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Coinbase, a publicly traded cryptocurrency trading exchange based in the United States, agreed to pay a $50 million fine after financial regulators found that it let customers open accounts without conducting sufficient background checks, in violation of anti-money-laundering laws. From a report: The settlement with the New York State Department of Financial Services, announced Wednesday, will also require Coinbase to invest $50 million to bolster its compliance program, which is supposed to prevent drug traffickers, sellers of child pornography and other potential lawbreakers from opening accounts with the exchange. It's the latest hit to the once-highflying global cryptocurrency trading business. Several cryptocurrency firms have filed for bankruptcy over the past year -- most notably FTX, which was the world's second-largest crypto exchange before it collapsed in November. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder, and other top FTX executives now face federal criminal charges. The compliance problems at Coinbase were first detected during a routine examination in 2020 after the exchange secured a license to operate in New York in 2017, regulators said. They found problems with the exchange's anti-money-laundering controls going as far back as 2018.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The effect of social media use on children is a fraught area of research, as parents and policymakers try to ascertain the results of a vast experiment already in full swing. Successive studies have added pieces to the puzzle, fleshing out the implications of a nearly constant stream of virtual interactions beginning in childhood. A new study by neuroscientists at the University of North Carolina tries something new, conducting successive brain scans of middle schoolers between the ages of 12 and 15, a period of especially rapid brain development. The researchers found that children who habitually checked their social media feeds at around age 12 showed a distinct trajectory, with their sensitivity to social rewards from peers heightening over time. Teenagers with less engagement in social media followed the opposite path, with a declining interest in social rewards. The study, published on Tuesday in JAMA Pediatrics, is among the first attempts to capture changes to brain function correlated with social media use over a period of years. The study has important limitations, the authors acknowledge. Because adolescence is a period of expanding social relationships, the brain differences could reflect a natural pivot toward peers, which could be driving more frequent social media use. "We can't make causal claims that social media is changing the brain," said Eva H. Telzer, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and one of the authors of the study. But, she added, "teens who are habitually checking their social media are showing these pretty dramatic changes in the way their brains are responding, which could potentially have long-term consequences well into adulthood, sort of setting the stage for brain development over time." "They are showing that the way you use it at one point in your life does influence the way your brain develops, but we don't know by how much, or whether it's good or bad," said Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, who was not involved in the study. He said that many other variables could have contributed to these changes. "What if these people joined a new team -- a hockey team or a volleyball team -- so started getting a lot more social interaction?" he said. It could be, he added, that the researchers are "picking up on the development of extroversion, and extroverts are more likely to check their social media." He described the paper as "a very sophisticated piece of work," contributing to research that has emerged recently showing that sensitivity to social media varies from person to person. "There are people who have a neurological state that means they are more likely to be attracted to checking frequently," he said. "We're not all the same, and we should stop thinking that social media is the same for everyone."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Walt Cunningham, one of the early Apollo astronauts, died Tuesday after complications from a fall. He was 90. NPR reports: Walt Cunningham flew in space just one time. His flight in 1968 was an important -- and often forgotten one -- for the lunar program. Cunningham was the lunar module pilot of the first manned Apollo mission that went to space. Apollo 7's 11-day trip around the Earth was a key stepping stone to NASA's march to the moon. "The real accomplishment, of course, was the first manned landing on the moon," Cunningham told NPR in 2016. "But that was the fifth of what I've always described as five giant steps. The first one was the Apollo 7 mission, of course. Complete test of the Apollo spacecraft." The launch came after a difficult time for NASA. Just 21 months before, a fire on the launchpad killed three astronauts during a test of Apollo 1. In the interim, NASA changed many procedures and the command module underwent a series of safety improvements. Cunningham said in 2016 that if Apollo 7 had not gone well, the U.S. wouldn't have landed on the moon before the end of the 1960s. "Historically, what the public doesn't realize," he said, "It is still the longest, most ambitious, most successful first test flight of any new flying machine ever." "There were so many things that had to be tested," he recalled. During the flight, the crew test-fired the engine that would place Apollo into and out of lunar orbit, simulated docking maneuvers and did the first-ever live television broadcast from an American spacecraft. "It was hard to imagine that we could get through all those things [in an 11-day mission] without something going wrong and saying, 'hey you need to gotta come home," Cunningham said. The mission was deemed a success but it was the last time these astronauts would fly in space. There was tension between Apollo 7's commander, Wally Schirra, and mission control. As the flight dragged on, Schirra caught a cold and so did astronaut Donn Eisele and the crew's squabbles worsened with ground controllers. Despite that, Cunningham said, "As I look back on it, it was a job, a challenge, and a task that in the end was very well done."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is in the works to launch a version of its search engine Bing using the artificial intelligence behind OpenAI-launched chatbot ChatGPT, The Information reported on Tuesday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the plans. Reuters reports: Microsoft could launch the new feature before the end of March, and hopes to challenge Alphabet-owned search engine Google, the San Francisco-based technology news website said in a report. Microsoft said in a blog post last year that it planned to integrate image-generation software from OpenAI, DALL-E 2, into Bing. Microsoft had in 2019 backed San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI, offering $1 billion in funding. The two had formed a multi-year partnership to develop artificial intelligence supercomputing technologies on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service. Further reading: ChatGPT Is a 'Code Red' For Google's Search BusinessRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Immune therapies have rewritten the game when it comes to cancer treatment, earning the "fifth pillar" label next to more tried and true treatments like radiation therapy, surgery, and chemotherapy. And no immunotherapy has garnered quite the same excitement as CAR T-cell therapy, first approved in 2017 by the Food and Drug Administration to treat a form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. At the time, then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb called the approval "a new frontier in medical innovation," and it seemed like the possibilities for CAR T were near-endless. Flash-forward almost six years, and six therapies have been approved for blood cancers, including lymphomas, leukemia, and multiple myeloma. There's no question that when CAR T works, it works incredibly well. But why it doesn't work for the majority of patients or cancer types has befuddled researchers. CAR T therapies also haven't yet been expanded to treat solid tumors, which make up the majority of cancers. The immune therapy hasn't been able to crack physical barriers, idiosyncratic tumor cells, and a suppressive microenvironment that characterize these cancers. But a new generation of CAR T therapies are emerging, equipped with highly effective small molecules that scientists hope will solve their low success rate for both blood cancers and solid tumors. Known as "armored CAR T," these infusions have been boosted with additional layers of protection and cancer-fighting proteins. Early research shows that the armored flavor of CAR T might have what it takes for immunotherapy to go the extra mile. Briefly, immunotherapy can boost or restore the body's immune system by lowering cancer cells' defenses, priming the immune system's T cells to destroy tumors, or -- in the case of CAR T-cell therapy -- genetically editing a patient's T cells. Scientists do this by isolating a patient's T cells from their blood and inserting a gene for a chimeric antigen receptor -- a type of synthetic protein that has been specially made to bind to another protein present on the surface of that patient's cancer cells. Then, upon infusing these modified T cells back into a patient, the immune fighters will recognize and destroy the tumor cells when the patient's normal T cells have failed. That, at least, is the idea. But when CAR T doesn't work, a few factors could be at play. One, Lim said, is the tumor microenvironment, the set of chemicals and structures present in solid cancers that naturally suppress pushback from the body's immune system. Tumor heterogeneity is also a factor -- depending on the type and stage of cancer, tumor cells may not express the protein that the CAR T cells' receptors have been designed to recognize, blocking the ability of the CAR T cells to attack the cancer Finally, there are physical barriers on the outside of a solid tumor that can even prevent the T cells from entering inside to destroy the cancer. Armored CAR T is meant to overcome these difficulties. With this form of therapy, not only are T cells engineered to express a tumor cell's surface protein, they are also given potent cargo often in the form of small proteins called cytokines. If deployed on their own, such molecules can be toxic -- but pairing them with T cells designed to release them at the tumor site and nowhere else represents a promising new strategy. Jakub Svodoba, an oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania, "is helping to lead a clinical trial using armored CAR T-cell therapy to treat patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma for whom previous CAR T therapy has failed," reports the Daily Beast. "Last month, he presented findings that the first seven patients treated with this therapy all responded to it and were alive eight months after receiving it. Svoboda said an important additional finding was that toxicities experienced by the patients -- a concern with cytokines -- were comparable to those from traditional CAR T therapy." Wendell Lim, a cellular and molecular pharmacology researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and his team are also working on an armored CAR-T therapy, with the potential for it to be used to treat solid tumors. "In a paper published in Science on Dec. 16, he and his colleagues designed T cells to release a cytokine directly to the tumors of mice with pancreatic cancer and melanoma," reports the Daily Beast. "In the study, they wrote that these cancers are 'nearly completely resistant' to treatment with traditional CAR T, but releasing a cytokine allowed the engineered T cells to get past the tumor microenvironment -- effectively solving one of the issues that has set the therapy back."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At least three major torrent sites are currently exposing intimate details of their operations to anyone with a web browser. TorrentFreak understands that the sites use a piece of software that grabs brand-new content from other sites before automatically uploading it to their own. A security researcher tried to raise the alarm but nobody will listen. From the report: To get their hands on the latest releases as quickly as possible, [private torrent sites, or private trackers as they're commonly known] often rely on outside sources that have access to so-called 0-Day content, i.e, content released today. The three affected sites seem to have little difficulty obtaining some of their content within minutes. At least in part, that's achieved via automation. When outside suppliers of content are other torrent sites, a piece of software called Torrent Auto Uploader steps in. It can automatically download torrents, descriptions, and associated NFO files from one site and upload them to another, complete with a new .torrent file containing the tracker's announce URL. The management page [here] has been heavily redacted because the content has the potential to identify at least one of the sites. It's a web interface, one that has no password protection and is readily accessible by anyone with a web browser. The same problem affects at least three different servers operated by the three sites in question. Torrent Auto Uploader relies on torrent clients to transfer content. The three sites in question all use rTorrent clients with a ruTorrent Web UI. We know this because the researcher sent over a whole bunch of screenshots and supporting information which confirms access to the torrent clients as well as the Torrent Auto Uploader software. The image [here] shows redactions on the tracker tab for good reason. In a regular setup, torrent users can see the names of the trackers coordinating their downloads. This setup is no different except that these URLs reference three different trackers supplying the content to one of the three compromised sites. Rather than publish a sequence of completely redacted screenshots, we'll try to explain what they contain. One begins with a GET request to another tracker, which responds with a torrent file. It's then uploaded to the requesting site which updates its SQL database accordingly. From there the script starts checking for any new entries on a specific RSS feed which is hidden away on another site that has nothing to do with torrents. The feed is protected with a passkey but that's only useful when nobody knows what it is. The same security hole also grants direct access to one of the sites tracker 'bots' through the panel that controls it. Then there's access to 'Staff Tools' on the same page which connect to other pages allowing username changes, uploader application reviews, and a list of misbehaving users that need to be monitored. That's on top of user profiles, the number of torrents they have active, and everything else one could imagine. Another screenshot featuring a torrent related to a 2022 movie reveals the URL of yet another third-party supplier tracker. Some basic queries on that URL lead to even more torrent sites. And from there, more, and more, and more -- revealing torrent passkeys for every single one on the way.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: While Mesa's development has been very vibrant this year, the X.Org Server development pace has continued pulling back greatly from its late 00's and early 10's highs. This year saw just 156 commits to the xserver Git master branch, down from 331 last year and well off the highs of 2,114 as the most ever back in 2008. This jives with the downward pace over the past decade of the number of new commits continuing to slide. But it's not just on a commit basis but in overall code churn, 2022 was another low for the X.Org Server. With the 156 commits this year, there were just 3,618 lines of new code added and 888 lines removed.... Compared to last year with its 331 commits seeing 31.4k new lines and 179k lines removed. The X.Org Server development this year on a commit basis hasn't been as low since 2003 when there were just 125 commits under their old development model and even back then meant there was +865k lines /680k lines removed across that span of commits. There hasn't been so little code churn to the X Server since 2002. [...] This year saw commits from just 32 different email addresses, down from 48 in prior years and that number of different authors hasn't been so low since 2003 when there were just 10 recorded. Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat was the most prolific committer to the X.Org Server this year with nearly a quarter of the commits. Following Olivier was Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia, Peter Hutterer, Michel DÃnzer, Alan Coopersmith, and Sultan Alsawaf. This year's X.Org Server development metrics can be found here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The WPC announced during CES 2023 that the next generation of the Qi standard, named "Qi2," was built with Apple's help. 9to5Mac reports: The new standard aims to improve the efficiency and interoperability of the technology, which is why it will have a "Magnetic Power Profile" at its core. As explained by WPC, this Magnetic Power Profile essentially works like Apple's MagSafe. As a result, Qi2 accessories will be perfectly aligned with the devices, thus improving energy efficiency and fast charging. And of course, since it was developed in partnership with Apple, the Qi2 standard will also work with MagSafe by default. Currently, MagSafe is a proprietary standard from Apple, and even accessory manufacturers have to pay to use such a standard. While Apple can still technically limit some features to MagSafe certified accessories, the announcement of the Qi2 standard is good news to ensure that this type of accessory is compatible with different phones. The new Qi2 standard will replace its Qi predecessor once it becomes available. WPC says that one billion Qi devices are expected to be sold globally by 2023. The first Qi2 certified devices and accessories are expected to be introduced by the end of the year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Quality assurance workers at Microsoft's ZeniMax Studios, the people who make the Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Doom, games, just voted to form a union, making it the first games studio to unionize under Microsoft and the largest group of union-represented Quality Assurance testers at any U.S. game studio. ZeniMax Workers United and the Communication Workers of America didn't share the exact vote count but said that the 300 QA testers overwhelmingly voted in favor of their union. Workers decided to join the union by signing union authorization cards or by voting via an online portal. As the company had previously promised, Microsoft has recognized the union. "Before us is an opportunity to make big changes and bring equity to the video game industry. We want to put an end to sudden periods of crunch, unfair pay, and lack of growth opportunities within the company. Our union will push for truly competitive pay, better communication between management and workers, a clear path for those that want to progress their career, and more," Victoria Banos, a senior QA audio tester at Hunt Valley, said in a statement. "It's difficult to express in words just how much winning our union matters to us. We've been working so hard to get here that it would be impossible not to be excited. We know this is not the end of our hard work, but reaching this milestone gives us faith that when workers stand together, we can accomplish anything we set our minds to," Dylan Burton, a senior QA tester in Dallas said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NVIDIA has announced that it's bringing GeForce Now game streaming to cars using the company's Drive platform. Engadget reports: The rollout will offer access to titles like Cyberpunk 2077 on a driver display while you're charging or parked, or any time from the backseat. The cloud gaming option already has initial support from major brands like the Hyundai group (including Genesis and Kia), Polestar and China's BYD. NVIDIA didn't offer a timeframe for GeForce Now access, although it noted that BYD would offer Drive Hyperion-powered cars in the first half of 2023. The Polestar 3 SUV (built using Drive Orin) arrives in late 2023. The in-car GeForce Now client works on either Android or web-based infotainment systems. NVIDIA's service provides a catalog of 1,500 games, over 1,000 of which are playable using gamepads. While most of the selection is paid, there are free-to-play options like Destiny 2 and Fortnite. As with other game streaming services, this could get costly if you plan to use it often. While basic GeForce Now use is free, you can pay up to $200 per year for the full experience before you factor in the cost of the games themselves. In some cases, though, this might make more sense than buying a handheld console or tablet. Further reading: Nvidia Unveils GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs for LaptopsRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's keynote at the RISC-V Summit was all about bold proclamations [...]. Lars Bergstrom, Android's director of engineering, wants RISC-V to be seen as a "tier-1 platform" in Android, which would put it on par with Arm. That's a big change from just six months ago. Bergstrom says getting optimized Android builds on RISC-V will take "a lot of work" and outlined a roadmap that will take "a few years" to come to fruition, but AOSP started to land official RISC-V patches back in September. The build system is up and running, and anyone can grab the latest "riscv64" branch whenever they want -- and yes, in line with its recent Arm work, Google wants RISC-V on Android to be 64-bit only. For now, the most you can get is a command line, and Bergstrom's slide promised "initial emulator support by the start of 2023, with Android RunTime (ART) support for Java workloads following during Q1." One of Bergstrom's slides featured the above "to-do" list, which included a ton of major Android components. Unlike Android's unpolished support for x86, Bergstrom promised a real push for quality with RISC-V, saying, "We need to do all of the work to move from a prototype and something that runs to something that's really singing -- that's showing off the best-in-class processors that [RISC-V International Chairman Krste Asanovic] was mentioning in the previous talk." Once Google does get Android up and running on RISC-V, then it will be up to manufacturers and the app ecosystem to back the platform. What's fun about the Android RunTime is that when ART supports RISC-V, a big chunk of the Android app ecosystem will come with it. Android apps ship as Java code, and the way that becomes an ARM app is when the Android Runtime compiles it into ARM code. Instead, it will soon compile into RISC-V code with no extra work from the developer. Native code that isn't written in Java, like games and component libraries, will need to be ported over, but starting with Java code is a big jump-start. In her opening remarks, RISC-V International (the nonprofit company that owns the architecture) CEO Calista Redmond argued that "RISC-V is inevitable" thanks to the open business model and wave of open chip design that it can create, and it's getting hard to argue against that. While the show was mostly about the advantages of RISC-V, I want to add that the biggest reason RISC-V seems inevitable is that current CPU front-runner Arm has become an unstable, volatile company, and it feels like any viable alternative would have a good shot at success right now. [...] The other reason to kick Arm to the curb is the US-China trade war, specifically that Chinese companies (and the Chinese government) would really like to distance themselves from Western technology. [...] RISC-V is seen as a way to be less reliant on the West. While the project started at UC Berkeley, RISC-V International says the open source architecture is not subject to US export law. In 2019, the RISC-V Foundation actually moved from the US to Switzerland and became "RISC-V International," all to try to avoid picking a side in the US-China trade war. The result is that Chinese tech companies are rallying around RISC-V as the future chip architecture. One Chinese company hit by US export restrictions, the e-commerce giant Alibaba, has been the leading force in bringing RISC-V support to Android, and with Chinese companies playing a huge part in the Android ecosystem, it makes sense that Google would throw open the doors for official support. Now we just need someone to build a phone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty in New York federal court Tuesday to eight charges related to the collapse of his former crypto exchange FTX and hedge fund Alameda Research. CNBC reports: The onetime crypto billionaire was indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and securities fraud, individual charges of securities fraud and wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to avoid campaign finance regulations. The trial will begin on Oct. 2. [...] Earlier in the day, attorneys for Bankman-Fried filed a motion to seal the names of two individuals who had guaranteed Bankman-Fried release on bail with a bond. They claimed that the visibility of the case and the defendant had already posed a risk to Bankman-Fried's parents, and that the guarantors should not be subject to the same scrutiny. [Judge Lewis Kaplan] approved the motion in court. Federal prosecutor Danielle Sassoon told the court that Bankman-Fried had worked with foreign regulators to transfer assets that FTX's U.S. management had been attempting to recover through the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process. Regulators in the Bahamas and FTX's U.S. lawyers have been fighting for weeks in Delaware bankruptcy court over hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. FTX's attorneys insist that Bahamian regulators have illicitly transferred hundreds of millions of dollars, and that Bankman-Fried assisted them. Bahamian regulators say that local laws give them jurisdiction over those assets, and dispute the validity of the U.S. Chapter 11 proceedings. Federal prosecutors appear to agree with FTX's U.S. attorneys. Sassoon asked Kaplan to impose a new restriction barring Bankman-Fried from transferring or accessing FTX customer assets. The judge approved that motion as well. The U.S. attorney's office for the SDNY had argued that Bankman-Fried used $8 billion worth of customer assets for extravagant real estate purchases and vanity projects, including stadium naming rights and millions in political donations. Federal prosecutors built the indictment against Bankman-Fried with unusual speed, packaging together the criminal charges against the 30-year-old in a matter of weeks. The federal charges came alongside complaints from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group representing internet service providers across Europe said on Tuesday that a proposal to make Big Tech companies pay towards telecom operators' network costs could create systemic weakness in critical infrastructure. From a report: Telecom operators have been pushing the European Union to implement new laws that would see U.S. tech firms like Alphabet's Google, Meta's Facebook, and Netflix bear some of the costs of Europe's telecoms network, arguing that they drive much of the region's internet traffic. In September, European Commission's industry chief Thierry Breton said he would launch a consultation on so-called "fair share" payments in early 2023, before proposing legislation. Now, the European Internet Exchange Association said the proposals risked reducing the quality of service for internet users across Europe, and could "accidentally create new systemic weaknesses" in critical infrastructure, in a letter addressed to the European Commission's industry chief Thierry Breton and the Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alienware is unveiling a refreshed lineup of its M- and X-series gaming laptops at CES 2023. Like some other laptop companies, including Razer and Acer, Alienware is shifting focus away from 15- and 17-inch laptops toward thin, powerful 16- and 18-inch models. From a report: The brand is going big with the new M18, an 18-inch model that's being pitched as a desktop replacement. This is actually a resurrection following the M18's previous spec update way back in 2015. The 2023 model will feature Intel's 13th Generation HX CPUs and Nvidia's RTX 4090 mobile graphics card. The latest processors and graphics options from AMD will be available in the M18 later in 2023. Not only is the M18 massive and powerful -- it's a big deal in other ways. It can be configured with an 18-inch QHD Plus screen in the taller 16:10 aspect ratio and set up to include a ton of ports, including two Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI 2.1, Ethernet, an SD card reader, and many others. It supports user-upgradeable dual DDR5 RAM slots, and you can also cram up to 9TB of NVMe M.2 storage in it. This model starts at $2,099, but the first configuration it's releasing will cost $2,899.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Jan. 1, Oregon became the first state in the nation to legalize the adult use of psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic that has shown significant promise for treating severe depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and end-of-life anxiety among the terminally ill, among other mental health conditions. From a report: Although scientists are still working to understand their therapeutic dynamics, psilocybin and other psychedelics are thought to promote neuroplasticity, a rewiring of the brain that gives patients fresh perspectives on longstanding psychiatric problems. One recent study on alcohol-use disorder, for example, found that two doses of psilocybin paired with talk therapy led to an 83 percent decline in heavy drinking among participants, and that nearly half of them had stopped drinking entirely by the end of the eight-month trial. The long-term benefits, however, remain unclear. Measure 109, as it's called, authorized the creation of psilocybin service centers where anyone over 21 can consume the mushrooms in a supervised setting. One key requirement is that a state-certified facilitator must be present during drug-induced journeys, which can last five or six hours.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google wants to expand its Nebraska footprint with an additional 187 acres that abuts its roughly 270-acre data center site already under construction in northwest Omaha. Nebraska Examiner reports: In all, the developer representing Google would control about 460 acres of once rolling agricultural hillside northwest of State Street and Blair High Road. City documents show that Westwood Solutions LLC, representing the California-based global tech giant, has asked the city to rezone the additional land to allow for more light industrial use. Operations are to be located within multiple buildings totaling more than 2.2 million gross square feet in floor area, with various equipment yards and parking areas throughout. A security entrance and Omaha Public Power District switchyard are to be on site. The data center would operate around the clock. Though the plan submitted to the city says skilled, technical full-time jobs would be created, it does not detail how many.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The porn industry has been around for a while and in today's digital age business is booming. When Laurie Schlegel isn't seeing her patients who struggle with sex addiction, she's at the Louisiana State Capitol. The Republican state representative from Metairie passed HB 142 earlier this year requiring age verification for any website that contains 33.3% or more pornographic material. "Pornography is destroying our children and they're getting unlimited access to it on the internet and so if the pornography companies aren't going to be responsible, I thought we need to go ahead and hold them accountable," said Schlegel. According to Schlegel, websites would verify someone's age in collaboration with LA Wallet. So, if you plan on using these sites in the future, you may want to download the app. "I would say so," said Sara Kelley, project manager with Envoc. "I mean, I think it's a must-have for anyone who has a Louisiana state ID or driver's license." Kelley added there are other ways websites could ask you to verify your age if you cannot access LA Wallet. She added that although some personal information will be required, companies must not retain personal data after complete verification. "It doesn't identify your date of birth, it doesn't identify who you are, where you live, what part of the state you're in, or any information from your device or from your actual ID. It just returns that age to say that yes, this person is old enough to be allowed to go in," explained Kelley. It will be the website's responsibility to ensure age verification is required when accessing their site in Louisiana. Schlegel said there will be consequences for those who fail to follow the law.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Southwest Airlines meltdown that stranded thousands of passengers during one of the busiest travel weeks of the year exposed a major industry shortcoming: crew-scheduling technology that was largely built for a bygone era and is due for a major overhaul. From a report: Southwest relies on crew-assignment software called SkySolver, an off-the-shelf application that it has customized and updated, but is nearing the end of its life, according to the airline. The program was developed decades ago and is now owned by General Electric. During the winter storm, amid a huge volume of changes to crew schedules to work through, SkySolver couldn't handle the task of matching crew members and which flights they should work, executives of the Dallas-based carrier said. Southwest's software wasn't designed to solve problems of that scale, Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson said Thursday, forcing the airline to revert to manual scheduling. Unlike some large rivals with hub-and-spoke networks, Southwest planes hopscotch from city to city, which may have been another complicating factor. Many carriers still rely on homegrown solutions, which largely were built on legacy mainframe computers, analysts say. Analysts and industry insiders say the airline industry is overdue for a massive technology overhaul that would take advantage of highly scalable cloud technologies and fully connect disparate sources of real-time data to better coordinate crews with aircraft. The airline sector has been among the slowest to adopt cloud-based and analytics technologies that could help solve complicated transportation network problems, those analysts say.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Perhaps the biggest reason TVs have gotten so much cheaper than other products is that your TV is watching you and profiting off the data it collects. From a report: Modern TVs, with very few exceptions, are "smart," which means they come with software for streaming online content from Netflix, YouTube, and other services. Perhaps the most common media platform, Roku, now comes built into TVs made by companies including TCL, HiSense, Philips, and RCA. But there are many more operating systems: Google has Google TV, which is used by Sony, among other manufacturers, and LG and Samsung offer their own. Smart TVs are just like search engines, social networks, and email providers that give us a free service in exchange for monitoring us and then selling that info to advertisers leveraging our data. These devices "are collecting information about what you're watching, how long you're watching it, and where you watch it," Willcox said, "then selling that data -- which is a revenue stream that didn't exist a couple of years ago." There's nothing particularly secretive about this -- data-tracking companies such as Inscape and Samba proudly brag right on their websites about the TV manufacturers they partner with and the data they amass. The companies that manufacture televisions call this "post-purchase monetization," and it means they can sell TVs close to at cost and still make money over the long term by sharing viewing data. In addition to selling your viewing information to advertisers, smart TVs also show ads in the interface. Roku, for example, prominently features a given TV show or streaming service on the right-hand side of its home screen -- that's a paid advertisement. Roku also has its own ad-supported channel, the Roku Channel, and gets a cut of the video ads shown on other channels on Roku devices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is developing a free moderation tool that smaller websites can use to identify and remove terrorist material, as new legislation in the UK and the EU compels Internet companies to do more to tackle illegal content. From a report: The software is being developed in partnership with the search giant's research and development unit Jigsaw and Tech Against Terrorism, a UN-backed initiative that helps tech companies police online terrorism. "There are a lot of websites that just don't have any people to do the enforcement. It is a really labor-intensive thing to even build the algorithms [and] then you need all those human reviewers," said Yasmin Green, chief executive of Jigsaw. "[Smaller websites] do not want Isis content there, but there is a ton of it all over [them]," she added. The move comes as Internet companies will be forced to remove extremist content from their platforms or face fines and other penalties under laws such as the Digital Services Act in the EU, which came into force in November, and the UK's Online Safety bill, which is expected to become law this year. The legislation has been pushed by politicians and regulators across Europe who argue that Big Tech groups have not gone far enough to police content online. But the new regulatory regime has led to concerns that smaller start-ups are not equipped to comply and that a lack of resources will limit their ability to compete with larger technology companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel has finally pulled the proverbial trigger on its non-K series SKUs, with sixteen new Raptor Lake-S series processors for desktops. AnandTech: Varied across a mixture of bare multiplier locked SKUs such as the Core i9-13900 and Core i7-13700 with a TDP of 65 W, Intel has also announced its T series models with a TDP of just 35 W for lower powered computing, including the Core i9-13900T. Furthermore, Intel has launched its Core i3 series family, offering decent performance levels, albeit with just performance (P) cores and no efficiency (E) cores, at a more affordable price starting from $109. Although the overclockable parts typically get consumers' attention when they launch, most of Intel's sales come through its regular non-K parts. Despite not being world record holders regarding performance or overclocking ability, the non-K series SKUs account for most system builders and OEM systems across the entry-level and mid-range offerings. Intel's non-K launch offerings as part of its Raptor Lake-S architecture all come with a TDP of 65 W or lower, with variants representing the Core i9, Core i7, and Core i5; Intel has also now pulled the trigger on its 13th Gen Core i3 series. Intel has sixteen new desktop processors with varying performance, specification, and price levels, ranging from 24-core (8P+16E) to quad-core (4P+0E) options. Memory support on the Core i9 and Core i7 series includes both DDR5-5600 and DDR4-3200, while the new Core i5 and Core i3 series support DDR5-4800 and DDR4-3200 as per JEDEC specifications. There are three new Intel 13th Gen Core i9 series processors to select from, starting at $549 with the Core i9-13900. All Core i9 series non-K parts include 8P+16E cores for 32 threads, and 36 MB of Intel Smart L3 cache, with the Core i9-13900 ($549) and Core i9-13900F ($524) sharing the same 5.6 GHz turbo clock speed and a base frequency of 3.3 GHz on the performance (P) cores. Both models also include a base TDP of 65 W and a turbo TDP of 219 W, which is plenty of power budget for turbo clock speeds on both the P and E cores. The only caveat is that the Core i9-13900F doesn't include Intel's UHD 770 integrated graphics (32 EUs); consequently, it has a $25 lower MSRP. The third of Intel's Core i9 non-K series chips is the Core i9-13900T, with the T signifying that it's a 35 W part. A lower power envelope means it sacrifices plenty of MHz to account for the drop in power. The Core i9-13900 has a P-core base frequency of 1.1 GHz, with a turbo clock speed of up to 5.3 GHz; the E-core specifications are similar, with a base frequency of 800 MHz and a turbo of 3.9 GHz. Even though the Core i9-13900T ($549) comes with a 35 W base TDP, it has a turbo TDP of 106 W. Moving onto the Core i5 family, Intel has three new Raptor Lake-S desktop processors, including two 65 W and one T series (35 W) part. All three include 30 MB of Intel The Core i7-13700 and Core i7-13700F both feature a P-core turbo clock speed of 5.2 GHz, while the restrictions in power mean that the P-core base frequency sits at just 2.1 GHz. For the efficiency (E) cores, this means that they have a base frequency of 1.5 GHz and a turbo clock speed of 4.1 GHz, while both conform to Intel's interpretation of 65 W; they both have a turbo TDP of 219 W. The Core i7-13700T, as per the specifications, has a base TDP of 35 W, but it has a turbo TDP of 106 W. As with other T-series family products, the lower TDP puts constraints on raw frequency, with a P-core base frequency of just 1.4 GHz, but the eight performance cores boost to 4.9 GHz, while the eight efficiency cores turbo up to 3.6 GHz. It shares the same level of 30 MB of L3 cache as the other Raptor Lake-S desktop Core i7 processors and includes Intel's UHD 770 integrated graphics chip.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shopify spent last year cutting costs. Now, it's cutting meetings. From a report: As employees return from holiday break, the Canadian e-commerce firm said it's conducting a "calendar purge," removing all recurring meetings with more than two people "in perpetuity," while reupping a rule that no meetings at all can be held on Wednesdays. Big meetings of more than 50 people will get shoehorned into a six-hour window on Thursdays, with a limit of one a week. The company's leaders will also encourage workers to decline other meetings, and remove themselves from large internal chat groups. "The best thing founders can do is subtraction," Chief Executive Officer Tobi Lutke, who co-founded the company, said in an emailed statement. "It's much easier to add things than to remove things. If you say yes to a thing, you actually say no to every other thing you could have done with that period of time. As people add things, the set of things that can be done becomes smaller. Then, you end up with more and more people just maintaining the status quo." Large, long and unproductive meetings have become a scourge of today's hybrid workplace, prompting companies to try and curtail them. Facebook parent Meta Platforms, household product maker Clorox and tech firm Twilio are among those that have instituted no-meeting days.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: One year ago this month, Microsoft announced it would spend $68.7 billion to acquire Activision Blizzard, highlighting how it would get "iconic franchises" including Call of Duty, Warcraft and Candy Crush for that fee. But now that gamers and regulators are worrying Microsoft might keep Call of Duty from appearing on Sony's PlayStation, Microsoft's lawyers are suddenly pretending they have no idea why Call of Duty is special. Or even when it came out, for that matter. As Matt Stoller notes, the company's 37-page reply to the FTC lawsuit seeking to block the Activision Blizzard deal includes this laughable passage: "Microsoft avers that it lacks knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the allegations concerning industry perceptions of Call of Duty and Call of Duty's original release date; or as to the truth of the allegations concerning Call of Duty's launch and typical release schedule and the resources and budget Activision allocates to Call of Duty, including the number of studios that work on Call of Duty."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Weather records have been falling across Europe at a disconcerting rate in the last few days, say meteorologists. From a report: The warmest January day ever was recorded in at least eight European countries including Poland, Denmark, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Belarus, Lithuania and Latvia, according to data collated by Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist who tracks extreme temperatures. In Korbielow, Poland, the mercury hit 19C (66F) -- a temperature the Silesian village is more used to in May, and 18C above the 1C annual average for January. In Javornik in the Czech Republic it was 19.6C, compared with an average of 3C for this time of year. Temperatures in Vysokaje, Belarus, would normally hover around zero at this time of year. On Sunday they reached 16.4C, beating the country's previous record January high by 4.5C. Elsewhere on the continent, local records were broken at thousands of individual measuring stations, with nearly 950 toppled in Germany alone from 31 December to 2 January, Herrera said. Northern Spain and the south of France basked in beach weather, with 24.9C in Bilbao, its hottest ever January day, and records broken at stations in Cantabria, Asturias and the Basque region. Only Norway, Britain, Ireland, Italy and the south-east Mediterranean posted no records.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dozens of once crystal-clear streams and rivers in Arctic Alaska are now running bright orange and cloudy, and in some cases they are becoming more acidic. From a report: This otherwise undeveloped landscape now looks as if an industrial mine has been in operation for decades, and scientists want to know why. Roman Dial, a professor of biology and mathematics at Alaska Pacific University, first noticed the stark water-quality changes while doing field work in the Brooks Range in 2020. He spent a month with a team of six graduate students, and they could not find adequate drinking water. "There's so many streams that are not just stained, they're so acidic that they curdle your powdered milk," he said. In others, the water was clear, "but you couldn't drink it because it had a really weird mineral taste and tang." Dial, who has spent the last 40 years exploring the Arctic, was gathering data on climate-change-driven changes in Alaska's tree line for a project that also includes work from ecologists Patrick Sullivan, director of the Environment and Natural Resources Institute at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and Becky Hewitt, an environmental studies professor at Amherst College. Now the team is digging into the water-quality mystery. "I feel like I'm a grad student all over again in a lab that I don't know anything about, and I'm fascinated by it," Dial said. Most of the rusting waterways are located within some of Alaska's most remote protected lands: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, the Kobuk Valley National Park, and the Selawik Wildlife Refuge. The phenomenon is visually striking. "It seems like something's been broken open or something's been exposed in a way that has never been exposed before," Dial said. "All the hardrock geologists who look at these pictures, they're like, 'Oh, that looks like acid mine waste.'" But it's not mine waste. According to the researchers, the rusty coating on rocks and streambanks is coming from the land itself. The prevailing hypothesis is that climate warming is causing underlying permafrost to degrade. That releases sediments rich in iron, and when those sediments hit running water and open air, they oxidize and turn a deep rusty orange color. The oxidation of minerals in the soil may also be making the water more acidic. The research team is still early in the process of identifying the cause in order to better explain the consequences. "I think the pH issue" -- the acidity of the water -- "is truly alarming," said Hewitt.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Almost four out of five new cars sold in Norway last year were battery-powered, with Tesla the top-selling brand for the second year in a row, registration data showed on Monday. From a report: Seeking to become the first nation to end the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2025, oil-producing Norway has until now exempted battery-powered fully electric vehicles (BEV) from taxes imposed on rivals using internal combustion engines (ICE). The share of new electric vehicles rose to 79.3% in 2022 from 65% in 2021 and from a mere 2.9% a decade ago, the Norwegian Road Federation said. Tesla had a 12.2% share of the overall car market in Norway, making it the number one brand for a second consecutive year, ahead of Volkswagen with 11.6%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For much of the global economy, 2023 is going to be a tough year as the main engines of global growth -- the US, Europe and China -- all experience weakening activity, the head of the International Monetary Fund has warned. From a report: The new year is going to be "tougher than the year we leave behind," IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva said on the CBS Sunday morning news program Face the Nation on Sunday. "Why? Because the three big economies -- the US, EU and China -- are all slowing down simultaneously," she said. "We expect one-third of the world economy to be in recession. Even countries that are not in recession, it would feel like recession for hundreds of millions of people," she added. In October, the IMF cut its outlook for global economic growth in 2023, reflecting the continuing drag from the war in Ukraine as well as inflation pressures and the high interest rates engineered by central banks like the US Federal Reserve aimed at bringing those price pressures to heel. Georgieva said that China, the world's second-largest economy, is likely to grow at or below global growth for the first time in 40 years as Covid-19 cases surge following the dismantling of its ultra-strict zero-Covid policy. "For the first time in 40 years, China's growth in 2022 is likely to be at or below global growth," Georgieva said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From customer service to the entertainment industry, businesses in China are paying big bucks for virtual employees. From a report: Tech company Baidu said the number of virtual people projects it's worked on for clients has doubled since last year, with a wide price range of as little as $2,800 to a whopping $14,300 per year. Virtual people are a combination of animation, sound tech and machine learning that create digitized human beings who can sing and even interact on a livestream. While these digital beings have appeared on the fringes of the U.S. internet, they've been popping up more and more in China's cyberspace. Some buyers of virtual people include financial services companies, local tourism boards and state media, said Li Shiyan, who heads Baidu's virtual people and robotics business. As the tech improves, costs have dropped by about 80% since last year, he said. It costs about 100,000 yuan ($14,300) a year for a three-dimensional virtual person, and 20,000 yuan for a two-dimensional one. Li expects the virtual person industry overall will keep growing by 50% annually through 2025. China is pushing hard into the development of virtual people. Beijing city announced in August a plan to build up the municipal virtual people industry into one valued at more than 50 billion yuan by 2025. The municipal authorities also called for the development of one or two "leading virtual people businesses" with operating revenue of more than 5 billion yuan each. This fall, central government ministries released a detailed plan for incorporating more virtual reality -- especially in broadcasting, manufacturing and other areas. The country's latest five-year plan revealed last year included a call for more digitalization of the economy, including in virtual and augmented reality.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto entrepreneur Cameron Winklevoss is accusing fellow businessman Barry Silbert of "bad faith stall tactics" in resolving a dispute between their two companies that grew out of the collapse of FTX. From a report: Gemini, owned by Winklevoss and his twin brother, paused redemptions on a lending product called Earn. It had offered investors the potential to generate as much as 8% in interest on their digital coins -- by lending them out to Genesis Global Capital, one of the companies owned by Silbert's Digital Currency Group (DCG). Genesis owes Gemini's customers $900 million, Winklevoss said in an open letter to Silbert. The Earn halt came in November, after Genesis revealed it had $175 million locked in an account on Sam Bankman-Fried's bankrupt FTX crypto exchange. Genesis, which suspended both redemptions and new loan originations at the lending unit, has told clients that it could take "weeks" to find a path forward. Winklevoss, facing pressure of his own from angry customers locked out of their Gemini accounts and a lawsuit alleging fraud, said he had provided Silbert with multiple proposals to resolve the issue, including most recently on Dec. 25. "Despite this, you continue to refuse to get into a room with us to hash out a resolution," Winklevoss wrote. "In addition, you continue to refuse to agree to a timeline with key milestones. Every time we ask you for tangible engagement, you hide behind lawyers, investment bankers, and process. After six weeks, your behavior is not only completely unacceptable, it is unconscionable." Silbert's response: "DCG did not borrow $1.675 billion from Genesis. DCG has never missed an interest payment to Genesis and is current on all loans outstanding; next loan maturity is May 2023. DCG delivered to Genesis and your advisors a proposal on December 29th and has not received any response."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India set an "incredibly important precedent" by banning TikTok two and a half years ago, FCC Commissioner said, as he projected a similar fate for the Chinese giant Bytedance app in the U.S. From a report: Brendan Carr, Commissioner of the FCC, warned that TikTok "operates as a sophisticated surveillance tool," and told the Indian daily Economic Times that banning the social app is a "natural next step in our efforts to secure communication network." The senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission said he is worried that China could use sensitive and non-public data gleaned from TikTok to "blackmail, espionage, foreign influence campaigns and surveillance." He said: "We need to follow India's lead more broadly to weed out other nefarious apps as well," he said. Carr's remarks further illustrates a growing push among U.S. states and lawmakers that are increasingly growing cautious of TikTok, which has amassed over 100 million users in the nation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fierce Wireless reports:Verizon is telling customers that if they're still using a 3G CDMA or 4G (non-VoLTE) phone that does not support its newer network technologies, "your line will be suspended without billing and will lose the ability to call, text, or use data." Verizon is the last of the Big 3 wireless carriers in the U.S. to shut down a 3G network and repurpose the spectrum for newer technology. AT&T was first, shutting its 3G network down in February. T-Mobile's shuttered its 3G network over the summer.... Verizon has been working with customers — both consumers and businesses — since 2016 to ensure customers have "every opportunity" to get a device that uses either 4G or 5G, including direct outreach to customers and even sending some customers updated devices proactively, according to Karen Schulz of Verizon's Global Network & Technology Communications team. Indeed, the company initially said it was closing its 3G network in 2019. Then they extended it to the end of 2020 and finally, to the end of 2022. In March 2021, Verizon made it clear they were sticking with the 2022 end date and advised customers still accessing the 3G network that they may experience a degradation or complete loss of service. "Even after that, until the day before their February billing cycle, they'll still be able to use the phones for two things: calling 911 and Verizon customer service," reports the Verge:While 3G will still exist in other countries for quite a few more years, Verizon's deadline is pretty much the end of the line for it here in the US. The tech hasn't gone gentle into that good night; carriers delayed their shutdowns several times, there were tiffs between Dish and T-Mobile, and you can't just turn a network that had been around for years off without things starting to break. (Some notable examples: some connected cars and trucks have been pushed offline, as have parking meters and older Kindles. AT&T's shutdown was even blamed for delays in reporting voting results in Michigan this year.) Part of the reason carriers are decommissioning their networks is to help build their new ones. As we saw earlier this month, T-Mobile's latest and greatest 5G tech makes use of spectrum that was once part of its 3G network. The Verge's conclusion? "Spare a thought for the tech that helped build the mobile-first world we live in; even if this ends up being the last time you ever think about it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been "an enormous ramp-up in U.S. chip-making plans" over the last 18 months, reports the New York Times. For example: - In September Intel pledged $20 billion for two chip factories in Ohio- Micron expects to spend at least that amount on a new manufacturing site in Syracuse, New York.- Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company plans to invest $40 billion in Phoenix. "The boom has implications for global technological leadership and geopolitics, with the United States aiming to prevent China from becoming an advanced power in chips..."Across the U.S., more than 35 companies have pledged nearly $200 billion for manufacturing projects related to chips since the spring of 2020, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group. The money is set to be spent in 16 states, including Texas, Arizona and New York on 23 new chip factories, the expansion of nine plants, and investments from companies supplying equipment and materials to the industry. The push is one facet of an industrial policy initiative by the Biden administration, which is dangling at least $76 billion in grants, tax credits and other subsidies to encourage domestic chip production.... The new U.S. production efforts may correct some of these imbalances, industry executives said — but only up to a point. The new chip factories would take years to build and might not be able to offer the industry's most advanced manufacturing technology when they begin operations. Companies could also delay or cancel the projects if they aren't awarded sufficient subsidies by the White House. And a severe shortage in skills may undercut the boom, as the complex factories need many more engineers than the number of students who are graduating from U.S. colleges and universities.... A $50 billion government investment is likely to prompt corporate spending that would take the U.S. share of global production to as much as 14 percent by 2030, according to a Boston Consulting Group study in 2020 that was commissioned by the Semiconductor Industry Association. "It really does put us in the game for the first time in decades," said John Neuffer, the association's president, who added that the estimate may be conservative because Congress approved $76 billion in subsidies in a piece of legislation known as the CHIPS Act. The article also cites predictions of 40,000 new jobs (made by the Semiconductor Industry Association) in exploring the possibility of a U.S. "talent shortage." "Intel, responding to the issue, plans to invest $100 million to spur training and research at universities, community colleges and other technical educators."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time geriatrician James Kirkland is a Mayo clinic researcher joining "a growing movement to halt chronic disease by protecting brains and bodies from the biological fallout of aging," reports Ars Technica. "While researchers like Kirkland don't expect to extend lifespan, they hope to lengthen 'health span,' the time that a person lives free of disease."One of their targets is decrepit cells that build up in tissues as people age. These "senescent" cells have reached a point — due to damage, stress or just time — when they stop dividing, but don't die. While senescent cells typically make up only a small fraction of the overall cell population, they accounted for up to 36 percent of cells in some organs in aging mice, one study showed. And they don't just sit there quietly. Senescent cells can release a slew of compounds that create a toxic, inflamed environment that primes tissues for chronic illness. Senescent cells have been linked to diabetes, stroke, osteoporosis and several other conditions of aging. These noxious cells, along with the idea that getting rid of them could mitigate chronic illnesses and the discomforts of aging, are getting serious attention. The U.S. National Institutes of Health is investing $125 million in a new research effort, called SenNet, that aims to identify and map senescent cells in the human body as well as in mice over the natural lifespan. And the National Institute on Aging has put up more than $3 million over four years for the Translational Geroscience Network multicenter team led by Kirkland that is running preliminary clinical trials of potential antiaging treatments. Drugs that kill senescent cells — called senolytics — are among the top candidates. Small-scale trials of these are already underway in people with conditions including Alzheimer's, osteoarthritis and kidney disease. "It's an emerging and incredibly exciting, and maybe even game-changing, area," says John Varga, chief of rheumatology at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, who isn't part of the Translational Geroscience Network. But he and others sound a note of caution as well, and some scientists think the field's potential has been overblown. "There's a lot of hype," says Varga. "I do have, I would say, a very healthy skepticism." He warns his patients of the many unknowns and tells them that trying senolytic supplementation on their own could be dangerous.... So far, evidence that destroying senescent cells helps to improve health span mostly comes from laboratory mice. Only a couple of preliminary human trials have been completed, with hints of promise but far from blockbuster results. In conjunction with SpaceX and Axiom Space, Kirkland and a colleague also are investigating how space radiation affects senescence indicators in astronauts, the article points out . "They hypothesize that participants in future long-term missions to Mars might have to monitor their bodies for senescence or pack senolytics to stave off accelerated cellular aging caused by extended exposure to radiation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Australian city of Melbourne recently posted QR codes its citizens could use to report grafitti, reports Australia's public broadcaster ABC. Unfortunately, someone overlaid "a number" of those QR codes with "alternative" QR codes leading to a pro-graffiti documentary:The City of Melbourne is investigating how many of the QR codes have been affected and is assessing whether an alternative will be needed in future.... The lord mayor said the City of Melbourne had initiated discussions with Victoria Police and would draw on CCTV footage to see "how we can catch those culprits". [...] The Lord Mayor did not believe the compromised QR codes had resulted in more graffiti in the city. "I think this is more of a PR effort by the vandals," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Guess what's finally entering America's public domain today? Appropriately enough, it's Marcel Proust's 1927 novel Remembrance of Things Past. Also entering the public domain today are thousands of other books, plus the music and lyrics of hundreds of songs, and even several silent movies. Fritz Lang's sci-fi classic Metropolis enters the public domain today — and so does the Laurel & Hardy comedy Battle of the Century (which culminates with one of Hollywod's first pie fights), according to Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain:This is actually the second time that Metropolis has gone into the US public domain. The first was in 1955, when its initial 28-year term expired and the rights holders did not renew the copyright. Then in 1996 a new law restored the copyrights in qualifying foreign works. Metropolis, along with thousands of other works, was pulled out of the public domain, and now reenters it after the expiration of the 95-year term, with the once missing scenes available for anyone to reuse. They also note that some material is in the public domain from the beginning, including government works like the images from the James Webb telescope. But for other works, today is a big and important day, writes the Associated Press:Alongside the short-story collection "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes," books such as Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse," Ernest Hemingway's "Men Without Women," William Faulkner's "Mosquitoes" and Agatha Christie's "The Big Four" — an Hercule Poirot mystery — will become public domain as the calendar turns to 2023. Once a work enters the public domain it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without permission or cost. The works from 1927 were originally supposed to be copyrighted for 75 years, but the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act delayed opening them up for an additional 20 years. While many prominent works on the list used those extra two decades to earn their copyright holders good money, a Duke University expert says the copyright protections also applied to "all of the works whose commercial viability had long subsided." "For the vast majority — probably 99% — of works from 1927, no copyright holder financially benefited from continued copyright. Yet they remained off limits, for no good reason," Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, wrote in a blog post heralding "Public Domain Day 2023." That long U.S. copyright period meant many works that would now become available have long since been lost, because they were not profitable to maintain by the legal owners, but couldn't be used by others. On the Duke list are such "lost" films like Victor Fleming's "The Way of All Flesh" and Tod Browning's "London After Midnight...." Also entering the public domain today: - Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop- A. A. Milne's Now We Are Six (illustrations by E. H. Shepard)- Franklin W. Dixon's The Tower Treasure — the first Hardy Boys book- Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf (German version)- The song "My Blue Heaven"- Songs by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong- Alfred Hitchcock's early silent movie The Lodger The UK-based newspaper the Observer adds:For those readers who do not reside in the US, there is perhaps another reason for celebrating today, because copyright terms are longer in the US than they are in other parts of the world, including the EU and the UK. And therein lies a story about intellectual property laws and the power of political lobbying in a so-called liberal democracy.... The term was gradually lengthened in small increments by Congress until 1976, when it was extended by 19 years to 75 years and then in 1998 by the Sonny Bono Act. So, as the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig puts it, "in the 20 years after the Sonny Bono Act, while 1 million patents will pass into the public domain, zero copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a copyright term".... [T]he end result is that American citizens have had to wait two decades to be free to adapt and reuse works to which we Europeans have had easy access.... The issue highlighted by Public Domain Day is not that intellectual property is evil but that aspects of it — especially copyright — have been monopolised and weaponised by corporate interests and that legislators have been supine in the face of their lobbying. Authors and inventors need protection against being ripped off. It's obviously important that clever people are rewarded for their creativity and the patent system does that quite well. But if a patent only lasts for 20 years, why on earth should copyright last for life plus 70 years for a novel?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Starting next year, Nintendo fans can step through a life-size warp pipe and enter the Mushroom Kingdom," reports Bloomberg, "for the first time on American soil." Bloomberg shares its reaction after "an early preview tour of the land as it finalizes construction," noting that it has "a chirping soundtrack of cheerful instrumentals and distant coin clinks."Super Nintendo World, an interactive replica of Nintendo's dynamic lands and characters, will bring its colorful chaos to Universal Studios Hollywood when it opens on Feb. 17, 2023. The expansion provides an opportunity to race alongside Mario and Luigi before meeting them face to face, and it will bring video game-inspired dining, retail and merchandise to the California theme park inside an immersive, bowllike structure lined with spinning coins and turtle shells.... Whether Koopa Troopas in motion or a fake desert set against the actual skies, there's always something to look at — and somewhere intriguing to head first. Its marquee attraction, Mario Kart: Bowser's Challenge, puts riders in augmented reality-enabled helmets to experience the Mario Kart racing game firsthand while the challenge plays out virtually in front of them.... Super Nintendo World was released at Universal Studios Japan in March 2021, but its arrival stateside marks Universal Studio Hollywood's largest opening since its Wizarding World of Harry Potter expansion in 2016, and it's the first of Nintendo's notable footprints on domestic soil. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, starring Chris Pratt, hits theaters in April, and a third iteration of Super Nintendo World will open with Epic Universe, the all-new theme park arriving at Universal Orlando Resort in 2025. In each iteration, the main draw is the Mario Kart experience. Here, riders in four-passenger vehicles will join Team Mario to compete across multiple courses for the Golden Cup — a familiar process to anyone who's played Nintendo's racing challenge back home. The article reminds readers that "all attendees can punch blocks (with more force than one may anticipate) and re-create other moments in the Mushroom Kingdom." But they ultimately describe the experience as a kind of "overwhelming immersion, transporting people to a location they've previously seen, but never before in real life."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2022 was the year that Microsoft retired its Internet Explorer web browser (to concentrate on its Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser). Yet Ghacks reports that Internet Explorer "is still haunting some from its grave."Some websites and apps use code to determine the user agent. The user agent informs the site about several parameters, including the used web browser (engine) and operating system. When done correctly, it may reveal the used browser and that may then lead to a custom user experience. When done incorrectly, it may lead to false identification; this is exactly what is happening on some sites currently regarding Internet Explorer user agent sniffing and the Firefox web browser. Some sites identify Firefox as Internet Explorer because of inaccurate user agent sniffing.. Internet Explorer 11's user agent ends by identifying its release version as rv:11.0, the article points out. So when a Firefox user visits a website using Firefox 110 (or any other version up to Firefox 119), "The site in question checks for rv:11 in the user agent [and] Firefox's rv:110 value is identified wrongly as Internet Explorer." Instead of risking problems with functionality, compatibility, or other display issues for Firefox versions 110 through 119, Mozilla has "decided to freeze part of Firefox's version."Instead of echoing rv:110, rv:111 and so on up to rv:119, Firefox returns rv:109 instead. The end of the user agent string displays the actual version of Firefox still. Mozilla plans to restore the original user agent of Firefox with the release of Firefox 120. The organization plans to release Firefox 120 on November 21, 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Boston Globe tech reporter checked last year's performance for the region's tech companies:A list of the worst local performers includes some truly bottom-of-the-barrel returns. Cannabis tech company Agrify in Billerica suffered a 99.6 percent stock drop in 2022. Wireless Internet service Starry and diet-device maker Gelesis were close behind with losses of 99.5 and 99.3 percent, respectively. (All stock prices are as of Dec. 28.) Agrify suffered a recent sales drop and growing losses while ending the year facing a customer lawsuit and possible hostile takeover. Starry was unable to raise the funds needed to continue building its network and put itself up for sale last month. And Gelesis fell far short of its sales forecast, bringing in about $30 million of revenue compared to a projection of $171 million presented when its merger with Capstar Special Purpose Acquisition Corp. was announced in 2021.... Companies like Starry and Gelesis that went public by merging with blank-check firms had a particularly tough year, as investors flipped from euphoria to panic on the so-called SPAC boom. The average 2022 return for 21 such stocks tracked by the Globe was a loss of 70 percent. Of tech companies that went public the traditional way, the average loss was 45 percent. Toast, which did a standard IPO at the same time Ginkgo Bioworks completed its SPAC deal, lost 51 percent for the year while Ginkgo plunged 80 percent. In the wider market of tech stocks, the article notes that the S&P 500 index dropped 20%, while the Nasdaq Composite plunged 34 percent, "and tech giants such as Apple, Amazon, and Meta shed hundreds of billions of dollars of market value." "Of 60 local tech stocks tracked by the Globe, only two posted positive returns: robotics maker Symbotic in Wilmington and payments company WEX in Portland, Maine.... Perhaps in 2023, the winners column will be a little longer."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Companies like Apple have moved hardware production to places like India and Vietnam, reports the Washington Post. But Facebook "has hit walls, say three people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations."Until recently, the people said, Meta executives viewed the company's reliance on China to make Oculus virtual reality headsets as a relatively minor concern because the company's core focus was its social media and messaging apps. All that has changed now that Meta has rebranded itself as a hardware company, the people said. Beyond last year's name change from Facebook to Meta, the company has undertaken a broad internal reorganization, launched augmented-reality smart glasses, and is building a connected device that could be worn on a person's wrist. In October, the company introduced Meta Quest Pro, the first in a new line of headsets built for collaboration. Internal concerns about the hardware push intensified last year, when some executives worried that the anti-China strategy...would hurt its business ambitions and be viewed by the public and regulators as hypocritical, given the company's growing reliance on China for its plans.... Executives also looked, unsuccessfully, for ways to move manufacturing of Oculus to Taiwan. "Meta is building a complicated hardware product. You can't just turn on a dime and make it elsewhere," said one of the executives.... While the original smartwatch plan was abandoned, the company continues to work on a wearable device for the wrist, according to two people familiar with the company's plans. "At present, Meta's consumer electronics hardware is manufactured in China but we are constantly reviewing and exploring supply chain opportunities around the world," spokeswoman Ha Thai said.... Executives are still hoping the hardware-focused rebranding will shift the conversation away from criticism of its social media business, said two of the people. But they are well aware that relying on China for a growing suite of virtual reality headsets, smartwatches and other hardware will invite a new set of political challenges. Companies dependent on China for manufacturing have faced criticism over shipping jobs overseas as well as environmental and labor rights issues, and have had their businesses impacted by trade wars and other political escalations. "You trade in one set of problems for another," said one of the people. The article also notes that Meta has quietly funded the nonprofit "American Edge" that "runs online advertising and other campaigns that are critical of China and of TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media app. "[S]ome Chinese analysts have argued that Meta was resorting to desperate measures because it feared TikTok owner ByteDance's growing dominance in short video."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Cryptocurrency went through a transformation in 2022," writes CNN, noting that its peak price last year occurred on January 1 of 2022, at over $47,000:Since then, the asset — along with other cryptocurrencies — has seen a steep fall in price, remaining well below $20,000 since early November.... [Current price: $16,585] In the wake of the FTX collapse, Emily Parker rhetorically asked, "So who will save crypto now?" Whether the currency can be saved at all is a question that divides our prognosticators. [Political commentator] Alice Stewart is the most bullish on the future of bitcoin, predicting that its peak price in 2023 will be $103,000. [Legal analyst] Elliot Williams isn't too far behind her, guessing the asset will top out at $70,000. [Opinion contributors] Jill Filipovic and Allison Hope, however, don't anticipate a rise in price at all — speculating that its peak value next year will be just $12,000 and $13,000 respectively. "I know nothing about Bitcoin," admits Hope, "but this seems like a conservative gloom and doom figure." In their larger collection of predictions, two CNN opinion contributors expressed mild hopes for bitcoin Raul Reyes wrote that Bitcoin "seems like the steadiest investment in the volatile crypto world," before predicting its 2023 peak price would be about $29,400. And Frida Ghitis predicted that "Speculators will swarm in, and Bitcoin will spike up above $36,000 — before falling back to Earth again."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

January's Communications of the ACM includes an essay predicting "the end of programming," in an AI-powered future where "programming will be obsolete." But IT analyst and ZDNet contributor Joe McKendrick remains skeptical, judging by a new essay sardonically titled "It's the end of programming as we know it — again."Over the past few decades, various movements, paradigms, or technology surges — whatever you want to call them — have roiled the software world, promising either to hand a lot of programming grunt work to end users, or automate more of the process. CASE tools, 4GL, object-oriented programming, service oriented architecture, microservices, cloud services, Platform as a Service, serverless computing, low-code, and no-code all have theoretically taken the onerous burdens out of software development. And, potentially, threaten the job security of developers. Yet, here we are. Software developers are busier than ever, with demand for skills only increasing. "I remember when the cloud first started becoming popular and companies were migrating to Office 365, everyone was saying that IT Pros will soon have no job," says Vlad Catrinescu, author at Pluralsight. "Guess what — we're still here and busier than ever." The question is how developers' job will ultimately evolve. There is the possibility that artificial intelligence, applied to application development and maintenance, may finally make low-level coding a thing of the past.... Catrinescu believes that the emerging generation of automated or low-code development solutions actually "empowers IT professionals and developers to work on more challenging applications. IT departments can focus on enterprise applications and building complicated apps and automations that will add a lot of value to the enterprise." Even the man predicting "the end of programming" in an AI-powered future also envisions new technology that "potentially opens up computing to almost anyone" (in ACM's video interview). But in ZDNet's article Jared Ficklin, chief creative technologist and co-founder of argodesign, even predicts the possibility of real-time computing. "You could imagine asking Alexa to make you an app to help organize your kitchen. AI would recognize the features, pick the correct patterns and in real time, over the air deliver an application to your mobile phone or maybe into your wearable mobile computer."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Imagine starting your work day with a fresh coconut juice perched by your laptop as you gaze over the ocean or a tropical rainforest...." writes the Conversation. "More than 40 nations or territories now offer "digital nomad" visas to attract those able to be employed in one country while living, and spending their income, in another."Fancy the beach? A bunch of exotic islands are on the list. Prefer tropical forests? Try Brazil or Costa Rica. Looking for history? There's Spain or Greece. Love Wim Hof-style ice-bathing? Iceland beckons. Think of a "digital nomad" visa as a cross between a tourist and temporary migrant visa — a working-on-holiday visa. Instead of the visa giving you the right to work in the country, it's allowing you to stay so long as you're gainfully employed and bringing money into the local economy. How long you can stay varies, from 90 days in Aruba in the Caribbean to up to two years in the Cayman Islands. Most are for 12 months, with an option to renew. Some places, such as Latvia, restrict visas to employers registered in an OECD country. But generally the key requirement is that you can show you have no need to find local work and can meet minimum income requirements. Generally, the visa conditions simplify taxation issues: you continue to pay your income tax in the country of your employer. But this varies. For example, in Greece (which offers a two-year renewable visa) you are exempt from paying local income tax only for the first six months. A key driver of the digital nomad trend is the ability to maintain a career while ticking off other personal goals, particularly travel and the ability to experience a different way of life. Moving somewhere with a cheaper cost of living could be another motivation. The article warns that "Living a long way away from family and friends and support networks is likely to be more challenging, no matter how idyllic your location. "If you like predictable structure and routine, the uncertainty and inevitable inconveniences that arise may mean it isn't for you."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports:Mars may seem like a dry, desolate place, but the red planet transforms into an otherworldly wonderland in winter, according to a new video shared by NASA.... "Enough snow falls that you could snowshoe across it," said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement from a NASA release. "If you were looking for skiing, though, you'd have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface." So far, no orbiters or rovers have been able to see snow fall on the red planet because the weather phenomenon only occurs at the poles beneath cloud cover at night. The cameras on the orbiters can't peer through the clouds, and no robotic explorers have been developed that could survive the freezing temperatures at the poles. [ -190 degrees Fahrenheit, or -123 degrees Celsius) ] However, the Mars Climate Sounder instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can detect light that's invisible to the human eye. It has made detections of carbon dioxide snow falling at the Martian poles. The Phoenix lander, which arrived on Mars in 2008, also used one of its laser instruments to detect water-ice snow from its spot about 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) away from the Martian north pole.... "Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped," Piqueux said. "Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair." Ice and carbon dioxide-based frosts also form on Mars, and they can occur farther away from the poles. The Odyssey orbiter (which entered Mars' orbit in 2001) has watched frost forming and turning to a gas in the sunlight, while the Viking landers spotted icy frost on Mars when they arrived in the 1970s. At the end of winter, the season's buildup of ice can thaw and turn into gas, creating unique shapes that have reminded NASA scientists of Swiss cheese, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, spiders and other unusual formations. That's just the beginning, according to a press release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab:This "thawing" also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing. And they also note that the camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter also captured some surprisingly colorful images of sand dunes covered by frostRead more of this story at Slashdot.

VentureBeat's lead gaming writer made 10 predictions for 2023. Prediction #8? "Gaming will become more open in 2023."There are many forces at play that will make gaming more open. The web browser is poised for a comeback. Companies are working on ways to get around the restrictions of the app stores by turning to the open web. In the past, this meant bad graphics and limited interactivity. But new standards like glTF and proprietary technologies could enable speedier delivery. The open web could be succeeded one day by the open metaverse. That won't happen real soon, but enough people are talking about this that the conversation is top of mind at some of the biggest and most important companies in the industry.... Gatekeepers who create platforms still take a 30% cut of royalties. Matthew Ball, author of the bestselling book The Metaverse, has argued that this stands in the way of progress as it weakens the developers who are in the best position to push forward ideas like the metaverse. While the industry isn't going to change overnight, the added awareness to the costs of closed platforms is a catalyst for change. Epic isn't fighting for this all by itself. The Open Metaverse Standards group has formed to push for better open standards, and USD is making progress as an interoperable 3D file format. Forte and Lamina1 have raised a lot of money and they believe that blockchain technology infrastructure can also improve the openness of sectors such as gaming, enabling players to finally own their stuff. Overall, more business models and technologies — like Web3 or cloud gaming or subscriptions — will yield more choice for both developers and consumers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares an article listing "the five best Linux distros of 2022" — as chosen by the editor of the blog omg! ubuntu! "Spoiler: they're not all Ubuntu-based!" the article begins, also noting that it's not a ranking of superiority of importance, but rather "giving a shoutout to some of the year's best Linux releases." Its top-listed non-Ubuntu distro? Fedora Workstation 37 Fedora Workstation is a flagship desktop Linux distro for good reason: it's robust, it's reliable, it's impeccably produced — it distills what a lot of folks seek most: a "pure" GNOME experience, delivered as devs intend, atop a strong and stable base. Autumn's offer of Fedora 37 Workstation features GNOME 43 — an update that majorly improves the GNOME Shell user experience with Quick Settings. There's also a more-featured Files rebuilt in GTK4/libadwaita; a revamped Calendar app; a Device Security panel; Raspberry Pi 4 support; GRUB instead of syslinux on BIOS; and more. Folk often overlook Fedora Workstation because, as Linux distros go, it's rather understated, unassuming, and drama-free. Yet, it is a finessed and functional distro that forgoes fancy flourishes to focus entirely on its performance, its integration, and its cohesion. If you've never tried Fedora you're missing out, so sort it! There were two other non-Ubuntu distros on the list: Manjaro 22.0 'Sikaris'. "As Arch-based Linux distros go Manjaro is one of the best.... Everything from the shell to the package manager to bespoke touches and apps are cohesive, considered, and choreographed. Manjaro 22.0 isn't just a distro, it's an experience." Linux Mint 21. "As well as being easy to use, Linux Mint ships with an interesting selection of pre-installed software that aims to cover most users' needs, including some homegrown apps that are rather special."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To hear the first results from the James Webb Telescope, 200 astronomers descended on the Space Telescope Science Institute for three days in December, reports the New York Times, with an update on what may be 2022's biggest science story. The $10 billion telescope "is working even better than astronomers had dared to hope" -- and astronomers are ecstatic:At a reception after the first day of the meeting, John Mather of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Webb's senior project scientist from the start, raised a glass to the 20,000 people who built the telescope, the 600 astronomers who had tested it in space and the new generation of scientists who would use it. "Some of you weren't even born when we started planning for it," he said. "Have at it!" Launched on Christmas one year ago, the Webb telescope "is seven times as powerful as its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope," the Times reports -- sharing what was revealed in that auditorium in December:One by one, astronomers marched to the podium and, speaking rapidly to obey the 12-minute limit, blitzed through a cosmos of discoveries. Galaxies that, even in their relative youth, had already spawned supermassive black holes. Atmospheric studies of some of the seven rocky exoplanets orbiting Trappist 1, a red dwarf star that might harbor habitable planets. (Data suggest that at least two of the exoplanets lack the bulky primordial hydrogen atmospheres that would choke off life as we know it, but they may have skimpy atmospheres of denser molecules like water or carbon dioxide.) "We're in business," declared Bjorn Benneke of the University of Montreal, as he presented data of one of the exoplanets. Megan Reiter of Rice University took her colleagues on a "deep dive" through the Cosmic Cliffs, a cloudy hotbed of star formation in the Carina constellation, which was a favorite early piece of sky candy. She is tracing how jets from new stars, shock waves and ionizing radiation from more massive nearby stars that were born boiling hot are constantly reshaping the cosmic geography and triggering the formation of new stars. "This could be a template for what our own sun went through when it was formed," Dr. Reiter said in an interview. Between presentations, on the sidelines and in the hallways, senior astronomers who were on hand in 1989 when the idea of the Webb telescope was first broached congratulated one another and traded war stories about the telescope's development. They gasped audibly as the youngsters showed off data that blew past their own achievements with the Hubble. The telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. And appropriately for New Year's Eve, the article concludes with a look to the future:Thus far the telescope, bristling with cameras, spectroscopes and other instruments, is exceeding expectations. (Its resolving power is twice as good as advertised.) The telescope's flawless launch, Dr. Rigby reported, has left it with enough maneuvering fuel to keep it working for 26 years or more. "These are happy numbers...." The closing talk fell to Dr. Mather. He limned the telescope's history, and gave a shout-out to Barbara Mikulski, the former senator of Maryland, who supported the project in 2011 when it was in danger of being canceled. He also previewed NASA's next big act: a 12-meter space telescope called the Habitable Worlds Observatory that would seek out planets and study them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Looking back at 2022's technology, the lead technology writer for the New York Times criticized Meta's $1,500 VR headset and the iPhone's "mostly unnoticeable improvements." But then he also predicted which new tech could affect you in 2023. Some highlights:- It's very likely that next year you could have a chatbot that acts as a research assistant. Imagine that you are writing a research paper and want to add some historical facts about World War II. You could share a 100-page document with the bot and ask it to sum up the highlights related to a certain aspect of the war. The bot will then read the document and generate a summary for you.... That doesn't mean that we'll see a flood of stand-alone A.I. apps in 2023. It may be more the case that many tools we already use for work will begin building automatic language generation into their apps. Rowan Curran, a technology analyst at the research firm Forrester, said apps like Microsoft Word and Google Sheets could soon embed A.I. tools to streamline people's work flows.- In 2023, the V.R. drumbeat will go on. Apple, which has publicly said it will never use the word "metaverse," is widely expected to release its first headset. Though the company has yet to share details about the product, Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, has laid out clues, expressing his excitement about using augmented reality to take advantage of digital data in the physical world. "You'll wonder how you lived your life without augmented reality, just like today you wonder: How did people like me grow up without the internet?" Mr. Cook said in September to students in Naples. He added, however, that the technology was not something that would become profound overnight. Wireless headsets remain bulky and used indoors, which means that the first iteration of Apple's headgear will, similar to many others that preceded it, most likely be used for games. In other words, there will continue to be lots of chatter about the metaverse and virtual (augmented, mixed, whatever-you-want-to-call-dorky-looking) goggles in 2023, but it most likely still won't be the year that these headsets become widely popular, said Carolina Milanesi, a consumer tech analyst for the research firm Creative Strategies. "From a consumer perspective, it's still very uncertain what you're spending your thousand bucks on when you're buying a headset," she said. "Do I have to do a meeting with V.R.? With or without legs, it's not a necessity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer programmer Zeynep Tufekci now writes about the impact of technology on society. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Tufekci writes on "the shameful open secret" that earlier this week led Southwest airlines to suddenly cancel 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours. "The recent meltdown was avoidable, but it would have cost them." Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes that the piece "takes a crack at explaining 'technical debt' to the masses." Tufekci writes:Computers become increasingly capable and powerful by the year and new hardware is often the most visible cue for technological progress. However, even with the shiniest hardware, the software that plays a critical role inside many systems is too often antiquated, and in some cases decades old. This failing appears to be a key factor in why Southwest Airlines couldn't return to business as usual the way other airlines did after last week's major winter storm. More than 15,000 of its flights were canceled starting on Dec. 22, including more than 2,300 canceled this past Thursday — almost a week after the storm had passed. It's been an open secret within Southwest for some time, and a shameful one, that the company desperately needed to modernize its scheduling systems. Software shortcomings had contributed to previous, smaller-scale meltdowns, and Southwest unions had repeatedly warned about it. Without more government regulation and oversight, and greater accountability, we may see more fiascos like this one, which most likely stranded hundreds of thousands of Southwest passengers — perhaps more than a million — over Christmas week. And not just for a single company, as the problem is widespread across many industries. "The reason we made it through Y2K intact is that we didn't ignore the problem," the piece argues. But in comparison, it points out, Southwest had already experienced another cancellation crisis in October of 2021 (while the president of the pilots' union "pointed out that the antiquated crew-scheduling technology was leading to cascading disruptions.") "In March, in its open letter to the company, the union even placed updating the creaking scheduling technology above its demands for increased pay." Speaking about this week's outage, a Southwest spokesman concedes that "We had available crews and aircraft, but our technology struggled to align our resources due to the magnitude and scale of the disruptions." But Tufekci concludes that "Ultimately, the problem is that we haven't built a regulatory environment where companies have incentives to address technical debt, rather than passing the burden on to customers, employees or the next management.... For airlines, it might mean holding them responsible for the problems their miserly approach causes to the flying public."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt Welsh is the CEO and co-founder of Fixie.ai, an AI-powered software delivery company founded by a team from Google and Apple. "I believe the conventional idea of 'writing a program' is headed for extinction," he opines in January's Communications of the ACM, "and indeed, for all but very specialized applications, most software, as we know it, will be replaced by AI systems that are trained rather than programmed." His essay is titled "The End of programming," and predicts a future will "Programming will be obsolete."In situations where one needs a "simple" program (after all, not everything should require a model of hundreds of billions of parameters running on a cluster of GPUs), those programs will, themselves, be generated by an AI rather than coded by hand.... with humans relegated to, at best, a supervisory role.... I am not just talking about things like Github's CoPilot replacing programmers. I am talking about replacing the entire concept of writing programs with training models. In the future, CS students are not going to need to learn such mundane skills as how to add a node to a binary tree or code in C++. That kind of education will be antiquated, like teaching engineering students how to use a slide rule. The engineers of the future will, in a few keystrokes, fire up an instance of a four-quintillion-parameter model that already encodes the full extent of human knowledge (and then some), ready to be given any task required of the machine. The bulk of the intellectual work of getting the machine to do what one wants will be about coming up with the right examples, the right training data, and the right ways to evaluate the training process. Suitably powerful models capable of generalizing via few-shot learning will require only a few good examples of the task to be performed. Massive, human-curated datasets will no longer be necessary in most cases, and most people "training" an AI model will not be running gradient descent loops in PyTorch, or anything like it. They will be teaching by example, and the machine will do the rest. In this new computer science — if we even call it computer science at all — the machines will be so powerful and already know how to do so many things that the field will look like less of an engineering endeavor and more of an an educational one; that is, how to best educate the machine, not unlike the science of how to best educate children in school. Unlike (human) children, though, these AI systems will be flying our airplanes, running our power grids, and possibly even governing entire countries. I would argue that the vast majority of Classical CS becomes irrelevant when our focus turns to teaching intelligent machines rather than directly programming them. Programming, in the conventional sense, will in fact be dead.... We are rapidly moving toward a world where the fundamental building blocks of computation are temperamental, mysterious, adaptive agents.... This shift in the underlying definition of computing presents a huge opportunity, and plenty of huge risks. Yet I think it is time to accept that this is a very likely future, and evolve our thinking accordingly, rather than just sit here waiting for the meteor to hit. "I think the debate right now is primarily around the extent to which these AI models are going to revolutionize the field," Welsh says in a video interview. "It's more a question of degree rather than whether it's going to happen.... "I think we're going to change from a world in which people are primarily writing programs by hand to a world in which we're teaching AI models how to do things that we want them to do... It starts to feel more like a field that focus on AI education and maybe even AI psychiatry. In order to solve these problems, you can't just assume that people are going to be writing the code by hand."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If humankind detects a message from an advanced civilisation, "It would be a transformative event for humankind," writes the Guardian, "one the world's nations are surely prepared for. "Or are they?""Look at the mess we made when Covid hit. We'd be like headless chickens," says Dr John Elliott, a computational linguist at the University of St Andrews. "We cannot afford to be ill-prepared, scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless, for an event that could happen at any time and which we cannot afford to mismanage." This frank assessment of Earth's unreadiness for contact with life elsewhere underpins the creation of the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) post-detection hub at St Andrews. Over the next month or two, Elliott aims to bring together a core team of international researchers and affiliates. They will take on the job of getting ready: to analyse mysterious signals, or even artefacts, and work out every aspect of how we should respond.... "After the initial announcement, we'd be looking at societal impact, information dissemination, the media, the impact on religions and belief systems, the potential for disinformation, what analytical capabilities we'll need, and much more: having strategies in place, being transparent with everything we've discovered — what we know and what we do not know," says Elliott.... Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist and professor of science communication at the University of Westminster, said the new hub at St Andrews is "an important step in raising awareness at how ill-prepared we currently are" for detecting a signal from an alien civilisation. But he added that any intelligent aliens were likely to be hundreds if not thousands of light years away, meaning communication time would be on the scale of many centuries. "Even if we were to receive a signal tomorrow, we would have plenty of breathing space to assemble an international team of diverse experts to attempt to decipher the meaning of the message, and carefully consider how the Earth should respond, and even if we should. "The bigger concern is to establish some form of international agreement to prevent capable individuals or private corporations from responding independently — before a consensus has formed on whether it is safe to respond at all, and what we would want to say as one planet," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.