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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Peru's Kimberly Garcia set a world record in her gold-medal winning turn at the women's 20 kilometer race walk event at the Pan American Games this weekend. Until she didn't. Once the race was over, organizers determined there was a serious "measuring problem" with the track, making the race times of Garcia, fellow medal winners Glenda Morejon of Ecuador and Peru's Evelyn Inga, and their competitors null and void. The athletes guessed the track had been drawn up roughly 3 kilometers (about 1.9 miles) shorter than it was supposed to be. Garcia crossed the finish line in 1 hour, 12 minutes and 26 seconds. The world record of 1 hour, 23 minutes and 49 seconds is held by China's Jiayu Yang. The athletes suspected something was amiss mid-race, according to the Associated Press. The Santiago 2023 Corporation, the group in charge of the 2023 Pan American Games, placed the blame on the Pan American Athletics Association, which reportedly chose the person who measured the race course. In a statement following the race, Santiago 2023 said the official who measured the course "did not take accurate measurements of the route the athletes took during the race." The group continued, "We deeply regret the inconvenience for the athletes, their coaches, the public and the attending press, but this situation cannot be attributed to the Organizing Committee."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Milmo reports via The Guardian: The Guardian has accused Microsoft of damaging its journalistic reputation by publishing an AI-generated poll speculating on the cause of a woman's death next to an article by the news publisher. Microsoft's news aggregation service published the automated poll next to a Guardian story about the death of Lilie James, a 21-year-old water polo coach who was found dead with serious head injuries at a school in Sydney last week. The poll, created by an AI program, asked: "What do you think is the reason behind the woman's death?" Readers were then asked to choose from three options: murder, accident or suicide. Readers reacted angrily to the poll, which has subsequently been taken down -- although highly critical reader comments on the deleted survey were still online as of Tuesday morning. A reader said one of the Guardian reporters bylined on the adjacent story, who had nothing to do with the poll, should be sacked. Another wrote: "This has to be the most pathetic, disgusting poll I've ever seen." The chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, Anna Bateson, outlined her concerns about the AI-generated poll in a letter to Microsoft's president, Brad Smith. She said the incident was potentially distressing for James's family and had caused "significant reputational damage" to the organization as well as damaging the reputation of the journalists who wrote the story. "This is clearly an inappropriate use of genAI [generative AI] by Microsoft on a potentially distressing public interest story, originally written and published by Guardian journalists," she wrote. Bateson added that it had demonstrated "the important role that a strong copyright framework plays in enabling publishers to be able to negotiate the terms on which our journalism is used." A Microsoft spokesperson said: "We have deactivated Microsoft-generated polls for all news articles and we are investigating the cause of the inappropriate content. A poll should not have appeared alongside an article of this nature, and we are taking steps to help prevent this kind of error from reoccurring in the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tanay Tanay has developed a smart vertical farming system using a Raspberry Pi 4 as the central controller, with features such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support for remote plant monitoring, precise automated watering based on moisture levels, and environmental factor tracking. Tom's Hardware reports: The end result is a Pi-powered system with tons of cool goodies to take your plant care to the next level. Tanay is able to monitor all sorts of environmental factors like how much light is available, how moist the air is, how much water is in the soil, what the temperature is and much more. The icing on the cake is a user-friendly interface that can be used to manually water the plants. The main board for this project is a Raspberry Pi 4 B. It's connected to an Arduino Nano R3 which is assigned to a specific plant. Some of the sensors confirmed in the design are a soil moisture sensor, an ambient light sensor as well as a water level depth detection sensor. You could always add more or take away modules depending on what you want to do with your vertical farm. For example, a camera could be used to log plant growth progress over time. Tanay explains that ThingSpeak, an IoT platform, was used in the project design. You can learn more about this Raspberry Pi project at Hackster.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. But when it comes to tackling a tricky task, researchers have found that getting angry can also be a powerful motivator. The experiments suggest people who are angry perform better on a set of challenging tasks than those who are emotionally neutral. "These findings demonstrate that anger increases effort toward attaining a desired goal, frequently resulting in greater success," said Dr Heather Lench, the first author of the study. The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (PDF), details how researchers at Texas A&M University conducted experiments involving more than 1,000 people, and analyzed survey data from more than 1,400 people, to explore the possible impact of anger on people in various circumstances. In one experiment, students were shown images previously found to elicit anger, desire, amusement, sadness or no particular emotion at all. Participants were subsequently asked to solve a series of anagrams. The results reveal that for a challenging set of anagrams, those who were angry did better than those in the other possible emotional states -- although no difference was seen for easy anagrams. The researchers say one explanation could be down to a link between anger and greater persistence, with the team finding those who were angry spent more time on the difficult set of anagrams. In another experiment, participants who were angry did better at dodging flags in a skiing video game than those who were neutral or sad, and were on a par with those who felt amusement or desire. "This pattern could indicate that general physical arousal had a benefit for game scores, as this would be greater in anger, amused, and desire conditions compared to the sad and neutral conditions," the researchers write. However, no such differences in performance was found when it came to an easier video game.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: For a period of two years between September 2019 and September 2021, two Americans and two Russians allegedly compromised the taxi dispatch system at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to sell cabbies a place at the front of the dispatch line. The two Russian nationals, Aleksandr Derebenetc and Kirill Shipulin, were indicted by a grand jury for conspiring to commit computer intrusions, the US Justice Department said on Tuesday. They remain at large. In early October, the two American nationals, Daniel Abayev and Peter Leyman, who were indicted last year, pleaded guilty, each to one count of conspiring to commit computer intrusions. The scheme represented an attempt to monetize the demand among taxi drivers for lucrative airport fares -- the current flat rate for JFK to Manhattan is $70 plus additional charges. As described in the indictment (PDF), taxi drivers are required to wait in a holding lot at JFK, often for several hours, before being dispatched in the order of their arrival to airport terminals. And because time spent waiting in line is not paid, drivers have a financial incentive to avoid waiting in line. The conspirators allegedly developed a plan to hack the dispatch system around September 2019. The indictment describes several approaches that were tried, "including bribing someone to insert a flash drive containing malware into computers connected to the dispatch system, obtaining unauthorized access to the dispatch system via a Wi-Fi connect, and stealing computer tablets connected to the dispatch system." The government's filing suggests that the group gained and lost access to the dispatch system several times. When they did have access, the alleged conspirators offered to move drivers to the front of the dispatch queue for a $10 fee, and waived the fee for those who found other drivers willing to pay to play. Many drivers took advantage of the service. According to the Justice Department, the group booked 2,463 queue cuts in a single week around December 2019. The scheme allegedly enabled as many as 1,000 trips per day that skipped the queue at JFK. The American conspirators are said to have collected the money from participating drivers and to have sent payments to the alleged Russian conspirators, describing the money transfers as "payment for software development" or "payment for services rendered." The indictment indicates that the Russians received more than $100,000 for their work. If apprehended -- which appears unlikely given current US relations with Russia -- the Russians face charges that carry a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. Abayev and Leyman each face up to five years in prison. They're scheduled to be sentenced early next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Registry has added domains ending in ".ing" -- "a situation seem/ing ripe for exceed.ing amounts of wordplay," reports 9to5Google. From the report: Google Registry -- which is different from Google Domains, the service Google is sell.ing off to SquareSpace -- tries to push the boundaries of domain names by launch.ing options like ".dev," ".app," and ".meme" (soon). After first be.ing announced in August, Google Registry is officially open.ing registration of .ing domains through partner companies like GoDaddy and 101Domain. As you might expect, the new domain end.ing is meant to inspire a sense of action, as exemplified by the first wave of companies debut.ing new domain names: If you want a .ing domain of your own, you can do so from the official ".ing" site, but you'll be pay.ing an extra one-time fee dur.ing the Early Access Period, which runs until December 5, 2023, with fees decreas.ing on a "daily schedule." Register.ing during "Phase 1" will set you back over $1 million -- quite a lot of cha-ch.ing -- while "Phase 9" drops down as low as $144.99.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emma Roth reports via The Verge: YouTube is broadening its efforts to crack down on ad blockers. The platform has "launched a global effort" to encourage users to allow ads or try YouTube Premium, YouTube communications manager Christopher Lawton says in a statement provided to The Verge. If you run into YouTube's block, you may see a notice that says "video playback is blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled." It also includes a prompt to allow ads or try YouTube Premium. You may get prompts about YouTube's stance on ad blockers but still be able to watch a video, though, for one Verge staffer, YouTube now fully blocks them nearly every time. YouTube confirmed that it was disabling videos for users with ad blockers in June, but Lawton described it as only a "small experiment globally" at the time. Now, YouTube has expanded this effort. Over the past several weeks, more users with ad blockers installed have found themselves unable to watch YouTube videos, with a post from Android Authority highlighting the increase in reports. Lawton maintains that the "use of ad blockers" violates the platform's terms of service, adding that "ads support a diverse ecosystem of creators globally and allow billions to access their favorite content on YouTube."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The head of the Russian department responsible for identifying threats to the "stability, security and integrity" of the internet, has revealed the extent of the Kremlin's VPN crackdown. Former FSO officer Sergei Khutortsev, a central figure in Russia's 'sovereign internet' project, confirmed that 167 VPN services are now blocked along with over 200 email services. Russia is also reported as stepping up measures against protocols such as OpenVPN, IKEv2 and WireGuard. [...] An in-depth report published by TheIns.ru has details of the monitoring/blocking system reportedly deployed in Russia, how much it costs (4.3 billion rubles/$43 million in 2020, 24.7 billion rubles/$247 million for 2022-2024), and the names of the companies supplying the components. The publication also obtained original documents that apparently show some of the protocols Russia initially intended to block. They include older VPN protocols IPSec, L2TP, and PPTP, plus the BitTorrent protocol still widely used today. The full report on the system, which reveals the use of Intel chips/chipsets in 965 servers manufactured by Huawei and already purchased by Russia, plus another 2400+ servers for 2023/24, is available here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China's popular social media platforms are requiring "self-media" accounts with over 500,000 followers to disclose real-name information, prompting concerns over increased doxxing and privacy among some users. Reuters reports: China's most popular social media platforms on Tuesday announced that "self-media" accounts with more than 500,000 followers will be asked to display real-name information, a controversial measure that has prompted concerns over doxxing and privacy among some users. "Self-media" includes news and information not necessarily approved by the government, a genre of online content regulators have cracked down on in recent years to "purify" China's cyberspace. [...] Rumors of the new policy had prompted lively debate among users. Some, like former state media editor Hu Xijin, have defended the measure as necessary in order to force influential accounts to use more responsible speech. Others, however, have expressed concerns that the measure would make doxxing easier and platforms would further remove online users' anonymity in the future. The new measures will remove the anonymity of thousands of influencers on social media platforms that are used daily by hundreds of millions of Chinese. Several of the platforms said that accounts with over 1 million followers would be affected first and those that do not comply would face restrictions in their online traffic and income as a consequence.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The new open-source, copy-on-write file system known as Bcachefs has been successfully merged into the Linux 6.7 kernel. "Given the past struggles to get Bcachefs mainlined, I certainly didn't expect to see Linus Torvalds act so soon on merging it," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel. "But after it spent all of the 6.6 cycle within Linux-Next, overnight Linus Torvalds did in fact land this new file-system developed by Kent Overstreet." From a Slashdot story published on Friday August 21, 2015: Bcachefs is a new open-source file-system derived from the bcache Linux kernel block layer cache. Bcachefs was announced by Kent Overstreet, the lead Bcache author. Bcachefs hopes to provide performance like XFS/EXT4 while having features similar to Btrfs and ZFS. The bachefs on-disk format hasn't yet been finalized and the code isn't yet ready for the Linux kernel. That said, initial performance results are okay and "It probably won't eat your data -- but no promises." Features so far for Bcachefs are support for multiple devices, built-in caching/tiering, CRC32C checksumming, and Zlib transparent compression. Support for snapshots is to be worked on.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Android is slowly entering the RISC-V era. So far we've seen Google say it wants to give the up-and-coming CPU architecture "tier-1" support in Android, putting RISC-V on equal footing with Arm. Qualcomm has announced the first mass-market RISC-V Android chip, a still-untitled Snapdragon Wear chip for smartwatches. Now Google has announced a timeline for developer tools via the Google Open Source Blog. The last post is titled "Android and RISC-V: What you need to know to be ready." Getting the Android OS and app ecosystem to support a new architecture is going to take an incredible amount of work from Google and developers, and these tools are laying the foundation for that work. First up, Google already has the "Cuttlefish" virtual device emulator running, including a gif of it booting up. This isn't the official "Android Emulator" -- which is targeted at app developers doing app development -- Cuttlefish is a hardware emulator for Android OS development. It's the same idea as the Android Emulator but for the bottom half of the tech stack -- the kernel, framework, and hardware bits. Cuttlefish lets Google and other Android OS contributors work on a RISC-V Android build without messing with an individual RISC-V device. Google says it's working well enough now that you can download and emulate a RISC-V device today, though the company warns that nothing is optimized yet. The next step is getting the Android Emulator (for app developers) up and running, and Google says: "By 2024, the plan is to have emulators available publicly, with a full feature set to test applications for various device form factors!" The nice thing about Android is that most app code is written with no architecture in mind -- it's all just Java/Kotlin. So once the Android RunTime starts spitting out RISC-V code, a lot of app code should Just Work. That means most of the porting work will need to go into things written in the NDK, the native developer kit, like libraries and games. The emulator will still be great for testing, though.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple could be forced to scale back its App Store fees for developers after one of the European Union's antitrust watchdogs said its commissions violate the bloc's rules. From a report: In the latest twist in a long-running clash between the Dutch Authority for Consumers & Markets and the US tech giant, officials ruled that Apple's commission on certain app subscriptions are an abuse of the company's market power. In a confidential decision seen by Bloomberg, the Dutch regulator said Apple's rules unfairly target companies that offer subscription services, such as Match Group's dating app Tinder, which has to pay high commission rates on app sales, unlike ones that don't have paid digital content. Apple harms such companies "by charging them an additional and inexplicably higher fee," according to the Dutch decision, which was sent in July. Apple had earlier offered to reduce app sale commission in the Netherlands from 30% to 27%, but the ACM's confidential findings state this offer doesn't go far enough. The decision could pave the wave for greater antitrust scrutiny across the 27-nation EU on the fairness of Apple's fee structure for different apps. The European Commission in Brussels is already investigating how Apple restricts apps from informing users of cheaper subscriptions outside the app store.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nokia sued Amazon in courts across three continents, alleging the e-commerce giant uses its technologies in streaming services and devices without authorization. From a report: The suits were filed in the US, Germany, India, the UK, and the European Unified Patent Court, Arvin Patel, Nokia's Chief Licensing Officer said in a statement on the company's website. Separately, a suit was also filed against HP in the US over video-related technologies, he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Security reporter Brian Krebs: The top-level domain for the United States -- .US -- is home to thousands of newly-registered domains tied to a malicious link shortening service that facilitates malware and phishing scams, new research suggests. The findings come close on the heels of a report that identified .US domains as among the most prevalent in phishing attacks over the past year. Researchers at Infoblox say they've been tracking what appears to be a three-year-old link shortening service that is catering to phishers and malware purveyors. Infoblox found the domains involved are typically three to seven characters long, and hosted on bulletproof hosting providers that charge a premium to ignore any abuse or legal complaints. The short domains don't host any content themselves, but are used to obfuscate the real address of landing pages that try to phish users or install malware. Infoblox says it's unclear how the phishing and malware landing pages tied to this service are being initially promoted, although they suspect it is mainly through scams targeting people on their phones via SMS. A new report says the company mapped the contours of this link shortening service thanks in part to pseudo-random patterns in the short domains, which all appear on the surface to be a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers. "This came to our attention because we have systems that detect registrations that use domain name generation algorithms," said Renee Burton, head of threat intelligence at Infoblox. "We have not found any legitimate content served through their shorteners."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In September, a "bespoke AI nutrition" store opened in beleaguered downtown San Francisco to much fanfare, promising smoothie concoctions generated by AI and a much-needed boost to the area. Less than two months later, it has seemingly closed without explanation. From a report: BetterBlends advertised "Your Smoothie, powered by AI" and received positive press upon its opening, ginning up excitement for a new business and a novel use of artificial intelligence. Its AI model would take customer orders and preferences to generate a smoothie recipe that would then be blended by hand by co-founders Michael Parlato and Clayton Reynolds, who worked in the shop. But now the storefront sits empty. On Friday 20 October, the locked doors to BetterBlends featured a sign that read "temporarily closed," stating the shop would reopen in one hour -- but sources in the neighborhood said the storefront had been closed for more than three weeks. By the following Monday, the sign had been removed, and the inside of the shop was largely cleared of blenders, fruit, vegetables and other supplies -- anything you might need to make a smoothie, with or without AI. Only a trashcan and a few plants remained. The store's Google Maps listing speaks to both problems in the physical world and its roots in AI. A Google Maps review posted two weeks ago accompanied by a picture of the sign read: "I was hopeful for this business. The owners however did not understand the discipline to run a restaurant. It was often open late and closed early. They changed their hours after a week of being open. And then 1 day they put up a sign, 'Temporarily closed, be back in an hour.' They have not been back in over two weeks." Other reviews were positive, awarding BetterBlends four or five stars. The shop owners themselves uploaded pictures of their smoothies to the Google Maps page as well as an image of happy customers that bears the hallmarks of generative AI. The light on their smiling faces is soft and glossy like a photoshoot. The fruits in the store window are, on closer inspection, unrecognizable blobs of fruit-colored things. The clear plastic cups are branded with gibberish characters that don't spell anything and filled with lumpy smoothie-ish mixtures. They are cartoonishly large in the customers' hands, one of which has only three too-long fingers. AI image generators have a documented history of failing to produce text within images or realistic human hands.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The group behind the radical open-access initiative Plan S has announced its next big plan to shake up research publishing -- and this one could be bolder than the first. From a report: It wants all versions of an article and its associated peer-review reports to be published openly from the outset, without authors paying any fees, and for authors, rather than publishers, to decide when and where to first publish their work. The group of influential funding agencies, called cOAlition S, has over the past five years already caused upheaval in the scholarly publishing world by pressuring more journals to allow immediate open-access publishing. Its new proposal, prepared by a working group of publishing specialists and released on 31 October, puts forward an even broader transformation in the dissemination of research. It outlines a future "community-based" and "scholar-led" open-research communication system in which publishers are no longer gatekeepers that reject submitted work or determine first publication dates. Instead, authors would decide when and where to publish the initial accounts of their findings, both before and after peer review. Publishers would become service providers, paid to conduct processes such as copy-editing, typesetting and handling manuscript submissions. [...] If the vision comes to pass, it would mark a revolution in science publishing. Each element has already been endorsed and trialled on a small scale. But as a whole, the proposal "is describing a system that is completely different from today's mainstream forms of scholarly communication," says Andrea Chiarelli, a consultant at Research Consulting in Nottingham, UK. cOAlition S is launching a six-month process, co-led by Research Consulting, to collect feedback from members of the global research community on whether the plan will meet their needs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's latest M3 Pro chip in the new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro has 25% less memory bandwidth than the M1 Pro and M2 Pro chips used in equivalent models from the two previous generations. From a report: Based on the latest 3-nanometer technology and featuring all-new GPU architecture, the M3 series of chips is said to represent the fastest and most power-efficient evolution of Apple silicon thus far. For example, the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro with M3 Pro chip is up to 40% faster than the 16-inch model with M1 Pro, according to Apple. However, looking at Apple's own hardware specifications, the M3 Pro system on a chip (SoC) features 150GB/s memory bandwidth, compared to 200GB/s on the earlier M1 Pro and M2 Pro. As for the M3 Max, Apple says it is capable of "up to 400GB/s." This wording is because the less pricey scaled-down M3 Max with 14-core CPU and 30-core GPU has only 300GB/s of memory bandwidth, whereas the equivalent scaled-down M2 Max with 12-core CPU and 30-core GPU featured 400GB/s bandwidth, just like its more powerful 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU version. Notably, Apple has also changed the core ratios of the higher-tier M3 Pro chip compared to its direct predecessor. The M3 Pro with 12-core CPU has 6 performance cores (versus 8 performance cores on the 12-core M2 Pro) and 6 efficiency cores (versus 4 efficiency cores on the 12-core M2 Pro), while the GPU has 18 cores (versus 19 on the equivalent M2 Pro chip).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Forty countries in a U.S.-led alliance plan to sign a pledge never to pay ransom to cybercriminals and to work toward eliminating the hackers' funding mechanism, a senior White House official said on Tuesday. From a report: The International Counter Ransomware Initiative comes as the number of ransomware attacks grows worldwide. The United States is by far the worst hit, with 46% of such attacks, Anne Neuberger, U.S. deputy national security adviser in the Biden administration for cyber and emerging technologies, told reporters on a virtual briefing. "As long as there is money flowing to ransomware criminals, this is a problem that will continue to grow," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AV1 -- a next-generation, royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium including tech giants like Google, Mozilla, Cisco, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, Intel, and Apple -- is finally making inroads. From a report: We are finally seeing more hardware support for this codec. The new M3 chips from Apple support AV1 decode. The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max also feature an AV1 hardware decoder. The official Android 14 Compatibility Definition makes support for AV1 mandatory. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, widely used by Android phones released in 2023, supports AV1. With the exception of Microsoft Edge, all browsers support AV1.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Winter has come early for Apple, and it might last a while. From a report: The world's largest company by market value has become worth considerably less over the past three months. Apple's share price has slid 11% since the company reported its fiscal third-quarter results on Aug. 3, erasing nearly $400 billion in market value. It is hardly a typical swing given the fact that the company has long used the fall season to launch its biggest products for every year, including new iPhones. This is the first year since 2015 that Apple shares have lost ground between the company's key Worldwide Developers Conference in June and its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report that typically takes place in late October. That report is expected Thursday afternoon, and it will be the first to reflect sales of the iPhone 15 family that was launched in late September. Investors are worried that Apple's largest business is now facing new and potentially long-term threats. The growing geopolitical rift between the U.S. and China has finally caught Apple in its vortex, spurring reports of Chinese authorities considering a ban on the use of iPhones and other Apple devices by government employees. To make matters worse, Apple's old China-based rival Huawei appears to have made a comeback. The company launched a new smartphone called the Mate 60 Pro in September that reportedly is capable of 5G speeds, even though U.S. sanctions were supposed to deny the company the chips necessary for such an accomplishment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has warned over a half dozen Indian lawmakers from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's main opposition of their iPhones being targets of state-sponsored attacks, these people said Tuesday, in a remarkable turn of events just months before the general elections in the South Asian nation. From a report: Rahul Gandhi, Indian opposition leader, said in a media briefing Tuesday that his team had received the said alert from Apple. Shashi Tharoor, a key figure from the Congress party; Akhilesh Yadav, the head of the Samajwadi Party; Mahua Moitra, a national representative from the All India Trinamool Congress; Priyanka Chaturvedi of Shiv Sena, a party with notable influence in Maharashtra reported that they too had been notified by Apple regarding a potential security attack on their iPhones. Asaduddin Owaisi, the leader of the All-India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM); Raghav Chadha from AAP, originating from an anti-corruption crusade a decade prior and later securing a political foothold in the national capital region; Sitaram Yechury, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India; alongside Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera were also impacted, they said. Journalists Siddharth Varadarajan and Sriram Karri, along with Observer Research Foundation (ORF) India President Samir Saran shared that they had been served with identical warnings from Apple.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: In a surprising development on Monday that is spooking the cybersecurity community, the SEC filed charges against SolarWinds and its Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Timothy G. Brown, alleging that the software company misled investors about its cybersecurity practices and known risks. The charges stem from alleged fraud and internal control failures related to known cybersecurity weaknesses that took place between the company's October 2018 initial public offering (IPO) and its December 2020 revelation of the infamous supply chain cyberattack dubbed "SUNBURST." [...] The SEC's complaint also points to internal communications among SolarWinds employees, including Brown, in 2019 and 2020, which raised questions about the company's ability to protect its critical assets from cyberattacks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google says it'll issue a system update to fix a major storage bug in Android 14 that has caused some users to be locked out of their devices. Ars Technica reports: Apparently one more round of news reports was enough to get the gears moving at Google. Over the weekend the Issue tracker bug has been kicked up from a mid-level "P2" priority to "P0," the highest priority on the issue tracker. The bug has been assigned to someone now, and Googlers have jumped into the thread to make official statements that Google is looking into the matter. Here's the big post from Google on the bug tracker [...]. The highlights here are that Google says the bug affects devices with multiple Android users, not multiple Google accounts or (something we thought originally) users with work profiles. Setting up multiple users means going to the system settings, then "Multiple users," then "Allow multiple users," and you can add a user other than the default one. If you do this, you'll have a user switcher at the bottom of the quick settings. Multiple users all have separate data, separate apps, and separate Google accounts. Child users are probably the most popular reason to use this feature since you can lock kids out of things, like purchasing apps. Shipping a Google Play system update as a quick Band-Aid is an interesting solution, but as Google's post suggests, this doesn't mean the problem is fixed. Play system updates (these are alternatively called Project Mainline or APEX modules) allow Google to update core system components via the Play Store, but they are really not meant for critical fixes. The big problem is that the Play system updates don't aggressively apply themselves or even let you know they have been downloaded. They just passively, silently wait for a reboot to happen so they can apply. For Pixel users, it feels like the horse has already left the barn anyway -- like most Pixel phones have automatically applied the nearly 13-day-old update by now. Users can force Play system updates to happen themselves by going to the system settings, then "Security & Privacy," then "System & updates," then "Google Play system update." If you have an update, you'll be prompted to reboot the phone. Also note that this differs from the usual OS update checker location, which is in system settings, then "System," then "System update." The system update screen will happily tell you "Your system is up to date" even if you have a pending Google Play system update. It would be great to have a single location for OS updates, Google Play System/Mainline updates, and app updates, but they are scattered everywhere and give conflicting "up to date" messages.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Around 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid caused a mass extinction event, killing three-quarters of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs. A new study suggests that fine silicate dust from the asteroid, which remained in the atmosphere for up to 15 years, played a more significant role in causing the impact winter and extinction than previously thought. Phys.Org reports: Fine silicate dust from pulverized rock would have stayed in the atmosphere for 15 years, dropping global temperatures by up to 15 degrees Celsius, researchers said in a study in the journal Nature Geoscience. [...] For the study, the international team of researchers was able to measure dust particles thought to be from right after the asteroid struck. The particles were found at the Tanis fossil site in the US state of North Dakota. Though 3,000 kilometers (1,865 miles) away from the crater, the site has preserved a number of remarkable finds believed to be dated from directly after the asteroid impact in sediment layers of an ancient lake. The dust particles were around 0.8 to 8.0 -- micrometers -- just the right size to stick around in the atmosphere for up to 15 years, the researchers said. Entering this data into climate models similar to those used for current-day Earth, the researchers determined that dust likely played a far greater role in the mass extinction than had previously been thought. Out of all the material that was shot into the atmosphere by the asteroid, they estimated that it was 75 percent dust, 24 percent sulfur and one percent soot. The dust particles "totally shut down photosynthesis" in plants for at least a year, causing a "catastrophic collapse" of life, [said Ozgur Karatekin, a researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: GSK will pay 23andMe $20 million for access to the genetic-testing company's vast trove of consumer DNA data, extending a five-year collaboration that's allowed the drugmaker to mine genetic data as it researches new medications. Under the new agreement, 23andMe will provide GSK with one year of access to anonymized DNA data from the approximately 80% of gene-testing customers who have agreed to share their information for research, 23andMe said in a statement Monday. The genetic-testing company will also provide data-analysis services to GSK. 23andMe is best known for its DNA-testing kits that give customers ancestry and health information. But the DNA it collects is also valuable, including for scientific research. With information from more than 14 million customers, the only data sets that rival the size of the 23andMe library belong to Ancestry.com and the Chinese government. The idea for drugmakers is to comb the data for hints about genetic pathways that might be at the root of disease, which could significantly speed up the long, slow process of drug development. GSK and 23andMe have already taken one potential medication to clinical trials: a cancer drug that works to block CD96, a protein that helps modulate the body's immune responses. It entered that testing phase in four years, compared to an industry average of about seven years. Overall, the partnership between GSK and 23andMe has produced more than 50 new drug targets, according to the statement. The new agreement changes some components of the collaboration. Any discoveries GSK makes with the 23andMe data will now be solely owned by the British pharmaceutical giant, while the genetic-testing company will be eligible for royalties on some projects. In the past, the two companies pursued new drug targets jointly. GSK's new deal with 23andMe is also non-exclusive, leaving the genetic-testing company free to license its database to other drugmakers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Apple's "Scary Fast" event today, the company unveiled a refreshed 24-inch iMac, entry-evel MacBook Pro that ditches the Touch Bar, and its latest "M3" in-house chips. The Verge reports: As expected, Apple's M3 chips took the spotlight during this month's event. The new lineup includes the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips, which Apple says mark the "first personal computer chips" made using the more efficient 3-nanometer process. In addition to offering a "faster and more efficient CPU," the trio of chips comes with an updated GPU that supports ray tracing, mesh shading, and Dynamic Caching -- a feature that optimizes the amount of memory the device uses during tasks. Apple's M3 chips offer up to 128GB of unified memory, with the most powerful M3 Max chip coming with up to 92 billion transistors, a 40-core GPU, and a 16-core CPU. The new 24-inch iMac is getting an M3-flavored upgrade that Apple says offers two times faster performance than its M1-equipped predecessor. Along with the new chip, the refreshed iMac features a 4.5K Retina display with more than 1 billion colors, support for Wi-Fi 6E, and a 1080p webcam. The iMac also offers up to 24GB of unified memory and comes in seven colors: green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. There are also color-matched accessories that come with the iMac, but they still feature Lightning connectors. The 24-inch iMac costs $1,299 with an eight-core CPU or $1,499 with a 10-core chip. You can preorder it starting today, with availability starting on November 7th. Alongside the M3 Pro and M3 Max-equipped MacBook Pro models, Apple is releasing a cheaper 14-inch MacBook Pro that comes with the base M3 chip and starts at $1,599. The device replaces the 13-inch MacBook Pro with an M2 chip that Apple released last year and offers performance that's up to 60 percent faster. The Touch Bar model is being discontinued, which means it's all physical keys from here out. There are some drawbacks to this entry-level model, though: it features a meager 8GB of RAM and comes in just silver and space gray variations -- the black color is exclusive to the higher-end MacBook Pros. The device is available to preorder today and officially launches on November 7th.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Windows 11's last major update, 22H2 introduced native support for managing RAR archives, eliminating the need for third-party software," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "This enhancement is part of the OS's broader capability improvements for handling various archive file formats." TechSpot reports: Microsoft finally introduced native support for RAR archives earlier this year, just three decades after the format's official introduction in 1993. Windows 11 development is now progressing at an accelerated pace, therefore support for a whole lot of new (ancient) archive formats is coming soon. Microsoft recently released KB5031455, an optional, feature-rich preview cumulative update for Windows 11, refreshing the list of archive formats natively supported in the OS. Windows 11 22H2 and later versions can now manage files compressed in the following archive types: .rar, .7z, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.zst, .tar.xz, .tgz, .tbz2, .tzst, .txz. Support for password-encrypted archives is not available yet. Redmond programmers added support for the aforementioned archive files thanks to the libarchive library, an open source project designed to develop a portable, efficient C library that can "read and write streaming archives" in a variety of formats. Libarchive supports additional archive types (Lzh, Xar) that could eventually come to Windows 11 as well.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blake Brittain reports via Reuters: A judge in California federal court on Monday trimmed a lawsuit by visual artists who accuse Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt of misusing their copyrighted work in connection with the companies' generative artificial intelligence systems. U.S. District Judge William Orrick dismissed some claims from the proposed class action brought by Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, including all of the allegations against Midjourney and DeviantArt. The judge said (PDF) the artists could file an amended complaint against the two companies, whose systems utilize Stability's Stable Diffusion text-to-image technology. Orrick also dismissed McKernan and Ortiz's copyright infringement claims entirely. The judge allowed Andersen to continue pursuing her key claim that Stability's alleged use of her work to train Stable Diffusion infringed her copyrights. "Even Stability recognizes that determination of the truth of these allegations -- whether copying in violation of the Copyright Act occurred in the context of training Stable Diffusion or occurs when Stable Diffusion is run -- cannot be resolved at this juncture," Orrick said. Orrick agreed with all three companies that the images the systems actually created likely did not infringe the artists' copyrights. He allowed the claims to be amended but said he was "not convinced" that allegations based on the systems' output could survive without showing that the images were substantially similar to the artists' work. The judge also dismissed other claims from the artists, including that the companies violated their publicity rights and competed with them unfairly, with permission to refile. Orrick dismissed McKernan and Ortiz's copyright claims because they had not registered their images with the U.S. Copyright Office, a requirement for bringing a copyright lawsuit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Brazil's telecoms regulator Anatel claims that during an operation last week, it successfully blocked around 80% of pirate 'TV boxes' in the country. Estimates from early 2023 suggest that seven million were active in Brazil. The operation, claimed to be the most significant ever carried out, arrives just weeks after Google & Cisco were criticized for "turning a blind eye" to the IPTV piracy problem. [...] Whatever the approach, if Anatel had somehow managed to prevent 80% of all TV boxes receiving pirated content in the space of a year, that would be an extraordinary achievement. Even a week would be astonishing but the claim of millions in a day seems either incredible, non-credible, or entirely dependent on more important information or nuance that isn't being reported. Another angle is that disruption on a large scale tends to register in search results and Google data on various related search terms doesn't seem to reflect millions of TV boxes suddenly going dark in Brazil last week. At least, not for any significant length of time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pete Syme reports via Insider: A British software company is giving Meta 30 days to stop using the name Threads in the UK because it owns the trademark. Threads Software Limited says its lawyers wrote to the Facebook and Instagram parent company on Monday. If Meta doesn't stop using the name Threads, Threads Software Limited says it will seek an injunction from the courts. The British company trademarked Threads in 2012 for its intelligent messaging hub, which can store a company's emails, tweets, and voice over internet protocol phone calls in a cloud database. In a press release, it said it had declined the four offers that Meta's lawyers made to purchase its domain name "threads.app." Then when Meta launched Threads, its social media app designed to compete with Elon Musk's X, the British company says it was removed from Facebook. John Yardley, the managing director of Threads Software Limited, said the business "faces a serious threat from one of the largest technology companies in the world." "We recognize that this is a classic 'David and Goliath' battle with Meta," said Yardley. "And whilst they may think they can use whatever name they want, that does not give them the right to use the Threads brand name."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Citing an "unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security," Canada banned Chinese messaging application WeChat and Russian antivirus program Kaspersky on government-issued mobile devices. Reuters reports: The ban was announced after an assessment by Canada's chief information officer that Tencent-owned WeChat and applications made by Moscow-based Kaspersky "present an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security," the Treasury Board of Canada, which oversees public administration, said in a statement. Kaspersky said it was surprised and disappointed, and that the decision was made without warning or an opportunity for the firm to address the government's concerns. "As there has been no evidence or due process to otherwise justify these actions, they are highly unsupported and a response to the geopolitical climate rather than a comprehensive evaluation of the integrity of Kaspersky's products and services," the company said in a statement. The Treasury Board said it has no evidence that government information has been compromised, but the collection methods of the applications provide considerable access to a device's contents, and risks of using them were "clear." "The decision to remove and block the WeChat and the Kaspersky applications was made to ensure that government of Canada networks and data remain secure and protected and are in line with the approach of our international partners," the statement said. The applications will be removed from government-issued mobile devices on Monday, and users will be blocked from downloading them in the future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After a weekend of almost complete internet blackout, connectivity in Gaza has been partially restored. On Friday, internet monitoring firms and experts reported that access to the internet had significantly degraded in the Palestinian enclave. The local internet service NetStream "collapsed," according to NetBlocks, a firm that tracks internet access across the world. At the same time, IODA, another internet monitoring system, showed outages and degradation across several Palestinian internet providers. The lack of internet communications caused emergency lines to stop ringing, made it hard for paramedics to locate the wounded, and for family members to reach relatives and friends, according to The New York Times. On Sunday, IODA reported "marginal restoration" of internet connectivity in Gaza. Abdulmajeed Melhem, chief executive of the Palestinian main telecommunications company Paltel Group, told The Times that the internet had come back even though the company had not made any repairs. Then on Monday, Gaza had roughly the same access to internet connectivity as before Friday, according to several experts and firms that are monitoring the internet in the region, including Doug Madory, an expert who for years has focused on monitoring networks across the world. "There was the 34 hour complete blackout from Friday to Sunday -- a first for Gaza. Then there was last night's partial outage in northern Gaza," Madory, who is the director of internet analysis at Kentik, told TechCrunch on Monday. "The situation is still very precious: no power, little water. Service could potentially drop out again at any time." [...] It's unclear what caused the internet outages in Gaza on Friday and what caused the improvements on Sunday and Monday. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the U.S. government put pressure on the Israeli government to switch the internet back on in Gaza, citing an unnamed U.S. official. "We made it clear they had to be turned back on," the official said. "The communications are back on. They need to stay on," The Post quoted the official as saying. Also on Sunday, The Times reported that the U.S. government believed that the Israeli government was responsible for the near-blackout of the internet in Gaza.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Users have been reporting that their iPhone 15's NFC chips were failing after using BMW's in-car wireless charging, but until now, Apple hasn't addressed the complaints. That seems to have changed as MacRumors reported this week that an Apple internal memo to third-party repair providers says a software update later this year should prevent a "small number" of in-car wireless chargers from "temporarily" disabling iPhone 15 NFC chips. Apple reportedly says that until the fix comes out, anyone who experiences this should not use the wireless charger in their car. Users have been complaining about BMW wireless chargers breaking Apple Pay and the BMW digital key feature in posts on Reddit, Apple's Support community, and MacRumors' own forums.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers to ditch 26 over-the-counter eye drop products found at big retailers -- including CVS, Rite Aid, and Target -- due to a risk of infection. Consumers should not buy any of the products and should immediately stop using them if they've already purchased them. From a report: The products include Target's branded Up & Up Dry Eye Relief Lubricant Eye Drops and Up & Up Extreme Relief Dry Eye, as well as Lubricant Eye Drops and Lubricant Gel Drops branded by CVS Health and Rite Aid. The warning also includes eye drop products branded as Rugby and Leader (both from Cardinal Health) and Velocity Pharma. A full list can be found here, as can links to report adverse events. In an advisory posted Friday, the FDA reported that no infections or adverse events have been linked to the products so far. But the agency said it "found insanitary conditions in the manufacturing facility and positive bacterial test results from environmental sampling of critical drug production areas in the facility."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Russian-speaking hacking group obtained access to the email addresses of about 632,000 US federal employees at the departments of Defense and Justice as part of the sprawling MOVEit hack last summer, according to a report on the wide-ranging attack obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. From a report: The report, by the US Office of Personnel Management, provides new details about a cyberattack in which hackers exploited flaws in MOVEit, a popular file-transfer tool. Federal cybersecurity officers previously confirmed that government agencies were compromised by the attack but have provided little information on the scope of the attack, nor did they name the agencies affected. The Office of Personnel Management, in a July report on the incident submitted to a congressional committee, said an unauthorized actor obtained access to government email addresses, links to government employee surveys administered by OPM and internal OPM tracking codes. The impacted employees were at the Department of Justice and various parts of the Defense Department: the Air Force, Army, US Army Corps of Engineers, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff and Defense Agencies and Field Activities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's dedicated OS for embedded and pocket devices, Windows CE, has reached the end of its support lifetime. From a report: Windows CE -- and there's never been an official explanation of what the WinCE-inducing name stood for -- debuted in November 1996, just a few months after Windows NT 4, the first version of NT with the Explorer desktop from Windows 95. Earlier this month, as reported by HPC Factor, the last ever version, CE 8, branded Compact Embedded 2013, reached its end of support. In 2011, Microsoft said it would be replaced by a unified platform based on Windows 8, but we know how well that went down. By 2020, the official migration path was set -- to a container on top of Win10 IoT. Its fortunes have always fluctuated. In 1999, we asked does MS care about WinCE? By 2003, we reported that eTForecasts said it would outship PCs. Indirectly, the researchers were right -- smartphones did end up massively outselling PCs. They just weren't Microsoft ones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a significant development for Xbox users, the era of tinkering with your console to use unapproved accessories is drawing to a close. From a report: Xbox has taken a definitive stance by instituting a new policy that will block the use of unauthorized accessories with its consoles, effective as of November 17. This decision has already begun to reverberate amongst the gaming community, and many have already had a warning about it on their consoles in the form of error message 0x82d60002. The error message states: "A connected accessory is not authorized. Using unauthorized accessories compromises your gaming experience. For this reason, the unauthorized accessory will be blocked from use on 11/12/2023. For help returning it, check with the store it came from or contact the manufacturer. To see authorized accessories, go to www.xbox.com/accessories. (0x82d60002)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Western Digital said on Monday it would spin off its flash memory business that has been grappling with a supply glut after talks of merging the unit with Japan's Kioxia stalled. From a report: The split will leave the data storage products maker with its traditional hard-disk drive business and create two publicly traded firms, giving into demands from activist investor Elliott. The move clears years of uncertainty over Western Digital's flash memory unit that was built through its $19 billion purchase of SanDisk in 2016 and caters to the smartphone and computer industries. Demand for flash chips has slumped after the pandemic, leaving the market awash in supply and increasing the pressure on chipmakers to consolidate. Since 2021, Western Digital and its manufacturing partner Kioxia have been in talks for a merger that would create a company that controls a third of the global NAND flash market.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai took the stand Monday in the tech giant's antitrust trial, a pivotal moment in a case that could result in major changes to the company's search engine. From a report: Pichai described Google's search dominance as the result of its innovation and early investment in its Chrome browser. "We realized early on that browsers are critical to how people are able to navigate and use the web," Pichai said during questioning by Google lawyer John Schmidtlein. "It became very clear early on that if you make the user's experience better, they would use the web more, they would enjoy using the web more, and they would search more in Google as well," Pichai said. [...] The nonjury trial is being heard by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who could ultimately order a breakup or other changes to Google's business practices. Schmidtlein, Google's lead counsel, questioned Pichai about the deal at the heart of the case: the search giant's contract with Apple that makes it the default search engine on Apple's Safari web browser. The Apple deal "makes it very, very seamless and easy for users to use our services," Pichai said. "We know that making it the default will lead to increased usage of our products and services, particularly Google search in this case. So there is clear value in that and that's what we were looking for."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: PFAS stands for "per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances," a family of upwards of 15,000 or more human-made and incredibly durable chemical compounds that have been used in countless industrial and consumer applications for decades. Firefighting foams, waterproof hiking boots, raincoats, nonstick frying pans, dental floss, lipstick, and even the ink used to label packaging -- all can contain PFAS. The compounds are ubiquitous in drinking water and soil, even migrating to Arctic sea ice. PFAS are called forever chemicals because once present in the environment, they do not degrade or break down. They accumulate, are transferred throughout the watershed, and ultimately persist. The quest to reduce the amount of PFAS in the environment is what led me to an industrial park in a southern suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The jar of PFAS concentrate in my hand is part of a demonstration arranged by my hosts, Revive Environmental, during a tour of the company's PFAS destruction site, one of the first in the country to operate commercially and at scale. A few yards in front of me sits the company's PFAS "Annihilator" in a white shipping container. The Annihilator represents just one of several technologies now vying to break down and destroy PFAS. These span the gamut from established processes like electrochemical oxidation and supercritical water oxidation to emerging techniques relying on ultraviolet light, plasma, ultrasound, or catalyst-driven thermal processes. Some are deployed in field tests. Other companies are actively running pilot programs, many with various divisions of the US Department of Defense and other government agencies. And many other technologies are still undergoing laboratory research. There's good reason for this. Not only are PFAS everywhere around us; they're also in us. Humans can't break down PFAS, and our bodies struggle to clear them from our systems. Studies suggest they're in my blood and yours -- the majority of Americans,' in fact -- and they have been linked to increased risks of kidney and testicular cancer, decreased infant birthweights, and high blood pressure. And that's only what we know about now: researchers continue to grapple with the full impacts of PFAS on human and environmental health.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is rolling out new beta features for ChatGPT Plus members right now. Subscribers have reported that the update includes the ability to upload files and work with them, as well as multimodal support. From a report: Basically, users won't have to select modes like Browse with Bing from the GPT-4 dropdown -- it will instead guess what they want based on context. The new features bring a dash of the office features offered by its ChatGPT Enterprise plan to the standalone individual chatbot subscription. I don't seem to have the multimodal update on my own Plus plan, but I was able to test out the Advanced Data Analysis feature, which seems to work about as expected. Once the file is fed to ChatGPT, it takes a few moments to digest the file before it's ready to work with it, and then the chatbot can do things like summarize data, answer questions, or generate data visualizations based on prompts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK government confirmed plans to regulate cryptoasset activities more strictly, bringing them under the same regime as traditional financial services. From a report: The government intends to proceed with legislation in 2024 to implement the changes, according to a Treasury announcement on Monday, responding to a consultation it launched earlier this year. The plans include a mandate for crypto exchanges to write detailed requirements on admission standards and disclosures for token issuers when listing new assets. This could include information about a token's underlying code, known vulnerabilities and risks. The UK's push to regulate crypto is part of a wider effort by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to attract more digital-asset businesses and investment to the country, while at the same time protecting consumers. Crypto firms have long complained that a lack of clear rules has made it hard for them to operate in the UK. "We must make the UK a place where cryptoasset firms have the clarity needed to invest and innovate, and where customers have the protections necessary for confidently using these technologies," said City Minister Andrew Griffith. "The UK is the obvious choice for starting and scaling a cryptoasset business."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta, in a blog post: To comply with evolving European regulations, we are introducing a new subscription option in the EU, EEA and Switzerland. In November, we will be offering people who use Facebook or Instagram and reside in these regions the choice to continue using these personalised services for free with ads, or subscribe to stop seeing ads. While people are subscribed, their information will not be used for ads. People in these countries will be able to subscribe for a fee to use our products without ads. Depending on where you purchase it will cost $10.5/month on the web or $13.75/month on iOS and Android. Regardless of where you purchase, the subscription will apply to all linked Facebook and Instagram accounts in a user's Accounts Center. As is the case for many online subscriptions, the iOS and Android pricing take into account the fees that Apple and Google charge through respective purchasing policies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Joe Biden signed a wide-ranging executive order on artificial intelligence Monday, setting the stage for some industry regulations and funding for the U.S. government to further invest in the technology. From a report: The order is broad, and its focuses range from civil rights and industry regulations to a government hiring spree. In a media call previewing the order Sunday, a senior White House official, who asked to not be named as part of the terms of the call, said AI has so many facets that effective regulations have to cast a wide net. "AI policy is like running into a decathlon, and there's 10 different events here," the official said. "And we don't have the luxury of just picking 'we're just going to do safety' or "we're just going to do equity' or 'we're just going to do privacy.' You have to do all of these things." The official also called for "significant bipartisan legislation" to further advance the country's interests with AI. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., held a private forum in September with industry leaders but has yet to introduce significant AI legislation. Some of the order builds on a previous nonbinding agreement that seven of the top U.S. tech companies developing AI agreed to in July, like hiring outside experts to probe their systems for weaknesses and sharing their critical findings. The order leverages the Defense Production Act to legally require those companies to share safety test results with the federal government.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal reports that more than three million Americans have now had a total of $127 billion in student loans flagged for cancellation. (Which for 3 million would average out to over $40,000 apiece). Interestingly, the article notes this happened despite a set back for forgiveness in America's highest court this June:The high court ruled that the Biden administration couldn't cancel hundreds of billions of dollars for tens millions of student-loan holders, reasoning that the authority for such a broad-based policy doesn't exist under the law. While that closed one path, Biden tapped a variety of different tools that no previous president had ever used to this extent. Since taking office in 2021, the Biden administration has arranged to cancel loans equal to around 30% of the total projected cost of its blocked mass cancellation plan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wikipedia defines LIGO as "a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves." (It stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory - that is, measuring the interference caused by superimposed waves.) Now Science Alert reports:A technique for squeezing light in the arms of LIGO's interferometer has allowed its measurements to cross the quantum barrier. For LIGO, it's a bold new realm of sensitivity, giving the gravitational wave detector the ability to find 60% more dead star mergers than the rate of its previous run, which was around one or two detections every week or so... "Now that we have surpassed this quantum limit, we can do a lot more astronomy," says physicist Lee McCuller of Caltech... LIGO's sensitivity was already absolutely jaw-dropping. The interferometer works by detecting ripples in space-time that are generated by colliding black holes and neutron stars, millions of billions to light-years away. These cause gravitational waves, like ripples in a pond. We can't feel them; but they can be detected in miniscule deviations in the path of light down a long, long tunnel. These deviations are incredibly small, down to trillions of times smaller than a human hair. But once you get into subatomic scales - the quantum realm - LIGO's abilities are hobbled. That's because, on those unimaginably small scales, particles randomly pop in and out of space, creating a constant background hiss of quantum noise that's louder than any signal. Frequency-dependent squeezing is a way of amplifying the signals to be 'louder' than the quantum noise... If you pinch a property of light, such as amplitude (or power), other properties, such as frequency, can be measured more accurately... [T]he light can be squeezed in multiple ways to amplify the frequency of the gravitational waves the scientists are looking for... "We've known for a while how to write down the equations to make this work, but it was not clear that we could actually make it work until now. It's like science fiction," says physicist Rana Adhikari of Caltech... This means we're likely to see a significant uptick in the number of black hole and neutron star collisions we observe out there in the wider Universe.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"More developers are looking for or are open to a new job now compared to the last two years," writes Stack Overflow's senior analyst for market research and insights - citing the results of their latest survey of developers in 107 different countries. "More than 1,000 developers responded to this year's survey about jobs and 79% are at least considering new opportunities if not actively looking."New insights from these survey results show that new tech talent and late-career developers are both more likely to be looking. New developers have increasingly switched jobs compared to early- and mid-career developers in the last three years... Interest in looking for a new job drops as developers get older for new to mid-career (44 and younger) respondents (86% to 74%), but picks back up for those 55 to 64 (88%). Late-career developers acknowledge curiosity about other companies as their second top reason to look for a new job this year behind "better salary," which all age groups rank as their top reason. Curiosity grew in importance for late-career developers since last year more than all other age groups (32% vs. 22%) and is more important to this group than reasons other groups ranked higher such as working with new technology and growth opportunities... In our 2023 Developer Survey, we started asking about AI and the sentiment around it in our developer community; results were very similar when we checked in again through this pulse survey (70% are using AI or planning to). Developers may also feel less enthusiastic about learning opportunities now that AI tools are rapidly developing to help many be more productive in their jobs (30% cite this as the top benefit). Other interesting findings from the survey: Compared to the 2023 Developer Survey, 8% of developers have exited the technology industry and are increasingly filling roles in manufacturing and supply chain companies (11% vs. 7%) Technology is the industry most developers currently work in (46%), followed by manufacturing/supply chain (14%) and financial services (13%) New tech talent is onboarding at as many jobs by 24 as those up to 10 years their senior and this rapid experience cycle could rival the knowledge and experience of those they report to.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Are face masks effective in stopping virus transmissions? CBS News re-visited the question Sunday on its news show 60 Minutes by sending their chief medical correspondent to interview Linsey Marr, a professor who specializes in aerosol science at Virginia Tech University. Here's a transcript from an excerpt posted on YouTube: 60 Minutes: Is there any doubt in your mind that masks prevent the person who's wearing it from getting Covid - or at least, are helpful? Professor Marr: I would say they are very helpful in reducing the chances that the person will get Covid. Because it's reducing the amount of virus that you would inhale from the air around you. It's not going to guarantee that it's going to protect you, because are masks are not 100% effective - we talk about N-95's being 95% efficient at filtering out particles, if they're properly fitted and everything, and so that's in an ideal world. But even so, if you - instead of breathing in 100 virsues, I'm breathing in 20, because my mask was 80% effective? That's a huge reduction, and that greatly reduces the chance that I'm going to become infected. On the CBS News web site, they highlight this excerpt from the interview:Early in the pandemic, some guidance from health professionals suggested that wearing a mask might actually lead to infection: A person might encounter a contaminated mask and then touch their eyes, nose, or mouth. But research in the ensuing years has shown that fear to be misplaced. "There wasn't any evidence really that that happens," Marr said. Marr said her team aerosolized the coronavirus, pulled it through a mask, and then examined how much virus survived on the mask. The study reported some viral particle remained on some cloth masks, but no virus survived on the N95s or surgical masks. Marr's team also touched artificial skin to masks and looked at how many virus particles transferred to the artificial skin. No infectious virus transferred. "I hope the study kind of shows that it's something we don't need to worry about as much as we were told," Marr said. CBS gave their video interview the headline "Face mask effectiveness: What we know now" - and asked professor Marr for a definitive answer: 60 Minutes: There was a lot of controversy over whether or not masks worked at all. Were you able to show that they worked scientifically? Professor Marr: We were able to show that they block particles that are the same size as those that carry the virus... What happens is the virus is being carried in the air, and it's not just going straight through those holes. It has to weave around all these layers of fibers in there. As the air is going around the curves, the virus may crash into one of those fibers, and so then it's trapped, or maybe it comes up close to the fiber and brushes against it. And the really small particles, like the virus by itself if it were by itself, would be small enough that it undergoes these random motions, because it's getting bounced around by the gas molecules, and it ends up crashing into the fibers of the mask too. So there was accumulating evidence - and there had been kind of a handful of papers before that, too, showing the same thing. That masks - even cloth masks - do something.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: In 1994 the TV show Friends premiered, and its first season's high ratings made it the 8th most-popular show. The next year Microsoft released Windows 95 - and filmed a promotional video for it with 25-year-old Matthew Perry and 26-year-old Jennifer Aniston. "They'll be taking you on an adventure in computing that takes place in the office of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates," explains the video's narrator, adding "Along the way, they meet a wacky bunch of propellor-heads.... And are introduced the top 25 features of Windows 95!" It's a journey back in time. (At one point the video refers to Windows as the operating system "with tens of millions of users.") Their 30-minute segment - billed as "the world's first cyber sitcom" - appears in an hour-long video introducing revolutionary features like the new "Start" button. Also demonstrated in Excel are the new minimize and maximize "features" in "the upper right-side of the window". And the two actors marvel at the ability to type a filename that was longer than eight characters... Watch for reminders that The Microsoft Windows 95 Video Guide was filmed nearly three decades ago. When the desktop appears after waking from screensaver mode, Perry notes that there's "no messy DOS build-up." And later the video reminds viewers that Windows 95 is compatible "with DOS games like Flight Simulator." There's also a brand new feature called "Windows Explorer" (which is described as "File Manager on steroids"), as well as a new "Find" option, and a brand new icon named "My Computer". And near the end they pay a visit to the Microsoft Network - which was mostly a "walled garden" online service - described in the video as "your on-ramp to the information superhighway". The video even explains how Windows 95 "uses the right mouse button for what Microsoft calls power users." And by the end of it, Jennifer Anniston finds herself playing Space Cadet 3D pinball.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The seven industrial countries known as the "G7" - America, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, and Britain - will agree on a code of conduct Monday for companies developing advanced AI systems, reports Reuters. The news comes "as governments seek to mitigate the risks and potential misuse of the technology," Reuters reports - citing a G7 document.The 11-point code "aims to promote safe, secure, and trustworthy AI worldwide and will provide voluntary guidance for actions by organizations developing the most advanced AI systems, including the most advanced foundation models and generative AI systems", the G7 document said. It "is meant to help seize the benefits and address the risks and challenges brought by these technologies". The code urges companies to take appropriate measures to identify, evaluate and mitigate risks across the AI lifecycle, as well as tackle incidents and patterns of misuse after AI products have been placed on the market. Companies should post public reports on the capabilities, limitations and the use and misuse of AI systems, and also invest in robust security controls.Read more of this story at Slashdot.