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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nintendo's Satellaview, a Japan-only satellite add-on for the Super Famicom, is a rich target for preservationists because it was the home to some of the most ephemeral games ever released. That includes a host of content for Nintendo's own games, including F-Zero. That influential Super Nintendo (Super Famicom in Japan) racing title was the subject of eight weekly broadcasts sent to subscribing Japanese homes in 1996 and 1997, some with live "Soundlink" CD-quality music and voiceovers. When live game broadcasts were finished, the memory cartridges used to store game data would report themselves as empty, even though they technically were not. Keeping that same 1MB memory cartridge in the system when another broadcast started would overwrite that data, and there were no rebroadcasts. As reported by Matthew Green at Press the Buttons (along with Did You Know Gaming's informative video), data from some untouched memory cartridges was found and used to re-create some of the content. Some courses, part of a multi-week "Grand Prix 2" event, have never been found, despite a $5,000 bounty offering and extensive effort. And yet, remarkably, the 10 courses in those later broadcasts were reverse-engineered, using a VHS recording, machine learning tools, and some manual pixel-by-pixel re-creation. The results are "north of 99.9% accurate," according to those who crafted it and exist now as a mod you can patch onto an existing F-Zero ROM. [...] Their work means that, 25 years later, a moment in gaming that was nearly lost to time and various corporate currents has been, if not entirely restored, brought as close as is humanly (and machine-ably) possible to what it once was.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Speaking at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned that "very subtle societal misalignments" could make artificial intelligence systems wreak havoc. The Associated Press reports: "There's some things in there that are easy to imagine where things really go wrong. And I'm not that interested in the killer robots walking on the street direction of things going wrong," Altman said. "I'm much more interested in the very subtle societal misalignments where we just have these systems out in society and through no particular ill intention, things just go horribly wrong." However, Altman stressed that the AI industry, like OpenAI, shouldn't be in the driver's seat when it comes to making regulations governing the industry. "We're still in the stage of a lot of discussion. So there's you know, everybody in the world is having a conference. Everyone's got an idea, a policy paper, and that's OK," Altman said. "I think we're still at a time where debate is needed and healthy, but at some point in the next few years, I think we have to move towards an action plan with real buy-in around the world." [...] For his part, Altman said he was heartened to see that schools, where teachers feared students would use AI to write papers, now embrace the technology as crucial for the future. But he added that AI remains in its infancy. "I think the reason is the current technology that we have is like ... that very first cellphone with a black-and-white screen," Altman said. "So give us some time. But I will say I think in a few more years it'll be much better than it is now. And in a decade it should be pretty remarkable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sean O'Kane reports via TechCrunch: Waymo is voluntarily recalling the software that powers its robotaxi fleet after two vehicles crashed into the same towed pickup truck in Phoenix, Arizona, in December. It's the company's first recall. Waymo chief safety officer Mauricio Pena described the crashes as "minor" in a blog post, and said neither vehicle was carrying passengers at the time. There were no injuries. He also said Waymo's ride-hailing service -- which is live in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin -- "is not and has not been interrupted by this update." The company declined to share video of the crashes with TechCrunch. Waymo said it developed, tested, and validated a fix to the software that it started deploying to its fleet on December 20. All of its robotaxis received that software update by January 12. "This voluntary recall reflects how seriously we take our responsibility to safely deploy our technology and to transparently communicate with the public," Pena wrote. The crashes that prompted the recall both happened on December 11. Pena wrote that one of Waymo's vehicles came upon a backward-facing pickup truck being "improperly towed." The truck was "persistently angled across a center turn lane and a traffic lane." Pena said the robotaxi "incorrectly predicted the future motion of the towed vehicle" because of this mismatch between the orientation of the tow truck and the pickup, and made contact. The company told TechCrunch this caused minor damage to the front left bumper. The tow truck did not stop, though, according to Pena, and just a few minutes later another Waymo robotaxi made contact with the same pickup truck being towed. The company told TechCrunch this caused minor damage to the front left bumper and a sensor. (The tow truck stopped after the second crash.) Last week, a Waymo autonomous vehicle was vandalized and burned by a crowd of people in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Rival operator Cruise suspended its operations while it investigates an incident where one of its robotaxis ran over a pedestrian who had been hit by another vehicle driven by a human.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI must face a claim that it violated California unfair competition law by using copyrighted books from comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors to train ChatGPT without permission. From a report: But US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin on Monday also dismissed a number of Silverman and her coplaintiffs' other legal claims, including allegations of vicarious copyright infringement, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, negligence, and unjust enrichment. The judge gave the authors the opportunity to amend their proposed class action by March 13 to fix the defects in the complaint. The core of the lawsuit remains alive, as OpenAI's motion to dismiss, filed last summer, didn't address Silverman's claim of direct copyright infringement for copying millions of books across the internet without permission. Courts haven't yet determined whether using copyrighted work to train AI models falls under copyright law's fair use doctrine, shielding the companies from liability. Although Martinez-Olguin allowed the unfair competition claim to advance, she said the claim could be preempted by the federal Copyright Act, which prohibits state law claims that allege the same violation as a copyright claim.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Estate agents are increasingly using AI tools to digitally furnish empty rental flats, a practice known as "virtual staging," to make them look occupied in listings. While virtual staging has existed for years, AI advancements have made the process faster and cheaper. One major UK estate agency already offers AI staging services to customers, Vice reported this week. Industry insiders cited by Vice said AI virtual staging is likely to become more widespread as costs fall. The unrealistic furniture from AI staging can be noticeable, such as bunk beds with overlapping ladders. But the technology continues advancing in quality. The story adds: Although some agents have experimented with using popular AI image generators like Dall-e and Midjourney to "fix" property pictures, the results are usually pretty bizarre, like in this example, where the AI has envisioned bookcases in every corner of the living room and put a hob at perfect height for a toddler. Companies like Virtual Staging AI, ModelProp and Gepetto, which describes itself as like "Pinterest on steroids," are now taking this technology and tailoring it specifically to virtual furnishing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Walmart is in talks to buy TV manufacturer Vizio for more than $2 billion. Shares of Vizio jumped 36% after the report, while Walmart's shares were down about 1%. From the report: Walmart, including its Sam's Club chain, has historically been Vizio's largest customer. Vizio is historically the largest television brand sold at Walmart by sales. The deal talks demonstrate the importance of consumer data and ad space for major retailers as they build out their ad businesses and compete with Amazon. In addition to being an e-commerce behemoth, Amazon is among the biggest ad players in the U.S. behind Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta Platforms. Amazon has also been building its own smart TV business. Developing...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FTC chair Lina Khan is hunting for evidence that Microsoft, Google and Amazon require cloud computing spend, board seats or exclusivity deals in return for their investments in AI startups. From a report: At a Friday event, Khan framed today's AI landscape as an inflection point for tech that is "enormously important for opening up markets and injecting competition and disrupting existing incumbents." The FTC chair offered Axios' Sara Fischer new details of how she's handling a market inquiry into the relationship between Big Tech companies and AI startups, in an interview at the Digital Content Next Summit in Charleston, S.C. In handling the surge in AI innovation and its impacts on the broader tech and media landscape, Khan said she aims to tackle monopoly "before it becomes fully fledged."She said the FTC is looking for chokepoints in each layer of the AI tech stack: "chips. compute, foundational models, applications." Khan said she's also paying close attention to vertical integration -- when players look to extend dominance over one tech layer into adjacent layers -- or when they attempt acquisitions aimed at solidifying an existing monopoly. That includes any potential integration between Sam Altman's nascent chip project and OpenAI, though she said she welcomes chip competition.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: Apple's iMessage will avoid regulation requiring interoperability with other messaging platforms under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), following the conclusion of an investigation by the regulator (via Bloomberg). The probe concluded that the iMessage platform and Microsoft's Bing do not hold a dominant enough position to be brought under the DMA's strict rules for services provided by big tech's so-called digital "gatekeepers," which include Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon, and TikTok, according to the EU. The EU has been working on legislation under the DMA that would have required Apple to make changes to iMessage to make it available on other platforms. The interoperability rules would have meant that Meta apps like WhatsApp or Messenger could request to interoperate with Apple's iMessage framework, and Apple would have been forced to comply within the EU. However, the EU probe found that iMessage falls outside the legislation because it is not widely used by businesses. The reprieve for Apple is part of a five-month market investigation by the European Commission. It's not all good news for Apple, though. The DMA is still forcing the company to implement updates that will allow iPhone and iPad users to download and install apps outside the App Store through alternative app marketplaces. The changes will arrive with iOS 17.4 in March.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York City's public schools chancellor said the city did not pass Tuesday's remote learning "test" due to technical issues. From a report: "As I said, this was a test. I don't think that we passed this test," David Banks said during a news briefing, adding that he felt "disappointed, frustrated and angry" as a result of the technical issues. NYC Public Schools did a lot of work to prepare for the remote learning day, Banks said, but shortly before 8 a.m. they were notified that parents and students were having difficulty signing onto remote learning. This is the first time NYC Public Schools has implemented remote learning on a snow day since introducing the no snow day policy in 2022. The district serves 1.1 million students in more than 1,800 schools. Banks blamed the technical issues on IBM, which helps facilitate the city's remote learning program. "IBM was not ready for primetime," Banks said, adding that the company was overwhelmed with the surge of people signing on for school. IBM has since expanded their capacity and a total of 850,000 students and teachers are currently online, Banks said. "We'll work harder to do better next time," he said, adding that there will be a deeper analysis into what went wrong.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jensen Huang took an indirect jab at Sam Altman when he said $7 trillion can buy "apparently all the GPUs." From a report: The Nvidia CEO made the quip at the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Monday when asked how many GPU chips that much money could buy. Altman, the OpenAI chief, is reportedly trying to raise trillions to boost supplies of the chips needed for AI processing. Huang told the United Arab Emirates' AI minister, Omar Al Olama, that developing AI wouldn't cost as much as the amount Altman is seeking to raise. The Nvidia CEO said AI infrastructure costs would be considerably less than the $5 trillion to $7 trillion Altman is reportedly trying to raise because of expected advances in computing. "You can't assume just that you will buy more computers. You have to also assume that the computers are going to become faster and therefore the total amount that you need is not as much," Huang said. He also suggested that the cost of building AI data centers globally would amount to $2 trillion by 2029. Huang said: "There's about a trillion dollars' worth of installed base of data centers. Over the course of the next four or five years, we'll have $2 trillion worth of data centers that will be powering software around the world."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When it comes to defeating patent trolls with crowd-sourced prior art, Cloudflare is now two-for-two after winning its latest case against Sable Networks. The Register: Sable Networks, which owns patents originally given to defunct "flow-based router" company Caspian Networks, sued Cloudflare and five other companies in 2021 alleging a whole host of violations of four patents now owned by Sable. A lot has changed since the case was filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, leading to a jury verdict last week that found Cloudflare not only didn't infringe on the single patent that made it to trial, but that the final patent claim at issue was invalid as well. It took the jury just two hours to return the result, Cloudflare said. "Since Sable first sued us, we've invalidated significant parts of three Sable patents, hamstringing their ability to bring lawsuits against other companies," Cloudflare's in-house counsel boasted on Monday. Cloudflare said that it managed to whittle the case down from four patents and "approximately 100 claims" to a single claim on one patent -- number 7,012,919 -- over the past three years. This is thanks in part to the assistance of outside investigators on Project Jengo, a scheme first launched in 2017 to get help digging up prior-art patents when Cloudflare sued by another patent troll, Blackbird Technologies. More: Cloudflare blog.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Backblaze has published a report on hard drive failures for 2023, finding that rates increased during the year due to aging drives that it plans to upgrade. From a report: Backblaze, which focuses on cloud-based storage services, claims to have more than three exabytes of data storage under its management. As of the end of last year, the company monitored 270,222 hard drives used for data storage, some of which are excluded from the statistics because they are still being evaluated. That still left a collection of 269,756 hard drives comprised of 35 drive models. Statistics on SSDs used as boot drives are reported separately. Backblaze found one drive model exhibited zero failures for all of 2023, the Seagate 8 TB ST8000NM000A. However, this came with the caveat that there are only 204 examples in service, and these were deployed only since Q3 2022, so have accumulated a limited number of drive days (total time operational). Nevertheless, as Backblaze's principal cloud storage evangelist Andy Klein pointed out: "Zero failures over 18 months is a nice start."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wunderlist, a beloved to-do app known for its delightful design, was acquired by Microsoft in 2015 and discontinued years later. Now Wunderlist co-founder Christian Reber -- who apparently attempted to buy back Wunderlist to no luck -- has launched Superlist to revive its spirit. The new app focuses on centralized project management by compiling tasks, notes, files and more into shareable lists. It then automatically organizes tasks into a daily agenda. Superlist starts at $8 a month, but offers "uinlimited tasks, notes, and reminders, and unlimited private lists" for individuals at no cost.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A company called Hands-Free Automation (HFA) has been accused of improperly relisting properties on Airbnb at higher prices after taking listings from hotel and short-term rental sites, according to a lawsuit filed in February. HFA founder Anthony Agyeman allegedly promised investors returns in 3-6 months for $20,000-30,000 investments in owning stakes in Airbnb listings. However, Airbnb prohibits the practice, and HFA has not been authorized by property owners, CNBC reported this week. The Federal Trade Commission has accused similar companies previously of making false promises of profits. Airbnb said it was unaware of contact from regulators regarding HFA.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indian tech services giant Infosys has been named as the source of a data leak suffered by the Bank of America. From a report: Infosys disclosed the breach in a November 3, 2023, filing that revealed its US subsidiary Infosys McCamish Systems LLC (IMS) "has become aware of a cyber security incident resulting in non-availability of certain applications and systems in IMS." A data breach notification filed in the US state of Maine this week describes the incident as "External system breach (hacking)" and reveals the improperly accessed data includes "Name or other personal identifier in combination with: Social Security Number." The notification was submitted by an outside attorney working on behalf of the Bank of America, names IMS as the source, and revealed that information on 57,028 people was leaked. A sample of the letter sent to those impacted by the incident reveals that on November 24, "IMS told Bank of America that data concerning deferred compensation plans serviced by Bank of America may have been compromised. Bank of America's systems were not compromised." Things then get a bit scary: "It is unlikely that we will be able to determine with certainty what personal information was accessed as a result of this incident at IMS. According to our records, deferred compensation plan information may have included your first and last name, address, business email address, date of birth, Social Security number, and other account information."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia is releasing an early version of Chat with RTX today, a demo app that lets you run a personal AI chatbot on your PC. From a report: You can feed it YouTube videos and your own documents to create summaries and get relevant answers based on your own data. It all runs locally on a PC, and all you need is an RTX 30- or 40-series GPU with at least 8GB of VRAM. I've been briefly testing out Chat with RTX over the past day, and although the app is a little rough around the edges, I can already see this being a valuable part of data research for journalists or anyone who needs to analyze a collection of documents. Chat with RTX can handle YouTube videos, so you simply input a URL, and it lets you search transcripts for specific mentions or summarize an entire video.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr is calling on the Federal Communications Commission to investigate Apple's response to Beeper Mini -- the app that briefly brought iMessage to Android. From a report: During the State of the Net Conference on Monday, Carr said the FCC should look into whether Apple's move "complies with the FCC's Part 14 rules" about accommodating users with disabilities. Beeper Mini launched last year, allowing Android users to gain access to iMessage features, including blue message bubbles and the ability to send high-quality photos and videos. However, Apple quickly blocked Beeper Mini users and continued to shut down attempts to make the app work, leading its developers to eventually just give up. The FCC's Part 14 rules lay out requirements that "advanced communications service," such as iMessage, must follow to ensure they're accessible.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Russia hasbeen at the forefront ofinternet disinformationtechniques at least since 2014, when it pioneered the use of bot farms to spread fake news about its invasion of Crimea. According to French authorities, the Kremlin is at it again. On February 12th Viginum, the French foreign-disinformation watchdog, announced it had detected preparations for a large disinformation campaign in France, Germany, Poland and other European countries, tied in part to the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the elections to the European Parliament in June. Viginum said it had uncovered a Russian network of 193 websites which it codenames "Portal Kombat." Most of these sites, such as topnews.uz.ua, were created years ago and many were left dormant. Over 50 of them, such as news-odessa.ru and pravda-en.com, have been created since 2022. Current traffic to these sites, which exist in various languages including French, German, Polish and English, is low. But French authorities think they are ready to be activated aggressively as part of what one official calls a "massive" wave of Russian disinformation. Viginum says it watched the sites between September and December 2023. It concluded that they do not themselves generate news stories, but are designed to spread "deceptive or false" content about the war in Ukraine, both on websites and via social media. The underlying objective is to undermine support for Ukraine in Europe. According to the French authorities, the network is controlled by a single Russian organization. [...] As the campaign for the European Parliament elections draws near, France is thought to be a particular target for Moscow. According to an article in theWashington Postin December, Kremlin documents show that Russia has been intensifying its effort to undermine French backing for Ukraine. It also has a clear interest in promoting division in France, at a time when Marine Le Pen is riding high in the polls for the next presidential election in 2027. The hard-right leader, who financed previous campaigns with a Russian bank loan, stands to benefit the most from France's polarized politicsRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon Prime Video has cut Dolby Vision and Atmos support from their ad tier subscription. "That's on top of the ads that Amazon injected into the service on January 29th," reports The Verge. "Now, when you pay $2.99 a month to remove those ads, you can get Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos back as well." The Verge reports: That's the word from 4KFilme, which discovered that their smart TVs from Sony, LG, and Samsung were now displaying content in HDR10 with Dolby Digital 5.1 as opposed to the higher fidelity options they'd enjoyed previously. Amazon spokesperson Katie Barker confirms to The Verge that it's a deliberate move: "Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos capabilities are only available on the ad free option, on relevant titles." While price hikes are no longer remotely unusual in the streaming video space, where Netflix now charges $22.99 a month for its 4K tier, it's a bit harder to compare Amazon's prices to Netflix. Prime Video is also available as an $8.99-per-month standalone subscription; if you subscribe that way and add $2.99 per month, it's more like a 28 percent price hike. If you prefer ads, Prime Video's $8.99-per-month is a dollar less than Disney Plus with ads at $9.99 per month, though Netflix currently offers its 1080p service with ads at $6.99 per month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Minesto, a marine energy tech developer based in Sweden, has deployed their new Dragon 12 tidal energy harvester to the Faroe Islands. Operating like an underwater kite, the Dragon 12 "uses lift generated by tidal flows to fly patterns faster than the currents, harvesting renewable energy," reports New Atlas. From the report: Where devices like Orbital's O2 tidal turbine more or less just sit there in the water harvesting energy from tidal currents, Minesto's Dragon series are anchored to the sea bed, and fly around like kites, treating the currents like wind. Just as land-based wind energy kites fly in figure 8 patterns to accelerate themselves faster than the wind, so does the Dragon underwater. This, says Minesto, lets the Dragon pull more energy from a given tidal current than other designs -- and it also changes the economic equations for relevant sites, making slower tidal flows worth exploiting. These are by no means small kites -- the Dragon 12 needs to be disassembled to fit in a shipping container. It rocks a monster 12-meter (39-ft) wingspan, and weighs no less than 28 tons. But compared to other offshore power options like wind turbines, it's an absolute minnow, and extremely easy to install using a single smallish boat and a sea bed tether. As with any renewable energy project, the key figure here is LCoE (levelized cost of energy) -- so what's it gonna cost? Well, back in 2017, Minesto projected about US$108/MWh once its first hundred megawatts of capacity are installed -- with costs falling thereafter as low as $54/MWh. The Dragon 12, like other tidal devices, will be more effective in some places than others -- and Denmark's Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the chilly North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland, offer ideal conditions. Home to about 55,000 people and more than a million puffins, the Faroe Islands funnel tidal currents through a number of slim channels. This accelerates the water significantly, and thus increases the energy that devices like the Dragon 12 can harvest. That's where the first Dragon has been deployed, and on Friday, it was connected to the local power grid to begin delivering energy. You can watch a video of the Dragon 12 on YouTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: After decades of progress in the U.S. toward cleaner air, climate change-related events will cause a steady deterioration through 2054. New research from the nonprofit First Street Foundation is part of a hyperlocal air quality model showing shifts down to the property level between 2024 and 2054. Its conclusions flow from methods contained in three peer-reviewed studies published by the coauthors. The report itself is not peer reviewed, however. The study finds that climate change is increasing the prevalence of two of the air pollutants most harmful to human health: particulate matter, commonly referred to as PM2.5, and tropospheric ozone. PM2.5 are tiny particles emitted by vehicles, power plants, wildfires and other sources. They can get lodged in people's lungs and enter the bloodstream, causing or exacerbating numerous health problems. Through the use of air quality observations and the development of the new model, First Street's researchers found that the West will be particularly hard hit by increasing amounts of PM2.5 emissions, as wildfires become more frequent and severe. [...] Future projections estimate a continued increase in PM2.5 levels by nearly 10% over the next 30 years, said Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications at First Street, tells Axios in an interview. This would "completely" erase air quality gains made in the last two decades, he said. Porter says that whereas pollutants from cars and factors could be targeted by regulations over the past few decades (and the EPA is proposing tightening some further), climate-related deterioration in air quality is a much tougher problem to solve. Instead of national regulations, climate action requires global emissions cuts, and even sharp declines in greenhouse gas emissions may not alter trend lines for the next few decades. The population exposed to "dangerous" days on the air quality index is likely to grow to 11.2 million between 2024 and 2054, an increase of about 13%. A 27% gain in the population exposed to "hazardous" (or maroon) days on the AQI is likely between the present climate and 30 years from now, the report finds. Porter said that while 83 million people are exposed to at least one "unhealthy" (red) day, this is likely to grow to over 125 million during the next three decades. "The climate penalty, associated with the rapidly increasing levels of air pollution, is perhaps the clearest signal we've seen regarding the direct impact climate change is having on our environment," Porter told Axios via email.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers have made significant progress toward developing a blood test that can predict the risk of dementia up to 15 years before clinical diagnosis. The Guardian reports: Hopes for the test were raised after scientists discovered biological markers for the condition in blood samples collected from more than 50,000 healthy volunteers enrolled in the UK Biobank project. Analysis of the blood identified patterns of four proteins that predicted the onset of dementia in general, and Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia specifically, in older age. When combined with more conventional risk factors such as age, sex, education and genetic susceptibility, the protein profiles allowed researchers to predict dementia with an estimated 90% accuracy nearly 15 years before people received clinical confirmation of the disease. For the latest study, blood samples from 52,645 UK adults without dementia were collected and frozen between 2006 and 2010 and analyzed 10 to 15 years later. More than 1,400 participants went on to develop dementia. Using artificial intelligence, the researchers looked for connections between nearly 1,500 blood proteins and developing dementia years later. Writing in Nature Aging, they describe how four proteins, Gfap, Nefl, Gdf15 and Ltbp2, were present in unusual levels among those who developed all-cause dementia, Alzheimer's disease or vascular dementia. Higher levels of the proteins were warning signs of disease. Inflammation in the brain can trigger cells called astrocytes to over-produce Gfap, a known biomarker for Alzheimer's. People with raised Gfap were more than twice as likely to develop dementia than those with lower levels. Another blood protein, Nefl, is linked to nerve fibre damage, while higher than normal Gdf15 can occur after damage to the brain's blood vessels. Rising levels of Gfap and Ltbp2 was highly specific for dementia rather than other brain diseases, the scientists found, with changes occurring at least 10 years before people received a dementia diagnosis. The researchers are speaking to companies to develop the test but said the cost, currently at several hundred pounds, would need to come down to make it viable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a post on Threads today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the Twitter rival is rolling out a new test in the U.S. that shows a list of popular topics that other people are discussing. It's a core feature of Twitter (now "X") that should help make it easier to find new posts and users on Threads. The Verge reports: The list will appear on the search page and in the For You feed, allowing you to browse through posts about a particular topic. In addition to testing a way to save posts, Meta recently said it will add controls to limit political content recommendations on Threads. Instagram head Adam Mosseri says Threads uses machine learning AI systems to determine what goes on the list. It takes into account how many people are talking about a certain topic, as well as how many people have interacted with posts about it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A class-action lawsuit alleges (PDF) that Amazon manipulates its platform through a biased algorithm to favor the "Buy Box" for items that generate higher fees for Amazon, often leading consumers to overpay for products that could be obtained cheaper and just as quickly from other sellers on the platform. Ars Technica reports: The lawsuit claims that a biased algorithm drives Amazon's "Buy Box," which appears on an item's page and prompts shoppers to "Buy Now" or "Add to Cart." According to customers suing, nearly 98 percent of Amazon sales are of items featured in the Buy Box, because customers allegedly "reasonably" believe that featured items offer the best deal on the platform. "But they are often wrong," the complaint said, claiming that instead, Amazon features items from its own retailers and sellers that participate in Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA), both of which pay Amazon higher fees and gain secret perks like appearing in the Buy Box. "The result is that consumers routinely overpay for items that are available at lower prices from other sellers on Amazona"not because consumers don't care about price, or because they're making informed purchasing decisions, but because Amazon has chosen to display the offers for which it will earn the highest fees," the complaint said. Authorities in the US and the European Union have investigated Amazon's allegedly anticompetitive Buy Box algorithm, confirming that it's "favored FBA sellers since at least 2016," the complaint said. In 2021, Amazon was fined more than $1 billion by the Italian Competition Authority over these unfair practices, and in 2022, the European Commission ordered Amazon to "apply equal treatment to all sellers when deciding what to feature in the Buy Box." These investigations served as the first public notice that Amazon's Buy Box couldn't be trusted, customers suing said. Amazon claimed that the algorithm was fixed in 2020, but so far, Amazon does not appear to have addressed all concerns over its Buy Box algorithm. As of 2023, European regulators have continued pushing Amazon "to take further action to remedy its Buy Box bias in their respective jurisdictions," the customers' complaint said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On a brutal December day, 17% of Spotify employees found out they had been laid off in the company's third round of job cuts last year. Not long after, music fans around the world realized that the cult-favorite website Every Noise at Once (EveryNoise), an encyclopedic goldmine for music discovery, had stopped working. These two events were not disconnected. Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, who created EveryNoise, was one of the 1,500 employees who was let go that day, but his layoff had wider-reaching implications; now that McDonald doesn't have access to internal Spotify data, he can no longer maintain EveryNoise, which became a pivotal resource for the most obsessive music fans to track new releases and learn more about the sounds they love. "The project is to understand the communities of listening that exist in the world, figure out what they're called, what artists are in them and what their audiences are," McDonald told TechCrunch. "The goal is to use math where you can to find real things that exist in listening patterns. So I think about it as trying to help global music self-organize." If you work at a big tech company and get laid off, you probably won't expect the company's customers to write nine pages of complaints on a community forum, telling your former employer how badly they messed up by laying you off. Nor would you expect an outpouring of Reddit threads and tweets questioning how you could possibly get the axe. But that's how fans reacted when they heard McDonald's fate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A registered sex offender has become the first person in England and Wales to be convicted of cyber-flashing. The BBC reports: Nicholas Hawkes, 39, of Basildon, Essex, sent unsolicited photos of his erect penis to a 15-year-old girl and a woman on Friday. The woman took screenshots of the image on WhatsApp and reported Hawkes to Essex Police the same day.Hawkes admitted two charges when he appeared before magistrates in Southend earlier. He is the first person to be convicted of the new offense of cyber-flashing, which was brought in under the Online Safety Act and came into effect on January 31. After pleading guilty to two counts of sending a photograph or film of genitals to cause alarm, distress, or humiliation, he was remanded in custody until March 11, when he will be sentenced at Basildon Crown Court. Hawkes is a registered sex offender until November 2033 after he was convicted and given a community order for sexual activity with a child under 16 and exposure last year at Basildon Crown Court, the CPS said. He will also be sentenced for breaching the order when he is sentenced in March.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting today, telcos in American will need to disclose system break-ins within seven days. "[T]he same deadline now exists to report any data leaks to the FBI and US Secret Service as well," adds The Register. From the report: After releasing a proposed rule in early January and giving the industry 30 days to respond, the FCC's final rule was published today. It solidifies what the agency proposed a little more than a month ago, and what was teased in early 2022 when FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel drafted initial changes to the commission's 16-year old security "breach" reporting duties. Along with requiring that attacks are reported to the FCC within seven days of a telco discovering them, the same deadline now exists to report any data leaks to the FBI and US Secret Service as well. As the FCC planned, the new rule also eliminates the mandatory seven-day waiting period for reporting break-ins to consumers. The FCC now "requires carriers to notify customers of breaches of covered data without unreasonable delay ... and in no case more than 30 days following reasonable determination of a breach." "Reasonable determination" of a data blurt is further defined as "when the carrier has information indicating that it is more likely than not that there was a breach" and "does not mean reaching a conclusion regarding every fact surrounding a data security incident that may constitute a breach." In other words, if customers are affected then they had better be notified post-haste. The FCC has additionally extended the scope of data exposure types that telecom customers must be notified of. Prior to the passage of the new rule customers only had to be told if Customer proprietary network information (CPNI) was exposed to the world.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The US government has committed $42 million to further the development of the 5G Open RAN (O-RAN) standard that would allow wireless providers to mix and match cellular hardware and software, opening up a bigger market for third-party equipment that's cheaper and interoperable. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) grant would establish a Dallas O-RAN testing center to prove the standard's viability as a way to head off Huawei's steady cruise toward a global cellular network hardware monopoly. Verizon global network and technology president Joe Russo promoted the funding as a way to achieve "faster innovation in an open environment." To achieve the standard's goals, AT&T vice president of RAN technology Robert Soni says that AT&T and Verizon have formed the Acceleration of Compatibility and Commercialization for Open RAN Deployments Consortium (ACCoRD), which includes a grab bag of wireless technology companies like Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Dell, Intel, Broadcom, and Rakuten. Japanese wireless carrier Rakuten formed as the first O-RAN network in 2020. The company's then CEO, Tareq Amin, told The Verge's Nilay Patel in 2022 that Open RAN would enable low-cost network build-outs using smaller equipment rather than massive towers -- which has long been part of the promise of 5G. But O-RAN is about more than that; establishing interoperability means companies like Verizon and AT&T wouldn't be forced to buy all of their hardware from a single company to create a functional network. For the rest of us, that means faster build-outs and "more agile networks," according to Rakuten. In the US, Dish has been working on its own O-RAN network, under the name Project Genesis. The 5G network was creaky and unreliable when former Verge staffer Mitchell Clarke tried it out in Las Vegas in 2022, but the company said in June last year that it had made its goal of covering 70 percent of the US population. Dish has struggled to become the next big cell provider in the US, though -- leading satellite communications company EchoStar, which spun off from Dish in 2008, to purchase the company in January. The Washington Post writes that O-RAN "is Washington's anointed champion to try to unseat the Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies" as the world's biggest supplier of cellular infrastructure gear. According to the Post, Biden has emphasized the importance of O-RAN in conversations with international leaders over the past few years. Additionally, it notes that Congress along with the NTIA have dedicated approximately $2 billion to support the development of this standard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FT Alphaville: Last year, Norway's $1.5tn sovereign wealth fund revealed that it had lost NKr980mn, roughly $92mn, on an error relating to how it calculated its mandated benchmark. Here's what Norges Bank Investment Management said at the time: "In February this year, a calculation error was discovered in the composition of the index we're measured against. This error led to a marginal overweight in US fixed income relative to global fixed income. When this was discovered, we immediately set about correcting it, but because the fund is so large, the return was 0.7 basis points. Due to this our previously reported positive relative return of NOK 118 billion was adjusted down to NOK 117 billion." It is a good example of how even tiny operational mistakes can have mammoth-sized consequences in nominal terms when you manage one of the world's biggest pools of capital. Sometimes a mistake can even lead to a windfall -- such as in 2021, when NBIM apparently made NKr582mn by accidentally accumulating an outsized position in a rising stock. But the 2023 index snafu is by far the biggest the fund has registered, almost twice as large as the cumulative operational-accidental losses it suffered from 2010-20. Alphaville was intrigued. What exactly went wrong? Well, in a recently-released anthropological report commissioned to investigate its own culture, NBIM seems to have inadvertently revealed just how minuscule the mistake was. Here's an NBIM employee called "Simon" recounting the debacle to the report's author, Tone Danielsen. Alphaville's emphasis below: "Last year (spring 2022) we had an off-site. One of our workshops was on 'Mistakes and how to deal with them.' We wrote post-it notes, classifying them into different categories from harmless to no-goes. One of my post-it notes, I remember it vividly, read: Miscalculation of the Ministry of Finance benchmark. I placed it in the category unforgivable. When I wrote that note, I honestly couldn't even dare to think about the consequences. And less than a year later, I did exactly that. My worst nightmare. It was a manual mistake. My mistake. I used the wrong date, December 1st instead of November 1st which is clearly stated in our mandate. The mistake was not revealed until months later, by the Ministry of Finance. They reported back that the numbers did not add up. I did all the numbers once more, and the cause of the mistake was identified. I immediately reported to Patrick [Global Head] and Dag [Chief]. I openly express that this was my mistake, and mine alone. I felt miserable and was ready to take the consequences -- whatever they might be."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Abstract of a paper [PDF] the on pre-print server Arxiv: Citations are widely considered in scientists' evaluation. As such, scientists may be incentivized to inflate their citation counts. While previous literature has examined self-citations and citation cartels, it remains unclear whether scientists can purchase citations. Here, we compile a dataset of about 1.6 million profiles on Google Scholar to examine instances of citation fraud on the platform. We survey faculty at highly-ranked universities, and confirm that Google Scholar is widely used when evaluating scientists. Intrigued by a citationboosting service that we unravelled during our investigation, we contacted the service while undercover as a fictional author, and managed to purchase 50 citations. These findings provide conclusive evidence that citations can be bought in bulk, and highlight the need to look beyond citation counts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft appears to be readying its own DLSS-like AI upscaling feature for PC games. From a report: X user PhantomOcean3 discovered the feature inside the latest test versions of Windows 11 over the weekend, with Microsoft describing its automatic super resolution as a way to "use AI to make supported games play more smoothly with enhanced details." That sounds a lot like Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology, which uses AI to upscale games and improve frame rates and image quality. AMD and Intel also offer their own variants, with FSR and XeSS both growing in popularity in recent PC game releases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amid increasing speculation about the future of Xbox, its exclusives, and even its status as a hardware manufacturer, Phil Spencer reportedly told employees last week that it has no plans to stop making consoles. From a report: Reporter Shannon Liao said in her weekly Substack industry newsletter that Spencer moved to reassure staff during an all-hands meeting on Tuesday. "The company held an internal Tuesday townhall where Spencer told employees that there were no plans to stop making consoles, and that Xboxes would continue to be part of a strategy that involves multiple kinds of devices," Liao reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

stikves writes: Today, Broadcom announced immediate end of ESXi availability. ESXi has been an important tool for many "homelab" enthusiasts -- offering simple bare metal virtualization for small setups. Unfortunately they don't offer a replacement, except for paid subscription services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia blog: Every country needs to own the production of their own intelligence, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang told attendees Monday at the World Governments Summit in Dubai. Huang, who spoke as part of a fireside chat with the UAE's Minister of AI, His Excellency Omar Al Olama, described sovereign AI -- which emphasizes a country's ownership over its data and the intelligence it produces -- as an enormous opportunity for the world's leaders. "It codifies your culture, your society's intelligence, your common sense, your history -- you own your own data," Huang told Al Olama during their conversation, a highlight of an event attended by more than 4,000 delegates from 150 countries. "We completely subscribe to that vision," Al Olama said. "That's why the UAE is moving aggressively on creating large language models and mobilizing compute." Huang's appearance in the UAE comes as the Gulf State is moving rapidly to transform itself from an energy powerhouse into a global information technology hub. Dubai is the latest stop for Huang in a global tour that has included meetings with leaders in Canada, France, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam over the past six months. The Middle East is poised to reap significant benefits from AI, with PwC projecting a $320 billion boost to the region's economy by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia briefly surpassed Amazon in market capitalization on Monday, as the euphoria around AI catapulted the chipmaker to the fourth most valuable U.S. company. From a report: At a record high of $734.96, Nvidia was worth $1.82 trillion in market value, compared to $1.81 trillion for retail giant Amazon.com and a few billions away from Google-owner Alphabet's $1.87 trillion, according to LSEG data. The last time Nvidia was more valuable than Amazon was in 2002, when they were each worth under $6 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HP is seeking as much as $4 billion from Autonomy's former bosses following a London judge's finding that they fraudulently boosted the value of the company before its sale. From a report: Founder Mike Lynch was found to have inflated Autonomy's revenue alongside his chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain and induced HP to buy the firm for $11 billion, according to a London civil judgment in 2022. The British tech tycoon is currently waiting to face a criminal trial in the US over the sale after being extradited last year. He was previously investigated by the UK's Serious Fraud Office but the agency dropped its case. Hussain was convicted in the US for his role in the saga. Lawyers for HP calculated the total losses that Lynch and Hussain must pay back as over $4 billion, according to court documents prepared for a hearing Monday. This was revised from a previous calculation of $5 billion at trial due to further evidence.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The startup that develops the phone app for casino resort giant WinStar has secured an exposed database that was spilling customers' private information to the open web. Oklahoma-based WinStar bills itself as the "world's biggest casino" by square footage. The casino and hotel resort also offers an app, My WinStar, in which guests can access self-service options during their hotel stay, their rewards points and loyalty benefits, and casino winnings. The app is developed by a Nevada software startup called Dexiga. The startup left one of its logging databases on the internet without a password, allowing anyone with knowledge of its public IP address to access the WinStar customer data stored within using only their web browser. Dexiga took the database offline after TechCrunch alerted the company to the security lapse. Anurag Sen, a good-faith security researcher who has a knack for discovering inadvertently exposed sensitive data on the internet, found the database containing personal information, but it was initially unclear who the database belonged to. Sen said the personal data included full names, phone numbers, email addresses and home addresses. Sen shared details of the exposed database with TechCrunch to help identify its owner and disclose the security lapse.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many websites are using AI tools to generate fake obituaries about average people for profit. These articles lack substantiating details but are optimized for SEO, frequently outranking legitimate obituaries, The Verge reports. The fake obituaries, as one can imagine, are causing distress for grieving families and friends. In response, Google told The Verge that it aims to surface high-quality information but struggles with "data voids." The company terminated some YouTube channels sharing fake notices but declined to say if the flagged websites violate policies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US companies are discussing cost control on earnings calls at a record rate, amid a push to reallocate funds and invest in new technologies, according to an analysis by Morgan Stanley strategists. From a report: Transcript mentions of "operational efficiency" are at the highest ever in the US during this earnings season as companies focus on expense discipline, but also invest in technologies "that can drive future productivity like AI," a team led by Michael Wilson wrote in a note. There is a notable overlap among the industries discussing operational efficiency most prevalently and those that are discussing AI, the strategists said. These groups include software, professional services, health care services, and financial services. Pfizer, BlackRock, and Lam Research were among S&P 500 companies touting operational efficiency in their earnings calls this season, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The rising focus on cost control comes as firms position to protect margins amid hopes for a soft economic landing. Investors have looked for signs of cooling in the jobs market to gauge when the Federal Reserve will lower borrowing costs, although recent hot data has signaled the Fed won't be easing anytime soon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in 2006 Slashdot reported on a 50-megabyte "micro" distro called Damn Small Linux. (And in 2012 we wrote that it "rose from the dead" with a new release candidate.) Now Damn Small Linux has been reborn again, according to its developer's web site:Creating the original DSL, a versatile 50MB distribution, was a lot of fun and one of the things I am most proud of as a personal accomplishment. However, as a concept, it was in the right place at the right time, and the computer industry has changed a lot since then. While it would be possible to make a bootable Xwindows 50MB distribution today, it would be missing many drivers and have only a handful of very rudimentary applications. People would find such a distribution a fun toy or something to build upon, but it would not be usable for the average computer user out of the gate.... The new goal of DSL is to pack as much usable desktop distribution into an image small enough to fit on a single CD, or a hard limit of 700MB. This project is meant to service older computers and have them continue to be useful far into the future. Such a notion sits well with my values. I think of this project as my way of keeping otherwise usable hardware out of landfills. As with most things in the GNU/Linux community, this project continues to stand on the shoulders of giants. I am just one guy without a CS degree, so for now, this project is based on antiX 23 i386... a fantastic distribution that I think shares much of the same spirit as the original DSL project. AntiX shares pedigree with MEPIS and also leans heavily on the geniuses at Debian. The blog It's FOSS News describes it as "a unique experience in a sea of Debian-based and Fedora-based distros."It is offered with two window managers, Fluxbox and JWM, with apt being fully enabled by default for easy package installations...At the time of writing, only the Alpha ISOs were made available on the official downloads page. It is only a matter of time before we get a stable release.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A lawsuit involving the now-defunct Google+ social media site "has been settled for $350 million," reports CPO magazine, "after a lengthy appeals process played out..." "[T]he total pool after attorney and legal fees are deducted is likely to be well over $200 million."[The lawsuit] dates all the way back to 2018, when Google internally discovered that the Google+ API was being abused to access the private data of about half a million of the social media service's users. Google opted not to publicly declare the breach, as they were not legally compelled to. News of it came via the Wall Street Journal in late 2018. Google shareholders contend that the company kept the issue under wraps due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that Facebook was experiencing at the time, believing that they would suffer a similar negative PR blow. This was supported by an internal company memo that became public. As the news of the exploitable software glitch gradually came out, Google shareholders took a hit as the company collectively lost tens of billions of dollars in market value. The lead plaintiff in the case is Rhode Island Treasurer James Diossa, who was responsible for overseeing a state pension fund that held stock in Google parent company Alphabet. Google+ was shuttered in 2019 after an eight-year run due in part to repeated technical issues with unauthorized API access (as well as low user engagement). "If the settlement is approved by the 9th Circuit judge, the proceeds will be available to Google shareholders who held stock at any time from April 23, 2018, to April 30, 2019... "A separate class-action privacy lawsuit involving users who had private data exposed during the incident was settled in 2018 for $7.5 million, leading to very low payments for each of the claimants."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Technology made its mark on the Super Bowl ads this year. Microsoft purchased a long inspirational ad for Copilot, ending with the tagline "Your everyday AI companion." (Although another message made the opposite point. "With artificial intelligence, the future is in good hands," an announcer says ironically -- while the ad shows the minions from Despicable Me 4.) Google's ad showed how its Pixel 8 smartphone helps people with vision problems take photos. T-Mobile touted its internet service. And for some reason CrowdStrike's ad about its endpoint security software took place in the Old West... VW ended an ad looking at its history with a shot of its new electric vehicle, the ID.Buzz minivan, while Kia had its own heart-tugging ad touting their electric EV9. And Pfizer ran a minute-long ad showing the history of medical progress, culminating with a pointer to their new domain, LetsOutdoCancer.com. Even NASA got into the action, releasing a video showing an astronaut catching a pass in zero gravity. ("Including its solar panels, the Space Station is the same size as a regulation football field.") And some people even tried watching the Super Bowl on their new Apple Vision Pro...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At a press conference last week, a California Assemblymember joined the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in announcing a bill that, if passed, would require every public high school to teach computer science. (And establish CS as a high school graduation requirement by the 2030-31 school year.) Long-time Slashdot reader theodp says he noticed posters with CS-education advocacy charts and stats "copied verbatim" from the tech giant-backed nonprofit Code.org. (And "a California Dept. of Education news release also echoed Code.org K-12 CS advocacy factoids.")The announcement came less than two weeks after Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi - whose goal is to make CS a HS graduation requirement in all 50 states by 2030 - was a keynote speaker at the Association of California School Administrators Superintendents' Symposium. Even back in an October 20 Facebook post, [California state assemblyman] Berman noted he'd partnered with Code.org on legislation in the past and hinted that something big was in the works on the K-12 CS education front for California. "I had the chance to attend Code.org's 10th anniversary celebration and chat with their founder, Hadi Partovi, as well as CS advocate Aloe Blacc. They've done amazing work expanding access to computer science education... and I've been proud to partner with them on legislation to do that in CA. More to come!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last night in San Francisco's Chinatown, "A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield..." reports the Verge, "generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire."The fire department arrived minutes later, according to a report in The Autopian, but by then flames had already fully engulfed the car.... Waymo representative Sandy Karp told The Verge via email that the fully autonomous car "was not transporting any riders" when it was attacked and fireworks were tossed inside the car, sparking the flames... The fire takes place against the backdrop of simmering tension between San Francisco residents and automated vehicle operators... Just last week, a Waymo car struck a cyclist who had reportedly been following behind a truck turning across its path. The "burnt-out husk of the electric Waymo Jaguar" appears in a video posted on YouTube, according to the article. "Another set of videos posted by software developer Michael Vendi gives a view into the scene as it played out and the fire grew." San Francisco's 49ers play in the Super Bowl this afteroon, so last night's celebrations for Chinese New Year could be followed by additional celebrations tonight. Police Chief Bill Scott is already urging residents to behave responsibly. "Please don't light anything on fire."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:An abrupt shutdown of Atlantic Ocean currents that could put large parts of Europe in a deep freeze is looking a bit more likely and closer than before as a new complex computer simulation finds a "cliff-like" tipping point looming in the future. A long-worried nightmare scenario, triggered by Greenland's ice sheet melting from global warming, still is at least decades away if not longer, but maybe not the centuries that it once seemed, a new study in Friday's Science Advances finds. The study, the first to use complex simulations and include multiple factors, uses a key measurement to track the strength of vital overall ocean circulation, which is slowing. A collapse of the current - called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC - would change weather worldwide because it means a shutdown of one of key the climate and ocean forces of the planet. It would plunge northwestern European temperatures by 9 to 27 degrees (5 to 15 degrees Celsius) over the decades, extend Arctic ice much farther south, turn up the heat even more in the Southern Hemisphere, change global rainfall patterns and disrupt the Amazon, the study said. Other scientists said it would be a catastrophe that could cause worldwide food and water shortages. "We are moving closer (to the collapse), but we we're not sure how much closer," said study lead author Rene van Westen, a climate scientist and oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "We are heading towards a tipping point." When this global weather calamity - grossly fictionalized in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" - may happen is "the million-dollar question, which we unfortunately can't answer at the moment," van Westen said. He said it's likely a century away but still could happen in his lifetime. He just turned 30. "It also depends on the rate of climate change we are inducing as humanity," van Westen said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Mutant wolves roaming the deserted streets of Chernobyl appear to have developed resistance to cancer," reports Sky News, "raising hopes the findings can help scientists fight the disease in humans."Dr Cara Love, an evolutionary biologist and ecotoxicologist at Princeton University in the U.S., has been studying how the Chernobyl wolves survive despite generations of exposure to radioactive particles... The researchers discovered that Chernobyl wolves are exposed to upwards of 11.28 millirem of radiation every day for their entire lives - which is more than six times the legal safety limit for a human. Dr Love found the wolves have altered immune systems similar to cancer patients undergoing radiation treatment, but more significantly she also identified specific parts of the animals' genetic information that seemed resilient to increased cancer risk. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember "Servo," Mozilla's "next-generation browser engine," focused on performance and robustness? "The developers of Servo are starting 2024 by going all in..." reports It's FOSS News, citing a social media post from FOSDEM. "[T]he Servo Project team were there showing off the work done so far."If you were not familiar, Servo is an experimental browser engine that leverages the power of Rust to provide a memory-safe and modular experience that is highly adaptable. After Mozilla created Servo back in 2012 as a research project, it saw its share of ups and downs over the years, with it making a comeback in 2023; thanks to a fresh approach by the developers on how Servo should move forward. Even though there are plenty of open source Chrome alternatives, with this, there's a chance that we will get some really cool options based on Servo that just might give Blink and Gecko a run for the money! Just a few months back, in September 2023, after The Servo Project officially joined Linux Foundation Europe, the existing contributors from Igalia stepped up their game by taking over the project maintenance. To complement that, at Open Source Summit Europe last year, Manuel Rego from Igalia shared some really useful insights when he presented. He showcased stuff like the WebGL support, cross-platform support including mobile support for Android and Linux, among other things. They have experimented with Servo for embedded applications use-cases (like running it on Raspberry Pi), and have plans to make advances on it. As far as I can see, it looks like, Servo is faster for Raspberry Pi compared to Chromium. You can explore more such demos on Servo's demo webpage. 2024's roadmap includes "Initial Android support, that will see Servo being made to build on modern Android versions," according to the article, "with the developers publishing nightly APKs on the official website some time in the future." One fun fact? "Even though Mozilla dropped the experimental project, Firefox still utilizes some servo components in the browser" Another FOSDOM update from social media: "Thunderbird is also embracing Rust."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thursday a climate technology startup called Twelve "took a major step toward producing sustainable aviation fuel..." reports Bloomberg, "by launching its commercial-scale carbon transformation unit."Twelve is among the emerging companies working on ways to transform captured CO2 into useful products. In the case of the Berkeley, California-based startup, its nascent technology will be critical to cleaning up one of the hardest-to-decarbonize sectors: aviation. Twelve uses a technique called electrolysis that uses electricity to repurpose carbon dioxide and water into various products. When the electricity is generated from renewables, the process is essentially no-carbon. The company's CO2 electrochemical reactor - called OPUS - will be at the center of its first commercial production plant for sustainable aviation fuel, under construction in Moses Lake and set to be completed this year. The plant will run on hydropower and use CO2 captured from a nearby ethanol plant. That CO2 and water will be fed through OPUS and turned into synthetic gas, the basis of sustainable aviation fuel. Twelve's airline customers can blend it with traditional jet fuel. The resulting carbon credit can be bought by corporate customers like Microsoft to offset their business travel-related emissions... Although Twelve's carbon transformation technology can be used to make products ranging from spandex pants to car parts, it pivoted to focus more fully on sustainable aviation fuel after the announcement of tax credits for SAF blending, carbon capture and utilization, and hydrogen production, said Twelve co-founder and Chief Science Officer Etosha Cave. Those tax credits helped the company launch this commercial unit. "Without that, we would not be competitive in terms of being able to get to market at the stage we're at," Cave said. It's still not cost competitive with traditional jet fuel, the article points out, "but airlines are under increasing pressure from governments and their own net zero commitments to integrate SAF into their fuel mix. "Twelve would not disclose its cost to make the fuel, though it said it expects prices to go down as its technology scales up and eventually reach parity with traditional jet fuel."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Martin Hellman "achieved legendary status as co-inventor of the Diffie-Hellman public key exchange algorithm, a breakthrough in software and computer cryptography," notes a new interview in InfoWorld. Nine years after winning the Turing award, the 78-year-old cryptologist shared his perspective on some other issues: What do you think about the state of digital spying today? Hellman: There's a need for greater international cooperation. How can we have true cyber security when nations are planning - and implementing - cyber attacks on one another? How can we ensure that AI is used only for good when nations are building it into their weapons systems? Then, there's the grandaddy of all technological threats, nuclear weapons. If we keep fighting wars, it's only a matter of time before one blows up. The highly unacceptable level of nuclear risk highlights the need to look at the choices we make around critical decisions, including cyber security. We have to take into consideration all participants' needs for our strategies to be effective.... Your battle with the government to make private communication available to the general public in the digital age has the status of folklore. But, in your recent book (co-authored with your wife Dorothie [and freely available as a PDF]), you describe a meeting of minds with Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former head of the NSA. Until I read your book, I saw the National Security Agency as bad and Diffie-Hellman as good, plain and simple. You describe how you came to see the NSA and its people as sincere actors rather than as a cynical cabal bent on repression. What changed your perspective? Hellman: This is a great, real-life example of how taking a holistic view in a conflict, instead of just a one-sided one, resolved an apparently intractable impasse. Those insights were part of a major change in my approach to life. As we say in our book, "Get curious, not furious." These ideas are effective not just in highly visible conflicts like ours with the NSA, but in every aspect of life. Hellman also had an interesting answer when asked if math, game theory, and software development teach any lessons applicable to issues like nuclear non-proliferation or national defense. "The main thing to learn is that the narrative we (and other nations) tell ourselves is overly simplified and tends to make us look good and our adversaries bad."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Something revolutionary is on the horizon..." claims the company's web site. "Wearable neurotechnology that augments sleep, attention, and ultimately the human experience." Or, as Fierce Biotech put it, "A startup emerged from stealth this week with grand plans to pioneer a new form of neurotech dubbed 'electric medicine.'"Elemind's approach centers on artificial intelligence-powered algorithms that are trained to continuously analyze neurological activity collected by a noninvasive wearable device, then to deliver through the wearable bursts of neurostimulation that are uniquely tailored to those real-time brain wave readings. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company claims that its approach - which is based on research from its founders, a group of high-profile scientists hailing from the likes of MIT, Stanford and Harvard - offers a more "natural" treatment option than pharmaceuticals for neurological conditions like insomnia, essential tremor and memory loss. "Chemical drugs affect the entire body, often leading to unwanted side effects. Elemind offers a nonchemical, direct and on-demand solution that learns and dynamically adjusts to each person," Meredith Perry, a co-founder of Elemind and its CEO, said in the company's debut announcement. "We're the first and only company able to precisely guide and redirect brainwaves in real time." "Elemind's first product is a general wellness device and will not be subject to FDA regulation," notes an announcement from the company. But they've thoroughly researched the product's potential:To date, Elemind's technology is supported by five clinical trials and several publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Clinical trials show Elemind's technology is effective at inducing sleep up to 74% faster, suppressing essential tremor with a significant decrease after only 30 seconds of stimulation, and boosting memory. Clinical trials also demonstrate Elemind is effective at increasing pain thresholds and enhancing sedation; this study is currently in peer review.... "You can think about it like noise cancellation for the mind," said Dr. David Wang, CTO and co-founder of Elemind. "Our technology uses phase-locking auditory stimuli to align precisely with the user's brainwaves and steer them to a different frequency associated with a different state." The company plans to announce its first product within a few months, reports the Boston Globe, noting that the company's $12 million in seed funding came from "a consortium that includes Village Global, an early-stage venture fund backed by high-tech billionaires Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates., Reid Hoffman, and Ann Wojcicki..." More info from VentureBeat.Read more of this story at Slashdot.