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When it comes to US government employee satisfaction with IT services, one agency finds itself continually at the bottom of the heap: The rather crucial Department of Defense. From a report: Results from the General Services Administration's (GSA) Mission-Support Customer Satisfaction Survey published on Wednesday found the DoD was trailing the other 23 US federal government agencies included in the research. Of the seven technology user areas surveyed, the DoD came dead last in user satisfaction for IT support, equipment, function, and communication/collaboration. The DoD didn't fare much better in the three areas it wasn't scraping the bottom, either. For strategic IT partnerships and development, modernizations and enhancement the Defense Department ranked twentieth (out of 24), and for operations and maintenance satisfaction it beat the US Department of Agriculture - barely - on the seven-point scale used by the GSA. Despite its abysmal ranking among its fellow federal agencies, the DoD's users were still generally okay with their IT service, with 65 percent of respondents saying they were at least somewhat satisfied with IT support, and 64.5 percent expressing some degree of satisfaction with their IT equipment. Only development, modernization and enhancement failed to net 50 percent satisfaction among DoD respondents.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As a growing number of hackers target companies, organisations and industries with debilitating attacks, more skilled cyber security workers are urgently needed to combat the threat.AFrom a report: ISC2, the world's largest association of cyber professionals, estimates that the cyber security workforce in 2022 stood at about 4.7mn people globally. But a further 3.4mn roles remain unfilled. "The gap is massive," says Clar Rosso, ISC2's chief executive. "This shortfall is felt more acutely in countries such as India where digitisation is rapid. But even in the US, only 69 per cent of cyber roles are filled, according to Cyberseek, a website that provides data about the cyber security job market." Beyond a talent shortfall, existing workers are underskilled. A UK government report this year found that 50 per cent of UK businesses -- some 739,000 in total -- have a basic cyber skills gap, meaning that those in charge of cyber security lack the confidence to carry out the technical measures that protect against the most common digital attacks. Previously, it was thought that a company's IT team could take care of all cyber security concerns. But "over time, it became clear that this needed specialised attention," Rosso says, adding that, after some high-profile ransomware attacks over the past couple of years, "business executives are now paying attention."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The future of wearable technology, beyond now-standard accessories like smartwatches and fitness tracking rings, is ePANTS, according to the intelligence community. The Intercept: The federal government has shelled out at least $22 million in an effort to develop "smart" clothing that spies on the wearer and its surroundings. Similar to previous moonshot projects funded by military and intelligence agencies, the inspiration may have come from science fiction and superpowers, but the basic applications are on brand for the government: surveillance and data collection. Billed as the "largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles," the SMART ePANTS -- Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems -- program aims to develop clothing capable of recording audio, video, and geolocation data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced in an August 22 press release. Garments slated for production include shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all of which are intended to be washable. The project is being undertaken by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the intelligence community's secretive counterpart to the military's better-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. IARPA's website says it "invests federal funding into high-risk, high reward projects to address challenges facing the intelligence community." Its tolerance for risk has led to both impressive achievements, like a Nobel Prize awarded to physicist David Wineland for his research on quantum computing funded by IARPA, as well as costly failures. "A lot of the IARPA and DARPA programs are like throwing spaghetti against the refrigerator," Annie Jacobsen, author of a book about DARPA, "The Pentagon's Brain," told The Intercept. "It may or may not stick."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple and Microsoft, the most valuable companies in the US, have argued some of their flagship services are insufficiently popular to be designated "gatekeepers" under landmark new EU legislation designed to curb the power of Big Tech. FT: Brussels' battle with Apple over its iMessage chat app and Microsoft's search engine Bing comes ahead of Wednesday's publication of the first list of services that will be regulated by the Digital Markets Act. The legislation imposes new responsibilities on the tech companies, including sharing data, linking to competitors and making their services interoperable with rival apps.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Storied venture firm Y Combinator has removed an Indian startup from its batch after discovering "irregularities" at the firm, several people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Medobed, an Indian startup that promises medicine delivery in 10 minutes, was initially selected in Y Combinator's S23 batch. In recent weeks, Y Combinator has severed its ties with the Indian firm and a partner at the venture firm has also suggested many prospective investors to not engage with Medobed, according to two people familiar with the matter and a copy of an email obtained by TechCrunch. It's very rare for Y Combinator, which selects a few hundred startups from tens of thousands of applications, to remove a firm from its coveted batch, the report adds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

belmolis writes: Canadian prisons allow prisoners to buy devices such as personal computers and gaming consoles but severely restrict the technology, nominally on security grounds. Modern gaming consoles are forbidden on the grounds that they can connect to the internet, so the typical purchase is a Playstation 1. No version of Microsoft Windows more recent than Windows 98 is allowed. No device that can play MP3 files is allowed. The regulations forbid operating systems other than Microsoft DOS or Windows and any software capable of creating a program, such as a compiler as are "database programs capable of altering or manipulating SQL databases". Although learning job skills is encouraged, programming is evidently not considered appropriate. The relationship of most of these restrictions to security is obscure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has announced billing in public preview for Teams recording and transcription APIs, with pricing starting at 3 cents per minute for recordings. From a report: Getting meeting transcripts and recordings using Graph APIs is currently in public developer preview, so the billing, which started on September 1, might irk coders keen to use these features in their applications. The API for recording is billed at $0.03 per minute, and the API for transcription is $0.024 per minute. Microsoft cited line-of-business applications or ISV solutions in sales or HR as potential use cases for the technology, which permits recordings as an MP4 video file or transcripts as VTT files to be downloaded. VTT includes handy information such as the spoken words, timings, language, and the names of the speakers. A developer could automatically generate notes and attach meeting clips using one or both content API sets. Other information, such as sentiment and engagement metrics, could also be generated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A proposal to phase out CO2-emitting fossil fuels at COP27 last won backing from more than 80 countries but oil and gas-rich nations opposed it. European Union countries are preparing to push for a global deal on phasing out fossil fuels at the COP28 climate summit, a draft of the EU's negotiating position has shown. From a report: Diplomats from the bloc's 27 member states are drafting their position for the summit in Dubai in November, where nearly 200 countries will try to strengthen efforts to rein in climate change. "The shift towards a climate neutral economy will require the global phase-out of [unabated] fossil fuels and a peak in their consumption already in the near term," a draft of the EU's negotiating stance, seen by Reuters, says. Countries have never agreed in UN climate negotiations to gradually stop burning all CO2-emitting fossil fuels, despite this being the main cause of climate change. "Unabated" refers to fossil fuels burned without using technologies to capture the resulting CO2 emissions. The word was in brackets in the draft EU text, indicating that countries have not yet agreed on whether to include it. EU diplomats hope a deal can be made at COP28 - but expect to meet resistance from economies reliant on income from selling oil and gas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Invasive species are costing the world at least $423bn every year and have become a leading threat to the diversity of life on Earth, according to a UN assessment. From a news report: From invasive mice that eat seabird chicks in their nests to non-native grasses that helped fuel and intensify last month's deadly fires in Hawaii, at least 3,500 harmful invasive species have been recorded globally in every region, spread by human travel and trade. Their impact is destructive for humans and wildlife, sometimes causing extinctions and permanently damaging the healthy functioning of an ecosystem. Leading scientists say the threat posed by invasive species is under appreciated, underestimated and sometimes unacknowledged, with more than 37,000 alien species now known to be introduced around the world and about 200 establishing themselves each year. While not all will become invasive, experts say there are significant tools to mitigate their spread and impact, protecting and restoring ecosystems in the process. "Invasive alien species are a major threat to biodiversity and can cause irreversible damage to nature, including local and global species extinctions, and also threaten human wellbeing," wrote Prof Helen Roy, Prof Anibal Pauchard and Prof Peter Stoett, who led the research. "It would be an extremely costly mistake to regard biological invasions only as someone else's problem," said Pauchard. "Although the specific species that inflict damage vary from place to place, these are risks and challenges with global roots but very local impacts facing people in every country, from all backgrounds and in every community -- even Antarctica is being affected."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The London Stock Exchange Group has drawn up plans for a new digital markets business, saying this will make it the first major exchange to offer extensive trading of traditional financial assets on the blockchain technology best known for powering cryptocurrency. From a report: Murray Roos, head of capital's markets at the LSE Group, told the Financial Times that the company had been examining the potential for a blockchain-powered trading venue for about a year, and had reached an "inflection point" where it had decided to take the plans forward. It has asked Julia Hoggett, head of the London Stock Exchange, one unit in the broader group, to spearhead the project. Roos stressed that his exchange was "definitely not building anything around cryptoassets" but was looking to use the technology that underpins popular tokens such as bitcoin to improve the efficiency of buying, selling and holding traditional assets. "The idea is to use digital technology to make a process that is slicker, smoother, cheaper and more transparent and to have it regulated," Roos said. He added that LSEG had waited to proceed until it was sure that the public blockchain technology was "good enough" and that investors were ready.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If Apple had its way, the iPhone would continue to use the current Lightning connector for the next few years -- until the point when the company is ready to begin phasing out ports on its smartphones altogether. But the European Union forced its hand, requiring mobile device makers to use the USB-C standard by the end of next year. So Apple is now in the awkward position of embracing the very technology it didn't want. When the company introduces the iPhone 15 on Sept. 12, USB-C connectors will appear on its four new phone models, as well as the AirPods Pro, and Apple will describe it as a major win for customers. Customers will be able to use a single charging cable for iPhones, Macs and iPads. It will bring breakthrough data transfer speed increases for the new high-end iPhone models. Phones will charge faster in some instances. And, finally, the phones will be compatible with chargers used by billions of non-Apple devices. Why will Apple be so upbeat about a change it didn't ask for? That's because the company has an iron-clad rule: When it's introducing a new product or dealing with the media, it always wants to operate from a position of strength. Apple's keynote presentation won't mention the European Union or make reference to the many times over the past few years that it criticized the government's decision to require USB-C. Back when it was still resisting the switch, Apple laid out a few arguments, including that the change would harm the environment -- given that billions of obsolete cables may wind up in a landfill. Another rationale, floated by Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak last year, is the potentially harmful precedent of governments influencing product design.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's return-to-office has been a "lagging return," reports the Washington Post:Even with millions of workers across the country being asked to return to their cubicles, office occupancy has been relatively static for the past year. The country's top 10 metropolitan areas averaged 47.2 percent of pre-pandemic levels last week, according to data from Kastle Systems. This time last year, the average was around 44 percent.... About 52 percent of remote-capable U.S. workers are operating under hybrid arrangements, according to data from Gallup, while 29 percent are exclusively remote. And though executives like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg have argued that the rise of flexible work has had a deleterious effect on productivity, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that labor productivity rose 3.7 percent in the second quarter of 2023 and is up 1.3 percent compared to this time last year. While employers cite the collaborative benefits of spending time together in person, the majority of hybrid arrangements aren't fostering the connections bosses want to see, according to Rob Cross, associate professor of management at Babson College who studies collaboration across various companies through surveys, email and meeting data. He's found that mandates for a certain number of days in office are missing the mark, "because you're not getting the right people who need to collaborate... What we're seeing that's more successful is when companies are using some form of analytics" to determine which workers need to come in on the same days, Cross said. He estimates that only about 5 percent of organizations are taking this approach. "Leaders are just saying, 'We need water-cooler moments,' " Cross said. "They're not looking and saying, 'These are the interactions we need to stimulate.' " But the article argues that "After more than two years of trying to coax workers back into offices, bosses are losing their patience... Even tech companies that were once champions of remote work are changing their tune." The article cites return-to-office policies at Zoom, Meta, and Amazon, arguing that "Employers have new leverage as the labor market has cooled, leaving workers less room to be choosy..."The days of enticing employees with free food, laundry services and yoga classes are largely over. Now, executives are resorting to threats - and it's forcing some workers to decide whether they're willing to give up the flexibility they've gotten used to... "The pendulum has shifted from employees having all the power," said Matt Cohen, founder and managing partner of Ripple Ventures, a venture fund in Toronto that works with early stage companies across North America. The bulk of start-up founders he works with are requiring employees to be in offices a few days a week, although there's pushback. "During the pandemic, a lot of salespeople were taking calls from the top of mountains on hiking trips," Cohen said. "That's not working anymore...." [R]emote work is becoming harder to find. Roughly 8 percent of all job postings now advertise remote or hybrid work, according to Nick Bunker, director of North American economic research at Indeed Hiring Lab. That's down from 9.7 percent last year, he said, but still up significantly over pre-pandemic levels. The workplace software company HqO's chief executive says workers are after "elevated experiences they can't get at home". Their data shows workers attracted by free food, high-quality tools, and attractive workspaces - but "The number one thing people want out of a workplace is concentration space..You're not going to get them into a place just built for social interaction. You've got to be able to concentrate...." But the CEO of PR software company Muck Rack says going fully remote benefited their workers - both their well-being and their productivity. "I hope more people see the potential here and don't just go along with the return-to-office narrative.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The city of Boston also allows testing of self-driving cars. But the Boston Globe reports that "There are far fewer complaints about self-driving cars because you barely see them."[F]ollowing a string of high-profile crashes and the disruption of the COVID pandemic, the state Transportation Department - now under Governor Maura Healey - has seemingly lost its enthusiasm for AVs... Only one company is permitted to test autonomous vehicles here - Boston-based Motional - and it confines its occasional experiments to a corner of the Seaport and a closed track at Suffolk Downs in East Boston. And despite past efforts to woo autonomous-vehicle firms, the state hasn't received any new applications in years... Proponents have long said AVs could transform transportation, with all manner of economic and social benefits: high-paying jobs in robotics, manufacturing, and artificial intelligence, and reduced carbon emissions should people forgo private cars for electric robo-taxis. But skeptics abound, particularly in San Francisco, where residents say autonomous vehicles have caused traffic jams and blocked emergency vehicles... [A]fter an autonomous Uber vehicle in Arizona killed a pedestrian in 2018, Boston transportation officials asked nuTonomy and Optimus Ride, the two companies the state had granted a permit, to pause testing in the city... There's another key difference between Massachusetts and some other states - including California - where autonomous testing is more advanced. Here, companies seeking to test self-driving cars need the approval of both state regulators and officials in whatever communities where they plan to test. In California, AV firms just need the state Department of Motor Vehicles and the California Public Utilities Commission to sign off; then they "notify" local governments of planned testing in the area. Those rules significantly ease the path for AV companies, but have created significant friction between the state and cities like San Francisco, where companies like General Motors-owned Cruise and Waymo, a subsidiary of Google, have been testing self-driving cars without humans... So far, California has issued permits to seven companies to test autonomous vehicles without safety drivers and to over 60 automakers and software firms to test self-driving cars with a backup human driver, including Apple, Nissan, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Tesla, according to state records. In Massachusetts, there's only Motional, which seems inclined to stick to the Seaport and Suffolk Downs. One startup founded suggested Massachusetts create a special lane where autonomous vehicles can test safely.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:On April 26, 1986, the infamous explosion at a Chernobyl nuclear power plant unleashed large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere, an event that contaminated wildlife across country lines. The radiation levels seen in animals as a result has decreased in recent years - with the exception of one animal: the wild boar. For years, scientists questioned why levels of a radioactive isotope known as cesium-137 have remained surprisingly high in wild boars rooting around Germany and Austria, while decreasing in other deer and roe deer. In a new study released last week, a team of researchers finally solved this "wild boar paradox." They uncovered that the main radioactive source is not the Chernobyl accident but nuclear weapons testing from the 1960s... Radioactive cesium results from both nuclear weapons explosion and nuclear energy production. The element comes in different isotopic composition, cesium-135 and cesium-137, depending on the source. By analyzing the ratio of these amounts, the researchers can pinpoint the source of the radiation... In the nearly 50 collected meat samples, the team found 88 percent of the samples were above Germany's regulatory limits for radioactive cesium in food. Calculating the ratio of cesium isotopes in the samples, they found that nuclear weapons testing accounted for 10 to 68 percent of the contamination. Even if the Chernobyl accident had never happened, "some of the wild boars would actually still exceed the regulatory limits for food safety limits only because of the weapons tests today," said Georg Steinhauser, a radiochemist at TU Wien and author of the new study. "I think this is pretty mind-blowing because they were 60 years ago." Steinhauser said the wild boars probably ingested the cesium from contaminated deer truffle mushrooms, which they dig up and eat during the winter when corn and acorns on the ground are scarce. Cesium seeps through the soil and is absorbed by the mushrooms, as if it were a nutrient. This also explains why observations show radioactivity levels in wild boar are higher in the winter. While cesium from both the nuclear weapons testing and the Chernobyl accident spread through the soil, Steinhauser said, the mushrooms appear to have fully absorbed the source from the nuclear weapons testing so far. Cesium seeps very slowly through the soil, sometimes only one millimeter per year, he said. Deer truffles, located between 20 and 40 centimeters, have already absorbed the "older" cesium from six decades ago. The "younger" cesium from Chernobyl has likely not fully integrated or is just now integrating at the soil depths where the mushrooms are located. But it could be bad news when the cesium from Chernobyl does reach the mushrooms - radioactivity levels could go up higher. The study's author says his study isn't arguing for or against the use of nuclear energy - but does say that "it has to be done responsibly." He calls the study's results "a cautionary tale that we have to take good care of our environment," said Steinhauser. "Once released, a radioactive substance can never be unreleased again - and nature doesn't forget."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Viasat Inc. has more than $1 billion of orbiting satellites in trouble," reports Bloomberg, "and space insurers are girding for market-rattling claims."The company's roughly $1 billion ViaSat-3 Americas satellite, central to expanding its fixed-broadband coverage and fending off rivals including Elon Musk's Starlink, suffered an unexpected problem as it deployed its antenna in orbit in April. Should Viasat declare it a total loss, industry executives estimate the claim would reach a record-breaking $420 million and, in turn, make it harder - and more expensive - for other satellite operators to get insurance... Viasat on Aug. 24 reported another stricken spacecraft, saying its Inmarsat-6 F2 satellite launched in February suffered a power problem. The failure may end the craft's useful life and result in a $350 million insurance claim, Space Intel Report said. Viasat's troubles in orbit come a few years after big-name insurers like American International Group Inc. and Allianz SE have shuttered their space portfolios. That's left a smaller pool of providers to absorb the risks in the notoriously high-stakes $553 million market... Following news of the Inmarsat-6 anomaly, Viasat and other industry participants "will likely experience significant challenges with obtaining insurance for future satellite launches," [investment banking firm] William Blair's Louie DiPalma said in an Aug. 25 note... In 2019, the total losses from satellite claims amounted to $788 million, which overwhelmed the total premiums for the year at $500 million, according to launch and satellite database Seradata. In the years that followed, big names like American International Group Inc., Swiss Re AG, and Allianz SE all closed the door on satellite insurance. Earlier this month Viasat's CEO says before deciding whether they'll file a claim, "There's no consequences to us taking another couple or three months to get good measurements and then making those decisions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CBS News reports:Floridians battered by Hurricane Idalia this week may not have expected another threat - that floodwaters could cause their cars to suddenly burst into flames. Yet that's exactly what happened when two electric vehicles caught fire after being submerged in saltwater churned up by the storm... "If you own a hybrid or electric vehicle that has come into contact with saltwater due to recent flooding within the last 24 hours, it is crucial to relocate the vehicle from your garage without delay," the fire department said in a Facebook post. "Saltwater exposure can trigger combustion in lithium-ion batteries. If possible, transfer your vehicle to higher ground." The warning also applies to electric golf carts, scooters and bicycles, with lithium-ion batteries potentially sparking a fire when they get wet. More specifically, salt residue remains after the water dries out and can create "bridges" between the battery's cells, potentially creating electrical connections that can spark a fire. Fire crews were actually towing one of the vehicles when it burst into flames, the article points out. And EV manufacturers want people to take the possibility seriously:Tesla warns car owners about the risks of vehicle submersion and advises against driving a car that has been flooded. "Treat your vehicle as if it has been in an accident and contact your insurance company," the company says in its guidance for handling a submerged vehicle. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports that newspaper chain Gannett "has paused the use of an AI tool to write high school sports dispatches after the technology made several major flubs in articles in at least one of its papers."In one notable example, preserved by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the story began: "The Worthington Christian [[WINNING_TEAM_MASCOT]] defeated the Westerville North [[LOSING_TEAM_MASCOT]] 2-1 in an Ohio boys soccer game on Saturday...." The reports were mocked on social media for being repetitive, lacking key details, using odd language and generally sounding like they'd been written by a computer with no actual knowledge of sports. CNN identified several other local Gannett outlets, including the Louisville Courrier Journal, AZ Central, Florida Today and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, that have all published similar stories written by LedeAI in recent weeks. Many of the reports feature identical language, describing "high school football action," noting when one team "took victory away from" another and describing "cruise-control" wins. In many cases, the stories also repeated the date of the games being covered multiple times in just a few paragraphs. Gannett has paused its experiment with LedeAI in all of its local markets that had been using the service, according to the company. The pause was earlier reported by Axios... The AI tool debacle comes after Gannett axed hundreds of jobs in December when it laid off 6% of its news division. From Axios's report: One such Dispatch article from Aug. 18 was blasted on social media for its robotic style, lack of player names and use of awkward phrases like "close encounter of the athletic kind." "I feel like I was there!" The Athletic senior columnist Jon Greenberg posted sarcastically. More from the Washington Post:Another story about a game between the Wyoming Cowboys and Ross Rams described a scoreboard that "was in hibernation in the fourth quarter." When Ayersville High School staged a late comeback in another game, a write-up of their win read: "The Pilots avoided the brakes and shifted into victory gear...." In a statement, Gannett called the deployment of Lede AI an "experiment" in automation to aid its journalists and add content for readers... LedeAI CEO Jay Allred said in a statement to The Post that he believes automation is part of the future of local newsrooms and that LedeAI allows reporters and editors to focus on "journalism that drives impact in the communities they serve."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The BBC has an article about Japan's release into the sea of treated waste water from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant. "Scientists largely agree that the impact will be negligible, but China has strongly protested the release. And disinformation has only fuelled fear and suspicion in China."A report by a UK-based data analysis company called Logically, which aims to fight misinformation, claims that since January, the Chinese government and state media have been running a coordinated disinformation campaign targeting the release of the waste water. As part of this, mainstream news outlets in China have continually questioned the science behind the nuclear waste water discharge. The rhetoric has only increased since the water was released on 24 August, stoking public anger... Japan's foreign ministry even warned its citizens in China to be cautious and to avoid speaking Japanese loudly in public... Logically's data also showed that, since the beginning of the year, state-owned media have run paid ads on Facebook and Instagram, without disclaimers, about the risks of the waste water release in multiple countries and languages, including English, German, and Khmer. "It is quite evident that this is politically motivated," Hamsini Hariharan, a China expert at Logically, told the BBC. She added that misleading content from sources related to the Chinese government had intensified the public outcry... Dozens of posts on Chinese social media Weibo showed panicked crowds buying giant sacks of salt ahead of the Fukushima water release. Some worried that future supply would be contaminated. Others believed - falsely - that salt protected them against radiation. A restaurant in Shanghai, in an apparent effort to profit off the hysteria, advertised "anti-radiation" meals with errant claims of reducing skin damage and cell regeneration. A social media user asked wryly, "Why would I pay 28 yuan for tomato with seasoning?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Silicon Valley billionaires behind a secretive $800 million land-buying spree in Northern California have finally released some details about their plans for a new green city," reports the Associated Press, "but they still must win over skeptical voters and local leaders."After years of ducking scrutiny, Jan Sramek, the former Goldman Sachs trader spearheading the effort, launched a website Thursday about "California Forever." The site billed the project as "a chance for a new community, good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space" in Solano, a rural county between San Francisco and Sacramento that is now home to 450,000 people. He also began meeting with key politicians representing the area who have been trying unsuccessfully for years to find out who was behind the mysterious Flannery Associates LLC as it bought up huge swaths of land, making it the largest single landholder in the county... [T]o build anything resembling a city on what is now farmland, the group must first convince Solano County voters to approve a ballot initiative to allow for urban uses on that land, a protection that has been in place since 1984. Local and federal officials still have questions about the group's intentions... California is in dire need of more housing, especially affordable homes for teachers, firefighters, service and hospitality workers. But cities and counties can't figure out where to build as established neighborhoods argue against new homes that they say would congest their roads and spoil their quiet way of life. In many ways, Solano County is ideal for development. It is 60 miles northeast of San Francisco and 35 miles southwest of California's capital city of Sacramento. Solano County homes are among the most affordable in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a median sales price of $600,000 last month. But Princess Washington, mayor pro tempore of Suisun City, said residents deliberately decided to protect open space and keep the area around Travis Air Force Base free of encroachment given its significance. She's suspicious that the group's real purpose is "to create a city for the elite" under the guise of more housing. The web site for "California Forever" acknowledges they've purchased 50,000 acres - about 78 squares miles - "strategically located" in Northern California's Solano County with access to water and low fire risk. Speculative illustrations on the site "evoke a cityscape with a dreamy white stucco and red rooftop Mediterranean vibe that might be found in a Greek or Italian village," writes the San Francisco Chronicle.There are hillside neighborhoods stepping down to what must be the banks of the Sacramento River, kayakers tooling through lily pads and anglers fishing from the riverbank at sunrise... The website also names an investor who has not been named previously - venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, an early investor in Google, Slack and other companies... While California Forever may have billions to invest in the project, it will face staunch opposition from some ranchers who argue that the city would disrupt the economy of a county that is 62% farmland. The San Francisco Chronicle's urban design critic writes "OK, this is something new - an elevator pitch for a whole new city..."But the website launched Thursday by California Forever offers no real details, such as the projected population or precise location. Instead, there are renderings of cuddly townscapes and soothing talk of building "a remarkable place for Solano residents." Oh, and an earnest promise to "begin the phase of our work that matters most: our conversation with you." Let the eye-rolling commence. It's impossible to critique the vision of the investors, because what was unfurled is so innocuous as to be an insult... The website also refers to how this will be a center of "economic opportunity" and "new employers." Great! But only two of the 12 renderings show people at work, including one where three men install solar panels while the sun sets in the west. Let's hope they're being paid overtime... The Bay Area needs housing and jobs. It also needs honest approaches to making this happen. Let's hope when California Forever 2.0 launches, there is less fluff and more facts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Two stalled driverless taxis blocked an ambulance carrying a critically injured patient," writes the San Francisco Chronicle, citing a paywalled report from Forbes. The delay "contributed to 'poor patient outcome' - the person died 20 to 30 minutes after reaching the hospital, according to a report by San Francisco firefighters that the taxi company disputes." The report was obtained by Forbes, which recently published a story detailing accounts by San Francisco firefighters who say driverless taxis have repeatedly interfered with their emergency response. However, Forbes also reported that Cruise provided a video that disputed SFFD's account of the August 14 incident. The video, Forbes reported, shows that one Cruise car quickly left the scene while the other remained stalled at the intersection with an open lane to its right, which traffic was passing through. Forbes said it was not clear from the video if the ambulance could have navigated into the open lane. Hannah Lindow, a Cruise spokesperson, told the Chronicle that the Cruise vehicle that stopped did so to yield to first responders directing traffic. "Throughout the entire duration the (autonomous vehicle) is stopped, traffic remains unblocked and flowing to the right of the AV. The ambulance behind the AV had a clear path to pass the AV as other vehicles, including another ambulance, proceeded to do," Lindow said in an email. "As soon as the victim was loaded into the ambulance, the ambulance left the scene immediately and was never impeded from doing so by the AV."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To complete one full rotation around its axis it takes the moon 655 hours. So a single "lunar day" is 13.64 earth days. But sunset has finally come for India's Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft and its Pragyan rover, writes long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis , and the rover has switched off for the coming 655-hour night:With luck from the moon gods, it will wake up with the sunrise in 14 days. But, even if not, mission accomplished! It was designed for fourteen days of operation, the daylight period. In that time the rover accomplished just over a hundred meters (American units: one football field) of traverse, examining and chemically analyzing the surface. "The Indian Express newspaper said the electronics on board the Indian moon mission werena(TM)t designed to withstand very low temperatures, less than -120 C (-184 F) during the nighttime on the moon," according to the Associated Press. But the rover's accomplishments already include making the first-ever measurements of the south pole's near-surface Lunar plasma, and confirming the presence of aluminum, calcium, chromium, titanium, manganese, and silicon. There's also sulphur, iron, oxygen and other elements on the moon, Reuters reports, citing a statement from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO):The Pragyan rover from the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft was "set into Sleep mode" but with batteries charged and receiver on, the ISRO said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, late on Saturday. "Hoping for a successful awakening for another set of assignments!" ISRO said. "Else, it will forever stay there as India's lunar ambassador." Earlier this week the ISRO posted footage of the rover completing a near-pirouette to search for the safest route. "The solar panel is oriented to receive the light at the next sunrise expected on September 22, 2023," the ISRO posted Saturday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Microsoft has quietly revealed that WordPad, the basic word processor that's been included with Windows since 1995, is being retired," reports Windows blog Paul Thurrott:"WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows," the Deprecated features for Windows client page on Microsoft Learn notes in a September 1, 2023 addition. "We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt...." [W]hile Microsoft's advice to use Microsoft Word instead seems a bit off-base, given that Word is a paid product, RTF is rarely used these days, and anyone can access the web versions of Word for free if needed. The actual date of removal is unclear. But Neowinisn't the only thing Microsoft is removing from Windows:The company recently turned off Cortana, its neglected voice assistant, and announced the end of Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT). Also, Microsoft will soon disable old Transport Layer Security protocols to make Windows 11 more secure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The (Arch Linux-powered) Steam Deck was released in February of 2022 - and Phoronix reports that's helping Linux's market share on Steam. "While July was at 1.96% for Linux, the August numbers [from SteamPowered.com] show a 0.14% dip to 1.82%.Interestingly, macOS dipped by 0.27% to 1.57% while Windows rose by 0.4% to 96.61%. For those wondering why the Steam Linux numbers dropped while the Steam Deck continues to be very popular, it's possibly again another month impacted by large swings in Chinese traffic... SteamOS Holo that powers the Steam Deck gained another 2% marketshare to now commanding around 44% of the reported Linux gamers. Among Linux gamers, AMD CPUs power around 71% of the systems. In part due to the Steam Deck being powered by an AMD APU. Meanwhile Steam on Windows has the AMD CPU marketshare at around 33%.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vanity Fair revisits the many warning signs about OceanGate's Titan submersible prior to an implosion on June 18th that killed all five passengers onboard. A professional expedition leader tells their reporter that "This tragedy was predicted. It was avoidable. It was inevitable."As the world now knows, Stockton Rush touted himself as a maverick, a disrupter, a breaker of rules. So far out on the visionary curve that, for him, safety regulations were mere suggestions. "If you're not breaking things, you're not innovating," he declared at the 2022 GeekWire Summit. "If you're operating within a known environment, as most submersible manufacturers do, they don't break things. To me, the more stuff you've broken, the more innovative you've been." In a culture that has adopted the ridiculous mantra "move fast and break things," that type of arrogance can get a person far. But in the deep ocean, the price of admission is humility - and it's nonnegotiable... In December 2015, two years before the Titan was built, Rush had lowered a one third scale model of his 4,000-meter-sub-to-be into a pressure chamber and watched it implode at 4,000 psi, a pressure equivalent to only 2,740 meters. The test's stated goal was to "validate that the pressure vessel design is capable of withstanding an external pressure of 6,000 psi - corresponding to...a depth of about 4,200 meters." He might have changed course then, stood back for a moment and reconsidered. But he didn't. Instead, OceanGate issued a press release stating that the test had been a resounding success because it "demonstrates that the benefits of carbon fiber are real." OceanGate's director of marine operations later issued a Quality Control Inspection Report filled with warnings:These included missing bolts and improperly secured batteries, components zip-tied to the outside of the sub. O-ring grooves were machined incorrectly (which could allow water ingress), seals were loose, a highly flammable, petroleum-based material lined the Titan's interior... Yet even those deficiencies paled in comparison to what Lochridge observed on the hull. The carbon fiber filament was visibly coming apart, riddled with air gaps, delaminations, and Swiss cheese holes - and there was no way to fix that short of tossing the hull in a dumpster... Rush's response was to fire Lochridge immediately, serve him and his wife with a lawsuit (although Carole Lochridge didn't work at OceanGate or even in the submersible industry) for breach of contract, fraud, unjust enrichment, and misappropriation of trade secrets; threaten their immigration status; and seek to have them pay OceanGate's legal fees. The article also tells a story about OceanGate's 240-foot dive to the wreck of the Andrea Doria in 2016. The article claims that Rush disregarded safety instructions, then "landed too close, got tangled in the current, managed to wedge the sub beneath the Andrea Doria's crumbling bow, and descended into a full-blown panic..." The article's author marvels that five years ago, "I didn't yet know how reckless, how heedless, how insane the Titan was." They'd once even considered booking a trip on the OceanGate's submersible - until receiving this advice from the chief pilot of the University of Hawaii's two deep-sea submarines. "Do not get into that sub. He is going to have a major accident." Thanks to Slashdot reader AleRunner for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Santiago Valdarrama teaches machine learning. He posted this week on Twitter and LinkedIn that "Scrum is a cancer." Some highlights:I've been writing software for 25 years, and nothing renders a software team useless like Scrum does... We spent more time talking than doing... We spent more time estimating story points than writing software... Imagine having a manager, a scrum master, a product owner, and a tech lead. You had to answer to all of them and none simultaneously... I believe in Agile, but this ain't agile... The result was always the same: It didn't work. Scrum is a cancer that will eat your development team. Scrum is not for developers; it's another tool for managers to feel they are in control. DevOps.com shares some reactions, including the developer who calls Scrum "a life-sucking batch of meetings that are good for one thing: Taking developers who can't or don't want to see the overall business/architecture picture and getting useful work out of them." But later in the week, Valdarrama revisited the issue with a follow-up post. "After 3,400 replies, I learned a few things."First, the most common jobs among the people who told me I was wrong were "Agile Coach" and "Scrum Master...." Second, Scrum can't fail because Scrum is whatever you want Scrum to be. There's no right way to do Scrum, so if it doesn't work for you, you aren't as bright as you thought you were. Third, Scrum isn't agile, except when it is. But it's much better than Waterfall, except when it isn't. And it's better than nothing and everything at the same time. Fourth, many people got triggered by my comparison of Scrum and communism... Finally, by far, most people hate Scrum with passion. Thanks to Slashdot reader RUs1729 for sharing the link.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's how the Washington Post tells the story of 34-year-old marketer (and former model) Madison Conradis, who discovered nude behind-the-scenes photos from 10 years earlier had leaked after a series of photographer web sites were breached:Now the photos along with her name and contact information were on 4chan, a lawless website that allows users to post anonymously about topics as varied as music and white supremacy... Facebook users registered under fake names such as "Joe Bummer" sent her direct messages demanding that she send new, explicit photos, or else they would further spread the already leaked photos. Some pictures landed in her father's Instagram messages, while marketing clients told her about the nude images that came their way. Madison was at a friend's party when she got a panicked call from the manager of a hotel restaurant where she had worked: The photos had made their way to his inbox. After two years, hoping a new Florida law against cyberharassment would finally end the torture, Madison walked into her local Melbourne police station and shared everything. But she was told that what she was experiencing was not criminal. What Madison still did not know was that other women were in the clutches of the same man on the internet - and all faced similar reactions from their local authorities. Without help from the police, they would have to pursue justice on their own. Some cybersleuthing revealed the four women all had one follower in common on Facebook: Christopher Buonocore. (They were his ex-girlfriend, his ex-fiance, his relative, and a childhood friend.) Eventually Madison's sister Christine - who had recently passed the bar exam - "prepared a 59-page document mapping the entire case with evidence and relevant statutes in each of the victims' jurisdictions. She sent the document to all the women involved, and each showed up at her respective law enforcement offices, dropped the packet in front of investigators and demanded a criminal investigation."The sheriff in Florida's Manatee County, Christine's locality, passed the case up to federal investigators. And in July 2019, the FBI took over on behalf of all six women on the basis of the evidence of interstate cyberstalking that Christine had compiled... The U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida took action at the end of December 2020, but without a federal law criminalizing the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images, she charged Buonocore with six counts of cyberstalking instead, which can apply to some cases involving interstate communication done with the intent to kill, injure, intimidate, harass or surveil someone. He pleaded guilty to all counts the following January... U.S. District Judge Thomas Barber sentenced Buonocore to 15 years in federal prison - almost four years more than the prosecutor had requested.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Though it's Saturday at Nevada's desert-based Burning Man event "Dawn brought a growing realization for attendees that they might not be going home as planned, given rain forecast for later Saturday into Sunday..." reports the Reno Gazette-Journal. "More than 73,000 Burning Man attendees remain confined to their camps Saturday and are blocked from leaving the event after a slow-moving rainstorm turned their desert playground into a soupy, muddy morass." Burning Man has now closed both its entrance and exits gates. "Organizers warned attendees to conserve their food and water, indicating the closures could be lengthy."There was no estimated time for reopening, and thousands of attendees are facing the potential of missing flights, failing to return rental cars or failing to return to work Tuesday. The event is set to officially end Monday but many people begin leaving Saturday night or Sunday... The closures and order to remain in shelter come as the event was supposed reach its zenith on Saturday night with the burning of the giant wooden Man effigy towering over the temporary city. All vehicle traffic within the encampment has been halted, including servicing for the thousands of portable toilets that make the event possible. Organizers have also begun rationing ice sales... Given the conditions, which include forecast rain Sunday, it appears unlikely anyone will be permitted to drive out soon. Burning Man officials have not provided a comprehensive update on conditions, departure timing or even the multiple art burns scheduled for Saturday and Sunday. Longtime attendees said they can't remember a burn with this much rain... Organizers banned vehicle traffic from the roads Friday afternoon and kept the exit gates closed as of 5 a.m. Saturday. "Many attendees appeared to remain in good spirits, playing beer pong in the muddy streets or splashing in the standing water. Techno continued echoing around the encampment, and spontaneous dance parties kept breaking out." "Walking was almost impossible Saturday morning, but started to improve as the ground began to dry. Then it began raining again."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Are you old enough to remember channel surfing?" asks long-time Slashdog reader MightyMait. "When there were only a handful of broadcast channels, it wasn't a big deal..."But when we got cable/satelite, one could spend inordinate amounts of time flipping through the channels looking for something decent to watch. Now, with the proliferation of streaming services... Streaming viewers are now "spending a record 10.5 minutes per session deciding what to watch," according to TV Tech, citing a new study from the Nielsen-owned entertainment-data company Gracenote. Their 2023 State of Play report "found that that there were 1.9 million video titles available to viewers in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Mexico and Germany in July 2021, a number that had swelled to 2.7 million titles by June 2023."Of the total count, a whopping 86.7% were available on streaming services. Compounding complexity, many popular shows now appear in multiple streaming catalogs, as the industry pivots from offering content exclusivity to broad distribution strategies that companies hope will balance massive streaming loses, the report noted. The Gracenote analysis also found that audiences now have nearly 40,000 individual FAST channels, streaming providers and aggregators to choose from. The original submission from MightyMait asks Slashdot readers: "Are you feeling the pain? And if so, "What strategies do you employ to avoid this time suck?" Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. And do streamers spend more time deciding what to watch?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader martiniturbide writes: ArcaOS 5.1.0 is an OEM distribution of IBM's discontinued OS/2 Warp operating system. This new version of ArcaOS offers UEFI compatibility allowing it to run in modern x86 hardware and also includes the ability to install to GPT-based disk layouts. At OS2World the OS/2 community has been called upon to report supported hardware, open source any OS/2 software, make public as much OS/2 documentation as possible and post the important platform links. OS2World insists that open source has helped OS/2 in the past years and it is time to look under the hood to try to clone internal components like Control Program, Presentation Manager, SOM and Workplace Shell.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares The Hill's report from earlier this month. Apparently America's tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service "cannot locate thousands of microfilm cartridges containing millions of sensitive individual and business tax account records, according to a watchdog report."The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said in a report released August 8 that the IRS cannot account for microfilm cartridges - which contain backups of tax records as required under federal law - from fiscal 2010 that were originally stored at a processing center in Fresno, California... The watchdog also found seven empty boxes, which could hold up to 168 cartridges total, at the Ogden Tax Processing Center in Utah. Ogden personnel did not know where the missing cartridges were. More than 4,000 cartridges containing business tax account information from fiscal 2018 and 4,500 cartridges containing individual tax account information from fiscal 2019 also could not be accounted for at the Kansas City facility, according to the report. "The personal taxpayer and tax information included on these backup cartridges is key information that can be used to commit tax refund fraud identity theft," the report noted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Generally you may not carry a concealed firearm on your person in public," warns a California government web site, "unless you have a valid Carry Concealed Weapon (CCW) license." And a California appellate court associated justice writes that in the county where Apple is located, "the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office rarely issued CCW licenses." This has led to Thomas Moyer, Apple's head of global security, facing bribery charges, reports Reason's legal blog, the Volokh Conspiracy. According to the judge's statement (citing the case of the public defender)......the Santa Clara County undersheriff requested - and defendant Thomas Moyer made - a promise to donate iPads to the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office in exchange for releasing concealed carry weapon licenses that the sheriff had signed. Consistent with the Ninth Circuit's interpretation of California law, federal law and the law in many states, we conclude that such a promise may constitute a bribe. We also conclude that the evidence presented to the grand jury was sufficient to raise a reasonable suspicion of such bribery. Accordingly, we reverse the trial court's order dismissing the bribery count against Moyer, reinstate that count, and remand for further proceedings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What caused Monday's glitch in the UK's air traffic control system that left thousands of passengers stranded? Wednesday the Independent reported that it may have been triggered by "an incorrectly filed flight plan by a French airline."Several sources say the issue may have been caused when a French airline filed a dodgy flight plan that made no digital sense. Instead of the error being rejected, it prompted a shutdown of the entire National Air Traffic Services (Nats) system - raising questions over how one clerical error could cause such mayhem... Downing Street has launched an independent review into the incident, which caused more than a quarter of flights at UK airports to be cancelled on Monday... In his statement, Nats chief executive Martin Rolfe said Nats' systems, both primary and the back-ups, responded to the incorrect flight data by suspending automatic processing "to ensure that no incorrect safety-related information could be presented to an air traffic controller or impact the rest of the air traffic system". The article also points out that "Passengers hit by the air traffic control meltdown face being stranded abroad for up to a week."Around 300,000 airline passengers have now been hit by flight cancellations since the hours-long failure of the Nats system on bank holiday Monday. The knock-on effect is set to last for several more days, as under-pressure airlines battle the backlog in a week where millions are already returning to the UK from their summer holidays. Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"France and Germany lead the camps in disagreeing on the future of nuclear in Europe," write two climate policy journalists. On the Energy Post blog they explore why - citing energy experts and politicians. Germany "ultimately completed its nuclear exit in April 2023," while France "has the highest share of nuclear in the energy mix of any country in the world."[A] major concern is that more nuclear means less renewables, at a time when wind and solar need all the scale they can get... In a joint attempt to provide greater technical clarity on the nuclear power debate, French think tank IDDRI and German Agora Energiewende set out in 2018 to understand how nuclear energy will influence the transformation of energy systems in both countries. They found that if a high share of coal or nuclear based conventional power capacity stays online in both countries, this will likely to delay the time when market prices allow renewable power operators to cover their production costs and run the operations at a profit. They also found that exporting surplus electricity with conventional plants bites into renewable power investments abroad. At the same time, the growing share of renewables would eventually render most conventional plants unprofitable. "In order to avoid stranded assets, it is essential to gradually reduce conventional capacities," the bi-national report concluded... Xavier Moreno, president of French think tank Ecological Realities and Energy Mix Study Circle (Cereme) and former vice president of French utility company Suez, said the all-renewables approach was complicated by a lack of viable electricity storage technologies. "Technically speaking, it would be necessary to store up to 20 percent to be able to smoothen renewable power supply." Those who believe that this will be possible through a combination of different storage options are chasing "a dream," Moreno argued. The issue comes up when trading power in Europe's integrated energy market: should gate closure times be based on a decentralised, flexible renewables-based system, or a centralised grid based on nuclear baseloads? Rainer Hinrichs-Rahlwes, European policy expert for the German Renewable Energy Federation lobby group, says "Nuclear power plants and their inflexible output can cause grid congestion, the opposite of what is needed to accommodate large shares of wind and solar in a modern and flexible grid system." The article notes that France plans to eliminate coal use by 2038, and already has one of the lowest emissions per head of any rich country. But "In mid-2023, 800 French scientists warned against the risks of the country's new nuclear programme, pointing to unresolved questions of radioactive waste management, which remain largely unresolved in most of the EU, including in France. The scientists also warned against risks of accidental contamination or meltdown." Thanks to Slashdot reader AleRunner for submitting the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs:Domain names ending in ".US" - the top-level domain for the United States - are among the most prevalent in phishing scams, new research shows. This is noteworthy because .US is overseen by the U.S. government, which is frequently the target of phishing domains ending in .US. Also, .US domains are only supposed to be available to U.S. citizens and to those who can demonstrate that they have a physical presence in the United States... [F]ew other major countries in the world have anywhere near as many phishing domains each year as .US. That's according to The Interisle Consulting Group, which gathers phishing data from multiple industry sources and publishes an annual report on the latest trends. Interisle's newest study examined six million phishing reports between May 1, 2022 and April 30, 2023, and found 30,000 .US phishing domains. .US is overseen by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an executive branch agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. However, NTIA currently contracts out the management of the .US domain to GoDaddy, by far the world's largest domain registrar. Under NTIA regulations, the administrator of the .US registry must take certain steps to verify that their customers actually reside in the United States, or own organizations based in the U.S. But Interisle found that whatever GoDaddy was doing to manage that vetting process wasn't working.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Verge argues we're seeing "the end of the Googleverse. For two decades, Google Search was the invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content. "Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question... all around us are signs that the era of 'peak Google' is ending or, possibly, already over."There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was. The rise of massive closed algorithmic social networks like Meta's Facebook and Instagram began eating the web in the 2010s. More recently, there's been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok - which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users... Google Reader shut down in 2013, taking with it the last vestiges of the blogosphere. Search inside of Google Groups has repeatedly broken over the years. Blogger still works, but without Google Reader as a hub for aggregating it, most publishers started making native content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and, more recently, TikTok. Discoverability of the open web has suffered. Pinterest has been accused of eating Google Image Search results. And the recent protests over third-party API access at Reddit revealed how popular Google has become as a search engine not for Google's results but for Reddit content. Google's place in the hierarchy of Big Tech is slipping enough that some are even admitting that Apple Maps is worth giving another chance, something unthinkable even a few years ago. On top of it all, OpenAI's massively successful ChatGPT has dragged Google into a race against Microsoft to build a completely different kind of search, one that uses a chatbot interface supported by generative AI. Their article quotes the founder of the long-ago Google-watching blog, "Google Blogoscoped," who remembers that when Google first came along, "they were ad-free with actually relevant results in a minimalistic kind of design. If we fast-forward to now, it's kind of inverted now. The results are kind of spammy and keyword-built and SEO stuff. And so it might be hard to understand for people looking at Google now how useful it was back then." The question, of course, is when did it all go wrong? How did a site that captured the imagination of the internet and fundamentally changed the way we communicate turn into a burned-out Walmart at the edge of town? Well, if you ask Anil Dash, it was all the way back in 2003 - when the company turned on its AdSense program. "Prior to 2003-2004, you could have an open comment box on the internet. And nobody would pretty much type in it unless they wanted to leave a comment. No authentication. Nothing. And the reason why was because who the fuck cares what you comment on there. And then instantly, overnight, what happened?" Dash said. "Every single comment thread on the internet was instantly spammed. And it happened overnight...." As he sees it, Google's advertising tools gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform. From that moment forward, Google cared more about the health of its own network than the health of the wider internet. "At that point it was really clear where the next 20 years were going to go," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kotaku reports that last week 29-year old Darin Harris "allegedly stole dozens of copies of the game from a warehouse and started selling them online," prompting lots of pre-release leaks for the game. "One Reddit user immediately reported the leaks to Bethesda and Memphis police," adds Kotaku. "And he's now been banned from the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit after posting about it."I know this because the commenter in question, Jasper Adkins, emailed Kotaku to inform us it had happened. "It seems to me that the subreddit is running on 'bread and circuses' mode mixed with bystander syndrome," he wrote in his initial email. "They're perfectly willing to ignore a crime that hurts a developer they claim to support, in exchange for a few minutes of shaky gameplay filmed from a phone...." Despite the criminal charges against him, Harris has become something of a folk hero within the community of fans hungry for Starfield leaks. As the Commercial Appeal reported, memes hail him as "Lord Tyrone" (his middle name) and one player even vowed to name their Starfield ship "Memphian" in his honor... [Adkins] was banned from r/GamingLeaksAndRumours on August 24 shortly after posting about how he tried to help get Harris arrested. "An officer at the station told me so himself when I called him about it," he wrote in the middle of a long comment thread. Adkins soon received a notification that he had violated the subreddit's rules.He protested, but the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours admins weren't having it. "Just not interested in having someone here who takes action against the community like that," they wrote back. I reached out to one of the subreddit's admins to confirm what had happened and the thinking behind the ban. "If he just did it I wouldn't think badly of him but to come on the sub and brag about calling the cops on the dude just rubbed me the wrong way," one of them told Kotaku in a DM. "Might unban him at some point but for now he's behind the bars of the internet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A biotech company has conducted a small-scale trial involving the implantation of lab-made neurons into the brains of 12 people with Parkinson's disease. The implanted neurons are designed to produce dopamine, which is deficient in Parkinson's patients, and early data suggests they may have survived and improved symptoms in some cases. MIT Technology Review reports: The study is one of the largest and most costly tests yet of embryonic-stem-cell technology, the controversial and much-hyped approach of using stem cells taken from IVF embryos to produce replacement tissue and body parts. The replacement neurons were manufactured using powerful stem cells originally sourced from a human embryo created an in vitro fertilization procedure. According to data presented by Henchliffe and others on August 28 at the International Congress for Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorder in Copenhagen, there are also hints that the added cells had survived and were reducing patients' symptoms a year after the treatment. These clues that the transplants helped came from brain scans that showed an increase in dopamine cells in the patients' brains as well as a decrease in "off time," or the number of hours per day the volunteers felt they were incapacitated by their symptoms. However, outside experts expressed caution in interpreting the findings, saying they seemed to show inconsistent effects -- some of which might be due to the placebo effect, not the treatment. Because researchers can't see the cells directly once they are in a person's head, they instead track their presence by giving people a radioactive precursor to dopamine and then watching its uptake in their brains in a PET scanner. "It is encouraging that the trial has not led to any safety concerns and that there may be some benefits," says Roger Barker, who studies Parkinson's disease at the University of Cambridge. But Barker called the evidence the transplanted cells had survived "a bit disappointing." He said the results were not so strong, adding that it's "still a bit too early to know" whether the transplanted cells took hold and repaired the patients' brains.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Department of Defense has launched a website collecting publicly available, declassified information on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). "For now, the general public will be able to read through the posted information," reports CNET. "Soon, US government employees, contractors, and service members with knowledge of US programs can report their own sightings, and later, others will be able to submit reports." From the report: "This website will provide information, including photos and videos, on resolved UAP cases as they are declassified and approved for public release," the department said in a release posted on Thursday. "The website's other content includes reporting trends and a frequently asked questions section as well as links to official reports, transcripts, press releases, and other resources that the public may find useful, such as applicable statutes and aircraft, balloon and satellite tracking sites." For now, one of the most interesting parts of the site is its trends section. Apparently, most reported UAPs are round, either white, silver or translucent, spotted at around 10,000 to 30,000 feet, 1-4 meters in size, and do not emit thermal exhaust. Hotspots for sightings include both the US East and West coasts. There's also a small section of videos with names such as "DVIDS Video - Unresolved Case: Navy 2021 Flyby," and "UAP Video: Middle East Object." Readers are able to leave comments on the videos. Of the "Middle East Object" video, one person writes,"Noticed I never saw it cast a shadow. But other objects have shadows."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Early human ancestors came close to eradication in a severe evolutionary bottleneck between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago, according to scientists. A genomics analysis of more than 3,000 living people suggested that our ancestors' total population plummeted to about 1,280 breeding individuals for about 117,000 years. Scientists believe that an extreme climate event could have led to the bottleneck that came close to wiping out our ancestral line. "The numbers that emerge from our study correspond to those of species that are currently at risk of extinction," said Prof Giorgio Manzi, an anthropologist at Sapienza University of Rome and a senior author of the research. However, Manzi and his colleagues believe that the existential pressures of the bottleneck could have triggered the emergence of a new species, Homo heidelbergensis, which some believe is the shared ancestor of modern humans and our cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Homo sapiens are thought to have emerged about 300,000 years ago. "It was lucky [that we survived], but we know from evolutionary biology that the emergence of a new species can happen in small, isolated populations," said Manzi. Prof Chris Stringer, the head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, who was not involved in the research, said: "It's an extraordinary length of time. It's remarkable that we did get through at all. For a population of that size, you just need one bad climate event, an epidemic, a volcanic eruption and you're gone." The decline appears to coincide with significant changes in global climate that turned glaciations into long-term events, a decrease in sea surface temperatures, and a possible long period of drought in Africa and Eurasia. The team behind the work said the time window also coincides with a relatively empty period on the fossil record. However, Stringer said there was not convincing evidence for a global "blank" in the fossil record of early humans, raising the possibility that whatever caused the bottleneck was a more local phenomenon. "Maybe this bottleneck population was stuck in some area of Africa surrounded by desert," he said. The findings have been published in the journal Science.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The NYC police department intends to use drones to monitor Labor Day backyard parties, raising privacy concerns," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "Drone usage by U.S. police departments is increasing, with some operating them beyond visual line of sight. TechSpot reports: "If a caller states there's a large crowd, a large party in a backyard, we're going to be utilizing our assets to go up and go check on the party," said assistant NYPD Commissioner Kaz Daughtry at a recent press conference. Naturally, the admission attracted the attention of privacy and civil liberties advocates who questioned if the department's plans violate existing laws governing surveillance in the area. In its unmanned aircraft systems (UAS): Impact and use policy from 2021, the NYC police department said drones would not be used in areas where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy without a search warrant, except in exigent circumstances (PDF). Are backyard parties really all that pressing? "Deploying drones in this way is a sci-fi inspired scenario," said Daniel Schwarz, a technology and privacy strategist with the New York Civil Liberties Union. Schwarz added that it is at variance with the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, which "requires the reporting and evaluation of surveillance technologies used by the NYPD."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has patented an AI-powered backpack design featuring a plethora of sensors that may include cameras, microphones, GPS, and a compass. Tom's Hardware reports: Additionally, Microsoft thinks it may be useful to add in LEDs and speakers, as well as a haptic actuator, into the straps. Some real-time processing is deemed necessary to the smart wearable. Thus, various recognition modules are proposed to provide image, text, speech, facial, and cognitive recognition. As well as real-time monitors feeding data to the built-in processing power for AI smarts, the system housed in the backpack also will boast a recording device (using on-board storage), wireless connectivity, battery power / charging and more. With all the above sensing and processing on your person, in the backpack, it is envisioned that wearers will benefit from AI enhanced object identification and analysis, nearby device interaction, and be able to gain contextual insights. A flow chart shows how the backpack and its data feed might work alongside personal computers and cloud servers. Other illustrations show the wandering backpack wearer navigating a ski resort, and checking out supermarket prices, as well as considering booking concert tickets. Sometimes the user may interact with the backpack's on-board AI via speech, e.g. "Hey Backpack, add this poster to my calendar." Alternatively some AI actions or contextual tasks may be instigated by interacting with sensors on the straps. You can view the patent application here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Given that too many schools don't teach calculus, chemistry and physics, CalTech is allowing potential undergraduates to demonstrate their ability in these fields by using Khan Academy," writes Slashdot reader Bruce66423. Los Angeles Times reports: One of Caltech's alternative paths is taking Khan Academy's free, online classes and scoring 90% or higher on a certification test. Sal Khan, academy founder, said Caltech's action is a "huge deal" for equitable access to college. While Caltech is small -- only 2,400 students, about 40% of them undergraduates -- Khan said he hoped its prestigious reputation would encourage other institutions to examine their admission barriers and find creative solutions to ease them. The Pasadena-based institute, with a 3% admission rate last year, boasts 46 Nobel laureates and cutting-edge research in such fields as earthquake engineering, behavioral genetics, geochemistry, quantum information and aerospace. "You have one of the most academically rigorous schools on the planet that has arguably one of the highest bars for admission, saying that an alternative pathway that is free and accessible to anyone is now a means to meeting their requirements," said Khan, whose nonprofit offers free courses, test prep and tutoring to more than 152 million users. [...] The impetus for the policy change began in February, when Pallie, the admissions director, and two Caltech colleagues attended a workshop on equity hosted by the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling. They were particularly struck by one speaker, Melodie Baker of Just Equations, a nonprofit that seeks to widen math opportunities. As Baker pointed out the lack of access to calculus for many students, Pallie and her team began to question Caltech's admission requirement for the course, along with physics and chemistry. Pallie and Jared Leadbetter, a professor of environmental microbiology who heads the faculty admissions committee, began to look into potential course alternatives. Pallie connected with Khan's team, which started a second nonprofit, Schoolhouse.world, during the pandemic in 2020 to offer free tutoring. Peer tutors on the platform certify they are qualified for their jobs by scoring at least 90% on the course exam and videotaping themselves explaining how they solved each problem on it. The video helps ensure that the students actually took the exam themselves and understand the material. That video feature gave Caltech assurances about the integrity of the alternative path. Under the new process, students would take a calculus, physics or chemistry class offered by Khan Academy and use the Schoolhouse platform to certify their mastery of the content as tutors do with a 90% score or better on the exam and a videotaped explanation of their reasoning. Proof of certification is required within one week of the application deadline, which is in November for early action and January for regular decisions. Pallie and Leadbetter also wanted to test whether the Khan Academy courses are sufficiently rigorous. Several Caltech undergraduates took the courses to assess whether all concepts were covered in enough breadth and depth to pass the campus placement exams in those subjects. Miranda, a rising Caltech junior studying mechanical engineering, took the calculus course and gave it a thumbs-up, although she added that students would probably want to use additional textbooks and other study materials to deepen their preparation for Caltech.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: Slowly but surely, sales of electric cars have crept upward as traditional automakers finally embrace EVs. Nissan was early to the electric future with the venerable if modest Leaf. Nissan is now looking to turn old Leafs into something new by harvesting their batteries. The company has begun selling portable power banks built around refurbished automotive batteries, which could give these expensive Leaf cells a new lease on life. The Lithium-ion cells in vehicles have the same properties as the battery in your phone. They start out with a specific power rating, but successive discharge-recharge cycles cause physical stress to the internal structure. Eventually, this results in reduced capacity and voltage. However, Nissan says most Leaf owners stop driving the car before the battery stops working. In fact, many of the individual cells are still in good shape when the vehicles are discarded. Each Nissan Leaf has around 48 lithium-ion battery modules -- the exact number depends on model. While some may be in poor shape at the end of a car's life, Nissan has taken to disassembling the battery packs to refurbish working modules. The result is the Nissan portable power station, which was developed in partnership with JVCKenwood Corp. and 4R Energy Corp. The bulky 32-pound portable chargers contain two Leaf battery modules with about 80% of their original capacity intact. They're no longer suitable for driving an EV, but they can still charge your phone. Nissan sells the battery packs in Japan for 170,500 yen (about $1,170). That might sound like a lot, but it's actually not bad for a super high-capacity battery pack. Each of Nissan's current-gen battery modules is 1.67 kWh, which converts to 112 Ah (112,000 mAh). Assuming a 20% loss in capacity, two of them would have enough juice to charge the largest current iPhone more than 40 times.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lenovo's upcoming 27-inch 4K monitor offers a unique experience unlike any other display: glasses-free 3D that can be toggled on and off. According to Ars Technica, the monitor features a lenticular lens and real-time eye-tracking to create the effect. It's being targeted at content creators, like 3D graphic designers and developers. From the report: Like other glasses-less 3D screens, [Lenovo's ThinkVision 27 3D Monitor] works by projecting two different images to each of your eyes, resulting in a 3D effect where, as PR images would have you believe, it appears that the images are popping out of the screen. Lenovo says the monitor's 3D resolution is 1920x2160. The lenticular lens in the monitor is switchable, allowing for normal, 2D viewing at 3840x2160, too. The ThinkVision's 27-inch display gives workers a bigger palette. It also means the monitor can be a regular 2D monitor when needed. [...] As a regular 2D monitor, the ThinkVision's specs are pretty standard. It's a 4K IPS screen claiming a 60 Hz refresh rate, 310 nits, a 1,000:1 contrast ratio, and 99 percent DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB color coverage with a Delta E under 2. Like a proper workplace monitor, there's also a strong port selection: two HDMI 2.1, one DisplayPort 1.4, four USB-A (3.1 Gen 1) ports, one USB-C port (3.2 Gen 1) with up to 15 W power delivery, RJ45, a 3.5mm jack, plus an upstream USB-C port with up to 100 W power delivery.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robinhood announced it has purchased more than 55 million shares of the firm previously held by former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, which were seized in January by the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the criminal case against FTX and its executives. CoinTelegraph reports: The purchase had been expected. Robinhood's board of directors announced the approval of the deal in the company's Q4 2022 report, and an Aug. 30 SEC filing said the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York had approved the purchase "free and clear of any claims, interests, liens and encumbrances." Robinhood made the repurchase agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service. "We are happy to have completed the purchase of these shares and look forward to executing on our growth plans on behalf of our customers and shareholders," said Robinhood chief financial officer Jason Warnick.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An unknown hacker gained administrative control of Sourcegraph, an AI-driven service used by developers at Uber, Reddit, Dropbox, and other companies, and used it to provide free access to resources that normally would have required payment. In the process, the hacker(s) may have accessed personal information belonging to Sourcegraph users, Diego Comas, Sourcegraph's head of security, said in a post on Wednesday. For paid users, the information exposed included license keys and the names and email addresses of license key holders. For non-paying users, it was limited to email addresses associated with their accounts. Private code, emails, passwords, usernames, or other personal information were inaccessible. The hacker gained administrative access by obtaining an authentication key a Sourcegraph developer accidentally included in a code published to a public Sourcegraph instance hosted on Sourcegraph.com. After creating a normal user Sourcegraph account, the hacker used the token to elevate the account privileges to those of an administrator. The access token appeared in a pull request posted on July 14, the user account was created on August 28, and the elevation to admin occurred on August 30. "The malicious user, or someone connected to them, created a proxy app allowing users to directly call Sourcegraph's APIs and leverage the underlying LLM [large language model]," Comas wrote. "Users were instructed to create free Sourcegraph.com accounts, generate access tokens, and then request the malicious user to greatly increase their rate limit. On August 30 (2023-08-30 13:25:54 UTC), the Sourcegraph security team identified the malicious site-admin user, revoked their access, and kicked off an internal investigation for both mitigation and next steps." The resource free-for-all generated a spike in calls to Sourcegraph programming interfaces, which are normally rate-limited for free accounts. "The promise of free access to Sourcegraph API prompted many to create accounts and start using the proxy app," Comas wrote. "The app and instructions on how to use it quickly made its way across the web, generating close to 2 million views. As more users discovered the proxy app, they created free Sourcegraph.com accounts, adding their access tokens, and accessing Sourcegraph APIs illegitimately." [...] While most data was available for all paid and community users, the number of license keys exposed was limited to 20.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung today revealed the world's first 32 Gb DDR5 DRAM die. From a report: The new memory die is made on the company's 12 nm-class DRAM fabrication process and not only offers increased density, but also lowers power consumption. The chip will allow Samsung to build record 1 TB RDIMMs for servers as well as lower costs of high-capacity memory modules. "With our 12nm-class 32 Gb DRAM, we have secured a solution that will enable DRAM modules of up to 1 TB, allowing us to be ideally positioned to serve the growing need for high-capacity DRAM in the era of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and big data," said SangJoon Hwang, executive vice president of DRAM product & technology at Samsung Electronics. 32 Gb memory dies not only enable Samsung to build a regular, single-rank 32 GB module for client PCs using only eight single-die memory chips, but they also allow for higher capacity DIMMs that were not previously possible. We are talking about 1 TB memory modules using 40 8-Hi 3DS memory stacks based on eight 32 Gb memory devices. Such modules may sound overkill, but for artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, and database servers, more DRAM capacity can easily be put to good use. Eventually, 1TB RDIMMs would allow for up to 12 TB of memory in a single socket server (e.g. AMD's EPYC 9004 platform), something that cannot be done now.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: AMD last week announced what are probably the last major GPU launches of this generation of graphics cards: the $449 Radeon RX 7700 XT and $499 Radeon RX 7800 XT. AMD's pricing and performance numbers pit the cards against Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (specifically the $499 16GB version) and the $599 RTX 4070. AMD's pricing is aggressive enough that Nvidia is quietly cutting the prices of some 16GB RTX 4060 Ti cards to $449, to match the RX 7700 XT. The announcement about the $50 reduction was buried toward the bottom of an email that Nvidia sent to GPU reviewers ahead of AMD's launch next week; it also drew attention to Nvidia-specific features like DLSS upscaling and frame generation, which compete with AMD's GPU-agnostic FSR, plus recent DLSS improvements that improve ray-tracing performance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hot on the heels of its lunar landing success, India is readying to blast a probe even deeper into space to study the sun. From a report: The country's first solar observation mission, named Aditya-L1, is set to be launched from India's main spaceport on Sriharikota, an island off the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, at 11:50 a.m. local time on Saturday. The spacecraft is scheduled to spend 125 days traveling 1.5 million kilometers (932,000 miles) to its destination, a point in space where objects stay put and consume less fuel. While arriving there would be an impressive achievement for ISRO, the Indian space agency, Aditya-L1 would have gone just a fraction of the 150 million km between Earth and the sun. For ISRO, success would be another major feat after India became the first country to land a spacecraft close to the lunar south pole in August. India has more ambitious projects in the works. A human spaceflight program aims to launch astronauts into orbit for the first time possibly by 2025, ISRO Chairman S Somanath said in an interview with news agency Asian News International. ISRO and NASA plan to cooperate on sending astronauts to the International Space Station and India is in discussions with Japan to work together on a mission.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The centenary of the Great Kanto earthquake brings angst, and lessons for the world. From a report: Every year on September 1st, Japan's ministers trek by foot to the prime minister's office to take part in a crisis simulation. Across the country, local officials and schoolchildren drill for disasters. The date marks the Great Kanto earthquake, a 7.9-magnitude tremor that struck near the capital back in 1923. The ensuing disaster killed at least 105,000 people, including around 70,000 in Tokyo itself, destroyed 370,000 homes and changed the course of Japanese history. This year's centenary of the disaster has occasioned much commemoration -- and angst. What will happen when the next Big One hits? Seismologists cannot predict earthquakes, but their statistical models, which are based on past patterns, can estimate the likelihood of one. The city government's experts reckon there is a 70% chance of a magnitude 7 or higher quake hitting the capital within the next 30 years. Far fewer people will probably die than during the disaster in 1923, thanks to better technology and planning: the worst case foresees some 6,000 deaths in the city. But millions of lives will be upended. Another, similarly likely scenario could be much worse. A Nankai Trough earthquake, envisaged south of Kansai, Japan's industrial heartland, could trigger a tsunami; as many as 323,000 might be killed, according to an official estimate. Japan's approach to the risks of such catastrophes offers insights for a warming world facing more frequent disasters. Quakes of this size could "challenge the survival of Japan as a state" and send economic shock waves around the globe, says Fukuwa Nobuo of Nagoya University. After the next Tokyo quake, recovering basic city functions could take weeks and rebuilding the capital could take years; direct damage alone could run to as much as $75bn. One piece of research estimates that gdp would dip by 11% following a Nankai earthquake.Read more of this story at Slashdot.