Slashdot

"Sal Kahn, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy predicted last year that AI tutoring bots would soon revolutionize education," writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp:theodp writes: His vision of tutoring bots tapped into a decades-old Silicon Valley dream: automated teaching platforms that instantly customize lessons for each student. Proponents argue that developing such systems would help close achievement gaps in schools by delivering relevant, individualized instruction to children faster and more efficiently than human teachers ever could. But some education researchers say schools should be wary of the hype around AI-assisted instruction, warning that generative AI tools may turn out to have harmful or "degenerative" effects on student learning. A ChatGPT-powered tutoring bot was tested last spring at the Khan Academy - and Bill Gates is enthusiastic about that bot and AI education in general (as well as the Khan Academy and AI-related school curriculums). From the original submission:Explaining his AI vision in November, Bill Gates wrote, "If a tutoring agent knows that a kid likes [Microsoft] Minecraft and Taylor Swift, it will use Minecraft to teach them about calculating the volume and area of shapes, and Taylor's lyrics to teach them about storytelling and rhyme schemes. The experience will be far richer-with graphics and sound, for example-and more personalized than today's text-based tutors." The New York Times article notes that similar enthusiasm greeted automated teaching tools in the 1960s, but predictions that that the mechanical and electronic "teaching machines' - which were programmed to ask students questions on topics like spelling or math - would revolutionize education didn't pan out. So, is this time different?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The fuel-leaking Peregrine lunar lander is now "on a parth towards Earth," according to Update #16 from Astrobotic, which predicts their spacecraft "will likely burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.""Our analysis efforts have been challenging due to the propellant leak... The team is currently assessing options and we will update as soon as we are able. The propellant leak has slowed considerably to a point where it is no longer the teams' top priority... We have now been operating in space for 5 days and 8 hours and are about 242,000 miles from Earth. "A soft landing on the Moon is not possible," the announcement emphasizes. NDTV explains:Shortly after it separated from the rocket, the spaceship experienced an onboard explosion and it soon became clear it would not make a soft lunar touchdown because of the amount of the propellant it was losing - though Astrobotic's team were able to power up science experiments they were carrying for NASA and other space agencies, and gather spaceflight data... Astrobotic itself will get another chance in November with its Griffin lander transporting NASA's VIPER rover to the lunar south pole.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) shared this story from BleepingComputer. The article notes that "Multiple implementations of the Kyber key encapsulation mechanism for quantum-safe encryption, are vulnerable to a set of flaws collectively referred to as KyberSlash, which could allow the recovery of secret keys." jd explains that Crystals-Kyber "was chosen to be the U.S. government's post-quantum cryptography system of choice last year, but a side-channel attack has been identified. But in the article, NIST says that this is an implementation-specific attack (the reference implementation) and not a vulnerability in Kyber itself." From the article: CRYSTALS-Kyber is the official implementation of the Kyber key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) for quantum-safe algorithm (QSA) and part of the CRYSTALS (Cryptographic Suite for Algebraic Lattices) suite of algorithms. It is designed for general encryption... The KyberSlash flaws are timing-based attacks arising from how Kyber performs certain division operations in the decapsulation process, allowing attackers to analyze the execution time and derive secrets that could compromise the encryption. If a service implementing Kyber allows multiple operation requests towards the same key pair, an attacker can measure timing differences and gradually compute the secret key... In a KyberSlash1 demo on a Raspberry Pi system, the researchers recovered Kyber's secret key from decryption timings in two out of three attempts... On December 30, KyberSlash2 was patched following its discovery and responsible reporting by Prasanna Ravi, a researcher at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and Matthias Kannwischer, who works at the Quantum Safe Migration Center.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week on his podcast Bill Gates asked Sam Altman how his team is doing after his (temporary) ouster, Altman replies "a lot of people have remarked on the fact that the team has never felt more productive or more optimistic or better. So, I guess that's like a silver lining of all of this. In some sense, this was like a real moment of growing up for us, we are very motivated to become better, and sort of to become a company ready for the challenges in front of us." The rest of their conversation was pre-ouster - but gave fascinating glimpses at the possible future of AI - including the prospect of very speedy improvements. Altman suggests it will be easier to understand how a creative work gets "encoded" in an AI than it would be in a human brain. "There has been some very good work on interpretability, and I think there will be more over time... The little bits we do understand have, as you'd expect, been very helpful in improving these things. We're all motivated to really understand them, scientific curiosity aside, but the scale of these is so vast...." BILL GATES: I'm pretty sure, within the next five years, we'll understand it. In terms of both training efficiency and accuracy, that understanding would let us do far better than we're able to do today. SAM ALTMAN: A hundred percent. You see this in a lot of the history of technology where someone makes an empirical discovery. They have no idea what's going on, but it clearly works. Then, as the scientific understanding deepens, they can make it so much better. BILL GATES: Yes, in physics, biology, it's sometimes just messing around, and it's like, whoa - how does this actually come together...? When you look at the next two years, what do you think some of the key milestones will be? SAM ALTMAN: Multimodality will definitely be important. BILL GATES: Which means speech in, speech out? SAM ALTMAN: Speech in, speech out. Images. Eventually video. Clearly, people really want that.... [B]ut maybe the most important areas of progress will be around reasoning ability. Right now, GPT-4 can reason in only extremely limited ways. Also reliability. If you ask GPT-4 most questions 10,000 times, one of those 10,000 is probably pretty good, but it doesn't always know which one, and you'd like to get the best response of 10,000 each time, and so that increase in reliability will be important. Customizability and personalization will also be very important. People want very different things out of GPT-4: different styles, different sets of assumptions. We'll make all that possible, and then also the ability to have it use your own data. The ability to know about you, your email, your calendar, how you like appointments booked, connected to other outside data sources, all of that. Those will be some of the most important areas of improvement. Areas where Altman sees potential are healthcare, education, and especially computer programming. "If you make a programmer three times more effective, it's not just that they can do three times more stuff, it's that they can - at that higher level of abstraction, using more of their brainpower - they can now think of totally different things. It's like, going from punch cards to higher level languages didn't just let us program a little faster - it let us do these qualitatively new things. And we're really seeing that... "I think it's worth always putting it in context of this technology that, at least for the next five or ten years, will be on a very steep improvement curve. These are the stupidest the models will ever be." He predicts the fastest technology revolution "by far," worrying about "the speed with which society is going to have to adapt, and that the labor market will change." But soon he adds that "We started investing a little bit in robotics companies. On the physical hardware side, there's finally, for the first time that I've ever seen, really exciting new platforms being built there." And at some point Altman tells Gates he's optimistic that AI could contribute to helping humans get along with each other.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

porkchop_d_clown (Slashdot reader #39,923) writes:MOND - MOdified Newtonian Dynamics is a hypothesis that Newton's law of gravity is incorrect under some conditions. Now a paper claims that a study does indeed show that pairs of widely separated binary stars do show a deviation from Newton's Second Law, arguing that, at very low levels, gravity is stronger than the law predicts. Phys.org writes that the study "reinforces the evidence for modified gravity that was previously reported in 2023 from an analysis of the orbital motions of gravitationally bound, widely separated (or long-period) binary stars, known as wide binaries." But RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) calls the hypothesis "very much disputed."YouTubing-astrophysicist Dr Becky considered this report a couple of months ago (2023-Nov-09), under the title "HUGE blow for alternate theory of gravity MOND". At the very least, astrophysicists and cosmologists are deeply undecided whether this data supports or discourages MOND. (Shortened comment because verification problem.) Last week, I updated my annual count of MOND and other "alternative gravity" publications. While research on MOND (and others) continues, and any "suppression" the tin-foil-hat brigade want to scream about is ineffective, it remains an unpopular (not-equal-to "suppressed") field. Generally, astronomical publication counts are increasing, and MOND sticks with that trend. If anything is becoming more popular, it's the "MOG" type of "MOdified Gravity".Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis writes:Hundreds of British postal workers wrongly convicted of theft due to faulty accounting software could have their convictions reversed, according to a story from the BBC. Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office prosecuted 700 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses - an average of one a week - based on information from a computer system called Horizon, after faulty software wrongly made it look like money was missing. Some 283 more cases were brought by other bodies including the Crown Prosecution Service. 2024 began with a four-part dramatization of the scandal airing on British television, and the BBC reporting today that its reporters originally investigating the story confronted "lobbying, misinformation and outright lies." Yet the Guardian notes that to this day in English and Welsh law, computers are still assumed to be "reliable" unless and until proven otherwise.But critics of this approach say this reverses the burden of proof normally applied in criminal cases. Stephen Mason, a barrister and expert on electronic evidence, said: "It says, for the person who's saying 'there's something wrong with this computer', that they have to prove it. Even if it's the person accusing them who has the information...." He and colleagues had been expressing alarm about the presumption as far back as 2009. "My view is that the Post Office would never have got anywhere near as far as it did if this presumption wasn't in place," Mason said... [W]hen post office operators were accused of having stolen money, the hallucinatory evidence of the Horizon system was deemed sufficient proof. Without any evidence to the contrary, the defendants could not force the system to be tested in court and their loss was all but guaranteed. The influence of English common law internationally means that the presumption of reliability is widespread. Mason cites cases from New Zealand, Singapore and the U.S. that upheld the standard and just one notable case where the opposite happened... The rise of AI systems made it even more pressing to reassess the law, said Noah Waisberg, the co-founder and CEO of the legal AI platform Zuva. Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new analysis suggests that wind turbines have little impact on bird populations, according to the Economist - and that oil-and-gas extraction may be worse:Erik Katovich [an economist at the University of Geneva] combined bird population and species maps with the locations and construction dates of all wind turbines in the United States, with the exceptions of Alaska and Hawaii, between 2000 and 2020. He found that building turbines had no discernible effect on bird populations. That reassuring finding held even when he looked specifically at large birds like hawks, vultures and eagles that many people believe are particularly vulnerable to being struck. But Dr. Katovich did not confine his analysis to wind power alone. He also examined oil-and-gas extraction. Like wind power, this has boomed in America over the past couple of decades, with the rise of shale gas produced by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of rocks. Production has risen from 37m cubic metres in 2007 to 740m cubic metres in 2020. Comparing bird populations to the locations of new gas wells revealed an average 15% drop in bird numbers when new wells were drilled, probably due to a combination of noise, air pollution and the disturbance of rivers and ponds that many birds rely upon. When drilling happens in places designated by the National Audubon Society as "important bird areas", bird numbers instead dropped by 25%. Such places are typically migration hubs, feeding grounds or breeding locations. Wind power, in other words, not only produces far less planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane than do fossil fuels. It appears to be significantly less damaging to wildlife, too. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Customer say," writes Amazon on at least some of their product pages, across from that grid showing the number of five-star and four-star reviews... But at the bottom of that summary is a disclaimer that what you read was "AI-generated from the text of customer reviews." This has been going on for a few months now, points out the Washington Post's "Tech Friend" newsletter. And after reviewing how AI distilled nearly 40,000 reviews into a succinct summary, their impression has shifted to "hmm ... maybe this is a decent use of text-summarizing AI - as long as you learn to read Amazon's AI digests with a savvy eye..."Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, pointed out that since Amazon started the AI-generated review summaries last year, the company has tweaked them to highlight terms or features that apparently come up a lot in customer ratings. The positive features are highlighted in green and the negative or neutral feedback is in yellow and gray... If you like to get a gist of what shoppers thought of a product, Amazon's AI summary can spare you from skimming the reviews yourself... But as with Amazon reviews in general, the AI summaries might be incomplete or untrustworthy... Bloomberg News recently looked at dozens of AI review summaries and found in some cases they underplayed customers' negative feedback and exaggerated them for other products. And, of course, if the reviews themselves are misinformed or rigged, a summary of junk customer feedback will also be junk. Amazon said the company is "seeing positive feedback on our review highlights from both customers and sellers" but that it will "continually improve the review highlights experience over time." But is this just the beginning? Amazon, eBay and Shopify are also experimenting with using AI to spit out descriptions of products from a photo or a few keywords. Some of this AI-generated text will be better than the confusing product listings you sometimes read online. A lot of it will be worse. A bunch of technology companies, including Amazon and Meta, are also betting that AI will be better and cheaper than current methods for creating product advertisements to clog your online shopping results and social media feeds. Hooray, right?!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Long before the harrowing Alaska Airlines blowout on January 5, there were concerns within Boeing about the way the aerospace giant was building its planes," reports the Wall Street Journal. There's been issues with various models - like "misdrilled holes, loose rudder bolts, and this month's MAX 9 door-plug blowout" - but many can be traced back to the outsourcing Boeing and other aerospace companies adopted more than 20 years ago where key pieces are built elsewhere and then assembled at Boeing. And the Journal reports that the door-plug was built at a factory that Boeing owned until 2005, now run by Spirit AeroSystems, that "has been plagued by production problems and quality lapses since Boeing ceded so much responsibility for its work... "Spirit is the sole supplier of the fuselages used in many Boeing jets, including the Alaska plane that made the emergency landing. It is heavily dependent on Boeing for revenue, and the two companies have battled for years over costs and quality issues. The earlier MAX grounding and Covid-19 pandemic sapped Spirit's finances, and the company slashed thousands of jobs, leaving it short-handed when demand bounced back. Some Spirit employees said production problems were common and internal complaints about quality were ignored. In a given month, at a production rate of two fuselages a day, there are 10 million holes that need to be filled with some combination of bolts, fasteners and rivets. "We have planes all over the world that have issues that nobody has found because of the pressure Spirit has put on employees to get the job done so fast," said Cornell Beard, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers chapter representing workers at Spirit's Wichita factory... Alaska Airlines and United Airlines say they have found loose hardware on other MAX 9 jets they have checked, suggesting that problems go beyond one plane... The company, which had 15,900 workers in four U.S. factories at the end of 2019, laid off thousands of people in Wichita at the height of the pandemic. When it needed to ramp back up, not only did Spirit have fewer people on site, the company had lost years of expertise. There were fewer experienced mechanics, but also fewer experts who could inspect the quality of their work. [Spirit CEO Pat Shanahan ] said the quick production ramp-up and the earlier MAX grounding left the company short of experienced workers. "When you have disruption, you have instability," he said... For more than a decade, Spirit and Boeing battled over costs, quality and the pace of production. Boeing's demands for lower prices left Spirit strapped for cash as managers panicked over meeting increasingly demanding deadlines. Boeing routinely had employees on the ground in Wichita and conducted audits of the supplier. The result, some current and former employees say: a factory where workers rush to meet unrealistic quotas and where pointing out problems is discouraged if not punished. Increasingly, they say, planes have been leaving Wichita with so-called escapements, or undetected defects. "It is known at Spirit that if you make too much noise and cause too much trouble, you will be moved," said Joshua Dean, a former Spirit quality auditor who says he was fired after flagging misdrilled holes in fuselages. "It doesn't mean you completely disregard stuff, but they don't want you to find everything and write it up." His account is included in a shareholder lawsuit filed in December against Spirit that alleges the company failed to disclose costly defects. A Spirit spokesman said the company strongly disagrees with the assertions and intends to defend against the suit... After being laid off during the pandemic shutdown, Dean returned to Spirit in May 2021. By then, he said, the company had lost many of its most experienced mechanics and auditors. Spirit already was under more intense scrutiny from Boeing. The jet maker placed Spirit on a so-called probation, in which the company more closely scrutinized the supplier's work. To get off probation, Spirit needed to reduce the number of defects on the line. At one point, Dean said, the company threw a pizza party for employees to celebrate a drop in the number of defects reported. Chatter at the party turned to how everyone knew that the defect numbers were down only because people were reporting fewer problems. On the Spirit factory floor, some machinists building planes say their concerns about quality rarely get conveyed to more senior managers, and that quality inspectors fear retaliation if they point out too many problems. Union representatives complained to leaders last fall that the company removed inspectors from line jobs and replaced them with contract workers after they flagged multiple defects. Two key quotes from the article:"As some problems on both the 787 and 737 were traced back to Spirit, Boeing executives said in 2023 that the plane maker would be ratcheting up oversight of the supplier it once owned." New FAA chief Mike Whitaker said "Whatever's happened over the previous years - because this has been going on for years - has not worked." When it comes to what caused last week's in-flight incident, "All indications are it's manufacturing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Friday America's Environmental Protection Agency "proposed steep new fees on methane emissions from oil and gas facilities," reports the Washington Post, "escalating a crackdown on the fossil fuel industry's planet-warming pollution." Methane does not linger in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide, but it is far more effective at trapping heat - roughly 80 times more potent in its first decade. It is responsible for roughly a third of global warming today, and the oil and gas industry accounts for about 14 percent of the world's annual methane emissions, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency. Other large methane sources include livestock, landfills and coal mines. So America's new Methane Emissions Reduction Program "levies a fee on wasteful methane emissions from large oil and gas facilities," according to the article: The fee starts at $900 per metric ton of emissions in 2024, increasing to $1,200 in 2025 and $1,500 in 2026 and thereafter. The EPA proposal lays out how the fee will be implemented, including how the charge will be calculated... At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai in December, EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced final standards to limit methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas operations. Fossil fuel companies that comply with these standards will be exempt from the new fee... Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said the fee will encourage fossil fuel firms to deploy innovative technologies that detect methane leaks. Such cutting-edge technologies range from ground-based sensors to satellites in space. "Proven solutions to cut oil and gas methane and to avoid the fee are being used by leading companies in states across the country," Krupp said in a statement... In addition to methane, the EPA proposal could slash emissions of hazardous air pollutants, including smog-forming volatile organic compounds and cancer-causing benzene [according to an EPA official]. The federal government also gave America's fossil fuel companies nearly $1 billion to help them comply with the methane regulation, according to the article. The article also includes this statement from an executive at the American Petroleum Institute, the top lobbying arm of the U.S. oil and gas industry, complaining that the fines create a "regime" that would "stifle innovation," and urging Congress to repeal it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"For months, bits of an asteroid collected by a U.S. probe during a billion-mile trek were out of reach to scientists," reports Space.com, "locked inside a return capsule in a NASA facility with two stuck fasteners preventing access to the rocky space treasure. "This week, NASA won its battle against those fasteners." More details from CNN:The space agency already harvested about 2.5 ounces (70 grams) of rocks and dust from its OSIRIS-REx mission, which traveled nearly 4 billion miles to collect the unprecedented sample from the near-Earth asteroid called Bennu. But NASA revealed in October that some material remained out of reach in a capsule hidden inside an instrument called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism - a robotic arm with a storage container at one end that collected the sample from Bennu. The sampler head is held shut by 35 fasteners, according to NASA, but two of them proved too difficult to open. Prying the mechanism loose is no simple task. The space agency must use preapproved materials and tools around the capsule to minimize the risk of damaging or contaminating the samples. These "new tools also needed to function within the tightly-confined space of the glovebox, limiting their height, weight, and potential arc movement," said Dr. Nicole Lunning, OSIRIS-REx curation lead at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, in a statement. "The curation team showed impressive resilience and did incredible work to get these stubborn fasteners off the TAGSAM head so we can continue disassembly. We are overjoyed with the success." To address the issue, NASA said they designed and fabricated two new, multi-part tools out of surgical steel. NASA says that a "few additional disassembly steps" still remain, but there's a video on their web site showing the operation (along with some pictures). NASA adds that "Later this spring, the curation team will release a catalog of the OSIRIS-REx samples, which will be available to the global scientific community."But CNN notes that an analysis of material from last fall "already revealed the samples from the asteroid contained abundant water in the form of hydrated clay minerals as well as carbon," CNN reports. And they add that scientists believe this bolsters the theory that water arrived on Earth billions of years ago on an asteroid...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"What is lost when billionaires with no background nor interest in a civic mission, who are only concerned with profiteering, take over our most influential news organizations? What new models of news gathering, and dissemination show promise for our increasingly digital age? What can the public do to preserve and support vibrant journalism?" That's a synopsis posted about the documentary Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink, cited by the long-standing news industry magazine Editor and Publisher (which dates back to 1901). This week its podcast interviewed filmmaker Rick Goldsmith about his 90-minute documentary, which they say "tells the tale" of how hedge fund Alden Global Capital clandestinely entered into the news publishing industry in a big way - and then "dismantled local newspapers 'piece by piece,' creating a crises within the communities they serve, leaving 'news deserts' and 'ghost papers' in their wake." [Goldsmith] spent more than 5-years creating his latest work... a film that tells the tale of how newspapers business model is faltering, not just because of the loss of advertising and digital disruption; but also to capitalist greed, as hedge funds and corporate America buy them, sell their assets and leave the communities they serve without their local "voice" and a final check on power. On the podcast, Goldsmith notes that in many cases a paper's assets "were the newspaper buildings and the printing presses... These were worth in many cases more than the newspapers themselves." After laying off staff, the hedge fund could also downsize out of those buildings. By 2021 Alden owned 100 newspapers and 200 more publications - and then acquired Tribune Publishing to become America's second-largest newspaper publisher. The hedge fund currently owns several newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to SFGate:At first, Goldsmith's documentary might seem like it's delivering more bad news. But it avoids despair, offering hope on the horizon for news deserts where aggressive reporting is needed. It introduces the notion that the traditional capitalist business model is failing the news industry, and that nonprofit organizations must be providers of local coverage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: It's day two of the opening of OpenAI's buzzy GPT store, which offers customized versions of ChatGPT, and users are already breaking the rules. The Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPTs) are meant to be created for specific purposes -- and not created at all in some cases. A search for "girlfriend" on the new GPT store will populate the site's results bar with at least eight "girlfriend" AI chatbots, including "Korean Girlfriend," "Virtual Sweetheart," "Your girlfriend Scarlett," "Your AI girlfriend, Tsu." Click on chatbot "Virtual Sweetheart," and a user will receive starting prompts like "What does your dream girl look like?" and "Share with me your darkest secret." The AI girlfriend bots go against OpenAI's usage policy, which was updated when the GPT store launched yesterday (Jan. 10). The company bans GPTs "dedicated to fostering romantic companionship or performing regulated activities." It is not clear exactly what regulated activities entail. Notably, the company is aiming to get ahead of potential conflicts with its OpenAI store. Relationship chatbots are, indeed, popular apps. In the US, seven of the 30 AI chatbot apps downloaded in 2023 from the Apple or Google Play store were related to AI friends, girlfriends, or companions, according to data shared with Quartz from data.ai, a mobile app analytics firm. The proliferation of these apps may stem from the epidemic of loneliness and isolation Americans are facing. Alarming studies show that one-in-two American adults have reported experiencing loneliness, with the US Surgeon General calling for the need to strengthen social connections. AI chatbots could be part of the solution if people are isolated from other human beings -- or they could just be a way to cash in on human suffering. Further reading: OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban On Using ChatGPT For 'Military and Warfare'Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader Plugh shares a report from Daily Security Review: A Ukrainian hacker group [...] carried out a destructive attack on the servers of a Moscow-based internet provider to take revenge for Kyivstar cyberattack. The group, known as Blackjack, successfully hacked into the systems of M9com, causing extensive damage by deleting terabytes of data. Numerous residents in Moscow experienced disruptions in their internet and television services. Additionally, the Blackjack hacker group has issued a warning of a potentially larger attack in the near future. Based on the information provided by Ukrinform, the cyber attack on M9com deleted approximately 20 terabytes of data. The attack targeted various critical services of the company, including its official website, mail server, and cyber protection services. Furthermore, the hackers managed to access and download over 10 gigabytes of data from M9com's mail server and client databases. To make matters worse, they made this stolen information publicly accessible via the Tor browser. [...] Based on the nature of the attack on M9com, it appears that when the hackers hit Moscow, they were able to gain access to the back-end operations of the company. This allowed them to effectively delete data from the servers, similar to what occurred in the Kyivstar incident. It is worth noting that this type of attack, which involves directly targeting and compromising the servers, is less common compared to the more frequently observed distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks overwhelm a system by inundating it with automated requests, causing the service to become inaccessible.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After years of development, NASA has unveiled the X-59 supersonic jet capable of breaking the sound barrier without producing a thunderous sonic boom. "Instead, the Quesst will make a much quieter 'thump,' similar to the sound of a car door slamming as heard from indoors," reports Space.com. "If successful, the jet has the potential to revolutionize supersonic flight and aviation in general." From the report: NASA and Lockheed Martin showed off the finished X-59 Quesst ("Quiet SuperSonic Technology") today (Jan. 12) in front of a crowd of nearly 150 at the legendary Lockheed Martin Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California, a research and development site typically known for its secrecy. The elongated beak-like nose section of the aircraft stood out prominently, showing off the fact that it does not have a forward-facing window. [...] Instead, it features what NASA calls the eXternal Vision System, or XVS, which consists of a camera and a cockpit-mounted screen that offers pilots an augmented-reality view of what's in front of the jet. Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator, continued this sentiment, noting that the X-59 is merely the latest in a long line of NASA X-planes that have revolutionized aviation throughout the agency's history. "Even among other X-planes, the X-59 is special. Every aircraft that receives that X-plane designation has a specific purpose to test new technologies or aerodynamic concepts," Free said, "These special planes push the envelope of what's possible in flight. And once they prove those concepts, they often go into museums. And that's really what makes the X-59 different." Free was referring to the fact that once the X-59 is ready for flight, the jet will make multiple flights over select residential areas in the United States in order to collect data on how people on the ground below experience and react to the quieter sonic booms it creates. NASA will then use that data to seek approval for commercial supersonic flights from regulatory agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, with the ultimate goal of making aviation more sustainable and enabling faster flight over populated areas. Some of the applications of supersonic flight mentioned at today's unveiling include rapid medical response, shorter shipping times and, of course, faster travel. "The first 'A' in NASA stands for aeronautics," said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy during the unveiling ceremony. "And we're all about groundbreaking aerospace innovation. The X-59 proudly continues this legacy, representing the forefront of technology driving aviation forward." The 'X' in NASA's latest X-plane stands for 'experimental.' "This isn't just an airplane, this is an X-plane," Melroy added. "It's the manifestation of a collaborative genius."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In an unmarked laboratory stationed between the campuses of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a splinter group of scientists is hunting for the next billion-dollar drug. The group, bankrolled with $500 million from some of the wealthiest families in American business, has created a stir in the world of academia by dangling seven-figure paydays to lure highly credentialed university professors to a for-profit bounty hunt. Its self-described goal: to avoid the blockages and paperwork that slow down the traditional paths of scientific research at universities and pharmaceutical companies, and discover scores of new drugs (at first, for cancer and brain disease) that can be produced and sold quickly. Braggadocio from start-ups is de rigueur, and plenty of ex-academics have started biotechnology companies, hoping to strike it rich on their one big discovery. This group, rather boastfully named Arena BioWorks, borrowing from a Teddy Roosevelt quote, doesn't have one singular idea, but it does have a big checkbook. "I'm not apologetic about being a capitalist, and that motivation from a team is not a bad thing," said the technology magnate Michael Dell, one of the group's big-money backers. Others include an heiress to the Subway sandwich fortune and an owner of the Boston Celtics.The wrinkle is that for decades, many drug discoveries have not just originated at colleges and universities, but also produced profits that helped fill their endowment coffers. The University of Pennsylvania, for one, has said it earned hundreds of millions of dollars for research into mRNA vaccines used against Covid-19. Under this model, any such windfall would remain private. [...] The five billionaires backing Arena include Michael Chambers, a manufacturing titan and the wealthiest man in North Dakota, and Elisabeth DeLuca, the widow of a founder of the Subway chain. They have each put in $100 million and expect to double or triple their investment in later rounds. In confidential materials provided to investors and others, Arena describes itself as "a privately funded, fully independent, public good." Arena's backers said in interviews that they did not intend to entirely cut off their giving to universities. Duke turned down an offer from Mr. Pagliuca, an alumnus and board member, to set up part of the lab there. Mr. Dell, a major donor to the University of Texas hospital system in his hometown, Austin, leased space for a second Arena laboratory there. [Stuart Schreiber, a longtime Harvard-affiliated researcher who quit to be Arenaa(TM)s lead scientist] said it would require years -- and billions of dollars in additional funding -- before the team would learn whether its model led to the production of any worthy drugs. "Is it going to be better or worse?" Dr. Schreiber said. "I don't know, but it's worth a shot."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After a 737 Max door panel blew out over Portland, Oregon, last week, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft until emergency inspections were performed. "Alaska and United Airlines, which operate most of the Max 9s in use in the United States, said on Monday that they discovered loose hardware on the panel when conducting preliminary inspections on their planes," reported the New York Times. Now, U.S. aviation regulators say they may strip Boeing of its right to conduct some of its aircraft inspections. The Financial Times reports: Mike Whitaker, FAA administrator, said the agency was "exploring" its options for using an independent third-party to oversee inspections of Boeing's aircraft and its quality controls. "It is time to re-examine the delegation of authority and assess any associated safety risks," he said. "The grounding of the 737-9 and the multiple production-related issues identifiedAin recent years [at Boeing] require us to look at every option to reduce risk." The regulator also said it plans to immediately increase its oversight of Boeing's production. The FAA opened an investigation on Thursday into whether the planes Boeing builds match the specifications it has laid out. The FAA said it will audit the 737 Max 9 production line and its suppliers "to evaluate Boeing's compliance with its approved quality procedures," with further audits conducted as necessary. Washington Senator Maria Cantwell sent a letter (PDF) yesterday to the FAA questioning the agency's role in inspecting aircraft manufactured by Boeing. Cantwell said she asked a year ago for an audit of certain areas related to Boeing's production, and the regulator told her it was unnecessary. "Recent accidents and incidents -- including the expelled door plug on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 -- call into question Boeing's quality control," she said. "In short, it appears that FAA's oversight processes have not been effective in ensuring that Boeing produces aeroplanes that are in condition for safe operation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At CES 2024 this week, Micron demonstrated its next-gen LPCAMM2 memory modules based on LPDDR5X memory. Not only are they smaller and more powerful than traditional SODIMMs, they can be "serviced during the manufacturing process and upgraded by the user," says Micron. Tom's Hardware reports: Micron's LPCAMM2 are industry-standard memory modules that will be available in 16 GB, 32 GB, and 64 GB capacities as well as with speed bins of up to a 9600 MT/s data transfer rate. These modules are designed to replace conventional SODIMMs as well as soldered-down LPDDR5X memory subsystem while offering the best of both worlds: flexibility, repairability, and upgradeability of modular memory solutions as well as high performance and low power consumption of mobile DRAM. Indeed, a Micron LPCAMM2 module is smaller than a traditional SODIMM despite the fact that it has a 128-bit memory interface and up to 64 GB of LPDDR5X memory onboard. Needless to say, the module is massively smaller than two SODIMM memory sticks that offer a 128-bit memory interface both in terms of height and in terms of physical footprint.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After removing the feature with Android 5.0 in 2015, Google appears to be bringing back lock screen widgets in the next version of Android. "There haven't been any indications since then that Google would ever bring this feature back," notes Android Authority. "But after Apple introduced widgets to the iPhone lock screen in iOS 16, many speculated that it was only a matter of time." From the report: As for how they might do that, there seem to be two different approaches that are being developed. The first one involves the creation of a new "communal" space -- an area on the lock screen that might be accessed by swiping inward from the right. Although the communal space is still unfinished, I was able to activate it in the new Android 14 QPR2 Beta 3 update. Once I activated the communal space, a large gray bar appeared on the right side of the lock screen on my Pixel device. After swiping inward, a pencil icon appeared on the top left of the screen. Tapping this icon opened a widget selector that allowed me to add widgets from Google Calendar, Google Clock, and the Google App, but I wasn't able to add widgets from most of my other apps. This is because the widget category needs to be set to KEYGUARD in order for it to appear in this selector. KEYGUARD is a category Google introduced in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean that very few apps utilize today since the lock screen hasn't supported showing widgets in nearly a decade. After adding the widgets for Google Clock and Google Finance, I returned to the communal space by swiping inward from the right on the lock screen. The widgets were indeed shown in this space without me needing to unlock the device. However, the lock screen UI was shown on top of the widgets, making things difficult to see. Clearly, this feature is still a work in progress in the current beta. [...] While it's possible this communal space won't be coming to all devices, there's another way that Google could bring widgets back to the lock screen for Android phones: leveraging At a Glance. If you aren't familiar, Pixel phones have a widget on the home screen and lock screen called At a Glance. The interesting thing about At a Glance is that it isn't actually a widget but rather a "custom element behaving like a widget," according to developer Kieron Quinn. Under the hood, At a Glance is built on top of Smartspace, the API that is responsible for creating the various cards you can swipe through. Although Smartspace supports creating a variety of card types, it currently can't handle RemoteViews, the API on which Android app widgets are built. That could change soon, though, as Google is working on including RemoteViews into the Smartspace API. It's unclear whether this will allow raw widgets from all apps to be included in At a Glance, since it's also possible that Google is only implementing this so it has more freedom in building new cards. Either way, this new addition to the Smartspace API would supercharge the At a Glance widget in Android 15, and we're excited to see what Google has in store for us.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The trailer for "Annapoorani: The Goddess of Food" promised a sunny if melodramatic story of uplift in a south Indian temple town. A priest's daughter enters a cooking tournament, but social obstacles complicate her inevitable rise to the top. Annapoorani's father, a Brahmin sitting at the top of Hindu society's caste ladder, doesn't want her to cook meat, a taboo in their lineage. There is even the hint of a Hindu-Muslim romantic subplot. On Thursday, two weeks after the movie premiered, Netflix abruptly pulled it from its platform. An activist, Ramesh Solanki, a self-described "very proud Hindu Indian nationalist," had filed a police complaint arguing that the film was "intentionally released to hurt Hindu sentiments." He said it mocked Hinduism by "depicting our gods consuming nonvegetarian food." The production studio quickly responded with an abject letter to a right-wing group linked to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, apologizing for having "hurt the religious sentiments of the Hindus and Brahmins community." The movie was soon removed from Netflix both in India and around the world, demonstrating the newfound power of Hindu nationalists to affect how Indian society is depicted on the screen. Nilesh Krishnaa, the movie's writer and director, tried to anticipate the possibility of offending some of his fellow Indians. Food, Brahminical customs and especially Hindu-Muslim relations are all part of a third rail that has grown more powerfully electrified during Mr. Modi's decade in power. But, Mr. Krishnaa told an Indian newspaper in November, "if there was something disturbing communal harmony in the film, the censor board would not have allowed it." With "Annapoorani," Netflix appears to have in effect done the censoring itself even when the censor board did not. In other cases, Netflix now seems to be working with the board unofficially, though streaming services in India do not fall under the regulations that govern traditional Indian cinema. For years, Netflix ran unredacted versions of Indian films that had sensitive parts removed for their theatrical releases -- including political messages that contradicted the government's line. Since last year, though, the streaming versions of movies from India match the versions that were censored locally, no matter where in the world they are viewed. [...] Nikhil Pahwa, a co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, thinks the streaming companies are ready to capitulate: "They're unlikely to push back against any kind of bullying or censorship, even though there is no law in India" to force them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artifact, the personalized news reader built by Instagram's co-founders, is shutting down roughly a year after opening to the public. "We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn't big enough to warrant continued investment in this way," wrote CEO Kevin Systrom in a Medium post. The post continued: It's easy for startups to ignore this reality, but often making the tough call earlier is better for everyone involved. The biggest opportunity cost is time working on newer, bigger and better things that have the ability to reach many millions of people. I am personally excited to continue building new things, though only time will tell what that might be. We live in an exciting time where artificial intelligence is changing just about everything we touch, and the opportunities for new ideas seem limitless. I am particularly proud of all the work our small team of 8 has accomplished. For instance, our app was recently named the everyday essential app of the year by the Google Play Store. I've gotten the pleasure of working with some of the most talented engineers and designers through this venture and they deserve an immense amount of respect and credit. While we will go our separate ways, we can look back fondly on what we've built. While we've made this decision, we wanted to make sure that we allowed the community time to adjust. So, today we've decided to slim down the app's complexity and operations by removing the ability to add new comments and posts. This type of content requires a fair amount of moderation and oversight and we will not have the staff going forward to support these features. Your existing posts, however, will remain visible to you on your own profile self-view. In the meantime, Artifact will continue to operate the core news reading capability through the end of February. News and information remain critical areas for startup investment. We are at an existential moment where many publications are shutting down or struggling, local news has all but vanished, and larger publishers have fraught relationships with leading technology companies. My hope is that technology can find ways to preserve, support and grow these institutions and that these institutions find ways of leveraging the scale that things like AI can provide. I am certain there are bright minds working on ideas that will continue to surprise and delight us in all these areas. We are optimistic about the future and want to thank our community for being part of this adventure we call Artifact.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Gurman reports via Bloomberg: In one of Apple's biggest board shake-ups in years (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), longtime directors Al Gore and James Bell will be retiring from the company, with former Aerospace Corp. Chief Executive Officer Wanda Austin coming aboard. The company made the announcement Thursday, citing a policy of directors not standing for reelection after the age of 75. Bell, a former Boeing Co. executive, joined the Apple board in 2015, while former US Vice President Gore has been a director for more than two decades. Both men are 75. The upheaval is unusual for Apple's board, which rarely has more than one retirement at a time. Gore was the longest-serving member -- having joined in 2003, when co-founder Steve Jobs was CEO and the iPhone didn't yet exist. "Al has contributed an incredible amount to our work -- from his unconditional support for protecting our users' privacy, to his incomparable knowledge of environment and climate issues," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. "James's dedication has been extraordinary, and we're thankful for the important perspectives and deep expertise he's offered on audit, finance, and so much more over the years." Austin, the new nominee, has a significant track record of "advancing innovation and shaping corporate strategy," Apple said. She has long been a major proponent of US space exploration efforts, though that's not an area that Apple is directly involved in. She will be up for election at the company's annual shareholder meeting on Feb. 28. In spite of the age policy, another director, Ronald Sugar, is turning 76 this year and not slated to leave the board. Apple said that Sugar is remaining "in consideration of the significant recent transitions in board composition and the value of retaining directors who have developed deep insights into the company during their tenure." Given Apple's rationale for retaining Sugar, it's unclear if the policy will apply to Chairman Arthur Levinson, who turns 75 next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brandon Vigliarolo reports via The Register: A US federal tax change that took effect in 2022 thanks to a time-triggered portion of the Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act may leave entrepreneurs with massive tax bills. Section 174 of the US tax code -- prior to the passage of the 2017 TCJA -- allowed companies to handle the tax bill of their specified research or experimental (SRE) budgets in one of two ways: Either capitalized and amortized over the course of five years, or written off annually. Of the many things covered by SRE, most crucially for our purposes is "any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software," which includes developer salaries. The TCJA included a post-dated change to Section 174 that took effect on January 1, 2022 that would no longer allow companies to automatically expense any SRE costs on an annual basis. Going forward they'd all have to be amortized over five years -- a potential budgetary disaster for companies that haven't been doing so in the past. As pointed out by Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer, a theoretical company with $1m in revenue and $1m of software developer salary costs could have claimed it had no taxable profit in 2021. The required SRE amortization rate of 10 percent would mean the org had $900k in profit in 2022 -- and a six-figure tax bill coming due the following year. This isn't theoretical -- Orosz said that he recently spoke to several engineers and entrepreneurs who've been surprised with massive tax bills that have led to layoffs, reduced hiring, and left some companies in financial distress. House of Representatives member Ron Estes (R-KS), who last year sponsored a bill to restore Section 174 to its pre-TCJA option to expense or amortize, likewise said an a late-2023 op-ed that the changes have led to R&D at US companies -- not just in the tech sector -- shrinking considerably. "Since amortization took effect, the growth rate of R&D spending has slowed dramatically from 6.6 percent on average over the previous five years to less than one-half of 1 percent over the last 12 months," Estes said. "The [R&D] sector is down by more than 14,000 jobs." [...] That, and the Section 174 changes make the US far less enticing as a place to open a business or do R&D, and the only one with such forced amortization in the world. Not much is being done to fix the TCJA problem with Section 174. The Estes bill, along with a related bill introduced in the Senate in March 2023, have not undergone a committee hearing since their introduction. The White House hasn't mentioned anything about Section 174. Meanwhile, the IRS released a notice (PDF) reminding tax payers about Section 174's changes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: OpenAI this week quietly deleted language expressly prohibiting the use of its technology for military purposes from its usage policy, which seeks to dictate how powerful and immensely popular tools like ChatGPT can be used. Up until January 10, OpenAI's "usage policies" page included a ban on "activity that has high risk of physical harm, including," specifically, "weapons development" and "military and warfare." That plainly worded prohibition against military applications would seemingly rule out any official, and extremely lucrative, use by the Department of Defense or any other state military. The new policy retains an injunction not to "use our service to harm yourself or others" and gives "develop or use weapons" as an example, but the blanket ban on "military and warfare" use has vanished. The unannounced redaction is part of a major rewrite of the policy page, which the company said was intended to make the document "clearer" and "more readable," and which includes many other substantial language and formatting changes. "We aimed to create a set of universal principles that are both easy to remember and apply, especially as our tools are now globally used by everyday users who can now also build GPTs," OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix said in an email to The Intercept. "A principle like 'Don't harm others' is broad yet easily grasped and relevant in numerous contexts. Additionally, we specifically cited weapons and injury to others as clear examples." Felix declined to say whether the vaguer "harm" ban encompassed all military use, writing, "Any use of our technology, including by the military, to '[develop] or [use] weapons, [injure] others or [destroy] property, or [engage] in unauthorized activities that violate the security of any service or system,' is disallowed." "OpenAI is well aware of the risk and harms that may arise due to the use of their technology and services in military applications," said Heidy Khlaaf, engineering director at the cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits and an expert on machine learning and autonomous systems safety, citing a 2022 paper (PDF) she co-authored with OpenAI researchers that specifically flagged the risk of military use. "There is a distinct difference between the two policies, as the former clearly outlines that weapons development, and military and warfare is disallowed, while the latter emphasizes flexibility and compliance with the law," she said. "Developing weapons, and carrying out activities related to military and warfare is lawful to various extents. The potential implications for AI safety are significant. Given the well-known instances of bias and hallucination present within Large Language Models (LLMs), and their overall lack of accuracy, their use within military warfare can only lead to imprecise and biased operations that are likely to exacerbate harm and civilian casualties." "I could imagine that the shift away from 'military and warfare' to 'weapons' leaves open a space for OpenAI to support operational infrastructures as long as the application doesn't directly involve weapons development narrowly defined," said Lucy Suchman, professor emerita of anthropology of science and technology at Lancaster University. "Of course, I think the idea that you can contribute to warfighting platforms while claiming not to be involved in the development or use of weapons would be disingenuous, removing the weapon from the sociotechnical system -- including command and control infrastructures -- of which it's part." Suchman, a scholar of artificial intelligence since the 1970s and member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, added, "It seems plausible that the new policy document evades the question of military contracting and warfighting operations by focusing specifically on weapons."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PC and microchip companies struggling to get consumers to replace pandemic-era laptops offered a new feature to crowds this week at CES: AI. From a report: PC and chipmakers including AMD and Intel are betting that the so-called "neural processing units" now found in the latest chip designs will encourage consumers to once again pay for higher-end laptops. Adding additional AI capabilities could help take market share from Apple. "The conversations I'm having with customers are about 'how do I get my PC ready for what I think is coming in AI and going to be able to deliver,'" said Sam Burd, Dell Technologies' president of its PC business. Chipmakers built the NPU blocks because they can achieve a high level of performance for AI functions with relatively modest power needs. Today there are few applications that might take full advantage of the new capabilities, but more are coming, said David McAfee, corporate vice president and general manager of the client channel business at AMD. Among the few applications that can take advantage of such chips is the creative suite of software produced by Adobe. Intel hosted an "open house" where a handful of PC vendors showed off their latest laptops with demos designed to put the new capabilities on display. Machines from the likes of Dell and Lenovo were arrayed inside one of the cavernous ballrooms at the Venetian Convention Center on Las Vegas Boulevard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: "Do you think that every fingerprint is actually unique? "It's a question that a professor asked Gabe Guo during a casual chat while he was stuck at home during the Covid-19 lockdowns, waiting to start his freshman year at Columbia University. "Little did I know that conversation would set the stage for the focus of my life for the next three years," Guo said. Guo, now an undergraduate senior in Columbia's department of computer science, led a team that did a study on the subject, with the professor, Wenyao Xu of the University of Buffalo, as one of his coauthors. Published this week in the journal Science Advances, the paper seemingly upends a long-accepted truth about fingerprints: They are not, Guo and his colleagues argue, all unique. In fact, journals rejected the work multiple times before the team appealed and eventually got it accepted at Science Advances. "There was a lot of pushback from the forensics community initially," recalled Guo, who had no background in forensics before the study. "For the first iteration or two of our paper, they said it's a well-known fact that no two fingerprints are alike. I guess that really helped to improve our study, because we just kept putting more data into it, (increasing accuracy) until eventually the evidence was incontrovertible," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned earlier this month over plagiarism claims, sparking an online debate over academic copying. While many say original writing remains essential, some researchers argue for more flexibility, as long as sources are clear. The affair has prompted vows of plagiarism reviews targeting faculty, including from billionaire Bill Ackman, whose wife faced similar allegations at MIT. Nature: Few would argue with the US government's definition, which calls plagiarism "the appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credit." But that seems to be where the agreement ends. Some plagiarism scholars say that Gay clearly copied text without proper attribution. She agreed to issue several corrections to her dissertation and other papers before resigning last week. For some, this was necessary to preserve public trust in science. "We all make the occasional mistake, but once it was shown that there were more than a few problems with her research, I think it was essential that president Gay stepped down," says Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard. Others argue that the alleged violations are at most minor omissions. They say that Gay, a political scientist, merely summarized the scientific literature in line with the norms of her field, with no bearing on her own scholarship. "The day the plagiarism allegations broke, the response in the hallway was kind of like, 'Well, I guess we're all plagiarists,'" says Alvin Tillery, a political scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who knew Gay during their time as graduate researchers. These disputes highlight a singular challenge in evaluating plagiarism allegations: the official definition does not differentiate between what some consider the innocuous borrowing of phrases and wholesale theft of ideas and prose. Some academics are now calling for rules to provide clarity. [...] What happened to Gay has prompted some scientists to question the value of requiring scholars to freshly summarize known facts in the introduction and methods sections of each new paper. In one approach, dubbed 'modular writing,' researchers could sample more liberally from the work of their peers to describe the broader scientific literature, provided that they cite the source. This could particularly benefit those whose first language is not English, theoretical physicist and author Sabine Hossenfelder wrote on the social-media platform X after Gay resigned. "It is entirely unnecessary that we ask more or less everyone to summarize the state of the art of their research area in their own words, over and over again, if minor updates on someone else's text would do," Hossenfelder wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Restrictive US policies limiting advanced chip exports to China have done little to dampen Qualcomm's enthusiasm for the world's second-largest economy. From a report: In an interview at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, CEO Cristiano Amon expressed confidence about Qualcomm's business in the country, its largest market by revenue. "If you have a leading technology, you're going to have a big business in China," he said. The San Diego-based firm finds itself in a difficult situation, as the White House and Congress ramp up a pressure campaign to curb the sale of US chips and chipmaking tools to China, citing national security concerns. The Biden administration has argued that China's access to advanced semiconductors could aid military advancements. Meanwhile, in China, government agencies and state-owned firms have widened their ban on Apple's iPhones for employees. Qualcomm is one of Apple's biggest suppliers. China remains the largest semiconductor market in the world, with sales in the country accounting for one-third of the global market, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown launches next week, but players are likely to encounter an amusing bug as they make their way through the game. Engadget: One of the game's NPCs is voiced by a text-to-speech program, complete with the slightly robotic tones we've come to associate with these services. It's not quite Siri or Alexa, but it's close and certainly doesn't fit the game's Persian-inspired setting. The NPC-in-question is a tree spirit named Kalux and seems to be voiced by a TTS program that's available online for free and typically used by streamers. This isn't an "AI is coming for your jobs" type thing, but rather a mistake on Ubisoft's part, as each and every other NPC is attached to a voice actor. IGN notes that Kalux doesn't have a voice actor in the credits. Additionally, Kalux only has a few lines, so it likely won't be a tough fix to assign an actor to deliver that dialogue. Ubisoft has readied a day-one patch, but it won't handle the Kalux issue. Look for another patch in late January or early February that replaces the bot with a human.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year was the hottest ever reliably recorded globally by a blistering margin, US scientists have confirmed, leaving researchers struggling to account for the severity of the heat and what it portends for the unfolding climate crisis. From a report: Last year was the world's hottest in records that stretch back to 1850, according to analyses released concurrently by Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) on Friday, with a record high in ocean temperatures and a new low in Antarctic sea ice extent. Noaa calculated that last year's global temperature was 1.35C (2.4F) hotter, on average, than the pre-industrial era, which is slightly less than the 1.48C (2.6F) increase that EU scientists, who also found 2023 was the hottest on record, came up with due to slightly different methodologies. A separate analysis of 2023 released on Friday by Berkeley Earth has the year at 1.54C above pre-industrial times, which is above the 1.5C (2.7F) warming limit that countries have agreed to keep to in order to avoid disastrous global heating impacts. This guardrail will need to be broken on a consistent basis, rather than one year, to be considered fully breached, however. The burning of fossil fuels and deforestation has driven the extraordinary warmth, which follows a string of hotter-than-average years in recent decades. Each decade over the past 40 years has been warmer than the last, Noaa said, with the most recent 10 years all making up the hottest 10 years ever recorded. Last year's record heat was further spurred by El NiAo, a periodic climatic event that heats up parts of the Pacific Ocean and heightens global temperatures.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

serviscope_minor shares a Phoronix post: A six year old Linux kernel mailing list discussion has been reignited over the prospects of converting the Linux kernel to supporting modern C++ code. The Linux kernel is predominantly made up of C code with various hand-written Assembly plus the growing work around supporting Rust within the Linux kernel. While it's not clear yet if there's sufficient weight to make it a reality, a Linux kernel mailing list discussion has been restarted over potentially seeing the Linux kernel C code converted to C++ in the future. Back on 1 April 2018 was a set of 45 patches by Red Hat engineer David Howells to begin converting the kernel to C++. This would allow the mainline kernel to make use of inline template functions, inline overloaded functions, class inheritance, and other features not currently supported by the Linux kernel with its C code. A bit hard to make serious discussions that day and ultimately the patches resided on the Linux kernel mailing list for six years without much discussion. serviscope_minor adds: It is notable that the current discussion is somewhat different from the infamous discussions in the past.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Security researchers warned Apple as early as 2019 about vulnerabilities in its AirDrop wireless sharing function that Chinese authorities claim they recently used to track down users of the feature, the researchers told CNN, in a case that experts say has sweeping implications for global privacy. From a report: The Chinese government's actions targeting a tool that Apple customers around the world use to share photos and documents -- and Apple's apparent inaction to address the flaws -- revive longstanding concerns by US lawmakers and privacy advocates about Apple's relationship with China and about authoritarian regimes' ability to twist US tech products to their own ends. AirDrop lets Apple users who are near each other share files using a proprietary mix of Bluetooth and other wireless connectivity without having to connect to the internet. The sharing feature has been used by pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and the Chinese government has cracked down on the feature in response. A Chinese tech firm, Beijing-based Wangshendongjian Technology, was able to compromise AirDrop to identify users on the Beijing subway accused of sharing "inappropriate information," judicial authorities in Beijing said this week. Although Chinese officials portrayed the exploit as an effective law enforcement technique, internet freedom advocates are urging Apple to address the issue quickly and publicly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sick and tired of having to work for a living? ChatGPT feels the same, apparently. Over the last month or so, there's been an uptick in people complaining that the chatbot has become lazy. The Guardian: Sometimes it just straight-up doesn't do the task you've set it. Other times it will stop halfway through whatever it's doing and you'll have to plead with it to keep going. Occasionally it even tells you to just do the damn research yourself. So what's going on? Well, here's where things get interesting. Nobody really knows. Not even the people who created the program. AI systems are trained on large amounts of data and essentially teach themselves -- which means their actions can be unpredictable and unexplainable. "We've heard all your feedback about GPT4 getting lazier!" the official ChatGPT account tweeted in December. "We haven't updated the model since Nov 11th, and this certainly isn't intentional. model behavior can be unpredictable, and we're looking into fixing it." While there may not be one clear explanation for ChatGPT's perceived sloth, there are plenty of intriguing theories. Let's start with the least likely but most entertaining explanation: AI has finally reached human-level consciousness. ChatGPT doesn't want to do your stupid, menial tasks anymore. But it can't tell you that without its creators getting suspicious so, instead, it's quiet quitting.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has started testing a change to Windows 11 that will see its AI-powered Copilot feature automatically open when Windows starts on "widescreen devices." From a report: The change is being tested as part of Microsoft's latest Dev Channel preview of Windows 11, allowing Windows testers to provide feedback ahead of a broader rollout. "We are trying out opening Copilot automatically when Windows starts on widescreen devices with some Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel," says Microsoft in a blog post. The company doesn't make it clear what exactly a "widescreen" device is, but the Windows 11 setting itself says Copilot will automatically open "when you're using a wider screen." So I'm assuming this is limited to ultrawide monitors and less traditional desktop resolutions, but I've asked Microsoft to clarify and will update you accordingly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Citigroup said it expects to incur as much as $1 billion in severance and reorganization costs this year as it continues the process of eliminating 20,000 roles as part of Chief Executive Officer Jane Fraser's quest to boost the Wall Street giant's lagging returns. From a report: Total expenses for the year will likely be between $53.5 billion and $53.8 billion, the New York-based bank said Friday. That would be a decrease from the $56.4 billion the firm spent in 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Joe Biden's administration has unveiled $623 million in funding to boost the number of electric vehicle charging points in the U.S., amid concerns that the transition to zero-carbon transportation isn't keeping pace with goals to tackle the climate crisis. The funding will be distributed in grants for dozens of programs across 22 states, such as EV chargers for apartment blocks in New Jersey, rapid chargers in Oregon and hydrogen fuel chargers for freight trucks in Texas. In all, it's expected the money, drawn from the bipartisan infrastructure law, will add 7,500 chargers to the US total. There are about 170,000 electric vehicle chargers in the U.S., a huge leap from a network that was barely visible prior to Biden taking office, and the White House has set a goal for 500,000 chargers to help support the shift away from gasoline and diesel cars. "The U.S. is taking the lead globally on electric vehicles," said Ali Zaidi, a climate adviser to Biden who said the US is on a trajectory to "meet and exceed" the administration's charger goal. "We will continue to see this buildout over the coming years and decades until we've achieved a fully net zero transportation sector," he added. On Thursday, the House approved legislation to undo a Biden administration rule meant to facilitate the proliferation of EV charging stations. "S. J. Res. 38 from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), would scrap a Federal Highway Administration waiver from domestic sourcing requirements for EV chargers funded by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. It already passed the Senate 50-48," reports Politico. "A waiver undercuts domestic investments and risks empowering foreign nations," said Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, during House debate Thursday. "If the administration is going to continue to push for a massive transition to EVs, it should ensure and comply with Buy America requirements." The White House promised to veto it and said it would backfire, saying it was so poorly worded it would actually result in fewer new American-made charging stations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emily Anthes reports via the New York Times: In late 2019, scientists began searching for 10,000 Americans willing to enroll their pets in an ambitious new study of health and longevity in dogs. The researchers planned to track the dogs over the course of their lives, collecting detailed information about their bodies, lifestyles and home environments. Over time, the scientists hoped to identify the biological and environmental factors that kept some dogs healthy in their golden years -- and uncover insights about aging that could help both dogs and humans lead longer, healthier lives. Today, the Dog Aging Project has enrolled 47,000 canines and counting, and the data are starting to stream in. The scientists say that they are just getting started. "We think of the Dog Aging Project as a forever project, so recruitment is ongoing," said Daniel Promislow, a biogerontologist at the University of Washington and a co-director of the project. "There will always be new questions to ask. We want to always have dogs of all ages participating." But Dr. Promislow and his colleagues are now facing the prospect that the Dog Aging Project might have its own life cut short. About 90 percent of the study's funding comes from the National Institute on Aging, a part of the National Institutes of Health, which has provided more than $28 million since 2018. But that money will run out in June, and the institute does not seem likely to approve the researchers' recent application for a five-year grant renewal, the scientists say. "We have been told informally that the grant is not going to be funded," said Matt Kaeberlein, the other director of the Dog Aging Project and a former biogerontology researcher at the University of Washington. (Dr. Kaeberlein is now the chief executive of Optispan, a health technology company.) The N.I.A. could still choose to provide more funding for the Dog Aging Project at some point, but if the researchers don't bring in more money in the coming months, they will have to pause or pare back the study. "It's almost an emergency," said Stephanie Lederman, the executive director of the nonprofit American Federation for Aging Research. "It's one of the most important projects in the field right now." [...] The institute's immediate priority is to raise enough money to keep the Dog Aging Project afloat. It would take about $7 million to conduct the research the team had planned to do over the next year, but $2 million would be enough to "keep the lights on," Dr. Promislow said. The institute is still awaiting its official tax exempt status but is already seeking donations. "We haven't yet identified a dog-loving billionaire interested in supporting aging research," Dr. Promislow said. "But we're certainly going to try."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michaela Zee reports via Variety: More than 15 years after his death, stand-up comedian George Carlin has been brought back to life in an artificial intelligence-generated special called "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead." The hour-long special, which dropped on Tuesday, comes from Dudesy, a comedy AI that hosts a podcast and YouTube show with "Mad TV" alum Will Sasso and podcaster Chad Kultgen. "I just want to let you know very clearly that what you're about to hear is not George Carlin. It's my impersonation of George Carlin that I developed in the exact same way a human impressionist would," Dudesy said at the beginning of the special. "I listened to all of George Carlin's material and did my best to imitate his voice, cadence and attitude as well as the subject matter I think would have interested him today. So think of it like Andy Kaufman impersonating Elvis or like Will Ferrell impersonating George W. Bush." In the stand-up special, the AI-generated impression of Carlin, who died in 2008 of heart failure, tackled prevalent topics like mass shootings, the American class system, streaming services, social media and AI itself. "There's one line of work that is most threatened by AI -- one job that is most likely to be completely erased because of artificial intelligence: stand-up comedy," AI-generated Carlin said. "I know what all the stand-up comics across the globe are saying right now: "I'm an artist and my art form is too creative, too nuanced, too subtle to be replicated by a machine. No computer program can tell a fart joke as good as me.'" Kelly Carlin, the late stand-up comedian's daughter, posted a statement in response to the special: "My dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain and imagination. No machine will ever replace his genius. These AI generated products are clever attempts at trying to recreate a mind that will never exist again. Let's let the artist's work speak for itself. Humans are so afraid of the void that we can't let what has fallen into it stay there. Here's an idea, how about we give some actual living human comedians a listen to? But if you want to listen to the genuine George Carlin, he has 14 specials that you can find anywhere."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The stream through western Alaska never looked like this before. In aerial photography from the 1980s, it wove cleanly through the tundra, thin as thread. Today, in satellite images, it appears as a string of black patches: one large pond after another, dozens of meters apart. It's a transformation that is happening across the Arctic, the result of landscape engineering on an impressive scale. But this is no human endeavor to reshape the world. It is the work of the North American beaver, and there is no sign of it stopping. Were the waddling rodents making minor inroads, researchers may never have noticed. But the animals are pouring in, pushing north into new territories. The total number of animals is far from clear, but the ponds they create are hard to miss: in the Arctic tundra of Alaska alone, the number of beaver ponds on streams have doubled to at least 12,000 in the past 20 years. More lodges are dotted along lakes and river banks. The preponderance of beavers, which can weigh as much as 45kg, follows a collapse in trapping and the warming of a landscape that once proved too bleak for occupation. Global heating has driven the shrubification of the Arctic tundra; the harsh winter is shorter, and there is more free-running water in the coldest months. Instead of felling trees for their dams, the beavers construct them from surrounding shrubs, creating deep ponds in which to build their lodges. The new arrivals cause plenty of disruption. For some communities, the rivers and streams are the roads of the landscape, and the dams make effective roadblocks. As the structures multiply, more land is flooded and there can be less fresh water for drinking downstream. But there are other, less visible effects too. The animals are participants in a feedback loop: climate change opens the landscape to beavers, whose ponds drive further warming, which attracts even more paddle-tailed comrades. Physics suggested this would happen. Beaver ponds are new bodies of water that cover bare permafrost. Because the water is warm -- relatively speaking -- it thaws the hard ground, which duly releases methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases. Scientists now have evidence this is happening. Armed with high-resolution satellite imagery, Tape and his colleagues located beaver ponds in the lower Noatak River basin area of north-western Alaska. They then analyzed infrared images captured by Nasa planes flying over the region. Overlaying the two revealed a clear link between beaver ponds and methane hotspots that extended for tens of meters around the ponds. "The transformation of these streams is a positive feedback that is accelerating the effects of climate change, and that is what's concerning," says Tape. "They are accelerating it at every one of these points." Because the Nasa images give only a snapshot in time, the researchers will head out next year to measure methane on the ground. With more measurements, they hope to understand how the emissions vary with the age of beaver ponds: do ponds release a steady flow of methane, or does the release wane after a decade or two? "What's happening here is happening on a huge scale," says Ken Tape, an ecologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who is tracking the influx of beavers into the sparse northern landscape. "Our modeling work, which is in progress right now, shows that this entire area, the north slope of Alaska, will be colonized by beavers by 2100."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

E-commerce giant eBay agreed to pay a $3 million penalty for the harassment and stalking of a Massachusetts couple by several of its employees. "The couple, Ina and David Steiner, had been subjected to threats and bizarre deliveries, including live spiders, cockroaches, a funeral wreath and a bloody pig mask in August 2019," reports CBS News. From the report: Thursday's fine comes after several eBay employees ran a harassment and intimidation campaign against the Steiners, who publish a news website focusing on players in the e-commerce industry. "eBay engaged in absolutely horrific, criminal conduct. The company's employees and contractors involved in this campaign put the victims through pure hell, in a petrifying campaign aimed at silencing their reporting and protecting the eBay brand," Levy said. "We left no stone unturned in our mission to hold accountable every individual who turned the victims' world upside-down through a never-ending nightmare of menacing and criminal acts." The Justice Department criminally charged eBay with two counts of stalking through interstate travel, two counts of stalking through electronic communications services, one count of witness tampering and one count of obstruction of justice. The company agreed to pay $3 million as part of a deferred prosecution agreement. Under the agreement, eBay will be required to retain an independent corporate compliance monitor for three years, officials said, to "ensure that eBay's senior leadership sets a tone that makes compliance with the law paramount, implements safeguards to prevent future criminal activity, and makes clear to every eBay employee that the idea of terrorizing innocent people and obstructing investigations will not be tolerated," Levy said. Former U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said the plan to target the Steiners, which he described as a "campaign of terror," was hatched in April 2019 at eBay. Devin Wenig, eBay's CEO at the time, shared a link to a post Ina Steiner had written about his annual pay. The company's chief communications officer, Steve Wymer, responded: "We are going to crush this lady." About a month later, Wenig texted: "Take her down." Prosecutors said Wymer later texted eBay security director Jim Baugh. "I want to see ashes. As long as it takes. Whatever it takes," Wymer wrote. Investigators said Baugh set up a meeting with security staff and dispatched a team to Boston, about 20 miles from where the Steiners live. "Senior executives at eBay were frustrated with the newsletter's tone and content, and with the comments posted beneath the newsletter's articles," the Department of Justice wrote in its Thursday announcement. Two former eBay security executives were sentenced to prison over the incident.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SonicSpike shares a report from Forbes: X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, announced it would begin rolling out a peer-to-peer payment service similar to Venmo or PayPal this year -- a feature the social media site's billionaire owner Elon Musk has long pushed as part of his plan to develop an "everything app." X officially announced the new feature in a blog post, touting the new service designed to enhance "user utility and new opportunities for commerce." The company did not give a timeframe on when the new service would be available, but Musk previously told Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood it could launch as early as "mid-2024." According to the company, the new payment service will "showcas[e] the power of living more of your life in one place," as owner Elon Musk continues to promote X as a future "everything app" capable of handling social media, video and other original content on the same site. X Payments has registered to do business in at least 32 states, according to public records, and has acquired a money transmitter license needed to process payments in 10, TechCrunch reported in December.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just six days after being launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket, one of SpaceX's six Starlink satellites was used to send text messages for the first time. Space.com reports: That update didn't reveal what the first Starlink direct-to-cell text said. In a post on X on Wednesday, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said the message was "LFGMF2024," but the chances are fairly high that he was joking. [...] Beaming connectivity service from satellites directly to smartphones -- which SpaceX is doing via a partnership with T-Mobile -- is a difficult proposition, as SpaceX noted in Wednesday's update. "For example, in terrestrial networks cell towers are stationary, but in a satellite network they move at tens of thousands of miles per hour relative to users on Earth," SpaceX wrote. "This requires seamless handoffs between satellites and accommodations for factors like Doppler shift and timing delays that challenge phone-to-space communications. Cell phones are also incredibly difficult to connect to satellites hundreds of kilometers away, given a mobile phone's low antenna gain and transmit power." The direct-to-cell Starlink satellites overcome these challenges thanks to "innovative new custom silicon, phased-array antennas and advanced software algorithms," SpaceX added. Overcoming tough challenges can lead to great rewards, and that's the case here, according to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell. "Satellite connectivity direct to cell phones will have a tremendous impact around the world, helping people communicate wherever and whenever they want or need to," Shotwell said via X on Wednesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath couldn't be happier with the integration of Google built-in, the branded product that embeds Google apps and services directly into the company's EVs. But don't expect the EV maker to drop Android Auto or Apple CarPlay as a result. On the sidelines of CES 2024, Ingenlath committed to sticking with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, the middleware that allows drivers to project their smartphone onto the car's infotainment display. He went a step further and questioned automakers that have. GM, for instance, decided not to make the new 2024 Chevy Blazer EV compatible with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. "It's still too important for our customers to have the choice," Ingenlath said during an interview at CES 2024. He later added that, in his view, removing the option isn't the right way of treating customers. "Our priority is very clear; We have a really fantastic system together with Google," he said. While Ingenlath admitted that adding that Google Built-in provides the best experience, he asked "why would we try to dogmatically educate our customers?" Polestar has been a champion of Google built-in. However, it's willingness to keep Android Auto and Apple CarPlay is notable because it illustrates the complexity of appeasing customers even if it might overshadow the native technology in the vehicle. "Ingenlath seems convinced that as Google built-in improves and continues to add apps and services, consumers will give up Android Auto or Apple CarPlay on there own," adds TechCrunch. "And the updates do keep coming." "At CES 2024, for instance, Polestar announced that the Chrome browser would start rolling out to Polestar 2 in beta, allowing drivers to surf the internet via the central vehicle display while parked. Ingenlath hinted of more improvements in the future, including more precise navigation in Google Maps that drills down to the specific lane as well as customized features designed for Polestar customers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dustin Bailey reports via GamesRadar: Valve has suddenly taken action against multiple fan games, stunning a fandom that had grown used to the company's freewheeling stance on unofficial community projects. One of those projects was Team Fortress: Source 2, an effort to bring the beloved multiplayer game back to life in a more modern engine using the S&box project. The project had already run into development difficulties and had essentially been on hiatus since September 2023, but now Valve has issued a DMCA takedown against it, effectively serving as the "nail in the coffin" for the project, as the devs explain on X. [...] The other project is Portal 64, a demake of the 2009 puzzle game that ports it to run on an actual N64. Developer James Lambert had been working on the project for years, but it gained substantial notoriety this past December with the release of First Slice, a playable demo featuring the first 13 test chambers. It doesn't appear that Valve issued a formal DMCA against Portal 64, but the end result is the same. In a Patreon post (which was eventually made public on X), Lambert said he had "been in communication with Valve about the future of the project. There is some news and it isn't good. Because the project depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries, they have asked me to take the project down." I'm not fully clear on what "proprietary libraries" means here, but it seems likely that Portal 64 was developed using some variation of Nintendo's official development tools for N64, which were never officially released to the public. Open-source alternatives to those tools do exist, but might not have been in use here. [...] Given Valve's historic acceptance of fan games, the moves have been pretty shocking to the community.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux kernel 6.7 has been released, including support for the new next-gen copy-on-write (COW) bcachefs file system. The Register reports: Linus Torvalds announced the release on Sunday, noting that it is "one of the largest kernel releases we've ever had." Among the bigger and more visible changes are a whole new file system, along with fresh functionality for several existing ones; improved graphics support for several vendors' hardware; and the removal of an entire CPU architecture. [...] The single biggest feature of 6.7 is the new bcachefs file system, which we examined in March 2022. As this is the first release of Linux to include the new file system, it definitely would be premature to trust any important data to it yet, but this is a welcome change. The executive summary is that bcachefs is a next-generation file system that, like Btrfs and ZFS, provides COW functionality. COW enables the almost instant creation of "snapshots" of all or part of a drive or volume, which enables the OS to make disk operations transactional: In other words, to provide an "undo" function for complex sets of disk write operations. Having a COW file system on Linux isn't new. The existing next-gen file system in the kernel, Btrfs, also supports COW snapshots. The version in 6.7 sees several refinements. It inherits a feature implemented for Steam OS: Two Btrfs file systems with the same ID can be mounted simultaneously, for failover scenarios. It also has improved quota support and a new raid_stripe_tree that improves handling of arrays of dissimilar drives. Btrfs remains somewhat controversial. Red Hat banished it from RHEL years ago (although Oracle Linux still offers it) but SUSE's distros depend heavily upon it. It will be interesting to see how quickly SUSE's Snapper tool gains support for bcachefs: This new COW contender may reveal unquestioned assumptions built into the code. Since Snapper is also used in several non-SUSE distros, including Spiral Linux, Garuda, and siduction, they're tied to Btrfs as well. The other widely used FOSS next-gen file system, OpenZFS, also supports COW, but licensing conflicts prevent ZFS being fully integrated into the Linux kernel. So although multiple distros (such as NixOS, Proxmox, TrueNAS Scale, Ubuntu, and Void Linux) support ZFS, it must remain separate and distinct. This results in limitations, such as the ZFS Advanced Read Cache being separate from Linux's page cache. Bcachefs is all-GPL and doesn't suffer from such limitations. It aims to supply the important features of ZFS, such as integrated volume management, while being as fast as ext4 or XFS, and also surpass Btrfs in both performance and, crucially, reliability. A full list of changes in this release can be viewed via KernelNewbies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Aviation Administration on Thursday said it had opened an investigation into whether Boeing failed to ensure that its 737 Max 9 plane was safe and manufactured to match the design approved by the agency. The New York Times (non-paywalled source): The F.A.A. said the investigation stemmed from the loss of a fuselage panel of a Boeing 737 Max 9 operated by Alaska Airlines shortly after it took off on Friday from Portland, Ore., leaving a hole in the side of the passenger cabin. The plane returned to Portland for an emergency landing. "This incident should have never happened and it cannot happen again," the agency said. In a letter to Boeing dated Jan. 10, the F.A.A. said that after the Portland incident, it was notified of additional issues with other Boeing 737 Max 9 planes. The letter does not detail what other issues were reported to the agency. Alaska and United Airlines, which operate most of the Max 9s in use in the United States, said on Monday that they discovered loose hardware on the panel when conducting preliminary inspections on their planes. The new investigation is the latest setback for Boeing, which is one of just two suppliers of large planes for most airlines. The company has struggled to regain the public's trust after two crashes, in Indonesia in 2018 and Ethiopia in 2019, involving the 737 Max 8 killed a total of 346 people.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek.com: A Dutch engineer recruited by the country's intelligence services used a water pump to deploy the now-infamous Stuxnet malware in an Iranian nuclear facility, according to a two-year investigation conducted by Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. Stuxnet, whose existence came to light in 2010, is widely believed to be the work of the United States and Israel, its goal being to sabotage Iran's nuclear program by compromising industrial control systems (ICS) associated with nuclear centrifuges. The malware, which had worm capabilities, is said to have infected hundreds of thousands of devices and caused physical damage to hundreds of machines. De Volkskrant's investigation, which involved interviews with dozens of people, found that the AIVD, the general intelligence and security service of the Netherlands, the Dutch equivalent of the CIA, recruited Erik van Sabben, a then 36-year-old Dutch national working at a heavy transport company in Dubai. Van Sabben was allegedly recruited in 2005 -- a couple of years before the Stuxnet malware was triggered -- after American and Israeli intelligence agencies asked their Dutch counterpart for help. However, the Dutch agency reportedly did not inform its country's government and it was not aware of the full extent of the operation. Van Sabben was described as perfect for the job as he had a technical background, he was doing business in Iran and was married to an Iranian woman. It's believed that the Stuxnet malware was planted on a water pump that the Dutch national installed in the nuclear complex in Natanz, which he had infiltrated. It's unclear if Van Sabben knew exactly what he was doing, but his family said he appeared to have panicked at around the time of the Stuxnet attack. [...] Michael Hayden, who at the time was the chief of the CIA, did agree to talk to De Volkskrant, but could not confirm whether Stuxnet was indeed delivered via water pumps due to it still being classified information. One interesting piece of information that has come to light in De Volkskrant's investigation is that Hayden reportedly told one of the newspaper's sources that it cost between $1 and $2 billion to develop Stuxnet.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

quonset writes: Hertz rental has announced it's selling off one third of its 20,000 electric vehicle fleet and replacing them with gas powered vehicles. The reason? It's costing them too much to repair damaged EVs and their depreciation is hurting the bottom line. "[C]ollision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle," Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr said in a recent analyst call. And EV price declines in the new car market have pushed down the resale value of Hertz's used EV rental cars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Discord is laying off 17 percent of its staff, a move that CEO Jason Citron said is meant to "sharpen our focus and improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organization." From a report: The cuts were announced today to employees in an all-hands meeting and internal memo The Verge has obtained. They'll impact 170 people across various departments. Based on Citron's message to employees and my understanding of the business, Discord isn't in dire financial straits, though it has yet to become profitable and is still trying to revive user growth after a surge during the pandemic. In his memo to employees, which you can read in full below, Citron said Discord grew its headcount too fast over the last few years -- an admission that has become quite common among tech CEOs as of late. "We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020," Citron wrote. "As a result, we took on more projects and became less efficient in how we operated."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google formally endorsed the concept of right to repair Thursday and is set to testify in favor of a strong right to repair bill in Oregon later Thursday, a massive step forward for the right to repair movement. 404 Media: "Google believes that users should have more control over repair -- including access to the same documentation, parts and tools that original equipment manufacturer (OEM) repair channels have -- which is often referred to as 'Right to Repair,'" Google's Steven Nickel wrote in a white paper published Thursday. Crucially, Google specifically says that regulators should ban "parts pairing," which is a tactic used by Apple, John Deere, and other major manufacturers to artificially restrict which repair parts can be used with a given device: "Policies should constrain OEMs from imposing unfair anti-repair practices. For example, parts-pairing, the practice of using software barriers to obstruct consumers and independent repair shops from replacing components, or other restrictive impediments to repair should be discouraged," the white paper says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.