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Friday Microsoft told Bleeping Computer "that they have fixed the issue and Hotmail should no longer fail SPF checks." But earlier in the day the site reported that "Hotmail users worldwide have problems sending emails, with messages flagged as spam or not delivered after Microsoft misconfigured the domain's DNS SPF record."The email issues began late Thursday night, with users and admins reporting on Reddit, Twitter, and Microsoft forums that their Hotmail emails were failing due to SPF validation errors... The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email security feature that reduces spam and prevents threat actors from spoofing domains in phishing attacks... When a mail server receives an email, it will verify that the hostname/IP address for the sending email servers is part of a domain's SPF record, and if it is, allows the email to be delivered as usual... After analyzing what was causing email delivery errors, admins noted that Microsoft removed the 'include:spf.protection.outlook.com' record from hotmail.com's SPF record. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Archangel Michaelfor sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thursday a Cruise robotaxi drove through a green light in front of an oncoming firetruck "with its forward facing red lights and siren on, the San Francisco Police Department said in a statement to Reuters." The San Francisco Chronicle adds that the Cruise vehicle's passenger "passenger was treated on the scene and shared taken in an ambulance to a hospital, though the company said the injuries were 'non-severe.' The company added in an email to the Chronicle that the passenger was on the scene walking around and talking to emergency responders before being taken to the hospital." By Friday California's Department of Motor Vehicles said it was investigating the "concerning incidents," according to TechCrunch. But it adds that the AV-regulating agency also "called for Cruise to reduce its fleet by 50% and have no more than 50 driverless vehicles in operation during the day and 150 driverless vehicles in operation at night until the investigation is complete.Cruise told TechCrunch it is complying with the request. Cruise also issued a blog post giving the company's perspective of how and why the crash occurred. Cruise's blog post points out the firetruck was unexpectedly in the oncoming lane of traffic that night. But meanwhile, elsewhere in the city...The same night, a Cruise car collided with another vehicle at 26th and Mission streets. The company said another driverless car, which had no passengers, entered the intersection on a green light when another car ran a red light at high speed. The driverless car detected the other car and braked, according to Cruise, but the two cars still collided... The collisions came a day after city officials asked state regulators to halt their approval of robotaxi companies' unrestricted commercial expansion in the city, citing concerns about how the robotaxis' behavior impacts emergency responders. Last weekend Cruise was also criticized after "as many as 10 Cruise driverless taxis blocked two narrow streets," reports the Los Angeles Times:Human-driven cars sat stuck behind and in between the robotaxis, which might as well have been boulders: no one knew how to move them.... The cars sat motionless with parking lights flashing for 15 minutes, then woke up and moved on, witnesses said. Cruise "blamed cellphone carriers for the problem," according to the article - arguing that a music festival overloaded the cellphone network they used to communicate with their vehicles. Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Founded in 2011, AnonFiles.com became known as a popular hosting service that allowed users to share files up to 20GB without download restrictions. As the name suggests, registering an account wasn't required either; both up and downloading files was totally anonymous. The same also applies to BayFiles.com, an affiliated file-hosting service that was launched by The Pirate Bay. Both sites launched around the same time and shared a similar design and identical features. Both sites had millions of visitors but AnonFiles stood out with over 18 million visitors a month. This popularity didn't go unnoticed by rightsholders, who repeatedly flagged AnonFiles as a "notorious" pirate site. Rightsholders and law enforcement authorities were not the only ones unhappy with the illegal content posted to the site. For AnonFiles' operators, it caused major problems too. The current owners purchased the site two years ago but didn't expect the abuse to be so massive that the only option would be to shut it down. According to a goodbye message posted on the site, they simply can't continue. "After trying endlessly for two years to run a file sharing site with user anonymity, we have been tired of handling the extreme volumes of people abusing it and the headaches it has created for us." The operators tried to contain the abuse by setting up all sorts of automated filters and filename restrictions, taking thousands of false positives for granted, but that didn't help much. With tens of millions of uploads and petabytes of data, no anti-abuse measure was sufficient. And when the site's proxy service pulled the plug a few days ago, AnonFiles decided to call it quits. "We have auto banned contents of hundreds of thousands files. Banned file names and also banned specific usage patterns connected to abusive material," the AnonFiles team writes. "Even after all this the high volume of abuse will not stop. This is not the kind of work we imagine when acquiring it and recently our proxy provider shut us down. This can not continue." The current owners have invited others to buy the domain name and give it a shot themselves.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a prototype pipeline for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that can "distill" binary executables into human-intelligible code so that it can be updated and deployed in "weeks, days, or hours, in some cases." The work is part of a five-year, $10 million project with the agency. The Register reports: After running an executable through the university's "distillation" process, software engineers should be able to examine the generated HAR, figure out what the code does, and make changes to add new features, patch bugs, or improve security, and turn the HAR back into executable code, says GT associate professor and project participant Brendan Saltaformaggio. This would be useful for, say, updating complex software that was written by a contractor or internal team, the source code is no longer or never was to hand and neither are its creators, and stuff needs to be fixed up. Reverse engineering the binary and patching in an update by hand can be a little hairy, hence DARPA's desire for something a bit more solid and automatic. The idea is to use this pipeline to freshen up legacy or outdated software that may have taken years and millions of dollars to develop some time ago. Saltaformaggio told El Reg his team has the entire process working from start to finish, and with some level of stability, too. "DARPA sets challenges they like to use to test the capabilities of a project," he told us over the phone. "So far we've handled every challenge problem DARPA's thrown at us, so I'd say it's working pretty well." Saltaformaggio said his team's pipeline disassembles binaries into a graph structure with pseudo-code, and presented in a way that developers can navigate, and replace or add parts in C and C++. Sorry, Java devs and Pythonistas: Saltaformaggio tells us that there's no reason the system couldn't work with other programming languages, "but we're focused on C and C++. Other folks would need to build out support for that." Along with being able to deconstruct, edit, and reconstruct binaries, the team said its processing pipeline is also able to comb through HARs and remove extraneous routines. The team has also, we're told, baked in verification steps to ensure changes made to code within hardware ranging from jets and drones to plain-old desktop computers work exactly as expected with no side effects.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the National Business Daily, China's fertility rate in 2022 dropped to a record low of 1.09 from 1.15 in 2021. Reuters reports: The state-backed Daily said the figure from China's Population and Development Research Center put it as having the lowest fertility level among countries with a population of more than 100 million. China's fertility rate is already one of the world's lowest alongside South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. China has said it will focus on education, science and technology to improve population quality and strive to maintain a "moderate fertility" level to support economic growth in future. Hong Kong's Family Planning Association said in a separate release on Tuesday that the number of childless women in the special Chinese administrative region more than doubled from five years ago to 43.2% last year. The percentage of couples with one or two children also tumbled while the average number of children per woman dropped from 1.3 in 2017 to a record low of 0.9 last year, according to its survey.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In May, the World Health Organization issued an alarming report that declared widely used non-sugar sweeteners like aspartame are likely ineffective for weight loss, and long term consumption may increase the risk of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and mortality in adults. A few months later, WHO declared aspartame, a key ingredient in Diet Coke, to be a "possible carcinogen," then quickly issued a third report that seemed to contradict its previous findings -- people could continue consuming the product at levels determined to be safe decades ago, before new science cited by WHO raised health concerns. That contradiction stems from beverage industry corruption of the review process by consultants tied to an alleged Coca-Cola front group, the public health advocacy group US Right-To-Know said in a recent report. It uncovered eight WHO panelists involved with assessing safe levels of aspartame consumption who are beverage industry consultants who currently or previously worked with the alleged Coke front group, International Life Sciences Institute (Ilsi). Their involvement in developing intake guidelines represents "an obvious conflict of interest", said Gary Ruskin, US Right-To-Know's executive director. "Because of this conflict of interest, [the daily intake] conclusions about aspartame are not credible, and the public should not rely on them," he added. [...] Ilsi describes itself as a nonprofit that conducts "science for the public good", but it was founded in 1978 by a Coca-Cola executive who simultaneously worked for the company through 2021, US Right-To-Know found. Other Coca-Cola executives have worked with the group, and US Right-To-Know detailed tax returns that show millions in donations from Coca-Cola and other beverage industry players. Coke ended its official membership with the group in 2021. Over the years, Ilsi representatives have sought to shape food policy worldwide, and Ruskin, who has written multiple peer-reviewed papers on the group, characterized the aspartame controversy as a "masterpiece in how Ilsi worms its way into these regulatory processes." US Right To Know identified six out of 13 Jefca panel members with ties to the industry group. After it released its report, the WHO acknowledged two more of its members with industry ties. In a statement to the Guardian, a WHO spokesperson defended the industry consultants' inclusion in the review process. "For the meeting on aspartame, Jefca selected the experts likely to make the best contributions to the debate," said spokesperson Fadela Chaib. She said WHO's guidelines only require disclosure of conflicts of interest within the last four years. "To our knowledge, the experts you listed by name have not participated in any Ilsi activities for at least 10 years," she said. But that partially contradicts a statement made by WHO just weeks before to the news outlet Le Parisien in which it acknowledged two people currently working with Ilsi were involved in the process. The Guardian had also asked about those two people identified in the Parisien story but were not listed "by name" in its email. The WHO told Le Parisien: "We regret that this interest was not declared by these two experts either in the written statement or orally at the opening of the meeting."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new study of studies, researchers have concluded that blue light-filtering eyeglasses might not deliver on claims made by advertisers or optometrist offices. NewAtlas reports: To reach their conclusion, researchers at the University of Melbourne with colleagues from Monash University, and City, University of London looked at 17 published studies from six different countries relating to the use of eyeglasses that block blue light. The randomized control studies ranged in size from five to 156 participants and each took place over a time period of just less than one day to five weeks. They found that based on the current research, nothing conclusive could be said about the benefits of blue-light-blocking glasses on overall eye health, sleep quality, or visual performance. This is despite the facts that there are a range of advertising claims regarding these very benefits, and that such lenses are often prescribed for patients based on their alleged efficacy. Downie and her team are quick to point out that even with such a comprehensive review of the current research on blue-blocking glasses, it would take a much larger study to reach truly valuable data about the use of such specs. One of the issues they point out is that none of the studies reviewed had long enough follow-up periods for the researchers to make conclusions about the long-term use of the glasses. Singh also points out that even without larger, longer, and more rigorous studies, the efficacy of blue-light-blocking glasses remains dubious. "The amount of blue light our eyes receive from artificial sources, such as computer screens, is about a thousandth of what we get from natural daylight," he said. "It's also worth bearing in mind that blue-light filtering lenses typically filter out about 10-25% of blue light, depending on the specific product. Filtering out higher levels of blue light would require the lenses to have an obvious amber tint, which would have a substantial effect on color perception." The new study has been published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A critical vulnerability (CVE-2023-40477) has been patched in WinRAR, enabling remote attackers to execute arbitrary code by luring victims into opening a specially crafted RAR file. The severity rating is only 7.8 though due to user deception being necessary. BleepingComputer reports: The vulnerability was discovered by researcher "goodbyeselene" of Zero Day Initiative, who reported the flaw to the vendor, RARLAB, on June 8th, 2023. "The specific flaw exists within the processing of recovery volumes," reads the security advisory released on ZDI's site. "The issue results from the lack of proper validation of user-supplied data, which can result in a memory access past the end of an allocated buffer." RARLAB released WinRAR version 6.23 on August 2nd, 2023, effectively addressing CVE-2023-40477. Therefore, WinRAR users are strongly advised to apply the available security update immediately. Apart from the RAR4 recovery volumes processing code fix, version 6.23 addresses an issue with specially crafted archives leading to wrong file initiation, which is also considered a high-severity problem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Mozilla Foundation has started a petition to stop the French government from forcing browsers like Mozilla's Firefox to censor websites. "It would set a dangerous precedent, providing a playbook for other governments to also turn browsers like Firefox into censorship tools," says the organization. "The government introduced the bill to parliament shortly before the summer break and is hoping to pass this as quickly and smoothly as possible; the bill has even been put on an accelerated procedure, with a vote to take place this fall." You can add your name to their petition here. The bill in question is France's SREN Bill, which sets a precarious standard for digital freedoms by empowering the government to compile a list of websites to be blocked at the browser level. The Mozilla Foundation warns that this approach "is uncharted territory" and could give oppressive regimes an operational model that could undermine the effectiveness of censorship circumvention tools. "Rather than mandate browser based blocking, we think the legislation should focus on improving the existing mechanisms already utilized by browsers -- services such as Safe Browsing and Smart Screen," says Mozilla. "The law should instead focus on establishing clear yet reasonable timelines under which major phishing protection systems should handle legitimate website inclusion requests from authorized government agencies. All such requests for inclusion should be based on a robust set of public criteria limited to phishing/scam websites, subject to independent review from experts, and contain judicial appellate mechanisms in case an inclusion request is rejected by a provider."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Canadian government on Friday demanded that Meta lift a "reckless" ban on domestic news from its platforms to allow people to share information about wildfires in the west of the country. Meta started blocking news on its Facebook and Instagram platforms for all users in Canada this month in response to a new law requiring internet giants to pay for news articles. Some people fleeing wildfires in the remote northern town of Yellowknife have complained to domestic media that the ban prevented them from sharing important data about the fires. "Meta's reckless choice to block news ... is hurting access to vital information on Facebook and Instagram," Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said in a social media post. "We are calling on them to reinstate news sharing today for the safety of Canadians facing this emergency. We need more news right now, not less," she said. Transport Minister Pablo Rodriguez earlier said the ban meant people did not have access to crucial information. Chris Bittle, a legislator for the ruling Liberal Party, complained on Thursday that "Meta's actions to block news are reckless and irresponsible." Ollie Williams, who runs Yellowknife's Cabin Radio digital radio station, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that people were posting screen shots of information on Facebook since they could not share links to news feeds. A Meta spokesperson responded by saying that the company had activated the "Safety Check" feature on Facebook that allows users to mark that they are safe in the wake of a natural disaster or a crisis.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Reuters, SoftBank has acquired the 25% stake in Arm it does not directly own from its Vision Fund unit. The new deal values the chip designer at $64 billion. From the report: Details of the transaction will be unveiled on Monday when Arm makes public the filing for its blockbuster stock market launch, the sources said, requesting anonymity as these discussions are confidential. SoftBank is now expected to sell fewer Arm shares in the initial public offering (IPO) and would likely be retaining a stake of as much as 90% in the company, according to the sources, adding that Arm's capital raising from the IPO would be less than the range of $8 billion to $10 billion it was earlier planning. SoftBank is currently in talks to list Arm at a valuation of $60 billion to $70 billion in the IPO, which is expected to happen in September, Reuters has previously reported. SoftBank, which took Arm private for $32 billion in 2016, sold a 25% stake in the company to Vision Fund 1 (VF1) for $8 billion in 2017. The deal removes a potential overhang for Arm's stock following the IPO, because VF1 had initially planned to cash out its stake in the stock market over time following the listing, while SoftBank has indicated it will remain a long-term strategic investor.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is adding a new charge for third-party sellers who ship their own products instead of paying for the company's fulfillment services. CNBC reports: Beginning Oct. 1, members of Amazon's Seller Fulfilled Prime program will pay the company a 2% fee on each product sold, according to a notice sent to merchants last week, which was viewed by CNBC. Previously, there was no such fee for sellers. "We're updating our requirements for Seller Fulfilled Prime to ensure that it provides customers a great and consistent Prime experience," the notice states. An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC in a statement that the company instituted a fee for SFP members due to the costs of developing and running the program. The SFP program, launched in 2015, allows third-party merchants to sell their products with the Prime badge without paying for Amazon's fulfillment services, known as Fulfillment By Amazon. The SFP program hasn't attracted as many users as FBA has, given that sellers are expected to meet the company's Prime delivery standards, such as speedy shipping and weekend service. In June, Amazon reopened sign-ups for the invite-only program, after it suspended enrollment in SFP in 2019. The e-commerce giant also charges sellers a referral fee between 8% and 15% on each sale. Sellers may also pay for things like warehouse storage, packing and shipping, as well as advertising fees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Google has announced the first open-source quantum resilient FIDO2 security key implementation, which uses a unique ECC/Dilithium hybrid signature schema co-created with ETH Zurich. FIDO2 is the second major version of the Fast IDentity Online authentication standard, and FIDO2 keys are used for passwordless authentication and as a multi-factor authentication (MFA) element. Google explains that a quantum-resistant FIDO2 security key implementation is a crucial step towards ensuring safety and security as the advent of quantum computing approaches and developments in the field follow an accelerating trajectory. To protect against quantum computers, a new hybrid algorithm was created by combining the established ECDSA algorithm with the Dilithium algorithm. Dilithium is a quantum-resistant cryptographic signature scheme that NIST included in its post-quantum cryptography standardization proposals, praising its strong security and excellent performance, making it suitable for use in a wide array of applications. This hybrid signature approach that blends classic and quantum-resistant features wasn't simple to manifest, Google says. Designing a Dilithium implementation that's compact enough for security keys was incredibly challenging. Its engineers, however, managed to develop a Rust-based implementation that only needs 20KB of memory, making the endeavor practically possible, while they also noted its high-performance potential. The hybrid signature schema was first presented in a 2022 paper (PDF) and recently gained recognition at the ACNS (Applied Cryptography and Network Security) 2023, where it won the "best workshop paper" award. This new hybrid implementation is now part of the OpenSK, Google's open-source security keys implementation that supports the FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards. The tech giant hopes that its proposal will be adopted by FIDO2 as a new standard and supported by major web browsers with large user bases. The firm calls the application of next-gen cryptography at the internet scale "a massive undertaking" and urges all stakeholders to move quickly to maintain good progress on that front.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Free and open software have transformed the tech industry. But we still have a lot to work out to make them healthy, equitable enterprises. From a report: When Xerox donated a new laser printer to MIT in 1980, the company couldn't have known that the machine would ignite a revolution. While the early decades of software development generally ran on a culture of open access, this new printer ran on inaccessible proprietary software, much to the horror of Richard M. Stallman, then a 27-year-old programmer at the university. A few years later, Stallman released GNU, an operating system designed to be a free alternative to one of the dominant operating systems at the time: Unix. The free-software movement was born, with a simple premise: for the good of the world, all code should be open, without restriction or commercial intervention. Forty years later, tech companies are making billions on proprietary software, and much of the technology around us is inscrutable. But while Stallman's movement may look like a failed experiment, the free and open-source software movement is not only alive and well; it has become a keystone of the tech industry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has joined a coalition of U.S. businesses in protest at India's sudden introduction of tech import restrictions last month, claiming the move will damage New Delhi's ambitions to become a global manufacturing hub and harm consumers. From a report: n a letter sent to U.S. officials this week, eight American trade groups asked the government to urge India to reconsider the policy, which will see the country impose a new license requirement for technology imports from November 1, covering everything from laptops and tablets to servers and datacenter components. India didn't give a reason for the change in rules, but the move is thought to be an effort to boost local manufacturing, forming another prong in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "Made in India" campaign to encourage domestic manufacturing in the tech sector.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google and some of its Chromebook partners decided to try making "gaming Chromebooks" a thing late last year. These machines included some gaming laptop features like configurable RGB keyboards and high refresh rate screens, but because they still used integrated GPUs, they were meant mostly for use with streaming services like Nvidia's GeForce Now and Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming. But there were also apparently plans for some gaming Chromebooks with the power to play more games locally. Earlier this year, 9to5Google spotted developer comments earlier this year pointing to a Chromebook board (codenamed Hades) that would have included a dedicated GeForce RTX 4050 GPU like the one found in some Windows gaming notebooks. This board would have served as a foundation that multiple PC makers could have used to build Chromebooks. But these models apparently won't be seeing the light of day anytime soon. Developer comments spotted by About Chromebooks this week indicate that the Hades board (plus a couple of other Nvidia-equipped boards, Agah and Herobrine) has been canceled, which means that any laptops based on that board won't be happening.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon, looking to amp up its TikTok-like shopping feed, has called on influencers to make hundreds of videos apiece. But its offer of $25 a pop -- about a tenth of the going rate -- was widely mocked on social media. From a report: Amazon sent an email to select influencers, asking them to submit videos showing two or more products. The e-commerce giant said it would pay up to $12,500 per creator in exchange for a maximum of 500 videos that meet the company's criteria, according to screenshots of the message posted to social media. Amazon plans to cap the initiative at 35,000 videos, or the equivalent of $875,000 worth. Last December, Amazon launched Inspire, a TikTok-like feed of photos and videos customized to users' interests and featuring products that can be purchased on Amazon's web store. The goal is to help consumers browse and discover products serendipitously, as they do on social media platforms, rather simply searching for specific items. Amazon for years relied mostly on free customer reviews to entice shoppers. It's been adding more advertising to the site, mostly in the form of paid placement in search results similar to Google.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) office responsible for protecting the public from toxic substances has changed how it defines PFAS for a second time since 2021, a move critics say they fear will exclude thousands of "forever chemicals" from regulation and largely benefit industry. From a report: Instead of using a clear definition of what constitutes a PFAS, the agency's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics plans to take a "case-by-case" approach that allows it to be more flexible in determining which chemicals should be subjected to regulations. Among other uses for the compounds, the EPA appears to be excluding some chemicals in pharmaceuticals and pesticides that are generally defined as PFAS, current and former EPA officials say, and the shift comes amid fierce industry opposition to proposed limits on the chemicals. The approach puts the toxics office at odds with other EPA divisions, other federal agencies, the European Union, Canada and most of the scientific world. The definition is likely to generate confusion in the chemical industry and within the agency, current and former EPA officials say. [...] PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 15,000 compounds most frequently used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant. They have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems. They are dubbed "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down in the environment. In a statement to the Guardian, the EPA said its latest definition was more "expansive" than the previous.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the big promises of NFTs was that the artist who originally made them could get a cut every time their piece was resold. Unfortunately, that's not the case anymore. From a report: OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace still fully enforcing royalty fees, said today that it plans to stop the mandatory collection of resale fees for artists. Starting March 2024, those fees will essentially be tips -- an optional percentage of a sale price that sellers can choose to give the original artist. If the seller doesn't want to hand over any money, that'll be their choice. The NFT ecosystem has been on a race to the bottom when it comes to fees. As the market for NFTs collapsed, marketplaces have lowered their own trading fees and stopped enforcing royalty fees in order to attract sellers. Blur, which has overtaken OpenSea as the biggest NFT marketplace by trading volume, only enforces a 0.5 percent fee on most collections, whereas creators typically set their fees at 5 to 10 percent. OpenSea will stop enforcing royalty fees on all new NFTs starting August 31st. The marketplace will continue enforcing the fees on certain existing collections until March 2024, at which point they'll become optional on all sales.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Months before Kenya finally banned iris scans by Sam Altman's crypto startup Worldcoin, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (ODPC) had ordered its parent company, Tools for Humanity, to stop collecting personal data. From a report: The ODPC had in May this year instructed the crypto startup to stop iris scans and the collection of facial recognition and other personal data in Kenya, a letter sent to Worldcoin and seen by TechCrunch shows. Tools for Humanity, the company building Worldcoin, did not stop taking biometric data until early this month when Kenya's ministry of interior and administration, a more powerful entity, suspended it following its official launch. Worldcoin's official launch led to a spike in the number of people queuing up to have their eyeballs scanned in exchange for "free money," drawing the attention of authorities. The letter shows that ODPC had instructed Worldcoin to cease collecting data for intruding on individuals' privacy by gathering biometric data without a well-established and compelling justification. Further, it said Worldcoin had failed to obtain valid consent from people before scanning their irises, saying its agents failed to inform its subjects about the data security and privacy measures it took, and how the data collected would be used or processed. "Your client is hereby instructed to cease the collection of all facial recognition data and iris scans, from your subscribers. This cessation should be implemented without delay and should include all ongoing and future data processing activities," said Rose Mosero, in a letter to Tools for Humanity that outlined the concerns.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Checkout.com, the London-based credit card processing company that ballooned its business model by servicing billions in crypto transactions for Binance clients, cut short its contract with the crypto giant this week, Forbes reported Friday. From the report: In a pair of letters sent to Binance on August 9 and 11, Checkout CEO Guillaume Pousaz terminated the company's relationship with its once-largest customer citing "reports of regulators actions and orders in relevant jurisdictions" and "inquiries from partners." The second letter, seen by Forbes and sent two days after the first, cited additional concerns over Binance's anti-money laundering, sanctions and compliance controls, and said the termination would be effective August 17. Checkout spokesperson Lewis Jones confirmed to Forbes the company had ended its contract with Binance. In response, Binance told Forbes it disagreed with Checkout's basis for terminating the contract, and said it was considering legal action. "We have come a long way to building an industry-leading compliance program and we hope to build more trust with regulators and partners," spokesperson Dewi Mustajab said in a statement. He added that Checkout's withdrawal would have "no impact on our services."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Late last week, MSN.com's Microsoft Travel section posted an AI-generated article about the "cannot miss" attractions of Ottawa that includes the Ottawa Food Bank, a real charitable organization that feeds struggling families. In its recommendation text, Microsoft's AI model wrote, "Consider going into it on an empty stomach." Titled, "Headed to Ottawa? Here's what you shouldn't miss!," (archive here) the article extols the virtues of the Canadian city and recommends attending the Winterlude festival (which only takes place in February), visiting an Ottawa Senators game, and skating in "The World's Largest Naturallyfrozen Ice Rink" (sic). As the No. 3 destination on the list, Microsoft Travel suggests visiting the Ottawa Food Bank, likely drawn from a summary found online but capped with an unfortunate turn of phrase: "The organization has been collecting, purchasing, producing, and delivering food to needy people and families in the Ottawa area since 1984. We observe how hunger impacts men, women, and children on a daily basis, and how it may be a barrier to achievement. People who come to us have jobs and families to support, as well as expenses to pay. Life is already difficult enough. Consider going into it on an empty stomach." That last line is an example of the kind of empty platitude (or embarrassing mistaken summary) one can easily find in AI-generated writing, inserted thoughtlessly because the AI model behind the article cannot understand the context of what it is doing. The article is credited to "Microsoft Travel," and it is likely the product of a large language model (LLM), a type of AI model trained on a vast scrape of text found on the Internet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid shares a report from The Economist: What you notice first is how silent it is," says Kimmo Koski, the boss of the Finnish IT Centre for Science. Dr Koski is describing LUMI -- Finnish for "snow" -- the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, which sits 250km south of the Arctic Circle in the town of Kajaani in Finland. LUMI, which was inaugurated last year, is used for everything from climate modeling to searching for new drugs. It has tens of thousands of individual processors and is capable of performing up to 429 quadrillion calculations every second. That makes it the third-most-powerful supercomputer in the world. Powered by hydroelectricity, and with its waste heat used to help warm homes in Kajaani, it even boasts negative emissions of carbon dioxide. LUMI offers a glimpse of the future of high-performance computing (HPC), both on dedicated supercomputers and in the cloud infrastructure that runs much of the internet. Over the past decade the demand for HPC has boomed, driven by technologies like machine learning, genome sequencing and simulations of everything from stockmarkets and nuclear weapons to the weather. It is likely to carry on rising, for such applications will happily consume as much computing power as you can throw at them. Over the same period the amount of computing power required to train a cutting-edge AI model has been doubling every five months. All this has implications for the environment. HPC -- and computing more generally -- is becoming a big user of energy. The International Energy Agency reckons data centers account for between 1.5% and 2% of global electricity consumption, roughly the same as the entire British economy. That is expected to rise to 4% by 2030. With its eye on government pledges to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the computing industry is trying to find ways to do more with less and boost the efficiency of its products. The work is happening at three levels: that of individual microchips; of the computers that are built from those chips; and the data centers that, in turn, house the computers. [...] The standard measure of a data centre's efficiency is the power usage effectiveness (pue), the ratio between the data centre's overall power consumption and how much of that is used to do useful work. According to the Uptime Institute, a firm of it advisers, a typical data centre has a pue of 1.58. That means that about two-thirds of its electricity goes to running its computers while a third goes to running the data centre itself, most of which will be consumed by its cooling systems. Clever design can push that number much lower. Most existing data centers rely on air cooling. Liquid cooling offers better heat transfer, at the cost of extra engineering effort. Several startups even offer to submerge circuit boards entirely in specially designed liquid baths. Thanks in part to its use of liquid cooling, Frontier boasts a pue of 1.03. One reason lumi was built near the Arctic Circle was to take advantage of the cool sub-Arctic air. A neighboring computer, built in the same facility, makes use of that free cooling to reach a pue rating of just 1.02. That means 98% of the electricity that comes in gets turned into useful mathematics. Even the best commercial data centers fall short of such numbers. Google's, for instance, have an average pue value of 1.1. The latest numbers from the Uptime Institute, published in June, show that, after several years of steady improvement, global data-centre efficiency has been stagnant since 2018. The report notes that the U.S., Britain and the European Union, among others, are considering new rules that "could force data centers to become more efficient." Germany has proposed the Energy Efficiency Act that would mandate a minimum pue of 1.5 by 2027, and 1.3 by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two years after being listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, the Linux-for-enterprise company SUSE is switching back to private ownership. The Register reports: On Wednesday the developer announced that its majority shareholder, an entity called Marcel LUX III SARL, intends to take it private by delisting it from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and merging it with an unlisted Luxembourg entity. Marcel is an entity controlled by EQT Private Equity, a Swedish investment firm, which acquired it from MicroFocus in 2018. The announcement offers scant detail about the rationale for the delisting, other than a canned quote from SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen who said, "I believe in the strategic opportunity of taking the company private -- it gives us the right setting to grow the business and deliver on our strategy with the new leadership team in place." Van Leeuwen took the big chair at SUSE just over three months back, on May 1. The deal values SUSE at 16 euros per share -- well below the 30-euro price of the 2021 float, but above the Thursday closing price of 9.605 euros. Interestingly, Marcel is happy for shareholders not to take the money and run. "There is no obligation for shareholders to accept the Offer," explains the announcement's detail of the transaction's structure. "EQT Private Equity does not intend to pursue a squeeze-out. Therefore, shareholders who wish to stay invested in SUSE in a private setting may do so." Shareholders who stick around will therefore score their portion of a special dividend SUSE will pay out as part of this transaction. Those who sell will get the aforementioned 16-euros per share, less their portion of the interim dividend. The transaction to take SUSE private is expected to conclude in the final quarter of 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Stefania Benonisdottir and Augustine Kong at Oxford's Big Data Institute have just demonstrated that we can determine if genetic studies are biased using nothing but the genes of the participants. You may wonder how this was done -- quite reasonably, since we can't very well compare the genes of participants to those of non-participants. The analysis done by Kong and his student relies on the key idea that a genetic sequence that occurs more frequently in participants than in nonparticipants will also occur more frequently in the genetic regions that are shared by two related participants. Put differently, a bit of DNA that is common in the population will show up frequently in the study. But it will still only have a 50/50 chance of showing up in the child of someone who carried a copy. If a bit of DNA makes people more likely to enroll in genetic studies, it will be more common both in the overall data and among closely related family members. So they checked the genetic sequences shared between first-degree relatives -- either parents and children or siblings (but not twins) -- in the UK Biobank. [...] This analysis used genetic data from about 500,000 people collected between 2006 and 2010. It examined roughly 500,000 genetic regions from around 20,000 pairs of first-degree relatives. They didn't find (or look for) "a gene" that correlates with participation in a study. Rather, they compared all of the shared and not-shared genetic sequences among the pairs of first-degree relatives enrolled in the study and analyzed their relative frequencies according to the above three principles. This analysis allowed them to calculate a polygenic score, a summary of how all of the genetic sequences in aggregate contribute to a trait. They deduced that genetics is positively associated with education level, with being invited to participate in further studies, and with accepting that invitation. Genetics was also associated with low BMI. Education level and BMI are both covariates that are often controlled for when using UK Biobank data. But now, no external information is needed; the ascertainment bias can be determined not from looking at other things about the participants' lives, but from their genes. Benonisdottir, the first author of the work, explained in an email: "It has previously been reported by others that the UK Biobank is not representative with regard to many traits, including BMI and educational attainment. Thus, the fact that these traits are associated with the participation polygenic score, which does not use any information about EA and BMI but is constructed with weights from analysis using our new method of comparing shared and not-shared alleles of participating first-degree relatives, validates that our method is capturing real information about participation." This validation is essential, since their method is so new. The authors of this study propose that their methodology could be used to look for ascertainment bias using only genetic data and that taking participation data into account could help study outcomes become more accurate. They conclude by noting that "participation" is not thus just a result of someone's characteristics and traits; rather, the propensity to participate is a trait in its own right, and one with a genetic component. Being a joiner is hereditary.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI has acquired Global Illumination, a small "digital product company" that has a link to a game called Biomes. The web-based, open source sandbox MMORPG "has a striking resemblance to Minecraft," says The Verge's Jay Peters. From the report: In its announcement, OpenAI didn't disclose the terms of the acquisition but said that Global Illumination's "entire team" has joined the company to work on its "core products," including ChatGPT. Beyond that, OpenAI didn't specify what the Global Illumination team would be doing at the company. OpenAI didn't immediately reply to a request for comment. "Global Illumination is a company that has been leveraging AI to build creative tools, infrastructure, and digital experiences," OpenAI said in the announcement. "The team previously designed and built products early on at Instagram and Facebook and have also made significant contributions at YouTube, Google, Pixar, Riot Games, and other notable companies." TechCrunch notes that this is OpenAI's "first public acquisition in its roughly seven-year history."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lawyers for the New York Times are deciding whether to sue OpenAI to protect the intellectual property rights associated with its reporting. NPR reports: For weeks, the Times and the maker of ChatGPT have been locked in tense negotiations over reaching a licensing deal in which OpenAI would pay the Times for incorporating its stories in the tech company's AI tools, but the discussions have become so contentious that the paper is now considering legal action. A lawsuit from the Times against OpenAI would set up what could be the most high-profile legal tussle yet over copyright protection in the age of generative AI. A top concern for the Times is that ChatGPT is, in a sense, becoming a direct competitor with the paper by creating text that answers questions based on the original reporting and writing of the paper's staff. If, when someone searches online, they are served a paragraph-long answer from an AI tool that refashions reporting from the Times, the need to visit the publisher's website is greatly diminished, said one person involved in the talks. So-called large language models like ChatGPT have scraped vast parts of the internet to assemble data that inform how the chatbot responds to various inquiries. The data-mining is conducted without permission. Whether hoovering up this massive repository is legal remains an open question. If OpenAI is found to have violated any copyrights in this process, federal law allows for the infringing articles to be destroyed at the end of the case. In other words, if a federal judge finds that OpenAI illegally copied the Times' articles to train its AI model, the court could order the company to destroy ChatGPT's dataset, forcing the company to recreate it using only work that it is authorized to use. Federal copyright law also carries stiff financial penalties, with violators facing fines up to $150,000 for each infringement "committed willfully." Yesterday, Adweek reported that the New York Times updated its Terms of Service to prohibit its content from being used in the development of "any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Western Digital was sued on Tuesday on behalf of a California resident who claims the solid state drive he bought from the manufacturer was defective and that the storage slinger shipped kit that didn't live up to its marketing promises. The Register reports: The complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in San Jose, California, where the storage giant is based, alleges the Western Digital SanDisk 2TB Extreme Pro SSD purchased by plaintiff Nathan Krum in May for $180 failed because of an undisclosed flaw, which also affects SanDisk Extreme Pro, Extreme Portable, Extreme Pro Portable, and WD My Passport SSD models since January 2023, it's claimed. The complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in San Jose, California, where the storage giant is based, alleges the Western Digital SanDisk 2TB Extreme Pro SSD purchased by plaintiff Nathan Krum in May for $180 failed because of an undisclosed flaw, which also affects SanDisk Extreme Pro, Extreme Portable, Extreme Pro Portable, and WD My Passport SSD models since January 2023, it's claimed. The complaint asserts Western Digital customers "have widely reported drive failures and data loss." Krum, in his filing, believes Western Digital is aware of the problem and not doing enough about it. "The SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD hard drives, which are also sold under the WD My Passport brand, have a firmware issue that causes them to disconnect or become unreadable by computers," he claimed, adding that his drive was among those that stopped working as expected. It is alleged the drives can break down in various ways, including randomly disconnecting from their host, which could result in information not being saved correctly or file-system corruption. In any case, people find they can no longer access their stored documents, making the SSDs worthless and useless, it is claimed. [...] Chris Cantrell, an attorney at Doyle Lowther LLP who is representing the plaintiffs, told The Register it's not yet clear how many SanDisk SSDs experienced data loss though there are more than a few people who share his client's experience. "While Western Digital appears to have attempted to fix the issue with a firmware update, it does not appear to have fixed the issue," Cantrell added. "This is what prompted us to file this lawsuit on behalf of affected SanDisk SSD purchasers. We anticipate adding additional named plaintiffs from other states over the next few weeks." The complaint alleges breach of contract, violation of consumer protection law, and misleading advertising, among other claims, and seeks damages, legal costs, and other relief.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Sotheby's auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by investors who regret buying Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that sold for highly inflated prices during the NFT craze in 2021. A Sotheby's auction duped investors by giving the Bored Ape NFTs "an air of legitimacy... to generate investors' interest and hype around the Bored Ape brand," the class-action lawsuit claims. The boost to Bored Ape NFT prices provided by the auction "was rooted in deception," said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Central District of California. It wasn't revealed at the time of the auction that the buyer was the now-disgraced FTX, the lawsuit said. "Sotheby's representations that the undisclosed buyer was a 'traditional' collector had misleadingly created the impression that the market for BAYC NFTs had crossed over to a mainstream audience," the lawsuit claimed. Lawsuit plaintiffs say that harmed investors bought the NFTs "with a reasonable expectation of profit from owning them." Sotheby's sold a lot of 101 Bored Ape NFTs for $24.4 million at its "Ape In!" auction in September 2021, well above the pre-auction estimates of $12 million to $18 million. That's an average price of over $241,000, but Bored Ape NFTs now sell for a floor price of about $50,000 worth of ether cryptocrurrency, according to CoinGecko data accessed today. [...] The amended lawsuit alleges that "[Bored Ape creator Yuga Labs] colluded with fine arts broker, Defendant Sotheby's, to run a deceptive auction." After the sale, a Sotheby's representative described the winning bidder during a Twitter Spaces event as a "traditional" collector, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit said it turned out the auction buyer was now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, whose founder Sam Bankman-Fried is in jail awaiting trial on criminal charges. Ethereum blockchain transaction data shows that after the auction, "Sotheby's transferred the lot of BAYC NFTs to wallet address 0xf8e0C93Fd48B4C34A4194d3AF436b13032E641F3,77 which, upon information and belief, is owned/controlled by FTX," the complaint said. Speculation that FTX was the buyer had been percolating since at least January 2023. The lawsuit alleges that Yuga Labs and Sotheby's violated the California Unfair Competition Law, the California Corporate Securities Law, the US Securities Exchange Act, and the California Corporations Code. The plaintiffs also claim that Sotheby's Metaverse, an NFT trading platform opened after the auction, "operated (or attempted to operate) as an unregistered broker of securities."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new Reuters/Ipsos survey, nearly half of American adults support a ban on TikTok. From the report: TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance and used by tens of millions of Americans, has faced calls from U.S. lawmakers for a nationwide ban over concerns about possible Chinese government influence. Some 47% of respondents to the two-day poll, which concluded on Tuesday, said they at least somewhat supported "banning the social media application, TikTok, from use in the United States," while 36% opposed a ban and 17% said they didn't know. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans favored a ban, compared to 47% of Democrats, the poll showed. The online Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted nationwide, collecting responses from 1,005 adults, including 443 Democrats and 346 Republicans. It had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 4 percentage points in either direction. Last month, a Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of Americans (59%) believe the social media app is a threat to the national security of the United States.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) says it is temporarily banning transgender women from competing in its women's events. The BBC reports: The FIDE said individual cases would require "further analysis" and that a decision could take up to two years. "The transgender legislation is rapidly developing in many countries and many sport bodies are adopting their own policies," it said. "FIDE will be monitoring these developments and see how we can apply them to the world of chess. Two years is a scope of sight that seemed reasonable for the thorough analyses of such developments." It added that transgender players could still compete in the open section of its tournaments. In its policy decision, FIDE also said that trans men who had won women's titles before transitioning would see their titles abolished. Woman Grandmaster and two-time US Women's Champion Jennifer Shahade said the policy was "ridiculous and dangerous." "It's obvious they didn't consult with any transgender players in constructing it... I strongly urge FIDE to reverse course on this and start from scratch with better consultants," Ms Shahade said. UK MP Angela Eagle, who was a joint winner of the 1976 British Girls' Under-18 chess championship, said: "There is no physical advantage in chess unless you believe men are inherently more able to play than women -- I spent my chess career being told women's brains were smaller than men's and we shouldn't even be playing." She added: "This ban is ridiculous and offensive to women."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: This year, BMO, a Canadian bank, was looking for Canadian adults to apply for a credit card. So the bank's advertising agency ran a YouTube campaign using an ad-targeting system from Google that employs artificial intelligence to pinpoint ideal customers.But Google, which owns YouTube, also showed the ad to a viewer in the United States on a Barbie-themed children's video on the "Kids Diana Show," a YouTube channel for preschoolers whose videos have been watched more than 94 billion times. When that viewer clicked on the ad, it led to BMO's website, which tagged the user's browser with tracking software from Google, Meta, Microsoft and other companies, according to new research from Adalytics, which analyzes ad campaigns for brands. As a result, leading tech companies could have tracked children across the internet, raising concerns about whether they were undercutting a federal privacy law, the report said. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, requires children's online services to obtain parental consent before collecting personal data from users under age 13 for purposes like ad targeting. Adalytics identified more than 300 brands' ads for adult products, like cars, on nearly 100 YouTube videos designated as "made for kids" that were shown to a user who was not signed in, and that linked to advertisers' websites. It also found several YouTube ads with violent content, including explosions, sniper rifles and car accidents, on children's channels. An analysis by The Times this month found that when a viewer who was not signed into YouTube clicked the ads on some of the children's channels on the site, they were taken to brand websites that placed trackers -- bits of code used for purposes like security, ad tracking or user profiling -- from Amazon, Meta's Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others -- on users' browsers. As with children's television, it is legal, and commonplace, to run ads, including for adult consumer products like cars or credit cards, on children's videos. There is no evidence that Google and YouTube violated their 2019 agreement with the F.T.C. The report's findings raise new concerns about YouTube's advertising on children's content. In 2019, YouTube and Google agreed topay a record $170 million fineto settle accusations from the Federal Trade Commission and the State of New York that the company had illegally collected personal information from children watching kids' channels. Regulators said the company had profited from using children's data to target them with ads. YouTube then said it would limit the collection of viewers' data and stop serving personalized ads on children's videos.On Thursday, two United States senators sent a letter to the F.T.C., urging it to investigate whether Google and YouTube had violated COPPA, citing Adalytics and reporting by The New York Times. Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said they were concerned that the company may have tracked children and served them targeted ads without parental consent, facilitating "the vast collection and distribution" of children's data. "This behavior by YouTube and Google is estimated to have impacted hundreds of thousands, to potentially millions, of children across the United States," the senators wrote. Google spokesman Michael Aciman called the report's findings "deeply flawed and misleading." Google has stated that running ads for adults on children's videos is useful because parents watching could become customers. However, they acknowledge that violent ads on children's videos violate their policies and have taken steps to prevent such ads from running in the future. Google claims they do not use personalized ads on children's videos, ensuring compliance with COPPA. Google notes that it does not inform advertisers if a viewer has watched a children's video, only that they clicked on the ad. Google also says it cannot control data collection on a brand's website after a YouTube viewer clicks an ad -- a process that could occur on any website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Codeweavers took to its official forums today to announce the release of CrossOver 23.0.0, the new version of its software that aims to make emulating Windows software and games easier on macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS systems. From a report: CrossOver 23 has updated to Wine 8.0.1, and it's loaded with improvements across all its platforms. The most notable, though, is the addition of DirectX 12 support under macOS via VKD3D and MoltenVK. This marks the first time most Mac users have had access to software that relies on DirectX 12; previously, only DirectX 11 was supported, and that went for other software solutions like Parallels, too. This new release adds "initial support" for geometry shaders and transforms feedback on macOS Ventura. Codeweavers claims that will address a lot of problems with "missing graphics or black screens in-game" in titles like MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, and Octopath Traveler.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1995, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates sent a memo calling the internet a "tidal wave" that would be crucial to every part of the company's business. Nearly two decades later, Microsoft's current leader, Satya Nadella, said he believes the impact of artificial intelligence will be just as profound. "The Bill memo in 1995, it does feel like that to me," Nadella said on this week's episode of The Circuit With Emily Chang. "I think it's as big." Central to the latest attempt to transform Microsoft is OpenAI, a startup whose generative AI technology has created so much buzz that it snagged a $13 billion commitment from the software giant. "We have a great relationship," OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said on The Circuit. "These big, major partnerships between tech companies usually don't work. This is an example of it working really well. We're super grateful for it." The alliance has plenty of critics. The loudest is Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI with Altman and then split from the company, citing disagreements over its direction and the addition of a for-profit arm. He has said OpenAI is now "effectively controlled by Microsoft." In response to a question about Musk's critiques and the prospect that Microsoft could acquire OpenAI, Altman said, "Company is not for sale. I don't know how to be more clear than that."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House ordered federal agencies to shore up their cybersecurity after agencies have lagged in implementing a key executive order President Joe Biden issued in 2021. From a report: Multiple federal departments and agencies have, as of the end of June, "failed to fully comply" with critical security practices prescribed by the executive order, "leaving the U.S. Government exposed to malicious cyber intrusions and undermining the example the Government must set for adequate cybersecurity practices," national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a memo to Cabinet secretaries this week. Sullivan asked senior officials from across the departments to ensure they achieve "full compliance" with the executive order's security requirements by the end of the year. His memo is addressed to agencies outside of the Pentagon. "This morning the National Security Advisor shared a memo with federal departments and agencies to ensure their cyber infrastructure is compliant with the President's Executive Order to improve the nation's cybersecurity," a National Security Council spokesperson told CNN. "As we've said, the Biden-Harris Administration has had a relentless focus on strengthening the cybersecurity of nation's most critical sectors since day one, and will continue to work to secure our cyber defenses."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft will close its Xbox 360 digital store next July, though anything purchased will still be accessible. From a report: On 29th July 2024, Xbox 360 users will no longer be able to purchase new games, DLC, or other entertainment content from either the console store or the web-based marketplace. In addition, the Microsoft Movies & TV app on the Xbox 360 will no longer function. Of course, the store will continue as normal until that date next July. After that time, any games purchased will still remain playable and deleted purchases can still be re-downloaded. Online multiplayer will also remain accessible for games already purchased (digitally or physically), as long as the publisher supports the servers. Further, users will still be able to play Xbox 360 games on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S consoles via backward compatibility, and hundreds of games will remain available to purchase on those consoles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Subscription-based models dominate daily life and businesses profit from forgotten subscription payments. The problem of forgotten subscriptions is so large there's now a robust ecosystem of startups promising to save users money by ferreting out and canceling the subscriptions they forgot about. From a report: Now, researchers have put a number on the high value of customer inertia. Buyers' inattention can boost a business's revenue by as much as 200%, according to a new working paper from researchers at Stanford and Texas A&M submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research. "I knew that people forgot to cancel," said coauthor Neale Mahoney, an economics professor at Stanford. "The magnitude, the pervasiveness of this issue was surprising." Mahoney, along with fellow Stanford economics professor Liran Einav and Benjamin Klopack, an assistant professor of economics at Texas A&M, calculated the cost (or -- to companies -- benefit) of inattention by zeroing in on a specific moment in purchasers' lives: replacing a credit card. Using a large dataset from an undisclosed payment system provider, the researchers first identified 10 common subscription services, and then looked at how frequently they were renewed during normal times and when the subscriber replaced a card, forcing them to update their payment information with each service. Renewals sharply dropped off after these card replacements, even as other shopping behavior, such as buying groceries and gas, continued normally, leading them to a conclusion: When people had to actively decide to resubscribe to a service and enter new payment information, many opted out.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adyen's shares plunged as aggressive competition in North America contributed to the slowest revenue growth since its initial public offering, erasing more than $19.6 billion of market value in a single day. From a report: Shares of the Dutch payment processing company fell a record 40.6% to $950 at 4:49 p.m. in Amsterdam, the lowest since May 2020. Trading was temporarily halted due to volatility multiple times in the day. Pricing competition, higher inflation and interest rates stunted revenue growth in the first half, the Amsterdam-based fintech firm said on Thursday. Net sales rose 21% to $803 million in the period, compared to an estimate of $843 million in a Bloomberg survey of analysts. Adyen has been a reliable growth stock, with revenue rising by at least 26% in every half since its listing in 2018 until the latest period. The disappointing results, which were also hurt by inflation and rising interest rates, suggest maintaining such momentum will be a challenge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facing a rapidly aging population and land scarcity, the Chinese capital is piloting burial spaces with electronic screens instead of headstones. From a report: When someone dies in Beijing, the body is typically cremated and the ashes are buried behind a gravestone in one of the city's public cemeteries. Family and friends gather at the site to light candles and burn incense to pay their respects. Zhang Yin, a local resident in her 40s, chose a very different burial rite when her grandmother died earlier this year: She had her ashes stored in a compartment of a large room at Beijing's Taiziyu Cemetery, almost like a safe deposit box at a bank. An electronic screen on the door of the compartment displaying pictures and videos of the deceased replaces the traditional headstone. It's a land-saving option that's also more affordable and dovetails with the growing trend of Chinese families wanting more personalized funerals for their loved ones. "Traditional cemeteries are outdoors, exposed to the wind and sun," Zhang says. "If you bring your kids there, they will only see bare graves, which has no meaning to them. For digital cemeteries, families can watch the photo display of deceased relatives together in a hall." Zhang says her grandfather gave his approval for the digital funeral because he's very receptive to new things -- and, by coincidence, the niche storing her grandmother's ashes is the same as the number of her grandmother's old house. Both local governments and funeral companies in China are experimenting with new ways of conducting burial rites as the country confronts urban land scarcity and a rapidly aging population.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Debian blog: Over 30 years ago the late Ian Murdock wrote to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup about the completion of a brand-new Linux release which he named "The Debian Linux Release." He built the release by hand, from scratch, so to speak. Ian laid out guidelines for how this new release would work, what approach the release would take regarding its size, manner of upgrades, installation procedures; and with great care of consideration for users without Internet connection. Unaware that he had sparked a movement in the fledgling F/OSS community, Ian worked on and continued to work on Debian. The release, now aided by volunteers from the newsgroup and around the world, grew and continues to grow as one of the largest and oldest FREE operating systems that still exist today. Debian at its core is comprised of Users, Contributors, Developers, and Sponsors, but most importantly, People. Ians drive and focus remains embedded in the core of Debian, it remains in all of our work, it remains in the minds and hands of the users of The Universal Operating System. The Debian Project is proud and happy to share our anniversary not exclusively unto ourselves, instead we share this moment with everyone, as we come together in celebration of a resounding community that works together, effects change, and continues to make a difference, not just in our work but around the world. Debian is present in cluster systems, datacenters, desktop computers, embedded systems, IoT devices, laptops, servers, it may possibly be powering the web server and device you are reading this article on, and it can also be found in Spacecraft.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The new Bing with AI chatbot is "cute, but not a game changer," the data thus far suggests. From a report: When Microsoft unveiled an AI-powered version of Bing in February, the company said it could add $2 billion of revenue if the revamped search engine could pry away even a single point of market share from Google. Six months later, it looks as if even 1 percentage point could be a tough target, with some new data showing Bing's place in search has barely budged -- partly because of how Microsoft handled its high-profile rollout. In July, Bing had 3% market share worldwide, according to analytics firm StatCounter. That is the same share it had in January, the month before the launch of the new Bing. Another report, from analytics firm Similarweb, shows Bing had around 1% of Google's monthly visitors in July, around the same it had in January. Microsoft is calling the new Bing a success. It disputed outside data, saying third-party data companies aren't measuring all the people who are going directly to Bing's chat page.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers seem to have solved the puzzle of LK-99. Scientific detective work has unearthed evidence that the material is not a superconductor, and clarified its actual properties. Nature: The conclusion dashes hopes that LK-99 -- a compound of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen -- marked the discovery of the first superconductor that works at room temperature and ambient pressure. Instead, studies have shown that impurities in the material -- in particular, copper sulfide -- were responsible for the sharp drops in electrical resistivity and partial levitation over a magnet, which looked similar to properties exhibited by superconductors. "I think things are pretty decisively settled at this point," says Inna Vishik, a condensed-matter experimentalist at the University of California, Davis. The LK-99 saga began in late July, when a team led by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim at the Quantum Energy Research Centre, a start-up firm in Seoul, published preprints claiming that LK-99 is a superconductor at normal pressure and temperatures up to at least 127C (400 kelvin). All previously confirmed superconductors function only at extreme temperatures and pressures. The extraordinary claim quickly grabbed the attention of the science-interested public and researchers, some of whom tried to replicate LK-99. Initial attempts did not see signs of room-temperature superconductivity, but were not conclusive. Now, after dozens of replication efforts, many experts are confidently saying that the evidence shows LK-99 is not a room-temperature superconductor. The South Korean team based its claim on two of LK-99's properties: levitation above a magnet and abrupt drops in resistivity. But separate teams in Beijing, at Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), found mundane explanations for these phenomena. Another study, by US and European researchers, combined experimental and theoretical evidence to demonstrate how LK-99's structure made superconductivity infeasible. And other experimenters synthesized and studied pure samples of LK-99, erasing doubts about the material's structure and confirming that it is not a superconductor, but an insulator. The only further confirmation would come from the Korean team sharing their samples, says Michael Fuhrer, a physicist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. "The burden's on them to convince everybody else," he says. Perhaps the most striking evidence for LK-99's superconductivity was a video taken by the Korean team that showed a coin-shaped sample of silvery material wobbling over a magnet. The team said the sample was levitating because of the Meissner effect -- a hallmark of superconductivity in which a material expels magnetic fields. Multiple unverified videos of LK-99 levitating subsequently circulated on social media, but none of the researchers who initially tried to replicate the findings observed any levitation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech companies aren't yet ramping up hiring after massive layoffs over the past year, despite a surge in interest in artificial intelligence, requiring workers with special skills. From a report: Still, job cuts in the tech industry appeared to slow in June and July and are on track to be even lower this month, according to an analysis by research firm Jefferies, citing proprietary data as well as that from job marketplace TrueUp. The tech sector had some of the earliest and steepest workforce reductions as the economic downturn forced companies to cut costs and eliminate a glut of staffing created during the pandemic boom. So far this year, there have been 342,671 layoffs in the tech industry, according to Jefferies and TrueUp, well ahead of the 243,075 for all of last year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The Associated Press published standards today for generative AI use in its newsroom. The organization, which has a licensing agreement with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, listed a fairly restrictive and common-sense list of measures around the burgeoning tech while cautioning its staff not to use AI to make publishable content. Although nothing in the new guidelines is particularly controversial, less scrupulous outlets could view the AP's blessing as a license to use generative AI more excessively or underhandedly. The organization's AI manifesto underscores a belief that artificial intelligence content should be treated as the flawed tool that it is -- not a replacement for trained writers, editors and reporters exercising their best judgment. "We do not see AI as a replacement of journalists in any way," the AP's Vice President for Standards and Inclusion, Amanda Barrett, wrote in an article about its approach to AI today. "It is the responsibility of AP journalists to be accountable for the accuracy and fairness of the information we share." The article directs its journalists to view AI-generated content as "unvetted source material," to which editorial staff "must apply their editorial judgment and AP's sourcing standards when considering any information for publication." It says employees may "experiment with ChatGPT with caution" but not create publishable content with it. That includes images, too. "In accordance with our standards, we do not alter any elements of our photos, video or audio," it states. "Therefore, we do not allow the use of generative AI to add or subtract any elements." However, it carved an exception for stories where AI illustrations or art are a story's subject -- and even then, it has to be clearly labeled as such. Barrett warns about AI's potential for spreading misinformation. To prevent the accidental publishing of anything AI-created that appears authentic, she says AP journalists "should exercise the same caution and skepticism they would normally, including trying to identify the source of the original content, doing a reverse image search to help verify an image's origin, and checking for reports with similar content from trusted media." To protect privacy, the guidelines also prohibit writers from entering "confidential or sensitive information into AI tools." Although that's a relatively common-sense and uncontroversial set of rules, other media outlets have been less discerning. [...] It's not hard to imagine other outlets -- desperate for an edge in the highly competitive media landscape -- viewing the AP's (tightly restricted) AI use as a green light to make robot journalism a central figure in their newsrooms, publishing poorly edited / inaccurate content or failing to label AI-generated work as such. Further reading: NYT Prohibits Using Its Content To Train AI ModelsRead more of this story at Slashdot.

A paper from U.K.-based researcher suggests that OpenAI's ChatGPT has a liberal bias, highlighting how artificial intelligence companies are struggling to control the behavior of the bots even as they push them out to millions of users worldwide. From a report: The study, from researchers at the University of East Anglia, asked ChatGPT to answer a survey on political beliefs as it believed supporters of liberal parties in the United States, United Kingdom and Brazil might answer them. They then asked ChatGPT to answer the same questions without any prompting, and compared the two sets of responses. The results showed a "significant and systematic political bias toward the Democrats in the U.S., Lula in Brazil, and the Labour Party in the U.K.," the researchers wrote, referring to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's leftist president.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Tuesday, Snapchat's My AI in-app chatbot posted its own Story to the app that appeared to be a photo of a wall and ceiling. It then stopped responding to users' messages, which some Snapchat users found disconcerting. TechCrunch reports: Though the incident made for some great tweets (er, posts), we regret to inform you that My AI did not develop self-awareness and a desire to express itself through Snapchat Stories. Instead, the situation arose because of a technical outage, just as the bot explained. Snap confirmed the issue, which was quickly addressed last night, was just a glitch. (And My AI wasn't snapping photos of your room, by the way). "My AI experienced a temporary outage that's now resolved," a spokesperson told TechCrunch. However, the incident does raise the question as to whether or not Snap was considering adding new functionality to My AI that would allow the AI chatbot to post to Stories. Currently, the AI bot sends text messages and can even Snap you back with images -- weird as they may be. But does it do Stories? Not yet, apparently. "At this time, My AI does not have Stories feature," a Snap spokesperson told us, leaving us to wonder if that may be something Snap has in the works.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The United States Space Force has activated its first and only unit dedicated to targeting other nations' satellites and the ground stations that support them. Space.com reports: The 75th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron (ISRS) was activated on Aug. 11 at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado. This unit is part of Space Delta 7, an element of the U.S. Space Force tasked with providing intelligence on adversary space capabilities. It'll do things like analyze the capabilities of potential targets, locate and track these targets as well as participate in "target engagement," which presumably refers to destroying or disrupting adversary satellites, the ground stations that support them and transmissions sent between the two. Master Sgt. Desiree Cabrera, 75th ISRS operations superintendent, said the new unit will revolutionize the targeting capabilities of not just the Space Force, but also the entire U.S. military: "Not only are we standing up the sole targeting squadron in the U.S. Space Force, we are changing the way targeting is done across the joint community when it comes to space and electromagnetic warfare." The 75th ISRS will also analyze adversary space capabilities including "counterspace force threats," according to the Space Force's statement. Counterspace forces refer to adversary systems aimed at preventing the U.S. from using its own satellites during a conflict.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Scientists have trained a computer to analyze the brain activity of someone listening to music and, based only on those neuronal patterns, recreate the song. The research, published on Tuesday, produced a recognizable, if muffled version of Pink Floyd's 1979 song, "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1)." [...] To collect the data for the study, the researchers recorded from the brains of 29 epilepsy patients at Albany Medical Center in New York State from 2009 to 2015. As part of their epilepsy treatment, the patients had a net of nail-like electrodes implanted in their brains. This created a rare opportunity for the neuroscientists to record from their brain activity while they listened to music. The team chose the Pink Floyd song partly because older patients liked it. "If they said, 'I can't listen to this garbage,'" then the data would have been terrible, Dr. Schalk said. Plus, the song features 41 seconds of lyrics and two-and-a-half minutes of moody instrumentals, a combination that was useful for teasing out how the brain processes words versus melody. Robert Knight, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the leader of the team, asked one of his postdoctoral fellows, Ludovic Bellier, to try to use the data set to reconstruct the music "because he was in a band," Dr. Knight said. The lab had already done similar work reconstructing words. By analyzing data from every patient, Dr. Bellier identified what parts of the brain lit up during the song and what frequencies these areas were reacting to. Much like how the resolution of an image depends on its number of pixels, the quality of an audio recording depends on the number of frequencies it can represent. To legibly reconstruct "Another Brick in the Wall," the researchers used 128 frequency bands. That meant training 128 computer models, which collectively brought the song into focus. The researchers then ran the output from four individual brains through the model. The resulting recreations were all recognizably the Pink Floyd song but had noticeable differences. Patient electrode placement probably explains most of the variance, the researchers said, but personal characteristics, like whether a person was a musician, also matter. The data captured fine-grained patterns from individual clusters of brain cells. But the approach was also limited: Scientists could see brain activity only where doctors had placed electrodes to search for seizures. That's part of why the recreated songs sound like they are being played underwater. [...] The researchers also found a spot in the brain's temporal lobe that reacted when volunteers heard the 16th notes of the song's guitar groove. They proposed that this particular area might be involved in our perception of rhythm. The findings offer a first step toward creating more expressive devices to assist people who can't speak. Over the past few years, scientists have made major breakthroughs in extracting words from the electrical signals produced by the brains of people with muscle paralysis when they attempt to speak.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A genetically altered pig kidney transplanted into a brain-dead man has continued to function for 32 days, an advance toward the possible use of animal organs in humans, surgeons at NYU Langone Health said Wednesday. The Washington Post reports: The kidney was not rejected in the minutes after it was transplanted -- a problem in xenotransplantation, the use of organs from a different species. It began producing urine and took over the functions of a human kidney such as filtering toxins, the physicians said at a news conference. Also Wednesday, researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine published a similar case study, of a brain-dead patient who received two pig kidneys that underwent 10 gene alterations earlier this year. The kidneys were not rejected and continued to function for seven days. The results were peer-reviewed and published in the journal JAMA Surgery. In the NYU Langone transplant, the specially bred pig from which the kidney was procured required just one genetic alteration, to remove a protein that human immune systems attack shortly after surgery. Surgeons also implanted the pig's thymus gland, which helps train the immune system, by sewing it under the outer layer of the kidney, and used immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection later on. Managing the condition of the brain-dead man, who on Wednesday still had a heart beat and was breathing with the aid of a ventilator, for an extended period of time also requires extensive efforts by critical care personnel. But the work has revealed information about longer-term use of animal organs, the doctors said. The researchers expect to follow the patient for another month. With the results released Wednesday, both Montgomery and Locke said they can envision moving toward the early stage of clinical trials to identify the safety of transplanting pig kidneys into live humans. [...] The genetic alteration in the NYU Langone study knocked out a carbohydrate molecule known as Alpha-gal, for short. Humans do not produce the substance and create high levels of antibodies against it, which has in the past proven a formidable obstacle to xenotransplantation. "Now that it can be completely removed from the pig, that allows us to move forward," Montgomery said. Still, the team said, pigs have 1,000 proteins that humans don't, and it can take 10 to 14 days to see how a person's immune system reacts to them. Getting beyond that stage with this patient at NYU Langone is a first sign that long-term viability of the organ and patient is possible, they said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recent developments, such as Adobe ending support for Type 1 fonts in 2023 and Microsoft discontinuing Type 1 font support in Office apps, may impact users who manage their own fonts, potentially leading to compatibility and layout issues in older files. Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham writes: If you want to know about the history of desktop publishing, you need to know about Adobe's PostScript fonts. PostScript fonts used vector graphics so that they could look crisp and clear no matter what size they were, and Apple licensed PostScript fonts for the original LaserWriter printer; together with publishing software like Aldus PageMaker, they made it possible to create a file that would look exactly the same on your computer screen as it did when you printed it. The most important PostScript fonts were so-called "Type 1" fonts, which Adobe initially didn't publish a specification for. From the 1980s up until roughly the early 2000s or so, if you were working in desktop publishing professionally, you were probably using Type 1 fonts. Other companies didn't want Adobe to have a monopoly on vector-based fonts or desktop publishing, of course; Apple created the TrueType format in the early 90s and licensed it to Microsoft, which used it in Windows 3.1 and later versions. Adobe and Microsoft later collaborated on a new font format called OpenType that could replace both TrueType and PostScript Type 1, and by the mid-2000s, it had been released as an open standard and had become the predominant font format used across most operating systems and software. For a while after that, apps that had supported PostScript Type 1 fonts continued to support them, with some exceptions (Microsoft Office for Windows dropped support for Type 1 fonts in 2013). But now we're reaching an inflection point; Adobe ended support for PostScript Type 1 fonts in January 2023, a couple of years after announcing the change. Yesterday, a Microsoft Office for Mac update deprecated Type 1 font support for the continuously updated Microsoft 365 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook for Mac (plus the standalone versions of those apps in Office 2019 and 2021). The LibreOffice suite, otherwise a good way to open ancient Word documents, stopped supporting Type 1 fonts in the 5.3 release in mid-2022. If you began using Adobe and Microsoft's productivity apps at some point in the last 10 or 15 years and you've stuck mostly with the default fonts -- either the ones included with the software or the ones from Adobe's extensive font library -- it's not too likely that you've been using a Type 1 font unintentionally. For these kinds of users, this change will be effectively invisible. But if you install and manage your own fonts and you've been using the same ones for a while, it's possible that you created a document in 2022 that you simply won't be able to open in 2023. The change will also cause problems if you open and work with decades-old files with any kind of regularity; files that use Type 1 fonts will begin generating lots of "missing font" messages, and the substitution OpenType fonts that apps might try to use instead can introduce layout issues. You'll also either need to convert any specialized PostScript Type 1 font that you may have paid for in the past or pay for an equivalent OpenType alternative.Read more of this story at Slashdot.