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"A tomato lost for eight months on the orbiting lab has been located, " reports Gizmodo, "absolving astronaut Frank Rubio of playful allegations that he ate it."NASA's Veg-05 experiment, a project focusing on growing fruits and vegetables in space, experienced an unusual turn of events when a Red Robin dwarf tomato vanished shortly after being harvested in March. This tomato, part of a study to explore the feasibility of continuous fresh-food production in space, was finally found, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli revealed during a livestream on December 6... The Veg-05 project expanded the scope of in-space farming to include dwarf tomatoes, exploring how lighting and fertilizer variations influence fruit growth, safety, and nutritional value (and yes, tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables)... Following the harvest in March, each astronaut received a tomato sample stored in a Ziploc bag. However, concerns about potential fungal contamination led NASA to instruct the astronauts not to consume the fruit, as Space.com reported. News of the missing tomato first emerged on September 13, during an event commemorating Rubio's one-year stay in orbit. Rubio, who had an extended mission on the ISS due to a malfunctioning Russian Soyuz spacecraft, lamented the loss of his tomato share, which had floated away before he could take a bite. Rubio, who spent a record 371 days in space, mused about the missing tomato, saying: "I spent so many hours looking for that thing. I'm sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future." In the livestream Moghbeli "did not specify where on the 356-foot space station the one-inch-wide red dwarf tomato was located," notes the Guardian, "or in what condition."The Rubio tomato turned out to be one of only 12 red dwarves successfully germinated and grown to ripeness in space during the Veg-05 project, compared with more than 100 in a parallel experiment conducted on Earth, according to NASA. Thanks to Slashdot reader christoban for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Doom, both John Romero and John Carmack are appearing now on a special 30th anniversary stream on Twitch. (Right now they're talking about people who got into professional networking careers because of what they'd learned from setting up multiplayer deathmatches...) And earlier this morning, Romero shocked the gaming world by posting six words on X. "Free WAD for SIGIL II is up" The official page for the long-awaited new Doom episode promises a 2 megabyte file "packed with some hardcore classic DOOM punishment - beware of Ultra-Violence mode!" There's nine new maps with names like "Wrathful Reckoning" and "Vengeance Unleashed". And the site is also selling an upgrade with a THORR soundtrack - priced at 6.66 - along with t-shirts, boxed editions of the original game Sigil, and a "Megawad Beast Box" that's "individually numbered and signed personally by John Romero and featuring the artwork of Christopher Lovell" (including a signed art print). Besides sundry extras including a t-shirt, stickers, and a Sigil-themed coin, it also comes with a pewter statue of John Romero's head on a spike...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The United States military is preparing to launch its secretive X-37B space plane on a seventh mission in orbit," reports NBC News. Shaped like a small space shuttle, "It's an itty-bitty spaceplane, not quite 30 feet long and under 10 feet tall," writes the Washington Post, "with a pair of stubby wings and a rounded, bulldog-like nose." Space.com says the launch window for the uncrewed vehicle opens Monday at 8:14 p.m. EST. From NBC News:For the first time, the X-37B will ride into orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Since its debut more than a decade ago, the X-37B has been a source of intrigue within the space community, mostly owing to the mysterious nature of its activities in low Earth orbit. Despite not knowing its true purpose or location, skywatchers have occasionally spotted and photographed the space plane in the night sky using telescopes... The military is tight-lipped about such operations, but the Space Force said the X-37B missions "are key to ensuring safe and responsible operations in space for all users of the space domain..." The "U.S. Space Force says that launching on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket will allow testing "in new orbital regimes, experimenting with space domain awareness technologies and investigating the radiation effects to NASA materials." The Washington Post notes that "The reference about 'space domain awareness' could mean that it will be keeping an eye on other satellites, potentially watching for threats":At least one part of the mission is known. The vehicle will "expose plant seeds to the harsh radiation environment of long-duration spaceflight" in an experiment for NASA. In the past, the Pentagon has also used the X-37B to test some of its cutting edge technologies, including a small solar panel designed to transform solar energy into microwaves, a technology that one day could allow energy harnessed in space to be beamed back to Earth... If Sunday's X-37B mission is like previous ones, the spaceplane could be in space for a while. Its first flight, which launched in 2010, lasted 224 days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every five years America's federal Department of Health updates its dietary guidelines with the latest nutrition science, affecting federal nutrition programs and various other government health initiatives. Now an anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal:Botanists count potatoes as a vegetable. But should Americans? The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has sparked the question... White potatoes, which come in various colors, are classified as "starchy vegetables." But the committee could uproot potatoes from the vegetable bin and toss them in with a broader category of rice, other grains and carbohydrates as the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services weigh updates to national diet guidelines for 2025. The scientific debate isn't easy to follow. But it sounds like a half-baked idea to Kam Quarles, chief executive of the National Potato Council, a potato-industry group. The dietary guidelines shape nutrition advice to Americans, as well as what foods are served in school cafeterias. Potatoes, according to Quarles, should be respected as a gateway vegetable. "Kids are far more likely to eat" dishes with other vegetables if potatoes are involved, he said. Not all parents swallow that a trail of tubers leads to leafy greens. Some complained about a Peppa Pig animated cartoon that featured a potato preaching the nutritional value of vegetables. "By the power of vegetables, I am here," Super Potato said, soaring through the sky, singing, "Fruit and vegetables keep us alive. Always remember to eat your five." The U.K.'s National Health Service, for one, doesn't count spuds toward the U.K.'s recommended five portions of fruits and vegetables a day. "It's a giant spud singing it. You're, like, 'Really? A potato's one of your five a day?'" said Dan Greef, the owner of Deliciously Guilt Free, a sugar-free bakery in Cambridge, U.K. He spent years persuading his two children to eat vegetables. Then, he said, "a drawing of a potato tells you it's fine, and you don't listen to your dad...." Nutrition researchers say the potato contains helpful nutrients, including potassium and vitamin C, but its health benefits are diminished when it is fried. Nearly half of all U.S. potatoes eaten as food go into frozen products, mostly french fries, the USDA found. For comparison, the article points out that under U.S. dietary guidelines, "corn on the cob is a starchy vegetable, while cornmeal is a grain."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechSpot remembers that Turbo Pascal "stands out as one of the first instances of an integrated development environment (IDE), providing a text-based interface through which developers could write their code, compile it, and finally link it with runtime libraries."The early IDE, written in Assembly, eschewed the use of floppies, instead building the code directly in RAM for an unprecedented performance boost. The language demonstrated superior speed, greater convenience, and a more affordable price compared to its competition. Philippe Kahn, Borland's CEO who initially conceptualized turning the new language into an all-in-one product, decided to sell the software via mail orders for just $49.95, establishing a market presence for the then-newly founded company. It was called "Turbo" because its use of RAM made it considerable faster, adds the Register:Anders Hejlsberg, who would later go on to join Microsoft as part of the C# project, is widely credited as creator of the language, with Borland boss Philippe Kahn identifying the need for the all-in-one tool... Version 1 had limitations. Source code files, for example, were limited to 64 KB. It would only produce .COM executable files for DOS and CP/M - although other architectures and operating systems were supported. It would also run from a single floppy disk, saving users from endless swapping in a world where single drives were the norm and a hard disk seemed impossibly exotic - and expensive... However, it was with version 4, in 1987, that Turbo Pascal changed dramatically. For one, support for CP/M and CP/M-86 was dropped, and the compiler would generate .EXE executables under DOS, lifting the .COM restrictions... For this writer, 1989's version 5.5 was peak Turbo Pascal. Object-oriented programming features turned up, including classes and inheritance, and a step-by-step debugger. Version 6 and 7 brought in inline assembly and support for the creation of Windows executables and DLLs respectively, but version 7 also marked the end of the line as far as Borland was concerned. Turbo Pascal for Windows would turn up, but was eventually superseded by Delphi. However, the steamroller of tools such as Visual Basic 3 ensured that Borland never had the same success in Windows that it enjoyed under DOS. As for Turbo Pascal, several versions were eventually released by Borland as freeware including version 1 for DOS, 5.5, and 7. I once took a computer programming course taught entirely in Pascal. (Functions, subroutines, and procedures...) Any Slashdot readers have their own memories to share about Pascal?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UPDATE: John Romero released a new 9-map episode of Doom. But it was 30 years ago today that Doom "invented the modern PC games industry, as a place dominated by technologically advanced action shooters," remembers the Guardian:In late August 1993, a young programmer named Dave Taylor walked into an office block... The carpets, he discovered, were stained with spilled soda, the ceiling tiles yellowed by water leaks from above. But it was here that a team of five coders, artists and designers were working on arguably the most influential action video game ever made. This was id Software. This was Doom... [W]hen Taylor met id's charismatic designer and coder John Romero, he was shown their next project... "There were no critters in it yet," recalls Taylor of that first demo. "There was no gaming stuff at all. It was really just a 3D engine. But you could move around it really fluidly and you got such a sense of immersion it was shocking. The renderer was kick ass and the textures were so gritty and cool. I thought I was looking at an in-game cinematic. And Romero is just the consummate demo man: he really feeds off of your energy. So as my jaw hit the floor, he got more and more animated. Doom was amazing, but John was at least half of that demo's impact on me." [...] In late 1992, it had become clear that the 3D engine John Carmack was planning for Doom would speed up real-time rendering while also allowing the use of texture maps to add detail to environments. As a result, Romero's ambition was to set Doom in architecturally complex worlds with multiple storeys, curved walls, moving platforms. A hellish Escher-esque mall of death... "Doom was the first to combine huge rooms, stairways, dark areas and bright areas," says Romero, "and lava and all that stuff, creating a really elaborate abstract world. That was never possible before...." [T]he way Doom combined fast-paced 3D action with elaborate, highly staged level design would prove hugely influential in the years to come. It's there in every first-person action game we play today... But Doom wasn't just a single-player game. Carmack consumed an entire library of books on computer networking before working on the code that would allow players to connect their PCs via modem to a local area network (LAN) and play in the game together... Doom brought fast-paced, real-time action, both competitive and cooperative, into the gaming mainstream. Seeing your friends battling imps and zombie space marines beside you in a virtual world was an exhilarating experience... When Doom was launched on 10 December 1993, it became immediately clear that the game was all-consuming - id Software had chosen to make the abbreviated shareware version available via the FTP site of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but that crashed almost immediately, bringing the institution's network to its knees... "We changed the rules of design," says Romero. "Getting rid of lives, which was an arcade holdover that every game had; getting rid of score because it was not the goal of the game. We wanted to make it so that, if the player died, they'd just start that level over - we were constantly pushing them forward. The game's attitude was, I want you to keep playing. We wanted to get people to the point where they always needed more." It was a unique moment in time. In the article designer Sandy Petersen remembers that "I would sometimes get old dungeons I'd done for D&D and use them as the basis for making a map in Doom." Cheat codes had been included for debugging purposes - but were left in the game rs to discover. The article even includes a link to a half-hour video of a 1993 visit to Id software filmed by BBS owner Dan Linton. And today on X, John Romero shared a link to the Guardian's article, along with some appreciative words for anyone who's ever played the game. "DOOM is still remembered because of the community that plays and mods it 30 years on. I'm grateful to be a part of that community and fortunate to have been there at its beginning." The Guardian's article notes that now Romero "is currently working on Sigil 2, a spiritual successor to the original Doom series."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Four Republican candidates for U.S. president debated Wednesday - and moderator Megyn Kelly had a tough question for former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. "Can you please speak to the requirement that you said that every anonymous internet user needs to out themselves?" Nikki Haley: What I said was, that social media companies need to show us their algorithms. I also said there are millions of bots on social media right now. They're foreign, they're Chinese, they're Iranian. I will always fight for freedom of speech for Americans; we do not need freedom of speech for Russians and Iranians and Hamas. We need social media companies to go and fight back on all of these bots that are happening. That's what I said. As a mom, do I think social media would be more civil if we went and had people's names next to that? Yes, I do think that, because I think we've got too much cyberbullying, I think we've got child pornography and all of those things. But having said that, I never said government should go and require anyone's name. DeSantis: That's false. Haley: What I said - DeSantis:You said I want your name. As president of the United States, her first day in office, she said one of the first things I'm going to do -- Haley: I said we were going to get the millions of bots. DeSantis: "All social medias? I want your name." A government i.d. to dox every American. That's what she said. You can roll the tape. She said I want your name - and that was going to be one of the first things she did in office. And then she got real serious blowback - and understandably so, because it would be a massive expansion of government. We have anonymous speech. The Federalist Papers were written with anonymous writers - Jay, Madison, and Hamilton, they went under "Publius". It's something that's important - and especially given how conservatives have been attacked and they've lost jobs and they've been cancelled. You know the regime would use that to weaponize that against our own people. It was a bad idea, and she should own up to it. Haley: This cracks me up, because Ron is so hypocritical, because he actually went and tried to push a law that would stop anonymous people from talking to the press, and went so far to say bloggers should have to register with the state -- DeSantis:That's not true. Haley: - if they're going to write about elected officials. It was in the - check your newpaper. It was absolutely there. DeSantis quickly attributed the introduction of that legislation to "some legislator". The press had already extensively written about Haley's position on anonymity on social media. Three weeks ago Business Insider covered a Fox News interview, and quoted Nikki Haley as saying: "When I get into office, the first thing we have to do, social media companies, they have to show America their algorithms. Let us see why they're pushing what they're pushing. The second thing is every person on social media should be verified by their name."Haley said this was why her proposals would be necessary to counter the "national security threat" posed by anonymous social media accounts and social media bots. "When you do that, all of a sudden people have to stand by what they say, and it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots, and the Chinese bots," Haley said. "And then you're gonna get some civility when people know their name is next to what they say, and they know their pastor and their family member's gonna see it. It's gonna help our kids and it's gonna help our country," she continued... A representative for the Haley campaign told Business Insider that Haley's proposals were "common sense." "We all know that America's enemies use anonymous bots to spread anti-American lies and sow chaos and division within our borders. Nikki believes social media companies need to do a better job of verifying users so we can crack down on Chinese, Iranian, and Russian bots," the representative said. The next day CNBC reported that Haley "appeared to add a caveat... suggesting Wednesday that Americans should still be allowed to post anonymously online." A spokesperson for Haley's campaign added, "Social media companies need to do a better job of verifying users as human in order to crack down on anonymous foreign bots. We can do this while protecting America's right to free speech and Americans who post anonymously." Privacy issues had also come up just five minutes earlier in the debate. In March America's Treasury Secretary had recommended the country "advance policy and technical work on a potential central bank digital currency, or CBDC, so the U.S. is prepared if CBDC is determined to be in the national interest." But Florida governor Ron DeSantis spoke out forecefully against the possibility. "They want to get rid of cash, crypto, they want to force you to do that. They'll take away your privacy. They will absolutely regulate your purchases. On Day One as president, we take the idea of Central Bank Digital Currency, and we throw it in the trash can. It'll be dead on arrival." [The audience applauded.]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 16-year-old high school student reverse engineered Apple's messaging protocol, leading to the launch of an interoperable Android app called "Beeper Mini". But on Friday the Verge reported that "less than a week after its launch, the app started experiencing technical issues when users were suddenly unable to send and receive blue bubble messages."Reached for comment, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky did not deny that Apple has successfully blocked Beeper Mini. "If it's Apple, then I think the biggest question is... if Apple truly cares about the privacy and security of their own iPhone users, why would they stop a service that enables their own users to now send encrypted messages to Android users, rather than using unsecure SMS...? Beeper Mini is here today and works great. Why force iPhone users back to sending unencrypted SMS when they chat with friends on Android?" Apple says they're unable to verify that end-to-end encryption is maintained when messages are sent through unauthorized channels, according to a statement quoted by TechCrunch:"At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe. We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users." Beeper responded on X:We stand behind what we've built. Beeper Mini is keeps your messages private, and boosts security compared to unencrypted SMS. For anyone who claims otherwise, we'd be happy to give our entire source code to mutually agreed upon third party to evaluate the security of our app. Ars Technica adds:On Saturday, Migicovsky notified Beeper Cloud (desktop) users that iMessage was working again for them, after a long night of fixes. "Work continues on Beeper Mini," Migicovsky wrote shortly after noon Eastern time. Engadget notes:The Beeper Mini team has apparently been working around the clock to resolve the outage affecting the new "iMessage on Android" app, and says a fix is "very close." And once the fix rolls out, users' seven-day free trials will be reset so they can start over fresh. Meanwhile, at around 9 p.m. EST, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky posted on X that "For 3 blissful days this week, iPhone and Android users enjoyed high quality encrypted chats. We're working hard to return to that state."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Every day, 3 trillion dollars worth of transactions are handled by a 64-year-old programming language that hardly anybody knows anymore," writes PC Magazine. But most school's don't teach the mainframe programming language COBOL any more, and "COBOL cowboys" are aging out of the workforce, with replacements in short supply. "This is precisely the kind of problem that IBM thinks it can fix with AI."IBM's approach is fairly straightforward: Rather than relying exclusively on a limited pool of human programmers to solve the problem, it built a generative AI-powered code assistant (watsonx) that helps convert all that dusty old COBOL code to a more modern language, thereby saving coders countless hours of reprogramming. In extremely simplified terms, the process is similar to feeding an essay written in English into ChatGPT and asking it to translate certain paragraphs into Esperanto. It allows programmers to take a chunk of COBOL and enlist watsonx to transform it into Java. But of course, it's not quite that simple in practice... After IBM and the customer have a thorough understanding of the application landscape, the data flow, and the existing dependencies, "we help them refactor their applications," says IBM's Vice President of Product Management, IT Automation, Keri Olson. "That is, breaking it down into smaller pieces, which the customer can selectively choose, at that point, to do the modernization from COBOL to Java." Skyla Loomis, IBM's Vice President of IBM Z Software adds, "But you have to remember that this is a developer assistant tool. It's AI assisted, but it still requires the developer. So yes, the developer is involved with the tooling and helping the customers select the services." Once the partnership between man and machine is established, the AI steps in and says, 'Okay, I want to transform this portion of code. The developer may still need to perform some minor editing of the code that the AI provides, Loomis explains. "It might be 80 or 90 percent of what they need, but it still requires a couple of changes. It's a productivity enhancement - not a developer replacement type of activity." The article quotes a skeptical Gartner Distinguished Vice President and Analyst, who notes that IBM "has no case studies, at this time, to validate its claims."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than half a century ago, Digital Equipment Corporation released the first of their 16-bit PDP-11 minicomputers, continuing the PDP-11 line until 1997. This week long-time Slashdot reader Shayde writes:I've been working on a 1986 PDP/11 that I basically got as a "barn find" from an estate sale a year ago. The project has absolutely had it's ups and downs, as the knowledgebase for these machines is aging quickly. I'm hoping to restore my own expertise with this build, but it's been challenging finding parts, technical details, and just plain information. I leaned pretty heavily on the folks at the Vintage Computing Federation, as well as connections I've made in the industry - and made some great progress... Check it out if you're keen on retrocomputing and old minicomputers and DEC gear. The entire saga is chronicled in three videos titled "Barn Find PDP 11/73 - Will it boot" - part 1, part 2, and this week's latest video. "What started as a curiosity has turned into an almost 10-month-long project," it concludes, creeping up hopefully on the possibility of an awe-struck glimpse at the PDP-11's boot sequence (over two minutes long) "So cool," responded Jeremiah Cornelius (Slashdot reader #137) in a comment on the submitted Slashdot story. "I have huge affection for these beasts. I cut my teeth in High School on a DEC PDP11/70 and AT&T SysV, and a little RSTS/E in 1979-82. We switched systems by loading different cakelid platters into the washing-machine drives, and toggling the magenta keys. "I've thought about the Blinkenlights 7/10 scale emulator, tha uses an RPi, but I envy you and hope you have fun."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports:A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech. Joan Donovan claimed in a filing with the Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general that her superiors soured on her as Harvard was getting a record $500 million pledge from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg's charitable arm. As research director of Harvard Kennedy School projects delving into mis- and disinformation on social media platforms, Donovan had raised millions in grants, testified before Congress and been a frequent commentator on television, often faulting internet companies for profiting from the spread of divisive falsehoods. Last year, the school's dean told her that he was winding down her main project and that she should stop fundraising for it. This year, the school eliminated her position. As one of the first researchers with access to "the Facebook papers" leaked by Frances Haugen, Donovan was asked to speak at a meeting of the Dean's Council, a group of the university's high-profile donors, remembers The Columbia Journalism Review :Elliot Schrage, then the vice president of communications and global policy for Meta, was also at the meeting. Donovan says that, after she brought up the Haugen leaks, Schrage became agitated and visibly angry, "rocking in his chair and waving his arms and trying to interrupt." During a Q&A session after her talk, Donovan says, Schrage reiterated a number of common Meta talking points, including the fact that disinformation is a fluid concept with no agreed-upon definition and that the company didn't want to be an "arbiter of truth." According to Donovan, Nancy Gibbs, Donovan's faculty advisor, was supportive after the incident. She says that they discussed how Schrage would likely try to pressure Douglas Elmendorf, the dean of the Kennedy School of Government (where the Shorenstein Center hosting Donovan's project is based) about the idea of creating a public archive of the documents... After Elmendorf called her in for a status meeting, Donovan claims that he told her she was not to raise any more money for her project; that she was forbidden to spend the money that she had raised (a total of twelve million dollars, she says); and that she couldn't hire any new staff. According to Donovan, Elmendorf told her that he wasn't going to allow any expenditure that increased her public profile, and used a number of Meta talking points in his assessment of her work... Donovan says she tried to move her work to the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, but that the head of that center told her that they didn't have the "political capital" to bring on someone whom Elmendorf had "targeted"... Donovan told me that she believes the pressure to shut down her project is part of a broader pattern of influence in which Meta and other tech platforms have tried to make research into disinformation as difficult as possible... Donovan said she hopes that by blowing the whistle on Harvard, her case will be the "tip of the spear." Another interesting detail from the article:[Donovan] alleges that Meta pressured Elmendorf to act, noting that he is friends with Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer. (Elmendorf was Sandberg's advisor when she studied at Harvard in the early nineties; he attended Sandberg's wedding in 2022, four days before moving to shut down Donovan's project.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader jd writes: The Register is reporting that Akamai security researchers have found a way to hack Active Directory and obtain the information stored within it. The researchers go on to say that Microsoft is NOT planning to fix the vulnerability. From the article:While the current report doesn't provide technical details or proof-of-concept exploits, Akamai has promised, in the near future, to publish code that implements these attacks called DDSpoof - short for DHCP DNS Spoof. 'We will show how unauthenticated attackers can collect necessary data from DHCP servers, identify vulnerable DNS records, overwrite them, and use that ability to compromise AD domains,' Akamai security researcher Ori David said. The DHCP attack research builds on earlier work by NETSPI's Kevin Roberton, who detailed ways to exploit flaws in DNS zones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux magazine interviewed an AlmaLinux official about what happened after their distro pivoted to binary compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux rather than being a downstream build: Linux Magazine: What prompted AlmaLinux to choose ABI over 1:1 compatibility with RHEL? benny Vasquez, chair of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation: The short answer is our users. Overwhelmingly, our users made it clear that they chose AlmaLinux for its ease of use, the security and stability that it provides, and the backing of a diverse group of sponsors. All of that together meant that we didn't need to lock ourselves into copying RHEL, and we could continue to provide what our users needed. Moreover, we needed to consider what our sponsors would be able to help us provide, and how we could best serve the downstream projects that now rely on AlmaLinux. The rippling effects of any decision that we make are beyond measure at this point, so we consider all aspects of our impact and then move forward with confidence and intention. LM: How did AlmaLinux's mission of improving the Linux ecosystem for everyone influence this decision? bV: We strongly believe that the soul of open source means working together, providing value where there is a gap, and helping each other solve problems. If we participate in an emotional reaction to a business's change, we will then be distracted and potentially hurt users and the Enterprise Linux ecosystem overall. By remaining focused on what is best (though not easiest), and adapting to the ecosystem as it is today, we will provide a better and more stable operating system. LM: What opportunities does the ABI route offer over 1:1 compatibility? bV: By liberating ourselves from the 1:1 promise, we have been able to do a few small things that have proven to be a good testing ground for what will come in the future. Specifically, we shipped a couple of smallish, but extremely important, security patches ahead of Red Hat, offering quicker security to the users of AlmaLinux... This also opens the door for other features and improvements that we could add back in or change, as our users need. We have already seen greater community involvement, especially around these ideas. LM: Does the ABI route pose any extra challenges? bV: The obvious one is that building from CentOS Stream sources takes more effort, but I think the more important challenge (and the one that will only be solved with consistency over time) is the one of proving that we will be able to deliver on the promise...We will continue on our goal of becoming the home for all users that need Enterprise Linux for free, but in the next year I expect that we will see an expansion in the number of kernels we support and see some new and exciting SIGs spun up around other features or use cases, as the community continues to standardize on how to achieve their goals collectively. Linux magazine notes that in August AlmaLinux added two new repositories, Testing and Synergy. "Testing, currently available for AlmaLinux 8 and 9, offers security updates before they are approved and implemented upstream. Synergy contains packages requested by community members that currently aren't available in RHEL or Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL, a set of extra software packages maintained by the Fedora SIG that are not available in RHEL or CentOS Stream)." The article also points out that "On the upside, AlmaLinux can now include comments in their patches for greater transparency. Users will see where the patch comes from, which was not an option before." Vasquez tells the magazine, "I think folks will be seriously happy about what they find as we release the new versions, namely, the consistency, stability, and security that they've come to expect from us."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After billionaire Bill Ackman demanded three college presidents "resign in disgrace," that post on X - excerpting their testimony before a U.S. Congressional committee - has now been viewed more than 104 million times, provoking a variety of reactions. Saturday afternoon, one of the three college presidents resigned - University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill. Politico reports that the Republican-led Committee now "will be investigating Harvard University, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania after their institutions' leaders failed to sufficiently condemn student protests calling for 'Jewish genocide.'" The BBC reports a wealthy UPenn donor reportedly withdrew a stock grant worth $100 million. But after watching the entire Congressional hearing, New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that she'd seen a "more understandable" context:In the questioning before the now-infamous exchange, you can see the trap [Congresswoman Elise] Stefanik laid. "You understand that the use of the term 'intifada' in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?" she asked Claudine Gay of Harvard. Gay responded that such language was "abhorrent." Stefanik then badgered her to admit that students chanting about intifada were calling for genocide, and asked angrily whether that was against Harvard's code of conduct. "Will admissions offers be rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or applicants who say, 'From the river to the sea' or 'intifada,' advocating for the murder of Jews?" Gay repeated that such "hateful, reckless, offensive speech is personally abhorrent to me," but said action would be taken only "when speech crosses into conduct." So later in the hearing, when Stefanik again started questioning Gay, Kornbluth and Magill about whether it was permissible for students to call for the genocide of the Jews, she was referring, it seemed clear, to common pro-Palestinian rhetoric and trying to get the university presidents to commit to disciplining those who use it. Doing so would be an egregious violation of free speech. After all, even if you're disgusted by slogans like "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," their meaning is contested... Liberal blogger Josh Marshall argues that "While groups like Hamas certainly use the word [intifada] with a strong eliminationist meaning it is simply not the case that the term consistently or usually or mostly refers to genocide. It's just not. Stefanik's basic equation was and is simply false and the university presidents were maladroit enough to fall into her trap." The Wall Street Journal published an investigation the day after the hearing. A political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley hired a survey firm to poll 250 students across the U.S. from "a variety of backgrounds" - and the results were surprising:A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported "definitely" supporting "from the river to the sea" because "Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side." Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to "probably not." Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view... In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting "from the river to the sea" to rejecting the mantra. These students had never seen a map of the Mideast and knew little about the region's geography, history, or demography. More about the phrase from the Associated Press:Many Palestinian activists say it's a call for peace and equality after 75 years of Israeli statehood and decades-long, open-ended Israeli military rule over millions of Palestinians. Jews hear a clear demand for Israel's destruction... By 2012, it was clear that Hamas had claimed the slogan in its drive to claim land spanning Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank... The phrase also has roots in the Hamas charter... [Since 1997 the U.S. government has considered Hamas a terrorist organization.] "A Palestine between the river to the sea leaves not a single inch for Israel," read an open letter signed by 30 Jewish news outlets around the world and released on Wednesday... Last month, Vienna police banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration, citing the fact that the phrase "from the river to the sea" was mentioned in invitations and characterizing it as a call to violence. And in Britain, the Labour party issued a temporary punishment to a member of Parliament, Andy McDonald, for using the phrase during a rally at which he called for a stop to bombardment. As the controversy rages on, Ackman's X timeline now includes an official response reposted from a college that wasn't called to testify - Stanford University:In the context of the national discourse, Stanford unequivocally condemns calls for the genocide of Jews or any peoples. That statement would clearly violate Stanford's Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university. Ackman also retweeted this response from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman:for a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed. i'd like to just state that i was totally wrong. i still don't understand it, really. or know what to do about it. but it is so fucked. Wednesday UPenn's president announced they'd immediately consider a new change in policy," in an X post viewed 38.7 million times:For decades under multiple Penn presidents and consistent with most universities, Penn's policies have been guided by the [U.S.] Constitution and the law. In today's world, where we are seeing signs of hate proliferating across our campus and our world in a way not seen in years, these policies need to be clarified and evaluated. Penn must initiate a serious and careful look at our policies, and provost Jackson and I will immediately convene a process to do so. As president, I'm committed to a safe, secure, and supportive environment so all members of our community can thrive. We can and we will get this right. Thank you. The next day the university's business school called on Magill to resign. And Saturday afternoon, Magill resigned.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ZDNet reports that "At the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit Japan, Linus Torvalds and his good friend Dirk Hohndel, the head of Verizon open source, talked about the current state of Linux:Speaking of maintainers, Hohndel brought up the question of "maintainer fatigue and how draining and stressful this role is...." Torvalds replied, "It's much easier to find developers; we have a lot of developers. Some people think that you have to be a superdeveloper who can do everything to be a maintainer, but that's not actually true...." Hohndel commented that the aging of the kernel community is a "double-edged sword." Torvalds agreed, but he noted that "one of the things I liked about the Rust side of the kernel, was that there was one maintainer who was clearly much younger than most of the maintainers. We can clearly see that certain areas in the kernel bring in more young people...." Hohndel and Torvalds also talked about the use of the Rust language in the Linux kernel. Torvalds said, "It's been growing, but we don't have any part of the kernel that really depends on Rust yet. To me, Rust was one of those things that made technical sense, but to me personally, even more important was that we need to not stagnate as a kernel and as developers." That said, Torvalds continued, "Rust has not really shown itself as the next great big thing. But I think during next year, we'll actually be starting to integrate drivers and some even major subsystems that are starting to use it actively. So it's one of those things that is going to take years before it's a big part of the kernel. But it's certainly shaping up to be one of those." Torvalds also said he enjoyed the fact that open source "has become the standard within the industry." But later Hohndel, calling AI "autocorrect on steroids," asked Torvalds if he thought he'd ever see submissions of LLM-written code."I'm convinced it's gonna happen. And it may well be happening already, maybe on a smaller scale where people use it more to help write code." But, unlike many people, Torvalds isn't too worried about AI. "It's clearly something where automation has always helped people write code. This is not anything new at all...."But, "What about hallucinations?," asked Hohndel. Torvalds, who will never stop being a little snarky, said, "I see the bugs that happen without AI every day. So that's why I'm not so worried. I think we're doing just fine at making mistakes on our own."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Gemini LLMs developed by Google Deepmind can process more than text, including images, video and audio. So a team at Google has proposed using AI to create a "bird's-eye" view of users' lives, reports CNBC, "using mobile phone data such as photographs and searches."Dubbed "Project Ellmann," after biographer and literary critic Richard David Ellmann, the idea would be to use LLMs like Gemini to ingest search results, spot patterns in a user's photos, create a chatbot and "answer previously impossible questions," according to a copy of a presentation viewed by CNBC. Ellmann's aim, it states, is to be "Your Life Story Teller." It's unclear if the company has plans to produce these capabilities within Google Photos, or any other product. Google Photos has more than 1 billion users and 4 trillion photos and videos, according to a company blog post... A product manager for Google Photos presented Project Ellman alongside Gemini teams at a recent internal summit, according to documents viewed by CNBC. They wrote that the teams spent the past few months determining that large language models are the ideal tech to make this bird's-eye approach to one's life story a reality. Ellmann could pull in context using biographies, previous moments and subsequent photos to describe a user's photos more deeply than "just pixels with labels and metadata," the presentation states... "We trawl through your photos, looking at their tags and locations to identify a meaningful moment," a presentation slide reads. "When we step back and understand your life in its entirety, your overarching story becomes clear...." The team also demonstrated "Ellmann Chat," with the description: "Imagine opening ChatGPT but it already knows everything about your life. What would you ask it?" Reached for a comment, a Google spokesperson told CNBC that Google Photos "has always used AI to help people search their photos and videos, and we're excited about the potential of LLMs to unlock even more helpful experiences. "This was an early internal exploration and, as always, should we decide to roll out new features, we would take the time needed to ensure they were helpful to people, and designed to protect users' privacy and safety as our top priority."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

15,279 people live in the rural Minnesota town of Bemidji. But now mail carriers there, "overwhelmed by Amazon packages, say they've been warned not to use the word 'Amazon,' including when customers ask why the mail is delayed," reports the Washington Post:"We are not to mention the word 'Amazon' to anyone," said a mail carrier who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job. "If asked, they're to be referred to as 'Delivery Partners' or 'Distributors,'" said a second carrier. "It's ridiculous." The directive, passed down Monday morning from U.S. Postal Service management, comes three weeks after mail carriers in the northern Minnesota town staged a symbolic strike outside the post office, protesting the heavy workloads and long hours caused by the sudden arrival of thousands of Amazon packages... In addition to being banned from saying "Amazon," postal workers have also been told their jobs could be at risk if they speak publicly about post office issues. Staffers were told they could attend Tuesday's meeting only on their 30-minute lunch break if they changed out of uniform, mail carriers said. One mail carrier said he'd been warned there could be "consequences" for those who showed up. Postal customers in Bemidji have been complaining about late and missing mail since the beginning of November, when the contract for delivering Amazon packages in town switched from UPS to the post office. Mail carriers told The Post last month that they were instructed to deliver packages before the mail, leaving residents waiting for tax rebates, credit card statements, medical documents and checks... The post office has held a contract to deliver Amazon packages on Sundays since 2013. The agency, which has lost $6.5 billion in the past year, has said that it's crucial to increase package volume by cutting deals with Amazon and other retailers. Tuesday the town's mayor held a listening session for the state's two senators with Bemidji residents, whose complaints included "missing medications and late bills resulting in fees." Senator Amy Klobuchar later told the Post that "We need a very clear commitment that we're not going to be prioritizing Amazon packages over regular mail," promising to explore improving postal staffing and pay for rural carriers.On Monday, the Minnesota senators introduced a bill called the Postal Delivery Accountability Act, which would require the post office to improve tracking and reporting of delayed and undelivered mail nationally.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Go team conducted a survey of Go Developers in August - and has just released the results. Among the findings: "90% of survey respondents saying they felt satisfied while working with Go during the prior year," while 6% said they were dissastified.Further, the number of people working with Go continues to increase; we see evidence of this from external research like Stack Overflow's Developer Survey (which found 14% of professional developers worked with Go during the past year, a roughly 15% year-over-year increase), as well as analytics for go.dev (which show an 8% rise in visitors year-over-year). Combining this growth with a high satisfaction score is evidence that Go continues to appeal to developers, and suggests that many developers who choose to learn the language feel good about their decision long afterwards... As in prior years, the majority of survey respondents told us they work with Go on Linux (63%) and macOS (58%) systems... We do continue to see that newer members of the Go community are more likely to be working with Windows than more experienced Go developers. We interpret this as a signal that Windows-based development is important for onboarding new developers to the Go ecosystem, and is a topic our team hopes to focus on more in 2024... While x86-compatible systems still account for the majority of development (89%), ARM64 is also now used by a majority of respondents (56%). This adoption appears to be partly driven by Apple Silicon; macOS developers are now more likely to say they develop for ARM64 than for x86-based architectures (76% vs. 71%). However, Apple hardware isn't the only factor driving ARM64 adoption: among respondents who don't develop on macOS at all, 29% still say they develop for ARM64. The most-preferred code editors among the surveyed Go programmers were VS Code (44%), GoLand (31%), Vim/Neovim (16%), and Emacs (3%).52% of the survey's respondents actually selected "very satisfied" for their feelings about Go - the highest possible rating. Other interesting findings: " The top requests for improving toolchain warnings and errors were to make the messages more comprehensible and actionable; this sentiment was shared by developers of all experience levels, but was particularly strong among newer Go developers.""Three out of every four respondents work on Go software that also uses cloud services; this is evidence that developers see Go as a language for modern, cloud-based development."The experimental gonew tool (which offers predefined templates for instantiating new Go projects) "appears to solve critical problems for Go developers (especially developers new to Go) and does so in a way that matches their existing workflows for starting a new project. Based on these findings, we believe gonew can substantially reduce onboarding barriers for new Go developers and ease adoption of Go in organizations."And when it comes to AI, "Go developers said they are more interested in AI/ML tooling that improves the quality, reliability, and performance of code they write, rather than writing code for them."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"This fall, a small number of senior leaders approached the board of OpenAI with concerns about chief executive Sam Altman," the Washington Post reported late Friday:Altman - a revered mentor, and avatar of the AI revolution - had been psychologically abusive, the employees alleged, creating pockets of chaos and delays at the artificial-intelligence start-up, according to two people familiar with the board's thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters. The company leaders, a group that included key figures and people who manage large teams, mentioned Altman's allegedly pitting employees against each other in unhealthy ways, the people said. Although the board members didn't use the language of abuse to describe Altman's behavior, these complaints echoed some of their interactions with Altman over the years, and they had already been debating the board's ability to hold the CEO accountable. Several board members thought Altman had lied to them, for example, as part of a campaign to remove board member Helen Toner after she published a paper criticizing OpenAI, the people said. The new complaints triggered a review of Altman's conduct during which the board weighed the devotion Altman had cultivated among factions of the company against the risk that OpenAI could lose key leaders who found interacting with him highly toxic. They also considered reports from several employees who said they feared retaliation from Altman: One told the board that Altman was hostile after the employee shared critical feedback with the CEO and that he undermined the employee on that person's team, the people said... The complaints about Altman's alleged behavior, which have not previously been reported, were a major factor in the board's abrupt decision to fire Altman on Nov. 17, according to the people. Initially cast as a clash over the safe development of artificial intelligence, Altman's firing was at least partially motivated by the sense that his behavior would make it impossible for the board to oversee the CEO. Bloomberg reported Friday:The board had heard from some senior executives at OpenAI who had issues with Altman, said one person familiar with directors' thinking. But employees approached board members warily because they were scared of potential repercussions of Altman finding out they had spoken out against him, the person said. Two other interesting details from the Post's article:While over 95% of the company's employees signed an open letter after Altman's firing demanding his return, "On social media, in news reports and on the anonymous app Blind, which requires members to sign up with a work email address to post, people identified as current OpenAI employees also described facing intense peer pressure to sign the mass-resignation letter."The Post also spotted "a cryptic post" on X Wednesday from OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever about lessons learned over the past month: "One such lesson is that the phrase 'the beatings will continue until morale improves' applies more often than it has any right to,'" (The Post adds that "The tweet was quickly deleted.")The Post also reported in November that "Before OpenAI, Altman was asked to leave by his mentor at the prominent start-up incubator Y Combinator, part of a pattern of clashes that some attribute to his self-serving approach."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Jack Dorsey's Block (the company formerly known as Square) announced today that it is releasing its hardware Bitcoin wallet, Bitkey, in 95 countries. However, users can only preorder the device at the moment, with shipping starting in early 2024. The device will cost $150 USD. Block's pitch to Bitcoin holders is that using a self-custodial crypto wallet is more secure than keeping their crypto assets in custodial wallets or exchanges. Self-custodial wallets put the onus on users to remember -- or store securely -- passwords or long seed phrases to unlock their accounts. The Proto team at Block, which worked on developing the Bitkey wallet, said that it solved this problem by using a two-of-three authentication mechanism. Two keys lie with the customer: the hardware wallet and a mobile app. Bitkey stores the third key on its server. The company argues that by having access to just one key, it can't access or move customers' Bitcoins. Block said that it uses its server-side key only to authenticate transactions to move Bitcoin when they just have their phone and to recover their account when their device or phone is lost. The company said the server-side key will also be able to handle the scenario when a customer loses both the phone and the hardware wallet. Recovery was recently detailed in a blog post by the company. [...] Block has partnered with crypto exchange Coinbase and the company's own Cash App to help people easily buy or transfer (or both) Bitcoins to the hardware wallet. The company said that the ability to transfer Bitcoin from Coinbase and Cash App will be rolled out immediately with other features coming later.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NotebookLM, Google's experimental AI-powered note-taking app unveiled at Google I/O earlier this year (formerly referred to as Project Tailwind), is now widely available in the United States. "It's also getting several new features and is 'starting' to use Google's Gemini Pro AI model 'to help with document understanding and reasoning,'" reports The Verge. From the report: NotebookLM can already do things like summarize the documents you import into the app, come up with key points, and even answer questions about your note-taking sources. But now, Google is adding a way to transform your notes into other types of documents, too. Once you select all the notes you want to include, NotebookLM will automatically suggest formats, such as an outline or study guide. However, Google notes that you can also tell NotebookLM to transform your notes into a format of your choosing, like an email, script outline, newsletter, and more. Additionally, NotebookLM will now start providing suggested actions based on what you're doing in the app. As an example, Google says if you're writing a note, NotebookLM may automatically "offer tools to polish or refine your prose, or suggest related ideas from your sources based on what you've just written." Some other handy features coming to the app include a way to save helpful responses from NotebookLM as notes, share your notes with others, and focus NotebookLM's AI on select sources when chatting with it. Google is expanding some of NotebookLM's limitations as well. You can now include up to 20 sources in your notebook, each with up to 200,000 words.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

hackingbear writes: China has started commercial operations at a new generation nuclear reactor that is the first of its kind in the world, state media said on Dec 5. Compared with previous reactors, the fourth generation Shidaowan plant, a modular 200 megawatt (MW) high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor (HTGCR) plant developed jointly by state-run utility Huaneng, Tsinghua University and China National Nuclear Corporation, is designed to use fuel more efficiently and improve its economics, safety and environmental footprint as China turns to nuclear power to try to meet carbon emissions goals. In a related development, Shanghai-based Jiangnan Shipyard has unveiled a design for an innovative new giant container ship -- with a load capacity starting at 24,000 standard containers -- powered by a thorium molten-salt nuclear reactor, an alternative 4th gen design. "The new ship model uses nuclear energy as a clean energy source and adopts an internationally advanced fourth-generation molten salt reactor solution. The proposed design of super-large nuclear container ships will truly achieve 'zero emissions' during the operation cycle of this type of ship," the journal Marine Time China said in its official WeChat account. Shipbuilders from Japan, the United States, South Korea, and Europe have come up with similar designs but none of these countries has a modern and reliable operating reactor to make the design a reality. But China has carried on and, earlier this year, got the first thorium-based molten salt reactor, which needs little amount of water to cool down, making it safer and more efficient, up and running in the Gobi desert. Further reading: China is Building Nuclear Reactors Faster Than Any Other CountryRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from STAT: The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the world's first medicine based on CRISPR gene-editing technology, a groundbreaking treatment for sickle cell disease that delivers a potential cure for people born with the chronic and life-shortening blood disorder. The new medicine, called Casgevy, is made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics. Its authorization is a scientific triumph for the technology that can efficiently and precisely repair DNA mutations -- ushering in a new era of genetic medicines for inherited diseases. In a clinical trial, Casgevy was shown to eliminate recurrent episodes of debilitating pain caused by sickle cell, which afflicts approximately 100,000 people in the U.S., a vast majority of whom are Black. The therapy, whose scientific name is exa-cel, is described as a potential cure because the genetic fix enabled by CRISPR is designed to last a lifetime, although confirmation will require years of follow-up. The FDA decision comes three weeks after regulators in the U.K. were the first to clear the drug. Approval in the European Union is expected next year. The FDA is also expected to rule on exa-cel as a treatment for beta thalassemia, another inherited blood disorder, by March 30. The FDA on Friday also approved another sickle cell treatment, a gene therapy from Bluebird Bio called Lyfgenia. Patients will now have the option of two cutting-edge therapies that provide potentially curative benefits. Scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna published their first CRISPR paper just over a decade ago. In 2020, the research won the pair a Nobel Prize. Reflecting on the approval of Casgevy, Charpentier told STAT via email that she was "excited and pleased" for what it means for patients and their families.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration is threatening to cancel the patents of some costly medications to allow rivals to make their own more affordable versions. The Associated Press reports: Under a plan announced Thursday, the government would consider overriding the patent for high-priced drugs that have been developed with the help of taxpayer money and letting competitors make them in hopes of driving down the cost. In a 15-second video released to YouTube on Wednesday night, President Joe Biden promised the move would lower prices. "Today, we're taking a very important step toward ending price gouging so you don't have to pay more for the medicine you need," he said. White House officials would not name drugs that might potentially be targeted. The government would consider seizing a patent if a drug is only available to a "narrow set of consumers," according to the proposal that will be open to public comment for 60 days. Drugmakers are almost certain to challenge the plan in court if it is enacted. [...] The White House also intends to focus more closely on private equity firms that purchase hospitals and health systems, then often whittle them down and sell quickly for a profit. The departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, and the Federal Trade Commission will work to share more data about health system ownership. While only a minority of drugs on the market relied so heavily on taxpayer dollars, the threat of a government "march-in" on patents will make many pharmaceutical companies think twice, said Jing Luo, a professor of medicine at University of Pittsburgh. "If I was a drug company that was trying to license a product that had benefited heavily from taxpayer money, I'd be very careful about how to price that product," Luo said. "I wouldn't want anyone to take my product away from me."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The role-playing adventure game Baldur's Gate 3 won game of the year last night at The Game Awards 2023 in Los Angeles. The New York Times reports: It was the crowning achievement for a game based on Dungeons & Dragons that largely stayed under the radar during its six years in development by the Belgian company Larian Studios. But its summer release -- 23 years after its predecessor -- captivated gamers, who celebrated a robust character creator, deep narrative and branching paths that made it seem as though anything was possible in its fictional universe of vampires and elves. Baldur's Gate 3, which is available on the PC, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X|S, also went home with several other awards, including those for best role-playing game, best performance and best multiplayer. The other nominees for game of the year were Alan Wake 2, by Remedy Entertainment; Marvel's Spider-Man 2, by Insomniac Games; Resident Evil 4, by Capcom; Super Mario Bros. Wonder, by Nintendo; and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, by Nintendo.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ahead of its December 14th launch in the European Union, Meta's Twitter-like social media platform, Threads, is adding a simplified version of hashtags to help users find related posts. 9to5Google reports: Announced in a post on Threads today, Meta is adding "Tags" to the social platform as a way to categorize a post and have it show up alongside other posts on the same topic. Tags work similarly to hashtags in the sense that they group together content, but they also work differently. Unlike hashtags, you can only have one tag/topic on a post. So, where many platforms (including Instagram) suffer somewhat from posts being flooded with dozens of hashtags appended to the bottom, Threads seemingly avoids that entirely. Meta says that this "makes it easier for others who care about that topic to find and read your post." The other big difference with tags is how they appear in posts. Tags can be added by typing the # symbol in line with the text, but they don't appear with the symbol in the published post. Instead, they appear in blue text in the post, much like a traditional hyperlink. You can also add a tag by tapping the "#" symbol on the new post UI. As for the EU launch, Meta has opted to "sneakily update the Threads website with an untitled countdown timer (which won't be viewable in countries where Threads is already available) with just under six days remaining on the clock," reports The Verge. "European Instagram users can also search for the term 'ticket' within the app to discover a digital invitation to Threads, alongside a scannable QR code and a launch time -- which may vary depending on the country in which the user is based." "The delay in Threads' rollout to the EU has been caused by what Meta spokesperson Christine Pai described as 'upcoming regulatory uncertainty,' likely in reference to strict rules under the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: European Union negotiators clinched a deal Friday on the world's first comprehensive artificial intelligence rules, paving the way for legal oversight of technology used in popular generative AI services like ChatGPT that has promised to transform everyday life and spurred warnings of existential dangers to humanity. Negotiators from the European Parliament and the bloc's 27 member countries overcame big differences on controversial points including generative AI and police use of facial recognition surveillance to sign a tentative political agreement for the Artificial Intelligence Act. "Deal!" tweeted European Commissioner Thierry Breton, just before midnight. "The EU becomes the very first continent to set clear rules for the use of AI." The result came after marathon closed-door talks this week, with one session lasting 22 hours before a second round kicked off Friday morning. Officials provided scant details on what exactly will make it into the eventual law, which wouldn't take effect until 2025 at the earliest. They were under the gun to secure a political victory for the flagship legislation but were expected to leave the door open to further talks to work out the fine print, likely to bring more backroom lobbying. The AI Act was originally designed to mitigate the dangers from specific AI functions based on their level of risk, from low to unacceptable. But lawmakers pushed to expand it to foundation models, the advanced systems that underpin general purpose AI services like ChatGPT and Google's Bard chatbot. Foundation models looked set to be one of the biggest sticking points for Europe. However, negotiators managed to reach a tentative compromise early in the talks, despite opposition led by France, which called instead for self-regulation to help homegrown European generative AI companies competing with big U.S rivals including OpenAI's backer Microsoft. [...] Under the deal, the most advanced foundation models that pose the biggest "systemic risks" will get extra scrutiny, including requirements to disclose more information such as how much computing power was used to train the systems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slash_Account_Dot writes: The FBI investigated a man who allegedly posed as a police officer in emails and phone calls to trick Verizon to hand over phone data belonging to a specific person that the suspect met on the dating section of porn site xHamster, according to a newly unsealed court record. Despite the relatively unconvincing cover story concocted by the suspect, including the use of a clearly non-government ProtonMail email address, Verizon handed over the victim's data to the alleged stalker, including their address and phone logs. The stalker then went on to threaten the victim and ended up driving to where he believed the victim lived while armed with a knife, according to the record. The news is a massive failure by Verizon who did not verify that the data request was fraudulent, and the company potentially put someone's safety at risk. The news also highlights the now common use of fraudulent emergency data requests (EDRs) or search warrants in the digital underworld, where criminals pretend to be law enforcement officers, fabricate an urgent scenario such as a kidnapping, and then convince telecoms or tech companies to hand over data that should only be accessible through legitimate law enforcement requests. As 404 Media previously reported, some hackers are using compromised government email accounts for this purpose.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Laura Dobberstein reports via The Register: Lenovo won't stop making Chromebooks despite the machines scoring poorly when it comes to both sustainability and revenue, according to an exec speaking at Canalys APAC Forum in Bangkok on Wednesday. "I don't know who makes the profit," commented Che Min Tu, Lenovo senior vice president and group operations officer. "Everybody struggled to sell the Chromebook." Tu further remarked that the laptop is not great from an environmental standpoint either -- recycling its material won't be easy, or cheap. "But I think we'll continue to sell the Chromebook because there's a demand," explained Tu, who added that the major driver of that demand is coming from the education sector. [...] While the number of Chromebooks being sold has dropped since the pandemic, the education market has kept it afloat. In the US, education accounted for 80 percent of Chromebook sales in Q2 this year. IDC estimated that Q2 Chromebook channel sales shrank 1.8 percent to 5.8 million units in that quarter as many customers had refreshed in the previous quarter to avoid a licensing increase in the second half of 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Researchers have identified previously unknown elements of whale vocalizations that may be analogous to human speech, a new study reports. Sperm whales are giants of the deep, with healthy adults having no known predators. Scientists studying their vocalizations have already picked out key elements of their communication, namely clicks, sequences of which are called codas. Now, researchers led by Gasper Beus from the University of California, Berkeley report the discovery that the acoustic properties of these clicks -- for example, pitch -- are "on many levels analogous to human vowels and dipthongs," which is when one vowel sound morphs into another such as in the word "coin." The researchers even identify two unique "coda vowels" that are "actively exchanged" in conversation between whales, which they term the a-vowel and i-vowel. The researchers explain in their paper, published as a preprint online this week, that the first clue that so-called spectral properties could be meaningful for whale speech was provided by AI. Beus previously developed a deep learning model for human language called fiwGAN which "was trained to imitate sperm whale codas and embed information into these vocalizations." Not only did the AI predict elements of whale vocalizations already thought to be meaningful, such as clicks, but it also singled out acoustic properties. To follow up on the AI's tip, the researchers analyzed a dataset of 3948 sperm whale codas recorded with hydrophones placed directly on whales between 2014 and 2018. They only analyzed one channel from the hydrophones to control for underwater effects and whale movement, and removed click timing from their visualization to better isolate patterns in the acoustic properties themselves. These visualizations vindicated the AI's prediction: The whales reliably exchanged codas with one or two formants -- frequency peaks in the sound wave -- below the 10kHz range. The researchers termed these codas "vowels," with single-formant codas being a-vowels and two-formant codas being i-vowels. "This is by analogy to human vowels which differ in their formant frequencies," the authors wrote. They also identified upward and downward frequency "trajectories" in these codas, which they considered analogous to dipthongs in human language. Considering that these coda vowel patterns were very distinct and not intermixed, plus the existence of dipthongs, the researchers argue that whales are controlling the frequency of their vocalizations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon sued what it called an international ring of thieves who swiped millions of dollars in merchandise from the company through a series of refund scams that included buying products on Amazon and seeking refunds without returning the goods. From a report: An organization called REKK advertised its refund services on social media sites, including Reddit and Discord, and communicated with perpetrators on the messaging app Telegram, Amazon said in a lawsuit filed Thursday in US District Court in the state of Washington. The lawsuit names REKK and nearly 30 people from the US, Canada, UK, Greece, Lithuania and the Netherlands as defendants in the scheme, which involved hacking into Amazon's internal systems and bribing Amazon employees to approve reimbursements. REKK charged customers, who wanted to get pricey items like MacBook Pro laptops and car tires without paying for them, a commission based on the value of the purchase. "The defendants' scheme tricks Amazon into processing refunds for products that are never returned; instead of returning the products as promised, defendants keep the product and the refund," Amazon said in its lawsuit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Record-breaking land and sea temperatures, driven by climate breakdown, will probably cause "unprecedented mass coral bleaching and mortality" throughout 2024, according to a pioneering coral scientist. From a report: The impact of climate change on coral reefs has reached "uncharted territory," said Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, from the University of Queensland, Australia, leading to concerns that we could be at a "tipping point." The upper ocean is undergoing unmatched changes in conditions, ecosystems and communities that can be traced back to the 1980s, when mass coral bleaching first appeared. In a paper published in the journal Science, US and Australian researchers say that historical data on sea surface temperatures, over four decades, suggests that this year's extreme marine heatwaves may be a precursor to a mass bleaching and coral mortality event across the Indo-Pacific in 2024-25. Mass coral bleaching happens when delicate corals become stressed due to factors including heat, causing them to lose their brown microbial algae, turning them white. At low stress levels, the algae can return to corals over a few months. But many Caribbean reef areas have recently experienced historically high sea temperatures that began one or two months earlier and lasted longer than usual. Crucially, 2023 is the first year of a potential pair of El Nino years, with the warmest average global surface sea temperature from February to July on record. Since 1997, every instance of these El Nino pairs has led to a global mass coral bleaching event.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple and its suppliers aim to build more than 50 million iPhones in India annually within the next two to three years, with additional tens of millions of units planned after that, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the situation. From the report: If the plans are achieved, India would account for a quarter of global iPhone production and take further share toward the end of the decade. China will remain the largest iPhone producer. Apple has gradually boosted its reliance on India in recent years despite challenges including rickety infrastructure and restrictive labor rules that often make doing business harder than in China. Among other issues, labor unions retain clout even in business-friendly states and are pushing back on an effort by companies to get permission for 12-hour work days, which Apple suppliers find helpful during crunch periods. Apple and its suppliers, led by Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology Group, generally believe the initial push into India has gone well and are laying the groundwork for a bigger expansion, say people involved in the supply chain. Apple is emblematic of a move among companies worried about overdependence on China to move parts of their supply chains elsewhere, most often to Southeast Asia and South Asia. Diplomatic efforts by the U.S. and its allies to block Beijing's access to advanced technology and strengthen ties with New Delhi have accelerated the trend.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tencent revealed one of its most ambitious attempts at a big-budget console game on Friday, betting on a new franchise to fire up fans and help the global expansion of China's most valuable company. From a report: Last Sentinel is an open-world adventure game set in a dystopian future Tokyo, developed by Tencent's California-based Lightspeed LA studio. The 200-member creative team is headed up by Steve Martin, a quarter-century veteran of the games industry who has worked on marquee games in the genre like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. The new title, four years in development, is testament to Tencent's long-term pursuit of foreign gaming assets and talent. The WeChat operator still relies heavily on domestic game sales in China, but in recent years it's amped up efforts to acquire slices of up-and-coming studios from Europe to Japan to complement its ownership of League of Legends creator Riot Games and large stake in Epic Games. Last Sentinel is part of its push to create new intellectual property from scratch. "We have a global gaming community that's screaming out that it wants something new. It wants new IPs, it wants new characters. We get to provide that," Martin, who left Rockstar Games to join Tencent in 2019, said in a video interview before unwrapping his work at The Game Awards in Los Angeles.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The biggest UK mobile phone operators could face total damages of $4.15 billion following class-action claims that they allegedly charged 5 million existing customers "loyalty penalties" over a 16-year period. From a report: Claimant lawyers say they filed court documents at the Competition Appeals Tribunal against Vodafone, EE, Three UK and O2 last week. The claims accuse the phone companies of overcharging on as many as 28.2 million contracts by not reducing the amount customers had to pay after their minimum terms expired, despite them having effectively paid off their mobile devices. The claim consists of individual lawsuits against each company, with damages sought of up to $1.76 billion from Vodafone, up to $1.38 billion from EE, up to $637.8 million from Three, and up to $322 million from O2. Claimant lawyers at Charles Lyndon, a law firm, estimate that up to 4.8 million people could be affected. If the case is successful, someone who held a contract with one of the mobile operators could receiveAup to $2,293. The claims are on an "opt-out" basis, which means all qualifying customers will be automatically included in the claim unless they make a choice not to join.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WindBourne shares a report: Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels reached record levels again in 2023, as experts warned that the projected rate of warming had not improved over the past two years. The world is on track to have burned more coal, oil and gas in 2023 than it did in 2022, according to a report by the Global Carbon Project, pumping 1.1% more planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a time when emissions must plummet to stop extreme weather from growing more violent. The finding comes as world leaders meet in Dubai for the fraught Cop28 climate summit. In a separate report published on Tuesday, Climate Action Tracker (CAT) raised its projections slightly for future warming above the estimates it made at a conference in Glasgow two years ago. As carbon clogs the atmosphere, trapping sunlight and baking the planet, the climate is growing more hostile to human life. The growth in CO2 emissions had slowed substantially over the past decade, the Global Carbon Project found, but the amount emitted each year had continued to rise. It projected that total CO2 emissions in 2023 would reach a record high of 40.9 gigatons. If the world continued to emit CO2 at that rate, the international team of more than 120 scientists found, it would burn through the remaining carbon budget for a half-chance of keeping global heating to 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial temperatures in just seven years. In 15 years, the scientists estimated, the budget for 1.7C would be gone too.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Particle physicists should begin laying the groundwork for a revolutionary particle collider that could be built on American soil, a committee of scientists wrote in a draft report on the future of particle physics released on Thursday. From a report: The machine would collide tiny, point-like particles called muons, which resemble electrons but are more massive. Muons provide more bang for the buck than the protons used in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and would push the search for new forces and particles deeper than ever into the unknown. The siting of such a project, perhaps at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, would restore American particle physics to a position of pre-eminence that was ceded to Europe in 1993 when Congress canceled the giant Superconducting Super Collider. But it will take at least 10 years to demonstrate that the muon collider could work and how much it would cost. "This is our muon shot," the committee, charged with outlining a vision for the next decade of American particle physics, said in a draft report titled "Exploring the Quantum Universe: Pathways to Innovation and Discovery in Particle Physics." The draft is being presented and discussed at a meeting in Washington, D.C., on Thursday and Friday, and at Fermilab next week. The draft report also highlighted a need to invest in next-generation experiments probing the nature of subatomic particles called neutrinos; the cosmic microwave background, relic radiation from the Big Bang; and dark matter, the gravitational glue holding galaxies together. The panel also recommended participating in a future facility in either Europe or Japan, dedicated to studying the Higgs boson, the discovery of which in 2012 was key for understanding how other particles get their mass. "The size of the universe we now see as 14 billion light-years across was actually smaller than the size of a nucleus" early in cosmic time, said Hitoshi Murayama, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the committee. "So our field is actually not just looking for the fundamental constituents, but getting a bigger picture of how the universe works as whole." The committee, formally known as the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5, was tasked by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to lay out a road map for the future of the field. The three-year process began by soliciting input from the particle physics community at large, and the final report will serve as a recommendation for what national agencies should prioritize over the next decade.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Drive recently lost user files, with some reporting missing documents since May 2023. Google said this month that it has posted a fix, but its description of a "syncing issue" doesn't seem to capture the problem based on user reports of web files disappearing, ArsTechnica notes. The company hasn't fully explained the cause or its recovery solution, which involves desktop app options and command line file recovery, the report asserts. This opaque handling, along with Google shutting down the Drive user forum that allowed people to share fixes, adds to perception that the company prioritizes PR over assisting users, the report adds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following a hack that potentially ensnared 6.9 million of its users, 23andMe has updated its terms of service to make it more difficult for you to take the DNA testing kit company to court, and you only have 30 days to opt out. From a report: In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission last week, 23andMe said hackers accessed around 14,000 customer accounts earlier this year by trying login-password combinations exposed in unrelated breaches. It later said hackers had access to 6.9 million accounts due to the interconnected nature of its DNA Relatives feature. 23andMe has since updated its terms of service in a way that changes how the company resolves disputes with users. Customers were informed via email that "important updates were made to the Dispute Resolution and Arbitration section" on Nov. 30 "to include procedures that will encourage a prompt resolution of any disputes and to streamline arbitration proceedings where multiple similar claims are filed." Customers have 30 days to let the site know if they disagree with the terms. If they don't reach out via email to opt out, the company will consider their silence an agreement to the new terms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Networks spent years telling us that 5G would change everything. But the flashiest use cases are nowhere to be found -- and the race to deploy the tech was costly in more ways than one. From a report: At CES in 2021, 5G was just about everywhere you looked. It was the future of mobile communications that would propel autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, and AR into reality. The low latency! The capacity! It'll change everything, we were told. Verizon and AT&T wrote massive checks for new spectrum licenses, and T-Mobile swallowed another network whole because it was very important to make the 5G future happen as quickly as possible and win the race. CES 2024 is just around the corner, and while telecom executives were eager to shout about 5G to the rafters just a few years ago, you'll probably be lucky to hear so much as a whisper about it this time around. While it's true that 5G has actually arrived, the fantastic use cases we heard about years ago haven't materialized. Instead, we have happy Swifties streaming concert footage and a new way to get internet to your home router. These aren't bad things! But deploying 5G at the breakneck speeds required to win an imaginary race resulted in one fewer major wireless carrier to choose from and lots of debt to repay. Now, network operators are looking high and low for every bit of profit they can drum up -- including our wallets. If there's a poster child for the whole 5G situation in the US, it's Verizon: the loudest and biggest spender in the room. The company committed $45.5 billion to new spectrum in 2021's FCC license auction -- almost twice as much as AT&T. And we don't have to guess whether investors are asking questions about when they'll see a return -- they asked point blank in the company's most recent earnings call. CEO Hans Vestberg fielded the question, balancing the phrases "having the right offers for our customers" and "generating the bottom line for ourselves," while nodding to "price adjustments" that also "included new value" for customers. It was a show of verbal gymnastics that meant precisely nothing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Data breaches and ransomware attacks are getting worse. Some 2.6 billion personal records have been exposed in data breaches over the past two years and that number continues to grow, according to a new report commissioned by Apple. From a report: Apple says the escalating intrusions, combined with increases in ransomware means the tech industry needs to move toward greater use of encryption. According to the report, prepared by MIT professor emeritus Stuart E. Madnick: 1. Data breaches in the US through the first nine months of the year are already 20% higher than for all of 2022.2. Nearly 70 percent more ransomware attacks were reported through September 2023, than in the first three quarters of 2022.3. Americans and those in the UK topped the list of those most targeted in ransomware attacks in 2023, followed by Canada and Australia. Those four countries accounted for nearly 70% of reported ransomware attacks.4. One in four people in the US had their health data exposed in a data breach during the first nine months of 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Speaking of early-impressions of Gemini, users' confidence in Google might be shaken further to learn that the company pretty much faked the most impressive demo of Gemini. TechCrunch: A video called "Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI" hit a million views over the last day, and it's not hard to see why. The impressive demo "highlights some of our favorite interactions with Gemini," showing how the multimodal model (that is, it understands and mixes language and visual understanding) can be flexible and responsive to a variety of inputs. To begin with, it narrates an evolving sketch of a duck from a squiggle to a completed drawing, which it says is an unrealistic color, then evinces surprise ("What the quack!") when seeing a toy blue duck. [...] Just one problem: the video isn't real. "We created the demo by capturing footage in order to test Gemini's capabilities on a wide range of challenges. Then we prompted Gemini using still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text." So although it might kind of do the things Google shows in the video, it didn't, and maybe couldn't, do them live and in the way they implied. In actuality, it was a series of carefully tuned text prompts with still images, clearly selected and shortened to misrepresent what the interaction is actually like.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK's antitrust watchdog is considering whether Microsoft and OpenAI's partnership should be called in for a merger probe. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority said Friday it was seeking views from interested parties to comment on whether the two firms recent collaboration could result in competition issues in the UK. The move from the UK watchdog comes less than two months since it eventually approved Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Microsoft is the largest investor in OpenAI, having invested $13 billion into the startup so far. The software giant has incorporated several of OpenAI's products into its suite of enterprise tools, and the startup spends considerable amounts on Microsoft's cloud services. The CMA said it will look at whether the the balance of power between the two firms has fundamentally shifted to give one side more control or influence over the other. When asked to comment on the CMA's move a spokesperson at the European Commission said the regulator had been "following very closely the situation of control over OpenAI."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Stellantis struck a deal with California-based EV battery swapping company Ample to power a fleet of shared Fiat 500e vehicles in Spain. But the company says the deal could eventually expand to include personally owned EVs in Europe and the US as well. By becoming one of the first Western automakers to embrace battery swapping technology, Stellantis is betting that EV charging infrastructure in Europe and the US will remain a barrier to adoption in the near future, necessitating other solutions. Battery swapping could theoretically help EV owners power up and get moving without having to wait for long stretches at a charging station. Stellantis will work with Ample to launch a battery swapping system for a fleet of Fiat 500e vehicles as part of a car-sharing service through its Free2move subsidiary. The service will first appear in Madrid in 2024, where the Fiat 500e is already available. (The tiny EV won't come to North America until next year.) Ample has four stations already in operation in the city and plans to build an additional nine stations in the months to come. Stellantis will need to install modular batteries in the Fiat 500e in order to be compatible with Ample's swapping system. The process works by driving the vehicle into a station, where it gets raised slightly. Ample's robot arms remove the spent battery from underneath the vehicle, replace it with a fully charged one, and then lower the vehicle. The company says the whole process can take as little as five minutes. "Our system knows how many batteries are in the Fiat 500e, knows how to extract each one of those modules, and put them back in the same arrangement," Khaled Hassounah, CEO of Ample, said in a briefing with reporters. Starting with a small fleet of shared vehicles in one city will help Stellantis see how well Ample's system works and whether it can be scaled to new markets and to include privately owned vehicles. If the company does decide to expand its partnership with Ample, the Fiat 500e will likely be the first vehicle to support the technology, said Ricardo Stamatti, senior VP for charging and energy at Stellantis. Customers who buy cars that are compatible with Ample's swapping system would then just subscribe to a battery, opening up a possible new line of revenue for Stellantis. "We believe that this is actually an infrastructure play that can and will scale," Stamatti added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an exclusive interview with PetaPixel, astronaut Don Pettit reveals the changes that Nikon makes to its firmware especially for NASA. From the report: Galactic cosmic rays are high-energy particles that originate from outside the solar system that likely come from explosive events such as a supernova. They are bad news for cameras in space -- damaging the sensor and spoiling photos -- so Nikon made special firmware for NASA to limit the harm. Pettit tells PetaPixel that Nikon changed the in-camera noise reduction settings to battle the cosmic rays -- noise is unwanted texture and blur on photos. Normal cameras have in-camera noise reduction for exposures equal to or longer than one second. This is because camera manufacturers don't think photographers need noise reduction for shorter exposures because there's no noise to reduce. But in space, that's not true. "Our cameras in space get sensor damage from galactic cosmic rays and after about six months we replace all the cameras but you still have cameras with significant cosmic ray damage," explains Pettit. "It shows up at fast shutter speeds, not just the slow ones. So we got Nikon to change the algorithm so that it can do in-camera noise reduction at shutter speeds of up to 500th of a second." Pettit says Nikon's in-camera noise reduction "does wonders" for getting rid of the cosmic ray damage and that "trying to get rid of it after the fact is really difficult." That's not the only special firmware feature that Nikon makes for NASA; photographers who shoot enough photos know that the file naming system resets itself eventually which is no good for the space agency's astronauts. "The file naming system on a standard digital system will repeat every so often and we can't have two pictures with the same number," explains Pettit. "We'll take half a million pictures with the crew on orbit and so Nikon has changed the way the RAW files are numbered so that there will be no two with the same file number." The report notes that NASA started using Nikon film cameras in 1971, shortly after the Apollo era; "in part because Nikon is so good at making custom modifications that help the astronauts." Previously, the agency used boxy, black Hasselblad cameras.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anna Demming reports via Scientific American: [A]lthough so far there's no way to unscramble an egg, in certain carefully controlled scenarios within relatively simple systems, researchers have managed to turn back time. The trick is to create a certain kind of reflection. First, imagine a regular spatial reflection, like one you see in a silver-backed glass mirror. Here reflection occurs because for a ray of light, silver is a very different transmission medium than air; the sudden change in optical properties causes the light to bounce back, like a Ping-Pong ball hitting a wall. Now imagine that instead of changing at particular points in space, the optical properties all along the ray's path change sharply at a specific moment in time. Rather than recoiling in space, the light would recoil in time, precisely retracing its tracks, like the Ping-Pong ball returning to the player who last hit it. This is a "time reflection." Time reflections have fascinated theorists for decades but have proved devilishly tricky to pull off in practice because rapidly and sufficiently changing a material's optical properties is no small task. Now, however, researchers at the City University of New York have demonstrated a breakthrough: the creation of light-based time reflections. To do so, physicist Andrea Alu and his colleagues devised a "metamaterial" with adjustable optical properties that they could tweak within fractions of a nanosecond to halve or double how quickly light passes through. Metamaterials have properties determined by their structures; many are composed of arrays of microscopic rods or rings that can be tuned to interact with and manipulate light in ways that no natural material can. Bringing their power to bear on time reflections, Alu says, revealed some surprises. "Now we are realizing that [time reflections] can be much richer than we thought because of the way that we implement them," he adds. [...] The device Alu and his collaborators developed is essentially a waveguide that channels microwave-frequency light. A densely spaced array of switches along the waveguide connects it to capacitor circuits, which can dynamically add or remove material for the light to encounter. This can radically shift the waveguide's effective properties, such as how easily it allows light to pass through. "We are not changing the material; we are adding or subtracting material," Alu says. "That is why the process can be so fast." Time reflections come with a range of counterintuitive effects that have been theoretically predicted but never demonstrated with light. For instance, what is at the beginning of the original signal will be at the end of the reflected signal -- a situation akin to looking at yourself in a mirror and seeing the back of your head. In addition, whereas a standard reflection alters how light traverses space, a time reflection alters light's temporal components -- that is, its frequencies. As a result, in a time-reflected view, the back of your head is also a different color. Alu and his colleagues observed both of these effects in the team's device. Together they hold promise for fueling further advances in signal processing and communications -- two domains that are vital for the function of, say, your smartphone, which relies on effects such as shifting frequencies. Just a few months after developing the device, Alu and his colleagues observed more surprising behavior when they tried creating a time reflection in that waveguide while shooting two beams of light at each other inside it. Normally colliding beams of light behave as waves, producing interference patterns where their overlapping peaks and troughs add up or cancel out like ripples on water (in "constructive" or "destructive" interference, respectively). But light can, in fact, act as a pointlike projectile, a photon, as well as a wavelike oscillating field -- that is, it has "wave-particle duality." Generally a particular scenario will distinctly elicit just one behavior or the other, however. For instance, colliding beams of light don't bounce off each other like billiard balls! But according to Alu and his team's experiments, when a time reflection occurs, it seems that they do. The researchers achieved this curious effect by controlling whether the colliding waves were interfering constructively or destructively -- whether they were adding or subtracting from each other -- when the time reflection occurred. By controlling the specific instant when the time reflection took place, the scientists demonstrated that the two waves bounce off each other with the same wave amplitudes that they started with, like colliding billiard balls. Alternatively they could end up with less energy, like recoiling spongy balls, or even gain energy, as would be the case for balls at either end of a stretched spring. "We can make these interactions energy-conserving, energy-supplying or energy-suppressing," Alu says, highlighting how time reflections could provide a new control knob for applications that involve energy conversion and pulse shaping, in which the shape of a wave is changed to optimize a pulse's signal.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Quest VR headsets and creator of leading open source large language model Llama 2 -- is getting into the text-to-image AI generator game. Actually, to clarify: Meta was already in that game via a text-to-image and text-to-sticker generator that was launched within Facebook and Instagram Messengers earlier this year. However, as of this week, the company has launched a standalone text-to-image AI generator service, "Imagine" outside of its messaging platforms. Meta's Imagine now a website you can simply visit and begin generating images from: imagine.meta.com. You'll still need to log in with your Meta or Facebook/Instagram account (I tried Facebook, and it forced me to create a new "Meta account," but hey -- it still worked). [...] Meta's Imagine service was built on its own AI model called Emu, which was trained on 1.1 billion Facebook and Instagram user photos, as noted by Ars Technica and disclosed in the Emu research paper published by Meta engineers back in September. An earlier report by Reuters noted that Meta excluded private messages and images that were not shared publicly on its services. When developing Emu, Meta's researchers also fine-tuned it around quality metrics. As they wrote in their paper: "Our key insight is that to effectively perform quality tuning, a surprisingly small amount -- a couple of thousand -- exceptionally high-quality images and associated text is enough to make a significant impact on the aesthetics of the generated images without compromising the generality of the model in terms of visual concepts that can be generated. " Interestingly, despite Meta's vocal support for open source AI, neither Emu nor the Imagine by Meta AI service appear to be open source.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. antitrust regulators told a federal appeals court Wednesday that a federal judge got it wrong when she allowed Microsoft's $69 billion purchase of Activision to close. Reuters reports: Speaking for the Federal Trade Commission, lawyer Imad Abyad argued that the lower-court judge held the agency to too high a standard, effectively requiring it to prove that the deal was anticompetitive. He told a three-judge appeals court panel in California that the FTC had only to show that Microsoft had the ability and incentive to withhold Activision's games from rival game platforms to prove the agency's case. He said the FTC "showed that in the past that's what Microsoft did," referring to allegations that Microsoft made some Zenimax games exclusive after buying that company. Speaking for Microsoft, lawyer Rakesh Kilaru called the FTC case "weak" and said that the agency had asked the lower-court judge for too much leeway. "It is also clear that the standard can't be as low as the FTC is suggesting," he said. "It can't be kind of a mere scintilla of evidence." He argued that the agency failed to show that Microsoft had an incentive to withhold "Call of Duty" from rival gaming platforms. The judges actively questioned both attorneys, with Judge Daniel Collins pressing the FTC's attorney on how concessions that Microsoft gave British antitrust enforcers affect the U.S. market. He also appeared to take issue with Abyad's assertions that more analysis of the deal was necessary, especially since Microsoft had struck agreements with rivals recently, including one with Sony this past summer. "This was not a rush job on the part of the FTC," he said. Two antitrust scholars who listened to the arguments said the FTC faced a tough slog to prevail. A finding of "clear error" by a lower court judge is "really stark," said Alden Abbott, a former FTC general counsel, comparing it to the idea that a court ignored key evidence from a witness. Abbott said the appeals court noted that the trial judge had considered "a huge amount of record evidence."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The iFixit team pulled apart the newest Fairphone 5 smartphone and awarded its highest score for repairability: 10 out of 10. With the exception of one or two compromises, the Fairphone 5 is just as repairable as its predecessors. The Register reports: As before, opening the phone is a simple matter of popping off the back of the case. The beefier battery -- 4200 mAh instead of the previous 3905 mAh -- remains easy to remove, although the bigger size has implications elsewhere in the device. Replacing the USB-C port remains simple thanks to a metal lip that allows it to be removed easily. Individual cameras can also be replaced, a nice upgrade from the all-in-one unit of the preceding phone. However, rather than something along the lines of the Core Module of the previous phone, the iFixit team found a motherboard and daughterboard more akin to other Android handsets. According to Fairphone, the bigger battery made the change necessary, but it's still a little disappointing. Still, the teardown team noted clear labeling to stop cables from being accidentally plugged into the wrong places. It said: "That's what intuitive repair design is all about: it should be easy to do the right thing and complicated to do the wrong thing." According to iFixit co-founder and CEO Kyle Wiens: "Fairphone's promise of five Android version upgrades and over eight years of security updates with the Fairphone 5 is a bold statement in an industry that leans towards fleeting product life cycles. This is a significant stride towards sustainability and sets a new benchmark for smartphone lifespan." "At iFixit, we believe in tech that lasts, and Fairphone is making that belief a reality. Fairphone's effort to attain a 10-year lifespan is not just impressive; it's unparalleled."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jason Koebler reports via 404 Media: A judge rejected John Deere's motion to dismiss a landmark class action lawsuit over the agricultural giant's repair monopolies, paving the way for a trial that will determine whether the company's repair practices are illegal. The case will specifically examine whether Deere has engaged in a "conspiracy" in which Deere and its dealerships have driven up the cost of repair while preventing independent and self-repair of tractors that farmers own. In a forceful, 89-page memorandum, U.S. District Court Judge Iain Johnson wrote that the founder of John Deere "was an innovative farmer and blacksmith who -- with his own hands -- fundamentally changed the agricultural industry." Deere the man "would be deeply disappointed in his namesake corporation" if the plaintiffs can ultimately prove their antitrust allegations against Deere the company, which are voluminous and well-documented. Reuters first reported on Johnson's memo. At issue are the many tactics Deere has used to make it more difficult and often impossible for farmers to repair their own tractors, from software locks and "parts pairing" that prevent farmers from replacing parts without the authorization of a Deere dealership. "Only Deere and Dealer authorized technicians have access to the Repair Tools, and Deere withholds these resources from farmers and independent repair shops," Johnson wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.