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Researchers are now waking up to another factor why so many places on earth are getting warmer, one that could be filed under the category of unintended consequences: disappearing clouds known as ship tracks. From a report: Regulations imposed in 2020 by the United Nations's International Maritime Organization (IMO) have cut ships' sulfur pollution by more than 80% and improved air quality worldwide. The reduction has also lessened the effect of sulfate particles in seeding and brightening the distinctive low-lying, reflective clouds that follow in the wake of ships and help cool the planet. The 2020 IMO rule "is a big natural experiment," says Duncan Watson-Parris, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "We're changing the clouds." By dramatically reducing the number of ship tracks, the planet has warmed up faster, several new studies have found. That trend is magnified in the Atlantic, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. In the shipping corridors, the increased light represents a 50% boost to the warming effect of human carbon emissions. It's as if the world suddenly lost the cooling effect from a fairly large volcanic eruption each year, says Michael Diamond, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University. The natural experiment created by the IMO rules is providing a rare opportunity for climate scientists to study a geoengineering scheme in action -- although it is one that is working in the wrong direction. Indeed, one such strategy to slow global warming, called marine cloud brightening, would see ships inject salt particles back into the air, to make clouds more reflective. In Diamond's view, the dramatic decline in ship tracks is clear evidence that humanity could cool off the planet significantly by brightening the clouds. "It suggests pretty strongly that if you wanted to do it on purpose, you could," he says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July has been confirmed as the hottest month on record globally after several heatwaves in parts of Europe, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). From a report: The global average temperature was 16.95C last month, surpassing the previous record set in 2019 by a substantial 0.33C. Temperatures exceeded 40C last week in several countries across Europe including Greece, France, Italy and Spain. Wildfires forced the evacuation of thousands of residents and tourists from several Greek islands including Rhodes. There were also high temperatures in South American countries, despite it being winter there. July is estimated to have been about 1.5C warmer than the average for 1850-1900, according to C3S, and 0.72C warmer than the 1991-2020 average. Dr Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S, said: "We just witnessed global air temperatures and global ocean surface temperatures set new all-time records in July. These records have dire consequences for both people and the planet exposed to ever more frequent and intense extreme events.Antarctic sea ice has also been at record lows this July, freezing less than in any other winter since satellites began observations in 1979. Further reading: Iran Declares 2-Day Public Holiday on Extreme Heat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WeWork warned there's "substantial doubt" about its ability to continue operating. The company cited sustained losses and canceled memberships to its office spaces. From a report: The co-working business will focus over the next 12 months on reducing rental costs, negotiating more favorable leases, increasing revenue and raising capital, WeWork said in a statement Tuesday. The warning comes mere months after WeWork struck a deal with some of its biggest creditors and SoftBank to cut its debt load by around $1.5 billion and extend other maturities. Its bonds trade at deeply distressed levels. The company's 7.875% unsecured notes due 2025 last changed hands for 33.5 cents on the dollar, according to data from Trace. The market cap of WeWork, once valued at $47 billion, fell below $300 million on Wednesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recently released research reveals a fundamental challenge of developing artificial intelligence: ChatGPT has become worse at performing certain basic math operations. From a report: The researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley said the deterioration is an example of a phenomenon known to AI developers as drift, where attempts to improve one part of the enormously complex AI models make other parts of the models perform worse. [...] Thus far, they have tested two versions of ChatGPT: version 3.5, available free online to anyone, and version 4.0, available via a premium subscription. The results aren't entirely promising. They gave the chatbot a basic task: identify whether a particular number is a prime number. This is the sort of math problem that is complicated for people but simple for computers. Is 17,077 prime? Is 17,947 prime? Unless you are a savant you can't work this out in your head, but it is easy for computers to evaluate. A computer can just brute force the problem -- try dividing by two, three, five, etc., and see if anything works. To track performance, the researchers fed ChatGPT 1,000 different numbers. In March, the premium GPT-4, correctly identified whether 84% of the numbers were prime or not. (Pretty mediocre performance for a computer, frankly.) By June its success rate had dropped to 51%. Across eight different tasks, GPT-4 became worse at six of them. GPT-3.5 improved on six measures, but remained worse than its advanced sibling at most of the tasks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Commerce Department said on Wednesday that more than 460 companies have expressed interested in winning government semiconductor subsidy funding in a bid to boost the country's competitiveness with China's science and technology efforts. From a report: The White House is marking the one-year anniversary on Wednesday of President Joe Biden's signing of the landmark "Chips for America" legislation providing $52.7 billion in subsidies for U.S. semiconductor production, research and workforce development. Biden said in a statement that companies have announced $166 billion in semiconductors and electronics manufacturing over the last year, adding the law will "make America once again a leader in semiconductor manufacturing and less dependent on other countries for our electronics or clean energy supply chains." The Commerce Department began accepting applications in June for the $39-billion subsidy program for U.S. semiconductor manufacturing as well as equipment and materials for making chips but has not yet issued awards. "We're finally making the investments that are long overdue to secure our economic and national security," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters. "We need to move quickly but it's more important we get it right."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China will require all mobile app providers in the country to file business details with the government, its information ministry said, marking Beijing's latest effort to keep the industry on a tight leash. From a report: The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said late on Tuesday that apps without proper filings will be punished after the grace period that will end in March next year, a move that experts say would potentially restrict the number of apps and hit small developers hard. You Yunting, a lawyer with Shanghai-based DeBund Law Offices, said the order is effectively requiring approvals from the ministry. The new rule is primarily aimed at combating online fraud but it will impact on all apps in China, he said. Rich Bishop, co-founder of app publishing firm AppInChina, said the new rule is also likely to affect foreign-based developers which have been able to publish their apps easily through Apple's App Store without showing any documentation to the Chinese government. Bishop said that in order to comply with the new rules, app developers now must either have a company in China or work with a local publisher.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phoronix: This Patch Tuesday brings a new and potentially painful processor speculative execution vulnerability... Downfall, or as Intel prefers to call it is GDS: Gather Data Sampling. GDS/Downfall affects the gather instruction with AVX2 and AVX-512 enabled processors. At least the latest-generation Intel CPUs are not affected but Tigerlake / Ice Lake back to Skylake is confirmed to be impacted. There is microcode mitigation available but it will be costly for AVX2/AVX-512 workloads with GATHER instructions in hot code-paths and thus widespread software exposure particularly for HPC and other compute-intensive workloads that have relied on AVX2/AVX-512 for better performance. Downfall is characterized as a vulnerability due to a memory optimization feature that unintentionally reveals internal hardware registers to software. With Downfall, untrusted software can access data stored by other programs that typically should be off-limits: the AVX GATHER instruction can leak the contents of the internal vector register file during speculative execution. Downfall was discovered by security researcher Daniel Moghimi of Google. Moghimi has written demo code for Downfall to show 128-bit and 256-bit AES keys being stolen from other users on the local system as well as the ability to steal arbitrary data from the Linux kernel. Skylake processors are confirmed to be affected through Tiger Lake on the client side or Xeon Scalable Ice Lake on the server side. At least the latest Intel Alder Lake / Raptor Lake and Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids are not vulnerable to Downfall. But for all the affected generations, CPU microcode is being released today to address this issue. Intel acknowledges that their microcode mitigation for Downfall will have the potential for impacting performance where gather instructions are in an applications' hot-path. In particular given the AVX2/AVX-512 impact with vectorization-heavy workloads, HPC workloads in particular are likely to be most impacted but we've also seen a lot of AVX use by video encoding/transcoding, AI, and other areas. Intel has not relayed any estimated performance impact claims from this mitigation. Well, to the press. To other partners Intel has reportedly communicated a performance impact up to 50%. That is for workloads with heavy gather instruction use as part of AVX2/AVX-512. Intel is being quite pro-active in letting customers know they can disable the microcode change if they feel they are not to be impacted by Downfall. Intel also believes pulling off a Downfall attack in the real-world would be a very difficult undertaking. However, those matters are subject to debate. Intel's official security disclosure is available here. The Downfall website is downfall.page.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google announced today that Chrome is now adopting weekly Stable channel updates in an effort to block major exploits quicker. 9to5Google reports: Google's browser gets major "milestone" updates every four (previously six) weeks, like going from version 100 to 101. In the past, Chrome would get a "Stable Refresh" update to "address security and other high impact bugs" in-between milestones every two weeks. This is now changing to occur weekly between milestones, starting with Google Chrome 116 on desktop and mobile, so that security updates get to end users much faster. Since Chromium is an open source project, "anyone can view the source code, submit changes for review, and see the changes made by anyone else, even security bug fixes." [...] The current patch gap is around 15 days. It was previously 35 days before switching to patch updates every two weeks in 2020. Google expects weekly patch updates to result in security fixes shipping "3.5 days sooner on average, greatly reducing the already small window for n-day attackers to develop and use an exploit against potential victims and making their lives much more difficult." This new schedule will also result in fewer unplanned updates that occur when there are known in-the-wild exploits: "By now shipping stable updates weekly, we expect the number of unplanned updates to decrease since we'll be shipping updates more frequently."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

During its 54th flight on Mars, NASA's helicopter Ingenuity captured an image of the space agency's Perseverance rover. Space.com reports: Perseverance is nearly out of frame at the top of the photo, which Ingenuity took when it was about 16 feet (5 meters) above the red dirt. Unlike previous sorties, the Aug. 3 flight wasn't a scouting run to aid Perseverance's science activities. It lasted just 24 seconds, reached a maximum altitude of 16 feet and covered no ground laterally, according to Ingenuity's flight log. The mission team designed this short and simple hop in an attempt to help understand what happened during Ingenuity's previous flight, which was cut short unexpectedly. The mission team designed this short and simple hop in an attempt to help understand what happened during Ingenuity's previous flight, which was cut short unexpectedly. That July 22 sortie was supposed to last 136 seconds and feature several complicated maneuvers. However, Ingenuity stayed aloft for just 74 seconds, touching down after something triggered its "flight-contingency program." [...] Imagery from Ingenuity's navigation camera likely got out of sync with its inertial measurement unit, which helps the little chopper determine its position, speed and orientation. This also happened near the end of Ingenuity's sixth flight, back in May 2021. The mission team soon uploaded a software patch to deal with the issue, but that patch apparently couldn't handle what happened on Flight 53, NASA officials said in the statement. "Since the very first flight, we have included a program called 'LAND_NOW' that was designed to put the helicopter on the surface as soon as possible if any one of a few dozen off-nominal scenarios was encountered," Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead emeritus at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement. "During Flight 53, we encountered one of these, and the helicopter worked as planned and executed an immediate landing," Tzanetos added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Gizmodo editor-in-chief Daniel Ackerman has sued Apple and other parties over the 2023 Apple TV Plus film Tetris, alleging it rips off his 2016 book The Tetris Effect. Ackerman claims Apple, Tetris rightsholder the Tetris Company, the Tetris film's producers, and screenwriter Noah Pink copied "the exact same feel, tone, approach, and scenes" from The Tetris Effect -- particularly its framing of the game's release as a "Cold War spy thriller." Initially reported by Reuters, Ackerman's lawsuit (PDF) outlines a yearslong correspondence with the Tetris Company as he wrote The Tetris Effect. He claims that the Tetris Company was aware of his work and threatened him with legal action for trying to pursue film and TV adaptations of his own book, only to draw heavily from his framing of the Tetris story. "The film liberally borrowed numerous specific sections and events of the book," claims Ackerman. Apple and the Tetris Company did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Verge. But Ackerman's case may be difficult given the fact that Tetris and The Tetris Effect both draw on real historical facts, which are not generally protected by copyright law. As a result, the suit relies heavily on arguing that Tetris copies the feel of The Tetris Effect. (He also argues that some potential inventions of the film -- like a guide who turns out to be a secret KGB agent -- are based on speculations in his narrative.) "Ackerman's book took a unique approach to writing about the real history of Tetris, as it not only applied the historical record, but also layered his own original research and ingenuity to create a compelling narrative non-fiction book in the style of a Cold War spy thriller," the suit says. "Mr. Ackerman's literary masterpiece, unlike other articles and writings, dispelled of the emphasis on the actual gameplay and fans, and instead concentrated on the surrounding narrative, action sequences, and adversarial relationship between the players ... This was the identical approach Defendants adopted for the Tetris Film, without notable material distinction." Ackerman says that he reached out after the Tetris trailer's release and unsuccessfully requested Apple and the other defendants address legal issues before the film's release. His suit alleges copyright infringement and unfair competition, among other offenses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a report from NBC News: A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the Biden administration to enforce regulations aimed at clamping down on so-called ghost guns -- firearm-making kits available online that people can assemble at home. The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, in a brief order (PDF) put on hold a July 5 ruling by a federal judge in Texas that blocked the regulations nationwide. The vote was 5-4, with conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberal justices in the majority. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, commonly known as ATF, issued the regulations last year to tackle what it claims has been an abrupt increase in the availability of ghost guns. The guns are difficult for law enforcement to trace, with the administration calling them a major threat to public safety. The rule clarified that ghost guns fit within the definition of 'firearm' under federal law, meaning that the government has the power to regulate them in the same way it regulates firearms manufactured and sold through the traditional process. The regulations require manufacturers and sellers of the kits to obtain licenses, mark the products with serial numbers, conduct background checks and maintain records.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House on Tuesday held its first-ever cybersecurity "summit" on the ransomware attacks plaguing U.S. schools, in which criminal hackers have dumped online sensitive student data, including medical records, psychiatric evaluations and even sexual assault reports. PBS reports: At least 48 districts have been hit by ransomware attacks this year -- already three more than in all of 2022, according to the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. All but 10 had data stolen, the firm reported. Typically, Russian-speaking foreign-based gangs steal the data -- sometimes including the Social Security numbers and financial data of district staff -- before activating network-encrypting malware then threaten to dump it online unless paid in cryptocurrency. "Last school year, schools in Arizona, California, Washington, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Michigan were all victims of major cyber attacks," the deputy national security advisor for cyber, Anne Neuberger, told the summit. An October 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, found that more than 1.2 million students were affected in 2020 alone -- with lost learning ranging from three days to three weeks. Nearly one in three U.S. districts had been breached by the end of 2021, according to a survey by the Center for Internet Security, a federally funded nonprofit. "Do not underestimate the ruthlessness of those who would do us harm," said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during the summit, noting that even reports on suicide attempts have been dumped online by criminal extortionists and urging educators to avail themselves of federal resources already available. Among measures announced at the summit: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will step up tailored security assessments for the K-12 sector while technology providers, including Amazon Web Services, Google and Cloudflare, are offering grants and other support. A pilot proposed by Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel -- yet to be voted on by the agency -- would make $200 million available over three years to strengthen cyber defense in schools and libraries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Soon, all GM EV's on the Ultium platform will come equipped with bidirectional charging capabilities. Electrek reports: According to a release from GM this morning, the automaker has decided to roll out V2H capabilities to all of its incoming EV models, in addition to those already promised. [...] According to GM, all new EVs based upon the Ultium platform will feature bi-directional charging by model year 2026, so expect additional models beyond those above to also come equipped with the ability to power your home. GM states its expanded V2H access will be supported by the rollout of the Ultium Home bundles previously announced, although we still do not know how much this technology is going to cost homeowners. GM says that additional details of expanded V2H technology and the specific timings of its rollout to the models mentioned above will be revealed at a later date. In the meantime, check out GM's latest sizzle reel showing off some of the incoming capabilities of its Ultium EVs, including a shadowy peek at the aforementioned Escalade IQ.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google today announced the launch of Project IDX, its foray into offering an AI-enabled browser-based development environment for building full-stack web and multiplatform apps. It currently supports frameworks like Angular, Flutter, Next.js, React, Svelte and Vue, and languages like JavaScript and Dart, with support for Python, Go and others in the works. Google did not build a new IDE (integrated development environment) when it created IDX. Instead, it is using Visual Studio Code -- Open Source as the basis of its project. This surely allowed the team to focus on the integration with Codey, Google's PaLM 2-based foundation model for programming tasks. Thanks to Codey, IDX supports smart code completion, a ChatGPT/Bard-like chatbot that can help developers with general coding questions as well as those related specifically to the code you are working on (including the ability to explain it) and the ability to add contextual code actions like "add comments." "We spend a lot of time writing code, and recent advances in AI have created big opportunities to make that time more productive," the IDX team explains in today's announcement. "With Project IDX, we're exploring how Google's innovations in AI -- including the Codey and PaLM 2 models powering Studio Bot in Android Studio, Duet in Google Cloud and more -- can help you not only write code faster, but also write higher-quality code." As a cloud-based IDE, it's no surprise that Project IDX integrates with Google's own Firebase Hosting (and Google Cloud Functions) and allows developers to bring in existing code from the GitHub repository. Every workspace has access to a Linux-based VM (virtual machine) and, soon, embedded Android and iOS simulators right in the browser.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TSMC is committing $3.8 billion to establish its first European factory in Germany, benefiting from significant state support for the $11 billion project as Europe aims to shorten supply chains. Reuters reports: The plant, which will be TSMC's third outside of traditional manufacturing bases Taiwan and China, is central to Berlin's ambition to foster the domestic semiconductor industry its car industry will need to remain globally competitive. Germany, which has been courting the world's largest contract chipmaker since 2021, will contribute up to 5 billion euros to the factory in Dresden, capital of the eastern state of Saxony, German officials said. "Germany is now probably becoming the major location for semiconductor production in Europe," German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said, less than two months after Intel announced a 30 billion euro plan to build two chip-making plants in the country. "That is important for the resilience of production structures around the world, but it is also important for the future viability of our European continent, and it is of course particularly important for the future viability of Germany." TSMC said it would invest up to 3.499 billion euros into a subsidiary, European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC), of which it will own 70%. Germany's Bosch and Infineon and the Netherlands' NXP (NXPI.O) will each own 10% of the plant, which will make up to 40,000 wafers a month for cars and industrial and home products when it opens in 2017. The factory will cost around 10 billion euros in total.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK's Electoral Commission revealed that a cyber attack granted access to the data of 40 million voters. It went unnoticed for a year and was not disclosed to the public for an additional 10 months. The Guardian reports: The Electoral Commission apologized for the security breach in which the names and addresses of all voters registered between 2014 and 2022 were open to "hostile actors" as far back as August 2021. The attack was discovered last October and reported within 72 hours to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), as well as the National Crime Agency. However, the public has only now been informed that the electoral registers containing the data of millions of voters may have been accessible throughout that time. The Electoral Commission said it was "not able to know conclusively" what information had been accessed. It is not known whether the attackers were linked to a hostile state, such as Russia, or a criminal cyber gang. The watchdog said "much of the data" was already in the public domain and insisted it would be difficult for anyone to influence the outcome of the UK's largely paper-based electoral system, but it acknowledged that voters would still be concerned. The attackers were able to access full copies of the electoral registers, held by the commission for research purposes and to enable permissibility checks on political donations. These registers include the name and address of anyone in the UK who was registered to vote between 2014 and 2022. The commission's email system was also accessible during the attack. The full register held by the Electoral Commission contains name and address data that can be inspected by the public but only locally through electoral registration officers, with only handwritten notes allowed. The information is not permitted to be used for commercial or marketing purposes. The data of anonymous voters whose details are private for safety reasons and the addresses of overseas voters were not accessible to the intruders in the IT system. A spokesperson for the ICO, the UK's independent regulator on data protection, said: "The Electoral Commission has contacted us regarding this incident and we are currently making inquiries." They added: "We recognize this news may cause alarm to those who are worried they may be affected and we want to reassure the public that we are investigating as a matter of urgency. In the meantime, if anyone is concerned about how their data has been handled, they should get in touch with the ICO or check our website for advice and support."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Discussion about artificial intelligence is everywhere these days -- even the Vatican. On Tuesday, Pope Francis issued a communique announcing the theme for World Day of Peace 2024 as "Artificial Intelligence and Peace," emphasizing the potential impact of AI on human life and calling for responsible use, ethical reflection, and vigilance to prevent negative consequences. [...] In the communique, Pope Francis' office called for "an open dialogue on the meaning of these new technologies, endowed with disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects." Echoing common ethical sentiments related to AI, he said society needs to be vigilant about the technology so that "a logic of violence and discrimination does not take root in the production and use of such devices, at the expense of the most fragile and excluded." The Pope even glanced at alignment, a popular concept in the AI community that seeks to "align" the outputs of AI with the positive needs of humanity. "The urgent need to orient the concept and use of artificial intelligence in a responsible way, so that it may be at the service of humanity and the protection of our common home, requires that ethical reflection be extended to the sphere of education and law," the statement said. The Vatican issued the communique through the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, which is a department of the Roman Curia, the administrative apparatus of the Holy See and the central governing body through which the Pope conducts the affairs of the global Catholic Church.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is the most successful manufacturer of Arm server chips, accounting for just over half of Arm-based server CPUs currently deployed, while some chipmakers are also now betting on Arm-based Windows PCs. From a report: This information comes from a report issued by Bernstein Research which estimates that nearly 10 percent of servers across the world contain Arm processors, and 40 percent of those are located in China, as we reported earlier. But that total is beaten by just one company -- Amazon -- which has slightly above 50 percent of all Arm server CPUs in the world deployed in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacenters, said the analyst. Amazon currently uses its own Graviton family of chips, designed by the Annapurna Labs division of Amazon Web Services and introduced to the world back in 2018, which are for its own internal use only. The latest iteration is the Graviton3E for high-performance computing applications, introduced towards the end of 2022. According to Bernstein, because these chips were optimized for the specific needs of AWS, the company is able to fit in more cores per socket or per rack and the chips consume less power, translating to lower spending on space and cooling.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Speaking of SMSes, Google announced today it's making its Messages by Google app more secure with improvements to RCS, or Rich Communication Services -- a protocol aimed at replacing SMS and is more on par with the advanced features found in Apple's iMessage. From a report: The company says it will now make RCS the default for both new and existing Messages app users. In addition, end-to-end encryption for group chats is now fully rolled out to all RCS users. The latter had launched into an open beta earlier this year after earlier tests, but was not fully launched until now. With this update, all conversations between users in Messages, whether 1:1 or group chats, will now be kept private, Google says. Since rolling out RCS to U.S. Android users in 2019, Google has been campaigning in an effort to pressure Apple into adopting the technology in its own messaging service, iMessage. It even launched a website last year to explain why RCS benefits consumers, noting "It's not about the color of the bubbles. It's the blurry videos, broken group chats, missing read receipts and typing indicators, no texting over Wi-Fi and more."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Air pollution is helping to drive a rise in antibiotic resistance that poses a significant threat to human health worldwide, a global study suggests. From a report: The analysis, using data from more than 100 countries spanning nearly two decades, indicates that increased air pollution is linked with rising antibiotic resistance across every country and continent. It also suggests the link between the two has strengthened over time, with increases in air pollution levels coinciding with larger rises in antibiotic resistance. "Our analysis presents strong evidence that increasing levels of air pollution are associated with increased risk of antibiotic resistance," researchers from China and the UK wrote. "This analysis is the first to show how air pollution affects antibiotic resistance globally." Their findings are published in the Lancet Planetary Health journal. Antibiotic resistance is one of the fastest-growing threats to global health. It can affect people of any age in any country and is already killing 1.3 million people a year, according to estimates. The main drivers are still the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, which are used to treat infections. But the study suggests the problem is being worsened by rising levels of air pollution. The study did not look at the science of why the two might be linked. Evidence suggests that particulate matter PM2.5 can contain antibiotic-resistant bacteria and resistance genes, which may be transferred between environments and inhaled directly by humans, the authors said. Air pollution is already the single largest environmental risk to public health. Long-term exposure to air pollution is associated with chronic conditions such as heart disease, asthma and lung cancer, reducing life expectancy. Short-term exposure to high pollution levels can cause coughing, wheezing and asthma attacks, and is leading to increased hospital and GP attendances worldwide.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal regulators continued their crackdown against employees of Wall Street firms using private messaging apps to communicate, with 11 brokerage firms and investment advisers agreeing Tuesday to pay $549 million in fines. From a report: Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, Societe Generale and Bank of Montreal were hit with the biggest penalties by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Together, the brokerage and investment advisory arms of those four financial institutions accounted for nearly 90 percent of the fines, according to statements released by the regulators. The latest round of fines adds to the nearly $2 billion in penalties against big Wall Street banks announced last year for similar violations. In all, the regulators have now penalized more than two dozen banks and investment firms for not properly policing employees use of "off channel" messaging services like WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal. The S.E.C. charged the financial institutions for failing to properly "maintain and preserve" all official communications by their employees. Federal securities laws require banks and investments firms to maintain records and make sure their employees are not conducting company business using unauthorized means of communication.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Original High-C writes: Dear Commander Taco, I hope you are well, as the world is increasingly 'mid', as the kids say. I am the guy whose story you published 17 years ago about a nerd rap compilation. We had a wild ride, as documented in this, um, documentary on Amazon Prime. Long after anyone stopped caring, I finally released my first free-as-in-beer album. This song tells the story of the ultimate demise of the scene, and I felt it was a fitting bookend for our first chapter. Maybe 2.0 will be better? Thanks for all you did for us, if no one ever told you before. Sincerely, The Original High-CRead more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S. judge rejected Google's bid to dismiss a lawsuit claiming it invaded the privacy of millions of people by secretly tracking their internet use. From a report: U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on Monday said she could not find that users consented to letting Google collect information about what they viewed online because the Alphabet unit never explicitly told them it would. David Boies, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the proposed $5 billion class action, called the decision "an important step in protecting the privacy interests of millions of Americans." The plaintiffs alleged that Google's analytics, cookies and apps let the Mountain View, California-based company track their activity even when they set Google's Chrome browser to "Incognito" mode and other browsers to "private" browsing mode. They said this let Google learn enough about their friends, hobbies, favorite foods, shopping habits, and "potentially embarrassing things" they seek out online, becoming "an unaccountable trove of information so detailed and expansive that George Orwell could never have dreamed it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia announced an updated AI processor that gives a jolt to the chip's capacity and speed, seeking to cement the company's dominance in a burgeoning market. From a report: The Grace Hopper Superchip, a combination graphics chip and processor, will get a boost from a new type of memory, Nvidia said Tuesday at the Siggraph conference in Los Angeles. The product relies on high-bandwidth memory 3, or HBM3e, which is able to access information at a blazing 5 terabytes per second. The Superchip, known as GH200, will go into production in the second quarter of 2024, Nvidia said. It's part of a new lineup of hardware and software that was announced at the event, a computer-graphics expo where Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang is speaking. [...] The latest Nvidia products are designed to spread generative AI -- and its underlying hardware -- to even more industries by making the technology simpler to use. A new version of the company's AI Enterprise software will ease the process of training the models, which can then generate text, images and even video based on simple prompts. The lineup also includes new chips for workstations, computers designed for heavy workloads. New AI Workbench software, meanwhile, helps users switch their work on AI models between different types of computers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI now lets you block its web crawler from scraping your site to help train GPT models. From a report: OpenAI said website operators can specifically disallow its GPTBot crawler on their site's Robots.txt file or block its IP address. "Web pages crawled with the GPTBot user agent may potentially be used to improve future models and are filtered to remove sources that require paywall access, are known to gather personally identifiable information (PII), or have text that violates our policies," OpenAI said in the blog post. For sources that don't fit the excluded criteria, "allowing GPTBot to access your site can help AI models become more accurate and improve their general capabilities and safety." Blocking the GPTBot may be the first step in OpenAI allowing internet users to opt out of having their data used for training its large language models. It follows some early attempts at creating a flag that would exclude content from training, like a "NoAI" tag conceived by DeviantArt last year. It does not retroactively remove content previously scraped from a site from ChatGPT's training data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Floods, fires and heavy rains have landed more blows across Europe this week, with the authorities on the continent scrambling to respond to the extreme weather that has become increasingly common in the past few years. From a report: The most recent events have destroyed large amounts of land, left dozens of people injured, forced thousands to evacuate and, in some cases, caused deaths, and they come on the heels of scorching temperatures that have engulfed much of Southern Europe this summer. Climate change has made extreme heat a fixture of the warmer months in Europe, but experts say that the continent has failed to significantly adapt to the hotter conditions. Governments in many countries are now struggling to address the devastating effects. "The extreme weather conditions across Europe continue to be of concern," Roberta Metsola, the president of the European Parliament, wrote on Twitter. "The EU is showing solidarity with all those in need." Heavy rains in recent days have led rivers to overflow across Slovenia in what the authorities there said was the worst natural disaster since the country's independence in 1991. At least six people have died, according to the Slovenian news agency STA, and thousands have been forced to flee their homes to escape the floods. Several countries have tried to help, with France and Germany sending equipment such as prefabricated bridges, and even Ukraine, in the middle of a war with Russia, promising to send a helicopter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Walt Disney has created a task force to study artificial intelligence and how it can be applied across the entertainment conglomerate, even as Hollywood writers and actors battle to limit the industry's exploitation of the technology. From a report: Launched earlier this year, before the Hollywood writers' strike, the group is looking to develop AI applications in-house as well as form partnerships with startups, three sources told Reuters. As evidence of its interest, Disney has 11 current job openings seeking candidates with expertise in artificial intelligence or machine learning. The positions touch virtually every corner of the company - from Walt Disney Studios to the company's theme parks and engineering group, Walt Disney Imagineering, to Disney-branded television and the advertising team, which is looking to build a "next-generation" AI-powered ad system, according to the job ad descriptions. One of the sources, an internal advocate who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said legacy media companies like Disney must either figure out AI or risk obsolescence. This supporter sees AI as one tool to help control the soaring costs of movie and television production, which can swell to $300 million for a major film release like "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" or "The Little Mermaid." Such budgets require equally massive box office returns simply to break even. Cost savings would be realized over time, the person said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seven years after updating Messenger to allow it to serve as your default Android text messaging app, the company formerly known as Facebook is quietly abandoning the feature. From a report: According to a support page, the feature will disappear after September 28th. I don't know anyone that uses it, but at least it'll be nice to have one fewer screens to tap through during setup.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Rex Heuermann, the meticulous architectural consultant who the authorities say murdered three women and buried them on a Long Island beach more than a decade ago, may have been among the last of the dying breed of American serial killers. Even as serial killers came to inhabit a central place in the nation's imagination -- inspiring hit movies, television shows, books, podcasts and more -- their actual number was dwindling dramatically. There were once hundreds at large, and a spike in the 1970s and '80s terrified the country. Now only a handful at most are known to be active, researchers say. The techniques that led to the arrest of Mr. Heuermann, who has pleaded not guilty to the crimes, help explain the waning of serial killing, which the F.B.I. defines as the same person killing two or more victims in separate events at different times. It is harder to hide. Rapid advances in investigative technology, video and other digital surveillance tools, as well as the ability to analyze mountains of information, quickly allow the authorities to find killers who before would have gone undetected. At the same time, Americans have adopted more cautious habits in their everyday lives -- hitchhiking, for example, is less common, and children are driven to and from school. That reduces easy targets. And, some theorize, those bent on killing now opt for spectacular mass murders. "The 'perfect crime' concept is more of a concept than it ever has been before," said Adam Scott Wandt, an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. More than a decade ago, prosecutors said, Mr. Heuermann tried to cover his digital tracks by communicating with victims using so-called burner phones, prepaid units purchased anonymously for temporary use. But thanks to exponential progress in technology since 2010, investigators were able not only to chart Mr. Heuermann's decade-old movements; they could also monitor exactly what he was searching online in recent months. They saw that he was using an anonymous account for internet queries like "Why could law enforcement not trace the calls made by the long island serial killer," prosecutors said. He had also been visiting massage parlors and contacting women working as escorts, they said. The ubiquity of technology has made it harder to get away with murder, Mr. Wandt said. The amount of data people create in their daily lives is more than many can conceptualize, he said. Just by walking outside, people are now tracked by ever-present cameras, from Amazon's Ring units outside homes to surveillance at banks and retail stores, he said. Every use of a phone or computer creates streams of data that are collected directly on devices or immortalized on servers, he said. A concerted effort by the federal government to ensure that even the smallest police departments can use technology to their benefit has also helped give investigators an upper hand, Mr. Wandt said. In 1987, there were 198 known active serial killers -- people connected to at least two murders -- and 404 known victims across the United States, according to a report published three years ago by researchers who run Radford University and Florida Gulf Coast University's Serial Killer Database. By 2018, there were only 12 known serial killers and 44 victims, according to the report. "The big question is: Are they going underground and finding other techniques?a said Terence Leary, an associate professor in the psychology department at Florida Gulf Coast University and the team leader for the database. He said that some serial murderers have killed for discrete periods before taking prolonged breaks: "Maybe they decided to give it up. Who knows?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a period of less than nine months, Google received requests to remove over a billion links to pirate sites from its search engine. This is a significant increase compared to recent years, but not necessarily a new trend. More than a quarter of all reported links, relating to a single website, were sent by MindGeek, the parent company of PornHub. TorrentFreak reports: Google first started to keep track of these takedown notices at the beginning of the last decade. In the spring of 2012, Google launched its Transparency Report which publishes all DMCA requests the company receives, including the targeted links and their senders. This provided fuel for hundreds of news reports as well as academic research. A few days ago, Google reached a new milestone when it processed the seven billionth removal request. It's a mind-boggling number that comes less than a year after the six billionth takedown was recorded. Looking more closely at the timeline, we see that a billion URLs were reported to Google search in less than nine months. For comparison, it took twice as long to go from five to six billion, suggesting that the takedown volume picked up again after a previously reported decline. There's no denying the recent surge in reported links but much of the increase was generated by a single rightsholder in an effort to remove a particular pirate operation from Google search. Around the start of the year MG Premium began to increase its takedown efforts. The company is an intellectual property vehicle of the MindGeek conglomerate, known for popular adult sites such as PornHub. One of MG Premium's main goals is to shut down aunlicensed' sites or at least make when unfindable. [...] The surge is clearly visible in the graph above and at times the company was averaging more than two million takedown requests per day. More recently the volume has come down a bit, but it's been a major contributor to Google's takedown uptick.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader William Robinson shares a report from the BBC: India's space agency has released the first images of the Moon taken by the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which entered lunar orbit on Saturday. The images show craters on lunar surface getting larger and larger as the spacecraft draws closer. Chandrayaan-3's lander and rover are due to reach the surface on August 23. If successful, India will be the first country to perform a controlled "soft landing" near the south pole. It will also become only the fourth to achieve a soft landing on the Moon after the US, the former Soviet Union and China. After the spacecraft orbited the Earth for about 10 days, it was sent into the translunar orbit last Tuesday and successfully injected into the lunar orbit on Saturday. Indian Space Research Agency (Isro) said that all checks showed that Chandrayaan-3 was in good "health." It has also pointed out that "this is the third time in succession that Isro has successfully injected a spacecraft into the lunar orbit." Scientists say Chandrayaan-3, the third in India's program of lunar exploration, is expected to build on the success of its earlier Moon missions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Scientists have discovered that the Sun produces higher energy light than was thought possible. An unusual type of telescope detected gamma rays with energies of over 1 tera electron volt (TeV), at least five times more energetic than previously known. The Sun emits light spanning a wide range of energies, from infrared through visible light and up to ultraviolet. It was previously predicted that the Sun could produce gamma rays -- electromagnetic radiation with the highest energy -- through interactions with cosmic rays from distant sources, but these would rarely reach Earth to be detectable. A few decades later, these gamma rays were eventually detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in 2011. With more and more observations over the years since, Fermi found that the Sun was producing around seven times more gamma rays than had been predicted. Their energies were detected at up to 200 giga electron volts (GeV), which is the upper limit that Fermi can pick up. So for the new study, scientists used a different instrument that's sensitive beyond that limit. The instrument in question is called the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC), and it works in a way unlike your everyday telescope. It's made up of a series of 300 big tanks filled with 200 tons of water each. When gamma rays hit molecules in the Earth's atmosphere, they create a cascade of lower energy particles, and these can interact with the water molecules in those big tanks. Sensitive instruments keep watch for these interactions, and scientists can work backwards to calculate the energy of the original gamma ray. Using HAWC data gathered between 2015 and 2021, the researchers discovered that the Sun was producing gamma rays with energies well beyond that which Fermi detected. They were reaching energies on the scale of TeV, with some spiking to almost 10 TeV. Exactly how the Sun produces them remains a mystery, the team says, but further research will investigate how their energy gets so high and what role the Sun's magnetic field might play. The research was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Treasure hunters are aiming to prove there were tons of loot in the ground in Pennsylvania -- and that the government took it. WSJ: Dennis Parada points to a weedy spot where he believes the Federal Bureau of Investigation dug up nine tons of Civil War-era gold, worth more than $500 million, and made off with it in the middle of the night. The patch of ground halfway up a mountain in western Pennsylvania lies at the heart of the treasure hunter's quest to recover the trove and prove it was snatched from under his nose. The matter is now playing out in federal court. At 70, he has been chasing the Dents Run gold for more than 40 years. "It's definitely a major coverup," says Parada, who has the mustache of a 19th-century gambler and smokes his cigarettes down to a stub. Tales of lost Civil War-era gold have stirred imaginations for generations though few fortunes have been made. One exception was a pile of more than 700 gold coins minted in the mid-1800s that a farmer unearthed in a Kentucky cornfield earlier this year. In April 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis fled Richmond, Va., with gold that would be worth millions today. Union troops later seized a large portion in Georgia, but that was then stolen at gunpoint. Other stories of lost Confederate gold abound in the South. People across the U.S. have hunted for lost rebel treasure in Virginia, Georgia, Arkansas, Missouri -- and the bottom of Lake Michigan. The searches have inspired novels and films, including "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly," starring Clint Eastwood. Far less attention has been paid to tales of Union gold.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Spin ceased operations of its scooter rental service in Seattle, abandoned scooters were found throughout the city, each housing a Raspberry Pi 4B. Tom's Hardware reports: This discovery was recently shared to social media where Pi enthusiasts are simultaneously befuddled and ready to book their tickets to Seattle. Legally speaking, if the scooters are abandoned then snagging one for the Pi inside is fair game but it's currently not clear if Spin has plans to recover their remaining assets. As of writing, it's not clear what the Raspberry Pi 4 Bs were actually used for inside the scooter. At first glance, it seems like an overpowered option for something like an electric scooter but without exact confirmation of its purpose, we can only speculate. No doubt it requires much more power than something smaller like a Raspberry Pi Zero. In the meantime, residents have taken to finding these scooters and exploring their insides for the hardware left behind. We can see the Pi 4 is attached to a HAT and has something resembling a NoIR connected to the camera module port. Again, the exact purpose of each component and how it was implemented is unclear.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is bringing its AI-powered Bing Chat to all mobile browsers as part of the broader changes to stop blocking Bing Chat on third-party browsers. The Verge reports: Bing Chat first launched in February, but it was restricted to Microsoft's own Edge browser. Microsoft started opening up to Chrome and Safari desktop browsers in late July as part of testing for full third-party browser support. "With so many new, useful features now a part of Bing, we're excited to announce you can start experiencing the new AI-powered Bing in third-party browsers on web and mobile soon," says the Bing team in a blog post. "This next step in the journey allows Bing to showcase the incredible value of summarized answers, image creation and more, to a broader array of people."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After growing "increasingly frustrated" with the Google Maps experience, Fast Company's Michael Grothaus has highlighted five main reasons the app has "become a cluttered, frustrating mess" -- and why he finds himself turning to Apple Maps more often. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report: ENOUGH WITH THE HOTEL AND BAR PINS:Whenever I'm in a major metropolitan area, Google Maps seems to have an obsession with displaying as many hotels, bars, and clubs on the map as it can. This happens even when I haven't searched for a single hotel or bar. And it happens not only when I'm on vacation in a new city, but when I'm in my home city. Google knows my home address. So, why on Earth does it default to showing me as many hotels as possible in the city where I live? The same is true of clubs and bars. I see pins for more dance clubs and bars in one small area shown on my smartphone's display than I've ever actually been to in my life. Google knows I'm middle-aged and get up early to work. When I'm just browsing the map, can it really think I might care about the nearest club where patrons normally don't leave until well past midnight? By displaying all these irrelevant hotels and bars, Google makes it much harder to browse and navigate the map, since frequently the pins' labels overlap or obscure more important elements, such as the shape and layout of streets. TOO MANY ADS CLUTTER THE MAP:The square pins you see in Google Maps are ad pins. They represent a place of business (a hotel, spa, etc.) that is paying Google to make sure it's displayed on the map, despite the business's irrelevance to me. Again, ad pins for hotels dominate, but right behind them are ad pins for restaurants with small text underneath them imploring me to "Order Delivery with Uber Eats," which just further clutters the map. Google is, of course, first and foremost an advertising company. Data compiled by Oberlo showed that 78.2% of its Q1 2023 total revenue of $69.8 billion came from ads. But its enthusiasm for placing ads in every corner of Google Maps just makes it all the more cluttered and increasingly hard to read. And that's before we even get to PHOTO PINS SIGNIFY WHAT, EXACTLY?:Google Maps identifies points of interest primarily by pin color and glyph: Hotels are represented by a pink pin with an image of a person sleeping in a bed, restaurants get an orange pin with a fork and knife, and so forth. Regular pins, denoting businesses or other points of interest, are reverse teardrop-shaped, while ad pins are square-shaped. But, since last year, there is also now a third form: the photo pin. As best as I can tell, a photo pin is a pin for a business, but instead of a typical category glyph, it shows a large photo ostensibly related to the establishment. These pins don't appear to signify that the business is notable in any way. (I mean, I'm sure I've seen photo pins for muffler repair shops -- not exactly a tourist attraction.) The photo pin might be the ultimate map monopolizer. It's bigger, and the photo, seemingly pulled from a business's Google Maps listing, doesn't always even represent the business well. One photo pin I came across, oddly, seemed to show a photo of the dumpsters behind a restaurant. This just adds to user confusion and more clutter. It isn't helping the business, either. I HAVE NO INTEREST IN SOMEONE'S WORK-FROM-HOME BUSINESS:Another major contributor to Google Maps being an eyesore these days is a holdover from the pandemic when so many people were stuck working from home -- or decided to begin offering their services from home. It is not uncommon to be browsing a residential area on Google Maps and be faced with a sea of work-from-home business pins. The number of "consultant" businesses I've seen in residential areas on Google Maps has been shocking. The same goes for web designers, app programmers, and handymen -- all of whom operate out of their residential homes. These may all be legitimate businesses run by self-employed people, but why on earth does Google Maps surface their listings on maps if they never have a single client enter their doors and, more important, if I've not searched for a provider of any of these services? Clutter, clutter, clutter. WHY WON'T YOU SHOW ME THE STREET NAME?:Finally, Google Maps seems more intent today on showing bars, restaurants, ads, and work-from-home businesses than useful map-related features. Sometimes it doesn't even show the most basic information anymore, including street names. Many times I just want to see the name of the street I'm standing on. So, I open Google Maps and zoom in on my current location. Yet no matter how far in I zoom in, Google Maps doesn't always apply a label to the street I'm standing on. It just remains blank. Of course, business pins I have no interest in are still prominently displayed. A workaround I've stumbled upon whenever this happens is to select a business pin on the next street over. When Google Maps centers on that, it for some reason will label the street I'm standing on. Among all the gripes on this list, I think this one is my biggest. If my ad-hoc workaround doesn't work, I often have to open Apple Maps just to look up the name of the street I'm on.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PayPal has launched a U.S. dollar stablecoin, becoming the first major financial technology firm to embrace digital currencies for payments and transfers. Reuters reports: PayPal's announcement, which lifted its shares 2.66% on Monday, reflects a show of confidence in the troubled cryptocurrency industry that has over the last 12 months grappled with regulatory headwinds that were exacerbated by a string of high-profile collapses. "PayPal isn't quite as polarizing as Facebook, but it's a high-profile name that will surely get attention on Capitol Hill, and from the [Federal Reserve] and [Securities and Exchange Commission]," said Ian Katz, managing director of Capital Alpha Partners, in a note. PayPal's stablecoin, dubbed PayPal USD, is backed by U.S. dollar deposits and short-term U.S Treasuries, and will be issued by Paxos Trust Co. It will gradually be available to PayPal customers in the United States. The token can be redeemed for U.S. dollars at any time, and can also be used to buy and sell the other cryptocurrencies PayPal offers on its platform, including bitcoin. "PYUSD is the first of its kind, representing the next phase of U.S. dollars on the blockchain," Paxos posted on messaging platform X, formerly known as Twitter. "This is not just a milestone moment for Paxos & PayPal, but for the entire financial industry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shares a report from NBC News: A Detroit woman is suing the city and a police detective after she was falsely arrested because of facial recognition technology while she was eight months pregnant, according to court documents. Porcha Woodruff, 32, was getting her two children ready for school on the morning of Feb. 16 when six police officers showed up at her doorstep and presented her with an arrest warrant alleging robbery and carjacking. Woodruff initially believed the officers were joking given her visibly pregnant state. She was arrested. "Ms. Woodruff later discovered that she was implicated as a suspect through a photo lineup shown to the victim of the robbery and carjacking, following an unreliable facial recognition match," court documents say. [...] Woodruff was charged with robbery and carjacking and released from the Detroit Detention Center at around 7 p.m. on $100,000 personal bond. Her fiance took her to a medical center, where she was diagnosed with a low heart rate due to dehydration and was told she was having contractions from stress related to the incident. On March 6, the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office dropped the case for "insufficient evidence," according to the lawsuit. In a statement Sunday, the prosecutor's office said the case was dismissed, which emphasizes that a judge made the final decision, not prosecutors. The prosecutor's office said the warrant that led to Woodruff's arrest was on solid ground. "The warrant was appropriate based upon the facts," it said. The office confirmed that facial recognition prompted police to include the plaintiff's photo in a six-pack, or array of images of potential suspects in the warrant package. Detroit Police Chief James E. White said he reviewed the allegations in the lawsuit, which he said are "very concerning." "We are taking this matter very seriously, but we cannot comment further at this time due to the need for additional investigation," he said in a statement. "We will provide further information once additional facts are obtained and we have a better understanding of the circumstances."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brazil's central bank has named its upcoming digital currency "DREX," which it aims to use to boost financial services. DREX is scheduled to launch next year. Reuters reports: The DREX will use distributed ledger technology (DLT) to settle wholesale interbank transactions, while retail access will be based on tokenized bank deposits. Officials from the central bank previously predicted that the adoption of the Brazilian digital currency would commence by the end of 2024, following the completion of its testing phase. But Fabio Araujo, the coordinator of the initiative at the bank, said that employee strikes demanding better career advancement could potentially impact the project. During a live discussion organized by the central bank, he emphasized that the development of DREX is primarily aimed at improving access to financial services in the country. "By enabling simple and reliable access to registered values through DLT technology, we reduce costs and democratize access to financial services," Araujo stated. He also highlighted that Brazilians are already engaging in extensive digital payments through the instant payment platform Pix, which was launched in late 2021 and has been widely embraced. Now, the expectation is that DREX will bolster lending, investments, and insurance services. "We aim to make these financial products accessible to the public and increase financial inclusion in Brazil," Araujo added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Poland-based spyware LetMeSpy is no longer operational and said it will shut down after a June data breach wiped out its servers, including its huge trove of data stolen from thousands of victims' phones. In a notice on its website in both English and Polish, LetMeSpy confirmed the "permanent shutdown" of the spyware service and that it would cease operations by the end of August. The notice said LetMeSpy is blocking users from logging in or signing up with new accounts. A separate notice on LetMeSpy's former login page, which no longer functions, confirmed earlier reports that the hacker who breached the spyware operation also deleted the data on its servers. "The breach consisted of unauthorized access to the LetMeSpy website's database, downloading and at the same time deleting data from the website by the author of the attack," the notice reads. LetMeSpy's app no longer functions, a network traffic analysis by TechCrunch shows, and the spyware maker's website no longer provides the spyware app for download. LetMeSpy was an Android phone monitoring app that was purposefully designed to stay hidden on a victim's phone home screen, making the app difficult to detect and remove. When planted on a person's phone -- often by someone with knowledge of their phone passcode -- apps like LetMeSpy continually steal that person's messages, call logs and real-time location data. A copy of the database was obtained by nonprofit transparency collective DDoSecrets, which indexes leaked datasets in the public interest, and shared with TechCrunch for analysis. The data showed that LetMeSpy, until recently, had been used to steal data from more than 13,000 compromised Android devices worldwide, though LetMeSpy's website claimed prior to the breach that it controlled more than 236,000 devices. The database also contained information that shows the spyware was developed by a Krakow-based tech company called Radeal, whose chief executive Rafal Lidwin did not respond to a request for comment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paramount said on Monday it had reached a deal to sell Simon and Schuster, one of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses in the United States, to the private-equity firm KKR, in a major changing of the guard in the books business. From a report: The deal, for $1.62 billion, will put control of the cultural touchstone behind authors like Stephen King and Bob Woodward in the hands of a financial buyer with an expanding presence in the publishing industry. While private equity investors have had a significant footprint in the book business --different firms have owned literary agencies, publishing houses and the retailer Barnes & Noble -- the acquisition of one of the largest publishers in the country vastly increases the hold of financial interests in the business. [...] Since Simon & Schuster was first put up for sale in 2020, many in the publishing industry have fretted over where the company might land. A sale to another publisher would mean the new management would understand the book business. But it would also mean further consolidation in the industry, with potentially fewer players available to bid on big books, and the chance of layoffs as redundant jobs were eliminated. It could also raise regulatory scrutiny: Paramount's first attempt to sell Simon & Schuster, to Penguin Random House in 2020, was derailed by government antitrust concerns.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Production companies are scanning the faces and bodies of actors and actresses, who fear their likeness will be used to create fake AI doubles for TV shows and films in the future. Some workers spoke to NPR last week about being subjected to the scans, and feeling like they couldn't say no. Alexandria Rubalcaba, who was working as a background actor, described being called into a trailer and asked to stand in front of cameras. "Have your hands out. Have your hands in. Look this way. Look that way. Let us see your scared face. Let us see your surprised face," she said. What was most concerning, however, was that she didn't know what or how her images were going to be used. "My first thought leaving the trailer was, 'Oh this might just be the future," Lubsey said. "We might just lose our jobs," Dom Lubsey, an actor from Los Angeles, added. Studios already use computational techniques to create synthetic images of people to create fake crowds for backgrounds in films. It's not too far-fetched to think that extras can also be generated too. Andrew Susskind, an associate professor at Drexel University's film and TV department, explained how AI-made background actors would slash production budgets. "Imagine ballroom scenes, party scenes, any scenes that need tons of extras," Susskind said. "Imagine the amounts of money they would be saving. Not paying $180 a day. Plus meals. Plus costuming," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The next time you want a quick gut check on whether a sentence is grammatically accurate, Google Search might have the answer. From a report: 9to5Google has spotted a "grammar check" feature that will offer suggestions on whether a given phrase is grammatically accurate. For example, type "the quick brown fox jump over the lazy dog" into the search engine and Google will highlight that you probably meant "jumps" instead of "jump."Although most people probably don't care about the grammar of their search phrases, we suspect this tool is meant to be more general purpose. If one of your sentences looks off when you type it into a messaging app for example, Google's hope seems to be that you'll give it a check with Google Search -- because anything that encourages more searches and engagement is good for business.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Factories across Asia are struggling to attract young workers, which is bad news for Western consumers accustomed to inexpensive goods. From a report: The workplace features floor-to-ceiling windows and a cafe serving matcha tea, as well as free yoga and dance classes. Every month, workers gather at team-building sessions to drink beer, drive go-karts and go bowling. This isn't Google. It's a garment factory in Vietnam. Asia, the world's factory floor and the source of much of the stuff Americans buy, is running into a big problem: Its young people, by and large, don't want to work in factories. That's why the garment factory is trying to make its manufacturing floor more enticing, and why alarm bells are ringing at Western companies that rely on the region's inexpensive labor to churn out affordable consumer goods. The twilight of ultracheap Asian factory labor is emerging as the latest test of the globalized manufacturing model, which over the past three decades has delivered a vast array of inexpensively produced goods to consumers around the world. Americans accustomed to bargain-rate fashion and flat-screen TVs might soon be reckoning with higher prices. "There's nowhere left on the planet that's going to be able to give you what you want," said Paul Norriss, the British co-founder of the Vietnam garment factory, UnAvailable, based in Ho Chi Minh City. "People are going to have to change their consumer habits, and so are brands."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Britain faces being left with no hope of meeting its crucial climate crisis goals and losing its status as a world leader in offshore wind energy without an urgent overhaul of government support, ministers are being warned. From a report: The sudden halting of one of the country's biggest offshore windfarm projects last month could signal a "tipping point" in the construction of new sites unless ministers intervene, a number of senior energy industry figures told the Observer. They warn that a swathe of new projects, which Britain is relying on to meet key climate targets, could also become economically unviable under the existing regime. While the industry has been hit by huge price inflationary pressures, it warns that the government has failed to adjust the scheme that guarantees the price it is paid for energy. "If the government doesn't do something, there's a very real risk that, come September, just before party conferences, the story won't just be about getting rid of the 'green crap' -- it'll be about failing to deliver on the projects they've already said that they wanted," said one industry insider.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Communications Commission is paving the way for $75 monthly subsidies to make broadband service more affordable for low-income households in certain "high-cost" areas. From a report: The $75 subsidy will be part of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) that generally offers $30 monthly discounts to people with low incomes. The ACP was created by Congress in late 2021 and implemented by the FCC to replace a previous pandemic-related subsidy program. The ACP already provides $75 monthly subsidies for homes on tribal lands, but not in other areas. The US law that created the ACP lets the FCC make $75 subsidies available in areas where the costs of building broadband networks are higher than average. That's what the FCC did in its action announced yesterday. "The Infrastructure Act specified that the $75 monthly benefit would support providers that can demonstrate that the standard $30 monthly benefit would cause them to experience 'particularized economic hardship' such that they would be unable to maintain part or all of their broadband network in a high-cost area," the FCC said. ACP subsidies are distributed to Internet service providers that enroll in the program and give customers discounts. Comcast, Charter Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon, and other ISPs last year agreed to make $30 plans with download speeds of at least 100Mbps available to eligible low-income households, essentially making the Internet service free when the $30 subsidy is applied.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gigabyte has launched a new low-profile GeForce RTX 4060 OC graphics card that's designed to fit into mini PC builds. Unlike many of the other GPUs meant for compact PCs, this one comes with three fans instead of just two or one. From a report: That three-fan setup might make it a bit difficult to fit into some small form factor cases, as the card measures 182mm long. But it makes up for that with its thin 40mm height and 69mm width. Despite its slender design, the chip comes outfitted with two DisplayPort and two HDMI ports as well. It also comes with a low-profile bracket, which is a nice touch. While it's nice that Gigabyte has made a 40-series chip specifically for low-profile builds, Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 isn't that great of a card to begin with. The GPU barely outpaces the older (and slightly more expensive) 3060 Ti, as it comes with an underwhelming 8GB of VRAM and a 128-bit memory bus.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Zoom updated its Terms of Service in March, spelling out that the company reserves the right to train AI on user data with no mention of a way to opt out. On Monday, the company said in a blog post that there's no need to worry about that. Zoom execs swear the company won't actually train its AI on your video calls even though the Terms of Service still say it can. The company's legal documents call your video, audio, and chat transcripts "Customer Content." When you click through Zoom's terms, you agree to give Zoom "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights" to use that Customer Content for "machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing," and a variety of other product development purposes. The company reserves similar rights for "Service Generated Data," which includes telemetry data, product usage data, diagnostic data, and other information it gets from analyzing your content and behavior.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Iraq's telecoms ministry said it has blocked the Telegram messaging app over national security concerns and in order to preserve the integrity of users' personal data, which it said the app had mishandled. From a report: The app is widely used in Iraq for messaging but also as a source of news and for sharing content. Some channels contain large amounts of personal data including the names, addresses and family ties of Iraqis. The ministry said in a statement it had asked the app to close down "platforms that leak the data of the official state institutions and the personal data of citizens... but the company did not respond and did not interact with any of these requests."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toshiba announced a 2 trillion yen ($14 billion) tender offer on Monday in a move that would take it private, as the scandal-tarnished Japanese electronics and energy giant seeks to turn itself around. From a report: The tender offer led by a buyout fund of major Japanese banks and companies called Japan Industrial Partners starts Tuesday and is priced at 4,620 yen ($32) a share. Chairperson Akihiro Watanabe asked shareholders to back the proposal, saying it is the only option for Toshiba to return to its former strength. [...] Tokyo-based Toshiba also reported a 25 billion yen ($176 million) loss for the April-June quarter on 704 billion yen ($5 billion) in sales, down nearly 5% from the previous year. It did not give a full fiscal year profit projection, citing uncertainties in its computer chip business. If the proposal succeeds, it will be a major step in Toshiba's yearslong turnaround effort, allowing it to delist from the Tokyo Stock Exchange.Read more of this story at Slashdot.