlled drones. Swift emerged victorious in 15 out of the 25 total head-to-head races against the human pilots and clocked the fastest overall lap time at 17.47 seconds. That brisk lap time was nearly half a second better than the best human. The three human competitors, Alex Vanover, Thomas Bitmatta, and Marvin Schaepper, have each won drone racing championships in the past. In this case, the human competitors had a week to learn the new course and train for the race. During that same time, Swift was training as well but in a digitally simulated environment meant to resemble the course. Swift, according to the paper, used deep reinforcement learning while in the simulation along with additional data collected from the outside world. During the actual race, Swift would take in video collected by its camera and send that to a neural network capable of identifying the gates it had to fly through. A combination of onboard sensors are then used to aid the drone with positioning, speed, and orientation. All of this happened autonomously, at extreme speeds. The researchers noticed some interesting differences in the ways Swift approached the course as opposed to its human competitors. The autonomous system, they noted, was more consistent across laps and appeared to take tighter turns. Those tight turns can add up and give a drone an edge in a race by repeatedly shaving off fractions of a second from lap times.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new report by The Wall Street Journal, mobile carriers including Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile are all requiring customers to switch to a debit card or bank account withdrawal in order to receive an autopay discount on their plan. Verizon has included this requirement for years, but in the past few months the other two carriers have quietly added it too. The Verge reports: The new rule goes into effect for AT&T customers on October 2nd, and as a gesture of goodwill, the company will only reduce your discount if you continue to pay with a credit card. Those who register for autopay with a bank or debit card will receive $10 off; a credit card will only get you $5. T-Mobile's change went into effect in July, also eliminating Apple Pay and Google Pay as methods eligible for the $5 discount. Oh, and technically, you can qualify for Verizon's autopay discount with a credit card -- it just has to be a Verizon Visa card. AT&T and T-Mobile aren't just making this a requirement for new customers -- the change is being applied to all postpaid accounts. Even if you've been receiving the discount for years with a credit card, you'll have to make the switch in order to keep your discount. And it adds up -- the discounts are applied for each line on your plan, so if your whole family is on the same plan, it's a significant amount of money.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The day before a Texas antiporn law that requires age verification to access adult websites was set to take effect, the state's attorney general, Angela Colmenero, has been at least temporarily blocked from enforcing the law. US District Judge David Alan Ezra granted a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking enforcement after the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) joined adult performers and sites like Pornhub in a lawsuit opposing the law. Today, they convinced Ezra that Texas' law violates the First Amendment and would have "a chilling effect on legally-protected speech," FSC said in a press release. "This is a huge and important victory against the rising tide of censorship online," Alison Boden, FSC's executive director, said. "From the beginning, we have argued that the Texas law, and those like it, are both dangerous and unconstitutional. We're pleased that the court agreed with our view that [the law's] true purpose is not to protect young people, but to prevent Texans from enjoying First Amendment protected expression. The state's defense of the law was not based in science or technology, but ideology and politics." Now, Texas will have to wait until this lawsuit is litigated to enforce the law. [...] According to FSC, in addition to free speech concerns, the law needed to be blocked because it would have exposed consumers to "significant privacy risks" by forcing adult-website visitors to show digital IDs. A spokesperson for Pornhub's parent company Aylo told Ars: "We are pleased with the court's decision today, which reaffirms our position that the age verification law implemented in Texas is unconstitutional. We have publicly supported mandatory age verification of viewers of adult content for years, but any method of age verification must preserve user privacy and safety." "The only solution that makes the Internet safer, preserves user privacy, and stands to prevent children from accessing age-inappropriate content is performing age verification at the device level," Aylo's spokesperson said. "We are pleased that the court recognizes the severity of compelled speech and its presence in this law that Texas has implemented. We are proud to fight for our industry and the performers that use it to legally earn a living, and we are glad to see the court recognize that this law is unconstitutional and would have required adult entertainers to falsely imply that their content poses health risks." A similar age verification initiative in Australia was halted yesterday, citing concerns around privacy and security of the technology.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK's Home Office is looking to increase its use of controversial facial recognition technologies to track and find criminals within policing and other security agencies. From a report: In a document released on Wednesday, the government outlined its ambitions to potentially deploy new biometric systems nationally over the next 12 to 18 months. The move comes after privacy campaigners and independent academics criticised the technology for being inaccurate and biased, particularly against darker-skinned people. MPs have previously called for a moratorium on its use on the general population until clear laws are established by parliament. The government is calling for submissions from companies for technologies that "can resolve identity using facial features and landmarks," including for live facial recognition which involves screening the general public for specific individuals on police watch lists. In particular, the Home Office is highlighting its interest in novel artificial intelligence technologies that could process facial data efficiently to identify individuals, and software that could be integrated with existing technologies deployed by the department and with CCTV cameras. Facial recognition software has been used by South Wales Police and London's Metropolitan Police over the past five years across multiple trials in public spaces including shopping centres, during events such as the Notting Hill Carnival and, more recently, during the coronation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To date, Google has processed more than seven billion copyright takedown requests for its search engine. The majority of the reported links are purged from Google's search index, as required by the DMCA. Recently, however, Google appears to gone a step further, using search takedowns to "moderate" users' privately saved links collections. TorrentFreak: A few hours ago, Eddie Roosenmaallen shared an email from Google, notifying him that a link had been removed from his Google Saved collection because it violates Google's policy. The reason cited for the removal is the "downstream impact," as the URL in question is "blocked by Google Search." "The following saved item in one of your collections was determined to violate Google's policy. As a result, the item will be moderated..," Google writes, pointing out a defunct KickassTorrents domain as the problem. Initially, it was suggested that this removal impacted Google's synched Chrome bookmarks but further research reveals that's not the case. Instead, the removals apply to Google's saved feature. This Google service allows users to save and organize links, similar to what Pinterest does. These link collections can be private or shared with third parties.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Copyright Office is opening a public comment period around AI and copyright issues beginning August 30th as the agency figures out how to approach the subject. From a report: As announced [PDF] in the Federal Register, the agency wants to answer three main questions: how AI models should use copyrighted data in training; whether AI-generated material can be copyrighted even without a human involved; and how copyright liability would work with AI. It also wants comments around AI possibly violating publicity rights but noted these are not technically copyright issues. The Copyright Office said if AI does mimic voices, likenesses, or art styles, it may impact state-mandated rules around publicity and unfair competition laws. Written comments are due on October 18th, and replies must be submitted to the Copyright Office by November 15th. The copyright status of AI training data and the output of generative AI tools has become a hot topic for politicians, artists, authors, and even civil rights groups, making it a potential testing ground for coming AI regulation. The Copyright Office says that "over the past several years, the Office has begun to receive applications to register works containing AI-generated material." It may use the comments to inform how it decides to grant copyright in the future. The Copyright Office was involved in a lawsuit last year after it refused to grant Stephen Thaler rights to an image created by an AI platform. Earlier this month, a Washington, DC, court sided with the US Copyright Office in the case, stating copyright has never been handed to any work without a human involved.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The stakes are high for Bethesda's newest role-playing game. Microsoft needs an Xbox hit, and players are hungry for an expansive and satisfying space adventure. From a report: Starfield almost immediately nudges its players to the edges of the cosmos. In the opening hours of the role-playing video game, it's possible to land your spaceship on Earth's moon or zip 16 light-years to Alpha Centauri. When you open your map and zoom out from a planet, you can behold its surrounding solar system; zoom out again, and you're scrolling past luminous stars and the mysterious worlds that orbit them. That sprawling celestial journey within Starfield, developed by Bethesda Game Studios, reveals both the tremendous potential and the monumental challenge of an open-world space adventure. Bethesda has hyped an expansive single-player campaign with 1,000 explorable planets. And expectations around the game, officially releasing on Sept. 6 after a 10-month delay, are nearly as vast. It's the first new universe in 25 years for Bethesda, known for the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series. It's also a high-stakes moment for Microsoft, which makes the Xbox and has long faced criticism that it produces fewer hit games than its console rivals, Sony and Nintendo. To compete, Microsoft went on a spending spree, acquiring Bethesda's parent company in 2020 and agreeing to purchase Activision Blizzard in 2022, a $69 billion bet that is being challenged by regulators. Now Bethesda must deliver. Known for letting players navigate competing factions and undertake eccentric quests, the studio hopes Starfield will dazzle those clamoring for engaging encounters with alien life-forms or space mercenaries as well as a sense of boundless exploration.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The latest version of the flagship FOSS browser is out, and it's picked up one of the main features for which we keep Chrome around. From a report: The Firefox version 117 feature list might not look all that impressive, but it does have a big-ticket feature that may tempt people back: automatic translation. The snag is it's disabled by default in the release version, and you'll have to manually enable it. Although it was enabled in the betas, Mozilla has decided to go for a staged rollout and not enable it for everyone until Firefox 118 in six weeks or so. The new feature is integrated, privacy-respecting machine translation between multiple languages. This was already possible in older versions, but it needed an extension, and that had two side effects. One is that the extension hooked deep into the core of the browser in ways that Mozilla wasn't comfortable about, and the other is that once your text had been sent out to a third-party website, it could be snooped upon -- but the victims of any snooping would blame the browser, even if it wasn't the browser's fault. To enable it, go to the configuration page (enter about:config in the address bar), and search for a setting called browser.translations.enable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers say they have found fake apps in Google Play that masqueraded as legitimate ones for the Signal and Telegram messaging platforms. The malicious apps could pull messages or other sensitive information from legitimate accounts when users took certain actions. ArsTechnica: An app with the name Signal Plus Messenger was available on Play for nine months and had been downloaded from Play roughly 100 times before Google took it down last April after being tipped off by security firm ESET. It was also available in the Samsung app store and on signalplus[.]org, a dedicated website mimicking the official Signal.org. An app calling itself FlyGram, meanwhile, was created by the same threat actor and was available through the same three channels. Google removed it from Play in 2021. Both apps remain available in the Samsung store. Both apps were built on open source code available from Signal and Telegram. Interwoven into that code was an espionage tool tracked as BadBazaar. The Trojan has been linked to a China-aligned hacking group tracked as GREF. BadBazaar has been used previously to target Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic minorities. The FlyGram malware was also shared in a Uyghur Telegram group, further aligning it to previous targeting by the BadBazaar malware family. Signal Plus could monitor sent and received messages and contacts if people connected their infected device to their legitimate Signal number, as is normal when someone first installs Signal on their device. Doing so caused the malicious app to send a host of private information to the attacker, including the device IMEI number, phone number, MAC address, operator details, location data, Wi-Fi information, emails for Google accounts, contact list, and a PIN used to transfer texts in the event one was set up by the user.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The organization that represents the literary works of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard has filed a petition with the Federal Government, asking it to make it illegal to circumvent software locks for the repair of a highly specific set of electronic devices, according to a letter reviewed by 404 Media. From the report: The letter doesn't refer to any single device, but experts say the petition covers Scientology's "E-Meter," a "religious artifact" and electronic that is core to Scientology. Author Services Inc., a group "representing the literary, theatrical, and musical works of L. Ron Hubbard," told the U.S. Copyright Office that it opposes the renewal of an exemption to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that makes it legal for consumers to hack their personal electronics for the purposes of repair. This exemption to copyright law is needed because many electronics manufacturers put arbitrary software locks, Digital Rights Management systems, or other technological prevention measures that stop consumers from diagnosing or repairing devices unless they are authorized to do so. Special exemptions to copyright law make it legal for farmers to hack past John Deere's DRM to fix their tractors, consumers to use software tools to help them repair certain parts of game consoles, or use third-party software to circumvent repair locks on printers, air conditioners, laptops, etc.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

VanMoof, the Dutch e-bike maker that gained a zealous following but declared bankruptcy last month, has been acquired by Lavoie, an upscale electric scooter company, the firms announced on Thursday. From a report: Riders of the expensive and technologically advanced VanMoof bikes were left in limbo by the company's bankruptcy, because the machines are built from proprietary parts that only the company made and many of the bikes' functions are linked to a smartphone app that runs on the company's servers. Despite the buzz around the brand, VanMoof had run into financial problems that led to a production backlog and monthslong waits for sales and repairs. But riders will not be completely out of limbo under the new ownership. "What they can't expect in the first couple of weeks is definitive answers to the problems," said Nick Fry, the chairman of McLaren Applied, the British motorsports technology company that owns Lavoie. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but Mr. Fry said Lavoie would spend "tens of millions" on the transaction as well as in investments over the coming months to "rectify some of the challenges we face." He said, "this is not going to be a walk in the park. This is going to be a challenge." One of the new owner's priorities, he added, was improving the availability of parts and repairs, something that had become increasingly difficult for VanMoof owners. Regular bike shops could not -- or sometimes would not -- fix the bikes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S. Department of Commerce spokesperson on Thursday said the Biden administration "has not blocked chip sales to the Middle East." From a report: The comments come after artificial intelligence chip firms Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices received notifications from U.S. officials about new export licensing requirements to ship chips to some countries in the Middle East.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A tiny island in the Caribbean is now sitting on a digital treasure. From a report: Anguilla, a tropical British territory, is known for its coral reefs and white sand beaches. Since the 1990s, however, it's also been in charge of assigning internet addresses that end in .ai to residents and businesses looking to register websites. It was one of hundreds of country-specific domain names and easy to overlook -- until recently. Stability.ai, Elon Musk's X.ai and Character.ai are just a few of the hot artificial intelligence startups that have snapped up the .ai domain assigned to the islands and cays that comprise Anguilla. Plenty of tech giants have their own web addresses ending in .ai as well: Google.ai and Facebook.ai route visitors to their company's AI-focused webpages and Microsoft.ai shows off the company's Azure AI services. The total number of registrations of sites ending with these two letters has effectively doubled in the past year to 287,432, according to Vince Cate, who for decades has managed the .ai domain for Anguilla. Cate estimates Anguilla will bring in as much as $30 million in domain-registration fees for 2023. Once one of the many obscure top-level domains assigned to countries and territories, .ai websites experienced a slow but steady increase in demand in recent years. But the sudden spike in .ai domains nine months ago highlights the broader frenzy around artificial intelligence and its ripple effects throughout the global economy. Since ChatGPT launched, a growing number of tech companies have raced to raise billions in capital, scoop up engineering talent and secure powerful but increasingly scarce chips. A domain may sound less essential, but for an industry obsessed with clever branding, the right name can be everything. "Since November 30, things are very different here," Cate said, referring to the date when ChatGPT launched publicly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cybersecurity giant Malwarebytes this week laid off 100 employees as it prepares for a major restructuring that will see the business split into two, TechCrunch reported. From the report: The layoffs come almost exactly a year after Malwarebytes eliminated 14% of its global workforce. A former employee who asked not to be named told TechCrunch that the layoffs come just weeks after the company's chief product officer, chief information officer, and chief technology officer were let go. An archived version of the Malwarebytes leadership page shows that these positions no longer exist at the company. Multiple posts on LinkedIn showed that a number of additional employees were laid off this week. One former Malwarebytes employee described the layoffs as "an unfortunate annual tradition."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft will unbundle its chat and video app Teams from its Office suite and make it easier for rival products to work with its software, the U.S. company said on Thursday in a move aimed at staving off a possible EU antitrust fine. From a report: The proposed changes came a month after the European Commission launched an investigation into Microsoft's tying of Office and Teams following a complaint by Salesforce-owned workspace messaging app Slack in 2020. Microsoft's preliminary concessions failed to address concerns. The EU competition enforcer on Thursday said it took note of the company's announcement and declined further comment. Teams was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free. It eventually replaced Skype for Business and gained in popularity during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing. "Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission's investigation continues and we cooperate with it," [...] The changes, effective from Oct. 1, will apply in Europe and Switzerland.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: NASA officials sounded an alarm Tuesday about the agency's Deep Space Network, a collection of antennas in California, Spain, and Australia used to maintain contact with missions scattered across the Solar System. Everything from NASA's Artemis missions to the Moon to the Voyager probes in interstellar space rely on the Deep Space Network (DSN) to receive commands and transmit data back to Earth. Suzanne Dodd, who oversees the DSN in her position at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, likes to highlight the network's importance by showing gorgeous images from missions like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Perseverance rover on Mars. "All these images, and all these great visuals for the public, and all the science for the scientists come down through the Deep Space Network," Dodd said Tuesday in a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's Science Committee. But Dodd doesn't take a starry-eyed view of the challenges operating the Deep Space Network. She said there are currently around 40 missions that rely on the DSN's antennas to stay in communication with controllers and scientists back on Earth. Another 40-plus missions will join the roster over the next decade or so, and many of the 40 missions currently using time on the network will likely still be operating over that time. "We have more missions coming than we currently are flying," Dodd said. "We're nearly doubling the load on the DSN. A lot of those are either lunar exploration or Artemis missions, and a lot of Artemis precursor missions with commercial vendors. So the load is increasing, and it's very stressful to us." "It's oversubscribed, yet it's vital to anything the agency wants to do," she said. Vint Cerf, an Internet pioneer who is now an executive at Google, sits on the committee Dodd met with Tuesday. After hearing from Dodd and other NASA managers, Cerf said: "The deep space communications system is in deep -- well, let me use a better word, deficit. There's a four-letter word that occurs to me, too." Because astronauts are involved, the Artemis missions will come with unique requirements on the DSN. "We're not going to have bits of data. We're going to have gigabits of data," said Philip Baldwin, acting director of the network services division at JPL. "I don't want 1080p for video resolution. I want 8K video." Each of the three stations on the Deep Space Network has a 70-meter (230-foot) dish antenna, the largest antennas in the world for deep space communications. Each location also has at least three 112-foot (34-meter) antennas. The oldest of the large antennas in California entered service in 1966, then was enlarged to its 70-meter diameter in 1988. "We have reached a really critical point on the DSN's aging infrastructure," said Sandra Cauffman, deputy director of NASA's astrophysics division.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Timothy Geigner writes via Techdirt: Paramount has gone after fan-made works playing off of the franchise for years and years. Even Paramount's release of guidelines by which fans could create fan films served mostly as a giant middle finger to the fandom, so stringent were the rules. This apparently represents the owners of Star Trek's IP being completely deaf to the history of Star Trek and the internet and what the fans have meant to the franchise. And this all continued into the present day. Recently, a fan-made project called Wolf 359 Project suffered a DMCA takedown from Paramount. If you're a Next Generation fan, that name will likely sound familiar: "The Battle of Wolf 359 hearkens to a classic The Next Generation two-episode event called 'The Best of Both Worlds.' Captain Picard is assimilated by the Borg, and before the Enterprise crew rescues him, the relentless Borg forces fight a battle that kills 11,000 people. Star Trek: Picard Season 3 dealt with this, specifically through the character of Captain Liam Shaw. It was the first time someone described the Starfleet experience during one of the costliest battles in Star Trek history. Star Trek fans are never one to let a good idea go to waste, and The Wolf 359 Project is a fan-written oral history of the battle. The 'book' ran over 500 pages long, and its authors were giving it away for free. However, Paramount issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act strike against it." So here's what this essentially is: fans who love TNG filling in the gaps of the original story they love with the unexplored rest of the universe of people who would have been impacted by that storyline. That's important for two reasons. First and foremost, this doesn't take anything away from Paramount's Star Trek production, and in fact does the opposite. The project doesn't replace the original episodes, but rather builds upon them. In other words, this project could only possibly serve to draw more interest to Paramount's product, since the book isn't going to make much sense to anyone who hasn't seen the original episodes. Second, this is a work being done for free, given away for free, all by fans that are doing what Star Trek fans have always done: create. [...] ]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some of the world's leading astronomical observatories have reported cyberattacks that have resulted in temporary shutdowns. Space.com reports: The National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab, reported that a cybersecurity incident that occurred on Aug. 1 has prompted the lab to temporarily halt operations at its Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii and Gemini South Telescope in Chile. Other, smaller telescopes on Cerro Tololo in Chile were also affected. "Our staff are working with cybersecurity experts to get all the impacted telescopes and our website back online as soon as possible and are encouraged by the progress made thus far," NOIRLab wrote in a statement on its website on Aug. 24. It's unclear exactly what the nature of the cyberattacks were or from where they originated. NOIRLab points out that because the investigation is still ongoing, the organization will be cautious about what information it shares about the intrusions. The cyberattacks on NOIRLab's facilities occurred just days before the United States National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) issued a bulletin (PDF) advising American space companies and research organizations about the threat of cyberattacks and espionage. Foreign spies and hackers "recognize the importance of the commercial space industry to the U.S. economy and national security, including the growing dependence of critical infrastructure on space-based assets," the bulletin stated. "They see US space-related innovation and assets as potential threats as well as valuable opportunities to acquire vital technologies and expertise."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: A Guangdong-based state-backed enterprise in charge of e-government projects in the Southern Chinese province has apologized after admitting that its "home-developed" software was based on open-source code from US tech giant Microsoft. Digital Guangdong, known as DigitalGD, published an apology last week after it was revealed that its CEC-IDE software application, which helps programmers write code, was based on Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code), with just minor modifications and certain functions added. VS Code is available under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology licence, a permissive open source licence allowing for reuse even for commercial purposes. DigitalGD said this fact was not disclosed due to "negligence," and admitted that its description of its software as "self-developed" has met scrutiny and doubt from Chinese programmers. "We are deeply sorry and humiliated for this, and relevant teams have been ordered to make rectifications," the company said. "Chinese authorities have repeatedly demanded 'safe and controllable' hardware and software for key infrastructure, rewarding businesses for indigenous innovations, but this has motivated some companies to make false claims about their products," notes the South China Morning Post. A similar incident happened in May when a Shenzhen-based Powerleader announced a "home developed" Powerstar P3-01105 CPU that was later revealed to be Intel's Core i3-10105 Comet Lake CPU.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The federal government of Australia will not force adult websites to bring in age verification due to concerns around privacy and security of the technology. The Guardian reports: On Wednesday, the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, released the eSafety commissioner's long-awaited roadmap for age verification for online pornographic material, which has been sitting with the government since March 2023. The federal government has decided against forcing sites to bring in age verification technology, instead tasking the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, to work with the industry to develop a new code to educate parents on how to access filtering software and limit children's access to such material or sites that are not appropriate. "It is clear from the roadmap at present, each type of age verification or age assurance technology comes with its own privacy, security, effectiveness or implementation issues," the government's response to the roadmap said. The technology must work effectively without circumvention, must be able to be applied to pornography hosted outside Australia, and not introduce the risk to personal information for adults who choose to access legal pornography, the government stated. "The roadmap makes clear that a decision to mandate age assurance is not yet ready to be taken." The new tranche of codes will be developed by eSafety following the implementation of the first set of industry codes in December this year. The government will also bring forward an independent statutory review of the Online Safety Act in 2024 to ensure it is fit for purpose and this review will be completed in this term of government. The UK's approach to age assurance will also be monitored as the UK is "a key likeminded partner." The report suggested to trial a pilot of age assurance technologies, but this was not adopted by the government. The report also noted the government's development of a digital ID in the wake of the Optus and Medibank data breaches, but said it was not suggesting the government ID be used for confirming ages on pornographic websites.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Terraform, arguably the most popular Infrastructure as Code products, has been forked after the parent company HashiCorp changed its license from the Mozilla Public License (MPL) to the Business Source License v1.1 (BSL)," writes long-time Slashdot reader ochinko. "Our view is that we're actually not the fork because we're just changing the name but it's the same project under the same license," Sebastian Stadil, co-founder and CEO of DevOps automation biz Scalr told The Register. "Our position is that the fork is actually HashiCorp that has forked its own projects under a different license." From the report: HashiCorp's decision to issue new licensing terms for its software follows a path trodden by numerous other organizations formed around open source projects to limit what competitors can do with project code. As the biz acknowledged in its statement about the transition, firms like Cockroach Labs, Confluent Sentry, Couchbase, Elastic, MariaDB, MongoDB, and Redis Labs have similarly adopted less-permissive software licenses to create a barrier for competitors. You can see the OpenTF manifesto here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Activision has partnered with a company called Modulate to moderate voice chats using an AI technology called ToxMod. According to The Verge, the tool "will work to identify behaviors like hate speech, discrimination, and harassment in real time." From the report: ToxMod's initial beta rollout in North America begins today. It's active within Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Call of Duty: Warzone. A "full worldwide release" (it does not include Asia, the press release notes) will follow on November 10th with the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, this year's new entry in the franchise. Modulate's press release doesn't include too many details about how exactly ToxMod works. Its website notes that the tool "triages voice chat to flag bad behavior, analyzes the nuances of each conversation to determine toxicity, and enables moderators to quickly respond to each incident by supplying relevant and accurate context." The company's CEO said in a recent interview that the tool aims to go beyond mere transcription; it takes factors like a player's emotions and volume into context as well in order to differentiate harmful statements from playful ones. It is noteworthy that the tool (for now, at least) will not actually take action against players based on its data but will merely submit reports to Activision's moderators.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: A Saudi court has sentenced a man to death over his posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, and his activity on YouTube, the latest in a widening crackdown on dissent in the kingdom that has drawn international criticism. The judgement against Mohammed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, seen Wednesday by The Associated Press, comes against the backdrop of doctoral student Salma al-Shehab and others facing decades-long prison sentences over their comments online. The sentences appear part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's wider effort to stamp out any defiance in the kingdom as he pursues massive building projects and other diplomatic deals to raise his profile globally. According to court documents, the charges levied against al-Ghamdi include "betraying his religion," "disturbing the security of society," "conspiring against the government" and "impugning the kingdom and the crown prince" -- all for his activity online that involved re-sharing critics' posts. Saudi officials offered no reason for why they specifically targeted al-Ghamdi, a retired school teacher living in the city of Mecca. However, his brother, Saeed bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, is a well-known critic of the Saudi government living in the United Kingdom. "This false ruling aims to spite me personally after failed attempts by the investigators to have me return to the country," the brother tweeted last Thursday. Saudi Arabia has used arrests of family members in the past as a means to pressure those abroad into returning home, activists and those targeted in the past say. [...] Saudi Arabia is one of the world's top executioners, behind only China and Iran in 2022, according to Amnesty International. The number of people Saudi Arabia executed last year -- 196 inmates -- was the highest recorded by Amnesty in 30 years. In one day alone last March, the kingdom executed 81 people, the largest known mass execution carried out in the kingdom in its modern history. However, al-Ghamdi's case appears to be the first in the current crackdown to level the death penalty against someone for their online behavior.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac, committing to security updates and platform update compatibility for the next 12 months. 9to5Mac reports: "With today's announcement, we're redirecting our resources and focus to enhance Visual Studio and VS Code, optimizing them for cross-platform development," the company said in the announcement."No new framework, runtime, or language support will be added to Visual Studio for Mac." The company added: "We will also continue to provide runtime and workload updates so you can continue building and shipping applications built on .NET 6, .NET 7, and the Mono frameworks. While not officially supported, we've also enabled rudimentary support for .NET 8 in Visual Studio for Mac for building and debugging applications." Once the wheels fall off Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft recommends accessing its IDE through Windows in a machine virtual on the Mac or in the cloud. Otherwise, Microsoft points to cross-platform compatible developer technology that will run on macOS: "The recently announced C# Dev Kit, .NET MAUI, and Unity Extensions for VS Code are available in preview and are intended to augment VS Code's capabilities for .NET and C# developers. These extensions operate natively across all supported platforms, including macOS, and the experience using these will continue to be improved as they move from preview to GA and beyond."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slash_Account_Dot shares a report from 404 Media, written by cybersecurity journalist Joseph Cox: In the mid-afternoon one Saturday earlier this month, the target got on the New York subway. I knew what station they entered the subway at and at what specific time. They then entered another station a few hours later. If I had kept monitoring this person, I would have figured out the subway station they often start a journey at, which is near where they live. I would also know what specific time this person may go to the subway each day. During all this monitoring, I wasn't anywhere near the rider. I didn't even need to see them with my own eyes. Instead, I was sitting inside an apartment, following their movements through a feature on a Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) website, which runs the New York City subway system. With their consent, I had entered the rider's credit card information -- data that is often easy to buy from criminal marketplaces, or which might be trivial for an abusive partner to obtain -- and punched that into the MTA site for OMNY, the subway's contactless payments system. After a few seconds, the site churned out the rider's travel history for the past 7 days, no other verification required. On the OMNY website, the MTA offers the ability for riders to "Check trip history." This feature works for people who use contactless bank cards when entering the subway, or other solutions like Apple Pay and Google Pay. The issue is that the feature requires no other authentication -- no account linked to an email, for example -- meaning that anyone with a target's details can enter it and snoop on their movements. The MTA does offer the option of an OMNY account, which requires a password. The website says having an account lets riders "Securely access your trip history." But the first option that appears on the trip history website is the unauthenticated version. After 404 Media raised the concerns to the MTA, a spokesperson said the agency will look into improving the system. "But at the moment, the tracking feature is still accessible without any authentication," notes Cox.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The Environmental Protection Agency removed federal protections for a majority of the country's wetlands on Tuesday to comply with a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The EPA and Department of the Army announced a final rule amending the definition of protected "waters of the United States" in light of the decision in Sackett v. EPA in May, which narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act and the agency's power to regulate waterways and wetlands. A 2006 Supreme Court decision determined that wetlands would be protected if they had a "significant nexus" to major waterways. This year's court decision undid that standard. The EPA's new rule "removes the significant nexus test from consideration when identifying tributaries and other waters as federally protected," the agency said. In May, Justice Samuel Alito said the navigable U.S. waters regulated by the EPA under the Clean Water Act do not include many previously regulated wetlands. Writing the court's decision, he said the law includes only streams, oceans, rivers and lakes, and wetlands with a "continuous surface connection to those bodies." The EPA said the rule will take effect immediately. "The agencies are issuing this amendment to the 2023 rule expeditiously -- three months after the Supreme Court decision -- to provide clarity and a path forward consistent with the ruling," the agency said. As a result of the rule change, protections for many waterways and wetlands will now fall to states.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday rejected requests to eliminate an upcoming requirement that Internet service providers list all of their monthly fees. From a report: Five major trade groups representing US broadband providers petitioned the FCC in January to scrap the requirement before it takes effect. In June, Comcast told the FCC that the listing-every-fee rule "impose[s] significant administrative burdens and unnecessary complexity in complying with the broadband label requirements." The five trade groups kept up the pressure earlier this month in a meeting with FCC officials and in a filing that complained that listing every fee is too hard. The FCC refused to bend, announcing yesterday that the rules will take effect without any major changes. "Every consumer needs transparent information when making decisions about what Internet service offering makes the most sense for their family or household. No one wants to be hit with charges they didn't ask for or they did not expect," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said. Yesterday's order "largely affirms the rules... while making some revisions and clarifications such as modifying provider record-keeping requirements when directing consumers to a label on an alternative sales channel and confirming that providers may state 'taxes included' when their price already incorporates taxes," the FCC said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly engaged by organised criminal gangs into online criminality in Southeast Asia - from romance-investment scams and crypto fraud to illegal gambling - a report issued today by the UN Human Rights Office shows. From a report: Victims face a range of serious violations and abuses, including threats to their safety and security; and many have been subjected to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, arbitrary detention, sexual violence, forced labour, and other human rights abuses, the report says. "People who are coerced into working in these scamming operations endure inhumane treatment while being forced to carry out crimes. They are victims. They are not criminals," said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk. "In continuing to call for justice for those who have been defrauded through online criminality, we must not forget that this complex phenomenon has two sets of victims." The enormity of online scam trafficking in Southeast Asia is difficult to estimate, the reports says, because of the clandestine nature and gaps in the official response. Credible sources indicate that at least 120,000 people across Myanmar may be held in situations where they are forced to carry out online scams, with estimates in Cambodia similarly at around 100,000. Other States in the region, including Lao PDR, the Philippines and Thailand, have also been identified as main countries of destination or transit where at least tens of thousands of people have been involved. The scam centres generate revenue amounting to billions of US dollars each year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI has responded to a pair of nearly identical class-action lawsuits from book authors -- including Sarah Silverman, Paul Tremblay, Mona Awad, Chris Golden, and Richard Kadrey -- who earlier this summer alleged that ChatGPT was illegally trained on pirated copies of their books. From a report: In OpenAI's motion to dismiss (filed in both lawsuits), the company asked a US district court in California to toss all but one claim alleging direct copyright infringement, which OpenAI hopes to defeat at "a later stage of the case." The authors' other claims -- alleging vicarious copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment -- need to be "trimmed" from the lawsuits "so that these cases do not proceed to discovery and beyond with legally infirm theories of liability," OpenAI argued. OpenAI claimed that the authors "misconceive the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence." According to OpenAI, even if the authors' books were a "tiny part" of ChatGPT's massive dataset, "the use of copyrighted materials by innovators in transformative ways does not violate copyright." Unlike plagiarists who seek to directly profit off distributing copyrighted materials, OpenAI argued that its goal was "to teach its models to derive the rules underlying human language" in order to do things like help people "save time at work," "make daily life easier," or simply entertain themselves by typing prompts into ChatGPT. The purpose of copyright law, OpenAI argued is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" by protecting the way authors express ideas, but "not the underlying idea itself, facts embodied within the author's articulated message, or other building blocks of creative," which are arguably the elements of authors' works that would be useful to ChatGPT's training model. Citing a notable copyright case involving Google Books, OpenAI reminded the court that "while an author may register a copyright in her book, the 'statistical information' pertaining to 'word frequencies, syntactic patterns, and thematic markers' in that book are beyond the scope of copyright protection."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft employees were already expecting lackluster pay rises. In a company-wide email sent earlier this year, the tech company's CEO Satya Nadella warned staff of salary freezes and cuts to the bonusbudget. But despite previous transparency around the cost-cutting measures, employees enquiring about how the budget cuts have impacted their performance review will now be fobbed off. According to leaked guidance, managers are being ordered to dodge such questions in the name of company culture. "It's natural for employees to ask questions about budget given the decisions shared in Satya's email," the guidance reportedly states. "However, it's most important to focus discussions with direct reports on their impact for the past fiscal year and directly tie it to their rewards." Managers should not use the budget cuts as an "explanation" for compensation decisions for individual employees and instead should emphasize that the employee's own "impact" determines "rewards." "Using budgets or factors besides the employee's impact as an explanation for an employee's rewards will erode trust and confidence within your team," the guide cautions. "Reinforce that every year offers unique opportunity for impact, and we increase our high expectations, regardless of our budget."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The word "funga" should be used alongside flora and fauna when discussing conservation issues to reflect the importance of fungi to ecosystem health, a UN body has said. From a report: The secretariat of the UN convention on biological diversity (UNCBD) said it was time that fungi were "recognised and protected on an equal footing with animals and plants in legal conservation frameworks." "Whenever referring to the macroscopic diversity of life on Earth, we should use 'flora, fauna and funga,' and 'animal, plants and fungi,'" it said in an Instagram post. Mycologists, mostly from Latin America, established the term "funga" five years ago. It refers to the levels of diversity of fungi in any given place, and is analogous to "flora and fauna," which refer to plants and animals. Unlike flora and fauna, it is not a Latin term but was chosen because it is morphologically similar. "Just like mycelium, mycologically inclusive language will spread unseen but profound [sic], permeating public consciousness (and policy) to acknowledge fungi's vital role in the grand web of life on and in Earth," it said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union is stoking its power plants with fewer lumps of coal and barrels of oil and gas than it has ever recorded, data shows. From a report: The 27 member states burned 17% less fossil fuel to make electricity between January and June 2023 than over the same period the year before, a study from the clean energy thinktank Ember found. The EU made 410TWh of electricity from sources that release planet-heating gases, which analysts say is the lowest level since 2015 -- the first year for which they have monthly data -- and "very likely" since 2000. The drop in fossil fuel generation was driven by a fall in demand for electricity, as well as some growth in clean power, the study found. "We're glad to see fossil fuels down, but in the long-term it is not going to be sustainable to rely on the fall in demand to do this," said Matt Ewen, a data analyst at Ember and author of the report. "We have to be replacing this energy rather than just expecting it to go away and not be used." To try to stop the planet heating, the EU has promised to cut greenhouse gas pollution by at least 55% from 1990 levels by the end of the decade, and hit net zero emissions by 2050. To get there, it will probably have to use less energy but more electricity than it does today, as more people heat homes and drive cars with electricity instead of fossil fuels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon employees have been pushing back against the company's return-to-office policy for months -- and it seems CEO Andy Jassy has had enough. From a report: During a pre-recorded internal Q&A session earlier this month, Jassy told employees it was "past the time to disagree and commit" with the policy, which requires corporate employees to be in the office three days a week. The phrase "disagree and commit" is one of Amazon's leadership principles, and was used often by the company's founder and current executive chairman, Jeff Bezos. "If you can't disagree and commit, it's probably not going to work out for you at Amazon," Jassy said, adding it wasn't right for some employees to be in the office three days a week while others refuse to do so.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A couple months after Microsoft revealed plans to increase Game Pass subscription prices, Sony is getting in on the act. From a report: The company is bumping up the annual prices of all three PlayStation Plus plans on September 6th. An annual Essential subscription will soon cost $80 per year, up from $60. The Extra plan is going up by $35 to $135 per year, while an annual Premium plan will soon cost $40 more at $160. The price changes won't take effect for current PS Plus users on an annual plan until their next renewal date that's on or after November 6th. If you make any changes to your plan between September 6th and then (such as changing tiers), the new pricing will apply. Sony has not announced changes to the monthly ($10 for Essential, $15 for Extra and $18 for Premium) or quarterly ($25 for Essential, $40 for Extra and $50 for Premium) for the time being. It notes that the annual plan is still less expensive than a monthly or quarterly subscription in the long run.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes: I thought I had malware on my main Windows 11 machine this weekend. There I was minding my own business in Chrome before tabbing back to a game and wham a pop-up appeared asking me to switch my default search engine to Microsoft Bing in Chrome. Stunningly, Microsoft now thinks it's ok to shove a pop-up in my face above my apps and games just because I dare to use Chrome instead of Microsoft Edge. This isn't a normal notification, either. It didn't appear in the notification center in Windows 11, nor is it connected to the part of Windows 11 that suggests new features to you. It's quite literally a rogue executable file that has somehow appeared in c:\windows\temp\mubstemp and is digitally signed by Microsoft. "We are aware of these reports and have paused this notification while we investigate and take appropriate action to address this unintended behavior," says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications, in a statement to The Verge. [...] This isn't Microsoft's first rodeo, either. I'm growing increasingly frustrated by the company's methods of getting people to switch from Google and Chrome to Bing and Edge. Microsoft has been using a variety of prompts for years now, with pop-ups appearing inside Chrome, on the Windows taskbar, and elsewhere. Microsoft has even forced people into Edge after a Windows Update, and regularly presents a full-screen message to switch to Bing and Edge after updates.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Replacing a sort algorithm in the FreeBSD kernel has improved its boot speed by a factor of 100 or more... and although it's aimed at a micro-VM, the gains should benefit everyone. From a report: MicroVMs are a hot area of technology R&D in the last half decade or so. The core idea is a re-invention of some of concepts and technology that IBM invented along with the hypervisor in the 1960s: designing OSes specifically to run as guests under another OS. This means building the OS specifically to run inside a VM, and to talk to resources provided by a specific hypervisor rather than to fake hardware. This means that the guest OS needs next to no support for real hardware, just VirtIO drivers which talk directly to facilities provided by the host hypervisor. In turn, the hypervisor doesn't have to provide an emulated PCI bus, emulated power management, emulated graphics card, emulated network interface cards, and so on. The result is that the hypervisor itself can be much smaller and simpler. The result of ruthlessly chopping down both the hypervisor, and the OS that runs inside it, is that both ends can be much smaller and simpler. That means that VMs can use much fewer resources, and start up much quicker.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visa and Mastercard are planning to increase fees that many merchants pay when they accept customers' credit cards. From a report: The fee increases are scheduled to start in October and April, according to people familiar with the matter and documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Many of the increases are for online purchases. The changes could result in merchants paying an additional $502 million annually in fees, according to CMSPI, a consulting company that works with merchants. Increases in network fees will make up a little more than half of that revenue, CMSPI estimated. The rest will come from increases in interchange fees, also called swipe fees. Merchants pay these fees when shoppers pay via credit card. The economy of interchange fees is largely hidden from shoppers. But the fees are a major source of contention between the card networks and merchants large and small, from giant online retailers to corner coffee shops. U.S. merchants paid an estimated $93 billion in Visa and Mastercard credit-card fees last year, according to the Nilson Report, an industry publication. That was up from about $33 billion in 2012. Merchants pass along at least some of that cost to consumers in the form of higher prices. More small businesses have started offering discounts to shoppers who pay by debit card, cash or check.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is discontinuing its Pixel Pass subscription service that allowed people to get a Pixel phone combined with premium services including YouTube Premium, Google Play Pass, and YouTube Premium for a monthly fee. The company said on its support page that it will stop offering purchases or renewals for the Pixel Pass.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Europe wants its own Open AI. The bloc's politicians are sick of regulating American tech giants from afar. They want Europe to build its own generative AI, which is why so many people are rooting for Jonas Andrulis, an easy-going German with a carefully pruned goatee. Ask people within Europe's tech bubble which AI companies they're excited about and the names that come up most are Mistral, a French startup that has raised $100 million without releasing any products, and the company Andrulis founded, Aleph Alpha, which sells generative AI as a service to companies and governments and already has thousands of paying customers. [...] Now 41, Andrulis spent three years working on AI at Apple before leaving in 2019 to explore the technology's potential outside the constraints of a big corporation. He set up Aleph Alpha in Heidelberg, a city in southwestern Germany. The company set to work building large language models, a type of AI that identifies patterns in human language in order to generate its own text or analyze huge numbers of documents. Two years later, Aleph Alpha raised $27 million, an amount that's expected to be dwarfed by a new funding round Andriulis hints could be announced in the coming weeks. Right now, the company's clients -- which range from banks to government agencies -- are using Aleph Alpha's LLM to write new financial reports, concisely summarize hundreds of pages, and build chatbots that are experts in how a certain company works. "I think a good rule of thumb is whatever you could teach an intern, our technology can do," Andrulis says. The challenge, he says, is making the AI customizable so businesses using it feel in control and have a say in how it works. "If you're a large international bank and you want to have a chatbot that is very insulting and sarcastic, I think you should have every right." But Andrulis considers LLMs just a stepping stone. "What we are building is artificial general intelligence," he says. AGI, as it's known, is widely seen as the ultimate aim of generative AI companies -- an artificial, humanlike intelligence that can be applied to a wide range of tasks. The interest Aleph Alpha has received so far -- the company claims 10,000 customers across both business and government -- shows it is able to compete, or at least coexist, with the emerging giants of the field, says Jorg Bienert, who is CEO of the German AI Association, an industry group. "This demand definitely shows it really makes sense to develop and provide these types of models in Germany," he says. "Especially when it comes to governmental institutions that clearly want to have a solution that is developed and hosted in Europe." Last year, Aleph Alpha opened its first data center in Berlin so it could better cater to highly regulated industries, such as government or security clients, that want to ensure their sensitive data is hosted in Germany. The concern about sending private data overseas is just one reason it's important to develop European AI, says Bienert. But another, he says, is that it's important to make sure European languages are not excluded from AI developments. [...]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Zuckerberg posted a video to his personal Instagram profile showing clips of himself and Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth trying a surface-locked virtual keyboard in a Quest 2 headset. UploadVR reports: Zuckerberg claims he was able to achieve around 100 words per minute, while Bosworth says he reached 119 words per minute. The average person types at around 40 words per minute on a traditional keyboard, whereas professional typists reach between 70 and 120 words per minute depending on their skill level. If future headsets could turn any flat surface into a virtual keyboard, it would bring partial haptic feedback and allow you to rest your wrists as with physical keyboards, without the need to carry around a physical keyboard. Developers can technically already build surface-locked virtual keyboards on Quest today, by using hand tracking and getting the user to tap the surface to calibrate its position. But in practice, even the slightest deviation of the virtual surface height from the real surface results in false key presses. Meta didn't share yet exactly how its research solves this issue. However, fiducial markers can be seen on the desk in the clip. If the system is preprogrammed with the exact dimensions of these markers, this may act as a robust dynamic calibration system. Quest 3 will add a depth sensor to a Meta headset for the first time, and a leaked setup clip shows the headset generating a 3D mesh of its environment. If this mesh is precise enough, Quest 3 could potentially eventually support this kind of virtual keyboard. For now though, Meta is solely describing this as research, not a demo of a near term product experience. Meta will likely show off more of its VR and AR research at Meta Connect, which starts September 27 this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SonicSpike shares a report from NASA: In 2023, NASA is sending a technology demonstration known as the Integrated LCRD Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) to the space station. Together, ILLUMA-T and the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), which launched in December 2021, will complete NASA's first two-way, end-to-end laser relay system. With ILLUMA-T, NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program office will demonstrate the power of laser communications from the space station. Using invisible infrared light, laser communications systems send and receive information at higher data rates. With higher data rates, missions can send more images and videos back to Earth in a single transmission. Once installed on the space station, ILLUMA-T will showcase the benefits higher data rates could have for missions in low Earth orbit. "Laser communications offer missions more flexibility and an expedited way to get data back from space," said Badri Younes, former deputy associate administrator for NASA's SCaN program. "We are integrating this technology on demonstrations near Earth, at the Moon, and in deep space." In addition to higher data rates, laser systems are lighter and use less power -- a key benefit when designing spacecraft. ILLUMA-T is approximately the size of a standard refrigerator and will be secured to an external module on the space station to conduct its demonstration with LCRD. Currently, LCRD is showcasing the benefits of a laser relay in geosynchronous orbit -- 22,000 miles from Earth -- by beaming data between two ground stations and conducting experiments to further refine NASA's laser capabilities. "Once ILLUMA-T is on the space station, the terminal will send high-resolution data, including pictures and videos to LCRD at a rate of 1.2 gigabits-per-second," said Matt Magsamen, deputy project manager for ILLUMA-T. "Then, the data will be sent from LCRD to ground stations in Hawaii and California. This demonstration will show how laser communications can benefit missions in low Earth orbit." ILLUMA-T is launching as a payload on SpaceX's 29th Commercial Resupply Services mission for NASA. In the first two weeks after its launch, ILLUMA-T will be removed from the Dragon spacecraft's trunk for installation on the station's Japanese Experiment Module-Exposed Facility (JEM-EF), also known as "Kibo" -- meaning "hope" in Japanese. NASA's Laser Communications Roadmap. Following the payload's installation, the ILLUMA-T team will perform preliminary testing and in-orbit checkouts. Once completed, the team will make a pass for the payload's first light -- a critical milestone where the mission transmits its first beam of laser light through its optical telescope to LCRD. Once first light is achieved, data transmission and laser communications experiments will begin and continue throughout the duration of the planned mission.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A neurosurgeon in Australia pulled a wriggling 3-inch roundworm from the brain of a 64-year-old woman last year -- which was quite the surprise to the woman's team of doctors and infectious disease experts, who had spent over a year trying to identify the cause of her recurring and varied symptoms. A close study of the extracted worm made clear why the diagnosis was so hard to pin down: the roundworm was one known to infect snakes -- specifically carpet pythons endemic to the area where the woman lived -- as well as the pythons' mammalian prey. The woman is thought to be the first reported human to ever have an infection with this snake-adapted worm, and it is the first time the worm has been found burrowing through a mammalian brain. [...] Subsequent examination determined the roundworm was Ophidascaris robertsi based on its red color and morphological features. Genetic testing confirmed the identification. The woman went on ivermectin again and another anti-parasitic drug, albendazole. Months later, her lung and liver lesions improved, and her neuropsychiatric symptoms persisted but were improved. The doctors believe the woman became infected after foraging for warrigal greens (aka New Zealand spinach) around a lake near her home that was inhabited by carpet pythons. Usually, O. robertsi adults inhabit the snakes' esophagus and stomach and release their eggs in the snakes' feces. From there, the eggs are picked up by small mammals that the snakes feed upon. The larvae develop and establish in the small mammals, growing quite long despite the small size of the animals, and the worm's life cycle is complete when the snake eats the infected prey. Doctors hypothesize the woman picked up the eggs meant for small mammals as she foraged, ingesting them either by not fully washing or cooking the greens or by not properly washing her hands or kitchen equipment. In retrospect, the progression of her symptoms suggests an initial foodborne infection, followed by worm larva migrating from her gastrointestinal tract to multiple organs. The prednisolone, an immunosuppressive drug, may have inadvertently helped the worm migrate and get into the central nervous system. Kennedy, a co-author of the report on the woman's case, stressed the importance of washing any foods foraged or taken from a garden. She also emphasized proper kitchen safety and hand washing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to TechCrunch, unnamed hackers reportedly breached the spyware firm WebDetetive, deleting device information to protect surveillance victims and denying spyware users new data. Engadget reports: Users of the spyware won't get any new data from their targets. "Because #fuckstalkerware," the hackers wrote in a note obtained by TechCrunch. The WebDetetive breach compromised more than 76,000 devices belonging to customers of the stalkerware, and more than 1.5 gigabytes of data freed from app's servers, according to the hackers. While TechCrunch did not independently confirm the deletion of victim's data from the WebDetetive server, a cache of data shared by the hackers provided a look at what they were able to accomplish. TechCrunch also worked with a nonprofit that logs exposed datasets, DDoSecrets, to verify and analyze the information. Hackers obtained information on customers like IP addresses and devices that they targeted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to DigiTimes, Apple will receive all TSMC's first-generation 3-nanometer process chips this year for its upcoming devices. MacRumors reports: As early as May, Apple was known to have booked nearly 90% of the Taiwanese pure-play foundry for its upcoming next-gen devices. However, Apple is now projected to take 100% of TSMC's capacity in 2023, due to delays in Intel's wafer needs owing to later modifications to the company's CPU platform design plans. Intel's lack of orders means TSMC's sales of 3nm chips will be significantly lower this year. While TSMC is still expected to experience significant growth in the fourth quarter as it starts mass producing 3nm chips for Apple's needs, they too have been downgraded, according to DigiTimes' industry sources. The report suggests TSMC's 3nm process output may be reduced to 50,000-60,000 wafers monthly in the fourth quarter, down from the 80,000-100,000 units previously anticipated, due to a cutback in Apple's orders. The current monthly output of TSMC's 3nm process is estimated at approximately 65,000 wafers, the outlet's sources said. Apple's upcoming iPhone 15 Pro models are expected to feature the A17 Bionic processor, Apple's first iPhone chip based on TSMC's first-generation 3nm process, also known as N3B. The E3nm technology is said to deliver a 35% power efficiency improvement and 15% faster performance compared to 4nm, which was used to make the A16 Bionic chip for the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Companies increasingly see the value in mining their data for deeper insights. According to a NewVantage survey, 97.6% of major worldwide organizations are focusing investments into big data and AI. But challenges stand in the way of executing big data analytics. One recent poll found that 65% of organizations feel they have "too much" data to analyze. Google's proposed solution is BigQuery Studio, a new service within BigQuery, its fully managed serverless data warehouse, that provides a single experience to edit programming languages including SQL, Python and Spark to run analytics and machine learning workloads at "petabyte scale." BigQuery Studio is available in preview as of this week. "BigQuery Studio is a new experience that really puts people who are working on data on the one side and people working on AI on the other side in a common environment," Gerrit Kazmaier, VP and GM of data and analytics at Google, told TechCrunch in a phone interview. "It basically provides access to all of the services that those people need to work -- there's an element of simplification on the user experience side." BigQuery Studio is designed to enable users to discover, explore, analyze and predict data. Users can start in a programming notebook to validate and prep data, then open that notebook in other services, including Vertex AI, Google's managed machine learning platform, to continue their work with more specialized AI infrastructure and tooling. With BigQuery Studio, teams can directly access data wherever they're working, Kazmaier says. And they have added controls for "enterprise-level" governance, regulation and compliance. "[BigQuery Studio shows] how data is being generated to how it's being processed and how it's being used in AI models, which sounds technical, but it's really important," he added. "You can push down code for machine learning models directly into BigQuery as infrastructure, and that means that you can evaluate it at scale."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols shares what's new in the release of Linux 6.5: The biggest news for servers -- and cloud Linux users -- is AMD Ryzen processors' P-State support. This support should mean better performance and power use across CPU cores. Intel Alder Lake CPUs have also received improved load balancing in a related development. RISC-V architecture fans will be pleased to find Linux now has Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) support. ACPI is used in Linux and other operating systems for power management. It's vital for laptops and other battery-powered systems. For better security, people using virtual machines or sandboxes based on Usermode Linux for testing, or running multiple versions of Linux at once, now have Landlock support. Landock is a Linux Security Module that enables applications to sandbox themselves by selecting access rights to directories. It's designed to be used by unprivileged processes while following the system security policy. To make talking with the rest of the world easier, Linux 6.5 now supports USB 4v2. This new USB-C standard will support up to an eye-watering 120Gbps. And while we're still getting used to Wi-Fi 6E, the Wi-Fi Alliance is already working on bringing us Wi-Fi 7. When Wi-Fi 7 arrives, with its theoretical maximum speed of 46Gbps, Linux will be ready. As usual, the new Linux has many more built-in audio and graphics drivers. The Bcachefs filesystem didn't make it into Linux 6.5, notes Vaughan-Nichols. "While the Bcachefs filesystem looks good, there's been a lot of developers fighting about the development process. These personal arguments have led Torvalds to decide not to incorporate Bcachefs into Linux 6.5." Linus Torvalds announced Linux 6.5's delivery in a brief post on August 27.Read more of this story at Slashdot.