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An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:The mastermind behind a ransomware hosting service that allegedly helped criminals collect more than 5,000 bitcoin in ransom from hundreds of victims was indicted in federal court this week, prosecutors announced Thursday. Artur Grabowski's LolekHosted service operated for about a decade and advertised itself as a haven for "everything but child porn," according to Florida prosecutors. Clients allegedly used the hosting service to deploy ransomware viruses that infected around 400 networks around the world... [That's 400 just for the Netwalker ransomware, which the announcement calls "one of the ransomware variants facilitated by LolekHosted."] Grabowski was charged with computer fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit international money laundering. Grabowski himself is also the subject of a $21.5 million seizure order... Grabowski, a Polish national, faces a maximum sentence of 45 years, if he is ever detained and convicted. Grabowski also "remains a fugitive," according to an announcement from the U.S. Department of Justice. It notes that the 36-year-old's site - registered in 2014 - also "facilitated" brute-force attacks, and phishing. "Grabowski allegedly facilitated the criminal activities of LolekHosted clients by allowing clients to register accounts using false information, not maintaining Internet Protocol (IP) address logs of client servers, frequently changing the IP addresses of client servers, ignoring abuse complaints made by third parties against clients, and notifying clients of legal inquiries received from law enforcement."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon has sent emails "to those it believes are not complying with its return-to-office policies," reports CNN:The message highlights Amazon's determination to enforce its rules amid an employee backlash to the policy, which requires workers to report to an office at least three days a week, and in the face of a broader push by companies to scale back on remote work. Screenshots of the email circulating on social media show that Amazon told some employees they were "not currently meeting our expectation of joining your colleagues in the office at least three days a week, even though your assigned building is ready... We expect you to start coming into the office three or more days a week now," the email continued. It added that since the policy went into effect in May, many Amazon employees have complied, "and you can feel the surge in energy and collaboration happening among Amazonians and across teams." Amazon told employees that the email "was sent to employees who have badged in fewer than 3 days a week for 5 or more of the past 8 weeks, have not badged in 3 days a week for 3 or more of the past 4 weeks, and their building has been ready for 8 weeks or more." CNN adds that a followup email "acknowledged that some may have received the notice in error and urged those individuals to contact their managers to correct the mistake."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Internet Archive and a group of leading book publishers told a Manhattan federal court on Friday that they have resolved aspects of their legal battle over the Archive's digital lending of their scanned books. If accepted, the consent judgment would settle questions over potential money damages in the case and the scope of a ban on the Archive's lending and would clear the way for the Archive to appeal U.S. District Judge John Koeltl's decision that it infringed the publishers' copyrights. The proposed order would require the Archive to pay Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, News Corp's HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons and Bertelsmann SE & Co's Penguin Random House an undisclosed amount of money if it loses its appeal. The order would also permanently block the Archive from lending out copies of the publishers' books without permission, pending the result of the appeal. They asked Koeltl to resolve a dispute over whether the order will apply only to the publishers' books that are already available for electronic licensing or books commercially available in any format. The Internet Archive said in a blog post that the fight was "far from over," and founder Brewster Kahle said in a statement that "we must have strong libraries, which is why we are appealing this decision." Maria Pallante, the CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement that the plaintiffs were "extremely pleased" with the proposed injunction, which will "extend not only to the Plaintiffs' 127 works in suit but also to thousands of other literary works in their catalogs."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An international team of scientists has developed a new technology that can help detect (or even treat) cancer in hard-to-reach places, such as the colon. The team has published a paper in Science for the technique dubbed CATCH, or cellular assay for targeted, CRISPR-discriminated horizontal gene transfer. Engadget reports: For their lab experiments, the scientists used a species of bacterium called Acinetobacter baylyi. This bacterium has the ability to naturally take up free-floating DNA from its surroundings and then integrate it into its own genome, allowing it to produce new protein for growth. What the scientists did was engineer A. baylyi bacteria so that they'd contain long sequences of DNA mirroring the DNA found in human cancer cells. These sequences serve as some sort of one-half of a zipper that locks on to captured cancer DNA. For their tests, the scientists focus on the mutated KRAS gene that's commonly found in colorectal tumors. If an A. baylyi bacterium finds a mutated DNA and integrates it into its genome, a linked antibiotic resistance gene also gets activated. That's what the team used to confirm the presence of cancer cells: After all, only bacteria with active antibiotic resistance could grow on culture plates filled with antibiotics. While the scientists were successfully able to detect tumor DNA in mice injected with colorectal cancer cells in the lab, the technology is still not ready to be used for actual diagnosis. The team said it's still working on the next steps, including improving the technique's efficiency and evaluating how it performs compared to other diagnostic tests. In the future, the technology could also be used for targeted biological therapy that can deploy treatment to specific parts of the body based on the presence of certain DNA sequences.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A UCLA-led study of NASA's DART mission found that the collision launched a cloud of boulders from its surface. "The boulder swarm is like a cloud of shrapnel expanding from a hand grenade," said Jewitt, lead author of the study and a UCLA professor of earth and planetary sciences. "Because those big boulders basically share the speed of the targeted asteroid, they're capable of doing their own damage." From a news release: In September 2022, NASA deliberately slammed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos to knock it slightly off course. NASA's objective was to evaluate whether the strategy could be used to protect Earth in the event that an asteroid was headed toward our planet. Jewitt said that given the high speed of a typical impact, a 15-foot boulder hitting Earth would deliver as much energy as the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Fortunately, neither Dimorphos nor the boulder swarm have ever posed any danger to Earth. NASA chose Dimorphos because it was about 6 million miles from Earth and measured just 581 feet across -- close enough to be of interest and small enough, engineers reasoned, that the half-ton Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, planetary defense spacecraft would be able to change the asteroid's trajectory. When it hurtled into Dimorphos at 13,000 miles per hour, DART slowed Dimorphos' orbit around its twin asteroid, Didymos, by a few millimeters per second. But, according to images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the collision also shook off 37 boulders, each measuring from 3 to 22 feet across. None of the boulders is on a course to hit Earth, but if rubble from a future asteroid deflection were to reach our planet, Jewitt said, they'd hit at the same speed the asteroid was traveling -- fast enough to cause tremendous damage. The research, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, found that the rocks were likely knocked off the surface by the shock of the impact. A close-up photograph taken by DART just two seconds before the collision shows a similar number of boulders sitting on the asteroid's surface -- and of similar sizes and shapes -- to the ones that were imaged by the Hubble telescope. The boulders that the scientists studied, among the faintest objects ever seen within the solar system, are observable in detail thanks to the powerful Hubble telescope.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The founder and former CEO of Russia's largest internet company, Arkady Volozh, has slammed Vladimir Putin's "barbaric" war in Ukraine, becoming one of the most prominent Russian businessmen to express criticism of what Russia still calls euphemistically its "special military operation." "I've been asked a lot of questions over the past year, and especially a lot of them came up this week. I would like to clarify my position," he said in a statement released to the media. "I am totally against Russia's barbaric invasion of Ukraine, where I, like many, have friends and relatives. I am horrified by the fact that every day bombs fly into the homes of Ukrainians," said Volozh, describing himself "as a "Kazakhstan-born, Israeli tech entrepreneur, computer scientist, investor, and philanthropist." "Despite the fact that I have not lived in Russia since 2014, I understand that I also have a share of responsibility for the actions of the country," he added. "There were many reasons why I had to remain silent. You can argue about the timeliness of my statement, but not about its substance. I am against war." In June 2022, Volozh quit as CEO of Yandex (YNDX), which also operates Russia's most popular search engine, after he was sanctioned by the European Union over Russia's actions in Ukraine. "Volozh is a leading businessperson involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation, which is responsible for the annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of Ukraine," the EU said. "Yandex is also responsible for promoting State media and narratives in its search results, and de-ranking and removing content critical of the Kremlin, such as content related to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine." In his statement, Volozh said after moving to Israel in 2014, he has been working on developing Yandex's international projects. "But in February 2022, the world changed, and I realized that my story with Yandex was over." "After the outbreak of the war, I focused on supporting talented Russian engineers who decided to leave the country and start a new life. It turned out to be a difficult task that required a lot of effort, attention and caution," he said. "Now these people are outside of Russia and can start doing something new in the most advanced areas of technology. They will be of great benefit to the countries where they remain," he added. Volozh went on to say that when Yandex was created, "We believed that we were building a new Russia -- an open, progressive, integrated into the global economy, known in the world not only for its raw materials." However, "over time, it became clear that Russia was in no hurry to become part of the global world. At the same time, the pressure on the company grew," he said. "But we did not give up, we did our best despite the external conditions. Has it always been possible to find the right balance? Now, looking back, it is clear that something could have been done differently."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the unfortunate event that Amazon cancels Good Omens, a British fantasy comedy series created by Neil Gaiman, the New York Times bestselling author says a novel would be written to continue where the show left off. For those unaware, Good Omens recently launched season two on Amazon Prime and follows various characters all trying to either encourage or prevent an imminent Armageddon, seen through the eyes of the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley. According to Gizmodo's Linda Codega, it "ends on an absolutely devastating cliffhanger. Emotionally speaking." From the report: Neil Gaiman, the co-author of Good Omens (the book) alongside Terry Pratchett and the lead writer on Good Omens (the show), has always been active on Tumblr. Naturally, people have been asking him about that ending -- mostly because Good Omens, for all the hype, hasn't yet been renewed for a third season, and I will reiterate, the ending of season two is heart-wrenching. Gaiman had a lovely answer for one fan [poohbear0915] who asked: "In the unfortunate event that Good Omens is not renewed for a season three, would you consider releasing a script book of what would have happened for the fans to read?" Neil Gaiman responded: "No, I'd write a novel."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, Queens resident David Leacraft filed a lawsuit against Canon claiming that his Canon Pixma All-in-One printer won't scan documents unless it has ink. According to The Verge's Sean Hollister, it has quietly ended in a private settlement rather than becoming a big class-action. From the report: I just checked, and a judge already dismissed David Leacraft's lawsuit in November, without (PDF) Canon ever being forced to show what happens when you try to scan without a full ink cartridge. (Numerous Canon customer support reps wrote that it simply doesn't work.) Here's the good news: HP, an even larger and more shameless manufacturer of printers, is still possibly facing down a class-action suit for the same practice. As Reuters reports, a judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit by Gary Freund and Wayne McMath that alleges many HP printers won't scan or fax documents when their ink cartridges report that they've run low. Among other things, HP tried to suggest that Freund couldn't rely on the word of one of HP's own customer support reps as evidence that HP knew about the limitation. But a judge decided it was at least enough to be worth exploring in court. "Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that HP had a duty to disclose and had knowledge of the alleged defect," wrote Judge Beth Labson Freeman, in the order denying almost all of HP's current attempts to dismiss the suit. Interestingly, neither Canon nor HP spent any time trying to argue their printers do scan when they're low on ink in the lawsuit responses I've read. Perhaps they can't deny it? Epson, meanwhile, has an entire FAQ dedicated to reassuring customers that it hasn't pulled that trick since 2008. (Don't worry, Epson has other forms of printer enshittification.) HP does seem to be covering its rear in one way. The company's original description on Amazon for the Envy 6455e claimed that you could scan things "whenever". But when I went back now to check the same product page, it now reads differently: HP no longer claims this printer can scan "whenever" you want it to. Now, we wait to see whether the case can clear the bars needed to potentially become a big class-action trial, or whether it similarly settles like Canon, or any number of other outcomes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pornhub, along with several other members and activists in the adult industry are suing Texas to block the state's impending law that would require age verification to view adult content. Motherboard reports: The complaint was filed on August 4 in US District Court for the Western District of Texas, and the law will take effect on September 1 unless the court agrees to block it. Governor Greg Abbott passed HB 1181 into law in June. The plaintiffs, including Pornhub, adult industry advocacy group Free Speech Coalition, and several other site operators and industry members, claim that the law violates both the Constitution of the United States and the federal Communications Decency Act. In the complaint, the plaintiffs write that the act employs "the least effective and yet also the most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas' stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors," and that minors can easily use VPNs or Tor; on-device content filtering would be a better method of restricting access to porn for children, they write. "But such far more effective and far less restrictive means don't really matter to Texas, whose true aim is not to protect minors but to squelch constitutionally protected free speech that the State disfavors." Under the law, porn sites would be required to display a "Texas Health and Human Services Warning" on their websites in 14-point font or larger font, in addition to age verification. "Texas could easily spread its ideological, anti-pornography message through public service announcements and the like without foisting its viewpoint upon others through mandated statements that are a mix of falsehoods, discredited pseudo-science, and baseless accusations," the complaint says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last Friday, Illinois became one of the few states to pass an anti-doxxing law, making it possible for victims to sue attackers who "intentionally" publish their personally identifiable information with intent to harm or harass them. (Doxxing is sometimes spelled "doxing.") The Civil Liability for Doxing Act, which takes effect on January 1, 2024, passed after a unanimous vote. It allows victims to recover damages and to request "a temporary restraining order, emergency order of protection, or preliminary or permanent injunction to restrain and prevent the disclosure or continued disclosure of a person's personally identifiable information or sensitive personal information." It's the first law of its kind in the Midwest, the Daily Herald reported, and is part of a push by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to pass similar laws at the state and federal levels. ADL's Midwest regional director, David Goldenberg, told the Daily Herald that ADL has seen doxxing become "over the past few years" an effective way of "weaponizing" the Internet. ADL has helped similar laws pass in Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. [...] The law does not involve criminal charges but imposes civil liability on individuals who dox any Illinois residents. Actions can also be brought against individuals when "any element" of a doxxing offense occurs in the state. [...] Goldenberg told Ars that the Illinois law was written to emphasize not how information was found and gathered by people seeking to dox others, but on what they did with the information and how much harm they caused. The law might need less updating as the Internet evolves if it doesn't focus on the methods used to mine personally identifiable information. "The reality is that those who are using the Internet to spread hate, to spread misinformation, to do bad are pretty nimble and technology changes on a near daily basis," Goldenberg told Ars. "The law was crafted in a way that ensures that if technology changes, and people use new technologies to share someone's personally identifiable information with the intent to do harm and that harm actually happens, this law remains relevant."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is rolling out a new update for Windows 11 that disables the digital assistant Cortana. The Verge reports: If you attempt to launch Cortana on Windows 11 you'll now be met with a notice about how the app is deprecated and a link to a support article on the change. Microsoft is now planning to end support for Cortana in Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams Display, and Microsoft Teams Rooms "in the fall of 2023." Surprisingly, Cortana inside Outlook mobile "will continue to be available," according to Microsoft. Microsoft is now working on Windows Copilot, a new sidebar for Windows 11 that is powered by Bing Chat and can control Windows settings, answer questions, and lots more. Windows Copilot is expected to be available this fall as part of a Windows 11 update that will also include native RAR and 7-Zip support.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alibaba Group hasn't been able to completely fulfill demand for AI training from clients because of global supply constraints, its top executive said, suggesting a shortage of critical components such as artificial intelligence chips is weighing on Chinese efforts to ramp up in the cutting-edge technology. From a report: "In the past quarter, we have received strong demand for model training and related services on cloud infrastructure, which were only partially fulfilled due to the near-term supply chain constraints globally," Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang, who steps down in September, told analysts on a conference call. He will focus on Alibaba's cloud business full-time after ceding his dual roles to Alibaba co-founders Joseph Tsai and Eddie Wu. A shortage of high-powered semiconductors is undermining Chinese efforts to keep pace with the US in AI. Washington has banned Chinese firms from buying the most advanced chips made by Nvidia, impeding attempts to build rivals to OpenAI's ChatGPT.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: Zoom changed its terms of service to say that it won't use any customer content -- at all -- in training generative artificial intelligence models. The update, which the videoconference company announced Friday, comes after observers raised the alarm about a recent change in Zoom's TOS that appeared to grant the company royalty-free rights in perpetuity for customer video calls and presentations for the purposes of training AI models. In its initial response on Aug. 7, Zoom said it doesn't use any customer audio, video or chat content for training AI "without consent." Now it says it will not use such content in any way related to generative AI development. In a statement Friday appended its its earlier blog post, Zoom said, "Following feedback received regarding Zoom's recently updated terms of service, particularly related to our new generative artificial intelligence features, Zoom has updated our terms of service and the below blog post to make it clear that Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments or other communications like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom's or third-party artificial intelligence models." Zoom said it also updated in-product notices to reflect the change. According to Zoom's revised terms of service, the company still owns all rights to what it calls "service-generated data." That comprises telemetry data, product-usage data, diagnostic data and similar data "that Zoom collects or generates in connection with your or your End Users' use of the Services or Software," the terms of service say.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Private equity and venture capital funds targeted in Biden administration's crackdown. From a report: After President Joe Biden announced a ban on US investment in some of China's critical tech industries, the founder of a Shanghai-based semiconductor start-up felt forced to react. "After the news came out, I was determined to move the team out of China, at least part of the team," the person said, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject. "Otherwise, the financing will be very limited." The US ban, announced in an executive order on Wednesday and due to come into force next year, aims to block investment in quantum computing, advanced chips and artificial intelligence in an effort to stop China's military from accessing American funding and knowhow. For their part, US investors are trying to work out the potential impact of Biden's order on their holdings in China and weighing up strategies to comply or exit. Private equity groups General Atlantic, Warburg Pincus and Carlyle Group have poured billions into China in recent years as they sought the huge returns from betting on the nation's emergence as a technological superpower. Seeing the writing on the wall, though, many have already pulled back. Buyout groups struck deals in China worth $47bn in 2021, but that fell rapidly to just $2.4bn in 2022 and $2.8bn so far this year, figures from Dealogic show.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You're either a subtitles person or you're not. But increasingly, people are. From a report: Preply followed up on its subtitle-use survey of Americans from 2022 and found a 5% rise, to 58%, in how many people use captioning more than they used to. Now, just over half (51%) of those surveyed say they use subtitles most of the time. If you're thinking this habit could be the purview of older folks who are having a hard time hearing -- well, 96% of Gen Z survey respondents said they impose words over what they're watching. Netflix watchers are using captioning the most; 52% of survey respondents say they turn the feature on while they're watching. Subtitles help 81% of people better comprehend what they're watching. A significant part of the time (70%), people use subtitles to understand foreign accents, particularly if a speaker is Scottish, which poses a problem for Outlander fans. Preply found that Americans have a hard time understanding their own language when someone has a Scottish accent (47%), an Irish accent (20%), a British accent (13%), a South African accent (12%), an Australian accent (5%), and even a Southern US accent (3%). So those who watching Derry Girls, Downton Abbey, and Ozark are adjusting their settings to follow along.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S. judge revoked Sam Bankman-Fried's bail due to probable cause that he tampered with witnesses at least twice. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected a defense request to delay SBF's detention pending appeal of the bail revocation. Reuters reports: The decision could complicate Bankman-Fried's efforts to prepare for trial, where the 31-year-old former billionaire faces charges of having stolen billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to plug losses at his Alameda Research hedge fund. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty. He was led out of the courtroom by members of the U.S. Marshals Service in handcuffs after removing his shoelaces, jacket and tie and emptying his pockets. His parents, both law professors at Stanford University, were present in the courtroom's audience. His mother, Barbara Fried, nodded to him in tears as he left. His father, Joseph Bankman, placed his hand over his heart as he watched his son be led away. Bankman-Fried has been largely confined to his parents' Palo Alto, California, home on $250 million bond since his December 2022 arrest.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is reducing packaging on millions of deliveries. From a report: Millions of Amazon orders are arriving on doorsteps across the U.S. without any extra packaging. A new television may sit in the manufacturer's box at the door. A blender appears as if it were picked off a store shelf. The same for a box of baby wipes or trash bags. The change represents the next frontier in the tech giant's overhaul of its delivery processes, one Chief Executive Andy Jassy hopes will appeal to customers who are put off by the volume of Amazon-branded boxes they receive and discard every week. The company in the past year revamped its logistics network, enabling faster and more efficient deliveries. Eliminating or reducing packaging has become increasingly important for the company to maintain its dominance, reduce costs and reach its goals related to its climate impact. "The recognition by a number of senior leaders was just that this is becoming more and more important," said Pat Lindner, who Amazon hired last year as its first vice president of packaging and innovation. "There's a significant need for our company to take the next step in innovation around packaging." About 11% of items that the company delivers now arrive without extra packaging, or what the company calls "ships in own container," Amazon said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Biden administration will spend $1.2 billion to help build the nation's first two commercial-scale plants to vacuum carbon dioxide pollution from the atmosphere, a nascent technology that some scientists say could be a breakthrough in the fight against global warming, but that others fear is an extravagant boondoggle. From a report: Jennifer Granholm, the energy secretary, announced Friday that her agency would fund two pilot projects that would deploy the disputed technology, known as direct air capture. Occidental Petroleum will build one of the plants in Kleberg County, Texas, and Battelle, a nonprofit research organization, will build the other in Calcasieu Parish on the Louisiana coast. The federal government and the companies will equally split the cost of building the facilities. "These projects are going to help us prove out the potential of these next-generation technologies so that we can add them to our climate crisis fighting arsenal, and one of those technologies includes direct air capture, which is essentially giant vacuums that can suck decades of old carbon pollution straight out of the sky," Ms. Granholm said on a telephone call with reporters on Thursday. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law included $3.5 billion to fund the construction of four commercial-scale direct air capture plants. Friday's announcement covered the first two. Oil and gas companies lobbied for the direct air capture money to be included in the law, arguing that the world could continue to burn fossil fuels if it had a way to clean up their planet-warming pollution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scott DeVaney, writing at Mozilla blog: In the coming months Mozilla will launch support for an open ecosystem of extensions on Firefox for Android on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). We'll announce a definite launch date in early September, but it's safe to expect a roll-out before the year's end. Here's everything developers need to know to get their Firefox desktop extensions ready for Android usage and discoverability on AMO. For the past few years Firefox for Android officially supported a small subset of extensions while we focused our efforts on strengthening core Firefox for Android functionality and understanding the unique needs of mobile browser users. Today, Mozilla has built the infrastructure necessary to support an open extension ecosystem on Firefox for Android. We anticipate considerable user demand for more extensions on Firefox for Android, so why not start optimizing your desktop extension for mobile-use right away?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Detroit police chief said he's setting new policies on the use of facial-recognition technology after a woman who was eight months pregnant said she was wrongly charged with robbery and carjacking in a case that was ultimately dismissed by prosecutors. From a report: The technology, which was used on images taken from gas station video, produced leads in the case but was followed by "very poor" police work, Chief James White said. "We want to ensure that nothing like this happens again," White said Wednesday. His comments came two days after the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan announced a lawsuit on behalf of Porcha Woodruff, a 32-year-old Black woman, who was arrested in February while trying to get children ready for school. There have been two similar lawsuits against Detroit. Woodruff was identified as a suspect in a January robbery and carjacking through facial-recognition technology. She denied any role. The Wayne County prosecutor's office said charges later were dropped because the victim did not appear in court. White said his officers will not be allowed "to use facial-recognition-derived images in a photographic lineup. Period." He said two captains must review arrest warrants when facial technology is used in a case, among other changes. The new policies will be presented to the Detroit Police Board of Commissioners.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A battle has been brewing in San Francisco over driverless cars. Hundreds of the autonomous vehicles have been roaming city streets over the past couple of years. On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission, or CPUC, voted 3-1 to let self-driving car companies expand their programs and start charging passengers like taxis. The build-up before the Commission's vote Thursday was tense. Public comment lasted more than six hours. Much of that testimony was about how autonomous vehicles have impeded emergency operations in the city. San Francisco's police and fire departments have urged the CPUC to oppose the expansion a" they say they've tallied 55 incidents where self-driving cars have got in the way of rescue operations in just the last six months. The incidents include running through yellow emergency tape, blocking firehouse driveways and refusing to move for first responders. "Our folks cannot be paying attention to an autonomous vehicle when we've got ladders to throw," San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson said in a public meeting on Monday providing commissioners testimony before Thursday's vote. "I am not anti-technology, I am pro-safety."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the weeks leading up to her graduation from Pomona College, Sophia Augustine thought she had it all figured out. She had gotten a job offer at Accenture Plc and had plans to live with two friends in New York starting in August. Then she got a much-dreaded phone call. She, like hundreds of other new graduates this year, had a delayed start date. She would now report to work in April 2024, and for her troubles she'd receive a $25,000 stipend. The sudden change made her nervous, but she quickly pivoted. She found someone to sublet her apartment and made travel plans, starting with a trip to Southeast Asia. "I never got to study abroad in college because of Covid," Augustine said. "So I'm viewing this as, just like, my golden opportunity." The delay wasn't a complete surprise. Layoffs in consulting, finance and technology have piled up in recent months, putting the job market on shaky ground. Top consulting firms, reeling from a cut back in business spending, had been delaying start dates for some MBA graduates. And while undergrads with offers from Accenture, Bain & Co and Deloitte initially thought they were spared, they too have been caught up in the slump. Consulting firms are known to adjust their hiring plans when there's an economic downturn or change in market conditions. It's a way to ensure new hires have work to do, and keep costs down until business picks up again. For some new graduates, a stipend can provide an unexpected chance to travel, work at a nonprofit or pursue a professional certification.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shoddy guidebooks, promoted with deceptive reviews, have flooded Amazon in recent months. Their authors claim to be renowned travel writers. But do they even exist? The New York Times: The books are the result of a swirling mix of modern tools: A.I. apps that can produce text and fake portraits; websites with a seemingly endless array of stock photos and graphics; self-publishing platforms -- like Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing -- with few guardrails against the use of A.I.; and the ability to solicit, purchase and post phony online reviews, which runs counter to Amazon's policies and may soon face increased regulation from the Federal Trade Commission. The use of these tools in tandem has allowed the books to rise near the top of Amazon search results and sometimes garner Amazon endorsements such as "#1 Travel Guide on Alaska." A recent Amazon search for the phrase "Paris Travel Guide 2023," for example, yielded dozens of guides with that exact title. One, whose author is listed as Stuart Hartley, boasts, ungrammatically, that it is "Everything you Need to Know Before Plan a Trip to Paris." The book itself has no further information about the author or publisher. It also has no photographs or maps, though many of its competitors have art and photography easily traceable to stock-photo sites. More than 10 other guidebooks attributed to Stuart Hartley have appeared on Amazon in recent months that rely on the same cookie-cutter design and use similar promotional language. The Times also found similar books on a much broader range of topics, including cooking, programming, gardening, business, crafts, medicine, religion and mathematics, as well as self-help books and novels, among many other categories. Amazon declined to answer a series of detailed questions about the books.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The aviation sector's plans to pass along the cost of decarbonization could add hundreds of dollars to the price of some fights. From a report: Fresh from surviving the Covid-19 pandemic, the aviation industry is about to hand passengers the multi-trillion dollar bill to fight its next existential threat: decarbonization. Cleaning up flying is a mission of improbable scale: Neutralize the carbon emissions of about 25,000 planes in the world's commercial fleet that typically ferry some 4 billion people a year and burn close to 100 billion gallons of jet kerosene. That's more dirty liquid to launder than all the beer drunk in the world in a year. Some $5 trillion of capital investment may be needed to deliver on aviation's goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050, almost all of it plowed into sustainable fuel production and renewable power generation, according to McKinsey. It's a mountain of money so large it could wipe out global airline revenue for the best part of a decade. With the clock ticking, industry leaders are starting to voice an uncomfortable truth. It's clear, they say, that the costs of weaning air travel off fossil fuels will land on passengers. Through seven decades of nearly unfettered expansion, the aviation industry had to pay little attention to emissions. Passengers grew accustomed to ever-improving connectivity, increasing competition and cheap tickets. Suddenly, carriers find themselves in an environmental squeeze, with governments setting deadlines and activists gluing themselves to runways to call attention to global warming. While Greta Thunberg introduced flight-shaming to the public before the pandemic, record temperatures this summer have only underscored climate campaigners' point. Aviation's expensive transition to cleaner fuels has the power to put the democratization of flying into reverse, leading to higher fares, and fewer routes and airlines.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's time for the open source Rambos to stop fighting and agree that developers care more about software's access and ease of use than the purity of its license, reads a piece on InfoWorld. From the report: The open source war is over, however much some want to continue soldiering on. Recently Meta (Facebook) released Llama 2, a powerful large language model (LLM) with more than 70 billion parameters. In the past, Meta had restricted use of its LLMs to research purposes, but with Llama 2, Meta opened it up; the only restriction is that it can't be used for commercial purposes. Only a handful of companies have the computational horsepower to deploy it at scale (Google, Amazon, and very, very few others). This means, of course, it's not "open source" according to the Open Source Definition (OSD), despite Meta advertising it as such. This has a few open source advocates crying, Rambo style, "They drew first blood!" and "Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off!", insistent that Meta stop calling Llama 2 "open source." They're right, in a pedantic sort of way, but they also don't seem to realize just how irrelevant their concerns are. For years developers have been voting with their GitHub repositories to pick "open enough." It's not that open source doesn't matter, but rather it has never mattered in the way some hoped or believed. More than 10 years ago, the trend toward permissive licensing was so pronounced that RedMonk analyst James Governor declared, "Younger [developers] today are about POSS -- post open source software. [Screw] the license and governance, just commit to GitHub." In response, people in the comments fretted and scolded, saying past trends like this had resulted in "epic clusterf-s" or that "promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software-transmitted diseases." And yet, millions of unlicensed GitHub repositories later, we haven't entered the dark ages of software licensing. Open source, or "open enough," software now finds its way into pretty much all software, however it ends up being licensed to the end user. Ideal? Perhaps not. But a fact of life? Yep. In response, GitHub and others have devised ways to entice developers to pick open source licenses to govern their projects. As I wrote back in 2014, all these moves will likely help, but the reality is that they also won't matter. They won't matter because "open source" doesn't really matter anymore. Not as some countercultural raging against the corporate software machine, anyway. All of this led me to conclude we're in the midst of the post-open source revolution, a revolution in which software matters more than ever, but its licensing matters less and less.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia has successfully launched Luna 25, the country's first lunar lander in 47 years. From a report: The uncrewed spacecraft lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast, Russia. Hitching a ride aboard a Soyuz-2 Fregat rocket, Luna 25 took flight at 8:10 a.m. local time Friday, or 7:10 p.m. ET Thursday. Residents of a Russian village were temporarily evacuated Friday morning since there is a "one in a million chance" that one of Luna 25's rocket stages could fall there, according to Reuters. The spacecraft is expected to first enter an orbit around Earth before transferring to a lunar orbit and ultimately descending to the surface of the moon. Russia's last lunar lander, Luna 24, landed on the moon on August 18, 1976. Luna 25 and India's Chandrayaan-3 mission, which launched in mid-July, are both expected to land at the lunar south pole on August 23, and it's a race to see which country will land first, according to Reuters. But Roscomos said the two missions are not expected to cause a problem for each other because their specific landing zones differ, Reuters reported.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered signs of seasonal floods on Mars at a site called Gale Crater. Ars Technica reports: About 3,000 Martian days into its exploration, the rover was at a site that dates to roughly 3.6 billion years ago, during Mars' relatively wet Hesperian period. And it came across what would be familiar to gamers as a hex grid: hundreds of hexagonal shaped rock deposits in the area of a few centimeters across and at least 10 centimeters deep. These features are small enough that they'd be easy to overlook as simply another collection of wind-swept debris on the red planet. But up close, they're striking: large collections of hexagons that share sides, creating a regular grid. While there's some irregularity, the lines separating them largely form three-way intersections with equal angles between each line. And, in places where erosion has had different effects on nearby instances, it's clear that individual hexagons are at least 10 centimeters in height. Similar shapes have been seen on Pluto, formed by convection of an icy surface. But these are far, far larger, able to be detected from a considerable distance from Pluto. The tiny size of the hexes on Mars is completely incompatible with convection. Instead, it has to be the product of mud drying out, creating cracks as the material contracts. The water itself could either come externally, in the form of a flood, or via groundwater that soaks up to the surface. But again, the tiny size of these features is decisive, indicating that only the top few centimeters got wet, which is incompatible with a groundwater source. To form the regular, hexagonal shapes also means repeated cycles -- experiments show that at least a dozen cycles are needed before you start to get the equal angles at the junction. So, simply based on their shape, it appears that these hexagons are the product of repeated flooding. The chemistry backs this up. The rocks in the lines that separate individual hexagons are largely a mixture of calcium and magnesium sulfates, which will readily precipitate out of water as conditions get drier. These deposits will form harder rocks than the dried mud that comprises the bulk of the hexagons. The researchers behind the work note that the apparently regular, mild wet/dry cycling is incompatible with a lot of ideas about the source of water in Mars' past, such as volcanic melting of ice deposits. Instead, it's consistent with mild seasonal flooding, although there's no way to tell if the cadence was tied to Mars' orbit given what we currently know. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amtrak and a company called Texas Central announced a partnership on Wednesday to connect Houston and Dallas by train, spanning roughly 240 miles at speeds upwards of 205 mph. Popular Science reports: According to Quartz, the applications have already been submitted to "several federal grant programs" to help finance research and design costs. Amtrak representatives estimate the project could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 100,000 tons annually and remove an estimated 12,500 cars per day from the region's I-45 corridor. The reduction in individual vehicles on the roads could also save as much as 65 million gallons of fuel each year. The trains traveling Amtrak's Dallas-Houston route would be based on Japan's updated N700S Series Shinkansen "bullet train," a design that first debuted in 2020. "This high-speed train, using advanced, proven Shinkansen technology, has the opportunity to revolutionize rail travel in the southern US," Texas Central CEO Michael Bui said via the August 9 announcement. American city planners have been drawn to the idea of high-speed railways for decades, but have repeatedly fallen short of getting them truly on track due to a host of issues, including funding, political pushback, and cultural hurdles. That said, 85 percent of recently surveyed travelers between Dallas and the greater North Texas area indicated they would ride such a form of transportation "in the right circumstances." If so, as many as 6 million travelers could be expected to ride the train by the end of the decade, with the number rising to 13 million by 2050.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Scientists near Chicago say they may be getting closer to discovering the existence of a new force of nature. They have found more evidence that sub-atomic particles, called muons, are not behaving in the way predicted by the current theory of sub-atomic physics. Scientists believe that an unknown force could be acting on the muons. More data will be needed to confirm these results, but if they are verified, it could mark the beginning of a revolution in physics. All of the forces we experience every day can be reduced to just four categories: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. These four fundamental forces govern how all the objects and particles in the Universe interact with each other. The findings have been made at a US particle accelerator facility called Fermilab. They build on results announced in 2021 in which the Fermilab team first suggested the possibility of a fifth force of nature. Since then, the research team has gathered more data and reduced the uncertainty of their measurements by a factor of two, according to Dr Brendan Casey, a senior scientist at Fermilab. "We're really probing new territory. We're determining the (measurements) at a better precision than it has ever been seen before." In an experiment with the catchy name 'g minus two (g-2)' the researchers accelerate the sub-atomic particles called muons around a 50-foot-diameter ring, where they are circulated about 1,000 times at nearly the speed of light. The researchers found that they might be behaving in a way that can't be explained by the current theory, which is called the Standard Model, because of the influence of a new force of nature. Although the evidence is strong, the Fermilab team hasn't yet got conclusive proof. They had hoped to have it by now, but uncertainties in what the standard model says the amount of wobbling in muons should be, has increased, because of developments in theoretical physics. In essence, the goal posts have been moved for the experimental physicists. The researchers believe that they will have the data they need, and that the theoretical uncertainty will have narrowed in two years' time sufficiently for them to get their goal. That said, a rival team at Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are hoping to get there first. The results have been announced to the public and submitted to the Journal Physical Review Letters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic, the AI startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI execs, has released an updated version of its faster, cheaper, text-generating model available through an API, Claude Instant. TechCrunch reports: The updated Claude Instant, Claude Instant 1.2, incorporates the strengths of Anthropic's recently announced flagship model, Claude 2, showing "significant" gains in areas such as math, coding, reasoning and safety, according to Anthropic. In internal testing, Claude Instant 1.2 scored 58.7% on a coding benchmark compared to Claude Instant 1.1, which scored 52.8%, and 86.7% on a set of math questions versus 80.9% for Claude Instant 1.1. "Claude Instant generates longer, more structured responses and follows formatting instructions better," Anthropic writes in a blog post. "Instant 1.2 also shows improvements in quote extraction, multilingual capabilities and question answering." Claude Instant 1.2 is also less likely to hallucinate and more resistant to jailbreaking attempts, Anthropic claims. In the context of large language models like Claude, "hallucination" is where a model generates text that's incorrect or nonsensical, while jailbreaking is a technique that uses cleverly-written prompts to bypass the safety features placed on large language models by their creators. And Claude Instant 1.2 features a context window that's the same size of Claude 2's -- 100,000 tokens. Context window refers to the text the model considers before generating additional text, while tokens represent raw text (e.g. the word "fantastic" would be split into the tokens "fan," "tas" and "tic"). Claude Instant 1.2 and Claude 2 can analyze roughly 75,000 words, about the length of "The Great Gatsby." Generally speaking, models with large context windows are less likely to "forget" the content of recent conversations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Financial Times, China's internet giants have ordered more than $5 billion worth of high-performance Nvidia chips for building generative AI systems. Reuters reports: Baidu, TikTok-owner ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba have made orders worth $1 billion to acquire about 100,000 A800 processors from the U.S. chipmaker to be delivered this year, the FT reported, citing multiple people familiar with the matter. The Chinese groups had also purchased a further $4 billion worth of graphics processing units to be delivered in 2024, according to the report. The Biden administration last October issued a sweeping set of rules designed to freeze China's semiconductor industry in place while the U.S. pours billions of dollars in subsidies into its chip industry. Nvidia offers the A800 processor in China to meet export control rules after U.S. officials asked the company to stop exporting its two top computing chips to the country for AI-related work. Nvidia's finance chief said in June that restrictions on exports of AI chips to China "would result in a permanent loss of opportunities for the U.S. industry", though the company expected no immediate material impact.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader newbie_fantod shares a report from The Guardian: A New Zealand supermarket experimenting with using AI to generate meal plans has seen its app produce some unusual dishes -- recommending customers recipes for deadly chlorine gas, "poison bread sandwiches" and mosquito-repellent roast potatoes. The app, created by supermarket chain Pak 'n' Save, was advertised as a way for customers to creatively use up leftovers during the cost of living crisis. It asks users to enter in various ingredients in their homes, and auto-generates a meal plan or recipe, along with cheery commentary. It initially drew attention on social media for some unappealing recipes, including an "oreo vegetable stir-fry." When customers began experimenting with entering a wider range of household shopping list items into the app, however, it began to make even less appealing recommendations. One recipe it dubbed "aromatic water mix" would create chlorine gas. The bot recommends the recipe as "the perfect nonalcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses." "Serve chilled and enjoy the refreshing fragrance," it says, but does not note that inhaling chlorine gas can cause lung damage or death. New Zealand political commentator Liam Hehir posted the "recipe" to Twitter, prompting other New Zealanders to experiment and share their results to social media. Recommendations included a bleach "fresh breath" mocktail, ant-poison and glue sandwiches, "bleach-infused rice surprise" and "methanol bliss" -- a kind of turpentine-flavoured french toast. In a statement, a spokesperson for the supermarket said they would "keep fine tuning our controls" of the bot to ensure it was safe and useful. They noted that the bot should only be used by people over the age of 18 and that the recipes "are not reviewed by a human being."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A group of teenage hackers managed to breach some of the world's biggest tech firms last year by exploiting systemic security weaknesses in US telecom carriers and the business supply chain, a US government review of the incidents has found, in what is a cautionary tale for America's critical infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security-led review of the hacks, which was shared exclusively with CNN, determined US regulators should penalize telecom firms with lax security practices and Congress should consider funding programs to steer American youth away from cybercrime. The investigation of the hacks -- which hit companies like Microsoft and Samsung -- found that, in general, it was far too easy for the cybercriminals to intercept text messages that corporate employees use to log into systems. [...] "It is highly concerning that a loose band of hackers, including a number of teenagers, was able to consistently break into the best-defended companies in the world," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN in an interview, adding: "We are seeing a rise in juvenile cybercrime." After a series of high-profile cyberattacks marked his first four months in office, President Joe Biden established the DHS-led Cyber Safety Review Board in 2021 to study the root causes of major hacking incidents and inform policy on how to prevent the next big cyberattack. Staffed by senior US cybersecurity officials and executives at major technology firms like Google, the board does not have regulatory authority, but its recommendations could shape legislation in Congress and future directives from federal agencies. [...] The board's first review, released in July 2022, concluded that it could take a decade to eradicate a vulnerability in software used by thousands of corporations and government agencies worldwide. The second review, to be released Thursday, focused on a band of young criminal hackers based in the United Kingdom and Brazil that last year launched a series of attacks on Microsoft, Uber, Samsung and identity management firm Okta, among others. The audacious hacks were often followed by extortion demands and taunts by hackers who seemed to be out for publicity as much as they were for money. The hacking group, known as Lapsus$, alarmed US officials because they were able to embarrass major tech firms with robust security programs. "If richly resourced cybersecurity programs were so easily breached by a loosely organized threat actor group, which included several juveniles, how can organizations expect their programs to perform against well-resourced cybercrime syndicates and nation-state actors?" the Cyber Safety Review Board's new report states. Lapsus$, as well as other hacking groups, conduct "SIM-swapping" attacks that can take over a victim's phone number by having it transferred to another device, thereby gaining access to 2FA security codes and personal messages. These can then be used to reveal login credentials and access financial information. "The board wants telecom carriers to report SIM-swapping attacks to US regulatory agencies, and for those agencies to penalize carriers when they don't adequately protect customers from such attacks," reports CNN.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Financial Times, Universal Music Group and Google are considering developing a tool that people can use to create AI-generated music using popular artists' voices and melodies. Gizmodo reports: Under the licensing deal, the relevant copyright owners would be paid for the use of their likeness and would have the option to opt in to give UMG and Google permission to license AI-generated music using their voice, per the FT. Google and UMG are in the early stages of negotiations over creating the deepfake tool, and there aren't currently any plans to immediately launch it. Robert Kyncl, the CEO of Warner Music Group, voiced his opposition to deepfake technology in a conference earnings call on Tuesday, saying artists should always have a choice if they'll allow their likeness to be used. "There's nothing more precious to an artist than their voice," Kyncl said in the call, "and protecting their voice is protecting their livelihood and protecting their persona."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a lengthy blog post today, the open-source internet chess server, Lichess, announced they will formally end all cooperation with both the U.S. Chess Federation and Saint Louis University Chess Club (STLCC), citing two high-profile, sexual misconduct cases involving grandmasters Alejandro Ramirez and Timur Gareyev. Here's a brief summary of the issue: In February, chess commentator and author Jennifer Shahade publicly accused grandmaster Alejandro Ramirez of sexual misconduct. Her allegations sparked a swift and severe backlash against Ramirez, who was forced to resign from the Saint Louis Chess Club (STLCC), before being permanently banned by the United States Chess Federation (US Chess). The allegations also exposed apparent failures at US Chess and STLCC. Yet, neither organization has faced any serious scrutiny or accountability for their handling of the case. And Ramirez is not the only one. According to interviews and documents reviewed by Lichess, one other prominent American grandmaster has also been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women, raising further troubling questions about how chess organizations deal with such matters. Lichess has decided to stop cooperating with both organizations due to serious concerns about their accountability. We will not provide them with support, and we will not advertise their events. Women and girls in chess already face an uphill battle. They deserve a safe and supportive environment. But too often, they encounter abuse, harassment or worse. And too often, they feel powerless to report it or seek justice. It's time to help break the silence. Lichess urges US Chess and STLCC "to publicly acknowledge their past mistakes, be more open with the public, and hold those who engage in misconduct accountable." While they acknowledge US Chess has taken some steps to improve its processes, Lichess said "both US Chess and STLCC have failed to demonstrate an important aspect of accountability -- a willingness to acknowledge and address past shortcomings." They added: "We do not think that reconciliation will be possible without this acknowledgement."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a groundbreaking move, CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE have come together to announce the formation of the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA). From a report: The goal of this new collaborative trade association is to foster "the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free enterprise Linux source code." The inception of OpenELA is a direct response to Red Hat's recent alterations to RHEL source code availability. This new Delaware 501(c)(6) US nonprofit association will provide an open process for organizations to access source code. This will enable it to build RHEL-compatible distributions. The initiative underscores the importance of community-driven source code, which serves as a foundation for creating compatible distributions. Mike McGrath, Red Hat's vice president of Red Hat Core Platforms, sparked this when he announced Red Hat would be changing how users can access RHEL's source code. For the non-Hatters among you, Core Platforms is the division in charge of RHEL. McGrath wrote, "CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal." This made it much more difficult for RHEL clone vendors, such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux, to create perfect RHEL variant distributions. AlmaLinux elected to try to work with Red Hat's new source code rules. Oracle restarted its old fighting ways with IBM/Red Hat; SUSE announced an RHEL-compatible distro fork plan; and Rocky Linux found new ways to obtain RHEL code. Now the last two, along with CIQ, which started Rocky Linux, have joined forces.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Skydio today announced that it will be shutting down its consumer drone business. From a report: Beginning today, the firm will no longer be selling its Skydio 2+ Starter, Sports, Cinema or Pro kits, although it will continue to offer the Skydio 2+ Enterprise Kit to business customers. Skydio also promises to continue supporting those consumers who have already purchased a drone. That includes offering vehicle repairs and other support related to warranties. The company says it will also stock batteries, propellers and other accessories "for as long as we can." The company, which raised a $230 million Series E funding earlier this year, has raised over $550 million across all rounds, according to Crunchbase.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Extreme "glacial cooling" that occurred more than a million years ago in southern Europe is likely to have caused an "extinction of early humans" on the continent, according to new research. From a report: The previously unknown ice age pushed the European climate to "beyond what archaic humans could tolerate" and likely wiped out human life on the continent temporarily, concluded an academic paper published in the journal Science. The findings by 11 researchers from institutions including University College London and the University of Cambridge challenge the long-held idea that humans have continuously occupied Europe since first arriving in the region. The newly discovered cooling event was "comparable to some of the most severe events of recent ice ages," said the paper's lead author Vasiliki Margari from UCL. "We suggest that these extreme conditions led to the depopulation of Europe," the researchers concluded. Glacial-interglacial cycles, or warmer and colder periods each lasting thousands of years, have occurred cyclically over the past 2.6mn years, with large ice sheets forming during the colder spells and melting during the warmer periods. According to the academic paper, a previously unknown glacial period that occurred about 1.1mn years ago led to abrupt cooling that lasted about 4,000 years. This happened as conditions began to warm and large ice sheets melted into the Atlantic Ocean, which pushed down European sea and land temperatures.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity, the reusable rocket-powered space plane carrying the company's first crew of tourists to space, successfully launched and landed on Thursday. The mission, known as Galactic 02, took off shortly after 11am ET from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Aboard the spacecraft were six individuals total -- the space plane's commander and former Nasa astronaut CJ Sturckow, the pilot Kelly Latimer, as well as Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic's chief astronaut instructor who trained the crew before to the flight. The spacecraft also carried three private passengers, including the health and wellness coach Keisha Schahaff and her 18-year-old daughter, Anastasia Mayers, both of whom are Antiguan. [...] Galactic 02 is a suborbital flight. However, despite VSS Unity not reaching orbit, the trajectory allows passengers to experience several minutes of weightlessness at an altitude high enough for them to see the Earth's curvature, Space.com explains. Following liftoff, Virgin Galactic's carrier plane VMS Eve transported VSS Unity to an altitude of about 44,300ft. Eve then dropped Unity which then fired its own rocket motor and ascended to suborbital space. Passengers aboard experienced approximately 3Gs. Live footage inside the spacecraft showed the passengers unstrapping themselves from their seats and peering out down to earth through the windows as they floated throughout the spacecraft. Despite Galactic 02 being Virgin Galactic's second commercial spaceflight mission, it is the first flight to carry private customers. In June, Galactic 01 carried three crew members from the Italian air force and the National Research Council of Italy. According to Virgin Galactic, the company has already booked a backlog of about 800 customers. Tickets have ranged from $250,000 to $450,000. Galactic 03, the company's third commercial spaceflight, is planned for September.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SanDisk's silence this week has been deafening. Its portable SSDs are being lambasted as users and tech publications call for them to be pulled. From a report: The recent scrutiny of the drives follows problems from this spring when users, including an Ars Technica staff member, saw Extreme-series portable SSDs wipe data and become unmountable. A firmware update was supposed to fix things, but new complaints dispute its effectiveness. SanDisk has stayed mum on recent complaints and hasn't explained what caused the problems. In May, Ars Technica reported on SanDisk Extreme V2 and Extreme Pro V2 SSDs wiping data before often becoming unreadable to the user's system. At least four months of complaints had piled up by then, including on SanDisk's forums and all over Reddit. Even Ars' Lee Hutchinson fell victim to the faulty drives. Two whole Extreme Pros died on him. Both times they filled about 50 percent and then showed a bunch of read and write errors. Upon disconnecting and reconnecting, the drive was unformatted and wiped, and he could not fix either drive by wiping and reformatting. When Ars reached out to SanDisk about the problem in May, it didn't answer most of our questions about why these problems happened (and, oddly, excluded certain models we saw affected when naming which models were affected).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amid the flood of big tech layoffs, entry to Y Combinator has become the most competitive it's ever been. From a report: Silicon Valley's premier business incubator has received 44,000 applications so far this year, the most ever, and the acceptance rate for its summer batch was less than 1%, the lowest in the organization's history. Garry Tan, the president and chief executive officer of Y Combinator, said he anticipates "little tech" will thrive even in a turbulent economy. Cuts at big tech companies have unshackled people to work on important, new companies, Tan said on this week's episode of The Circuit with Emily Chang. "I think a lot of large companies started treating their employee base almost as a place to park resources and almost as a competitive moat versus the other giants," he said. "The amount of talent that was locked up in cushy jobs,a Tan said, "I'm hoping a lot of them actually come over to startups, and they realize, oh, this is what it's like to run fast again." Tan stepped into the top job at Y Combinator in January, succeeding co-founder Paul Graham and Sam Altman, who went on to help start OpenAI. Tan himself was accepted to the incubator as a founder in 2008, the same year Mark Zuckerberg attended the accelerator's regular "demo day" where Jeff Bezos announced Amazon Web Services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russia hopes to launch its first successful lunar landing mission for nearly 50 years, with a long-delayed takeoff from the far east of the country scheduled for early on Friday morning that the Kremlin aims to tout as a new achievement in space exploration. From a report: The Luna-25 mission will seek to land near the south pole of the moon, collecting geological samples from the area, and sending back data for signs of water or its building blocks, which could raise the possibility of a future human colony on the moon. But the more immediate goal is to prove that Russia still can launch a lunar landing mission after numerous failures in the past, generations of turnover among its scientific experts, delays due to sanctions and now isolation due to its war in Ukraine. Post-Soviet Russia has launched two failed space landing missions, the Mars-96 in 1996 and Phobos-Grunt in 2011, both of which crash-landed into the Pacific Ocean. "The Russian Federation hasn't had much luck with launching unmanned interplanetary probes," said Vitaly Egorov, a blogger who writes extensively on space exploration. "Now 12 years later they're launching Luna-25 and the main intrigue is whether or not it will succeed in reaching [the moon] or not, and if it does, can it actually land there? "One of the main goals is to let modern specialists put down space probes softly on celestial objects. They haven't had that experience in 47 years. That knowledge needs to be restored for new specialists on a new technological level."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube knows that it has a spam problem, particularly when it comes to its two-year-old Shorts feature. In an attempt to do something about it, the streamer has announced it's deactivating links in Shorts descriptions, comments and the vertical live feed. From a report: YouTube is also taking away the ability to click on social media icons on any desktop channel banners. The new changes will start to roll out on August 31st. Though YouTube claims it won't continue its "unclickable" crusade, but it adds, "Because abuse tactics evolve quickly, we have to take preventative measures to make it harder for scammers and spammers to mislead or scam users via links." At the same time, YouTube is adding new links on creators' channels, with a big clickable link appearing by the Subscribe button starting August 23rd. The link can bring users to anything from merchandise sites to social media accounts. The platform also recently introduced more creator tools for Shorts, like voiceovers. However, it won't be until at least the end of September that the streamer introduces "safer" ways to guide people from their Shorts back to the rest of their content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The nation's best-known public universities have been on an unfettered spending spree. Over the past two decades, they erected new skylines comprising snazzy academic buildings and dorms. They poured money into big-time sports programs and hired layers of administrators. Then they passed the bill along to students. From a report: The University of Kentucky upgraded its campus to the tune of $805,000 a day for more than a decade. Its freshmen, who come from one of America's poorest states, paid an average $18,693 to attend in 2021-22. Pennsylvania State University spent so much money that it now has a budget crisis -- even though it's among the most expensive public universities in the U.S. The University of Oklahoma hit students with some of the biggest tuition increases, while spending millions on projects including acquiring and renovating a 32,000-square-foot Italian monastery for its study-abroad program. The spending is inextricably tied to the nation's $1.6 trillion federal student debt crisis. Colleges have paid for their sprees in part by raising tuition prices, leaving many students with few options but to take on more debt. That means student loans served as easy financing for university projects. It has long been clear to American families that the cost of college has gone up, even at public schools designed to be affordable for state residents. To get at the root cause, The Wall Street Journal examined financial statements since 2002 from 50 universities known as flagships, typically the oldest public school in each state, and adjusted for inflation. At the median flagship university, spending rose 38% between 2002 and 2022. Only one school in the Journal's analysis -- the University of Idaho -- spent less. The schools paid for it in part by pulling in tuition dollars. The median flagship received more than double the revenue from undergraduate and graduate tuition and fees it did 20 years prior. Even accounting for enrollment gains, that amounted to a 64% price increase for the average student, far outpacing the growth in most big household expenses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British technology minister Michelle Donelan defended plans to require messaging apps to provide access to encrypted private messages when needed to protect children from abuse, which major platforms say would undermine the privacy of their users. From a report: Donelan told the BBC that the government was not against encryption, and the access would only be requested as a last resort, under Britain's Online Safety Bill which is expected to become law later this year. "I, like you, want my privacy because I don't want people reading my private messages. They'd be very bored but I don't want them to do it," said Donelan, minister for science, innovation and technology. "However, we do know that on some of these platforms, they are hotbeds sometimes for child abuse and sexual exploitation. And we have to be able access that information should that problem occur."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackers with apparent links to the Belarusian government have been targeting foreign diplomats in the country for nearly 10 years, according to security researchers. From a report: On Thursday, antivirus firm ESET published a report that details the activities of a newly discovered government hacking group that the company has dubbed MoustachedBouncer. The group has likely been hacking or at least targeting diplomats by intercepting their connections at the internet service provider (ISP) level, suggesting close collaboration with Belarus' government, according to ESET. Since 2014, MoustachedBouncer has targeted at least four foreign embassies in Belarus: two European nations, one from South Asia, and another from Africa. "The operators were trained to find some confidential documents, but we're not sure exactly what they were looking for," ESET researcher Matthieu Faou told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of his talk at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. "They are operating only inside Belarus against foreign diplomats. So we have never seen any attack by MustachedBouncer outside of Belarus."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is jettisoning dozens of its in-house brands as part of a significant reduction of its private-label operation as it works to fend off antitrust scrutiny and shore up profit. From a report: The Seattle-based company in the past year has decided to eliminate 27 of its 30 clothing brands, such as Lark & Ro, Daily Ritual and Goodthreads, according to people familiar with the matter. Some of the brands remain on Amazon's site for now as the company sells off remaining inventory, but when completed its house-label clothing division will have just three brands: Amazon Essentials, Amazon Collection and Amazon Aware. Amazon also is dropping private-label furniture, phasing out its Rivet and Stone & Beam brands once its stock of those items are gone, some of the people said. Exact numbers for brands being cut in other parts of the business couldn't be learned, but Amazon Basics, which sells a range of home goods and tech accessories, will remain a focus for the company.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: President Joe Biden signed an executive order Wednesday to block and regulate high-tech U.S.-based investments going toward China -- a move the administration said was targeted but it also reflected an intensifying competition between the world's two biggest powers. The order covers advanced computer chips, micro electronics, quantum information technologies and artificial intelligence. Senior administration officials said that the effort stemmed from national security goals rather than economic interests, and that the categories it covered were intentionally narrow in scope. The order seeks to blunt China's ability to use U.S. investments in its technology companies to upgrade its military while also preserving broader levels of trade that are vital for both nations' economies. The officials previewing the order said that China has exploited U.S. investments to support the development of weapons and modernize its military. The new limits were tailored not to disrupt China's economy, but they would complement the export controls on advanced computer chips from last year that led to pushback by Chinese officials. The Treasury Department, which would monitor the investments, will announce a proposed rulemaking with definitions that would conform to the presidential order and go through a public comment process. The goals of the order would be to have investors notify the U.S. government about certain types of transactions with China as well as to place prohibitions on some investments. Officials said the order is focused on areas such as private equity, venture capital and joint partnerships in which the investments could possibly give countries of concern such as China additional knowledge and military capabilities.The Chinese Ministry of Commerce responded in a statement early Thursday that it has "serious concern" about the order and "reserves the right to take measures." "We hope the U.S. side respects the laws of the market economy and the principle of fair competition, does not artificially obstruct global economic and trade exchanges and cooperation and does not put up obstacles for the recovery and growth of the world economy." The Chinese Ministry of Commerce also said the executive order "seriously deviates from the market economy and fair competition principles the United States has always advocated. It affects the normal business decisions of enterprises, disrupts the international economic and trade order and seriously disrupts the security of global industrial and supply chains."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A recent comprehensive study reveals that automated bots are substantially more efficient than humans at cracking Captcha tests, a widely used security measure on over 100 popular websites. The Independent reports: In the study, scientists assessed 200 of the most popular websites and found 120 still used Captcha. They took the help of 1,000 participants online from diverse backgrounds -- varying in location, age, sex and educational level -- to take 10 captcha tests on these sites and gauge their difficulty levels. Researchers found many bots described in scientific journals could beat humans at these tests in both speed and accuracy. Some Captcha tests took human participants between nine and 15 seconds to solve, with an accuracy of about 50 to 84 per cent, while it took the bots less than a second to crack them, with up to near perfection. "The bots' accuracy ranges from 85-100 per cent, with the majority above 96 per cent. This substantially exceeds the human accuracy range we observed (50-85 per cent)," scientists wrote in the study. They also found that the bots' solving times are "significantly lower" or nearly the same as humans in almost all cases.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A scientist has observed a "gravitational anomaly" in certain star systems that could potentially upend a fundamental assumption about the universe, according to a new study. Motherboard reports: Kyu-Hyun Chae, an astronomer at Sejong University, has now put these models to the test by analyzing the accelerations of stars in 26,500 wide binaries located within about 650 light years of Earth using imagery captured by the European Space Agency's Gaia observatory. Scientists have previously searched for signs of modified gravity in these systems, but Chae took the next step by developing a new code that could account for special details, like the occurrence rate of so-called "nested" binaries in which the loosely orbiting stars also have close stellar companions. The new data suggests that when the gravitational accelerations of these stars slip below one nanometer per second squared, they begin to move in ways that are more aligned with MOND models than by the standard model. Chae said the findings offer "direct evidence for the breakdown of standard gravity at weak acceleration" and reveal "an immovable anomaly of gravity in favor of MOND-based modified gravity," according to a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal. In the new study, Chae reports what he calls "clear evidence" that the movements of binaries at points of weak acceleration seem to sync up with a particular MOND prediction known as AQUAL, according to the study. This discovery suggests that the standard view of gravity cannot account for these motions at low accelerations, which may inspire scientists to rethink aspects of Newton's inverse square law of gravity and Einstein's general relativity, as well as the necessity of dark matter. "Because a large amount of dark matter -- six times the baryonic or ordinary matter based on the standard model -- was required by assuming that general relativity was valid in the low acceleration limit, such a need for a large amount of dark matter is no longer valid," Chae explained. "This does not necessarily preclude the possibility that new particles, such as sterile neutrinos, could not be found. But, it is clear that there is no need for as much dark matter as required by general relativity." "When the results started to show up from my new and more reliable code, my initial reaction was that it was unbelievable," Chae said in an email to Motherboard. "I was feeling like I was dreaming. It seemed so unreal. This is because my results did not match any previous results." "Several previous results even claimed that the standard gravity was preferred by wide binaries data including Gaia DR3. One group has been claiming an anomaly for some time, but the anomaly seemed not to match well the predictions of existing modified gravity theories. However, those previous studies did not self-calibrate or fully take into account the amount of hidden nested binaries."Read more of this story at Slashdot.