Slashdot

Silicon Valley-based payments firm PayPal announced it is launching a U.S. dollar stablecoin in conjunction with Paxos. From a report: The new digital token will be pegged to the dollar and "gradually" made available to PayPal's customers in the U.S., PayPal said in a press release. Paxos will issue the coin labeled PayPal USD, or PYUSD. Issued on the Ethereum blockchain, PYUSD will be "fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, short-term Treasuries and similar cash equivalents," the company also said in its statement. "As an ERC-20 token issued on the Ethereum blockchain, PayPal USD will be available to an already large and growing community of external developers, wallets and web3 applications," it added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canonical engineering manager Ben Hoyt believes that a variable's name is more important than its type, so "the name should be more prominent and come first in declarations."In many popular programming languages, including C, C++, Java, and C#, when you define a field or variable, you write the type before the name. For example (in C++): // Struct definitionstruct person { std::string name; std::string email; int age;}; In other languages, including Go, Rust, TypeScript, and Python (with type hints), you write the name before the type. For example (in Go): // Struct definitiontype Person struct { Name string Email string Age int} There's a nice answer in the Go FAQ about why Go chose this order: "Why are declarations backwards?". It starts with "they're only backwards if you're used to C", which is a good point - name-before-type has a long history in languages like Pascal. In fact, Go's type declaration syntax (and packages) were directly inspired by Pascal. The FAQ goes on to point out that parsing is simpler with name-before-type, and declaring multiple variables is less error-prone than in C. In C, the following declares x to be a pointer, but (surprisingly at first!) y to be a normal integer: int* x, y; Whereas the equivalent in Go does what you'd expect, declaring both to be pointers: var x, y *int The Go blog even has an in-depth article by Rob Pike on Go's Declaration Syntax, which describes more of the advantages of Go's syntax over C's, particularly with arrays and function pointers. Oddly, the article only hints at what I think is the more important reason to prefer name-before-type for everyday programming: it's clearer. Hoyt argues a variable's name has more meaning (semantically) - pointing out dynamically-typed languages like Python and Ruby don't even need types., and that languages like Java, Go, C++ and C# now include type inference. "I think the takeaway is this: we can't change the past, but if you're creating a new language, please put names before types!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After a hurricane hit Florida, 484 buildings just at the Tyndall Air Force base were destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Five years later, it's part of a $5 billion, nine-year rebuilding effort the Washington Post describes as rare "blank slate." The plan is "not merely to rebuild it, but to construct what the U.S. military calls 'the installation of the future,' which will be able to withstand rising seas, stronger storms and other threats..."The rebuild at Tyndall, which is expected to continue into 2027, marks the largest military construction project undertaken by the Pentagon. "Think of it as the Air Force throwing its Costco card down on the table and buying buildings in bulk," said Michael Dwyer, deputy chief of the Natural Disaster Recovery Division. A dizzying array of new technologies and approaches have been incorporated into the effort, from semiautonomous robot dogs patrolling the grounds to artificial intelligence software designed to detect and deter any armed person who enters the base. But the most robust funding is aimed at making Tyndall more efficient, connected and resilient in the face of a warming world. Structures under construction - from dormitory complexes to a child care center to hangars that will house three new squadrons of the F-35A Lightning II later this year - are being built to withstand winds in excess of 165 mph. Steel frames, high-impact windows, concrete facades and roofing with additional bracing are among the features meant to weather the stronger storms to come. At nearby Panama City, sea level rise has accelerated in recent years, with federal data showing seas have risen there more than 4 inches since 2010. Planners factored in the potential for as much as 7 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century, and as a result placed the "vast majority" of new buildings at elevations that should be safe from storm surges for decades, Dwyer said. In addition, sensors placed near the low spots of buildings will send alerts the moment a flood threatens. The Air Force also has created a "digital twin" of Tyndall - essentially, a virtual duplicate of the base that allows officials to simulate how roads, buildings and other infrastructure would hold up in different scenarios, such as a hurricane or historic rainfall events. Other efforts include restoring the beach's 10-foot sand dunes and its rocky shoreline, along with "the installation of submerged oyster reef breakwater that can reduce wave energy and erosion." But the article points out that the Air Force also has a second hope for their base: "that the lessons unfolding here can be replicated at other bases around the world that will face - or already are facing - similar threats...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a neighborhood in Seoul there's an ordinary red-brick, four-story building, reports Bloomberg - but there's something unique about the building's basement office. It's somehow the registered address of the Centre "whose extraordinary claims about a breakthrough in superconductor technology have shocked the scientific community and captivated the world." Bloomberg also reports that: - "No one responded when a Bloomberg News reporter knocked on the center's locked doors or reached out via LinkedIn." - "Goods including bottles of sparkling water delivered to the center's address have been left untouched outside the office's entrance." - "Multiple attempts to reach the scientists at the Quantum Energy Research Centre were not answered." - "The center's website has also been closed and says it is 'under construction.'" However, Kim Hyun Tak, one of the authors of the papers who is a research professor of physics at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, said the skeptical reaction is expected. "It's common practice when a new crucial discovery or invention is made public that there are more people who say that it's not credible," Kim said in a Zoom interview. "It's a natural thing for some people to laugh at it because it's the first time, and they don't even know what it is, but as time passes, they start to believe it...." In response to questions about why the Quantum Energy Research Centre hasn't provided the materials to other scientists, Kim said that it doesn't have enough inventory of the LK-99 compound nor time to recreate it, and that the researchers have been distracted by the number of journalists trying to contact them. "You know that the office is extremely small and in a poor state." he said. "It's so small, and you need the money to make the compounds. That's why they cannot mass-produce it." Despite the questions, he remained defiant that the research was sound. "The experimental data speaks for itself," Kim said. "We know it because we're the ones who synthesized it and conducted the studies." "The claim has been met with widespread excitement globally," adds Bloomberg, "sending related stocks soaring in South Korea and China, but also skepticism as past claims had been later proven wrong."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Australian news service 9News reports on the "strongest sign yet" that Australia is headed toward a "totally cashless society... the number of notes in circulation officially declining for the first time since dollars and cents were introduced in 1966."According to data from the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), more than a billion dollars worth of physical cash disappeared from circulation in the last financial year, a shift that's likely to make life more difficult for the elderly and for those in the regions. Authorities say less cash will also hurt the nation's criminals, who rely heavily on its use, making it harder for them to make transactions undetected... The RBA's survey of consumers' payment trends revealed that a third of Aussies now consider themselves "low cash users" - meaning they claim to use cash for less than 20 per cent of all their in-person transactions. In 2019, about half of the nation's residents were reported as such... It's expected that cash use will continue to decrease in the coming years, similar to the use of cheques, which are set to wrap up completely in the country by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Financial Times reports:U.S. government scientists have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time, a result that is set to fuel optimism that progress is being made towards the dream of limitless, zero-carbon power... "In an experiment conducted on July 30, we repeated ignition at NIF," the laboratory said. "As is our standard practice, we plan on reporting those results at upcoming scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed publications..." Although many scientists believe fusion power stations are still decades away, the technology's potential is hard to ignore. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-lived radioactive waste and a small cup of hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years... [T]he improved result at NIF, coming "only eight months" after the initial breakthrough, was a further sign that the pace of progress was increasing, said one of the people with knowledge of the results.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The necessity of multiple drafts may be an idea that's drilled into children's minds by teachers and parents, but in 2023 there's still a need to remind software engineers to Throw Away Your First Draft of Your Code. "The next time you start on a major project," advises Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya, "I want you to write code for a couple of days and then delete it all. Just throw it away. I'm serious. And you should probably have some of your best engineers doing this throwaway work. It's going to save you time in the long run." While Tietz-Sokolskaya's advice echoes that of Ernest Hemingway ("the first draft of anything is shit"), do developers tend to scrap or ship their first drafts in the real world?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN tells the story of Sandra Shuster, who'd included an airtag with her daughter's $2,000 lacrosse kit on a flight to Denver (with a stop-over in Chicago's O'Hare airport):When they arrived at Denver after midnight, the bag wasn't on the belt. United representatives at Denver gave them a case number and told them the bag should arrive on the 8.30 a.m. flight from Chicago in just a few hours. When it didn't, Shuster called the toll-free number for lost baggage that she'd been given. "They said, 'Your bag's going to come in later today on one of two flights.' I said 'OK, great,' but it never came. So I called later that afternoon and they said 'Your bag is still in Baltimore,'" says Shuster. There was just one problem: she already knew it wasn't in Baltimore. Three months earlier, Shuster had bought an AirTag - Apple's tracking devices - to know where her daughter's bag was... [T]he AirTag was showing as being at baggage reclaim at O'Hare. "I told them I could see it at Terminal 1 baggage reclaim in Chicago, and they said 'We have no record of it.' I asked them to call Chicago, and they said 'No, we're not allowed.' They said they'd put notes in the system and the baggage team would take care of it." The airline had mistakenly attached another customer's baggage-claim number to the luggage - so when it arrived at the stop-over in Chicago, baggage handlers couldn't know its ultimate destination, and it was moved to the "reclaim" belt. There were several more communication misfires - but fortunately, Shuster had more than 30,000 unused air miles... "I jumped on the plane, flew to Chicago, got to baggage claim, and it took them 30 seconds to give me my bag..." Shuster tells CNN. "What was difficult to comprehend was that it would have taken one call to Chicago to locate it, and nobody seemed able to do that... You can't tell me in this day and age, with all the technology available, that they can't figure this stuff out. Airlines need to do better." United later refunded Shuster's air miles, along with an apology "for the inconvenience you experienced on your recent trip with United."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Dungeons & Dragons expansion book included AI-generated artwork. Fans on Twitter spotted it before the book was even released (noting, among other things, a wolf with human feet). An embarrassed representative for Wizards of the Coast then tweeted out an announcement about new guidelines stating explicitly that "artists must refrain from using AI art generation as part of their creation process for developing D&D art." GeekWire reports:The artist in question, Ilya Shkipin, is a California-based painter, illustrator, and operator of an NFT marketplace, who has worked on projects for Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast since 2014. Shkipin took to Twitter himself on Friday, and acknowledged in several now-deleted tweets that he'd used AI tools to "polish" several original illustrations and concept sketches. As of Saturday morning, Shkipin had taken down his original tweets and announced that the illustrations for Glory of the Giants are "going to be reworked..." While the physical book won't be out until August 15, the e-book is available now from Wizards' D&D Beyond digital storefront. Wizards of the Coast emphasized this won't happen again. About this particular incident, they noted "We have worked with this artist since 2014 and he's put years of work into books we all love. While we weren't aware of the artist's choice to use AI in the creation process for these commissioned pieces, we have discussed with him, and he will not use AI for Wizards' work moving forward." GeekWire adds that the latest D&D video game, Baldur's Gate 3, "went into its full launch period on Tuesday. Based on metrics such as its player population on Steam, BG3 has been an immediate success, with a high of over 709,000 people playing it concurrently on Saturday afternoon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike quotes this article from BleepingComputer:A team of researchers from British universities has trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keyboard keystrokes recorded using a microphone with an accuracy of 95%... Such an attack severely affects the target's data security, as it could leak people's passwords, discussions, messages, or other sensitive information to malicious third parties. Moreover, contrary to other side-channel attacks that require special conditions and are subject to data rate and distance limitations, acoustic attacks have become much simpler due to the abundance of microphone-bearing devices that can achieve high-quality audio captures. This, combined with the rapid advancements in machine learning, makes sound-based side-channel attacks feasible and a lot more dangerous than previously anticipated. The researchers achieved 95% accuracy from the smartphone recordings, 93% from Zoom recordings, and 91.7% from Skype. The article suggests potential defenses against the attack might include white noise, "software-based keystroke audio filters," switching to password managers - and using biometric authentication.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Even Zoom is now telling its 8,400 employees to stop working remotely at least two days a week and return to the office. The policy applies to employees within 50 miles of a Zoom office ith a Zoom spokesperson calling this hybrid approach the "most effective". Business Insider quips that Zoom making the move means "The remote work revolution is officially dead." And earlier this week The Los Angeles Times argues that "After watching and waiting, some chaotic back-and-forth and a few false starts, the white-collar American workforce appears to be settling - for now - in a hybrid mode."Even as more corporations are moving to call workers back to the office, arguing it's better for preserving company culture and decision-making, few employers have required employees to work on-site five days a week. Most are like Meta and Los Angeles-based Farmers Group, which recently announced that most employees who had been working remotely will have to come in three days a week starting in September. Some firms have backtracked in favor of a more flexible system, or put return-to-office plans on ice, because of worker resistance and other changes wrought by the pandemic... [M]any other companies have stayed silent on the issue of remote work, maintaining vague or largely unenforced policies as they wait to see where the struggle ends. More unions, including the guild at the Los Angeles Times, are wrestling with management over remote work, which has become a top labor issue. For all these reasons, the overall amount of work done from home has held remarkably steady this year at about 28%, according to monthly surveys of thousands of workers by WFH Research, a group including Stanford and the University of Chicago. That's way up from roughly 5% of work done at home before COVID-19. And there are some signs that employers are giving workers greater flexibility in their work schedules and when they can work from home. In a nationwide survey conducted last month for The Times by polling firm Leger, 27% of full-time workers said their employers had become more lenient over the last year about working remotely. Only 15% said their employers got stricter. Most of the rest said there was no change. Leger's survey showed that 11% of full-time employees work 100% from home, and 31% work a hybrid schedule, with most saying they choose which days to come into the office. The remainder said that they work fully on company premises or that their jobs aren't compatible with at-home work. These results line up almost exactly with WFH data... Rob Sadow, chief executive at Scoop Technologies, a firm specializing in flexible-work software and research, says the percentages of employers that are fully remote and fully in-office have both declined since the start of the year. What's grown in their place is a "structured" hybrid model in which employees and employers have essentially split the difference. "This two to three days a week is starting to feel like a pretty decent, happy medium," Sadow said. "Executives and employees are finding somewhat of a truce in terms of how much time is spent in the office and at home." The article also points out that "Some employees have quit and moved to more remote-work friendly firms."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: This is straight out of science fiction. The technology is absolutely incredible..." says a woman who received an AI-powered bionic arm. "I'm just absolutely in awe of the technology and excited about the future prospects this will give me." The short video clip (produced by the BBC) also features the woman's doctor explaining that "the top section is customized to fit...with electrodes there recording the unique pattern of movement, that then talk to a little computer inside the forearm that then, through AI, build data and record those movements to tell the arm what to do." A GoFundMe campaign had raised 296,613 (about $378,121 USD) to purchase the bionic arm - and last week the grateful recipient shared a long-awaited status update. "It's here. It fits. It works...! 6 months after I first signed up in the clinic I have my bionic arm. State of the art, tailored to my body, the price of a very nice sports car. 24h in and I'm already putting it to good use. The feeling of freedom is unbeatable. Being able to carry things in 2 hands! Open a bottle! Give my husband a 2 arm hug! "I wouldn't have been able to do this without you, you believed in me since the very beginning. You stood by me in my darkest hour. THANK YOU."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently science author Sam Kean reviewed In a Flight of Starlings, a "slender, uneven collection of essays by Giorgio Parisi about his life in physics, from his student days in Rome to the work that won him a share of the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics." But the reviewer makes an interesting point:As someone who writes about science history, I have long grumbled about how misleading modern scientific papers are. I understand the need to present scientific findings in a clean, concise way, but the papers also omit all the false starts, blind alleys, broken equipment, and dumb mistakes that beset real scientific research every day. By omitting all the human stuff, the papers fail to explain how science really gets done. Parisi raises a related complaint - that scientific papers omit all sense of intuition. Indeed, the best sections of the book explore the role of intuition in scientific thinking. He quotes a friend who says that "a good mathematician understands immediately which mathematical statements are true and which are false, whereas a bad mathematician has to try to prove them in order to know." The same applies to science: the early stages of any project are chaotic, and the data can be confusing and even contradictory. Scientists need intuition to cut through the mess and focus on the most promising explanations. Much of this intuition is unconscious and, while still grounded in physical brain processes, remains murky and hard to reconstruct. And for whatever reason, that vagueness makes scientists uncomfortable. "In almost all texts written by scientists," Parisi notes, "these themes are taboo." So it's refreshing to see a scientist, especially one of Parisi's stature, honestly discuss the fuzzy side of scientific thinking, and not just during the early, groping stages but in the technical phases of a project, too. "The physicist sometimes uses mathematics ungrammatically," he admits, "a license that we grant to poets" as well... In a Flight of Starlings, Parisi writes, "is my attempt to convey to a wide readership something of the beauty, importance, and cultural value of modern science." Does he succeed? At times, yes... Perhaps it's not unlike the hodgepodge of science itself, then...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports:California's newly empowered privacy regulators announced their first case Monday, a probe of the data practices of newer-generation cars that are often or always connected to the internet. The California Privacy Protection Agency said its enforcement division would review manufacturer's treatment of data collected from vehicles, including locations, smartphone connections and images from cameras. The agency was established by a 2020 ballot initiative that toughened the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. As of July 1, it can conduct operations to enforce Californians' right to learn what is being collected about them, the right to stop that information from being spread and the right to have it deleted... When combined with web surfing habits and other internet data collated by brokers, movement tracking can paint a full portrait that includes a person's home, workplace, shopping habits, religious attendance and medical treatments. Insurance companies also want data on how quickly drivers brake ahead of problems on the road, along with other performance indicators, and they are willing to pay to get it. The Post notes that data is beamed to business partners of automakers under "vague privacy policies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Is natural gas really a cleaner alternative to coal and oil? That claim "is facing increasing scrutiny," writes Slashdot reader sonlas:One significant concern with natural gas is the release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, during its extraction, production, transportation, and processing. Methane is approximately 30 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2 over a 100-year period. (And methane leaks can occur at various stages of the gas supply chain, from wellhead emissions during drilling and extraction to leakage during transportation and distribution.) Additionally, intentional venting or flaring of methane also contributes to the problem. An article published in Environmental Research Letters challenges the assumption that natural gas is a cleaner energy source compared to coal or oil. Their study takes into account the full lifecycle emissions of natural gas, including methane leakage rates, and arrives at a different conclusion. With a methane leakage rate of 7.5% and other relevant factors considered, the greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas can be on par with or even exceed those of coal. Even a lower methane leakage rate of 2% can diminish the environmental advantage of natural gas significantly. A key aspect of this study is its focus on real-world methane leakage rates. Aerial measurements conducted in various oil and gas production regions in the U.S. revealed substantial methane leak rates ranging from 0.65% to a staggering 66.2%. (Similar leakage rates have been identified in other parts of the world.) These findings raise serious concerns about the climate impact of natural gas and cast doubt on its role as a so-called "transition energy" in the quest for cleaner and more sustainable energy sources, especially liquefied natural gas... This complicates the search for sustainable energy solutions, especially in Europe where gas was included in the green taxonomy following a push from Germany.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new analysis "shows that over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential is available along the U.S. coastline," capable of fulfilling up to 25% of U.S. energy demand in 2050. (And it could also add $1.8 trillion in economy-boosting investment, while employing up to 390,000 workers.) This new analysis comes from Berkeley researchers, who worked with nonprofit clean energy research firm GridLab and climate policy think tank Energy Innovation, reports the Verge:The Biden administration has committed to halving the nation's emissions by the end of the decade and has plans to source electricity completely from carbon pollution-free energy by 2035. Adding to that urgency, U.S. electricity demand is forecast to nearly triple by 2050, according to the Berkeley report. On top of a growing economy, the clean energy transition means electrifying more vehicles and homes - all of which put more stress on the power grid unless more power supply comes online at a similar pace. To meet that demand and hit its climate goals, the report says the U.S. has to add 27 gigawatts of offshore wind and 85 GW of land-based wind and solar each year between 2035 and 2050. That timeline might still seem far away, but it's a big escalation of the Biden administration's current goal of deploying 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030. Europe, with an electricity grid about 70% the size of the U.S., already has about as much offshore wind capacity as the Biden administration hopes to build up by the end of the decade. Right now, wind energy makes up just over 10% of the U.S. electricity mix, and nearly all of that comes from land-based turbines... For now, the U.S. has just two small wind farms off the coasts of Rhode Island and Virginia. Construction started on the foundations for the nation's first commercial-scale wind farm off Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, in June... Project costs have gone up with higher interest rates and rising prices for key commodities like steel, Heatmap reports. That's led to power purchase agreements falling through for some projects in early development, including plans in Rhode Island for an 884-megawatt wind farm that alone would have added more than 20 times as much generation capacity as the U.S. has today from offshore wind. Developers are struggling to make projects profitable without passing costs on to consumers... The study found a modest 2 to 3 percent increase in wholesale electricity costs with ambitious renewable energy deployment. But renewable energy costs have fallen so dramatically in the past that the researchers think those costs could wind up being smaller over time. The report points out that wind energy complements solar, by producing the most wind energy right when demand is peaking (in the summertime on the West Coast, and during the winter on the East Coast).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In February of 1994 Jon "maddog" Hall interviewed a young Linus Torvalds (then just 24). Nearly three decades later - as Hall approaches his 73rd birthday - he's shared a long essay looking back, but also assessing today's controversy about Red Hat's licensing of RHEL. A (slightly- condensed] excerpt:[O]ver time some customers developed a pattern of purchasing a small number of RHEL systems, then using the "bug-for-bug" compatible version of Red Hat from some other distribution. This, of course, saved the customer money, however it also reduced the amount of revenue that Red Hat received for the same amount of work. This forced Red Hat to charge more for each license they sold, or lay off Red Hat employees, or not do projects they might have otherwise funded. So recently Red Hat/IBM made a business decision to limit their customers to those who would buy a license from them for every single system that would run RHEL and only distribute their source-code and the information necessary on how to build that distribution to those customers. Therefore the people who receive those binaries would receive the sources so they could fix bugs and extend the operating system as they wished.....this was, and is, the essence of the GPL. Most, if not all, of the articles I have read have said something along the lines of "IBM/Red Hat seem to be following the GPL..but...but...but... the community! " Which community? There are plenty of distributions for people who do not need the same level of engineering and support that IBM and Red Hat offer. Red Hat, and IBM, continue to send their changes for GPLed code "upstream" to flow down to all the other distributions. They continue to share ideas with the larger community. [...] I now see a lot of people coming out of the woodwork and beating their breasts and saying how they are going to protect the investment of people who want to use RHEL for free [...] So far I have seen four different distributions saying that they will continue the production of "not RHEL", generating even more distributions for the average user to say "which one should I use"? If they really want to do this, why not just work together to produce one good one? Why not make their own distributions a RHEL competitor? How long will they keep beating their breasts when they find out that they can not make any money at doing it? SuSE said that they would invest ten million dollars in developing a competitor to RHEL. Fantastic! COMPETE. Create an enterprise competitor to Red Hat with the same business channels, world-wide support team, etc. etc. You will find it is not inexpensive to do that. Ten million may get you started. My answer to all this? RHEL customers will have to decide what they want to do. I am sure that IBM and Red Hat hope that their customers will see the value of RHEL and the support that Red Hat/IBM and their channel partners provide for it. The rest of the customers who just want to buy one copy of RHEL and then run a "free" distribution on all their other systems no matter how it is created, well it seems that IBM does not want to do business with them anymore, so they will have to go to other suppliers who have enterprise capable distributions of Linux and who can tolerate that type of customer. [...] I want to make sure people know that I do not have any hate for people and companies who set business conditions as long as they do not violate the licenses they are under. Business is business. However I will point out that as "evil" as Red Hat and IBM have been portrayed in this business change there is no mention at all of all the companies that support Open Source "Permissive Licenses", which do not guarantee the sources to their end users, or offer only "Closed Source" Licenses....who do not allow and have never allowed clones to be made....these people and companies do not have any right to throw stones (and you know who you are). Red Hat and IBM are making their sources available to all those who receive their binaries under contract. That is the GPL. For all the researchers, students, hobbyists and people with little or no money, there are literally hundreds of distributions that they can choose, and many that run across other interesting architectures that RHEL does not even address. Hall answered questions from Slashdot users in 2000 and again in 2013. Further reading: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst answering questions from Slashdot readers in 2017.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"For the second time this year, Wells Fargo acknowledged that deposits were not showing up in customers' accounts," reports NBC News:In an emailed statement Friday morning, a Wells Fargo representative said the issue was affecting a "limited number of customers," and that "the vast majority" of instances had been resolved before noon, while the "few remaining" would be resolved soon. This week's incident mirrored one encountered by Wells Fargo customers in March, which the company then blamed on an unspecified "technical issue...." Customers nationwide appeared to be affected by this week's outage. Jeani Cortez, a single, disabled, self-employed accountant and Alaska resident, says she was supposed to have paid her rent, gas, electric and internet payments for the month by now with funds she deposited Wednesday. She said she was told Friday by a Wells Fargo representative that she would not be able to access her deposit for another three to five business days. She'd earlier been told that Wells Fargo could send her a letter to give to her creditors; that too has not arrived.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For storing passwords, Slashdot reader eggegick has a simple, easy solution: "I use Vim to keep my passwords in an encrypted file." But what's the easiest solution for people who don't use Vim?My wife is not a Linux geek like I am, so she's using [free and open-source] KeePass. It's relatively simple to install and use, but I seem to recall it used to be even much simpler... Does anybody know of a really simple password manager or encrypting notepad? I've looked at a number of them, and they use Java or Javascript, or they involve an external web site, or they have way too many features, or they use an installation program. Or WindowsDefender objects to them. Share your own suggestions and thoughts in the comments. What's the best (encrypted) password manager?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:A judge has ordered criminal charges dropped against the final executive accused of lying about problems building two nuclear reactors in South Carolina that were abandoned without generating a watt of power.The judge tossed the charges Wednesday because ratepayers of the utility that lost billions of dollars on the project were improperly allowed on the grand jury that indicted Westinghouse Electric Co. executive Jeffrey Benjamin. But federal judge Mary Geiger Lewis also ruled that nothing is stopping prosecutors from properly seeking another indictment. "We're not going away," said assistant U.S. Attorney Winston Holliday, who said prosecutors are still reviewing the ruling to decide their next steps... The project fell apart in 2017 after nearly a decade of work, when executives and regulators determined construction of the reactors was so hopelessly behind schedule they could not get nearly $2 billion of tax breaks needed to help pay for the work. SCANA contracted with Westinghouse to build the reactors. Prosecutors said Benjamin , who was in charge of major projects, knew of delays and cost overruns but lied to regulators, utility executives and others. The lies led to electric rate increases while keeping the price of SCANA's stock from plummeting... Two former SCANA executives have been sentenced to federal prison after pleading guilty to their roles in lying to ratepayers, regulators and investors. Former CEO Kevin Marsh received two years while chief operating officer Stephen Byrne was sentenced to 15 months. Former Westinghouse project director Carl Churchman has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents investigating the project's failure and is awaiting sentencing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Three of Reddit's biggest communities are no longer focused entirely on John Oliver in a form of protest against Reddit," reports the Verge. Gizmodo argues that this means "the Reddit protest is finally over. Reddit won."Despite the infinite blackout threats, most moderators relented as the weeks rolled by. Three major holdouts were r/aww, r/pics, and r/videos, some of Reddit's largest communities that account for more than 91 million subscribers. The three subreddits reopened weeks ago but adopted rules by popular vote that prohibited content that did not feature HBO's John Oliver, rendering the forums useless for their previous purposes. For a while, the subreddits stood strong, but r/videos was the first to backpedal, dropping the John Oliver rule but requiring all posts to feature profanity. Soon that rule was abandoned as well. Last week, the moderators of r/aww announced the John Oliver rule was over, and over the weekend r/pics quietly gave up the protest as well, as reported by the Verge. "More than a month has passed, and as things on the internet go, the passion for the protest has waned and people's attention has shifted to other things," an r/aww moderator wrote in a post about the rule change. According to Reddark, a site that tracks the subreddit protest, 1,843 of the original 8,829 protesting communities are still dark. But most of these are small communities, and today the only protesting subreddit with over 10 million subscribers is r/fitness. The Verge: Two other big communities have switched back, too. r/pics (with more than 30 million subscribers) had perhaps been the most visibly tied to John Oliver: Oliver himself posted a series of silly photos specifically for the community to use, and at one point, the moderators of r/pics invited Oliver to join the mod team. But sometime recently, r/pics removed any obvious trace of its connections to John Oliver; the Wayback Machine shows that r/pics was all about John Oliver as of Friday but no longer on Saturday... r/videos (with more than 26 million subscribers) actually dropped its John Oliver rule back in June; it was replaced by a new rule that all posts needed to contain profanity in the title after a community vote. Earlier this month, the r/videos moderators reverted the rules to what they were before the protests started... In June, more than 8,000 communities went dark to protest the API pricing, but in the weeks since, many subreddits have opened back up (some after feeling pressure from Reddit) and are operating as they did before. Many users are still disgruntled, though, and made their feelings known in July's r/Place canvas. More than 1,800 subreddits are still private in protest, according to the Reddark tracker. Some key passages from the moderator's announcement at r/aww:What about the protest, though; did we win? The short answer is no. The long answer is also no, as Reddit's minimal attempts at positive outreach remain overshadowed by the plethora of depressing developments... At the end of the day, Reddit's API changes have gone into effect. They did not extend the transition period or reduce the exorbitant prices. They granted exemptions to a few apps and moderation tools, but that's about it. The best thing I can say is that they did honor their commitment to ensuring the continued functionality of some mod tools... Despite some reassurances and promises from Reddit, their conduct and these changes have driven away many developers, leading to the shutdown of some tools and an uncertain future for others. The announcement with a link labeled "and more importantly," which leads to a picture with a message for Reddit CEO Steve Huffman (who uses the name "Spez" when posting on Reddit.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently Ars Technica reported on "another application for SpaceX's Starship architecture that the company is studying," adding that NASA "is on board to lend expertise. "Though still in a nascent phase of tech development, the effort could result in repurposing Starship into a commercial space station, something NASA has a keen interest in because there are no plans for a government-owned research lab in low-Earth orbit after the International Space Station is decommissioned after 2030."NASA announced last month a new round of agreements with seven commercial companies, including SpaceX. The Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities (CCSC) program is an effort established to advance private sector development of emerging products and services that could be available to customers - including NASA - in approximately five to seven years... NASA passed over SpaceX's bid for a funded space station development agreement in 2021, identifying concerns about SpaceX's plans for scaling its life-support system to enable long-duration missions and SpaceX's plan for a single docking port, among other issues. The space agency isn't providing any funding for the new CCSC effort, which includes the Starship space station concept, but the government will support the industry with technical expertise, including expert assessments, lessons learned, technologies, and data. Apart from the SpaceX agreement, NASA said it will provide non-financial support to Blue Origin's initiative to develop a crew spacecraft for orbital missions that would launch on the company's New Glenn rocket. The agency also supports Northrop Grumman's development of a human-tended research platform in low-Earth orbit to work alongside the company's planned space station. The other companies NASA picked for unfunded agreements were: Sierra Space's proposal for a crewed version of its Dream Chaser spacecraft, Vast's concept for a privately owned space station, ThinkOrbital's plan to develop welding, cutting, inspection, and additive manufacturing technology for construction work in space, and Special Aerospace Services for collaboration on an autonomous maneuvering unit to assist, or potentially replace, spacewalkers working outside a space station. Despite the lack of NASA funding, the new collaboration announcement with SpaceX laid out - in broad strokes, at least - one of the directions SpaceX may want to take Starship. NASA said it will work with SpaceX on an "integrated low-Earth orbit architecture" that includes the Starship vehicle and other SpaceX programs, including the Dragon crew capsule and Starlink broadband network. The artice links to a recent NASA document detailing SpaceX's space station concept. Phil McAlister, who heads NASA's commercial spaceflight division, says its size and reduced cost "could have a far-reaching impact on the sustainable development of the low-Earth orbit) economy... "Adding increased confidence is the company's plan to self-fund Starship development from its launch and satellite enterprises." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports:A federal judge said the Department of Justice's landmark case alleging Google's dominance over the online search business is anti-competitive can go ahead, throwing out some of the government's claims but ruling that a trial is still necessary. Google had asked for the judge to make a ruling before the trial, which is scheduled for September. Some of the government's claims, including those put together by a consortium of state attorneys general that argued the way Google designed its search engine page was unfairly harming competitors like Yelp, were dismissed. But D.C. District Court Judge Amit Mehta said the allegations that Google's overall business practices constitute a monopoly that violates the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act still deserve a trial. "This is a significant victory for Google, knocking out several claims and narrowing the range of activities at issue for trial," said David Olson, an associate professor and antitrust expert at Boston College's law school. "Having said that, the strongest claims against Google remain, so Google still remains at risk of a significant antitrust ruling against it." The trial will be a major test for Google and the massive business empire it has assembled over the past two decades. The company is still the dominant portal to the internet, exercising immense power over what people see online... The eventual ruling will also be seen as a test for the U.S. government's more aggressive posture on antitrust.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Scientists in Japan may be at the start of a truly monumental accomplishment: a vaccine that can slow or delay the progression of Alzheimer's disease," reports Gizmodo:In preliminary research released this week, the vaccine appeared to reduce inflammation and other important biomarkers in the brains of mice with Alzheimer's-like illness, while also improving their awareness. More research will be needed before this vaccine can be tested in humans, however. The experimental vaccine is being developed primarily by scientists from Juntendo University in Japan. It's intended to work by training the immune system to go after certain senescent cells, aging cells that no longer divide to make more of themselves, but instead stick around in the body. These cells aren't necessarily harmful, and some play a vital role in healing and other life functions. But they've also been linked to a variety of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer's. The vaccine specifically targets senescent cells that produce high levels of something called senescence-associated glycoprotein, or SAGP. Other research has suggested that people with Alzheimer's tend to have brains filled with these cells in particular. The team tested their vaccine on mice bred to have brains that develop the same sort of gradual destruction seen in humans with Alzheimer's.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bram Moolenaar was Vim's creator/maintainer/benevolent-dictator for life. Early this morning his family shared sad news on the Vim-announce Google Group. "It is with a heavy heart that we have to inform you that Bram Moolenaar passed away on 3 August 2023." Moolenaar was 62 years old, and died from "a medical condition that progressed quickly over the last few weeks." "Bram dedicated a large part of his life to VIM and he was very proud of the VIM community that you are all part of." Anyone who's used Vim has seen evidence of Moolenaar's generosity. "Vim is Charityware," Moolenaar wrote in its pioneering license. "You can use and copy it as much as you like, but you are encouraged to make a donation for needy children in Uganda." Moolenaar pioneered the concept of charityware decades ago, and also helped to popularize its adoption. To this day Vim users can still view the license by typing the command :help Uganda or :help ICCF. And Vim's sponsor FAQ notes that "Each registered Vim user and sponsor who donates at least 10 euro will be able to vote for new features." Moolenaar's personal web site also includes photos from his travels around the world, and YouTube has some videos of talks and interviews with Moolenaar. He was still committing changes to Vim up until a month ago. In the comments below long-time Slashdot reader bads shares a link to a post from long-time Vim contributor Christian Brabandt :Bram was a great leader to the Vim community and I really enjoyed working with him over the past years, since I became involved with the development of Vim almost 20 years ago. Bram was of great inspiration in creating a great community, helping people with his charity and he was a great mentor. And now he left too soon. We lost a great leader and I regret never having met him in person. However to all of the community: I will continue and I hope all of the other contributors willalso keep up the good work. I do have access to the Vim homepage and the Vim organization (not sure if all the rights, but I am sure we will work on the details in the near future...) I hopetogether we will be able to continuesuccessfully.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"NASA has reestablished full communications with Voyager 2," according to a mission update posted Friday:The agency's Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, sent the equivalent of an interstellar "shout" more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) to Voyager 2, instructing the spacecraft to reorient itself and turn its antenna back to Earth. With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to reach Voyager, it took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command worked. At 12:29 a.m. EDT on Aug. 4, the spacecraft began returning science and telemetry data, indicating it is operating normally and that it remains on its expected trajectory. "Had the Earth-based signals not reached Voyager 2, the spacecraft is already programmed to reorient itself multiple times a year to keep its antenna pointing in our planet's direction," CNN points out. "The next reset was already scheduled for October 15. But the team didn't want to wait that long..." After controllers sent the wrong command to the 46-year-old spacecraft, Voyager 2's antenna needed to be shifted "a mere 2 degrees," notes The Associated Press: Voyager 2 has been hurtling through space since its launch in 1977 to explore the outer solar system. Launched two weeks later, its twin, Voyager 1, is now the most distant spacecraft - 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away - and still in contact. As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50th anniversary of their launch in 2027, according to Dodd. Among the scientific tidbits they've beamed back in recent years include details about the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As detailed in a paper published in Cell Chemical Biology, researchers have developed a "cancer-killing pill" capable of destroying solid tumors while leaving healthy cells unaffected. The new drug has been in development for 20 years and is now undergoing pre-clinical research in the U.S.. Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist and freelance writer on science and pharmaceutical topics, writes about the new paper via Science Magazine: It's about a molecule designated AOH1996, which seems to have a unique mode of action in tumor cells, one that might make it more more selective for those as compared to normal ones. The key target here is a protein called PCNA (from its old name of "proliferating cell nuclear antigen"). [...] The current molecule is a traditional direct small molecule binder that is selective for caPCNA over the regular type, which is a very attractive advantage to explore. The team behind it has been working on it for several years now to validate that mechanism, and the new paper linked first above is their report of going all the way into animal models. AOH1996 is a very unremarkable-looking molecule - to be honest, it looks like the sort of stuff that you used to see in old combinatorial chemistry libraries in the late 90s and early 2000s, a couple of aryl-rich groups strung together with amide bonds. It's certainly not going to be the most soluble stuff in the world, but they seem to have been able to formulate it. But I'm definitely not going to make fun of any chemical structure that works! [...] The new paper shows preclinical toxicity testing in two species (mice and dogs), which is what you need to get to human trials. It seems to pass those very well, with no signs of trouble at 6x the effective dose in either species. And if you were throwing DSBs all over the place in normal tissues, believe me, you'd see tox. It is clean in an Ames test, for example. As for efficacy, in cell assays the concentration needed for 50% growth inhibition across 70 different cancer cell lines averaged around 300nM, while it showed no toxic effects on various non-cancer lines up to 10 micromolar (at least a 30x window). The affected cells show cell-cycle arrest, replication stress, apoptosis, and so on. And application of AOH1996 along with other known chemotherapy agents made the cells much more sensitive to those, presumably because they couldn't deal with those on top of the problems that AOH1996 was already causing. It also shows growth arrest in xenograft tumors in mouse models, with a no-effect dose at least six times its effective dose, and combination therapy with a topoisomerase inhibitor showed even more significant effects. The compound has entered a Phase I trial in humans on the basis of the above data, and I very much look forward to seeing it advance to Phase II, where it will doubtless be used in combination with several existing therapies. I hope that human cancers will prove vulnerable to this new mode of attack in the clinic, and that they are not able to mutate around it with new forms of caPCNA too quickly, either. The comparison with the peptide agent mentioned above will be especially interesting, too. There's only one way to find out - good luck to everyone involved!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: The Environmental Protection Agency approved a component of boat fuel made from discarded plastic that the agency's own risk formula determined was so hazardous, everyone exposed to the substance continually over a lifetime would be expected to develop cancer. Current and former EPA scientists said that threat level is unheard of. It is a million times higher than what the agency usually considers acceptable for new chemicals and six times worse than the risk of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking. Federal law requires the EPA to conduct safety reviews before allowing new chemical products onto the market. If the agency finds that a substance causes unreasonable risk to health or the environment, the EPA is not allowed to approve it without first finding ways to reduce that risk. But the agency did not do that in this case. Instead, the EPA decided its scientists were overstating the risks and gave Chevron the go-ahead to make the new boat fuel ingredient at its refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Though the substance can poison air and contaminate water, EPA officials mandated no remedies other than requiring workers to wear gloves, records show. ProPublica and the Guardian in February reported on the risks of other new plastic-based Chevron fuels that were also approved under an EPA program that the agency had touted as a "climate-friendly" way to boost alternatives to petroleum-based fuels. That story was based on an EPA consent order, a legally binding document the agency issues to address risks to health or the environment. In the Chevron consent order, the highest noted risk came from a jet fuel that was expected to create air pollution so toxic that 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer. In February, ProPublica and the Guardian asked the EPA for its scientists' risk assessment, which underpinned the consent order. The agency declined to provide it, so ProPublica requested it under the Freedom of Information Act. The 203-page risk assessment revealed that, for the boat fuel ingredient, there was a far higher risk that was not in the consent order. EPA scientists included figures that made it possible for ProPublica to calculate the lifetime cancer risk from breathing air pollution that comes from a boat engine burning the fuel. That calculation, which was confirmed by the EPA, came out to 1.3 in 1, meaning every person exposed to it over the course of a full lifetime would be expected to get cancer. Another serious cancer risk associated with the boat fuel ingredient that was documented in the risk assessment was also missing from the consent order. For every 100 people who ate fish raised in water contaminated with that same product over a lifetime, seven would be expected to develop cancer -- a risk that's 70,000 times what the agency usually considers acceptable. When asked why it didn't include those sky-high risks in the consent order, the EPA acknowledged having made a mistake. This information "was inadvertently not included in the consent order," an agency spokesperson said in an email. [...] The risk assessment makes it clear that cancer is not the only problem. Some of the new fuels pose additional risks to infants, the document said, but the EPA didn't quantify the effects or do anything to limit those harms, and the agency wouldn't answer questions about them. Some of these newly approved toxic chemicals are expected to persist in nature and accumulate in living things, the risk assessment said. That combination is supposed to trigger additional restrictions under EPA policy, including prohibitions on releasing the chemicals into water. Yet the agency lists the risk from eating fish contaminated with several of the compounds, suggesting they are expected to get into water. When asked about this, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the agency's testing protocols for persistence, bioaccumulation and toxicity are "unsuitable for complex mixtures" and contended that these substances are similar to existing petroleum-based fuels. The EPA did address the concerns in June when it proposed a rule that "would require companies to contact the agency before making any of 18 fuels and related compounds listed in the Chevron consent order," notes ProPublica. "The EPA would then have the option of requiring tests to ensure that the oil used to create the new fuels doesn't contain unsafe contaminants often found in plastic, including certain flame retardants, heavy metals, dioxins and PFAS. If approved, the rule will require Chevron to undergo such a review before producing the fuels, according to the EPA."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For $99 a night, full-time employees of Google can stay at an on-campus hotel in Mountain View in what the company is deeming a "Summer Special." According to CNBC who obtained the materials, "the special will run through Sept. 30 in hopes it'll 'make it easier for Googlers to transition to the hybrid workplace.'" From the report: Since the promotion is for unapproved business travel, the company will not reimburse their stays, but will require employees to use their personal credit cards, the special's description states. "Just imagine no commute to the office in the morning and instead, you could have an extra hour of sleep and less friction," the description reads. "Next, you could walk out of your room and quickly grab a delicious breakfast or get a workout in before work starts." The ad goes on to say that after the work day ends, "you could enjoy a quiet evening on top of the rooftop deck or take in one of the fun local activities." The Google-owned hotel is situated on a newer campus in Mountain View, California, that it opened last year. The 42-acre campus is adjacent to NASA's Ames Research Center and has capacity to house 4,000 employees working on its ads products, the company said upon its opening. Some employees have commented on the hotel deal in internal discussion forums. One highly rated meme showed movie clips that included a scene in the movie "Mean Girls," where the main character played by Lindsey Lohan says "No, thank you." "Now I can give some of my pay back to Google," another highly rated meme read. Another meme joked that living on campus for the summer could disrupt "work-life balance." At $99 a night, the hotel would amount to roughly $3,000 a month, employees pointed out in internal discussions viewed by CNBC. One employee pointed out that hotel amenities were not to be ignored. "I pay more and get a lot less in total for my apartment," wrote one employee in a discussion thread. "Though admittedly where I live is much better." Another thought it was still too expensive. "If it was around $60 a night, that could be a fine-ish alternative to apartments, but $99? No thanks." "I would've totally done it, had it fit a certain profile: $3k rent all-in, fully-furnished, unlimited meals, paid utilities, plus housekeeping/cleaning every day," another employee wrote. Another hypothesized the move could be a way to reduce vacancy at the hotel after Google cut corporate travel budgets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Capella Space's synthetic aperture radar satellites are falling back to Earth much sooner than than the three years they were anticipated to operate, according to publicly available satellite data. TechCrunch reports: The startup has launched a total of ten small satellites to low Earth orbit since 2018, including eight in its family of "Whitney"-class spacecraft. Five of these satellites have reentered the atmosphere since the end of January of this year, including three of the Whitneys. Those Whitney sats were in orbit for less than two-and-a-half years; one, Capella-5, was in orbit for less than two years. That leaves five of the constellation in orbit, including the Capella-9 and Capella-10 launched on March 16, which are operating at an altitude of around 584 km and 588 km, respectively. According to filings with the Federal Communication Commission, the propulsion system of Capella-9 was built by Phase Four. At least one of the satellites that has reentered prematurely, Capella-5, also used Phase Four propulsion. In that same filing from March 2022, Capella said its Capella-9 satellite would operate at an orbital altitude of 525 km, and maintain an altitude between 475-575 km for three years. It seems this is the typical mission profile of Capella satellites. But Capella-7 and Capella-8, launched in January 2022, appear to be now operating below 400 kilometers, and will likely deorbit in a matter of weeks to a few months. The unexpected decay could be due to a problem with the propulsion system, or a systematic miscalculation of its requirements. "Probably they [Capella-7 and Capella-8] will reenter in Sep-Oct or so," astronomer and analyst Jonathan McDowell said when reviewing the data at TechCrunch's request. "I suspect propulsion failures but certainly it isn't clear." In a statement to TechCrunch, Capella CEO Payam Banazadeh confirmed that some of the satellites have been deorbiting faster than expected "due to the combination of increased drag due to much higher solar activity than predicted by NOAA and less than expected performance from our 3rd party propulsion system." "We have upgraded our propulsion system on all future satellites to account for these facts, including the launch of our next generation satellite Acadia-1, currently scheduled for launch on August 5th 2023. We plan to launch eight of our next generation Acadia satellites over the next 12 months," he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Jordi Van DenBussche used to devote every waking hour to building his presence on social media. The gaming creator, better known as Kwebbelkop, would labor 24/7 onhis YouTube channelcoming up with video ideas, shooting them, distributing them. He did this while courting brand deals and doing the other work integral to his survival on the platform. Five years ago, he ran into a problem. "Every time I wanted to take a holiday or I needed some time for myself, I couldn't really do that, because my entire business would stop," he says. It's an issue known as the "key person problem." Without Van Den Bussche on camera, the entire Kwebbelkop enterprise didn't work. He was too busy making videos to think about how to scale his business, and too tired to create videos. He needed a break: Around 2018, like many other YouTubers, he experienced significant burnout. The burnout sparked a change in mindset. He began thinking about what would benefit him and what would benefit the creator industry -- which often relies on milking the on-camera presence of an individual until they reach a breaking point, then finding another person seeking fame and fortune. He came up with a solution: a series of AI tools designed to create and upload videos, practically without his involvement. "I'm retired from being an influencer," he says. "I've had a lovely career. I had a lot of fun. I want to take things to the next level. And that means making this brand live on forever." Van Den Bussche's AI influencer platform, which launched this week after a suitably excitable level of hype on Twitter from its creator, is his attempt to make that happen. It comprises two versions of an AI tool. The first is trained on a creator's likeness -- their on-camera performances and what they say in videos -- and is used to create new content. It appears to be similar to Forever Voices,the controversial AI tool behind the CarynAI virtual influencer, which outsourced maintaining connections with fans on behalf of creators. The other involves simplifying the act of creation as much as possible by taking simple prompts -- such as "turn this article into a video formatted like an interview involving two people" -- and producing the end result. (The latter is similar toa tool called QuickVid, which has seen some early adoption.) Van Den Bussche won't reveal much about how the tools were built, but regardless of their origins they're coming at a critical time for generative AI and its impacts on how people work. And Van Den Bussche's way of doing things could have lasting impacts on creators on YouTube and beyond.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:The New York Police Department took social media influencer Kai Cenat into custody Friday and is considering charges such as "inciting a riot" after thousands-strong crowds gathered in Union Square for a giveaway, leaving multiple people arrested and several police officers injured. Cenat, who has over 4 million followers on YouTube, over 5 million on Instagram, and 6.5 million on Twitch, said during a Wednesday Twitch stream that he would be hosting a "huge giveaway" Friday at 4 p.m. in Union Square Park. In the stream, he said they would be giving away computers, Play Station 5s, microphones, keyboards, webcams, gaming chairs, headphones and giftcards from a truck in Union Square. "I feel like New York really deserves it," he said. Thousands of people began gathering at the park around 3 p.m., NYPD chief Jeffrey Maddrey said at a Friday news conference. "Soon the park and the surrounding streets were overrun with people, obstructing vehicular and pedestrian traffic," he said. The crowds spurred the NYPD to activate a "Level 4" response, its highest level of disaster response... "You had people walking around with shovels, axes, and other tools from the construction site," he said. "Individuals were also lighting fireworks, throwing them towards the police, they were throwing them towards each other...." Several police officers were injured in the frenzy and "quite a few" people were arrested as police worked to clear the crowd, Maddery said... Cenat could be arrested and face charges for inciting a riot, the chief said. He said NYPD Police Commissioner Edward Caban and the city's legal team were discussing possible charges. Police complained to CNN that the Twitch streamer "had not alerted the police to the gathering or obtained a permit, and it was declared an unlawful assembly." Cenat streamed live on Twitch on Friday for some portion of the event, posting video from the crowd. In one video seemingly posted from inside a truck, he described the chaotic gathering, saying, "It's everybody for themselves. It's a war out there."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader KindMind shares a report from The Register: Researchers at MIT claim to have found a novel new way to store energy using nothing but cement, a bit of water, and powdered carbon black -- a crystalline form of the element. The materials can be cleverly combined to create supercapacitors, which could in turn be used to build power-storing foundations of houses, roadways that could wirelessly charge vehicles, and serve as the foundation of wind turbines and other renewable energy systems -- all while holding a surprising amount of energy, the team claims. According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 45 cubic meters of the carbon-black-doped cement could have enough capacity to store 10 kilowatt-hours of energy -- roughly the amount an average household uses in a day. A block of cement that size would measure about 3.5 meters per side and, depending on the size of the house, the block could theoretically store all the energy an off-grid home using renewables would need." [...] Just three percent of the mixture has to be carbon black for the hardened cement to act as a supercapacitor, but the researchers found that a 10 percent carbon black mixture appears to be ideal. Beyond that ratio, the cement becomes less stable -- not something you want in a building or foundation. The team notes that non-structural use could allow higher concentrations of carbon black, and thus higher energy storage capacity. The team has only built a tiny one-volt test platform using its carbon black mix, but has plans to scale up to supercapacitors the same size as a 12-volt automobile battery -- and eventually to the 45 cubic meter block. Along with being used for energy storage, the mix could also be used to provide heat -- by applying electricity to the conductive carbon network encased in the cement, MIT noted. As Science magazine puts it, "Tesla's Powerwall, a boxy, wall-mounted, lithium-ion battery, can power your home for half a day or so. But what if your home was the battery?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok users in Europe will be able to switch off the personalized algorithm behind its For You and Live feeds as the company makes changes to comply with the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA). The Verge reports: According to TikTok, disabling this function will show users "popular videos from both the places where they live and around the world" instead of content based on their personal interests. These changes relate to DSA rules that require very large online platforms to allow their users to opt out of receiving personalized content -- which typically relies on tracking and profiling user activity -- when viewing content recommendations. To comply, TikTok's search feature will also show content that's popular in the user's region, and videos under the "Following" and "Friends" feeds will be displayed in chronological order when a non-personalized view is selected. Another change is that European users between the ages of 13 and 17 automatically won't be targeted with personalized ads based on their online activities, rather than having to opt out with a toggle.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Austria's leader is proposing to enshrine in the country's constitution a right to use cash, which remains more popular in the Alpine nation than in many other places. Chancellor Karl Nehammer said in a statement on Friday that "more and more people are concerned that cash could be restricted as a means of payment in Austria." His office said that the "uncertainty" is fueled by contradictory information and reports. "People in Austria have a right to cash," Nehammer said. [...] The chancellor's proposal, according to his office, involves a "constitutional protection of cash as a means of payment," ensuring that people can still pay with cash, and securing a "basic supply" of cash in cooperation with Austria's central bank. Austria is one of 20 countries that are part of the euro area. Nehammer said he has instructed Finance Minister Magnus Brunner to work on the proposal and plans to hold a round table with the ministries concerned, finance industry representatives and the central bank in September. "Everyone should have the opportunity to decide freely how and with what he wants to pay," he said. "That can be by card, by transfer, perhaps in future also with the digital euro, but also with cash. This freedom to choose must and will remain." Freedom Party leader Herbert Kickl accused Nehammer of stealing his party's ideas and argued that the chancellor's "suddenly discovered love of cash" was meant only "to secure his political survival." The biggest opposition party in the current parliament, the center-left Social Democrats, has called for at least one ATM in every municipality and accused Nehammer of "pure populism." "Even if we write the word 'cash' into the constitution 100 times, there won't be a single ATM more in Austria," said the head of its parliamentary group, Philip Kucher.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pirate eBook repository Z-Library has launched browser extensions that should make it easier for users to find the site if its current domains are seized in the future. While the site doesn't explicitly mention the U.S. Government crackdown, it likely plays a key role in the decision to make these extensions available. TorrentFreak reports: Since the shadow library is now well aware that its domain names could be taken away at any moment, numerous precautions are being taken to mitigate the risks. A few weeks ago, Z-Library released a dedicated desktop application that should make it easier to access the site. The software has the ability to redirect users to working domains and whenever necessary, connect over the Tor network, which also helps to evade blocking efforts. In an announcement this week, the operators of the shadow library unveiled new precautionary tools to redirect users to working domains, including any new ones, should they be needed. The new browser extensions are available for both Chrome and Firefox and promise 'seamless access' to alternative domains in the event that existing ones run into trouble. "Say goodbye to searching for available domains, as this handy extension takes care of everything for you. Simplify your online library experience and enjoy seamless access to a world of knowledge, right at your fingertips. "After launching the extension, the process of searching for an available domain will begin. Within some seconds when the domain is found, you will be redirected to the library homepage," Z-Library explains. While installing browser extensions should always happen with caution, in just a few hours thousands of Z-Library users have already installed the new software. According to the Chrome store, the Z-Library Finder currently has over 7,000 users. These extensions may indeed help to point users to new domain names, but the solution isn't bulletproof. The authorities may attempt to remove the listings from the Chrome and Firefox extension libraries, for example. Even if Z-Library decides to self-host these tools, they still rely on technical infrastructure that could be targeted in the future. That being said, the releases are still notable; it's rare to a service going full steam ahead in the face of an active criminal case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Telecommunications giant Telus says it is trimming 6,000 jobs, citing its need to free up cash flow and remain competitive. CBC.ca reports: The cuts involve 4,000 positions at its main Telus business and 2,000 at Telus International and include offers of early retirement and voluntary departure packages, the Vancouver-based company said Friday. Financial markets data firm Refinitiv says Telus had 108,500 workers at the end of last year. The cuts were made with "a very heavy heart" and prompted by the "evolving regulatory, competitive and macroeconomic environment," said Darren Entwistle, the company's president and chief executive. "Against the backdrop of rapid transformation in our industry and the ways in which our customers want to engage with us, today we are announcing a significant investment in an extensive efficiency and effectiveness initiative across Telus," he said in a news release. The restructuring will cost Telus $475 million in 2023 and lead to annual savings of more than $325 million, the company said. Its plans to reduce its workforce were announced at the same time as the company revealed its second-quarter net income fell almost 61 per cent from the same period last year to $196 million. The company's net income amounted to 14 cents per share for the quarter ending June 30 compared with 34 cents per share in the same quarter a year earlier. Yet Entwistle positioned the company's strategy of building out broadband networks, digitizing operations and streamlining costs as "winning." "Our resilience and ability to embrace change and continuously evolve the way we operate are cornerstones of our Telus culture and will continue to fuel our future success," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Arm is facing down its biggest competition ever, with the up-and-coming RISC-V architecture threatening to unseat it as the CPU at the center of almost every portable device. Now, one of Arm's biggest customers is trying out RISC-V, as Qualcomm is getting involved in a joint venture dedicated to the architecture. The joint venture doesn't have a name yet, but Qualcomm, NXP, Nordic Semiconductor, Bosch, and memory giant Infineon are all teaming up to form a new company that Qualcomm's press release says is "aimed at advancing the adoption of RISC-V globally by enabling next-generation hardware development." At first, the group will be focused on automotive uses, with an "eventual expansion" to IoT and mobile, Qualcomm's biggest market. Further reading: Qualcomm Chip Sales Down 25 Percent, Plans LayoffsRead more of this story at Slashdot.

A husband and wife cyber-crime team have pleaded guilty to trying to launder $4.5bn of Bitcoin that he had stolen in a hack in 2016. From a report: Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein were arrested last year in New York after police traced their riches back to the crypto heist. While evading police, Morgan masqueraded as a rapper and tech entrepreneur. As part of a plea deal, Lichtenstein admitted he was behind the hack. The couple both pleaded guilty to money laundering, but Morgan pleaded guilty to an additional count of conspiracy to defraud the United States. In spite of attempting to cover up her crimes, Morgan published dozens of expletive-filled music videos and rap songs filmed in locations around New York, under the name Razzlekhan. In her lyrics she called herself a "bad-ass money maker" and "the crocodile of Wall Street." In articles published in Forbes, Morgan also claimed to be a successful tech businesswoman, calling herself an "economist, serial entrepreneur, software investor and rapper." But while developing her rapping and tech persona, she and her computer programmer husband were attempting to cash out their fortune stolen from the crypto firm Bitfinex. The couple now face prison sentences with Lichtenstein in line for a possible maximum 20 years in prison and Morgan a possible 10. At the time of their arrest in February 2022, the stash of 119,000 Bitcoins was worth about $4.5bn -- making it the US Department of Justice's largest single financial seizure in its history. When the hack was carried out, the Bitcoins were worth about $71m.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SoftBank sued former IRL CEO Abraham Shafi and five siblings and cousins for allegedly misleading the investor about the messaging app's growth, prompting the Japanese conglomerate to buy $150 million worth of shares in the company in 2021 at the height of a pandemic-fueled consumer internet boom. The Information: SoftBank said Shafi and his family members defrauded investors by lying about the company's millions of users, which were actually bots. The lawsuit said the defendants deleted data and communications about the fraud after U.S. securities regulators began investigating the company following a report in The Information questioning the user figures. Last month, The Information reported the company was being shut down following an external investigation initiated by its board of directors that found 95% of its users were fake. The conduct described in the lawsuit, including allegedly deleting evidence during a federal investigation, could put Shafi in further legal trouble.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canadians will soon be able to access and apply for more federal government services online -- from passports to payments, says Canada's first minister of citizens' services. From a report: Terry Beech says he's also open to innovation and using new technologies like artificial intelligence to improve the way the government delivers services to Canadians. "I think, fundamentally, it's my job to wake up every day thinking about how we're improving the customer service experience for Canadians," Beech said in an interview with CBC News. Beech's appointment to the newly created position comes as the government has been hammered in headlines and by the opposition in recent months over problems delivering basic services to Canadians. News reports have featured images of long lineups and people camping out to apply for passports. In the House of Commons, Conservative MPs have repeatedly talked about a "broken" government, saying lineups have been getting longer, backlogs bigger and services slower.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Filipe Esposito, writing for Apple-focused news site 9to5Mac: As reported by Windows Latest, the Cortana app has received an update via the Microsoft Store after two years without getting a single new feature. But instead of new features, the update pretty much kills Cortana and now shows a message saying that "Cortana in Windows as a standalone app is deprecated." [...] Earlier this week, during a call with investors, Apple CEO Tim Cook reinforced that Apple has been conducting research with a "wide range of AI technologies," including "generative AI" for years. Multiple rumors have pointed to Apple internally developing a technology to compete with ChatGPT. However, while Microsoft and Google have already made their new tools available to the public, Apple is still a long way off. In the meantime, Siri is still Siri. Even Apple employees complain about "organizational dysfunction and a lack of ambition" when it comes to the development of Apple's virtual assistant. Some employees point out that Siri is still based on a very legacy technology and that improving it would require a lot of efforts. Seeing what other companies are achieving with generative AI, I do think it's time for Apple to give up on Siri and focus its efforts on new technologies. What about you? What are your thoughts on Apple, Siri, and AI?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dumi, a Zimbabwean, fell for E-Creator's review-writing job, investing $112. When the company's director disappeared with $1M, his account was frozen, leaving him scammed. Rest of World reports: Thousands of Zimbabweans have been lured into a scam in hopes of making a quick buck, at a time when unemployment in the country is high: Estimates vary from 7.9% to 20%, or even 90%, according to the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. Alongside the job crisis, the country has been reeling under an inflation of more than 100%, with many struggling to make ends meet. Dumi, who previously worked as a clerk, told Rest of World he found it hard to get another job due to scarce opportunities. He said he joined the E-Creator scheme hoping he'd earn an income while waiting to find the job of his dreams. "Some of us living in marginalized townships such as Mbare, with no decent employment, jumped at an opportunity, which seemed to be so technologically significant and rewarding. Losing money in the process was unexpected," Dumi said, adding that he would not have joined the scheme if he had a job of his choice. E-Creator agents told Rest of World they had taken up the role because they were unemployed or couldn't find enough work. They said they were lured by the promise of earning 10% returns for posting 10 fake reviews if they invested between $15 and $100. There were higher rewards promised for bigger investments: Depositing $100-$500 and recruiting five agents meant an additional 4.5% return; depositing $500-$2,000 and recruiting over 50 others would take earnings to the highest level of a 5% commision and a 10% base payout. While they could withdraw money from their E-Creator wallets, the lure of getting higher returns stopped them from doing so. Watson Manjobo, a former manager and affiliate marketer for E-Creator, told Rest of World the company owed him his salary for June. His job was to recruit more users and help people reset their account passwords. When news of Jiaotong's escape went viral, users flooded his phone with messages demanding answers, he said, adding that his direct superiors have since been unreachable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nikola Chief Executive Michael Lohscheller, an auto industry veteran, has stepped down due to a family health matter, and Nikola Chairman Steve Girsky has taken over as CEO of the electric-vehicle maker. From a report Girsky is Nikola's fourth CEO in almost as many years after the 2020 departure of Nikola founder Trevor Milton, who was later convicted of defrauding investors. Lohscheller, who took over as CEO of Nikola earlier this year, previously served as chief financial officer and then CEO of German automaker Opel, now owned by Stellantis. Before that, he was CFO of Volkswagen's U.S. business. Nikola credited Lohscheller with reducing the company's cash burn and improving production capabilities. Girsky previously served as CEO of the special-purpose acquisition company that merged with Nikola and took the company public in 2020. He previously served as vice chairman of General Motors. From 2005 to 2006, he was special adviser to the CEO and CFO of GM.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A cyberattack has disrupted hospital computer systems in several states, forcing some emergency rooms to close and ambulances to be diverted, and many primary care services remained closed on Friday as security experts worked to determine the extent of the problem and resolve it. From a report: The "data security incident" began Thursday at facilities operated by Prospect Medical Holdings, which is based in California and has hospitals and clinics there and in Texas, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. "Upon learning of this, we took our systems offline to protect them and launched an investigation with the help of third-party cybersecurity specialists," the company said in a statement Friday. "While our investigation continues, we are focused on addressing the pressing needs of our patients as we work diligently to return to normal operations as quickly as possible." In Connecticut, the emergency departments at Manchester Memorial and Rockville General hospital were closed for much of Thursday and patients were diverted to other nearby medical centers. [...] The FBI in Connecticut issued a statement saying it is working with "law enforcement partners and the victim entities" but could not comment further on an ongoing investigation. Elective surgeries, outpatient appointments, blood drives and other services were suspended, and while the emergency departments reopened late Thursday, many primary care services were closed on Friday, according to the Eastern Connecticut Health Network, which runs the facilities. Patients were being contacted individually, according to the network's website. Similar disruptions also were reported at other facilities system-wide.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is hoping to lure workers back to the office with a new on-site hotel special, but some workers aren't convinced it's a good deal. From a report: The company said full-time employees can book a room at an on-campus hotel in Mountain View for $99 a night in what it's deeming a "Summer Special," according to materials viewed by CNBC. The description states that the special will run through Sept. 30 in hopes it'll "make it easier for Googlers to transition to the hybrid workplace." Since the promotion is for unapproved business travel, the company will not reimburse their stays, but will require employees to use their personal credit cards, the special's description states. "Just imagine no commute to the office in the morning and instead, you could have an extra hour of sleep and less friction," the description reads. "Next, you could walk out of your room and quickly grab a delicious breakfast or get a workout in before work starts." The ad goes on to say that after the work day ends, "you could enjoy a quiet evening on top of the rooftop deck or take in one of the fun local activities." The Google-owned hotel is situated on a newer campus in Mountain View, California, that it opened last year. The 42-acre campus is adjacent to NASA's Ames Research Center and has capacity to house 4,000 employees working on its ads products, the company said upon its opening.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India is delaying the implementation of its import limitations on laptops, tablets, and servers, a day after the unexpected regulation left electronic industry giants in a state of disruption and uncertainty. From a report: New Delhi will provide a "transition period" before implementing the amended import policy, India's Deputy IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said Friday. The government will offer at least one month to companies to obtain licenses, a government official told local reporters. India's Ministry of Commerce announced Thursday that the new restrictions on import of consumer electronic devices were going into effect immediately. The notification said the government will permit import against a valid license for restricted products. The restriction will also not apply to passengers carrying the mentioned devices in their baggage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Smartphone sales are down across the board, and that means component vendors like Qualcomm are also feeling the heat. From a report: The company's Q3 2023 earnings (Qualcomm's fiscal year is October-September) have handset chip sales down 25 percent year over year, with net income down 52 percent year over year. The company also issued lower-than-expected guidance for the next quarter, all causing the stock to drop around 8 percent in the aftermath of the call. Like most other tech companies, Qualcomm's response to the less-than-stellar earnings is to cut costs via layoffs. Earlier this year the company cut 415 jobs at its San Diego headquarters, but the company's securities filing revealed more cuts are coming.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple now has more than 1 billion paid subscriptions across all of its services, including Apple Music, iCloud, Apple News, Apple TV+ and more. From a report: Apple has methodically executed a long-term strategy of offsetting slowing hardware sales growth with revenue from software services -- and that now accounts for more than a quarter of the company's sales. Apple's advertising business is expected to reach $6 billion by 2025, which would make it larger than both Snapchat and Twitter's ad business. [...] The quarter also represented Apple's biggest ever for software sales.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Threads, Meta's Twitter rival, is struggling to retain users roughly a month after its highly publicized launch, according to fresh industry estimates showing that app engagement has fallen to new lows. From a report: The data from market research firms Similarweb and Sensor Tower highlight the challenges facing Meta as it seeks to exploit the opening created by the chaos surrounding Twitter's management. Threads' daily active user count is down 82% from launch as of July 31, according to Sensor Tower, with just eight million users accessing the app each day. That is the lowest it has been since the day after the app's release when daily active users peaked at roughly 44 million, Sensor Tower said. People are also opening the app less frequently and spending less time there, Sensor Tower added. On its launch day, Threads users opened the app an average of 14 times and spent an average of 19 minutes scrolling through it, the company reported. By the end of the month, however, those figures had fallen sharply.Read more of this story at Slashdot.