Amazon said on Tuesday its online pharmacy will automatically apply manufacturer-sponsored coupons to more than 15 insulin and diabetes medicines to help patients access discounts pledged by the drug industry. From a report: With the new program, patients using Amazon Pharmacy will no longer have to search for and manually enter coupons from the three largest insulin makers, Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Sanofi, to lower the cost of their insulin to as little as $35 for a month's supply, the company said. Novo, Lilly and Sanofi announced in March that they would slash their insulin prices by at least 70% by or in 2024, but a report from Senator Elizabeth Warren released last month said some patients were finding it difficult to get already discounted generic insulin from pharmacies at the promised lower price. Despite Lilly lowering the list price of its Insulin Lispro to $25 per vial in May, patients were still being quoted as much as $330 for the medicine, were not being told about cheaper options when they went to pharmacies, and were finding it difficult to use Lilly's savings program, Warren's report found. Vin Gupta, Amazon Pharmacy's Chief Medical Officer, said the report highlighted the need to make it easier for patients to get their insulin at the lowest possible prices.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Powered by shows like "Suits" on Netflix, streaming's share of U.S. viewing time grew to a new high in July, while television viewing fell below 50% for the first time, according to new Nielsen data. From a report: The milestone is the latest sign of the rapid erosion of the cable-TV bundle, which has lost about a quarter of its subscribers over the past decade, as more Americans cut the cord in favor of streaming services like Netflix, Google's YouTube and Disney's Hulu. Cable television accounted for 29.6% of total U.S. viewing time in July, while broadcast attracted 20%, Nielsen said in a release published Tuesday. Streaming services, meanwhile, captured 38.7% of Americans' viewing time, while a category labeled "Other" -- which Nielsen says includes usage such as DVD playback and gaming -- accounted for the remaining 11.6%. The growth of streaming platforms at the expense of cable and broadcast TV networks has accelerated in recent years, as most entertainment conglomerates introduced their own direct-to-consumer services to take on industry leader Netflix. As they sought to rapidly grow their subscriber bases, many of them chose to make their highest-profile and costliest content available exclusively on streaming. While original content helps reel in subscribers and build streaming brands, the most-watched programs are sometimes older TV shows. Last month, the show Americans spent the most time watching was "Suits," a legal drama starring Meghan Markle made for cable TV that made its debut more than a decade ago.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The mysterious attacks began on July 11. "Strange beings," locals said, visiting an isolated Indigenous community in rural Peru at night, harassing its inhabitants and attempting to kidnap a 15-year-old girl. [...] News of the alleged extraterrestrial attackers quickly spread online as believers, skeptics, and internet sleuths around the world analyzed grainy videos posted by members of the Ikitu community. The reported sightings came on the heels of U.S. congressional hearings about unidentified aerial phenomenon that ignited a global conversation about the possibility of extraterrestrial life visiting Earth. Members of the Peruvian Navy and Police traveled to the isolated community, which is located 10 hours by boat from the Maynas provincial capital of Iquitos, to investigate the strange disturbances in early August. Last week, authorities announced that they believed the perpetrators were members of illegal gold mining gangs from Colombia and Brazil using advanced flying technology to terrorize the community, according to RPP Noticias. Carlos Castro Quintanilla, the lead investigator in the case, said that 80 percent of illegal gold dredging in the region is located in the Nanay river basin, where the Ikitu community is located. One of the key pieces to the investigation was related to the attempted kidnapping of a 15-year-old girl on July 29. Cristian Caleb Pacaya, a local teacher who witnessed the attack, said that they "were using state of the art technology, like thrusters that allow people to fly." He said that after looking the devices up on Google, he believed that they were "jetpacks." Authorities have not made any arrests related to the attacks, nor named the alleged assailants or their organization directly. However, the prosecutors office claimed that they had destroyed 110 dredging operations and 10 illegal mining camps in the area already in 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares a report from BleepingComputer: The Discord.io custom invite service has temporarily shut down after suffering a data breach exposing the information of 760,000 members. Discord.io is not an official Discord site but a third-party service allowing server owners to create custom invites to their channels. Most of the community was built around the service's Discord server, with over 14,000 members. Yesterday, a person known as 'Akhirah' began offering the Discord.io database for sale on the new Breached hacking forums. As proof of the theft, the threat actor shared four user records from the database. The most sensitive information in the breach is a member's username, email address, billing address (small number of people), salted and hashed password (small number of people), and Discord ID. "This information is not private and can be obtained by anyone sharing a server with you. Its inclusion in the breach does, however, mean that other people might be able to link your Discord account to a given email address," Discord.io explained about the leaking of Discord IDs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The judge overseeing Apple's "batterygate" iPhone throttling lawsuit has cleared the way for payments to be sent out. MacRumors reports: Apple in 2020 agreed to pay $500 million to settle the "batterygate" lawsuit, which accused the company of secretly throttling older iPhone models. The class action lawsuit was open to U.S. customers who had an iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, or 7 Plus running iOS 10.2.1 or iOS 11.2 prior to December 21, 2017. [...] Apple ultimately apologized for its lack of communication and dropped the price of battery replacements to $29 through the end of 2018. iPhone owners eligible for a payout would have needed to submit a claim back in 2020, and submissions were open through October 6, 2020. Those who submitted a claim back then will be eligible for a payment, which will be around $65 per claimant.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sam Bankman-Fried used money he stole from customers of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange to make more than $100 million in political campaign contributions before the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, federal prosecutors said on Monday. Reuters reports: An amended indictment accused the 31-year-old former billionaire of directing two FTX executives to evade contribution limits by donating to Democrats and Republicans, and to conceal where the money came from. "He leveraged this influence, in turn, to lobby Congress and regulatory agencies to support legislation and regulation he believed would make it easier for FTX to continue to accept customer deposits and grow," the indictment said. Bankman-Fried faces seven counts of conspiracy and fraud over FTX's collapse, though the indictment no longer includes conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws as a separate count. [...] Bankman-Fried's indictment does not name the two people prosecutors say he used for "straw donors" to donate money at his direction. But other court papers and Federal Elections Commission data show they are Nishad Singh and Ryan Salame. Singh, FTX's former engineering chief, pleaded guilty to fraud and campaign finance violations in February. He donated $9.7 million to Democratic candidates and causes, and said in court he knew the money came from FTX customers. Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX's Bahamian unit, gave more than $24 million to Republican candidates and causes in the 2022 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commision data. He has not been charged with a crime. In a separate court filing on Monday, prosecutors said Salame's lawyer had told them he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if called to testify. Prosecutors said Salame told a family member in a November 2021 message that Bankman-Fried wanted to use political donations to "weed-out" anti-crypto Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and would likely "route money through me to weed out that republican [sic] side." On Friday, a U.S. judge revoked Sam Bankman-Fried's bail due to probable cause that he tampered with witnesses at least twice. He is being sent to jail.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Iraq's telecom ministry lifted the ban on Telegram over the weekend, days after the agency blocked the chat app over security concerns. The ministry said it lifted the ban because of the "response of the company that owns the application to the requirements of the security authorities," which required Telegram to reveal sources leaking data of officials and citizens, according to a translated statement. Telegram has shown commitment to communicating with authorities about security concerns, the ministry said, insisting that it "doesn't stand against freedom of expression." Telegram told Reuters that the company forbids users from posting private data on the platform without consent. Telegram didn't share any private user data with Iraqi authorities, the messaging app operator told the publication. "We can confirm that our moderators took down several channels sharing personal data. However, we can also confirm that no private user data was requested from Telegram and that none has been shared," the company told the publication in a statement. Context: "Last week, Iraq banned the chat app saying that many channels were publishing citizen's private data such as names, addresses, and family ties with other people," reports TechCrunch. "At that time, the ministry said that Telegram -- which has more than 800 million users globally -- didn't respond to its requests, and as a result, the country banned the app."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
According to the Globe Gazette, the school board of Mason City, Iowa has begun leveraging AI technology to cultivate lists of potentially bannable books from the district's libraries ahead of the 2023/24 school year. Engadget reports: In May, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed, and Governor Kim Reynolds subsequently signed, Senate File 496 (SF 496), which enacted sweeping changes to the state's education curriculum. Specifically it limits what books can be made available in school libraries and classrooms, requiring titles to be "age appropriatea and without "descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act," per Iowa Code 702.17. But ensuring that every book in the district's archives adhere to these new rules is quickly turning into a mammoth undertaking. "Our classroom and school libraries have vast collections, consisting of texts purchased, donated, and found," Bridgette Exman, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction at Mason City Community School District, said in a statement. "It is simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements." As such, the Mason City School District is bringing in AI to parse suspect texts for banned ideas and descriptions since there are simply too many titles for human reviewers to cover on their own. Per the district, a "master list" is first cobbled together from "several sources" based on whether there were previous complaints of sexual content. Books from that list are then scanned by "AI software" -- the district doesn't specify which systems will be employed -- which tells the state censors whether or not there actually is a depiction of sex in the book. So far, the AI has flagged 19 books for removal. [The full list is available here.]Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Despite a record-breaking start in its first weeks of launch, engagement with Meta's Threads app continues to plummet. According to Similarweb, engagement is down 79% from a high of 2.3 million active users in early July to 576,000 as of August 7th. The Guardian reports: In addition to users jumping ship, large US companies like the fast food chain Wendy's, the clothing store Anthropologie and Rare Beauty, a makeup line, have all decreased the number of posts they publish on Threads, Adweek reports. On its busiest day, the number of users of Threads was less than half that of Twitter, according to Similarweb data. Twitter averages more than 100 million active daily users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
While Apple's next line of smartwatches is expected to be a minor upgrade, the company is working on a revamped "Watch X" update for the device's 10th anniversary. Bloombeg's Mark Gurman reports: Apple is planning a splashy upgrade for its smartwatch, but you won't see it this year. The 2023 models, due next month, will be a minor refresh -- the kind of incremental update that has characterized the product in recent years. Inside Apple, executives have pondered the idea of switching away from this slow-but-steady annual upgrade cycle. The deliberations haven't gotten far (Apple has dutifully released a new watch every year since the category debuted in 2015), but recent updates to the device underscore why this is even a discussion. [...] Fact is, Apple isn't giving consumers many reasons to buy a new watch with each generation. The company did launch an impressive new Apple Watch Ultra last year that spurred upgrades at the high end, but 2023 will (once again) be another low-key year. [...] Because of the Apple Watch's slow evolution over the years, the design has remained largely the same since the Series 4 launched in 2018 -- aside from the Ultra model. But that's poised to change. Apple is planning a "Watch X" model to mark the device's 10-year anniversary, and it promises to be the biggest overhaul yet. (The category was unveiled in 2014 and released the following year, so Apple is planning to launch Watch X either in 2024 or 2025.) With the X model, Apple designers are working on a thinner watch case and have explored changing the way bands are attached to the device. Starting with the original Apple Watch, bands have slid into the sides of the chassis and attached with a locking mechanism. Keeping that design the same let the bands stay compatible with old and new models, but it has downsides. People involved in the development of new Apple Watches say the system takes up a considerable amount of space that could be better filled with a bigger battery or other components. To that end, the company has explored a new magnetic band attachment system, though it's unclear if it will be ready or used in the Watch X revamp. Even bigger changes are coming as well: a microLED display that tops the color and clarity of the current OLED screens, as well as a technology for monitoring blood pressure.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: A whopping 80% of bosses regret their initial return-to-office decisions and say they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of what their employees wanted, according to new research from Envoy. "Many companies are realizing they could have been a lot more measured in their approach, rather than making big, bold, very controversial decisions based on executives' opinions rather than employee data," Larry Gadea, Envoy's CEO and founder, tells CNBC Make It. Envoy interviewed more than 1,000 U.S. company executives and workplace managers who work in-person at least one day per week. Some leaders lamented the challenge of measuring the success of in-office policies, while others said it's been hard to make long-term real estate investments without knowing how employees might feel about being in the office weeks, or even months, from now. Kathy Kacher, a consultant who advises corporate executives on their return-to-office plans, is surprised the percentage isn't higher. "Many organizations that attempted to force a return to the office have had to retract or change their plans because of employee pushback, and now, they don't look strong," says Kacher, the president of Career/Life Alliance Services. "A lot of executives have egg on their faces and they're sad about that."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Some iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro owners have complaints reminiscent of the bad old days of "batterygate," reporting that with less than a year of service on the clock, their phones are already reporting more battery degradation than expected. From a report: Sam Kohl of AppleTrack tweeted in July that his iPhone 14 Pro had already dropped to a maximum capacity of 90 percent, a much faster dropoff than previous iPhones he'd owned, and the thread shows many other people with the same experience. Kohl followed up with a video posted yesterday about the issue, saying it makes it hard for him to recommend the phone, especially considering how much it costs with a price of $999. Officially, Apple says iPhone batteries should "retain up to 80 percent of its original capacity at 500 complete charge cycles." The iPhone 15 series is expected to launch soon, and recent rumors have claimed those devices will see a battery size increase of 10 - 18 percent compared to current devices. He's not the only one seeing these kinds of numbers. Verge alum and Wall Street Journal senior tech columnist Joanna Stern wrote in her newsletter just this week that her iPhone 14 Pro is showing 88 percent battery capacity. Around The Verge, reports are mixed, with two 14 Pros down to 93 and 91 percent and another at 97 percent. In previous years, most haven't seen a drop in reported capacity until two years of use, at least.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
British households are making more green energy upgrades than ever before after installing a record number of solar panels and heat pumps in the first half of the year, according to the industry's official standards body. From a report: The industry figures show there were more green energy installations in June than in previous years. On average, more than 17,000 households installed solar panels every month this year, while the number of homes installing heat pumps reached 3,000 a month for the first time, according to the data. Each month of 2023 was a record month for battery technologies, as installation figures consistently surpassed the month before, bringing the total number of batteries installed in homes and businesses across the UK to more than 1,000 in 2023 so far. The industry's accreditation body, MCS, said the green energy boom has put households on track to install more renewable energy than the last record set in 2012, when many raced to install solar panels before government subsidies were reduced.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ford has hired former Apple executive Peter Stern to help build new high-margin digital and subscription services. Reuters reports: Stern, who previously oversaw Apple TV+, iCloud and Apple News+, will report to Ford CEO Jim Farley. In his new role, Stern will focus on integrating hardware, software and services across the company's Ford Blue, Model e and Ford Pro units. Like other U.S. automakers, Ford is looking to expand beyond its traditional wholesale-to-dealer business model and build recurring revenues from services connected to its vehicles, much as Apple has built on its hardware products. Stern joins an executive team at Ford that includes another Apple alumnus, Doug Field, who is chief advanced product development and technology officer. [...] Stern said Ford plans to create "bundles of services" that will provide "safer, more convenient and more productive experiences." "The basis for differentiation is shifting from the vehicles alone to the integration of hardware, software and services," Stern said. One of Stern's first tasks is to help expand Ford's BlueCruise hands-free driving package, which is being extended to more vehicles in the 2024 model year. Ford will install BlueCruise hardware on another 500,000 vehicles next year, while giving customers the option of activating the subscription package at any point during ownership, rather than just at time of purchase. The automaker plans to offer BlueCruise in a wider variety of Ford and Lincoln models, including F-150, F-150 Lightning, Expedition, Navigator, Nautilus and Corsair.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Millions of Americans had their sensitive medical and health information stolen after hackers exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the widely used MOVEit file transfer software raided systems operated by tech giant IBM. Colorado's Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF), which is responsible for administering Colorado's Medicaid program, confirmed on Friday that it had fallen victim to the MOVEit mass-hacks, exposing the data of more than four million patients. In a data breach notification (PDF) to those affected, Colorado's HCPF said that the data was compromised because IBM, one of the state's vendors, "uses the MOVEit application to move HCPF data files in the normal course of business." The letter states that while no HCPF or Colorado state government systems were affected by this issue, "certain HCPF files on the MOVEit application used by IBM were accessed by the unauthorized actor." These files include patients' full names, dates of birth, home addresses, Social Security numbers, Medicaid and Medicare ID numbers, income information, clinical and medical data including lab results and medication, and health insurance information. HCPF says about 4.1 million individuals are affected. IBM has yet to publicly confirm that it was affected by the MOVEit mass-hacks, and an IBM spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment by TechCrunch. The breach of IBM's MOVEit systems also impacted Missouri's Department of Social Services (DSS), though the number of affected individuals is not yet known. More than six million people live in Missouri state. In a data breach notification posted last week, Missouri's DSS said: "IBM is a vendor that provides services to DSS, the state agency that provides Medicaid services to eligible Missourians. The data vulnerability did not directly impact any DSS systems, but impacted data belonging to DSS." DSS says that the data accessed may include an individual's name, department client number, date of birth, possible benefit eligibility status or coverage, and medical claims information.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A bomb threat against Caesars Forum, the main venue for this week's DEF CON hacking convention, led to the halls being cleared on Saturday evening and the building searched by fire crews and police officers. The Register reports: The timing was very bad, coming in the evening of the main party night for the event. The conference Goons, the red-shirted volunteers who serve as guides and organizers, were praised by attendees for managing the evacuation with aplomb, but when it became clear that the search for the suspect device was going to be hard to find, the DEC CON team cancelled the evening's festivities at Caesars, to the disappointment of thousands. "Last night we were asked to evacuate the building due to a report of a suspicious package. Local police and fire departments conducted a thorough investigation and ultimately determined that the package was safe," the organizers said. "They also conducted additional sweeps of the building as a precaution before allowing our team to return and prepare for today's con. We are working quickly to keep the original schedule on track, but please check here for additional updates before arriving at DEF CON." The event kicked off on August 10 and wrapped up by August 13. Presumably the hoax caller thought of themselves as a merry prankster, rather than the selfish idiot who ruined everyone's night - particularly the timing for those in the Track Four hall who were enjoying 2001: A Space Odyssey and who were forced to miss the crucial last 10 minutes of the movie. While tricks and pranks are something of a tradition, they only get respect if they are clever and intricate, not some fool showing they could use a telephone. It's not like security at the show wasn't heavy enough. The event was patrolled regularly by security guards in body armor with handguns, tasers, the occasional police dog, and a host of other equipment that was a bit of an overkill for a bunch of peaceable hackers. Dubbed by some as "Gravy SEALs," by the end of the show they were visibly warming up, and this hack saw several of them accepting stickers from attendees.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Netflix is officially bringing its games to more devices. So far, the company's impressive library of games has only been available on iOS and Android. Now, though, Netflix is starting to use its streaming tech to publicly test its titles on TVs and computers. From a report: "Our goal has always been to have a game for everyone, and we are working hard to meet members where they are with an accessible, smooth and ubiquitous service," Mike Verdu, Netflix's vice-president of games, wrote in a blog post. "Today, we're taking the first step in making games playable on every device where our members enjoy Netflix." The test appears to be very limited for now. Just two games will be available at the outset: Oxenfree. The beta is only open to a small number of Netflix subscribers in the UK and Canada on Amazon Fire TV streaming media players, Chromecast with Google TV, LG TVs, NVIDIA Shield TV, Roku devices and TVs, Samsung smart TVs and Walmart ONN. The company will add support for more devices later.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
PowerPoint dominates presentations, utilized everywhere from sermons to weddings. In 2010, Microsoft revealed it was on over a billion computers. Before PowerPoint, 35-millimeter film slides reigned for impactful CEO presentations. These "multi-image" shows needed producers, photographers, and a production team to execute. MIT Technology Review has a rundown of the corporate presentation history.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Michael Burry, the money manager made famous in the book and film "The Big Short," held bearish options against the broad S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 Index at the end of the second quarter, according to securities fillings released on Monday. From a report: Burry's Scion Asset Management bought put options with a notional value of $739 million against the popular Invesco QQQ Trust ETF during the quarter, and separate put options with a notional value of $886 million against the SPDR S&P 500 ETF. Put options convey the right to sell shares at a fixed price in the future and are typically bought to express a bearish or defensive view. Burry rose to fame with his bets against the U.S. housing market before the 2008 financial crisis. Michael Lewis' nonfiction book "The Big Short" was released in 2010 and the movie version came out in 2015.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In the first ruling of its kind nationwide, a Montana state court decided Monday in favor of young people who alleged the state violated their right to a "clean and healthful environment" by promoting the use of fossil fuels. From a report: The court determined that a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act has harmed the state's environment and the young plaintiffs, by preventing Montana from considering the climate impacts of energy projects. The provision is accordingly unconstitutional, the court said. The win, experts say, could energize the environmental movement and reshape climate litigation across the country, ushering in a wave of cases aimed at advancing action on climate change. "People around the world are watching this case," said Michael Gerrard, the founder of Columbia's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. The ruling represents a rare victory for climate activists who have tried to use the courts to push back against government policies and industrial activities they say are harming the planet. In this case, it involved 16 young Montanans, ranging in age from 5 to 22, who brought the nation's first constitutional and first youth-led climate lawsuit to go to trial. Though the cumulative number of climate cases around the world has more than doubled in the last five years, youth-led lawsuits in the United States have faced an uphill battle. Already, at least 14 of these cases have been dismissed, according to a July report from the United Nations Environment Program and the Sabin Center. The report said about three-quarters of the approximately 2,200 ongoing or concluded cases were filed before courts in the United States. Experts said the Montana youth had an advantage in the state's constitution, which guarantees a right to a "clean and healthful environment." Coal is critical to the state's economy, and Montana is home to the largest recoverable coal reserves in the country. The plaintiff's attorneys say the state has never denied a permit for a fossil fuel project.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Zoom has nixed its policy forbidding internal meetings on Wednesdays, saying it hindered collaboration, a move that goes against the grain -- and its own employees' preferences -- as more companies look to reduce unnecessary gatherings. From a report: Chief Executive Officer Eric Yuan disclosed the shift last week in a memo to employees, which also included a new policy on office attendance, requiring those living within 50 miles of a corporate location to come in twice a week. It reverses a policy Zoom implemented in the early stages of the pandemic after surveying employees, who said they wanted to spend less time in meetings to have "more time to think, plan, focus, and execute." In March 2022, the company said that 84% of employees preferred to continue the policy. "As we further ramp up on hybrid work, we've decided to make another change and end our No Internal Meeting Wednesdays," Yuan said in the memo. "We move fast, and this effort has become more of a barrier to collaboration than it was intended. And as an increasingly global company, no Internal Meeting Wednesday creates a lack of clarity for Zoomies working across multiple time zones."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Dell has been fined more than $6.5 million by Australian regulators after it was found to have misled consumers on discounted hardware prices. From a report: The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) imposed a $10 million AUS fine on the tech giant for "making false and misleading representations" about discounted prices for add-on computer monitors. Dell Australia admitted that it has misled customers over prices available on monitors in 'bundle' packages alongside desktop, laptop, or notebook devices. Add-on monitors were "often advertised with a higher 'strikethrough' price," an investigation by the regulator found. These strikethrough prices were framed as a way for consumers to make significant savings on monitors if purchased alongside other computing products. However, these discounted prices were often overstated, with the regulator ruling that the monitors were not sold for discounted prices in many instances. Dell also conceded it misled customers about the discounted price of add-on monitors with statements such as "Total Savings," "Includes x% off," "Discounted Price," and "Get the best price for popular accessories when purchased with this product." The ACCC said in a statement, "In many cases, consumers paid more than if they had purchased the monitor as a standalone product."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In 2015, popular Grand Theft Auto V mod FiveM was banned by Rockstar after the gaming giant alleged that FiveM's work "contains code designed to facilitate piracy." Eight years later, Rockstar is taking a decidedly different tone in announcing that Cfx.re -- the mod team behind FiveM and a similar mod for Red Dead Redemption 2 -- is now "officially a part of Rockstar Games." ArsTechnica: With no apparent sense of irony, Rockstar said in a Friday blog post announcing the acquisition that it has "watched with excitement as Rockstar's creative community have found new ways to expand the possibilities of Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2, particularly through the creation of dedicated roleplay servers." But that statement ignores the distinct lack of excitement Rockstar exhibited when it barred the Rockstar Social Club accounts of many FiveM modders and others associated with promoting the project back in 2015. "Our policy on such violations of our terms of service are clear, and the individuals involved in its creation have had their Social Club accounts suspended," the company said at the time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Four years into a plan to eliminate its carbon emissions, Amazon has lost a key endorsement from the world's leading watchdog of corporate climate goals. From a report: The Science Based Targets initiative, a United Nations-backed entity that validates net zero plans, has removed Amazon from its list of companies taking action on climate goals after the tech behemoth failed to implement its commitment to set a credible target for reducing carbon emissions. The move raises questions around Amazon's status as a preferred stock among funds marketing themselves as ESG. The world's largest ESG exchange-traded fund, which is managed by BlackRock, lists Amazon among its top three holdings. The company is also held in over 900 ESG funds registered in the European Union alone, representing about 2% of outstanding shares, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Amazon is rolling out a new generative AI feature that summarizes product reviews for customers. From a report: The feature, which the company began testing earlier this year, is designed to help shoppers determine at a glance what other customers said about a product before they spend time reading through individual reviews. It will pick out common themes and summarize them in a short paragraph on the product detail page. The company wrote in a blog post published Monday that the AI-generated reviews are now available to a subset of mobile shoppers in the U.S. across a "broad" selection of products. And it may be expanded to more shoppers and additional categories of products in the "coming months" based on customer feedback, said Vaughn Schermerhorn, Amazon's director of community shopping. The Seattle-based company has been looking for ways to integrate more artificial intelligence into its product offerings as the generative AI race heats up among tech companies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
One of the Mac's built-in malware detection tools may not be working quite as well as you think. From a report: At the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas, longtime Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle presented findings today about vulnerabilities in Apple's macOS Background Task Management mechanism, which could be exploited to bypass and, therefore, defeat the company's recently added monitoring tool. There's no foolproof method for catching malware on computers with perfect accuracy because, at their core, malicious programs are just software, like your web browser or chat app. It can be difficult to tell the legitimate programs from the transgressors. So operating system makers like Microsoft and Apple, as well as third-party security companies, are always working to develop new detection mechanisms and tools that can spot potentially malicious software behavior in new ways. Apple's Background Task Management tool focuses on watching for software "persistence." Malware can be designed to be ephemeral and operate only briefly on a device or until the computer restarts. But it can also be built to establish itself more deeply and "persist" on a target even when the computer is shut down and rebooted. Lots of legitimate software needs persistence so all of your apps and data and preferences will show up as you left them every time you turn on your device. But if software establishes persistence unexpectedly or out of the blue, it could be a sign of something malicious. With this in mind, Apple added Background Task Manager in macOS Ventura, which launched in October 2022, to send notifications both directly to users and to any third-party security tools running on a system if a "persistence event" occurs. This way, if you know you just downloaded and installed a new application, you can disregard the message. But if you didn't, you can investigate the possibility that you've been compromised.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shared this report from The New York Times:More than $1.7 trillion worldwide is expected to be invested in technologies such as wind, solar power, electric vehicles and batteries globally this year, according to the International Energy Agency, compared with just over $1 trillion in fossil fuels. That is by far the most ever spent on clean energy in a year. Those investments are driving explosive growth. China, which already leads the world in the sheer amount of electricity produced by wind and solar power, is expected to double its capacity by 2025, five years ahead of schedule. In Britain, roughly one-third of electricity is generated by wind, solar and hydropower. And in the United States, 23 percent of electricity is expected to come from renewable sources this year, up 10 percentage points from a decade ago... [F]rom Beijing to London, Tokyo to Washington, Oslo to Dubai, the energy transition is undeniably racing ahead... [C]lean energy became cheap far faster than anyone expected. Since 2009, the cost of solar power has plunged by 83 percent, while the cost of producing wind power has fallen by more than half. The price of lithium-ion battery cells fell 97 percent over the past three decades. Today, solar and wind power are the least expensive new sources of electricity in many markets, generating 12 percent of global electricity and rising... The rapid drop in costs for solar energy, wind power and batteries can be traced to early government investment and steady improvements over time by hundreds of researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs around the world. "The world has produced nearly three billion solar panels at this point, and every one of those has been an opportunity for people to try to improve the process," said Gregory Nemet, a solar power expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "And all of those incremental improvements add up to something very dramatic." An equally potent force, along with the technological advances, has been an influx of money - in particular, a gusher since 2020 of government subsidies... In the United States, President Biden signed a trio of laws during his first two years in office that allocated unprecedented funds for clean energy: A $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law provided money to enhance the power grid, buy electric buses for schools and build a national network of electric vehicle chargers... Combined, the three laws have prompted companies to announce at least $230 billion in manufacturing investments so far... The U.S. solar industry installed a record 6.1 gigawatts of capacity in the first quarter of 2023, a 47 percent increase over the same period last year. And those low costs have led many of the United States' biggest corporations, such as Alphabet, Amazon and General Motors, to purchase large amounts of wind and solar power...Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"It was difficult to maintain a poker face when the leader of a big US tech firm I was chatting to said there was a definite tipping point at which the firm would exit the UK," writes a BBC technology editor:Many of these companies are increasingly fed up. Their "tipping point" is UK regulation - and it's coming at them thick and fast. The Online Safety Bill is due to pass in the autumn. Aimed at protecting children, it lays down strict rules around policing social media content, with high financial penalties and prison time for individual tech execs if the firms fail to comply. One clause that has proved particularly controversial is a proposal that encrypted messages, which includes those sent on WhatsApp, can be read and handed over to law enforcement by the platforms they are sent on, if there is deemed to be a national security or child protection risk... Currently messaging apps like WhatsApp, Proton and Signal, which offer this encryption, cannot see the content of these messages themselves. WhatsApp and Signal have both threatened to quit the UK market over this demand. The Digital Markets Bill is also making its way through Parliament. It proposes that the UK's competition watchdog selects large companies like Amazon and Microsoft, gives them rules to comply with and sets punishments if they don't. Several firms have told me they feel this gives an unprecedented amount of power to a single body. Microsoft reacted furiously when the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) chose to block its acquisition of the video game giant Activision Blizzard. "There's a clear message here - the European Union is a more attractive place to start a business than the United Kingdom," raged chief executive Brad Smith. The CMA has since re-opened negotiations with Microsoft. This is especially damning because the EU is also introducing strict rules in the same vein - but it is collectively a much larger and therefore more valuable market. In the UK, proposed amendments to the Investigatory Powers Act, which included tech firms getting Home Office approval for new security features before worldwide release, incensed Apple so much that it threatened to remove Facetime and iMessage from the UK if they go through. Clearly the UK cannot, and should not, be held to ransom by US tech giants. But the services they provide are widely used by millions of people. And rightly or wrongly, there is no UK-based alternative to those services. The article concludes that "It's a difficult line to tread. Big Tech hasn't exactly covered itself in glory with past behaviours - and lots of people feel regulation and accountability is long overdue."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:In an unmarked office building in Austin, Texas, two small rooms contain a handful of Amazon employees designing two types of microchips for training and accelerating generative AI. These custom chips, Inferentia and Trainium, offer AWS customers an alternative to training their large language models on Nvidia GPUs, which have been getting difficult and expensive to procure. "The entire world would like more chips for doing generative AI, whether that's GPUs or whether that's Amazon's own chips that we're designing," Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky told CNBC in an finterview in June. "I think that we're in a better position than anybody else on Earth to supply the capacity that our customers collectively are going to want...." In the long run, said Chirag Dekate, VP analyst at Gartner, Amazon's custom silicon could give it an edge in generative AI... With millions of customers, Amazon's AWS cloud service "still accounted for 70% of Amazon's overall $7.7 billion operating profit in the second quarter," CNBC notes. But does that give them a competitive advantage? A technology VP for the service tells them "It's a question of velocity. How quickly can these companies move to develop these generative AI applications is driven by starting first on the data they have in AWS and using compute and machine learning tools that we provide."In June, AWS announced a $100 million generative AI innovation "center." "We have so many customers who are saying, 'I want to do generative AI,' but they don't necessarily know what that means for them in the context of their own businesses. And so we're going to bring in solutions architects and engineers and strategists and data scientists to work with them one on one," AWS CEO Selipsky said... For now, Amazon is only accelerating its push into generative AI, telling CNBC that "over 100,000" customers are using machine learning on AWS today. Although that's a small percentage of AWS's millions of customers, analysts say that could change. "What we are not seeing is enterprises saying, 'Oh, wait a minute, Microsoft is so ahead in generative AI, let's just go out and let's switch our infrastructure strategies, migrate everything to Microsoft.' Dekate said. "If you're already an Amazon customer, chances are you're likely going to explore Amazon ecosystems quite extensively."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Earlier this year, after 15 years of searching, scientists finally heard the background hum of low-frequency gravitational waves that fill our universe," writes Space.com. "Now, the hard work of searching for the source of these ripples in spacetime can begin."Currently, the primary suspects in this case are pairings of supermassive black holes with masses millions, or even billions, of times that of the sun. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't room for a few unusual suspects, which could potentially point us toward new physics.... [G]ravitational waves detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) express wavelengths that are thousands of miles (or km) in length and hold frequencies of milliseconds to seconds. The new gravitational waves detected by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), by contrast, have wavelengths on a scale of trillions of miles (or km). This is similar to the distance between the sun and its neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, a staggering 20 light-years in length. Plus, NANOGrav gravitational wavelengths have frequencies on scales of years instead of mere seconds. Practically, what this means is scientists need to build over 15 years of NANOGrav data to confirm a low-frequency gravitational wave detection. But, when it happens, it's worth the wait. That's because these results have the capacity to point us toward new information about our universe... "The detection of low-frequency gravitational waves means they're from very different sources to the LIGO and Virgo sources, which are stellar mass black holes and neutron star mergers," Scott Ransom, a National Radio Astronomy Observatory astronomer and former chair of NANOGrav, told Space.com... Ransom is part of a collaboration of researchers that believe low-frequency gravitational waves, including those detected by NANOGrav, may originate from a pretty incredible source. They could come from, the team argues, hundreds of thousands of supermassive black hole pairings that, over the 13.8-billion-year course of cosmic history, came close enough together that they've merged... "For many decades, theorists have hypothesized that supermassive black hole binaries should produce a signal with characteristics just like what NANOGrav and other pulsar timing arrays are seeing," Luke Zoltan Kelly, a Northwestern University theoretical astrophysicist and NANOGrav researcher, told Space.com. "For most of the community, supermassive black hole binaries are a natural best guess for what's producing the gravitational wave background...." Zoltan Kelley pointed out to Space.com that besides binaries, there are a number of new models in cosmology and in particle physics that, under the right circumstances, could also produce a similar gravitational wave background to that detected by NANOGrav. For example, axion or 'fuzzy' dark matter, cosmic strings, inflationary phase transitions, and many others," the Northwestern astrophysicist said. "What's really exciting about these possibilities is that each of these models is an attempt to explain some of the biggest current mysteries of our universe."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Stack Overflow is adding artificial intelligence to its offerings," reports ZDNet (which notes traffic to the Q&A site has dropped 5% in the last year). So in a video, Stack Overflow's CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says that search and question-asking "will evolve to provide you with instant summarized solutions with citations to sources, aggregated by generative AI - plus the option to ask follow-up questions in a chat-like format." The New Stack provides some context:As computer scientist Santiago Valdarrama remarked in a tweet, "I don't remember the last time I visited Stack Overflow. Why would I when tools like Copilot and ChatGPT answer my questions faster without making me feel bad for asking?" It's a problem Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar acknowledges because, well, he encountered it too. "When I first started using Stack Overflow, I remember my first experience was quite harsh, because I basically asked a fairly simple question, but the standard on the website is pretty high," Chandrasekar told The New Stack. "When ChatGPT came out, it was a lot easier for people to go and ask ChatGPT without anybody watching...." But what may be of more interest to developers is that Stack Overflow is now offering an IDE (integrated development environment) extension for Visual Studio Code that will be powered by OverflowAI. This means that coders will be able to ask a conversational interface a question and find solutions from within the IDE. Stack Overflow also is launching a GenAI Stack Exchange, where the community can post and share knowledge on prompt engineering, getting the most out of AI and similar topics. And they're integrating it into other workflows as well. "Of course, AI isn't replacing humans any time soon," CEO Chandrasekar says in the video. "But it can help you draft a question to pose to our community..." Signups for the OverflowAI preview are available now. "With your help, we'll be putting AI to work," CEO Chandrasekar says in the video.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
By 2035 America needs a 43% increase in its power-transmitting capacity, according to an analysis by the REPEAT project.But NPR reports there's another way to quickly improve capacity without building new transmission lines: That's where the laser sensors come in, says Jon Marmillo, co-founder of LineVision, the company that makes them. Sensors can help utilities get real-time data on their power lines, which can allow them to send more renewable electricity through the wires. This tech is part of a suite of innovations that could help the U.S. increase its grid capacity faster and cheaper than building new transmission lines... At any given moment, utilities typically know how much power is going through their lines. But they aren't required to know the real time conditions of those lines, like the wind speed or how hot the line is. Without that data, utilities have to use conservative standards for how much power can safely flow, says Jake Gentle, senior program manager for infrastructure security at Idaho National Laboratory. But when sensors gather information from the wires - about wind, temperature, and wire sag - that data allows utilities to go beyond their conservative standards and safely put more electricity through the wires... With this tech, called "dynamic line rating", utilities are able to increase the efficiency of their lines - sometimes as much as 40%, says Gentle. One Pittsburgh company using similar technology told NPR that "we found an average of 25% additional available capacity on transmission lines that were equipped with the sensors."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OS News' managing editor calls Firefox "the single most important desktop Linux application," shipping in most distros (with some users later opting for a post-installation download of Chrome). But "I'm genuinely worried about the state of browsers on Linux, and the future of Firefox on Linux in particular..."While both GNOME and KDE nominally invest in their own two browsers, GNOME Web and Falkon, their uptake is limited and releases few and far between. For instance, none of the major Linux distributions ship GNOME Web as their default browser, and it lacks many of the features users come to expect from a browser. Falkon, meanwhile, is updated only sporadically, often going years between releases. Worse yet, Falkon uses Chromium through QtWebEngine, and GNOME Web uses WebKit (which are updated separately from the browser, so browser releases are not always a solid metric!), so both are dependent on the goodwill of two of the most ruthless corporations in the world, Google and Apple respectively. Even Firefox itself, even though it's clearly the browser of choice of distributions and Linux users alike, does not consider Linux a first-tier platform. Firefox is first and foremost a Windows browser, followed by macOS second, and Linux third. The love the Linux world has for Firefox is not reciprocated by Mozilla in the same way, and this shows in various places where issues fixed and addressed on the Windows side are ignored on the Linux side for years or longer. The best and most visible example of that is hardware video acceleration. This feature has been a default part of the Windows version since forever, but it wasn't enabled by default for Linux until Firefox 115, released only in early July 2023. Even then, the feature is only enabled by default for users of Intel graphics - AMD and Nvidia users need not apply. This lack of video acceleration was - and for AMD and Nvidia users, still is - a major contributing factor to Linux battery life on laptops taking a serious hit compared to their Windows counterparts... It's not just hardware accelerated video decoding. Gesture support has taken much longer to arrive on the Linux version than it did on the Windows version - things like using swipes to go back and forward, or pinch to zoom on images... I don't see anyone talking about this problem, or planning for the eventual possible demise of Firefox, what that would mean for the Linux desktop, and how it can be avoided or mitigated. In an ideal world, the major stakeholders of the Linux desktop - KDE, GNOME, the various major distributions - would get together and seriously consider a plan of action. The best possible solution, in my view, would be to fork one of the major browser engines (or pick one and significantly invest in it), and modify this engine and tailor it specifically for the Linux desktop. Stop living off the scraps and leftovers thrown across the fence from Windows and macOS browser makers, and focus entirely on making a browser engine that is optimised fully for Linux, its graphics stack, and its desktops. Have the major stakeholders work together on a Linux-first - or even Linux-only - browser engine, leaving the graphical front-end to the various toolkits and desktop environments.... I think it's highly irresponsible of the various prominent players in the desktop Linux community, from GNOME to KDE, from Ubuntu to Fedora, to seemingly have absolutely zero contingency plans for when Firefox enshittifies or dies...Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Quantum computing could turbo-charge AI into something "massively, universally transformative," argues the South China Morning Post, citing a quote from theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. "AI has the ability to learn new, complex tasks, and quantum computers can provide the computational muscle it needs..." "AI will give us the ability to create learning machines that can begin to mimic human abilities, while quantum computers may provide the calculational power to finally create an intelligent machine."Where AI brings an ability to self-improve and learn from its mistakes, quantum computers add speed and power. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said "AI can accelerate quantum computing, and quantum computing can accelerate AI...." Complex calculations that would take classical supercomputers thousands of years to crunch could, in theory, be completed by quantum computers in minutes... In expectation of its advantages, the automotive industry is already collaborating with pioneers in the quantum-computing arena. Daimler has partnered with IBM, Volkswagen with D-Wave Systems (a Canadian quantum-computing firm) and Hyundai with IonQ. "If you can increase the energy density of your battery by another factor of two, three or four, then instead of 300 miles (480km), you can go 600 miles and 1,200 miles on [one] charge," says Kim. "That actually starts to cross the threshold where they become so much more attractive than fossil fuel. And then we can really make an impact on global warming and all these problems..." Similarly, the mysteries of carbon sequestration could be unravelled by quantum computing, with clear benefits for the efforts to reverse global warming. Drug design at the molecular level could be revolutionised, opening up new avenues for vaccines and, for example, personalised cancer treatment. There's no doubt about it: with effective quantum computing our understanding of chemical processes could become godlike. Finance and investment, too, could be revolutionised by the qubit. The huge range of factors that produce market fluctuations allow for an almost infinite range of possible outcomes, and modelling these possibilities would be relatively simple for quantum computers. Forecasts of market movements would become far more accurate... For many physicists and mathematicians, every step of the journey towards functional and world-changing quantum computers assumes acknowledgement of an even more profound goal: a greater understanding of the nature of reality. This could also mean that the very nature of understanding has to be reconsidered. The article suggests we "occupy ourselves with the dawning realisation that something philosophically far-reaching has begun to percolate into our shared consciousness from the laboratories of the world's quantum pioneers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Owners of some older iPhone models are expected to receive about $65 each," reports SiliconValley.com, "after a judge cleared the way for payments in a class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of secretly throttling phone performance."The Cupertino cell phone giant agreed in 2020 to pay up to $500 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging it had perpetrated "one of the largest consumer frauds in history" by surreptitiously slowing the performance of certain iPhone models to address problems with batteries and processors... According to the lawsuit, filed in 2018, reports of unexplained iPhone shutdowns began to surface in 2015 and increased in the fall of 2016. Consumers complained their phones were shutting off even though the batteries showed a charge of more than 30%, the lawsuit claimed. The lawsuit claimed the shutdowns resulted from a mismatch between phones' hardware, including batteries and processing chips, and the ever-increasing demands of constantly updating operating systems. Apple tried to fix the problem with a software update, but the update merely throttled device performance to cut the number of shutdowns, the lawsuit claimed... In a 2019 court filing in the case, Apple argued that lithium-ion batteries become less effective with time, repeated charging, extreme temperatures and general use. Updating software, Apple asserted in the filing, entails trade-offs. "Providing more features also introduces complexity and can reduce speed, and increasing features or speed may adversely impact hardware lifespan," the company said. Consumer grief over the shutdowns and alleged throttling also led to a 2020 lawsuit against Apple by the State of California and Alameda and Los Angeles counties. Apple, admitting to no wrongdoing, settled the case for $113 million. About 3 million claims were received, the article notes, and two iPhone owners who'd objected to the settlement lost their appeal this week, "removing the final obstacle to the deal..." "The phones at issue in the case were iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, and SE devices running operating systems iOS 10.2.1 or later before Dec. 21, 2017, and iPhone 7 and 7 Plus phones running iOS 11.2 or later before that date."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Monday sees the release of "The Billion Dollar Heist," a documentary about the theft of $81 million from the Bangladesh Bank, considered the biggest cyber-heist of all time. The film's executive producer wrote the book Dark Market: How Hackers Became the New Mafia (and is also a rector at the Institute for Human Sciences). But he's also written an article for the Financial Times outlining the complicated background of Russian-speaking hacker gangs responsible for malware and ransomware, starting with "one of the most remarkable if little-known events in post-cold war history: the first and, to my knowledge, the last publicly organised conference of avowed criminals" in May, 2002. The First Worldwide Carders Conference was the brainchild of the administrators of a landmark website, carderplanet.com. Known as "the family", this was a mixed group of young men, both Ukrainians and Russians, who had spent the previous 10 years growing up in a lively atmosphere of gangster capitalism. During the 1990s, conventional law and order in the former Soviet Union had broken down. The collapse of the communist system had left a vacuum in which new forms of economic activity were emerging... Founded a year before the conference, CarderPlanet revolutionised web-based criminal activity, especially the lucrative trade in stolen or cloned credit card data, by solving the conundrum that until then had faced every bad guy on the web: how can I do business with this person, as I know he's a criminal, so he must be untrustworthy by definition? To obviate the problem, the CarderPlanet administrators created an escrow system for criminals. They would act as guarantor of any criminal sale of credit and debit card data - a disinterested party mediating between the vendor and the purchaser... The escrow system led to an explosion of credit card crime around the world in which many criminal fortunes were made.... Roman Stepanenko Vega, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian national who was one of the founders and administrators of CarderPlanet, explained to me how "two days before the conference's opening, we received a visit from an FSB [Federal Security Service] officer in Moscow. He explained that Moscow had no objections to us cloning credit cards or defrauding banks in Europe and the United States but anywhere within the CIS was off limits." In addition, the FSB officer let CarderPlanet know that if the Russian state ever required assistance from criminal gangs, it would be expected to co-operate... Members of criminal gangs were later recruited into notorious state-backed hacking teams such as Advanced Persistent Threat 28. A 2021 ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline brought warnings of a U.S. counterattack, the article notes, after which "Russian police started arresting and imprisoning cyber criminal groups." Ransomware attacks now seem particularly focused on Europe, and "According to cyber-security experts, the Russian government is giving these criminal groups information on potential targets."But once more the hackers have been careful not to cross what the Americans consider red lines, as advised, presumably, by Russia's security services. Russia is probably confident that disrupting European businesses will be unlikely to provoke a cyber attack. But the U.S. - whether its government, municipalities or police - remains strictly off-limits. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
What to make of the news that early research appears unable to duplicate the much-ballyhooed claims for the LK99 superconductor? "The episode revealed the intense appetite in Silicon Valley for finding the next big thing," argues the Washington Post, "after years of hand-wringing that the tech world has lost its ability to come up with big, world-changing innovations, instead channeling all its money and energy into building new variations of social media apps and business software..."[M]any tech leaders are nervous that the current focus on consumer and business software has led to stagnation. A decade ago, investors prophesied that self-driving cars would take over the roads by the mid-2020s - but they are still firmly in the testing phase, despite billions of dollars of investment. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have had multiple hype cycles of their own, but have yet to fundamentally change any industry, besides crime and money laundering. Tech meant to help mitigate climate change, like carbon capture and storage, has lagged without major advances in years. Meanwhile, Big Tech companies used their huge cash hoards to snap up smaller competitors, with antitrust regulators only recently beginning to clamp down on consolidation. Over the last year, as higher interest rates have cut into the amount of venture capital and slowing growth has caused companies to pull back spending, a massive wave of layoffs has swept the industry, and companies such as Google that previously said they'd invest some of their profits in big, risky ideas have turned away from such "moonshots..." Room-temperature superconductors would be especially relevant to the tech industry right now, which is busy burning billions of dollars on new computer chips and the energy costs to run them to train the AI models behind tools like ChatGPT and Google's Bard. For years, computer chips have gotten smaller and more efficient, but that progress has run up against the limits of the physical world as transistors get so small some are now just one atom thick.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Science magazine reports:Roughly one in five people are born with at least one copy of a gene variant called APOE4 that makes them more prone to heart disease and Alzheimer's disease in old age. That the variant is so common poses an evolutionary mystery: If it decreases our fitness, why hasn't APOE4 been purged from the human population over time? Now, a study of nearly 800 women in a traditional society in the Amazon finds that those with the disease-promoting variant had slightly more children. Such a fertility benefit may have allowed the gene to persist during human evolution despite its harmful effects for older people today... The Tsimane data also allowed the team to home in on how APOE4 may boost fertility: Women carrying it were slightly heavier that those without it, started bearing children about 1 year earlier, and had their next child a few months sooner. That fits with being more resistant to parasites, says siological anthropologist Benjamin Trumble . "Being in a better immune state means that you can then devote more calories towards growing faster, and then you're able to reproduce faster." Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A retired Technical Fellow from Rockwell Collins "released a 65-page paper that details an easy-to-understand, relatively inexpensive, and feasible plan to turn an asteroid into a space habitat," reports Universe Today (in an article republished at Science Alert):Dr. David W. Jensen breaks the discussion into three main categories - asteroid selection, habitat style selection, and mission strategy to get there (i.e., what robots to use)... He eventually settled on a torus as the ideal habitat type and then dives into calculations about the overall station mass, how to support the inner wall with massive columns, and how to allocate floor space. All important, but how exactly would we build such a massive behemoth? Self-replicating robots are Dr. Jensen's answer. The report's third section details a plan to utilize spider robots and a base station that can replicate themselves. He stresses the importance of only sending the most advanced technical components from Earth and using materials on the asteroid itself to build everything else, from rock grinders to solar panels... With admittedly "back-of-the-envelope" calculations, Dr. Jensen estimates that the program would cost only $4.1 billion. That is far less than the $93 billion NASA plans to spend on the Apollo program. And the result would be a space habitat that provides 1 billion square meters of land that didn't exist before. That's a total cost of $4.10 per square meter to build land - in space. Possibly even more impressive is the timeline - Dr. Jensen estimates that the entire construction project could be done in as little as 12 years. However, it will still take longer to fill the habitat with air and water and start regulating its temperature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shared this investigative report from The Markup:Over the past quarter-century, privacy policies - the lengthy, dense legal language you quickly scroll through before mindlessly hitting "agree" - have grown both longer and denser. A study released last year found that not only did the average length of a privacy policy quadruple between 1996 and 2021, they also became considerably more difficult to understand. "Analyzing the content of privacy policies, we identify several concerning trends, including the increasing use of location data, increasing use of implicitly collected data, lack of meaningful choice, lack of effective notification of privacy policy changes, increasing data sharing with unnamed third parties, and lack of specific information about security and privacy measures," wrote De Montfort University Associate Professor Isabel Wagner, who used machine learning to analyze some 50,000 website privacy policies for the study... To get a sense of what all of this means, I talked to Jesse Woo - a data engineer at The Markup who previously helped write institutional data use policies as a privacy lawyer. Woo explained that, while he can see why the language in Zoom's terms of service touched a nerve, the sentiment - that users allow the company to copy and use their content - is actually pretty standard in these sorts of user agreements. The problem is that Zoom's policy was written in a way where each of the rights being handed over to the company are specifically enumerated, which can feel like a lot. But that's also kind of just what happens when you use products or services in 2023 - sorry, welcome to the future! As a point of contrast, Woo pointed to the privacy policy of the competing video-conferencing service Webex, which reads: "We will not monitor Content, except: (i) as needed to provide, support or improve the provision of the Services, (ii) investigate potential or suspected fraud, (iii) where instructed or permitted by you, or (iv) as otherwise required by law or to exercise or protect Our legal rights." That language feels a lot less scary, even though, as Woo noted, training AI models could likely be covered under a company taking steps to "support or improve the provision of the Services." The article ends with a link to a helpful new guide showing "how to read any privacy policy and quickly identify the important/creepy/enraging parts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Why aren't more people using Linux on the desktop? Slashdot reader technology_dude shares one solution:Jack Wallen at ZDNet says establishing an "official" version of Linux may (or may not) help Linux on the desktop increase the number of users, mostly as someplace to point new users. It makes sense to me. What does Slashdot think and what would be the challenges, other than acceptance of a particular flavor? Wallen argues this would also create a standard for hardware and software vendors to target, which "could equate to even more software and hardware being made available to Linux." (And an "official" Linux might also be more appealing to business users.) Wallen suggests it be "maintained and controlled by a collective of people from users, developers, and corporations (such as Intel and AMD) with a vested interest in the success of this project... There would also be corporate backing for things like marketing (such as TV commercials)." He also suggests basing it on Debian, and supporting both Snap and Flatpak... In comments on the original submission, long-time Slashdot reader bobbomo points instead to kernel.org, arguing "There already is an official version of Linux called mainline. Everything else is backports." And jd (Slashdot user #1,658) believes that the official Linux is the Linux Standard Base. "All distributions, more-or-less, conform to the LSB, which gives you a pseudo 'official' Linux. About the one variable is the package manager. And there are ways to work around that." Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia...The LSB standard stopped being updated in 2015 and current Linux distributions do not adhere to or offer it; however, the lsb_release command is sometimes still available.[citation needed] On February 7, 2023, a former maintainer of the LSB wrote, "The LSB project is essentially abandoned." That post (on the lsb-discuss mailing list) argues the LSB approach was "partially superseded" by Snaps and Flatpaks (for application portability and stability). And of course, long-time Slashdot user menkhaura shares the obligatory XKCD comic... It's not exactly the same thing, but days after ZDNet's article, CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE announced the Open Enterprise Linux Association, a new collaborative trade association to foster "the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux." So where does that leave us? Share your own thoughts in the comments. And should there be an "official" version of Linux?Read more of this story at Slashdot.
"Teams across Google are working hard to prepare the web for the migration to quantum-resistant cryptography," writes Chrome's technical program manager for security, Devon O'Brien. "Continuing with our strategy for handling this major transition, we are updating technical standards, testing and deploying new quantum-resistant algorithms, and working with the broader ecosystem to help ensure this effort is a success."As a step down this path, Chrome will begin supporting X25519Kyber768 for establishing symmetric secrets in TLS, starting in Chrome 116, and available behind a flag in Chrome 115. This hybrid mechanism combines the output of two cryptographic algorithms to create the session key used to encrypt the bulk of the TLS connection: X25519 - an elliptic curve algorithm widely used for key agreement in TLS today Kyber-768 - a quantum-resistant Key Encapsulation Method, and NIST's PQC winner for general encryption In order to identify ecosystem incompatibilities with this change, we are rolling this out to Chrome and to Google servers, over both TCP and QUIC and monitoring for possible compatibility issues. Chrome may also use this updated key agreement when connecting to third-party server operators, such as Cloudflare, as they add support. If you are a developer or administrator experiencing an issue that you believe is caused by this change, please file a bug. The Register delves into Chrome's reasons for implementing this now:"It's believed that quantum computers that can break modern classical cryptography won't arrive for 5, 10, possibly even 50 years from now, so why is it important to start protecting traffic today?" said O'Brien. "The answer is that certain uses of cryptography are vulnerable to a type of attack called Harvest Now, Decrypt Later, in which data is collected and stored today and later decrypted once cryptanalysis improves." O'Brien says that while symmetric encryption algorithms used to defend data traveling on networks are considered safe from quantum cryptanalysis, the way the keys get negotiated is not. By adding support for a hybrid KEM, Chrome should provide a stronger defense against future quantum attacks... Rebecca Krauthamer, co-founder and chief product officer at QuSecure, told The Register in an email that while this technology sounds futuristic, it's useful and necessary today... [T]he arrival of capable quantum computers should not be thought of as a specific, looming date, but as something that will arrive without warning. "There was no press release when the team at Bletchley Park cracked the Enigma code, either," she said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Ars Technica reports that Microsoft "disclosed 15 high-severity vulnerabilities in a widely used collection of tools used to program operational devices inside industrial facilities" (like plants for power generation, factory automation, energy automation, and process automation). On Friday Microsoft "warned that while exploiting the code-execution and denial-of-service vulnerabilities was difficult, it enabled threat actors to 'inflict great damage on targets.'"The vulnerabilities affect the CODESYS V3 software development kit. Developers inside companies such as Schneider Electric and WAGO use the platform-independent tools to develop programmable logic controllers, the toaster-sized devices that open and close valves, turn rotors, and control various other physical devices in industrial facilities worldwide... "A denial-of-service attack against a device using a vulnerable version of CODESYS could enable threat actors to shut down a power plant, while remote code execution could create a backdoor for devices and let attackers tamper with operations, cause a PLC to run in an unusual way, or steal critical information," Microsoft researchers wrote. Friday's advisory went on to say: "[...] While exploiting the discovered vulnerabilities requires deep knowledge of the proprietary protocol of CODESYS V3 as well as user authentication (and additional permissions are required for an account to have control of the PLC), a successful attack has the potential to inflict great damage on targets. Threat actors could launch a denial-of-service attack against a device using a vulnerable version of CODESYS to shut down industrial operations or exploit the remote code execution vulnerabilities to deploy a backdoor to steal sensitive data, tamper with operations, or force a PLC to operate in a dangerous way." Microsoft privately notified Codesys of the vulnerabilities in September, and the company has since released patches that fix the vulnerabilities. It's likely that by now, many vendors using the SDK have installed updates. Any who haven't should make it a priority. "With the likelihood that the 15 vulnerabilities are patched in most previously vulnerable production environments, the dire consequences Microsoft is warning of appear unlikely," the article notes. A malware/senior vulnerability analyst at industrial control security firm Dragos also pointed out that CODESYS "isn't widely used in power generation so much as discrete manufacturing and other types of process control. So that in itself should allay some concern when it comes to the potential to 'shut down a power plant'." (And in addition, "industrial systems are extremely complex, and being able to access one part doesn't necessarily mean the whole thing will come crashing down.")Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shared this report from the San Francisco Standard:As autonomous vehicles become increasingly popular in San Francisco, some riders are wondering just how far they can push the vehicles' limits - especially with no front-seat driver or chaperone to discourage them from questionable behavior... The Standard has spoken to four separate Cruise car riders who said they've had sex or hooked up in the driverless vehicles in San Francisco over recent months and have provided ride receipts. The Standard was unable to find a source who said they'd had sex in a Waymo... The rules and regulations surrounding robotaxis are murky, largely because the industry is so new... Unfortunately for the debaucherous among us, robotaxi companies currently use pretty extensive camera surveillance inside and outside of their cars. "We record video inside of the car for added safety and support," Cruise states on its website... When asked, both Cruise and Waymo sidestepped commenting directly on what is or isn't allowed in their cars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register:ChatGPT, OpenAI's fabulating chatbot, produces wrong answers to software programming questions more than half the time, according to a [pre-print] study from Purdue University. That said, the bot was convincing enough to fool a third of participants. The Purdue team analyzed ChatGPT's answers to 517 Stack Overflow questions to assess the correctness, consistency, comprehensiveness, and conciseness of ChatGPT's answers. The U.S. academics also conducted linguistic and sentiment analysis of the answers, and questioned a dozen volunteer participants on the results generated by the model. "Our analysis shows that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers are incorrect and 77 percent are verbose," the team's paper concluded. "Nonetheless, ChatGPT answers are still preferred 39.34 percent of the time due to their comprehensiveness and well-articulated language style." Among the set of preferred ChatGPT answers, 77 percent were wrong... "During our study, we observed that only when the error in the ChatGPT answer is obvious, users can identify the error," their paper stated. "However, when the error is not readily verifiable or requires external IDE or documentation, users often fail to identify the incorrectness or underestimate the degree of error in the answer." Even when the answer has a glaring error, the paper stated, two out of the 12 participants still marked the response preferred. The paper attributes this to ChatGPT's pleasant, authoritative style. "From semi-structured interviews, it is apparent that polite language, articulated and text-book style answers, comprehensiveness, and affiliation in answers make completely wrong answers seem correct," the paper explained.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Science magazine reports:Researchers have shown how to conduct thousands of rapid molecular screenings simultaneously, using light to identify target molecules snared on top of an array of tiny silicon blocks. In theory, the tool could be used to spot 160,000 different molecules in a single square centimeter of space. Developed to spot gene fragments from the SARS-CoV-2 virus and other infectious organisms, the technology should also be able to identify protein markers of cancer and small molecules flagging toxic threats in the environment... "[P]revious sensors have not been able to detect a wide range of target molecules," from very low to very high abundance, says Jennifer Dionne, an applied physicist at Stanford University. In hopes of getting around these problems, Dionne and her colleagues turned to an optical detection approach that relies on metasurfaces, arrays of tiny silicon boxes - each roughly 500 nanometers high, 600 nanometers long, and 160 nanometers wide - that focus near-infrared light on their top surface. This focusing makes it easy for a simple optical microscope to detect the shift in the wavelength of light coming from each silicon block, which varies depending on what molecules sit on top... [T]he technique could allow doctors to detect viral infections without first having to amplify the genetic material from a patient, Dionne says. Perhaps as important, she notes, an array can be designed to reveal how much target DNA has bound, making it possible to detect in minutes not just whether a particular virus is present, but how intense the infection is. Such information could help doctors tailor their treatments. Current tests can also do this, but they normally take several hours to amplify the genetic material and quantify the results. Dionne and her colleagues have formed a company called Pumpkinseed Bio to commercialize their new detectors, specifically aimed at detecting minute levels of proteins and other molecules that can't readily be amplified to make them easier to detect. And because only a small number of silicon blocks would be needed to spot individual target molecules, researchers should be able to craft arrays to track a multitude of disease biomarkers simultaneously. "We hope to look at many disease states at the same time," says Jack Hu, a former graduate student in Dionne's lab and head of the new startup. "That's the vision." Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Long-time Slashdot reader UnCivil Liberty writes:Following in the footsteps of three MIT students who were previously gagged from presenting their findings at Defcon 2008 are two Massachusetts teens (who presented at this year's Defcon without interference). The four teens extended other research done by the 2008 hacker team to fully reverse engineer the "CharlieCard," the RFID touchless smart card used by Boston's public transit system. The hackers can now add any amount of money to one of these cards or invisibly designate it a discounted student card, a senior card, or even an MBTA employee card that gives them unlimited free rides. "You name it, we can make it," says Campbell.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The CBC reports that "Some parts of the Halifax harbour turned a bright shade of pink on Thursday - for science." After researchers dumped in 500 litres of safe, water-soluble dye, "boats, drones and underwater robots were then deployed to map the movement of the dye, so researchers can understand where materials spread and how quickly they do so." The CTV calls it "part of long-term research project that could help reverse some of the world's greenhouse gas emissions" by Dalhousie University and the climate-solutions research organization Planetary Technologies:The move is the first step, says Katja Fennel, an oceanographer at Dalhousie, before researchers release alkaline material into the water this fall. That material will effectively act as an antacid for the ocean, helping to neutralize the additional acidic carbon dioxide being absorbed by the world's oceans. "The purpose is to actually induce the ocean to take up atmospheric CO2 - CO2 from the air - and help us reduce legacy carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere," Fennel told CTV News. To track the uptake of carbon dioxide, researchers need to account for the movement of water. So "The ultimate goal here is to test an idea for a technology that would help us reduce atmospheric CO2," one oceanographer leading the research told the CBC, "and could be one tool in the toolbox for fighting climate change..." They point out that the ocean holds 50 times as much CO2 as is in the atmosphere, and call the experiment "cutting edge...world-leading research... Ocean alkalinity enhancement has the greatest potential, actually, in terms of storing carbon permanently and safely at a scale that is relevant for global climate." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal:U.S. spy agencies will share more intelligence with U.S. companies, nongovernmental organizations and academia under a new strategy released this week that acknowledges concerns over new threats, such as another pandemic and increasing cyberattacks. The National Intelligence Strategy, which sets broad goals for the sprawling U.S. intelligence community, says that spy agencies must reach beyond the traditional walls of secrecy and partner with outside groups to detect and deter supply-chain disruptions, infectious diseases and other growing transnational threats. The intelligence community "must rethink its approach to exchanging information and insights," the strategy says. The U.S. government in recent years has begun sharing vast amounts of cyber-threat intelligence with U.S. companies, utilities and others who are often the main targets of foreign hackers, as well as information on foreign-influence operations with social-media companies... The emphasis on greater intelligence sharing is part of a broader trend toward declassification that the Biden administration has pursued. "The new strategy is meant to guide 18 U.S. intelligence agencies with an annual budget of about $90 billion... "Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Verge writes that "LK-99 hasn't turned out to be the miraculous superconductor some people initially claimed it was..."[T]he results so far indicate that LK-99 is not a superconductor, at room temperature or otherwise. A slew of research groups have released studies that counter claims originally made about LK-99. "With a great deal of sadness, we now believe that the game is over. LK99 is NOT a superconductor, not even at room temperatures (or at very low temperatures). It is a very highly resistive poor quality material. Period. No point in fighting with the truth," the University of Maryland's Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC) posted on August 7th... [The last words of their tweet? "Data have spoken."] Labs hurriedly published their own results on ArXiv, the same server for preprints (papers that haven't undergone peer review) where the original papers on LK-99 first appeared. Now, a body of evidence has piled up that disproves claims about LK-99. "There is no sign of superconductivity in LK-99 at room temperature," says one preprint from the CSIR-National Physical Laboratory in India. (That was one of the papers cited by the University of Maryland's Condensed Matter Theory Center this week when it posted that "the game is over....") [H]opes that levitation meant that LK-99 is a superconductor were dashed this week after another preprint posed another explanation for why the material might float. The International Center for Quantum Materials in China found evidence that the material is ferromagnetic. That means it can be magnetized and then attracted or repelled by other magnetic materials (iron, for example, is ferromagnetic)... [T]here are already well over a dozen papers on ArXiv casting doubt on LK-99. "There may be room temperature superconductors to find, but this does not seem to be one," Chris Grovenor, professor of materials at the University of Oxford and director of the Centre for Applied Superconductivity, tells The Verge in an email. The Washington Post reports that one of physicists who co-authored the discovery paper "countered in an email that other research groups' failure to replicate their results are probably because they lack 'know how' in developing the sample the same way."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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