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Of the 15,000 satellites humans have sent into space, "just over half are still functioning," reports CNN. "The rest, after running out of fuel and ending their serviceable life, have either burned up in the atmosphere or are still orbiting the planet as useless hunks of metal" - scattering "an aura of space junk around the planet." "One way to start tackling the problem would be to stop producing more junk - by refueling satellites rather than decommissioning them once they run out of power.""Right now you can't refuel a satellite on orbit," says Daniel Faber, CEO of Orbit Fab. But his Colorado-based company wants to change that... "The lack of fuel creates a whole paradigm where people design their spacecraft missions around moving as little as possible. That means that we can't have tow trucks in orbit to get rid of any debris that happens to be left. We can't have repairs and maintenance, we can't upgrade anything. We can't inspect anything if it breaks. There are so many things we can't do and we operate in a very constrained way. That's the solution we're trying to deliver...." Orbit Fab has no plans to address the existing fleet of satellites. Instead, it wants to focus on those that have yet to launch, and equip them with a standardized port - called RAFTI, for Rapid Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface - which would dramatically simplify the refueling operation, keeping the price tag down. "What we're looking at doing is creating a low-cost architecture," says Faber. "There's no commercially available fuel port for refueling a satellite in orbit yet. For all the big aspirations we have about a bustling space economy, really, what we're working on is the gas cap - we are a gas cap company." Orbit Fab, which advertises itself with the tagline "gas stations in space," is working on a system that includes the fuel port, refueling shuttles - which would deliver the fuel to a satellite in need - and refueling tankers, or orbital gas stations, which the shuttles could pick up the fuel from. It has advertised a price of $20 million for on-orbit delivery of hydrazine, the most common satellite propellant. In 2018, the company launched two testbeds to the International Space Station to test the interfaces, the pumps and the plumbing. In 2021 it launched Tanker-001 Tenzing, a fuel depot demonstrator that informed the design of the current hardware. The next launch is now scheduled for 2024. "We are delivering fuel in geostationary orbit for a mission that is being undertaken by the Air Force Research Lab," says Faber. "At the moment, they're treating it as a demonstration, but it's getting a lot of interest from across the US government, from people that realize the value of refueling." Orbit Fab's first private customer will be Astroscale, a Japanese satellite servicing company that has developed the first satellite designed for refueling. Called LEXI, it will mount RAFTI ports and is currently scheduled to launch in 2026. According to Simone D'Amico, an associate professor of astronautics at Stanford University, who's not affiliated with Orbit Fab, on-orbit servicing is one of the keys to ensuring a safe and sustainable development of space... "The development of space infrastructure and the proliferation of space assets is reaching a critical volume that is not sustainable anymore without a change of paradigm." "In 10 or 15 years, we'd like to be building refineries in orbit," CEO Faber tells CNN, "processing material that is launched from the ground into a range of chemicals that people want to buy: air and water for commercial space stations, 3D printer feedstock minerals to grow plants. We want to be the industrial chemical supplier to the emerging commercial space industry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Associates of Elon Musk are planning to launch a new primary and secondary school," reports CNN, "and ultimately a university, in Austin, Texas, with the help of a nearly $100 million donation from the billionaire, tax documents show..."Members of Musk's inner circle - including Jared Birchall, who runs Musk's family office - are named as leaders of The Foundation, a new school planning to teach "STEM subjects and other topics," in an application to the Internal Revenue Service asking for tax-exempt status last year... The IRS filing, dated October 2022, was obtained and posted publicly by Bloomberg, which first reported plans for the school on Wednesday... "The School is being designed to meet the educational needs of those with proven academic and scientific potential, who will thrive in a rigorous, project based curriculum," the filing posted by Bloomberg states. The school plans to initially enroll about 50 students and grow over time, according to the filing. It expects to be funded through donations and tuition fees, although it notes that the school will offer scholarships to support students who couldn't otherwise afford to attend... "The School intends ultimately to expand its operations to create a university dedicated to education at the highest levels," according to the filing... The Foundation said in its filing said that it had raised around $100 million in contributions since mid-2022 for the new Austin school. The 2022 annual 990 tax filing for the Musk Foundation, also made public by Bloomberg, notes that the Musk charity donated $10 million in cash to the group that year, as well as nearly $90 million worth of Tesla stock.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of climate hazards at University College London. He also writes on CNN that it's "essential" to laugh in the face of the climate crisis:If you don't laugh, you will cry, and that marks the beginning of a very slippery slope. As civilization faces a threat that dwarfs that of every war ever fought combined, and the outcome of the latest climate COP offers little hope, it's something we need - not only to remember - but to actively adopt as a weapon in our armoury to fight for a better future for our children and their children. They say that laughter is the best medicine, but weaponised comedy has the potential to do more than just make us feel good. Not only can it help inform and educate about global heating and the climate breakdown it is driving, but also to encourage and bolster action... This is why ventures like "Climate Science Translated," which I took part in earlier this year, are so important. The British-based project - brainchild of ethical insurer Nick Oldridge and the climate communications outfit Utopia Bureau - teams climate scientists up with comedians, who 'translate' the science into bite-sized, funny and pretty irreverent chunks that can be understood, digested and appreciated by anyone. You can see four of the videos on their web site. "Climate science is complicated," each video begins. "So we're translating it into human." For example, last month Dr. Friederike Otto, senior lecturer on climate science at London's Imperial College, created a new video with comedian Nish Kumar: Dr. Otto: Human-caused climate change is fundamentally changing the fabric of the weather as we know it. It's leading to events which we've simply never seen before. Comedian Kumar: Translation: Weather used to be clouds. Now we've made it into a sort of Rottweiler on steroids that wants to chew everyone's head off. Dr. Otto: The continuing increase in global average temperature is already causing higher probabilities of extreme rainfall and flash flooding, as well more intense storms, prolonged droughts, record-breaking heatwaves, and wildfires. Kumar: Very soon climate scientists are just going to ditch their graphs and point out the window with an expression that says, "I fucking told you!" Dr. Otto: This is not a problem just for our children and grandchildren. This is an immediate threat to all our lives. Kumar: I don't know if you're familiar with the film The Terminator, but if someone came from the future to warn us of this threat, they'd have travelled from next Wednesday. And three weeks ago a follow-up video came from earth systems science professor Mark Maslin from London's University College, teaming up with comedian Jo Brand: Professor Maslin: We are heading for unknown territory if we trigger tipping points - irreversible threshholds which shift our entire ecosystem into a different state. Comedian Brand: If you liked climate crisis, you're going to love climate complete fucking collapse... Professor Maslin: The irony is solar and wind power are now over 10 times cheaper than oil and gas. We can still prevent much of the damage, and end up in a better place for everyone. Brand: With wind and sun power, we save money, and don't die. It's a pretty strong selling point. Professor Maslin: Most people actually are in favor of urgent action. The reason governments are not transitioning fast enough is because the fossil fuel industry has a grip on many politicians. In fact, governments subsidize them with our taxpayer money - over $1 trillion a year, according to the IMF. Brand: We are paying a bunch of rich dudes one trillion dollars a year to fuck up our future. I'd do it for that money. When can I start? Each video ends with the words "All Hands On Deck Now", urging action by voting, contacting your representative, joining a local group, and protesting. Climate hazard professor Bill McGuire writes on CNN that he hopes to see a growing movement:As Kiri Pritchard-McLean pointedly observes: "If comedians are helping scientists out, you know things aren't going well...." There is even a "Sustainable Stand-up" course aimed at teaching comedy beginners about how climate and social issues can be addressed in their shows, and which has run in 11 countries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports that America's largest pharmacy chains have "handed over Americans' prescription records to police and government investigators without a warrant, a congressional investigation found, raising concerns about threats to medical privacy."Though some of the chains require their lawyers to review law enforcement requests, three of the largest - CVS Health, Kroger and Rite Aid, with a combined 60,000 locations nationwide - said they allow pharmacy staff members to hand over customers' medical records in the store... Pharmacies' records hold some of the most intimate details of their customers' personal lives, including years-old medical conditions and the prescriptions they take for mental health and birth control. Because the chains often share records across all locations, a pharmacy in one state can access a person's medical history from states with more-restrictive laws. Carly Zubrzycki, an associate professor at the University of Connecticut law school, wrote last year that this could link a person's out-of-state medical care via a "digital trail" back to their home state... In briefings, officials with eight American pharmacy giants - Walgreens Boots Alliance, CVS, Walmart, Rite Aid, Kroger, Cigna, Optum Rx and Amazon Pharmacy - told congressional investigators that they required only a subpoena, not a warrant, to share the records. A subpoena can be issued by a government agency and, unlike a court order or warrant, does not require a judge's approval. To obtain a warrant, law enforcement must convince a judge that the information is vital to investigate a crime. Officials with CVS, Kroger and Rite Aid said they instruct their pharmacy staff members to process law enforcement requests on the spot, saying the staff members face "extreme pressure to immediately respond," the lawmakers' letter said. The eight pharmacy giants told congressional investigators that they collectively received tens of thousands of legal demands every year, and that most were in connection with civil lawsuits. It's unclear how many were related to law enforcement demands, or how many requests were fulfilled. Only one of the companies, Amazon, said it notified customers when law enforcement demanded its pharmacy records unless there was a legal prohibition, such as a "gag order," preventing it from doing so, the lawmakers said... Most investigative requests come with a directive requiring the company to keep them confidential, a CVS spokeswoman said; for those that don't, the company considers "on a case-by-case basis whether it's appropriate to notify the individual." The article points out that Americans "can request the companies tell them if they've ever disclosed their data...but very few people do. "CVS, which has more than 40,000 pharmacists and 10,000 stores in the United States, said it received a 'single-digit number' of such consumer requests last year, the letter states."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: Scientists have long viewed Saturn's moon Enceladus, which harbors an ocean beneath its thick, icy shell, as one of the best places to search for life beyond Earth. Now, a new analysis of data collected by NASA's Cassini mission, which orbited Saturn and its moons between 2004 and 2017, has uncovered intriguing evidence that further supports the idea of Enceladus as a habitable ocean world. Enceladus initially captured the attention of scientists in 2005 because plumes of ice grains and water vapor were observed rising through cracks in the moon's ice shell and releasing into space. The spacecraft flew through the plumes and "sampled" them, with data suggesting the presence of organic compounds within the plumes, some of which are key for life. The latest data analysis of Cassini's flybys of Enceladus revealed the detection of a molecule called hydrogen cyanide that's toxic to humans but crucial to processes driving the origin of life. What's more, the team also found evidence to support that Enceladus' ocean has organic compounds that provide a source of chemical energy that could potentially be used as powerful fuel for any form of life... The combination of these elements together suggested a process called methanogenesis, or the metabolic creation of methane, may be at play on Enceladus. Scientists suspect methanogenesis may have also played out on early Earth, contributing to the origin of life. But the new research indicates more varied and powerful chemical energy sources are occurring within Enceladus' ocean... Now, the study authors want to investigate how diluted the organic compounds are within the subsurface ocean because the dilution of these compounds could determine whether Enceladus could support life. In the future, astronomers hope to send a dedicated mission to investigate Enceladus, which could provide a definitive answer as to whether life exists in the ocean world. "Our work provides further evidence that Enceladus is host to some of the most important molecules for both creating the building blocks of life and for sustaining that life through metabolic reactions," accoding to one of the study's lead authors. "Not only does Enceladus seem to meet the basic requirements for habitability, we now have an idea about how complex biomolecules could form there, and what sort of chemical pathways might be involved."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Earlier this month, Amazon came under fire as the Los Angeles Times reported on a leaked confidential document that "reveals an extensive public relations strategy by Amazon to donate to community groups, school districts, institutions and charities" to advance the company's business objectives. "We will not fund organizations that have positioned themselves antagonistically toward our interests," explained Amazon officials of the decision to cut off donations to the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture after it ran an exhibit ("Burn Them All Down") that the artist called a commentary on how public officials were not listening to community concerns about the growing number of Amazon warehouses in Southern California's Inland Empire neighborhoods... Interestingly on the same day the Los Angeles Times was sounding the alarm on Amazon philanthropy, the White House and National Science Foundation (NSF) held a White House-hosted event on K-12 AI education. There it was announced that the Amazon-backed nonprofit Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) will develop new K-12 computer science standards that incorporate AI into foundational computer science education with support from the NSF, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. CSTA separately announced it had received a $1.5 million donation from Amazon to "support efforts to update the CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards to reflect the rapid advancements in technologies like artificial intelligence (AI)," adding that the CSTA standards - which CSTA credited Microsoft Philanthropies for helping to advance - "serve as a model for CS teaching and learning across grades K-12" in 42 states. The announcements, the White House noted, came during Computer Science Education Week, the signature event of which is Amazon, Google, and Microsoft-backed Code.org's Hour of Code (which was AI-themed this year), for which Amazon, Google, and Microsoft - not teachers - provided the event's signature tutorials used by the nation's K-12 students. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are also advisors to Code.org's TeachAI initiative, which was launched in May "to provide thought leadership to guide governments and educational leaders in aligning education with the needs of an increasingly AI-driven world and connecting the discussion of teaching with AI to teaching about AI and computer science."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN: The quest for new antibiotics is going back to the Stone Age. The urgency to identify possible candidates has never been greater as the global population faces nearly 5 million deaths every year that are associated with microbial resistance, according to the World Health Organization. A research team led by bioengineering pioneer Cesar de la Fuente is using artificial intelligence-based computational methods to mine genetic information from extinct human relatives such as Neanderthals and long-gone ice age creatures such as the woolly mammoth and giant sloth. The scientists say some of these small protein, or peptide, molecules they have identified have bacteria-fighting powers that may inspire new drugs to fight infections in humans. The innovative work also opens up a completely new way to think about drug discovery. "It has enabled us to uncover new sequences, new types of molecules that we have not previously found in living organisms, expanding the way we think about molecular diversity," said de la Fuente, Presidential Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he heads the machine biology group. "Bacteria from today have never faced those molecules so they may give us a better opportunity at targeting the pathogens that are problematic today...." The idea to look at extinct molecules came up during a lab brainstorm when the blockbuster movie "Jurassic Park" was mentioned. "The notion (in the film) was to bring back entire organisms, and obviously, they had a lot of issues," De la Fuente said. His team started thinking about a more feasible idea: "Why not bring back molecules from the past?" Advances in the recovery of ancient DNA from fossils mean that detailed libraries of genetic information about extinct human relatives and long-lost animals are now publicly available... In research expected to publish next year, de la Fuente and his colleagues have developed a new deep-learning model to explore what he describes as the "extinctome" - the protein sequences of 208 extinct organisms for which detailed genetic information is available. The team found more than 11,000 previously unknown potential antimicrobial peptides unique to extinct organisms and synthesized promising candidates... He said that the peptides they discovered displayed "excellent anti-infective activity" in mice. "Molecular de-extinction offers a unique opportunity to combat antibiotic resistance by resurrecting and tapping into the power of molecules from the past," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes this report from Bloomberg:The U.S. doubts whether Huawei Technologies Co. can produce the advanced chip in its new smartphone at the scale or performance threshold necessary to meet market demand, a senior Commerce Department official told lawmakers Tuesday. "Neither the performance nor yields may match the market of the device," Thea Kendler, assistant secretary for export administration, said during testimony before a House Foreign Affairs Committee oversight panel. "Moreover, the semiconductor chip that is inside that phone is a poorer performance than what they had years ago," Kendler said. "So our export controls are meaningful in slowing China's advanced technology acquisition...." The [U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security] is under pressure from Republicans to be tougher on Huawei and its chipmaking partner Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp [or SMIC]. Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul and others have called for the Bureau of Industry and Security to fully cut off both firms from their American suppliers. U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told Bloomberg News in a Monday interview that the U.S. will take the "strongest possible" action to protect its national security following the breakthrough, while declining to confirm the existence of an investigation into Huawei or SMIC.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this week Google Maps stopped storing user location histories in the cloud. But why did Google make this move?Bloomberg reports that it was "so that the company no longer has access to users' individual location histories, cutting off its ability to respond to law enforcement warrants that ask for data on everyone who was in the vicinity of a crime."The company said Thursday that for users who have it enabled, location data will soon be saved directly on users' devices, blocking Google from being able to see it, and, by extension, blocking law enforcement from being able to demand that information from Google. "Your location information is personal," said Marlo McGriff, director of product for Google Maps, in the blog post. "We're committed to keeping it safe, private and in your control." The change comes three months after a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation that found police across the US were increasingly using warrants to obtain location and search data from Google, even for nonviolent cases, and even for people who had nothing to do with the crime. "It's well past time," said Jennifer Lynch, the general counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that defends digital civil liberties. "We've been calling on Google to make these changes for years, and I think it's fantastic for Google users, because it means that they can take advantage of features like location history without having to fear that the police will get access to all of that data." Google said it would roll out the changes gradually through the next year on its own Android and Apple Inc.'s iOS mobile operating systems, and that users will receive a notification when the update comes to their account. The company won't be able to respond to new geofence warrants once the update is complete, including for people who choose to save encrypted backups of their location data to the cloud. The EFF general counsel also pointed out to Bloomberg that "nobody else has been storing and collecting data in the same way as Google." (Apple, for example, is technically unable to provide the same data to police.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2020 a NASA spacecraft visited the asteroid Bennu. In October it returned to earth with a sample. Monday scientists got their first data about it at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union - which is a truly big deal. "Before Earth had biology, it had chemistry," writes the Washington Post. "How the one followed from the other - how a bunch of boring molecules transformed themselves into this special thing we call life - is arguably the greatest unknown in science."The mission's top scientist, Dante Lauretta... showed slides with a long list of intriguing molecules, including carbon-based organics, in the grains and pebbles retrieved from Bennu. They will shine light on the molecular building blocks of the solar system and "maybe - still early phase - maybe insights into the origin of life." This analysis has only just started. The team has not yet released a formal scientific paper. In his lecture, Lauretta cited one interesting triangular, light-colored stone, which he said contained something he'd never seen before in a meteorite. "It's a head-scratcher right now. What is this material?" he said. In an interview after the lecture, Lauretta said almost 5 percent of the sample is carbon. "That is a very carbon-rich sample - the richest we have in all our extraterrestrial material. ... We're still unraveling the complex organic chemistry, but it looks promising to really understand: Did these carbon-rich asteroids deliver fundamental molecules that may have gone on to contribute to the origin of life...?" This space dirt has astrobiological import, though. By looking at prebiotic chemistry on Bennu, scientists will have a better idea what they are looking at if and when they find suspicious molecules elsewhere in the solar system, such as on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus. "This is almost the perfect laboratory control from non-biological chemistry," Glavin said. "This better prepares us for our search for life on Mars, or Europa or Enceladus - places that might have had life at one point." Space.com quotes Lauretta as saying "We definitely have hydrated, organic-rich remnants from the early solar system, which is exactly what we were hoping when we first conceived this mission almost 20 years ago."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: On Friday, two days after Threads finally started publicly testing ActivityPub integration, Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared a thread on Threads detailing the company's plans for its continued integration with the fediverse. Right now, it's possible to follow a few Threads accounts (including Mosseri's) from other platforms, but Meta has much bigger plans for Threads interoperability that Mosseri says will take "the better part of a year" to realize... Mosseri says that the Threads team wants to make it so the option to follow a Threads account on other platforms is available to "all public accounts on Threads, not just a handful of testers." The Threads team wants to let replies from other platforms show up inside of Threads. According to the article, Threads is also planning to support the ability to follow non-Threads fediverse accounts - and even taking that openness in the other direction. "Eventually, it should also be possible to enable creators to leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app / server," Mosseri writes. Flipboard and Wordpress already allow ActivityPub integration, according to NBC News. They estimate there's 11 million users of the Fediverse now, "the vast majority of them on Mastodon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Unlike automobiles, jumbo jets cannot run on batteries," notes the Washington Post. So Friday the White unveiled a plan for "subsidizing sustainable aviation fuels" - which could also give the U.S. a leg up in a brand new industry:Senior White House officials said the program would make the airline industry cleaner while bringing prosperity to rural America. But environmental groups and some scientists expressed reservations about the plan, which would award subsidies based on a scientific model that has previously been used to justify incentives for corn-based ethanol. Studies have found the gasoline additive is exacerbating climate change. The new tax credits, created through President Biden's signature climate law, are meant to spur production of jet fuels that create no more than half the emissions of the petroleum-based product. Each gallon of such fuel qualifies for a tax credit up to $1.75 per gallon. "The concern is they will end up subsidizing fuels that take an enormous amount of land to produce," said Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University... Administration officials said on a call with reporters Thursday that they are carefully weighing such concerns. Agencies are in the process of updating the scientific model for gauging climate friendliness of jet fuels, they said, and it will be revised to factor in the emissions impact of cropland converted from food to fuel production. Federal agencies plan to complete their revisions by March 1. "The sustainable aviation fuel industry is a potential 36 billion gallon industry that for all intents and purposes is just getting started," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said on the call. "This is a big, big deal."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: It's a question that comes up all the time on Reddit. Etsy even created a special page for programmer-themed gift suggestions (showing more than 5,000 results). While CNET sticks to broader lists of "tech gifts" - and a separate list for "Star Wars gifts" - other sites around the web have been specifically honing in on programmer-specific suggestions. (Blue light-blocking glasses... A giant rubber duck... The world's strongest coffee... A printer that transfers digital images onto cheese...) So while in years past Amazon has said they laughed at customer reviews for cans of uranium, this year Amazon has now added a special section that's entirely dedicated to Gifts for Computer Programmers, according to this funny rundown of 2023's "Gifts for Programmers" (that ends up recommending ChatGPT gift cards and backyard office sheds): From the article:[Amazon's Gifts for Programmers section] shows over 3,000 results, with geek-friendly subcategories like "Glassware & Drinkware" and "Novelty Clothing"... For the coder in your life, Amazon offers everything from brain-teasing programming puzzles to computer-themed jigsaw puzzles. Of course, there's also a wide selection of obligatory funny t-shirts... But this year there's also tech-themed ties and motherboard-patterned socks... Some programmers, though, might prefer a gift that's both fun and educational. And what's more entertaining than using your Python skills to program a toy robot dog...? But if you're shopping for someone who's more of a cat person, Petoi sells a kit for building a programmable (and open source) cat robot named "Nybble". The sophisticated Arduino-powered feline can be programmed with Python and C++ (as well as block-based coding)... [part of] the new community that's building around "OpenCat", the company's own quadruped robotic pet framework (open sourced on GitHub).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from : Microsoft Research, the blue sky division of the software giant, [...] announced the release of its Phi-2 small language model (SML), a text-to-text AI program that is "small enough to run on a laptop or mobile device," according to a post on X. At the same time, Phi-2 with its 2.7 billion parameters (connections between artificial neurons) boasts performance that is comparable to other, much larger models including Meta's Llama 2-7B with its 7 billion parameters and even Mistral-7B, another 7 billion parameter model. Microsoft researchers also noted in their blog post on the Phi-2 release that it outperforms Google's brand new Gemini Nano 2 model despite it having half a billion more parameters, and delivers less "toxicity" and bias in its responses than Llama 2. Microsoft also couldn't resist taking a little dig at Google's now much-criticized, staged demo video for Gemini in which it showed off how its forthcoming largest and most powerful new AI model, Gemini Ultra, was able to solve fairly complex physics problems and even correct students' mistakes on them. As it turned out, even though it is likely a fraction of the size of Gemini Ultra, Phi-2 also was able to correctly answer the question and correct the student using the same prompts. However, despite these encouraging findings, there is a big limitation with Phi-2, at least for the time being: it is licensed only for "research purposes only," not commercial usage, under a custom Microsoft Research License, which further states Phi-2 may only be used for "non-commercial, non-revenue generating, research purposes." So, businesses looking to build products atop it are out of luck.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Solana Saga smartphones sales are surging after arbitrage traders realized every phone comes with an airdrop of BONK meme coins valued at more than the cost of the hardware. "Saga sales have >10x'd in the past 48 hours, and are now on track to sell out before the new year," said Solana co-founder Raj Gokal in a post on X. As a result, Gokal's counterpart, Anatoly Yakovenko, said they'll need to raise the price. CoinDesk reports: The euphoria around BONK -- Solana's dog-themed equivalent to Dogecoin -- has led to a turnaround story for Saga, which just one week ago faced dimming prospects amid forgettable sales figures. Saga is a blockchain-enabled smartphone with special features for storing one's crypto securely on the phone's own hardware. The Saga Discord server exploded on Thursday with newcomers declaring they just bought the phone and wanted to get the airdrop. According to posts on the Discord server, the BONK airdrop is available to those who download the BONK app from Saga's crypto-forward custom app store."When you physically have the phone you will be able to mint 'Genesis token' through the 'dApp store, [this] token is eligible to claim the bonk drop," said a user who identified themselves as an employee of Solana Mobile in the Discord server. "The bonk drop is NOT forever, at some point that promotion will end," the user, whose screen name was Jax, said in the Discord. "As of right now the claim is live and is up to the bonk team on when they'd want to close it. No end date yet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers from the City University of Hong Kong have developed a special antenna that can control all five important aspects of electromagnetic waves using computer software. Interesting Engineering reports: The antenna, which they have named 'microwave universal metasurface antenna,' is capable of dynamically, simultaneously, independently, and precisely manipulating all the essential properties of electromagnetic waves through software control. [...] The antenna adjusts how strong the waves are, their timing, frequency, direction, and even the way they vibrate, all at the same time. It's the first time anyone has made an antenna that can do all these things simultaneously, marking a significant breakthrough in this field. The antenna is special because it can be used in advanced information systems, like the ones we might have in the future. It's great for handling a lot of data and keeping that data very safe. It can also transfer power wirelessly, meaning it can charge devices without physical connections. One cool thing about this antenna is that it can control the direction of its signals, adding an extra layer of privacy and security. This makes it a good choice for communication systems where we want to ensure nobody can eavesdrop or secretly listen in on our conversations. Although demonstrated in the microwave band, the UMA's concept can be expanded to terahertz frequencies using specific technologies, enabling applications in augmented reality, holography, integrated sensing and communications for 6G, quantum optics, and quantum information science, noted the researchers in their study. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A NASA telescope has captured the biggest solar flare in years, which temporarily knocked out radio communication on Earth. The sun spit out the huge flare on Thursday, resulting in two hours of radio interference in parts of the U.S. and other sunlit parts of the world. Scientists said it was the biggest flare since 2017. Multiple pilots reported communication disruptions, with the impact felt across the country, said the government's Space Weather Prediction Center. Scientists are now monitoring this sunspot region and analyzing for a possible outburst of plasma from the sun, also known as a coronal mass ejection, directed at Earth. The eruption occurred in the far northwest section of the sun, according to the center. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the action in extreme ultraviolet light, recording the powerful surge of energy as a huge, bright flash. Launched in 2010, the spacecraft is in an extremely high orbit around Earth, where it constantly monitors the sun. The sun is nearing the peak of its 11-year or so solar cycle. Maximum sunspot activity is predicted for 2025.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alex Williams reports via The New York Times: Vera Molnar, a Hungarian-born artist who has been called the godmother of generative art for her pioneering digital work, which started with the hulking computers of the 1960s and evolved through the current age of NFTs, died on Dec. 7 in Paris. She was 99. Her death was announced on social media by the Pompidou Center in Paris, which is scheduled to present a major exhibition of her work in February. Ms. Molnar had lived in Paris since 1947. While her computer-aided paintings and drawings, which drew inspiration from geometric works by Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, were eventually exhibited in major museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, her work was not always embraced early in her career. Ms. Molnar in fact began to employ the principles of computation in her work years before she gained access to an actual computer. In 1959, she began implementing a concept she called "Machine Imaginaire" -- imaginary machine. This analog approach involved using simple algorithms to guide the placement of lines and shapes for works that she produced by hand, on grid paper. She took her first step into the silicon age in 1968, when she got access to a computer at a university research laboratory in Paris. In the days when computers were generally reserved for scientific or military applications, it took a combination of gumption and '60s idealism for an artist to attempt to gain access to a machine that was "very complicated and expensive," she once said, adding, "They were selling calculation time in seconds." [...] Making art on Apollo-era computers was anything but intuitive. Ms. Molnar had to learn early computer languages like Basic and Fortran and enter her data with punch cards, and she had to wait several days for the results, which were transferred to paper with a plotter printer. One early series, "Interruptions," involved a vast sea of tiny lines on a white background. As ARTNews noted in a recent obituary: "She would set up a series of straight lines, then rotate some, causing her rigorous set of marks to be thrown out of alignment. Then, to inject further chaos, she would randomly erase certain portions, resulting in blank areas amid a sea of lines." Another series, "(Des)Ordres" (1974), involved seemingly orderly patterns of concentric squares, which she tweaked to make them appear slightly disordered, as if they were vibrating. Over the years, Ms. Molnar continued to explore the tensions between machine-like perfection and the chaos of life itself, as with her 1976 plotter drawing "1% of Disorder," another deconstructed pattern of concentric squares. "I love order, but I can't stand it," she told Mr. Obrist. "I make mistakes, I stutter, I mix up my words." And so, she concluded, "chaos, perhaps, came from this." [...] Her career continued to expand in scope in the 1970s. She began using computers with screens, which allowed her to instantly assess the results of her codes and adjust accordingly. With screens, it was "like a conversation, like a real pictorial process," she said in a recent interview with the generative art creator and entrepreneur Erick Calderon. "You move the 'brush' and you see immediately if it suits you or not." [...] Earlier this year, she cemented her legacy in the world of blockchain with "Themes and Variations," a generative art series of more than 500 works using NFT technology that was created in collaboration with the artist and designer Martin Grasser and sold through Sotheby's. The series fetched $1.2 million in sales.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox's Android browser now has over 450 new extensions available on Mozilla's Firefox Browser Add-ons page. "These extensions allow users to customize the mobile browser to their needs, whether that involves adding anti-tracking privacy tools, content blockers, productivity tools or other features that introduce new experiences, like streaming music, or those that allow users to personalize the browser's user interface -- like switching all websites to a dark mode or offering a better way to manage tabs," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The lack of extensions has been an issue for Firefox for Android users for years following the 2020 launch of a rebuilt version of the mobile browser that replaced the app's previous codebase with "GeckoView," a new, faster and more customizable browser engine. At the time, the company said it made a decision to limit the supported extensions to only those within the "Recommended Extensions" program -- meaning those that were commonly installed by end users. This choice allowed Mozilla to quickly get the new browser into consumers' hands, but squashed the long tail of extension development -- and opportunity for software developers focused on this market. While Firefox's nightly builds later enabled more extensions, the publicly available Firefox for Android browser did not have access to these hundreds of extensions, meaning most of Firefox's mainstream users were also without. In August of this year, Mozilla said it had finally completed the infrastructure needed to bring the open extension ecosystem back to Firefox for Android. It then began to test and make hundreds more extensions available to Firefox for Android users, culminating in today's news that there are now 450+ extensions available.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, has been secretly using OpenAI's technology to develop its own competing large language model (LLM). "This practice is generally considered a faux pas in the AI world," writes The Verge's Alex Heath. "It's also in direct violation of OpenAI's terms of service, which state that its model output can't be used 'to develop any artificial intelligence models that compete with our products and services.'" From the report: Nevertheless, internal ByteDance documents shared with me confirm that the OpenAI API has been relied on to develop its foundational LLM, codenamed Project Seed, during nearly every phase of development, including for training and evaluating the model.Employees involved are well aware of the implications; I've seen conversations on Lark, ByteDance's internal communication platform for employees, about how to "whitewash" the evidence through "data desensitization." The misuse is so rampant that Project Seed employees regularly hit their max allowance for API access. Most of the company's GPT usage has been done through Microsoft's Azure program, which has the same policy as OpenAI. In response, OpenAI said that it has suspended ByteDance's account: "All API customers must adhere to our usage policies to ensure that our technology is used for good. While ByteDance's use of our API was minimal, we have suspended their account while we further investigate. If we discover that their usage doesn't follow these policies, we will ask them to make necessary changes or terminate their account."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little over three years have passed since McDonald's sent out an email to thousands of its restaurant owners around the world that abruptly cut short the future ofa three-person startup called Kytch -- and with it, perhaps one of McDonald's best chances for fixing its famously out-of-order ice cream machines. Until then, Kytch had been selling McDonald's restaurant owners a popular internet-connected gadget designed to attach to their notoriously fragile and often broken soft-serve McFlurry dispensers, manufactured by McDonalds equipment partner Taylor. The Kytch device would essentially hack into the ice cream machine's internals, monitor its operations, and send diagnostic data over the internet to an owner or manager to help keep it running. But despite Kytch's efforts to solve the Golden Arches' intractable ice cream problems, a McDonald's email in November 2020 warned its franchisees not to use Kytch, stating that it represented a safety hazard for staff. Kytch says its sales dried up practically overnight. Now, after years of litigation, the ice-cream-hacking entrepreneurs have unearthed evidence that they say shows that Taylor, the soft-serve machine maker, helped engineer McDonald's Kytch-killing email -- kneecapping the startup not because of any safety concern, but in a coordinated effort to undermine a potential competitor. And Taylor's alleged order, as Kytch now describes it, came all the way from the top. On Wednesday, Kytch filed a newly unredacted motion for summary adjudication in its lawsuit against Taylor for alleged trade libel, tortious interference, and other claims. The new motion, which replaces a redacted version from August, refers to internal emails Taylor released in the discovery phase of the lawsuit, which were quietly unsealed over the summer. The motion focuses in particular on one email from Timothy FitzGerald, the CEO of Taylor parent company Middleby, that appears to suggest that either Middleby or McDonald's send a communication to McDonald's franchise owners to dissuade them from using Kytch's device. "Not sure if there is anything we can do to slow up the franchise community on the other solution," FitzGerald wrote on October 17, 2020. "Not sure what communication from either McD or Midd can or will go out." In their legal filing, the Kytch cofounders, of course, interpret "the other solution" to mean their product. In fact, FitzGerald's message was sent in an email thread that included Middleby's then COO, David Brewer, who had wondered earlier whether Middleby could instead acquire Kytch. Another Middleby executive responded to FitzGerald on October 17 to write that Taylor and McDonald's had already met the previous day to discuss sending out a message to franchisees about McDonald's lack of support for Kytch. But Jeremy O'Sullivan, a Kytch cofounder, claims -- and Kytch argues in its legal motion -- that FitzGerald's email nonetheless proves Taylor's intent to hamstring a potential rival. "It's the smoking gun," O'Sullivan says of the email. "He's plotting our demise."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Delta Dental of California announced that they've suffered a data breach that exposed the personal data of almost seven million patients. BleepingComputer reports: Delta Dental of California is a dental insurance provider that covers 45 million people across 15 states and is part of the Delta Dental Plans Association. According to a Delta Dental of California data breach notification (PDF), the company suffered unauthorized access by threat actors through the MOVEit file transfer software application. The software was vulnerable to a zero-day SQL injection flaw leading to remote code execution, tracked as CVE-2023-34362, which the Clop ransomware gang leveraged to breach thousands of organizations worldwide. Delta Dental of California learned about the compromise on June 1, 2023, and five days later, following an internal investigation, it confirmed that unauthorized actors had accessed and stolen data from its systems between May 27 and May 30, 2023. The second, more lengthy investigation to determine the exact impact of the security incident was completed on November 27, 2023. Based on this, the data breach has so far impacted 6,928,932 customers of Delta Dental of California, who had their names, financial account numbers, and credit/debit card numbers, including security codes, exposed. Delta Dental of California provides 24 months of free credit monitoring and identity theft protection services to impacted patients to mitigate the risk of their exposed data. Details on enrolling in the program are enclosed in the personal notices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Malak Saleh reports via Engadget: Twitch has quickly taken back its policy update that permitted users to post sexual content as long as it was labeled. In another update, the company said it is not going to allow any depictions of real or fictional nudity on its streaming platform. After giving users the green light to post "artistic nudity," Twitch says some streamers created content that violated policy. The media streamed in response to the initial approval of sexually explicit content on Twitch was "met with community concern," according to the update. The company said, "We have decided that we went too far with this change." While a huge part of the initial decision was to allow for the "digital depiction" of artistic nudity, the company clarified that digital depictions of sexual content is a concern when artificial intelligence can be used to develop realistic images and that it can be difficult to discern between what's been digitally produced and real photography.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some TikTok users may have skipped reviewing an update to TikTok's terms of service this summer that shakes up the process for filing a legal dispute against the app. According to The New York Times, changes that TikTok "quietly" made to its terms suggest that the popular app has spent the back half of 2023 preparing for a wave of legal battles. In July, TikTok overhauled its rules for dispute resolution, pivoting from requiring private arbitration to insisting that legal complaints be filed in either the US District Court for the Central District of California or the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles. Legal experts told the Times this could be a way for TikTok to dodge arbitration claims filed en masse that can cost companies millions more in fees than they expected to pay through individual arbitration. Perhaps most significantly, TikTok also added a section to its terms that mandates that all legal complaints be filed within one year of any alleged harm caused by using the app. The terms now say that TikTok users "forever waive" rights to pursue any older claims. And unlike a prior version of TikTok's terms of service archived in May 2023, users do not seem to have any options to opt out of waiving their rights. Lawyers told the Times that these changes could make it more challenging for TikTok users to pursue legal action at a time when federal agencies are heavily scrutinizing the app and complaints about certain TikTok features allegedly harming kids are mounting.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday denied a petition by the country's largest crypto exchange, Coinbase Global, seeking new rules from the agency for the digital asset sector. From a report: The five-member body, in a 3-2 vote, said it would not propose new rules because it fundamentally disagreed that current regulations are "unworkable" for the crypto sphere, as Coinbase has argued. The letter marked the latest in a broader tug-of-war between the crypto sector and the top U.S. markets regulator, which has repeatedly said most crypto tokens are securities and subject to its jurisdiction. The agency has sued several crypto companies, including Coinbase, for listing and trading crypto tokens which it says should be registered as securities. "Existing laws and regulations apply to the crypto securities markets," SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in a separate statement supporting the decision. In 2022, the company pressed the SEC to create a bespoke set of rules for the crypto sector, arguing that existing U.S. securities laws are inadequate. In April, Coinbase appealed to a judge to force the SEC to respond to the petition.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A marketing team within media giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims it has the capability to listen to ambient conversations of consumers through embedded microphones in smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices to gather data and use it to target ads, according to a review of CMG marketing materials by 404 Media and details from a pitch given to an outside marketing professional. From a report: Called "Active Listening," CMG claims the capability can identify potential customers "based on casual conversations in real time." The news signals that what a huge swath of the public has believed for years -- that smartphones are listening to people in order to deliver ads -- may finally be a reality in certain situations. Until now, there was no evidence that such a capability actually existed, but its myth permeated due to how sophisticated other ad tracking methods have become. It is not immediately clear if the capability CMG is advertising and claims works is being used on devices in the market today, but the company notes it is "a marketing technique fit for the future. Available today." 404 Media also found a representative of the company on LinkedIn explicitly asking interested parties to contact them about the product. One marketing professional pitched by CMG on the tech said a CMG representative explained the prices of the service to them. "What would it mean for your business if you could target potential clients who are actively discussing their need for your services in their day-to-day conversations? No, it's not a Black Mirror episode -- it's Voice Data, and CMG has the capabilities to use it to your business advantage," CMG's website reads.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China on Friday proposed a four-tier classification to help it respond to data security incidents, highlighting Beijing's concern with large-scale data leaks and hacking within its borders. From a report: The plan, which is currently soliciting opinions from the public, proposes a four-tier, colour-coded system depending on the degree of harm inflicted upon national security, a company's online and information network, or the running of the economy. According to the plan, incidents that involve losses surpassing 1 billion yuan ($141 million) and affect the personal information of over 100 million people, or the "sensitive" information of over 10 million people, will be classed as "especially grave," to which a red warning must be issued. The plan demands that in response to red and orange warnings, the involved companies and relevant local regulatory authorities must establish a 24-hour work rota to address the incident and MIIT must be notified of the data breach within ten minutes of the incident happening, among other measures.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Government researchers in the U.S. are studying methods to help identify hackers based on the code they use to carry out cyberattacks. From a report: The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the lead federal research agency for the intelligence community, plans to develop technologies that could speed up investigations for identifying perpetrators of cyberattacks. "The number of attacks is increasing far more than the number of forensic experts that are available to go after these attacks," said Kristopher Reese, who is managing the research program at IARPA and holds a doctorate in computer science and engineering. The lack of forensic resources means hackers who target small organizations or companies that don't fall under critical infrastructure sectors often escape identification, he said. Tools that are developed as part of the planned 30-month research project won't replace human analysts, who are crucial for identifying social and political dynamics that might explain why a particular hacking group targeted a victim, Reese said. But using artificial intelligence to analyze code used in cyberattacks will make investigations more efficient, he said. IARPA is accepting pitches from researchers until next month and plans to begin research next summer. [...] There hasn't been enough research into how analyzing code can reveal a hacker's identity, Reese said. Behavioral traits evident in code can reveal specific countries where hackers might be from or even the university where they were trained, he said. Some companies also have style guides outlining how employees should program, which could leave traces that indicate a person worked there, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SonicSpike writes: With several asterisks, qualification and caveats, Mickey Mouse in his earliest form will be the leader of the band of characters, films and books that will become public domain as the year turns to 2024. In a moment many close observers thought might never come, at least one version of the quintessential piece of intellectual property and perhaps the most iconic character in American pop culture will be free from Disney's copyright as his first screen release, the 1928 short "Steamboat Willie," featuring both Mickey and Minnie Mouse, becomes available for public use. "This is it. This is Mickey Mouse. This is exciting because it's kind of symbolic," said Jennifer Jenkins, a professor of law and director of Duke's Center for the Study of Public Domain, who writes an annual Jan. 1 column for "Public Domain Day." "I kind of feel like the pipe on the steamboat, like expelling smoke. It's so exciting." U.S. law allows a copyright to be held for 95 years after Congress expanded it several times during Mickey's life.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ten years ago, a Dutch scientist unveiled a $330,000 lab-grown hamburger made from cow cells grown in petri dishes. It took six weeks to culture the patty. A chef cooked it onstage as journalists watched. Reactions ranged from "unpleasant" to "beeflike." The scientist expected supermarket sales in a decade. His company and others have since raised over $2 billion but have little to show, only recently making one pound of chicken monthly. Despite bold promises of mass production, low emissions, and better nutrition, commercial viability remains elusive. Bloomberg Business: The company [Upside Foods], in a letter from its attorney to Bloomberg Businessweek, says plans for scaling up have been an evolution saddled with "realities and complexities of doing something that has never been done before. Innovation rarely happens in a straight and continuous line." The dream is moist, meaty flesh self-multiplying ad infinitum in high-tech, stainless steel cell-growing chambers. But according to internal company documentation and eight former employees, most of whom requested anonymity because they don't have permission to discuss confidential information, Upside at the moment is actually growing just minuscule numbers of chicken skin-type cells in small plastic bottles, then scraping them out gram by gram to compress and mold them into a single forkful of flesh. This labor-intensive chicken has higher levels of cholesterol and lead than the real thing, publicly available company documentation shows. Even if that sounds remotely desirable, some scientists say the whole energy-intensive endeavor may actually be worse for the environment, especially with chicken, which has the smallest carbon footprint of anything at the local butcher. All of which points to this question: Why exactly are we chasing lab-grown chicken?[...]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony Group's Naughty Dog studio has cancelled an online version of its popular console game The Last of Us. From a report: Naughty Dog announced today that the multiplayer spin-off of the hit series is no longer in development, citing concerns about managing ongoing content for a live-service game while still trying to produce the single-player blockbusters the PlayStation studio is famous for. "We realize many of you have been anticipating news around the project that we've been calling The Last of Us Online," Naughty Dog wrote in an update. "There's no easy way to say this: We've made the incredibly difficult decision to stop development on that game." The studio said that as production on the project ramped up, it became clear that "we'd have to put all our studio resources behind supporting post launch content for years to come, severely impacting development on future single-player games." The choices were apparently between becoming a "solely live-service games studio" in the mold of modern day Bungie, which makes Destiny 2, or "continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog's heritage."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a cavernous theater lit up with the green shapes of camels and palms at COP28 in Dubai, ecologist Thomas Crowther, former chief scientific adviser for the United Nations' Trillion Trees Campaign, was doing something he never would have expected a few years ago: begging environmental ministers to stop planting so many trees. From a report: Mass plantations are not the environmental solution they're purported to be, Crowther argued when he took the floor on December 9 for one of the summit's "Nature Day" events. The potential of newly created forests to draw down carbon is often overstated. They can be harmful to biodiversity. Above all, they are really damaging when used, as they often are, as avoidance offsets-- "as an excuse to avoid cutting emissions," Crowther said. The popularity of planting new trees is a problem -- at least partly -- of Crowther's own making. In 2019, his lab at ETH Zurich found that the Earth had room for an additional 1.2 trillion trees, which, the lab's research suggested, could suck down as much as two-thirds of the carbon that humans have historically emitted into the atmosphere. "This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date," the study said. Crowther subsequently gave dozens of interviews to that effect. This seemingly easy climate solution sparked a tree-planting craze by companies and leaders eager to burnish their green credentials without actually cutting their emissions, from Shell to Donald Trump. It also provoked a squall of criticism from scientists, who argued that the Crowther study had vastly overestimated the land suitable for forest restoration and the amount of carbon it could draw down. (The study authors later corrected the paper to say tree restoration was only "one of the most effective" solutions, and could suck down at most one-third of the atmospheric carbon, with large uncertainties.) Crowther, who says his message was misinterpreted, put out a more nuanced paper last month, which shows that preserving existing forests can have a greater climate impact than planting trees. He then brought the results to COP28 to "kill greenwashing" of the kind that his previous study seemed to encourage -- that is, using unreliable evidence on the benefits of planting trees as an excuse to keep on emitting carbon. "Killing greenwashing doesn't mean stop investing in nature," he says. "It means doing it right. It means distributing wealth to the Indigenous populations and farmers and communities who are living with biodiversity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple will expand its use of advanced OLED screens to iPads and MacBooks and is considering eventually introducing foldable tablets, a move set to further shake up the $150 billion display industry as it shifts away from traditional LCD screens, Asian news outlet Nikkei reported Friday. From the report: OLED, or organic light-emitting diode, displays are already used in most premium smartphones, including iPhones. Apple plans to deploy the tech in its high-end iPads next year, multiple tech industry executives told Nikkei Asia. An OLED MacBook model is also under development for production in the second half of 2025 at the earliest, the people said. The growing penetration of OLED is a significant win for Samsung Display and LG Display of South Korea and China's BOE Technology Holding, which have all bet heavily on this expensive display technology. On the flip side, it could be a blow to display makers that do not have much presence in this segment, including JDI and Sharp of Japan, and AUO and Innolux of Taiwan. Apple has also started evaluating the possibility of making foldable iPads after it deploys the flexible OLED screens on the tablet, but it does not have a concrete timeline for doing so, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The iPhone maker is not the first company to adopt OLED displays for tablets. Huawei, for instance, has been a significant driver of this trend, which in turn has helped strengthen the Chinese display supply chain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an interview with Lex Fridman, Jeff Bezos candidly acknowledged Blue Origin's slow progress (compared to SpaceX). From a report: "Blue Origin needs to be much faster, and it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago," he said. "I wanted to come in, and Blue Origin needs me right now. Adding some energy, some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster. And we're going to." How is Blue Origin going to speed up? "We're going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry," he said. "We're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risks, making those decisions quickly. You know, being bold on those things. And having the right culture that supports that. You need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious. If there are five ways to do something, we'll study them, but let's go through them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After years of withholding viewership data, Netflix earlier this week released statistics showing its top viewed titles from January-June 2023. The winner with over 800 million hours watched was The Night Agent. Though the steamy, soapy Sex/Life scored over 120 million hours, the warm coming-of-age series Sex Education had under 30 million. Netflix claimed "success comes in all shapes and sizes," but co-CEO Ted Sarandos admitted the data guides business decisions. So while Netflix says stats aren't everything, pouring resources into sure bets like The Night Agent seems likely as competition grows post-Hot Strike Summer. The show is what some call "just OK TV" -- not offensive, not groundbreaking, but reliably watched. Wired adds: This era of Just OK also comes as Netflix captures the King of Reality TV throne. Shows like Love Is Blind and Selling Sunset are becoming cultural juggernauts, and the streamer shows no sign of slowing down, especially now that the Squid Game spinoff, Squid Game: The Challenge, is getting major traction. True, Netflix is still putting out artful content. A show like Wednesday, for example, had more than 507 million hours viewed and is also currently up for 12 Emmys. Netflix, on the whole, is nominated for a whopping 103 Emmys. That's impressive, but also, it's down from the 160 nods it got at its peak in 2020 and fewer than the 127 nabbed by (HBO) Max, which crushed thanks to shows like The White Lotus, The Last of Us, and Succession. You see where this is going. Netflix likes to tout its prestige shows, but also has to keep its paying customers, who left in droves in 2022 before partly coming back as Netflix cracked down on password sharing. To that end, it behooves Netflix to make more Ginny & Georgia, more Night Agent, more You. One analysis of the data found that the most-watched film, according to Netflix's data dump, was the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Mother, which accumulated about 250 million hours watched in six months. Variety puts that level of engagement up there with Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Not a bad showing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Soon after payment-processing giant Wirecard reported in June 2020 that nearly $2 billion had gone missing from its balance sheet, its chief operating officer Jan Marsalek boarded a private jet out of Austria. After a landing in Belarus, he was whisked by car to Moscow, where he got a Russian passport under an assumed name. Western intelligence and security officials now say they have reached the unsettling conclusion that Marsalek had likely been a Russian agent for nearly a decade. From a report: Marsalek already stands accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from investors. Following multiple international investigations, officials from intelligence, police and judiciary agencies in several countries now say the 43-year-old native of Austria used his defunct payments company to illegally help Russian spy agencies move money to fund covert operations around the world. One of the most wanted men in the world, Marsalek has also provided assistance to the mercenary organization of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late Russian warlord, and is now involved in the reconfiguration of his business empire in Africa on behalf of Russian officials from his new domicile in Dubai, according to Western intelligence. Wirecard got its start processing payments for pornography websites on its way to becoming an Internet finance behemoth. During its heyday, the company claimed to process $140 billion of transactions a year on behalf of a quarter million businesses, making it a rival of Square and PayPal. It was briefly valued at more than any German bank. Former associates remember Marsalek as a bon vivant who at one point rented a Munich mansion for 35,000 euros, or $38,000, a month. He was making millions of dollars a year in salary and crisscrossing the globe in private jets. He was also obsessed with the cloak-and-dagger world of espionage, often intimating that he had connections with intelligence officers, they say -- claims many dismissed as bluster.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Criminal suspects can refuse to provide phone passcodes to police under the US Constitution's Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, according to a unanimous ruling issued (PDF) today by Utah's state Supreme Court. The questions addressed in the ruling could eventually be taken up by the US Supreme Court, whether through review of this case or a similar one. The case involves Alfonso Valdez, who was arrested for kidnapping and assaulting his ex-girlfriend. Police officers obtained a search warrant for the contents of Valdez's phone but couldn't crack his passcode. Valdez refused to provide his passcode to a police detective. At his trial, the state "elicited testimony from the detective about Valdez's refusal to provide his passcode when asked," today's ruling said. "And during closing arguments, the State argued in rebuttal that Valdez's refusal and the resulting lack of evidence from his cell phone undermined the veracity of one of his defenses. The jury convicted Valdez." A court of appeals reversed the conviction, agreeing "with Valdez that he had a right under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution to refuse to provide his passcode, and that the State violated that right when it used his refusal against him at trial." The Utah Supreme Court affirmed the court of appeals ruling. The Valdez case does not involve an order to compel a suspect to unlock a device. Instead, "law enforcement asked Valdez to verbally provide his passcode," Utah justices wrote. "While these circumstances involve modern technology in a scenario that the Supreme Court has not yet addressed, we conclude that these facts present a more straightforward question that is answered by settled Fifth Amendment principles." Ruling against the state, the Utah Supreme Court said it "agree[s] with the court of appeals that verbally providing a cell phone passcode is a testimonial communication under the Fifth Amendment."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have pinpointed the cause of nausea and vomiting in pregnancy, "finding that the severity of illness is influenced by how much of a hormone called GDF15 the growing fetus makes," reports Science Magazine. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. From the report: GDF15 is present in the blood of nonpregnant people and is known to be associated with nausea; it's also been tested as a weight loss aid because of its tendency to suppress appetite. Levels of the hormone rise sharply in early pregnancy and increase throughout gestation. Pregnant people with higher GDF15 concentrations have been documented as having a higher risk of vomiting and nausea. Some researchers suggest the hormone-caused aversion to some smells and tastes might encourage an expectant parent to avoid foods potentially dangerous to the fetus. To find out more about GDF15 changes during pregnancy, University of Cambridge physician-scientist Stephen O'Rahilly and colleagues studied half a dozen pregnant people who were known from previous genetic screening to produce a slightly different version of the GDF15 protein from their fetuses. Researchers could take advantage of that difference to trace whether GDF15 in the parent's blood originated in the parental or fetal genome: Almost all of it came from the fetus, O'Rahilly says. The team also took a closer look at the link between GDF15 levels and pregnancy sickness. Consistent with previous research, questionnaires from more than 300 participants showed that people who reported vomiting and nausea had significantly higher levels of circulating GDF15 on average than people without these symptoms. The researchers also found elevated levels of GDF15 in an analysis of more than 50 women hospitalized with hyperemesis gravidarum. Still, hormone levels alone couldn't explain the difference in sickness severity. "There was a big overlap" in GDF15 levels between the groups, O'Rahilly says. He and co-author Marlena Fejzo, a researcher at the University of Southern California, suspected that people's sensitivity to GDF15 might also play a role. (Fejzo began to study the condition after her own pregnancy loss following hyperemesis gravidarum.) To test the idea, the researchers studied 10 nonpregnant people with a rare genetic variant known to carry a heightened risk of hyperemesis gravidarum. These people had reduced GDF15 levels in their blood, hinting that naturally low levels of the hormone might predispose someone to sickness during pregnancy. The researchers found the opposite when they asked 20 pregnant people with beta thalassemia, a blood disorder associated with high GDF15 levels, about their pregnancy symptoms: Just 5% of this group reported nausea or vomiting. O'Rahilly's lab found a similar pattern in animal experiments.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is, once again, having trouble transmitting any scientific or systems data back to Earth. "The 46-year-old spacecraft is capable of receiving commands, but a problem seems to have arisen with the probe's computers," reports Space.com. Slashdot readers quonset and ArchieBunker shared the news. From the report: Voyager 1's flight data system (FDS), which collects onboard engineering information and data from the spacecraft's scientific instruments, is no longer communicating as expected with the probe's telecommunications unit (TMU), according to a NASA blog post on Dec. 12. When functioning properly, the FDS compiles the spacecraft's info into a data package, which is then transmitted back to Earth using the TMU. Lately, that data package has been "stuck," the blog post said, "transmitting a repeating pattern of ones and zeros." Voyager's engineering team traced the problem back to the FDS, but it could be weeks before a solution is found. In May 2022, Voyager 1 experienced transmitting issues for several months before a workaround was found. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 experienced an unplanned "communications pause" earlier this year after a routine sequence of commands triggered a 2-degree change in the spacecraft's antenna orientation. This prevented it from receiving commands or transmitting data back to Earth until NASA fixed the issue a week later.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: In a paper published in Nature today, the researchers say it is the first time a large language model has been used to discover a solution to a long-standing scientific puzzle -- producing verifiable and valuable new information that did not previously exist. "It's not in the training data -- it wasn't even known," says coauthor Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind. Large language models have a reputation for making things up, not for providing new facts. Google DeepMind's new tool, called FunSearch, could change that. It shows that they can indeed make discoveries -- if they are coaxed just so, and if you throw out the majority of what they come up with. FunSearch (so called because it searches for mathematical functions, not because it's fun) continues a streak of discoveries in fundamental math and computer science that DeepMind has made using AI. First Alpha Tensor found a way to speed up a calculation at the heart of many different kinds of code, beating a 50-year record. Then AlphaDev found ways to make key algorithms used trillions of times a day run faster. Yet those tools did not use large language models. Built on top of DeepMind's game-playing AI AlphaZero, both solved math problems by treating them as if they were puzzles in Go or chess. The trouble is that they are stuck in their lanes, says Bernardino Romera-Paredes, a researcher at the company who worked on both AlphaTensor and FunSearch: "AlphaTensor is great at matrix multiplication, but basically nothing else." FunSearch takes a different tack. It combines a large language model called Codey, a version of Google's PaLM 2 that isfine-tuned on computer code, with other systems that reject incorrect or nonsensical answers and plug good ones back in. The researchers started by sketching out the problem they wanted to solve in Python, a popular programming language. But they left out the lines in the program that would specify how to solve it. That is where FunSearch comes in. It gets Codey to fill in the blanks -- in effect, to suggest code that will solve the problem. A second algorithm then checks and scores what Codey comes up with. The best suggestions -- even if not yet correct -- are saved and given back to Codey, which tries to complete the program again. After a couple of million suggestions and a few dozen repetitions of the overall process -- which took a few days -- FunSearch was able to come up with code that produced a correct and previously unknown solution to the cap set problem, which involves finding the largest size of a certain type of set. Imagine plotting dots on graph paper. [...] To test its versatility, the researchers used FunSearch to approach another hard problem in math: the bin packing problem, which involves trying to pack items into as few bins as possible. This is important for a range of applications in computer science, from data center management to e-commerce. FunSearch came up with a way to solve it that's faster than human-devised ones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emma Roth reports via The Verge: Google is releasing a tool to help users diagnose problems with their Pixel phones. Users can launch the app by entering #*#7287#*# on the dial pad, allowing them to check whether their phone is working correctly before or after a repair. There are a bunch of diagnostic tools available within the app. While users can run a full diagnostic test to detect issues across the entire device, there are also options to run individual tests for physical defects and problems affecting the phone's display, sensors, and connectivity. The new tool is available on all Pixel phones in English. Aside from the diagnostics app, Google is introducing redesigned repair manuals the company says are "easier for technicians and DIYers to use." Users can download repair manuals from Google's website in English and French, but they're only available for the Pixel Fold, Pixel 8, and Pixel 8 Pro for now. Google says it will add repair manuals for previous and future devices "in the coming months." There's also a new Repair Mode Google introduced earlier this month, which Pixel Phone owners can toggle on when their device is getting repaired. The feature is meant to protect users' private information while their phone is in the hands of a technician [...].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Natasha Singer reports via The New York Times: According to new research from Stanford University, the popularization of A.I. chatbots has not boosted overall cheating rates in schools (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). In surveys this year of more than 40 U.S. high schools, some 60 to 70 percent of students said they had recently engaged in cheating -- about the same percent as in previous years, Stanford education researchers said. "There was a panic that these A.I. models will allow a whole new way of doing something that could be construed as cheating," said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education who has surveyed high school students for more than a decade through an education nonprofit she co-founded. But "we're just not seeing the change in the data." ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI in San Francisco, began to capture the public imagination late last year with its ability to fabricate human-sounding essays and emails. Almost immediately, classroom technology boosters started promising that A.I. tools like ChatGPT would revolutionize education. And critics began warning that such tools -- which liberally make stuff up -- would enable widespread cheating, and amplify misinformation, in schools. Now the Stanford research, along with a recent report from the Pew Research Center, are challenging the notion that A.I. chatbots are upending public schools.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's parent company, Alphabet, is launching a new company called "Renew Home." The new company will pull in some other projects from Nest and the rest of Alphabet to become a supposed one-stop shop for power savings and clean energy usage. The core concept is partnering with power companies to obtain data about the current condition of the power grid and using that data to change consumer habits. The new company is bankrolled by Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), an Alphabet venture capital firm. The first existing service getting pulled into Renew Home is Nest Renew. This service for Nest Thermostats uses power company data to tell consumers how their electricity is being generated and what it costs. That data lets your thermostat do things like automatically shift heating and cooling to times of day when energy is cheaper or cleaner, and shows various reports about the cleanness of the energy you've been using. (Nest's feature that lets utility companies remotely take control of your thermostat, Rush Hour Rewards, does not seem to be part of Renew Home.) Another Alphabet service being pulled into Renew Home is OhmConnect, which is the same basic idea as Nest's grid data-power thermostat adjustments but for more than just your thermostat. OhmConnect is compatible with a very small list of smart devices, like Nest-rival Ecobee and Honeywell thermostats, TL-Link's "Kasa" smart home system, and Tesla vehicles. The backbone of the service appears to be the in-house "OhmPlug" smart outlet, which can monitor the energy usage of anything that plugs into the wall. By seeing that you've turned these smart devices during peak usage times, OhmConnect offers people rewards like gift cards or cash for not using power when the grid is at capacity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amrita Khalid reports via The Verge: Proton has released a desktop version of its Proton Mail app that will give users full access to both Proton Mail and Proton Calendar and (eventually) the ability to view your emails offline. The desktop app is available in beta is optimized for both Windows and macOS, and encrypts sent emails end-to-end just like with the browser version, according to the Swiss company, while offline access to emails will be available "soon." [...] It's important to note that you'll still need internet access to both send and encrypt your emails on Proton. But the offline feature will let you view and draft emails while traveling, during a power outage, or any other situation where you don't have access to the internet. Proton is also bringing encrypted auto-forwarding to paid users, both on its desktop and browser versions, though the encryption for forwards will only apply when the forwarded emails go to other Proton users. The company says it has made improvements to Proton Calendar, too, including a fully searchable web version. Not everyone will be able to access Proton's desktop app right away. Proton is restricting access to its paid "Visionary" tier for legacy users at first (though the company is reopening subscriptions to that tier through January 3rd, 2024). The plan is to make the desktop app available to all users in early 2024.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads is now available to users in the European Union. "Today we're opening Threads to more countries in Europe," wrote Zuckerberg in a post on the platform. "Welcome everyone." MacRumors reports: The move comes five months after the social media network launched in most markets around the world, but remained unavailable to EU-based users due to regulatory hurdles. [...] In addition to creating a Threads profile for posting, users in the EU can also simply browse Threads without having an Instagram account, an option likely introduced to comply with legislation surrounding online services. The expansion into a market of 448 million people should see Threads' user numbers get a decent boost. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a company earnings call in October that Threads now has "just under" 100 million monthly users. Since its launch earlier this year it has gained a web app, an ability to search for posts, and a post editing feature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Hackers compromised the code behind a crypto protocol used by multiple web3 applications and services, the software maker Ledger said on Thursday. Ledger, a company that makes a widely used and popular crypto hardware and software wallet, among other products, announced on X (previously Twitter) that someone had pushed out a "malicious version" of its Ledger Connect Kit, a library that decentralized apps (dApps) made by other companies and projects use to connect to the Ledger wallet service. "A genuine version is being pushed to replace the malicious file now. Do not interact with any dApps for the moment. We will keep you informed as the situation evolves," Ledger wrote. Soon after, Ledger posted an update saying that the hackers had replaced the genuine version of its software some six hours earlier, and that the company was investigating the incident and would "provide a comprehensive report as soon as it's ready." After this story was published, Ledger spokesperson Phillip Costigan shared more details about the hack with TechCrunch and on X. Costigan said that a former Ledger employee was victim of a phishing attack on Thursday, which gave the hackers access to their former employee's NPMJS account, which is a software registry that was acquired by GitHub. From there, the hackers published a malicious version of the Ledger Connect Kit. "The malicious code used a rogue WalletConnect project to reroute funds to a hacker wallet," Costigan said. Then, Ledger deployed a fix within 40 minutes of the company becoming aware of the hack. The malicious file, however, was live for round 5 hours, but "the window where funds were drained was limited to a period of less than two hours," according to Costigan. Ledger also "coordinated" with WalletConnect which "quickly disabled the the rogue project," essentially stopping the attack, according to Costigan. Costigan also said Ledger pushed out a genuine software update that is "safe to use." "We are actively talking with customers whose funds might have been affected, and working proactively to help those individuals at this time," the Ledger spokeperson said, adding that the company believes it has identified the hackers' wallet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Communications Commission has taken a step toward prohibiting early termination fees charged by cable and satellite TV providers. From a report: If given final approval, the FCC action would also require cable and satellite providers to provide a prorated credit or rebate to customers who cancel before a billing period ends. The new rules are being floated in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that the FCC voted to approve this week in a 3-2 vote, with both Republicans dissenting. The NPRM seeks public comment on the proposed rules and could lead to a final vote in a few months or so. "Today's action proposes to adopt customer service protections that prohibit cable operators and DBS (Direct Broadcast Satellite) providers from imposing a fee for the early termination of a cable or DBS video service contract," the FCC said. "Additionally, the NPRM recommends the adoption of customer service protections to require cable and DBS providers to grant subscribers a prorated credit or rebate for the remaining whole days in a monthly or periodic billing cycle after the subscriber cancels service." FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said, "Consumers are tired of these junk fees. They now have more choices when it comes to video content. But these friction-filled tactics to keep us subscribing to our current providers are aggravating and unfair. So today we kick off a rulemaking to put an end to these practices." Cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association opposes the plan and said it will submit comments to support "consumer choice and competitive parity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon, which launched its first internet satellites in October, says it will use space lasers to ensure reliable broadband coverage even in the middle of the ocean. From a report: The technology will enable a satellite to deliver data to a cruise ship, say, even if the spacecraft isn't in range of an Amazon ground station connected to the internet. Instead, the laser will pass the request on to another satellite that has a clear view of a ground station. The two prototype satellites successfully tested the technology, which is officially called optical inter-satellite links, Amazon said on Thursday. "If you're going to serve maritime customers, air customers, you have got to be able to get data up to your satellites," said Rajeev Badyal, who leads Amazon's Project Kuiper internet-from-space initiative. "And in the middle of the ocean, it's difficult if not impossible" to install ground stations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is about to launch its grand plan to block third-party cookies in Chrome that many websites use to track your activity across the web for profit. From a report: Starting on January 4th, Google will start testing its new Tracking Protection feature that will eventually restrict website access to third-party cookies by default. It will come to a very small subset of Chrome users at the start, specifically to one percent of users globally. Afterward, Google plans to phase out the use of third-party cookies for all users in the second half of 2024. If you're randomly selected to try Tracking Protection, Google will notify you when opening Chrome on desktop or Android. If there are issues detected by Chrome while you're browsing, a prompt will appear asking if you'd like to temporarily re-enable third-party cookies for the site.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel unveiled new computer chips on Thursday, including Gaudi3, an AI chip for generative AI software. Gaudi3 will launch next year and will compete with rival chips from Nvidia and AMD that power big and power-hungry AI models. From a report: The most prominent AI models, like OpenAI's ChatGPT, run on Nvidia GPUs in the cloud. It's one reason Nvidia stock has been up nearly 230% year-to-date while Intel shares are up 68%. And it's why companies like AMD and, now Intel, have announced chips that they hope will attract AI companies away from Nvidia's dominant position in the market. While the company was light on details, Gaudi3 will compete with Nvidia's H100, the main choice among companies that build huge farms of the chips to power AI applications, and AMD's forthcoming MI300X, when it starts shipping to customers in 2024. Intel has been building Gaudi chips since 2019, when it bought a chip developer called Habana Labs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.