Slashdot

Jonathan Henry, a vice president at the University of Maine at Augusta, is hoping that an email will arrive this month. He is also sort of dreading it. The message, if it comes, will tell him that U.S. News & World Report has again ranked his university's online programs among the nation's best. History suggests the email will also prod the university toward paying U.S. News, through a licensing agent, thousands of dollars for the right to advertise its rankings. The New York Times: For more than a year, U.S. News has been embroiled in another caustic dispute about the worthiness of college rankings -- this time with dozens of law and medical schools vowing not to supply data to the publisher, saying that rankings sometimes unduly influence the priorities of universities. But school records and interviews show that colleges nevertheless feed the rankings industry, collectively pouring millions of dollars into it. Many lower-profile colleges are straining to curb enrollment declines and counter shrinking budgets. And any endorsement that might attract students, administrators say, is enticing. Maine at Augusta spent $15,225 last year for the right to market U.S. News "badges" -- handsome seals with U.S. News's logo -- commemorating three honors: the 61st-ranked online bachelor's program for veterans, the 79th-ranked online bachelor's in business and the 104th-ranked online bachelor's. Mr. Henry, who oversees the school's enrollment management and marketing, said there was just too much of a risk of being outshined and out-marketed by competing schools that pay to flash their shiny badges. "If we could ignore them, wouldn't that be grand?" Mr. Henry said of U.S. News. "But you can't ignore the leviathan that they are." Nor can colleges ignore how families evaluate schools. "The Amazonification of how we judge a product's quality," he said, has infiltrated higher education, as consumers and prospective students alike seek order from chaos. The money flows from schools large and small. The University of Nebraska at Kearney, which has about 6,000 students, bought a U.S. News "digital marketing license" for $8,500 in September. The Citadel, South Carolina's military college, moved in August to spend $50,000 for the right to use its rankings online, in print and on television, among other places. In 2022, the University of Alabama shelled out $32,525 to promote its rankings in programs like engineering and nursing. Critics believe that the payments, from schools of any size and wealth, enable and incentivize a ranking system they see as harmful.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Among the harrowing details of the blown-off fuselage panel that triggered a sudden decompression event on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, one revelation seemed to defy the laws of physics: one of the mobile phones that had been sucked out of the Boeing 737 Max 9 jet's cabin remained in functioning condition after a 16,000-foot tumble. A new-generation Apple iPhone landed intact, unlocked and with hours of battery life remaining on a Portland, Oregon roadside, according to a post on X by a user calling himself Seanathan Bates, who said he discovered the device. The screen showed an email from Alaska Airlines about a baggage claim for the flight, based on Bates' photos. The phone was in airplane mode, Bates said in a TikTok video. "It was still pretty clean, no scratches on it, sitting under a bush and it didn't have a screenlock on it," he said. The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed at a briefing on Sunday that one phone was found on the side of a road and another in a yard. The people have handed in both of the devices, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told reporters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Internal Revenue Service is rolling out a free option for filing federal tax returns this year to some residents of a dozen states. From a report: Last month, the agency published details of its plan to test an in-house filing system, in which taxpayers submit their federal tax returns directly to the agency online at no cost. Residents of 12 states are eligible to participate if they meet certain criteria. "This is a critical step forward for this innovative effort that will test the feasibility of providing taxpayers a new option to file their returns for free directly with the I.R.S.," Danny Werfel, the agency's commissioner, said in a recent statement. While the direct filing system is starting on a limited basis, it has already faced some resistance, particularly from commercial tax-preparation companies. A spokeswoman for Intuit, Tania Mercado, criticized the direct file project as a "half-baked solution" and a waste of taxpayer money. "The direct file scheme is a solution in search of a problem," she said. Intuit makes the TurboTax tax preparation software. Democrats in Congress generally support the idea of free, direct filing, while Republicans contend that the idea, part of President Biden's plan to overhaul the I.R.S., would give the agency even more power over ordinary taxpayers. US lawmakers said earlier this month that federal tax credits that Intuit received could have been better spent to build a free government alternative to Intuit's popular online tax preparation software TurboTax. The IRS estimates it would cost $64 million to $249 million annually for the agency to run a free-filing program. In the fiscal year ending in July 2023, Mountain View, California-based Intuit received $106 million in federal research and experimentation credits, which amounted to about 4% of its total R&D expenses, according to a regulatory filing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As General Motors prepares to roll out electric versions of its Buicks, "hundreds of Buick dealerships nationwide" are "turning their backs on the storied brand," reports the Boston Globe. "The move to electric Buicks is one reason so many dealers are giving up their Buick franchises, according to auto industry watchers."They say that smaller, low-volume Buick dealers either can't or won't make the big investments needed to begin selling EVs, especially as sales growth in the sector has cooled and unsold electrics are piling up on dealer lots. "I think there are dealers who are just not confident in the electric vehicle transition and they don't want to have to commit to the investment," said Karl Brauer, executive analyst at online car retailer iSeeCars.com... Buick has announced its intention to migrate to an all-electric line of cars by the end of the decade. The brand's first EV is set to go on sale this year. But getting ready to sell EVs is a costly proposition. Dealers must purchase new equipment to service the cars and must pay for worker retraining. GM estimates that the upfront cost to dealers will range between $200,000 and $400,000. "If you're in a market where you're not selling a lot of Buicks, investing a lot to sell electric Buicks may not make a good business case," said Mark Schirmer, spokesperson for Cox Automotive, an Atlanta-based automotive marketing company. While 854,000 Buicks were sold in 1980, just 103,000 were sold in 2022 - down from 207,000 in 2019, according to the article. So in 2022 GM bought out 44 percent of its dealerships (which they say accounted for just 20% of all U.S. Buick sales), with the majority of them still selling other GM brands like Chevrolet and GMC. But the article also includes some perspective from Robert O'Koniewski, executive vice president of the Massachusetts State Automobile Dealers Association. "The only reason GM has kept the Buick alive is that it's popular in China."That's Buick's biggest market by far, thanks to a 50-50 joint venture it launched in 1997 with government-owned SAIC Motor, China's biggest carmaker. The partnership sold 653,000 Chinese Buicks in 2022. But that's a big decline from the 926,000 sold in 2020. Brauer said that Chinese consumers are pulling away from the US brand in favor of Chinese companies like BYD, which passed Tesla in the fourth quarter of 2023 to become the world's largest maker of electric vehicles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The chief content officer for New York's public radio station WNYC predicts an "AI-fueled shift to niche community and authored excellence." And ironically, it will be fueled by "Greedy publishers and malicious propagandists... flooding the web with fake or just mediocre AI-generated 'content'" which will "spotlight and boost the value of authored creativity."And it may help give birth to a new generation of independent media. Robots will make the internet more human. First, it will speed up our migration off of big social platforms to niche communities where we can be better versions of ourselves. We're already exhausted by feeds that amplify our anxiety and algorithms that incentivize cruelty. AI will take the arms race of digital publishing shaped by algorithmic curation to its natural conclusion: big feed-based social platforms will become unending streams of noise. When we've left those sites for good, we'll miss the (mostly inaccurate) sense that we were seeing or participating in a grand, democratic town hall. But as we find places to convene where good faith participation is expected, abuse and harassment aren't, and quality is valued over quantity, we'll be happy to have traded a perception of scale influence for the experience of real connection. Second, this flood of authorless "content" will help truly authored creativity shine in contrast... "Could a robot have done this?" will be a question we ask to push ourselves to be funnier, weirder, more vulnerable, and more creative. And for the funniest, the weirdest, the most vulnerable, and most creative: the gap between what they do and everything else will be huge. Finally, these AI-accelerated shifts will combine with the current moment in media economics to fuel a new era of independent media. For a few years he's seen the rise of independent community-funded journalists, and "the list of thriving small enterprises is getting longer." He sees more growth in community-funding platforms (with subscription/membership features like on Substack and Patreon) which "continue to tilt the risk/reward math for audience-facing talent.... "And the amount of audience-facing, world-class talent that left institutional media in 2023 (by choice or otherwise) is unlike anything I've seen in more than 15 years in journalism... [I]f we're lucky, we'll see the creation of a new generation of independent media businesses whose work is as funny, weird, vulnerable and creative as its creators want it to be. And those businesses will be built on truly stable ground: a direct financial relationship with people who care. "Thank the robots."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"This December, I made a radical change," writes a New York Times tech reporter - ditching their $1,300 iPhone 15 for a $108 flip phone. "It makes phone calls and texts and that was about it. It didn't even have Snake on it..."The decision to "upgrade" to the Journey was apparently so preposterous that my carrier wouldn't allow me to do it over the phone.... Texting anything longer than two sentences involved an excruciating amount of button pushing, so I started to call people instead. This was a problem because most people don't want their phone to function as a phone... [Most voicemails] were never acknowledged. It was nearly as reliable a method of communication as putting a message in a bottle and throwing it out to sea... My black clamshell of a phone had the effect of a clerical collar, inducing people to confess their screen time sins to me. They hated that they looked at their phone so much around their children, that they watched TikTok at night instead of sleeping, that they looked at it while they were driving, that they started and ended their days with it. In a 2021 Pew Research survey, 31 percent of adults reported being "almost constantly online" - a feat possible only because of the existence of the smartphone. This was the most striking aspect of switching to the flip. It meant the digital universe and its infinite pleasures, efficiencies and annoyances were confined to my computer. That was the source of people's skepticism: They thought I wouldn't be able to function without Uber, not to mention the world's knowledge, at my beck and call. (I grew up in the '90s. It wasn't that bad... "Do you feel less well-informed?" one colleague asked. Not really. Information made its way to me, just slightly less instantly. My computer still offered news sites, newsletters and social media rubbernecking. There were disadvantages - and not just living without Google Maps. ("I've got an electric vehicle, and upon pulling into a public charger, low on miles, realized that I could not log into the charger without a smartphone app... I received a robot vacuum for Christmas ... which could only be set up with an iPhone app.") Two-factor authentication was impossible. But "Despite these challenges, I survived, even thrived during the month. It was a relief to unplug my brain from the internet on a regular basis and for hours at a time. I read four books... I felt that I had more time, and more control over what to do with it... my sleep improved dramatically." "I do plan to return to my iPhone in 2024, but in grayscale and with more mindfulness about how I use it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Jakarta, Indonesia, "the land is sinking nearly a foot a year because of collapsing aquifers," reports Wired. "Accordingly, within the next three decades, 95 percent of North Jakarta could be underwater." "Subsidence" is caused by over-extracting groundwater, or the settling of sediments - and it's not just happening in Indonesia. "In California's agriculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley, elevations have plummeted not by inches, but by dozens of feet."Last year, scientists reported that the US Atlantic Coast is dropping by several millimeters annually, with some areas, like Delaware, notching figures several times that rate. So just as the seas are rising, the land along the eastern seaboard is sinking, greatly compounding the hazard for coastal communities. In a follow-up study just published in the journal PNAS Nexus, the researchers tally up the mounting costs of subsidence - due to settling, groundwater extraction, and other factors - for those communities and their infrastructure... [O]ver 3,700 square kilometers [1,428 square miles] along the Atlantic Coast are sinking more than 5 millimeters annually. That's an even faster change than sea-level rise, currently at 4 millimeters a year... A few millimeters of annual subsidence may not sound like much, but these forces are relentless: Unless coastal areas stop extracting groundwater, the land will keep sinking deeper and deeper... The researchers selected 10 levees on the Atlantic Coast and found that all were impacted by subsidence of at least 1 millimeter a year. That puts at risk something like 46,000 people, 27,000 buildings, and $12 billion worth of property. But they note that the actual population and property at risk of exposure behind the 116 East Coast levees vulnerable to subsidence could be two to three times greater. "Levees are heavy, and when they're set on land that's already subsiding, it can accelerate that subsidence," says independent scientist Natalie Snider, who studies coastal resilience but wasn't involved in the new research. "It definitely can impact the integrity of the protection system and lead to failures that can be catastrophic...." The study finds that subsidence is highly variable along the Atlantic Coast, both regionally and locally, as different stretches have different geology and topography, and different rates of groundwater extraction. It's looking particularly problematic for several communities, like Virginia Beach, where 451,000 people and 177,000 properties are at risk. In Baltimore, Maryland, it's 826,000 people and 335,000 properties, while in NYC - in Queens, Bronx, and Nassau - that leaps to 5 million people and 1.8 million properties. Highways, airports, and even railway tracks could also be affected....Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from The Hacker News:Three new malicious packages have been discovered in the Python Package Index (PyPI) open-source repository with capabilities to deploy a cryptocurrency miner on affected Linux devices. The three harmful packages, named modularseven, driftme, and catme, attracted a total of 431 downloads over the past month before they were taken down... The malicious code resides in the __init__.py file, which decodes and retrieves the first stage from a remote server, a shell script ("unmi.sh") that fetches a configuration file for the mining activity as well as the CoinMiner file hosted on GitLab. The ELF binary file is then executed in the background using the nohup command, thus ensuring that the process continues to run even after exiting the session. "Echoing the approach of the earlier 'culturestreak' package, these packages conceal their payload, effectively reducing the detectability of their malicious code by hosting it on a remote URL," said Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Gabby Xiong. "The payload is then incrementally released in various stages to execute its malicious activities."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The famed and mysterious disappearance of D.B. Cooper has puzzled investigators for over half a century," writes a Seattle TV station.Now new evidence is coming to light in the supposed "skyjacking," after a microscopic piece of metal found on D. B. Cooper's tie could help reveal his true identity. "Considering the totality of all that has been uncovered in the last year with respect to DB Cooper's tie, I can say with a very high degree of certainty that DB Cooper worked for Crucible Steel," said independent investigator Eric Ulis. "I would not be surprised at all if 2024 was the year we figure out who this guy was," lis told another local Seattle news station:This particle is part stainless steel, part titanium... 18 months ago, Ulis used U.S. patents to trace three of these fragments from the same very tie to a specific plant in Pennsylvania, Crucible Steel. "Headquartered in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, a significant subcontractor all throughout the 1960s," said Ulis. "It supplied the lion's share of titanium and stainless steel for Boeing's aircraft...." Ulis claims evidence points to Cooper having in-depth knowledge of the 727 he hijacked, and of the Seattle area. Workers at Crucible Steel were known to travel and visit their contractor, Boeing. "This is also the time, 1971, when Boeing had this significant downturn, the big depression, with 'The last person leaving Seattle, please turn out the lights' [billboard sign]," said Ulis. "It's reasonable to deduce that D. B. Cooper may well have been part of that downturn." Ulis admits his findings are not yet concrete. He's not crossing any suspects off the list. However, he believes from what he's seen, all roads lead to titanium research engineer Vince Peterson from Pittsburgh. It all reminds me of that episode of Prison Break where they suspect one of the prisoner's is secretly D.B. Cooper...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"As Microsoft stock rises and Apple's falls over analysts expectation of slowing iPhone demand, the two firms are once more within $100 billion of each other - the smallest gap in over two years..." writes the blog Apple Insider: In August 2020, Apple became the first publicly-traded US company to reach a $2 trillion market cap, and Microsoft became the second one in June 2021. Later in October 2021, Microsoft took over the top spot, and for a time was move valuable than Apple by $100 billion. While the values of the two firms have continually changed, Microsoft is now worth just $100 billion less than Apple, according to MarketWatch. Microsoft is valued at $2.73 trillion, while Apple - fallen from its recent $3 trillion high - is currently at $2.83 trillion. MarketWatch notes that Microsoft's stock rose 57% in 2023, compared to Apple's which rose 48%. Microsoft shares have also reportedly seen what are described as slimmer losses at the start of 2024. Apple, on the other hand, has seen its shares take a considerable drop in recent days. The first hit was taken following a claim by Barclays that iPhone demand is weakening and that the iPhone 16 range will not offer any compelling new features to tempt upgraders. The analyst view that Apple is dependent on iPhone sales is part of why Microsoft is doing better. Analysts see Microsoft has being less attached to any hardware, and more attached to subscription software such as Office 365, and so therefore less attached to any falling demand for phones or computers. And, Microsoft has launched an AI tool in Copilot, while Apple has not unveiled any similar ChatGPT-style app or service.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're starting the new year with a new Linux distro, ZDNet just ran an enthusiastic profile of Rhino Linux, calling it "beautiful" with "one of the more useful command-line package managers on the market."Rhino uses a modern take on the highly efficient and customizable Xfce desktop (dubbed "Unicorn") to help make the interface immediately familiar to anyone who logs in. You'll find a dock on the left edge of the screen that contains launchers for common applications, access to the Application Grid (where you can find all of your installed software), and a handy Search Bar (Ulauncher) that allows you to quickly search for and launch any installed app (or even the app settings) you need... Thanks to myriad configuration options, Xfce can be a bit daunting. At the same time, the array of settings makes Xfce highly customizable, which is exactly what the Rhino developers did when they designed this desktop. For those who want a desktop that makes short work of accessing files, the Rhino developers have added a really nifty tool to the top bar. You'll find a listing of some folders you have in your Home directory (Files, Documents, Music, Pictures, Video). If you click on one of those entries, you'll see a list of the most recently accessed files within the directory. Click on the file you want to open with the default, associated application... Rhino opts for the Pacstall package manager over the traditional apt-get. That's not to say apt-get isn't on the system - it is. But with Rhino Linux, there's a much easier path to getting the software you want installed... [W]hen you first run the installed OS, you are greeted with a window that allows you to select what package managers you want to use. You can select from Snap, Flatpak, and AppImages (or all three). Next, the developers added a handy tool (rhino-pkg) that makes installing from the command line very simple. When the distro launched in August, 9to5Linux described it as "a unique distribution for Ubuntu fans who wanted a rolling-release system where they install once and receive updates forever."The theming looks gorgeous and it's provided by the Elementary Xfce Darker icon theme, Xubuntu's Greybird GTK theme, and Ubuntu's Yaru Dark WM theme. It also comes with some cool features, such as a dedicated and full-screen desktop switcher provided by Xfdashboard...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader xetdog shared this report from IEEE Spectrum:High in the Andes mountains where the borders of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile intersect, white expanses of salt stretch for thousands of kilometers. Under these flats lie reservoirs of brine that contain upwards of 58% of the world's lithium. For decades, producers have extracted that lithium by pumping the water up to the surface and letting it evaporate until the lithium salts become concentrated enough to filter out. The process takes 12 to 18 months, leaving behind piles of waste containing other metals. It also evaporates nearly 2 million liters of local water resources, harming indigenous communities. To keep up, many companies are now developing processes to chemically or physically filter out lithium from brines and inject the brine back underground. These direct lithium extraction (DLE) technologies take hours instead of months and could double the production of lithium from existing brine operations. Much as shale extraction did for oil, DLE is a "potential game-changing technology for lithium supply," because it could unlock new sources of lithium, according to a recent report by Goldman Sachs. But in contrast to shale's fracking risks, DLE brings environmental benefits, reducing land and water use, and waste... In China, a handful of commercial projects already use Chinese DLE innovator Sunresin's technology. More than 12 startups are pursuing new DLE processes, according to the article, "with the intent of commercial production as early as 2025." And America's Department of Energy is also investing millions of dollars in new DLE tech "to extract lithium from geothermal brines in the U.S., such as the Salton Sea in California, which the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates could provide over 24,000 metric tons of lithium a year."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 years ago, Slashdot interviewed Chris Montgomery about his team's new Ogg Vorbis audio format. But Slashdot reader joshuark admits when he first heard the name, it reminded him of the mushroom underworld in The Secret World of Og.I've downloaded videos from the Internet Archive, and one format is the OGG or Ogg Vorbis player format. I just was wondering with other formats, is Ogg still used anymore after approximately 20-years? I'm not commenting on good/bad/whatever about the format, just is it still in use, relevant anymore? The nonprofit Xiph.Org Foundation (which develops Orbis Vogg) started work in 2007 on the high-quality/low-delay format Opus, which their FAQ argues "theoretically" makes other lossy codecs obsolete. "From technical point of view (loss, delay, bitrates...) it can replace both Vorbis and Speex, and the common proprietary codecs too." But elsewhere Xiph.org points out that "The bitstream format for Vorbis I was frozen Monday, May 8th 2000. All bitstreams encoded since will remain compatible with all future releases of Vorbis." So how is that playing out in 2024? Share your own thoughts in the comments. Does anyone still use Ogg Vorbis format?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elvis Presley "will be stepping into his blue suede shoes once again..." according to an article in TheStreet, "thanks to the power of artificial intelligence."The legendary singer from Tupelo, Mississippi, is set to thrill audiences in "Elvis Evolution," an "immersive concert experience" that uses AI and holographic projection. The show will debut in London in November. But if you can't make it to England, that's all right, mama, that's all right for you, because additional shows are slated for Berlin, Tokyo and Las Vegas, where Presley had a seven-year residency from 1969 to 1976. "Man, I really like Vegas," he once reportedly said. The British immersive entertainment company Layered Reality partnered with Authentic Brands Group, which owns the rights to Elvis' image, to create the event. "The show peaks with a concert experience that will recreate the seismic impact of seeing Elvis live for a whole new generation of fans, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy," Layered Reality said on its website. "A life-sized digital Elvis will share his most iconic songs and moves for the very first time on a UK stage." The company previously made immersive experiences based on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and "The War of The Worlds."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The BBC checks in on "the pioneers of space exploration - the 24 Nasa astronauts who travelled to the Moon in the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s."Ken Mattingly and Frank Borman died within a few days of each other late last year. Now only eight people who have voyaged beyond the Earth's orbit remain. Who are they, and what are their stories...? There are only four people still alive who have walked on the Moon - Charlie Duke is one of them. He did it aged 36, making him the youngest person to set foot on the lunar surface... Charlie Duke now lives outside San Antonio, Texas, with Dorothy, to whom he has been married for 60 years.... Jim Lovell is one of only three men to have travelled to the Moon twice, and following Frank Borman's death in November 2023, he became the oldest living astronaut.... After leaving Nasa in 1975, [Harrison Schmitt] was elected to the U.S. Senate from his home state of New Mexico, but only served one term. Since then he has worked as a consultant in various industries as well as continuing in academia. And when confronted by a man claiming Apollo 11 was an elaborate lie, 72-year-old Buzz Aldrin "punched him on the jaw."Despite struggles in later life, he never lost his thirst for adventure and joined expeditions to both the North and South Poles, the latter at the age of 86. While embracing his celebrity, he has remained an advocate for the space programme, especially the need to explore Mars. "I don't think we should just go there and come back - we did that with Apollo," he says. Last 93-year-old Buzz Aldrin got married - and thanked his fans for remembering his birthday. "It means a lot and I hope to continue serving a greater cause for many more revolutions around the sun."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"For the last few years, Mozilla has started to look beyond Firefox," writes TechCrunch, citing startup investments like Mastodon's client Mammoth and the Fakespot browser extension that helps identify fake reviews. But Mozilla has also launched Mozilla.ai (added a bunch of new AI-focused members to its board). In an interview with TechCrunch, Mozilla's president and executive director Mark Surman clarifies their plans, saying that Mozilla.ai "had a broad mandate around finding open source, trustworthy AI opportunities and build a business around them.""Quickly, Moez [Draief], who runs it, made it about how do we leverage the growing snowball of open source large language models and find a way to both accelerate that snowball but also make sure it rolls in a direction that matches our goals and matches our wallet belt...." Right now, Surman argued, it remains hard to for most developers - and even more so for most consumers - to run their own models, even as more open source models seemingly launch every day. "What Mozilla.ai is focused on really is almost building a wrapper that you can put around any open source large language model to fine-tune it, to build data pipelines for it, to make it highly performant." While much work is in stealth mode, TechCrunch predicts "we'll hear quite a bit more in the coming months."Meanwhile, the open source and AI communities are still figuring out what exactly open source AI is going to look like. Surman believes that no matter the details of that, though, the overall principles of transparency and freedom to study the code, modify it and redistribute it will remain key... "We probably lean towards that everything should be open source - at least in a spiritual sense. The licenses aren't perfect and we are going to do a bunch of work in the first half of next year with some of the other open source projects around clarifying some of those definitions and giving people some mental models...." With a small group of very well-funded players currently dominating the AI market, he believes that the various open source groups will need to band together to collectively create alternatives. He likened it to the early era of open source - and especially the Linux movement - which aimed to create an alternative to Microsoft... Surman seems to be optimistic about Mozilla's positioning in this new era of AI, though, and its ability to both use it to further its mission and create a sustainable business model around it. "All this that we are going to do is in the kind of service of our mission. And some of that, I think, will just have to be purely a public good," he said. "And you can pay for public goods in different kinds of way, from our own resources, from philanthropy, from people pooling resources. [...] It's a kind of a business model but it's not commercial, per se. And then, the stuff we're building around communal AI hopefully has a real enterprise value if we can help people take advantage of open source large language models, effectively and quickly, in a way that is valuable to them and is cheaper than using open AI. That's our hope." And what about Firefox? "I think you'll see the browser evolve," says Mozilla's president. "In our case, that's to be more protective of you and more helpful to you. "I think it's more that you use the predictive and synthesizing capabilities of those tools to make it easier and safer to move through the internet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Klaus Zimmermann (a self-described "friendly hacker") recently posted a "State of the Distro" post, choosing his favorite distributions for things like portable installation from a USB drive (Alpine Linux) and for a desktop OS (Debian Linux or Devuan). But when it comes to a distro for the Raspberry Pi, (at least until the 4), Zimmerman argues that FreeBSD's performance is "unlike any other Linux distribution I've ever seen, even with cpupower activated and overclocking."Nope, no match - FreeBSD's performance on the Pi is still way better, even without overclocking. You can browse a modern web, have things scroll smoothly, watch videos and even play some 3D games like Quake with it! And if you overclock it a little (2GHz) you can even make it run that gargantua MS Teams. But what about all that lackluster driver support? WiFi drivers still on the 802.11g standard and all? Surely you can't be serious about it when Linux offers all that support out of the box, right? Wrong, actually. For starters, the drivers provided for the Pi's hardware are often half-assed proprietary blobs... I no longer think FreeBSD is really at fault if the driver support for the hardware is not helpful to begin with. Even drivers you find for Linux are shaky at best. So yes, I will keep using FreeBSD on the Pi. As a desktop. With USB WiFi and audio adapters for those services, because the existing hardware is sort of moot even otherwise. And with those USB adapters - and FreeBSD - the Pi works really well, truly desktop-like. I'd be curious to hear from Slashdot's readers about their own experiments with Linux (and FreeBSD) on a Raspberry Pi. Zimmerman's final winner, for the "Server" category, was Debian - though of his two servers, one is just an XMPP server set up on a Raspberry Pi. "I found that using Debian on the Pi is a real joy. Easy and simple to set up, familiar environment and all. So I'm keeping it. "This concept is about to be overshadowed, however, by my growing like of FreeBSD lately..." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Inc. reports that funding for Web3 startups in 2023 "declined 73% from 2022, according to new data from Crunchbase." In total, Web3 startups netted $7.8 billion in 2023, compared with the $21.5 billion raised in 2022. It's part of a broader and sobering comedown from the stratospheric highs of tech's pandemic boom time, in which investment flowed to startups at historic rates, valuations soared and unicorns emerged seemingly every week. Last year firmly belonged to AI, with $17.8 billion invested in the sector, according to Dealroom. Even as some remain convinced of Web3's future, uncertainty lingers over certain stumbling blocks, including how the technology can be farmed out to a massive user base on par with today's biggest tech firms. "I haven't seen [a company] that screams to me, 'this is what's going to get people on board,'" says Jillian Grennan, a business and law professor at UC Berkeley who studies Web3. Web3 startups are failing to net the investment indicative of revolutionary tech as AI steals the show and the dough. The reasons vary: Many have pointed out that defining Web3 is tricky, and Grennan mentions that appetites for navigating digital worlds may have been dented by pandemic-born Zoom fatigue. Beyond that, there's the question of how to regulate crypto - a marquee aspect of the Web3 universe--which may have given investors some pause. "In this next period, we're going to get some important regulatory clarity that we just haven't had," Richard Dulude, co-founder and partner at Underscore VC tells Inc. "A lot of people sit on the sidelines until they have that...." Interest rate hikes and the bloated startup valuations of 2021 have meant VCs can't throw their weight behind exciting ideas alone, Dulude says. The sector is undergoing "this transition from chasing growth, and trying to grow at all costs to actually investing behind the growth," he says.... All the investment couldn't compensate for one vulnerability: The technology is hard to use... Macroeconomic factors are of course important, but an industry resurgence depends first on whether Web3 can become easier to navigate for average people and provide them with a reason to hang around. "It's still pretty cumbersome to interact with the technology," Dulude explains. "Until it's made usable, it's really hard to break out of the current market environment we're in."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In the January 2024 Communications of the ACM, Rice University professor and former CACM Editor-in-Chief Moshe Y. Vardi minces no words in Computing, You Have Blood on Your Hands!. He argues that the unintended consequences of the rise of social media and mobile computing include hate mongering on a global scale and a worldwide youth mental health crisis. "How did the technology that we considered 'cool' just a decade ago become an assault weapon used to hurt, traumatize, and even kill vulnerable people?" Vardi asks. "Looking back at my past columns, one can see the forewarnings. Our obsession with efficiency came at the expense of resilience. In the name of efficiency, we aimed at eliminating all friction. In the name of efficiency, it became desirable to move fast and break things, and we allowed the technology industry to become dominated by a very small number of mega corporations. It is time for all computing professionals to accept responsibility for computing's current state. To use Star Wars metaphors, we once considered computing as the 'Rebels,' but it turns out that computing is the 'Empire.' Admitting we have a problem is a necessary first step toward addressing the problems computing has created." Examples cited in the piece include: Amnesty International's 2022 accusation that Meta "substantially contributed" to human rights violations of Myanmar's Rohingya peopleInternal Meta documents saying "We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly" in policing harmful content.So far the ACM's piece has attracted one comment. "Deep thanks for your long-term commitment to ethics and how you articulate clearly its challenges."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst has an announcement. A team of computer scientists "recently announced a new method for automatically generating whole proofs that can be used to prevent software bugs and verify that the underlying code is correct." It leverages the AI power of Large Language Models, and the new method, called Baldur, "yields unprecedented efficacy of nearly 66%." The idea behind the machine-checking technique was "to generate a mathematical proof showing that the code does what it is expected to do," according to the announcement, "and then use a theorem prover to make sure that the proof is also correct.But manually writing these proofs is incredibly time-consuming and requires extensive expertise. "These proofs can be many times longer than the software code itself," says Emily First, the paper's lead author who completed this research as part of her doctoral dissertation at UMass Amherst... First, whose team performed its work at Google, used Minerva, an LLM trained on a large corpus of natural-language text, and then fine-tuned it on 118GB of mathematical scientific papers and webpages containing mathematical expressions. Next, she further fine-tuned the LLM on a language, called Isabelle/HOL, in which the mathematical proofs are written. Baldur then generated an entire proof and worked in tandem with the theorem prover to check its work. When the theorem prover caught an error, it fed the proof, as well as information about the error, back into the LLM, so that it can learn from its mistake and generate a new and hopefully error-free proof. This process yields a remarkable increase in accuracy. The state-of-the-art tool for automatically generating proofs is called Thor, which can generate proofs 57% of the time. When Baldur (Thor's brother, according to Norse mythology) is paired with Thor, the two can generate proofs 65.7% of the time. Though there is still a large degree of error, Baldur is by far the most effective and efficient way yet devised to verify software correctness, and as the capabilities of AI are increasingly extended and refined, so should Baldur's effectiveness grow. In addition to First and Brun, the team includes Markus Rabe, who was employed by Google at the time, and Talia Ringer, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign. This work was performed at Google and supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A year ago the Washington Post reported "there are only seven working offshore wind turbines in the entire United States," adding that a massive wind project south of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts "is years behind schedule amid regulatory delays and litigation from opponents." But this week a local public radio station reported that electricity from America's first large-scale offshore wind project "is officially flowing into Massachusetts and helping to power the New England grid."The Vineyard Wind project achieved "first power" late Tuesday when one operating turbine near Martha's Vineyard delivered approximately five megawatts of electricity to the grid. The company said it expects to have five turbines operating at full capacity in early 2024... Once it's finished sometime in 2024, it will consist of 62 turbines spaced about a mile apart and rising more than 800 feet out of the water. The project will generate up to 800 megawatts of power, or about enough electricity for 400,000 homes in Massachusetts. Another smaller project near Long Island, South Fork Wind, also began producing electricity in early December. When that project is complete, its 12 turbines will generate about 132 megawatts of power... Massachusetts, in partnership with Rhode Island and Connecticut, is currently seeking bids for another 3,600 megawatts of offshore wind power... "This is a historic moment for the American offshore wind industry," wrote Gov. Maura Healey. "This is clean, affordable energy made possible by the many advocates, public servants, union workers, and business leaders who worked for decades to accomplish this achievement. Last year America's seven offshore wind turbines generated "a paltry 42 megawatts," according to the article, "far less than the average natural gas power plant." The CEO of one of the company's behind the project hailed the last 12 months as "a historic year defined by steel in the water and people at work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot readers necro81 writes: The popular vision of Neptune is azure blue. This comes mostly from the publicly released images from Voyager 2's flyby in 1989 - humanity's only visit to this icy giant at the edge of the solar system. But it turns out that view is a bit distorted - the result of color-enhancing choices made by NASA at the time. A new report from Oxford depicts Neptune's blue color as more muted, with a touch of green, not much different than Uranus. The truer-to-life view comes from re-analyzing the Voyager data, combined with ground-based observations going back decades. (Add'l links here, here, and here.) This is nothing new: most publicity images released by space agencies - of planets, nebulae, or the surface of Mars - have undergone some color-enhancement for visual effect. (They'll also release "true-color" images, which try to best mimic what the human eye would see.) Many images - such as those from the infrared-seeing JWST - need wholesale coloration of their otherwise invisible wavelengths. The new report is a good reminder, though, to remember that scientific cameras are pretty much always black and white; color images come from combining filters in various ways. Also thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

25 years ago, Slashdot's CmdrTaco posted an announcement from Slashdot reader #257. "Jabber is a new project I recently started to create a complete open-source platform for Instant Messaging with transparent communication to other Instant Messaging systems (ICQ, AIM, etc). "Most of the initial design and protocol work is done, as well as a working server and a few test clients." You can find the rest of the story on Wikipedia. "Its major outcome proved to be the development of the XMPP protocol." ("Based on XML, it enables the near-real-time exchange of structured data between two or more network entities.")Originally developed by the open-source community, the protocols were formalized as an approved instant messaging standard in 2004 and have been continuously developed with new extensions and features... In addition to these core protocols standardized at the IETF, the XMPP Standards Foundation (formerly the Jabber Software Foundation) is active in developing open XMPP extensions... XMPP features such as federation across domains, publish/subscribe, authentication and its security even for mobile endpoints are being used to implement the Internet of Things. "Designed to be extensible, the protocol offers a multitude of applications beyond traditional IM in the broader realm of message-oriented middleware, including signalling for VoIP, video, file transfer, gaming and other uses..." Slashdot reader #257 turned out to be Jeremie Miller (who at the time was just 23 years old). And according to his own page on Wikipedia, "Currently, Miller sits on the board of directors for Bluesky Social, a social media platform."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today America's Federal Aviation Administration "ordered the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft," reports CNN, identifying the aircraft as "the model involved in an Alaska Airlines emergency landing in Oregon on Friday after a section of the plane apparently blew out in midflight."A passenger's video posted to social media shows a side section of the fuselage, where a window would have been, missing - exposing passengers to the outside air. The video, which appears to have been taken from several rows behind the incident, shows oxygen masks deployed throughout the airplane, and least two people sitting near and just behind the missing section... The plane "landed safely back at Portland International Airport with 171 guests and six crew members," the airline said... According to FlightAware, the flight was airborne for about 20 minutes. "There was a really loud bang toward the rear of the plane and a whoosh noise," one passenger told a local news station - and then "all of the masks dropped." Long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunkershares more details from the BBC:Diego Murillo said the gap was "as wide as a refrigerator". Fellow passenger Elizabeth Lee added: "Part of the plane was missing and the wind was just extremely loud. but everyone was in their seats and had their belt on." Jessica Montoia described the flight as a "trip from hell" adding a phone was taken out of a man's hand by the wind. CNN covers the federal response:The FAA said the planes must be parked until emergency inspections are performed, which will "take around four to eight hours per aircraft." "The FAA is requiring immediate inspections of certain Boeing 737 MAX 9 planes before they can return to flight," FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said Saturday in a statement. "Safety will continue to drive our decision-making as we assist the (National Transportation Safety Board's) investigation into Alaska Airlines Flight 1282." The order impacts 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 jets, the agency approximates.... Boeing said the company supported the FAA's grounding decision. "Safety is our top priority and we deeply regret the impact this event has had on our customers and their passengers," Boeing said in a statement Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader lsllll for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports that some Verizon customers "might have found an unexpected surprise in the mail this week: An opportunity to receive a refund as part of a proposed $100 million settlement from a class-action lawsuit."Eligible customers are receiving postcards or emails alerting them to file a claim by April 15 to receive up to $100, which is the result of the lawsuit accusing Verizon of charging fees that were "unfair and not adequately disclosed." At issue is Verizon's "administrative charge," which the plaintiffs said were "misleading" because that fee wasn't disclosed in their plan's advertised monthly price and were charged in a "deceptive and unfair manner." Verizon has denied the claims and said in a statement that it "clearly identifies and describes its wireless consumer admin charge multiple times during the sales transaction, as well as in its marketing, contracts and billing." A company spokesperson said that the charge "helps our company recover certain regulatory compliance and network related costs." "The payout is at least $15," adds CNN, "and might be more depending on how long the customer used Verizon and the number of customers who file a claim."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tuesday's launch was different. "SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites designed to connect directly to unmodified smartphones..." reports SpaceNews, "after getting a temporary experimental license to start testing the capability in the United States."Six of the 21 Starlink satellites that launched on a Falcon 9 rocket at 10:44 p.m. Eastern from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, carry a payload that the company said could provide connectivity for most 4G LTE devices when in range. SpaceX plans to start enabling texting from space this year in partnership with cellular operators, with voice and data connectivity coming in 2025, although the company still needs regulatory permission to provide the services commercially. Initial direct-to-smartphone tests would use cellular spectrum from SpaceX's U.S. mobile partner T-Mobile. SpaceX has also partnered with mobile operators in Australia, Canada, Chile, Japan, New Zealand, and Switzerland.... Meanwhile, early-stage ventures AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global are closing in on fundraising deals to expand their dedicated direct-to-device constellations. AST SpaceMobile said January 2 it is seeking to secure funds this month from "multiple parties" ahead of launching its first five commercial satellites early this year on a Falcon 9. Lynk Global, which is currently providing intermittent texting and other low-bandwidth services to phones outside cellular networks in parts of the Solomon Islands, Cook Islands, and Palau, plans to raise funds by merging with a shell company run by former professional baseball player Alex Rodriguez.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 4 million electric vehicles are now on America's roads. And Friday the U.S. Energy announced that more than a third of them (1.4 million) were sold within the last year. That's 50% more than were sold in the previous year - and about the same number sold in the entire five years between 2016 and 2021. But the energy secretary's statement also touts the current administrations efforts at "building out a reliable and interoperable nationwide EV charging network - an undertaking never before seen in the United States."Today, the U.S. has close to 170,000 public EV chargers - a 75% increase since the president took office with nearly 900 new chargers coming online per week. These developments are part of an inevitable shift toward a thriving electric transportation sector - a shift that American automakers and battery manufacturers are already carrying forward.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"If you have been affected, you will will receive a notification when you open Chrome on either desktop or Android devices," reports Search Engine Land. But they add that "discussions among digital marketers on X indicate that advertisers are still not ready..." An anonymous reader writes: Google started its campaign to phase out of third-party cookies as announced earlier. At the beginning cookies are turned off for 1% of users, and those lucky ones unlock a "tracking protection" in Chrome settings. In agreement with the UK Competitions and Markets Authority, third-party cookies will be completely removed at the end of this year, a move under tight anti-competition scrutiny also in Brussels. Meanwhile, a technology researcher released their privacy audit of Google's third-party cookie replacement, Privacy Sandbox's Protected Audience API, validating its standing against EU data protection, which may even close the ever-present cookie consent popups disliked universally in Europe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week Harvard's president Claudine Gay resigned "after conservative activists revealed she had plagiarized," writes Business Insider, adding that hedge fund manager/prominent Harvard donor Bill Ackman "helped lead the charge." Then Business Insider "analyzed Ackman's wife's doctoral dissertation and found numerous instances of plagiarism." In most cases Ackman's wife put the author's name and publication date immediately after the material which she used - but did not put quotation marks around it. But according to the Business Insider, "At least 15 passages from her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation were lifted without any citation from Wikipedia entries."Her husband, Ackman, has taken a hardline stance on plagiarism. On Wednesday, responding to news that Gay is set to remain a part of Harvard's faculty after she resigned as president, he wrote on X that Gay should be fired completely due to "serious plagiarism issues... Students are forced to withdraw for much less," Ackman continued. "Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard." Ackman's wife was a tenured MIT professor from 2017 to 2021, according to the article. "It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family," Ackman posted Friday night on Twitter. Then Ackman threatened "a review of the work of all current MIT faculty members. We will begin with a review of the work of all current MIT faculty members, President Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism." Business Insider notes that Ackman "has been vocal about wanting to see MIT's president, Sally Kornbluth, fired since Kornbluth testified on December 5 in front of a congressional panel examining how university presidents handled student protests against Israel's war in Gaza. Kornbluth said in her opening statement that she didn't support 'speech codes' that would restrict what students say during protests."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Russian hackers were inside Ukrainian telecoms giant Kyivstar's system from at least May last year in a cyberattack that should serve as a "big warning" to the West, Ukraine's cyber spy chief told Reuters. The hack, one of the most dramatic since Russia's full-scale invasion nearly two years ago, knocked out services provided by Ukraine's biggest telecoms operator for some 24 million users for days from Dec. 12. In an interview, Illia Vitiuk, head of the Security Service of Ukraine's (SBU) cybersecurity department, disclosed exclusive details about the hack, which he said caused "disastrous" destruction and aimed to land a psychological blow and gather intelligence. "This attack is a big message, a big warning, not only to Ukraine, but for the whole Western world to understand that no one is actually untouchable," he said. He noted Kyivstar was a wealthy, private company that invested a lot in cybersecurity. The attack wiped "almost everything", including thousands of virtual servers and PCs, he said, describing it as probably the first example of a destructive cyberattack that "completely destroyed the core of a telecoms operator." During its investigation, the SBU found the hackers probably attempted to penetrate Kyivstar in March or earlier, he said in a Zoom interview on Dec. 27. "For now, we can say securely, that they were in the system at least since May 2023," he said. "I cannot say right now, since what time they had ... full access: probably at least since November." The SBU assessed the hackers would have been able to steal personal information, understand the locations of phones, intercept SMS-messages and perhaps steal Telegram accounts with the level of access they gained, he said. A Kyivstar spokesperson said the company was working closely with the SBU to investigate the attack and would take all necessary steps to eliminate future risks, adding: "No facts of leakage of personal and subscriber data have been revealed." Investigating the attack is harder because of the wiping of Kyivstar's infrastructure. Vitiuk said he was "pretty sure" it was carried out by Sandworm, a Russian military intelligence cyberwarfare unit that has been linked to cyberattacks in Ukraine and elsewhere. A year ago, Sandworm penetrated a Ukrainian telecoms operator, but was detected by Kyiv because the SBU had itself been inside Russian systems, Vitiuk said, declining to identify the company. The earlier hack has not been previously reported. Vitiuk said SBU investigators were still working to establish how Kyivstar was penetrated or what type of trojan horse malware could have been used to break in, adding that it could have been phishing, someone helping on the inside or something else. If it was an inside job, the insider who helped the hackers did not have a high level of clearance in the company, as the hackers made use of malware used to steal hashes of passwords, he said. Samples of that malware have been recovered and are being analysed, he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Business Insider's Kelli Maria Korducki reports on a growing trend happening on LinkedIn: some people are using the professional network for personal connections, fielding romantic offers amid job postings. But that leaves the question: Is it a good idea to mix work and love? From the report: Dustin Kidd, a professor of sociology at Temple University who researches social media and pop culture, said that dating via LinkedIn belonged to a long tradition of "dating hacks" -- using online tools designed for other purposes to snag a date. "In the aughts, this happened with Friendster and then Myspace," Kidd said, but has since spread to myriad platforms that are ostensibly romance-free. Even fitness-tracking sites such as Strava are fair game. The common thread for love-hijacked social-media sites is a single feature, Kidd said: DMs. "The design of LinkedIn helps to maintain its focus on the professional, but any platform with a direct-messaging option is likely to also be used to pursue sex and dating," he told me. The ease and relative privacy of direct messaging help explain how some people are using LinkedIn for romance, but it doesn't explain why. In an age with so many dedicated dating platforms -- from giants such as Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge to niche apps including Feeld (for the unconventional), Pure (for the noncommittal), and NUiT (for the astrologically inclined) -- why mix Cupid's arrow with corporate updates? Any type of social media where you can see people's pictures can turn into a dating app. And LinkedIn is even better because it's not just showing people's fake lives. One answer may be the growing number of Americans who have gotten tired of the roulette-like experience that comes with modern dating apps. In a 2023 Pew survey of US adults, nearly one-third of respondents said they had used an online dating site or app at least once. More than half of women who had used the apps reported feeling overwhelmed by the number of messages they had received in the past year, while 64% of men said they felt insecure from the lack of messages they had gotten. Though an overwhelming majority of men and women said they'd felt excited about people they connected with, an even-larger proportion of respondents said they were sometimes or often disappointed by their matches. [...] LinkedIn's appeal as a dating site, according to people who use it that way, is the platform's ability to give back some of that control and boost the caliber of their prospects. Because the professional-networking site asks users to link to their current and former employers' profile pages, it offers an additional layer of credibility that other social-media platforms lack. Many profiles also include first-person references from former colleagues and managers -- real people with real profile pages. [...] Even for those who shy away from using LinkedIn to angle for dates, the site has become a go-to tool for vetting romantic candidates found through conventional dating apps or in-person encounters. "Social media is just one big dating app," [said Samuela John, a 24-year-old personal organizer in New York City who developed chemistry with an oil-industry man on the platform]. "Any type of social media where you can see people's pictures can turn into a dating app. And LinkedIn is even better because it's not just showing people's fake lives." [...] "I don't think you should go into it like, 'All right, I'm going to find my husband on LinkedIn,'" John said. "I think you should go about it as if you were just networking, like in a casual sense. And then if you end up meeting the person, see the vibes and then go from there."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The White House has convened a last-minute meeting to discuss a private lunar mission, Peregrine Mission One, after the Navajo Nation requested a delay due to cultural concerns over the transport of human ashes for burial on the moon. "The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology," said Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren in a statement. "The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations." If successful, the commercial mission scheduled to launch Monday "will be the first time an American-made spacecraft has landed on the lunar surface since the end of the Apollo program in 1972," notes CNN. Longtime Slashdot reader garyisabusyguy shares the report: The private companies providing these lunar burial services, Celestis and Elysium Space, are just two of several paying customers hitching a ride to the moon on Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology's Peregrine lunar lander. The uncrewed spacecraft is expected to lift off on the inaugural flight of the United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Celestis' payload, called Tranquility Flight, includes 66 "memorial capsules" containing "cremated remains and DNA," which will remain on the lunar surface "as a permanent tribute to the intrepid souls who never stopped reaching for the stars," according to the company's website. "We are aware of the concerns expressed by Mr. Nygren, but do not find them substantive," Celestis CEO Charles Chafer told CNN. "We reject the assertion that our memorial spaceflight mission desecrates the moon," Chafer said. "Just as permanent memorials for deceased are present all over planet Earth and not considered desecration, our memorial on the moon is handled with care and reverence, is a permanent monument that does not intentionally eject flight capsules on the moon. It is a touching and fitting celebration for our participants -- the exact opposite of desecration, it is a celebration." Elysium Space has not responded to CNN's request for a comment, but the company's website describes its "Lunar Memorial" as delivering "a symbolic portion of remains to the surface of the Moon, helping to create the quintessential commemoration." "I've been disappointed that this conversation came up so late in the game," John Thornton, Astrobotic Technology CEO, said. "I would have liked to have had this conversation a long time ago. We announced the first payload manifest of this nature to our mission back in 2015. A second in 2020. We really are trying to do the right thing and I hope we can find a good path forward with Navajo Nation." [...] Friday's meeting convened by the White House is scheduled to feature representatives from NASA, the FAA, the US Department of Transportation, and the Department of Commerce. But Navajo Nation officials have little hope that they will be able to stop Monday's launch. "Based off of what we're seeing, and NASA are already having their pre-launch briefing, it doesn't look like they have any intention of stopping the launch or removing the remains," Ahasteen said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Consumer Reports has found that plastics retain a "widespread" presence in food despite the health risks, and called on regulators to reassess the safety of plastics that come into contact with food during production. The non-profit consumer group said on Thursday that 84 out of 85 supermarket foods and fast foods it recently tested contained "plasticizers" known as phthalates, a chemical used to make plastic more durable. It also said 79% of food samples in its study contained bisphenol A (BPA), another chemical found in plastic, and other bisphenols, though levels were lower than in tests done in 2009. Consumer Reports said none of the phthalate levels it found exceeded limits set by U.S. and European regulators. It also said there was no level of phthalates that scientists confirm is safe, but that does not guarantee the safety of foods you eat. Phthalates and bisphenols can disrupt the production and regulation of estrogen and other hormones, potentially boosting the risk of birth defects, cancer, diabetes, infertility, neurodevelopmental disorders, obesity and other health problems. Among tested supermarket foods, Annie's Organic Cheesy Ravioli contained the most phthalates in nanograms per serving, 53,579, followed by Del Monte sliced peaches and Chicken of the Sea pink salmon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Goodin reports via Ars Technica: Software maker Ivanti is urging users of its end-point security product to patch a critical vulnerability that makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to execute malicious code inside affected networks. The vulnerability, in a class known as a SQL injection, resides in all supported versions of the Ivanti Endpoint Manager. Also known as the Ivanti EPM, the software runs on a variety of platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS, and Internet of Things devices such as routers. SQL injection vulnerabilities stem from faulty code that interprets user input as database commands or, in more technical terms, from concatenating data with SQL code without quoting the data in accordance with the SQL syntax. CVE-2023-39336, as the Ivanti vulnerability is tracked, carries a severity rating of 9.6 out of a possible 10. "If exploited, an attacker with access to the internal network can leverage an unspecified SQL injection to execute arbitrary SQL queries and retrieve output without the need for authentication," Ivanti officials wrote Friday in a post announcing the patch availability. "This can then allow the attacker control over machines running the EPM agent. When the core server is configured to use SQL express, this might lead to RCE on the core server." RCE is short for remote code execution, or the ability for off-premises attackers to run code of their choice. Currently, there's no known evidence the vulnerability is under active exploitation. Ivanti has also published a disclosure that is restricted only to registered users. A copy obtained by Ars said Ivanti learned of the vulnerability in October. [...] Putting devices running Ivanti EDM behind a firewall is a best practice and will go a long way to mitigating the severity of CVE-2023-39336, but it would likely do nothing to prevent an attacker who has gained limited access to an employee workstation from exploiting the critical vulnerability. It's unclear if the vulnerability will come under active exploitation, but the best course of action is for all Ivanti EDM users to install the patch as soon as possible.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shortly after the premium email service Hey announced a standalone Hey Calendar app, co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson said it was rejected by Apple for violating App Store rules. "Apple just called to let us know they're rejecting the HEY Calendar app from the App Store (in current form)," wrote DHH on X. "Same bullying tactics as last time: Push delicate rejections to a call with a first-name-only person who'll softly inform you it's your wallet or your kneecaps. Since it's clear we're never going to pay them the extortionate 30% ransom, they're back to the bullshit about 'the app doesn't do anything when you download it.' Despite the fact that after last time, they specifically carved out HEY in App Store Review Guidelines 3.1.3 (f)!" The Verge's Amrita Khalid reports: New users can't sign up for Hey Calendar directly on the app -- Basecamp, which makes Hey, makes users first sign up through a browser. Apple's App Store rules require most paid services to offer users the ability to pay and sign up through the app, ensuring the company gets up to a 30 percent cut. The controversial rule has a ton of gray areas and carve-outs (i.e. reader apps like Spotify and Kindle get an exception) and is the subject of antitrust fights in multiple countries. But as Hansson detailed on X and in a subsequent blog post, he found Apple's rejection insulting for another reason. Close to four years ago, the company rejected Hey's original iOS app for its email service for the exact same reason. The outcome of the 2020 fight actually worked out in Hey's favor. After days of back and forth between Apple's App Store Review Board and Basecamp, the Hey team agreed to a rather creative solution suggested by Apple exec Phil Schiller. Hey would offer a free option for the iOS app, allowing new users to sign up directly. But the company had a slight twist -- users who signed up via the iOS app got a free, temporary randomized email address that worked for 14 days -- after which they had to pay to upgrade. Currently, Hey email users can only pay for an account through the browser. Following the saga with Hey, Apple made a carve-out to its App Store rules that stated that free companion apps to certain types of paid web services were not required to have an in-app payment mechanism. But, as Hansson mentions on X, a calendar app wasn't mentioned in the list of services that Apple now makes an exception for, which includes VOIP, cloud storage, web hosting -- and of course -- email. Hansson plans to fight Apple's decision without elaborating on exactly how he intends to do so.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Code within the latest version of the ChatGPT Android app suggests that you'll soon be able to set it as the default assistant app, replacing the Google Assistant. Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman reports: ChatGPT version 1.2023.352, released last month, added a new activity named com.openai.voice.assistant.AssistantActivity. The activity is disabled by default, but after manually enabling and launching it, an overlay appears on the screen with the same swirling animation as the one shown when using the in-app voice chat mode. This overlay appears over other apps and doesn't take up the entire screen like the in-app voice chat mode. So, presumably, you could talk to ChatGPT from any screen by invoking this assistant. However, in my testing, the animation never finished and the activity promptly closed itself before I could speak with the chatbot. This could either be because the feature isn't finished yet or is being controlled by some internal flag. [...] However, the fact that the aforementioned XML file even exists hints that this is what OpenAI intends to do with the app. Making the ChatGPT app Android's default digital assistant app would enable users to launch it by long-pressing the home button (if using three-button navigation) or swiping up from a bottom corner (if using gesture navigation). Unfortunately, the ChatGPT app still wouldn't be able to create custom hotwords or respond to existing ones, since that functionality requires access to privileged APIs only available to trusted, preinstalled apps. Still, given that Google will launch Assistant with Bard any day now, it makes sense that OpenAI wants to make it easier for Android users to access ChatGPT so that users don't flock to Bard just because it's easier to use.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: Last week border officials in the Punjab region of India revealed they intercepted 107 drug-carrying drones sent by smuggling gangs last year over the border from Pakistan, the highest number on record. Most were carrying heroin or opium from Pakistan to be dropped and received by collaborators in the Punjab, notorious for having India's worst levels of opiate addiction. Last year the head of a police narcotics unit in Lahore, a city in Pakistan which borders the Punjab, was dismissed after he was suspected of running a drug trafficking gang sending drones over to India. But the use of cheap flying robots instead of humans to smuggle drugs across borders is a worldwide phenomenon. [...] [D]rones will likely become an everyday part of drug dealing too, according to Peter Warren Singer, author of multiple books on national security and a Fellow at think tank New America, with legit medicines due to be delivered by drone in the U.S. later this year and maybe in the U.K. too. "We are just scraping the surface of what is possible, as drone deliveries become more and more common in the commercial world, it will be the same with delivery of illicit goods. In our book, Burn-In, we explain how a future city will see drones zipping about delivering everything from groceries and burritos to drugs, both prescribed by a doctor or bought off a dealer. Drones have traditionally been used by governments and corporations for what are known as the "3 D's" jobs that are too dull, dirty, or dangerous for humans. For criminals, it is the same, except add in another D: Dependable. A drone doesn't steal the product and can't be arrested or snitch if caught." Liam O'Shea, senior research fellow for organized crime and policing at defense and security thinktank RUSI, said drones were at the moment of limited value to wholesale traffickers and organized criminal gangs because of their range and the weight they can carry. "It makes sense that smugglers would seek to use drones. They are cheap and easy to acquire. They also lower the risks involved in some transactions, as smugglers do not have to be physically present during transactions. They offer opportunities for smuggling in areas where previous routes were too risky, such as prisons and over securitized borders. "I expect them to be of greater value to smaller players and distributors dealing with smaller quantities. Wholesale drug traffickers will still need to use routes that facilitate smuggling at higher volume or using drones to make multiple trips, which entails risks of detection. That may well change as improvements in technology improve drones' carrying capacity and crime groups are better able to access drones with greater capacity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tesla and Samsung are joining forces to allow users of Samsung's SmartThings platform to connect to Tesla products so they can keep track of energy production and usage. The Verge reports: When connected to the Powerwall, SmartThings Energy can sync with the "Storm Watch" feature so that you're notified of heavy weather on a Samsung phone or TV, for example. In addition to the Powerwall, SmartThings Energy will be able to connect to other Tesla products, including its electric vehicles, Solar Inverter, and Wall Connector charging solutions. The collaboration is possible thanks to Tesla's API, which Samsung claims SmartThings Energy is the first to take advantage of.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Once a dominant force in music discovery, Spotify's famed playlists like RapCaviar, which significantly influenced mainstream music and artist visibility, are losing ground. As the music industry shifts towards algorithmic suggestions and TikTok emerges as a major music promoter, Spotify's strategy evolves with more automated music discovery and less emphasis on human-curated playlists, signaling a potential end to the era where a few key playlists could make a star overnight. Bloomberg reports: Enter TikTok. In the late 2010s, as the algorithmic controlled, short-form video app emerged as a growing force in music promotion, Spotify took notice. On an earnings call in 2020, Spotify Chief Executive Officer Daniel Ek noted that users were increasingly opting for algorithmic suggestions and that Spotify would be leaning into the trend. "As we're getting better and better at personalization, we're serving better and better content and more and more of our users are choosing that," he said. From there, Spotify began implementing a number of changes that over time significantly altered the fundamental dynamics of how playlists get composed. Among other things, the company had already introduced a standardized pitching form that all artists and managers must use to submit tracks for playlist consideration. One former employee says the tool was created to foster a more merit-based system with a greater emphasis on data -- and less focus on the taste of individual curators. The goal, in part, was to give independent and smaller artists without the resources to personally court key playlist editors a better chance at placements. It was also a way to better protect the public-facing editors who in the early days were sometimes subjected to harassment from people disgruntled over their musical choices. As the automated submission system took hold, the editors gradually grew more anonymous and less associated with particular playlists. In a handbook for the editorial team, Spotify instructed curators not to claim ownership of any one playlist. At the same time, Spotify began introducing multiple splashy features meant to encourage algorithm-driven listening, including an AI DJ and Daylist, two features that constantly change to fit listeners' habits and interests. (Spotify says "human expertise" guides the AI DJ.) Last year, Spotify laid off members of the teams involved in making playlists as part of its various cuts. And over time, the shift in emphasis has had consequences outside the company as well. These days, the same music industry sources who in the late 2010s learned to obsess over what was included and excluded from key Spotify playlists have started noticing something else -- it no longer seems to matter as much. Employees at different major labels say they've seen streams coming from RapCaviar drop anywhere from 30% to 50%. The trend towards automated music discovery at Spotify shows no sign of slowing down. One internal presentation titled "Recapturing the Zeitgeist" encourages editorial curators to better utilize data. According to the people who have seen the plan, in addition to putting together a playlist, editorial curators would tag songs to help the algorithm accurately place them on relevant playlists that are automatically personalized for individual subscribers. The company has also shifted some human-curated playlists to personalized versions, including selections with seven-figure followings, like Housewerk and Indie Pop. These days, Spotify is also promoting something called Discovery Mode, wherein labels and artist teams can submit songs for additional algorithm pushes in exchange for a lower royalty rate. These tracks can only surface on personalized listening sessions, a former employee said, meaning Spotify would have a financial incentive to push people to them over editorially curated playlists. (For now, Discovery Mode songs only surface in radio or autoplay listening sessions.) The shift toward algorithmic distribution isn't necessarily a bad thing, says Dan Smith, US general manager at Armada, an independent dance label. "The way fans discovered new music was radio back in the day, then Spotify editorial playlists, then there were a few years where people only discovered new music through TikTok," Brad said. "All those things still work ... we're all just trying different ways to make sure songs get to the right people."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The Justice Department is in the late stages of an investigation into Apple and could file a sweeping antitrust case taking aim at the company's strategies to protect the dominance of the iPhone as soon as the first half of this year, said three people with knowledge of the matter. The agency is focused on how Apple has used its control over its hardware and software to make it more difficult for consumers to ditch the company's devices, as well as for rivals to compete, said the people, who spoke anonymously because the investigation was active. Specifically, investigators have examined how the Apple Watch works better with the iPhone than with other brands, as well as how Apple locks competitors out of its iMessage service. They have also scrutinized Apple's payments system for the iPhone, which blocks other financial firms from offering similar services, these people said. The Justice Department is closing in on what would be the most consequential federal antitrust lawsuit challenging Apple, which is the most valuable tech company in the world. If the lawsuit is filed, American regulators will have sued four of the biggest tech companies for monopolistic business practices in less than five years. The Justice Department is currently facing off against Google in two antitrust cases, focused on its search and ad tech businesses, while the Federal Trade Commission has sued Amazon and Meta for stifling competition. The Apple suit would likely be even more expansive than previous challenges to the company, attacking its powerful business model that draws together the iPhone with devices like the Apple Watch and services like Apple Pay to attract and keep consumers loyal to its products. Rivals have said that they have been denied access to key Apple features, like the Siri virtual assistant, prompting them to argue the practices are anticompetitive.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has begun ditching WordPad from Windows and removed the editor from the first Canary Channel build of 2024. From a report: We knew it was coming, but the reality has arrived in the Canary Channel. A clean install will omit WordPad as of build 26020 of Windows 11. At an undisclosed point, the application will be removed on upgrade. The People app is also being axed, as expected, and the Steps Recorder won't be getting any more updates and will instead show a banner encouraging users to try something else. Perhaps ClipChamp? WordPad was always an odd tool. Certainly not something one would want to edit text with, but not much of a word processor either. It feels like a throwback to a previous era. However, it was also free, came with Windows, and didn't insist on having a connection to the internet for it to work.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Huawei's newest laptop runs on a chip made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a teardown of the device showed, quashing talk of another Chinese technological breakthrough. From a report: The Qingyun L540 notebook contains a 5-nanometer chip made by the Taiwanese company in 2020, around the time US sanctions cut off Huawei's access to the chipmaker, research firm TechInsights found after dismantling the device for Bloomberg News. That counters speculation that Huawei's mainland Chinese chipmaking partner, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., may have achieved a major leap in fabrication technique. Huawei caused a stir in the US and China last August when it released a smartphone with a 7nm processor made by Shanghai-based SMIC. A teardown by the Canada-based research outfit for Bloomberg News showed the Mate 60 Pro's chip was only a few years behind the cutting edge, a feat that US trade curbs were meant to prevent. That revelation spurred celebration across the Chinese tech scene, and a debate in the US about the effectiveness of sanctions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Food and Drug Administration has allowed Florida to import millions of dollars worth of medications from Canada at far lower prices than in the United States, overriding fierce decades-long objections from the pharmaceutical industry. From a report: The approval, issued in a letter to Florida Friday, is a major policy shift for the United States, and supporters hope it will be a significant step forward in the long and largely unsuccessful effort to rein in drug prices. Individuals in the United States are allowed to buy directly from Canadian pharmacies, but states have long wanted to be able to purchase medicines in bulk for their Medicaid programs, government clinics and prisons from Canadian wholesalers. Florida has estimated that it could save up to $150 million in its first year of the program, importing medicines that treat H.I.V., AIDS, diabetes, hepatitis C and psychiatric conditions. Other states have applied to the F.D.A. to set up similar programs. But significant hurdles remain. The pharmaceutical industry's major lobbying organization, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, which has sued over previous importation efforts, is expected to file suit to prevent the Florida plan from going into effect. Some drug manufacturers have agreements with Canadian wholesalers not to export their medicines, and the Canadian government has already taken steps to block the export of prescription drugs that are in short supply.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the number of bees and other pollinators falls, field pansies are adapting by fertilizing their own seeds, a new study found. From a report: Every spring, trillions of flowers mate with the help of bees and other animals. They lure the pollinators to their flowers with flashy colors and nectar. As the animals travel from flower to flower, they take pollen with them, which can fertilize the seeds of other plants. A new study suggests that humans are quickly altering this annual rite of spring. As toxic pesticides and vanishing habitats have driven down the populations of bees and other pollinators, some flowers have evolved to fertilize their own seeds more often, rather than those of other plants. Scientists said they were surprised by the speed of the changes, which occurred in just 20 generations. "That's rapid evolution," said Pierre-Olivier Cheptou, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Montpellier in France who led the research. Dr. Cheptou was inspired to carry out the study when it became clear that bees and other pollinators were in a drastic decline. Would flowers that depend on pollinators for sex, he wondered, find another way to reproduce? The study focused on a weedy plant called the field pansy, whose white, yellow and purple flowers are common in fields and on roadsides across Europe. Field pansies typically use bumblebees to sexually reproduce. But they can also use their own pollen to fertilize their own seeds, a process called selfing. Selfing is more convenient than sex, since a flower does not have to wait for a bee to drop by. But a selfing flower can use only its own genes to produce new seeds. Sexual reproduction allows flowers to mix their DNA, creating new combinations that may make them better prepared for diseases, droughts and other challenges that future generations may face. To track the evolution of field pansies in recent decades, Dr. Cheptou and his colleagues took advantage of a cache of seeds that France's National Botanical Conservatories collected in the 1990s and early 2000s. The researchers compared these old flowers with new ones from across the French countryside. After growing the new and old seeds side by side in the lab under identical conditions, they discovered that selfing had increased 27 percent since the 1990s.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Little noticed, days before the holiday break, Boeing petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration for an exemption from key safety standards for the 737 MAX 7 -- the still-uncertified smallest member of its newest jet family. Seattle Times: Since August, earlier models of the MAX currently flying passengers in the U.S. have had to limit use of the jet's engine anti-ice system after Boeing discovered a defect in the system with potentially catastrophic consequences. The flaw could cause the inlet at the front end of the pod surrounding the engine -- known as a nacelle -- to break and fall off. In an August Airworthiness Directive, the FAA stated that debris from such a breakup could penetrate the fuselage, putting passengers seated at windows behind the wings in danger, and could damage the wing or tail of the plane, "which could result in loss of control of the airplane." Dennis Tajer, a spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association, the union representing 15,000 American Airlines pilots, said the flaw in the engine anti-ice system has "given us great concern." He said the pilot procedure the FAA approved as an interim solution -- urging pilots to make sure to turn off the system when icing conditions dissipate to avoid overheating that within five minutes could seriously damage the structure of the nacelle -- is inadequate given the serious potential danger. "You get our attention when you say people might get killed," Tajer said. "We're not interested in seeing exemptions and accommodations that depend on human memory. ... There's just got to be a better way." In its petition to the FAA, Boeing argues the breakup of the engine nacelle is "extremely improbable" and that an exemption will not reduce safety. "The 737 MAX has been in service since 2017 and has accumulated over 6.5 million flight hours. In that time, there have been no reported cases of parts departing aircraft due to overheating of the engine nacelle inlet structure," the filing states.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The DeepMind robotics team has revealed three new advances that it says will help robots make faster, better, and safer decisions in the wild. One includes a system for gathering training data with a "Robot Constitution" to make sure your robot office assistant can fetch you more printer paper -- but without mowing down a human co-worker who happens to be in the way. Google's data gathering system, AutoRT, can use a visual language model (VLM) and large language model (LLM) working hand in hand to understand its environment, adapt to unfamiliar settings, and decide on appropriate tasks. The Robot Constitution, which is inspired by Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics," is described as a set of "safety-focused prompts" instructing the LLM to avoid choosing tasks that involve humans, animals, sharp objects, and even electrical appliances. For additional safety, DeepMind programmed the robots to stop automatically if the force on its joints goes past a certain threshold and included a physical kill switch human operators can use to deactivate them. Over a period of seven months, Google deployed a fleet of 53 AutoRT robots into four different office buildings and conducted over 77,000 trials. Some robots were controlled remotely by human operators, while others operated either based on a script or completely autonomously using Google's Robotic Transformer (RT-2) AI learning model.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Orange Espana, Spain's second-biggest mobile operator, suffered a major outage on Wednesday after an unknown party obtained a "ridiculously weak" password and used it to access an account for managing the global routing table that controls which networks deliver the company's Internet traffic, researchers said. From a report: The hijacking began around 9:28 Coordinated Universal Time (about 2:28 Pacific time) when the party logged into Orange's RIPE NCC account using the password "ripeadmin" (minus the quotation marks). The RIPE Network Coordination Center is one of five Regional Internet Registries, which are responsible for managing and allocating IP addresses to Internet service providers, telecommunication organizations, and companies that manage their own network infrastructure. RIPE serves 75 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The password came to light after the party, using the moniker Snow, posted an image to social media that showed the orange.es email address associated with the RIPE account. RIPE said it's working on ways to beef up account security. Security firm Hudson Rock plugged the email address into a database it maintains to track credentials for sale in online bazaars. In a post, the security firm said the username and "ridiculously weak" password were harvested by information-stealing malware that had been installed on an Orange computer since September. The password was then made available for sale on an infostealer marketplace.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's top diplomat warned the US that decoupling would be "self defeating" as the country set out to implement a recent agreement made between their leaders. From a report: Foreign Minister Wang Yi, speaking on Friday at an event to mark the 45th anniversary of US-China diplomatic relations, cited a slew of initiatives that reflect improved ties including streamlined visas for US travelers, a counternarcotics working group to battle the flow of the synthetic fentanyl to the US, and the sending of pandas to the US by the end of the year. "Any decoupling attempt to stem the tide will only be counterproductive and self defeating," Wang said. David Meale, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, joined Friday's event as charge d'affaires with Ambassador Nicholas Burns out of town. Tensions between China and the US started to ease after President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met in November. The talks resulted in a resumption of high-level military-to-military ties, a promise to collaborate on the fentanyl problem and a commitment to boost interactions between people in the two countries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is collecting the eyelid shape and skin tone of children via parent submitted videos, according to a project description online reviewed by 404 Media. From the report: Canadian tech conglomerate TELUS, which says it is working on Google's behalf, is offering parents $50 to film their children wearing various props such as hats or sunglasses as part of the project, the description adds. The project shows the methods some companies are using to build machine learning, artificial intelligence, or facial recognition datasets and products. Rather than scraping already existing images or analyzing previously collected material, TELUS, and by extension Google, is asking the public to contribute directly and get paid in return. Google told 404 Media the collection was part of the company's efforts to verify users' age.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix has said it plans to be in gaming for years to come. Now the company is trying to figure out how to make money from it, a potential shift in strategy for the streamer. From a report: Executives at the streaming giant have had discussions in recent months about how to generate revenue from its games, according to people familiar with the discussions. Netflix games are currently free for all subscribers, part of a strategy to keep users coming back to the streaming service when their favorite shows are between seasons as well as to attract new fans. Some of the ideas that have been discussed include in-app purchases, charging for more sophisticated games it is developing or giving subscribers to its newer ad-supported tier access to games with ads in them, the people said. Such moves would mark a pivot for Netflix, which has resisted putting ads or in-app purchases in its games. [...] Netflix encourages open debate internally on its strategy, which is a key pillar of its culture, and such discussions don't mean the company will decide to monetize games.Read more of this story at Slashdot.