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"Scientists in Japan may be at the start of a truly monumental accomplishment: a vaccine that can slow or delay the progression of Alzheimer's disease," reports Gizmodo:In preliminary research released this week, the vaccine appeared to reduce inflammation and other important biomarkers in the brains of mice with Alzheimer's-like illness, while also improving their awareness. More research will be needed before this vaccine can be tested in humans, however. The experimental vaccine is being developed primarily by scientists from Juntendo University in Japan. It's intended to work by training the immune system to go after certain senescent cells, aging cells that no longer divide to make more of themselves, but instead stick around in the body. These cells aren't necessarily harmful, and some play a vital role in healing and other life functions. But they've also been linked to a variety of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer's. The vaccine specifically targets senescent cells that produce high levels of something called senescence-associated glycoprotein, or SAGP. Other research has suggested that people with Alzheimer's tend to have brains filled with these cells in particular. The team tested their vaccine on mice bred to have brains that develop the same sort of gradual destruction seen in humans with Alzheimer's.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bram Moolenaar was Vim's creator/maintainer/benevolent-dictator for life. Early this morning his family shared sad news on the Vim-announce Google Group. "It is with a heavy heart that we have to inform you that Bram Moolenaar passed away on 3 August 2023." Moolenaar was 62 years old, and died from "a medical condition that progressed quickly over the last few weeks." "Bram dedicated a large part of his life to VIM and he was very proud of the VIM community that you are all part of." Anyone who's used Vim has seen evidence of Moolenaar's generosity. "Vim is Charityware," Moolenaar wrote in its pioneering license. "You can use and copy it as much as you like, but you are encouraged to make a donation for needy children in Uganda." Moolenaar pioneered the concept of charityware decades ago, and also helped to popularize its adoption. To this day Vim users can still view the license by typing the command :help Uganda or :help ICCF. And Vim's sponsor FAQ notes that "Each registered Vim user and sponsor who donates at least 10 euro will be able to vote for new features." Moolenaar's personal web site also includes photos from his travels around the world, and YouTube has some videos of talks and interviews with Moolenaar. He was still committing changes to Vim up until a month ago. In the comments below long-time Slashdot reader bads shares a link to a post from long-time Vim contributor Christian Brabandt :Bram was a great leader to the Vim community and I really enjoyed working with him over the past years, since I became involved with the development of Vim almost 20 years ago. Bram was of great inspiration in creating a great community, helping people with his charity and he was a great mentor. And now he left too soon. We lost a great leader and I regret never having met him in person. However to all of the community: I will continue and I hope all of the other contributors willalso keep up the good work. I do have access to the Vim homepage and the Vim organization (not sure if all the rights, but I am sure we will work on the details in the near future...) I hopetogether we will be able to continuesuccessfully.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"NASA has reestablished full communications with Voyager 2," according to a mission update posted Friday:The agency's Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, sent the equivalent of an interstellar "shout" more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) to Voyager 2, instructing the spacecraft to reorient itself and turn its antenna back to Earth. With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to reach Voyager, it took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command worked. At 12:29 a.m. EDT on Aug. 4, the spacecraft began returning science and telemetry data, indicating it is operating normally and that it remains on its expected trajectory. "Had the Earth-based signals not reached Voyager 2, the spacecraft is already programmed to reorient itself multiple times a year to keep its antenna pointing in our planet's direction," CNN points out. "The next reset was already scheduled for October 15. But the team didn't want to wait that long..." After controllers sent the wrong command to the 46-year-old spacecraft, Voyager 2's antenna needed to be shifted "a mere 2 degrees," notes The Associated Press: Voyager 2 has been hurtling through space since its launch in 1977 to explore the outer solar system. Launched two weeks later, its twin, Voyager 1, is now the most distant spacecraft - 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away - and still in contact. As long as their plutonium power holds, the Voyagers may be alive and well for the 50th anniversary of their launch in 2027, according to Dodd. Among the scientific tidbits they've beamed back in recent years include details about the interstellar magnetic field and the abundance of cosmic rays.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As detailed in a paper published in Cell Chemical Biology, researchers have developed a "cancer-killing pill" capable of destroying solid tumors while leaving healthy cells unaffected. The new drug has been in development for 20 years and is now undergoing pre-clinical research in the U.S.. Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist and freelance writer on science and pharmaceutical topics, writes about the new paper via Science Magazine: It's about a molecule designated AOH1996, which seems to have a unique mode of action in tumor cells, one that might make it more more selective for those as compared to normal ones. The key target here is a protein called PCNA (from its old name of "proliferating cell nuclear antigen"). [...] The current molecule is a traditional direct small molecule binder that is selective for caPCNA over the regular type, which is a very attractive advantage to explore. The team behind it has been working on it for several years now to validate that mechanism, and the new paper linked first above is their report of going all the way into animal models. AOH1996 is a very unremarkable-looking molecule - to be honest, it looks like the sort of stuff that you used to see in old combinatorial chemistry libraries in the late 90s and early 2000s, a couple of aryl-rich groups strung together with amide bonds. It's certainly not going to be the most soluble stuff in the world, but they seem to have been able to formulate it. But I'm definitely not going to make fun of any chemical structure that works! [...] The new paper shows preclinical toxicity testing in two species (mice and dogs), which is what you need to get to human trials. It seems to pass those very well, with no signs of trouble at 6x the effective dose in either species. And if you were throwing DSBs all over the place in normal tissues, believe me, you'd see tox. It is clean in an Ames test, for example. As for efficacy, in cell assays the concentration needed for 50% growth inhibition across 70 different cancer cell lines averaged around 300nM, while it showed no toxic effects on various non-cancer lines up to 10 micromolar (at least a 30x window). The affected cells show cell-cycle arrest, replication stress, apoptosis, and so on. And application of AOH1996 along with other known chemotherapy agents made the cells much more sensitive to those, presumably because they couldn't deal with those on top of the problems that AOH1996 was already causing. It also shows growth arrest in xenograft tumors in mouse models, with a no-effect dose at least six times its effective dose, and combination therapy with a topoisomerase inhibitor showed even more significant effects. The compound has entered a Phase I trial in humans on the basis of the above data, and I very much look forward to seeing it advance to Phase II, where it will doubtless be used in combination with several existing therapies. I hope that human cancers will prove vulnerable to this new mode of attack in the clinic, and that they are not able to mutate around it with new forms of caPCNA too quickly, either. The comparison with the peptide agent mentioned above will be especially interesting, too. There's only one way to find out - good luck to everyone involved!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: The Environmental Protection Agency approved a component of boat fuel made from discarded plastic that the agency's own risk formula determined was so hazardous, everyone exposed to the substance continually over a lifetime would be expected to develop cancer. Current and former EPA scientists said that threat level is unheard of. It is a million times higher than what the agency usually considers acceptable for new chemicals and six times worse than the risk of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking. Federal law requires the EPA to conduct safety reviews before allowing new chemical products onto the market. If the agency finds that a substance causes unreasonable risk to health or the environment, the EPA is not allowed to approve it without first finding ways to reduce that risk. But the agency did not do that in this case. Instead, the EPA decided its scientists were overstating the risks and gave Chevron the go-ahead to make the new boat fuel ingredient at its refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Though the substance can poison air and contaminate water, EPA officials mandated no remedies other than requiring workers to wear gloves, records show. ProPublica and the Guardian in February reported on the risks of other new plastic-based Chevron fuels that were also approved under an EPA program that the agency had touted as a "climate-friendly" way to boost alternatives to petroleum-based fuels. That story was based on an EPA consent order, a legally binding document the agency issues to address risks to health or the environment. In the Chevron consent order, the highest noted risk came from a jet fuel that was expected to create air pollution so toxic that 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer. In February, ProPublica and the Guardian asked the EPA for its scientists' risk assessment, which underpinned the consent order. The agency declined to provide it, so ProPublica requested it under the Freedom of Information Act. The 203-page risk assessment revealed that, for the boat fuel ingredient, there was a far higher risk that was not in the consent order. EPA scientists included figures that made it possible for ProPublica to calculate the lifetime cancer risk from breathing air pollution that comes from a boat engine burning the fuel. That calculation, which was confirmed by the EPA, came out to 1.3 in 1, meaning every person exposed to it over the course of a full lifetime would be expected to get cancer. Another serious cancer risk associated with the boat fuel ingredient that was documented in the risk assessment was also missing from the consent order. For every 100 people who ate fish raised in water contaminated with that same product over a lifetime, seven would be expected to develop cancer -- a risk that's 70,000 times what the agency usually considers acceptable. When asked why it didn't include those sky-high risks in the consent order, the EPA acknowledged having made a mistake. This information "was inadvertently not included in the consent order," an agency spokesperson said in an email. [...] The risk assessment makes it clear that cancer is not the only problem. Some of the new fuels pose additional risks to infants, the document said, but the EPA didn't quantify the effects or do anything to limit those harms, and the agency wouldn't answer questions about them. Some of these newly approved toxic chemicals are expected to persist in nature and accumulate in living things, the risk assessment said. That combination is supposed to trigger additional restrictions under EPA policy, including prohibitions on releasing the chemicals into water. Yet the agency lists the risk from eating fish contaminated with several of the compounds, suggesting they are expected to get into water. When asked about this, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the agency's testing protocols for persistence, bioaccumulation and toxicity are "unsuitable for complex mixtures" and contended that these substances are similar to existing petroleum-based fuels. The EPA did address the concerns in June when it proposed a rule that "would require companies to contact the agency before making any of 18 fuels and related compounds listed in the Chevron consent order," notes ProPublica. "The EPA would then have the option of requiring tests to ensure that the oil used to create the new fuels doesn't contain unsafe contaminants often found in plastic, including certain flame retardants, heavy metals, dioxins and PFAS. If approved, the rule will require Chevron to undergo such a review before producing the fuels, according to the EPA."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For $99 a night, full-time employees of Google can stay at an on-campus hotel in Mountain View in what the company is deeming a "Summer Special." According to CNBC who obtained the materials, "the special will run through Sept. 30 in hopes it'll 'make it easier for Googlers to transition to the hybrid workplace.'" From the report: Since the promotion is for unapproved business travel, the company will not reimburse their stays, but will require employees to use their personal credit cards, the special's description states. "Just imagine no commute to the office in the morning and instead, you could have an extra hour of sleep and less friction," the description reads. "Next, you could walk out of your room and quickly grab a delicious breakfast or get a workout in before work starts." The ad goes on to say that after the work day ends, "you could enjoy a quiet evening on top of the rooftop deck or take in one of the fun local activities." The Google-owned hotel is situated on a newer campus in Mountain View, California, that it opened last year. The 42-acre campus is adjacent to NASA's Ames Research Center and has capacity to house 4,000 employees working on its ads products, the company said upon its opening. Some employees have commented on the hotel deal in internal discussion forums. One highly rated meme showed movie clips that included a scene in the movie "Mean Girls," where the main character played by Lindsey Lohan says "No, thank you." "Now I can give some of my pay back to Google," another highly rated meme read. Another meme joked that living on campus for the summer could disrupt "work-life balance." At $99 a night, the hotel would amount to roughly $3,000 a month, employees pointed out in internal discussions viewed by CNBC. One employee pointed out that hotel amenities were not to be ignored. "I pay more and get a lot less in total for my apartment," wrote one employee in a discussion thread. "Though admittedly where I live is much better." Another thought it was still too expensive. "If it was around $60 a night, that could be a fine-ish alternative to apartments, but $99? No thanks." "I would've totally done it, had it fit a certain profile: $3k rent all-in, fully-furnished, unlimited meals, paid utilities, plus housekeeping/cleaning every day," another employee wrote. Another hypothesized the move could be a way to reduce vacancy at the hotel after Google cut corporate travel budgets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Capella Space's synthetic aperture radar satellites are falling back to Earth much sooner than than the three years they were anticipated to operate, according to publicly available satellite data. TechCrunch reports: The startup has launched a total of ten small satellites to low Earth orbit since 2018, including eight in its family of "Whitney"-class spacecraft. Five of these satellites have reentered the atmosphere since the end of January of this year, including three of the Whitneys. Those Whitney sats were in orbit for less than two-and-a-half years; one, Capella-5, was in orbit for less than two years. That leaves five of the constellation in orbit, including the Capella-9 and Capella-10 launched on March 16, which are operating at an altitude of around 584 km and 588 km, respectively. According to filings with the Federal Communication Commission, the propulsion system of Capella-9 was built by Phase Four. At least one of the satellites that has reentered prematurely, Capella-5, also used Phase Four propulsion. In that same filing from March 2022, Capella said its Capella-9 satellite would operate at an orbital altitude of 525 km, and maintain an altitude between 475-575 km for three years. It seems this is the typical mission profile of Capella satellites. But Capella-7 and Capella-8, launched in January 2022, appear to be now operating below 400 kilometers, and will likely deorbit in a matter of weeks to a few months. The unexpected decay could be due to a problem with the propulsion system, or a systematic miscalculation of its requirements. "Probably they [Capella-7 and Capella-8] will reenter in Sep-Oct or so," astronomer and analyst Jonathan McDowell said when reviewing the data at TechCrunch's request. "I suspect propulsion failures but certainly it isn't clear." In a statement to TechCrunch, Capella CEO Payam Banazadeh confirmed that some of the satellites have been deorbiting faster than expected "due to the combination of increased drag due to much higher solar activity than predicted by NOAA and less than expected performance from our 3rd party propulsion system." "We have upgraded our propulsion system on all future satellites to account for these facts, including the launch of our next generation satellite Acadia-1, currently scheduled for launch on August 5th 2023. We plan to launch eight of our next generation Acadia satellites over the next 12 months," he added.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Jordi Van DenBussche used to devote every waking hour to building his presence on social media. The gaming creator, better known as Kwebbelkop, would labor 24/7 onhis YouTube channelcoming up with video ideas, shooting them, distributing them. He did this while courting brand deals and doing the other work integral to his survival on the platform. Five years ago, he ran into a problem. "Every time I wanted to take a holiday or I needed some time for myself, I couldn't really do that, because my entire business would stop," he says. It's an issue known as the "key person problem." Without Van Den Bussche on camera, the entire Kwebbelkop enterprise didn't work. He was too busy making videos to think about how to scale his business, and too tired to create videos. He needed a break: Around 2018, like many other YouTubers, he experienced significant burnout. The burnout sparked a change in mindset. He began thinking about what would benefit him and what would benefit the creator industry -- which often relies on milking the on-camera presence of an individual until they reach a breaking point, then finding another person seeking fame and fortune. He came up with a solution: a series of AI tools designed to create and upload videos, practically without his involvement. "I'm retired from being an influencer," he says. "I've had a lovely career. I had a lot of fun. I want to take things to the next level. And that means making this brand live on forever." Van Den Bussche's AI influencer platform, which launched this week after a suitably excitable level of hype on Twitter from its creator, is his attempt to make that happen. It comprises two versions of an AI tool. The first is trained on a creator's likeness -- their on-camera performances and what they say in videos -- and is used to create new content. It appears to be similar to Forever Voices,the controversial AI tool behind the CarynAI virtual influencer, which outsourced maintaining connections with fans on behalf of creators. The other involves simplifying the act of creation as much as possible by taking simple prompts -- such as "turn this article into a video formatted like an interview involving two people" -- and producing the end result. (The latter is similar toa tool called QuickVid, which has seen some early adoption.) Van Den Bussche won't reveal much about how the tools were built, but regardless of their origins they're coming at a critical time for generative AI and its impacts on how people work. And Van Den Bussche's way of doing things could have lasting impacts on creators on YouTube and beyond.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:The New York Police Department took social media influencer Kai Cenat into custody Friday and is considering charges such as "inciting a riot" after thousands-strong crowds gathered in Union Square for a giveaway, leaving multiple people arrested and several police officers injured. Cenat, who has over 4 million followers on YouTube, over 5 million on Instagram, and 6.5 million on Twitch, said during a Wednesday Twitch stream that he would be hosting a "huge giveaway" Friday at 4 p.m. in Union Square Park. In the stream, he said they would be giving away computers, Play Station 5s, microphones, keyboards, webcams, gaming chairs, headphones and giftcards from a truck in Union Square. "I feel like New York really deserves it," he said. Thousands of people began gathering at the park around 3 p.m., NYPD chief Jeffrey Maddrey said at a Friday news conference. "Soon the park and the surrounding streets were overrun with people, obstructing vehicular and pedestrian traffic," he said. The crowds spurred the NYPD to activate a "Level 4" response, its highest level of disaster response... "You had people walking around with shovels, axes, and other tools from the construction site," he said. "Individuals were also lighting fireworks, throwing them towards the police, they were throwing them towards each other...." Several police officers were injured in the frenzy and "quite a few" people were arrested as police worked to clear the crowd, Maddery said... Cenat could be arrested and face charges for inciting a riot, the chief said. He said NYPD Police Commissioner Edward Caban and the city's legal team were discussing possible charges. Police complained to CNN that the Twitch streamer "had not alerted the police to the gathering or obtained a permit, and it was declared an unlawful assembly." Cenat streamed live on Twitch on Friday for some portion of the event, posting video from the crowd. In one video seemingly posted from inside a truck, he described the chaotic gathering, saying, "It's everybody for themselves. It's a war out there."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader KindMind shares a report from The Register: Researchers at MIT claim to have found a novel new way to store energy using nothing but cement, a bit of water, and powdered carbon black -- a crystalline form of the element. The materials can be cleverly combined to create supercapacitors, which could in turn be used to build power-storing foundations of houses, roadways that could wirelessly charge vehicles, and serve as the foundation of wind turbines and other renewable energy systems -- all while holding a surprising amount of energy, the team claims. According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 45 cubic meters of the carbon-black-doped cement could have enough capacity to store 10 kilowatt-hours of energy -- roughly the amount an average household uses in a day. A block of cement that size would measure about 3.5 meters per side and, depending on the size of the house, the block could theoretically store all the energy an off-grid home using renewables would need." [...] Just three percent of the mixture has to be carbon black for the hardened cement to act as a supercapacitor, but the researchers found that a 10 percent carbon black mixture appears to be ideal. Beyond that ratio, the cement becomes less stable -- not something you want in a building or foundation. The team notes that non-structural use could allow higher concentrations of carbon black, and thus higher energy storage capacity. The team has only built a tiny one-volt test platform using its carbon black mix, but has plans to scale up to supercapacitors the same size as a 12-volt automobile battery -- and eventually to the 45 cubic meter block. Along with being used for energy storage, the mix could also be used to provide heat -- by applying electricity to the conductive carbon network encased in the cement, MIT noted. As Science magazine puts it, "Tesla's Powerwall, a boxy, wall-mounted, lithium-ion battery, can power your home for half a day or so. But what if your home was the battery?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok users in Europe will be able to switch off the personalized algorithm behind its For You and Live feeds as the company makes changes to comply with the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA). The Verge reports: According to TikTok, disabling this function will show users "popular videos from both the places where they live and around the world" instead of content based on their personal interests. These changes relate to DSA rules that require very large online platforms to allow their users to opt out of receiving personalized content -- which typically relies on tracking and profiling user activity -- when viewing content recommendations. To comply, TikTok's search feature will also show content that's popular in the user's region, and videos under the "Following" and "Friends" feeds will be displayed in chronological order when a non-personalized view is selected. Another change is that European users between the ages of 13 and 17 automatically won't be targeted with personalized ads based on their online activities, rather than having to opt out with a toggle.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Austria's leader is proposing to enshrine in the country's constitution a right to use cash, which remains more popular in the Alpine nation than in many other places. Chancellor Karl Nehammer said in a statement on Friday that "more and more people are concerned that cash could be restricted as a means of payment in Austria." His office said that the "uncertainty" is fueled by contradictory information and reports. "People in Austria have a right to cash," Nehammer said. [...] The chancellor's proposal, according to his office, involves a "constitutional protection of cash as a means of payment," ensuring that people can still pay with cash, and securing a "basic supply" of cash in cooperation with Austria's central bank. Austria is one of 20 countries that are part of the euro area. Nehammer said he has instructed Finance Minister Magnus Brunner to work on the proposal and plans to hold a round table with the ministries concerned, finance industry representatives and the central bank in September. "Everyone should have the opportunity to decide freely how and with what he wants to pay," he said. "That can be by card, by transfer, perhaps in future also with the digital euro, but also with cash. This freedom to choose must and will remain." Freedom Party leader Herbert Kickl accused Nehammer of stealing his party's ideas and argued that the chancellor's "suddenly discovered love of cash" was meant only "to secure his political survival." The biggest opposition party in the current parliament, the center-left Social Democrats, has called for at least one ATM in every municipality and accused Nehammer of "pure populism." "Even if we write the word 'cash' into the constitution 100 times, there won't be a single ATM more in Austria," said the head of its parliamentary group, Philip Kucher.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pirate eBook repository Z-Library has launched browser extensions that should make it easier for users to find the site if its current domains are seized in the future. While the site doesn't explicitly mention the U.S. Government crackdown, it likely plays a key role in the decision to make these extensions available. TorrentFreak reports: Since the shadow library is now well aware that its domain names could be taken away at any moment, numerous precautions are being taken to mitigate the risks. A few weeks ago, Z-Library released a dedicated desktop application that should make it easier to access the site. The software has the ability to redirect users to working domains and whenever necessary, connect over the Tor network, which also helps to evade blocking efforts. In an announcement this week, the operators of the shadow library unveiled new precautionary tools to redirect users to working domains, including any new ones, should they be needed. The new browser extensions are available for both Chrome and Firefox and promise 'seamless access' to alternative domains in the event that existing ones run into trouble. "Say goodbye to searching for available domains, as this handy extension takes care of everything for you. Simplify your online library experience and enjoy seamless access to a world of knowledge, right at your fingertips. "After launching the extension, the process of searching for an available domain will begin. Within some seconds when the domain is found, you will be redirected to the library homepage," Z-Library explains. While installing browser extensions should always happen with caution, in just a few hours thousands of Z-Library users have already installed the new software. According to the Chrome store, the Z-Library Finder currently has over 7,000 users. These extensions may indeed help to point users to new domain names, but the solution isn't bulletproof. The authorities may attempt to remove the listings from the Chrome and Firefox extension libraries, for example. Even if Z-Library decides to self-host these tools, they still rely on technical infrastructure that could be targeted in the future. That being said, the releases are still notable; it's rare to a service going full steam ahead in the face of an active criminal case.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Telecommunications giant Telus says it is trimming 6,000 jobs, citing its need to free up cash flow and remain competitive. CBC.ca reports: The cuts involve 4,000 positions at its main Telus business and 2,000 at Telus International and include offers of early retirement and voluntary departure packages, the Vancouver-based company said Friday. Financial markets data firm Refinitiv says Telus had 108,500 workers at the end of last year. The cuts were made with "a very heavy heart" and prompted by the "evolving regulatory, competitive and macroeconomic environment," said Darren Entwistle, the company's president and chief executive. "Against the backdrop of rapid transformation in our industry and the ways in which our customers want to engage with us, today we are announcing a significant investment in an extensive efficiency and effectiveness initiative across Telus," he said in a news release. The restructuring will cost Telus $475 million in 2023 and lead to annual savings of more than $325 million, the company said. Its plans to reduce its workforce were announced at the same time as the company revealed its second-quarter net income fell almost 61 per cent from the same period last year to $196 million. The company's net income amounted to 14 cents per share for the quarter ending June 30 compared with 34 cents per share in the same quarter a year earlier. Yet Entwistle positioned the company's strategy of building out broadband networks, digitizing operations and streamlining costs as "winning." "Our resilience and ability to embrace change and continuously evolve the way we operate are cornerstones of our Telus culture and will continue to fuel our future success," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Arm is facing down its biggest competition ever, with the up-and-coming RISC-V architecture threatening to unseat it as the CPU at the center of almost every portable device. Now, one of Arm's biggest customers is trying out RISC-V, as Qualcomm is getting involved in a joint venture dedicated to the architecture. The joint venture doesn't have a name yet, but Qualcomm, NXP, Nordic Semiconductor, Bosch, and memory giant Infineon are all teaming up to form a new company that Qualcomm's press release says is "aimed at advancing the adoption of RISC-V globally by enabling next-generation hardware development." At first, the group will be focused on automotive uses, with an "eventual expansion" to IoT and mobile, Qualcomm's biggest market. Further reading: Qualcomm Chip Sales Down 25 Percent, Plans LayoffsRead more of this story at Slashdot.

A husband and wife cyber-crime team have pleaded guilty to trying to launder $4.5bn of Bitcoin that he had stolen in a hack in 2016. From a report: Heather Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein were arrested last year in New York after police traced their riches back to the crypto heist. While evading police, Morgan masqueraded as a rapper and tech entrepreneur. As part of a plea deal, Lichtenstein admitted he was behind the hack. The couple both pleaded guilty to money laundering, but Morgan pleaded guilty to an additional count of conspiracy to defraud the United States. In spite of attempting to cover up her crimes, Morgan published dozens of expletive-filled music videos and rap songs filmed in locations around New York, under the name Razzlekhan. In her lyrics she called herself a "bad-ass money maker" and "the crocodile of Wall Street." In articles published in Forbes, Morgan also claimed to be a successful tech businesswoman, calling herself an "economist, serial entrepreneur, software investor and rapper." But while developing her rapping and tech persona, she and her computer programmer husband were attempting to cash out their fortune stolen from the crypto firm Bitfinex. The couple now face prison sentences with Lichtenstein in line for a possible maximum 20 years in prison and Morgan a possible 10. At the time of their arrest in February 2022, the stash of 119,000 Bitcoins was worth about $4.5bn -- making it the US Department of Justice's largest single financial seizure in its history. When the hack was carried out, the Bitcoins were worth about $71m.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SoftBank sued former IRL CEO Abraham Shafi and five siblings and cousins for allegedly misleading the investor about the messaging app's growth, prompting the Japanese conglomerate to buy $150 million worth of shares in the company in 2021 at the height of a pandemic-fueled consumer internet boom. The Information: SoftBank said Shafi and his family members defrauded investors by lying about the company's millions of users, which were actually bots. The lawsuit said the defendants deleted data and communications about the fraud after U.S. securities regulators began investigating the company following a report in The Information questioning the user figures. Last month, The Information reported the company was being shut down following an external investigation initiated by its board of directors that found 95% of its users were fake. The conduct described in the lawsuit, including allegedly deleting evidence during a federal investigation, could put Shafi in further legal trouble.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canadians will soon be able to access and apply for more federal government services online -- from passports to payments, says Canada's first minister of citizens' services. From a report: Terry Beech says he's also open to innovation and using new technologies like artificial intelligence to improve the way the government delivers services to Canadians. "I think, fundamentally, it's my job to wake up every day thinking about how we're improving the customer service experience for Canadians," Beech said in an interview with CBC News. Beech's appointment to the newly created position comes as the government has been hammered in headlines and by the opposition in recent months over problems delivering basic services to Canadians. News reports have featured images of long lineups and people camping out to apply for passports. In the House of Commons, Conservative MPs have repeatedly talked about a "broken" government, saying lineups have been getting longer, backlogs bigger and services slower.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Filipe Esposito, writing for Apple-focused news site 9to5Mac: As reported by Windows Latest, the Cortana app has received an update via the Microsoft Store after two years without getting a single new feature. But instead of new features, the update pretty much kills Cortana and now shows a message saying that "Cortana in Windows as a standalone app is deprecated." [...] Earlier this week, during a call with investors, Apple CEO Tim Cook reinforced that Apple has been conducting research with a "wide range of AI technologies," including "generative AI" for years. Multiple rumors have pointed to Apple internally developing a technology to compete with ChatGPT. However, while Microsoft and Google have already made their new tools available to the public, Apple is still a long way off. In the meantime, Siri is still Siri. Even Apple employees complain about "organizational dysfunction and a lack of ambition" when it comes to the development of Apple's virtual assistant. Some employees point out that Siri is still based on a very legacy technology and that improving it would require a lot of efforts. Seeing what other companies are achieving with generative AI, I do think it's time for Apple to give up on Siri and focus its efforts on new technologies. What about you? What are your thoughts on Apple, Siri, and AI?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dumi, a Zimbabwean, fell for E-Creator's review-writing job, investing $112. When the company's director disappeared with $1M, his account was frozen, leaving him scammed. Rest of World reports: Thousands of Zimbabweans have been lured into a scam in hopes of making a quick buck, at a time when unemployment in the country is high: Estimates vary from 7.9% to 20%, or even 90%, according to the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. Alongside the job crisis, the country has been reeling under an inflation of more than 100%, with many struggling to make ends meet. Dumi, who previously worked as a clerk, told Rest of World he found it hard to get another job due to scarce opportunities. He said he joined the E-Creator scheme hoping he'd earn an income while waiting to find the job of his dreams. "Some of us living in marginalized townships such as Mbare, with no decent employment, jumped at an opportunity, which seemed to be so technologically significant and rewarding. Losing money in the process was unexpected," Dumi said, adding that he would not have joined the scheme if he had a job of his choice. E-Creator agents told Rest of World they had taken up the role because they were unemployed or couldn't find enough work. They said they were lured by the promise of earning 10% returns for posting 10 fake reviews if they invested between $15 and $100. There were higher rewards promised for bigger investments: Depositing $100-$500 and recruiting five agents meant an additional 4.5% return; depositing $500-$2,000 and recruiting over 50 others would take earnings to the highest level of a 5% commision and a 10% base payout. While they could withdraw money from their E-Creator wallets, the lure of getting higher returns stopped them from doing so. Watson Manjobo, a former manager and affiliate marketer for E-Creator, told Rest of World the company owed him his salary for June. His job was to recruit more users and help people reset their account passwords. When news of Jiaotong's escape went viral, users flooded his phone with messages demanding answers, he said, adding that his direct superiors have since been unreachable.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nikola Chief Executive Michael Lohscheller, an auto industry veteran, has stepped down due to a family health matter, and Nikola Chairman Steve Girsky has taken over as CEO of the electric-vehicle maker. From a report Girsky is Nikola's fourth CEO in almost as many years after the 2020 departure of Nikola founder Trevor Milton, who was later convicted of defrauding investors. Lohscheller, who took over as CEO of Nikola earlier this year, previously served as chief financial officer and then CEO of German automaker Opel, now owned by Stellantis. Before that, he was CFO of Volkswagen's U.S. business. Nikola credited Lohscheller with reducing the company's cash burn and improving production capabilities. Girsky previously served as CEO of the special-purpose acquisition company that merged with Nikola and took the company public in 2020. He previously served as vice chairman of General Motors. From 2005 to 2006, he was special adviser to the CEO and CFO of GM.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A cyberattack has disrupted hospital computer systems in several states, forcing some emergency rooms to close and ambulances to be diverted, and many primary care services remained closed on Friday as security experts worked to determine the extent of the problem and resolve it. From a report: The "data security incident" began Thursday at facilities operated by Prospect Medical Holdings, which is based in California and has hospitals and clinics there and in Texas, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. "Upon learning of this, we took our systems offline to protect them and launched an investigation with the help of third-party cybersecurity specialists," the company said in a statement Friday. "While our investigation continues, we are focused on addressing the pressing needs of our patients as we work diligently to return to normal operations as quickly as possible." In Connecticut, the emergency departments at Manchester Memorial and Rockville General hospital were closed for much of Thursday and patients were diverted to other nearby medical centers. [...] The FBI in Connecticut issued a statement saying it is working with "law enforcement partners and the victim entities" but could not comment further on an ongoing investigation. Elective surgeries, outpatient appointments, blood drives and other services were suspended, and while the emergency departments reopened late Thursday, many primary care services were closed on Friday, according to the Eastern Connecticut Health Network, which runs the facilities. Patients were being contacted individually, according to the network's website. Similar disruptions also were reported at other facilities system-wide.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is hoping to lure workers back to the office with a new on-site hotel special, but some workers aren't convinced it's a good deal. From a report: The company said full-time employees can book a room at an on-campus hotel in Mountain View for $99 a night in what it's deeming a "Summer Special," according to materials viewed by CNBC. The description states that the special will run through Sept. 30 in hopes it'll "make it easier for Googlers to transition to the hybrid workplace." Since the promotion is for unapproved business travel, the company will not reimburse their stays, but will require employees to use their personal credit cards, the special's description states. "Just imagine no commute to the office in the morning and instead, you could have an extra hour of sleep and less friction," the description reads. "Next, you could walk out of your room and quickly grab a delicious breakfast or get a workout in before work starts." The ad goes on to say that after the work day ends, "you could enjoy a quiet evening on top of the rooftop deck or take in one of the fun local activities." The Google-owned hotel is situated on a newer campus in Mountain View, California, that it opened last year. The 42-acre campus is adjacent to NASA's Ames Research Center and has capacity to house 4,000 employees working on its ads products, the company said upon its opening.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India is delaying the implementation of its import limitations on laptops, tablets, and servers, a day after the unexpected regulation left electronic industry giants in a state of disruption and uncertainty. From a report: New Delhi will provide a "transition period" before implementing the amended import policy, India's Deputy IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said Friday. The government will offer at least one month to companies to obtain licenses, a government official told local reporters. India's Ministry of Commerce announced Thursday that the new restrictions on import of consumer electronic devices were going into effect immediately. The notification said the government will permit import against a valid license for restricted products. The restriction will also not apply to passengers carrying the mentioned devices in their baggage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Smartphone sales are down across the board, and that means component vendors like Qualcomm are also feeling the heat. From a report: The company's Q3 2023 earnings (Qualcomm's fiscal year is October-September) have handset chip sales down 25 percent year over year, with net income down 52 percent year over year. The company also issued lower-than-expected guidance for the next quarter, all causing the stock to drop around 8 percent in the aftermath of the call. Like most other tech companies, Qualcomm's response to the less-than-stellar earnings is to cut costs via layoffs. Earlier this year the company cut 415 jobs at its San Diego headquarters, but the company's securities filing revealed more cuts are coming.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple now has more than 1 billion paid subscriptions across all of its services, including Apple Music, iCloud, Apple News, Apple TV+ and more. From a report: Apple has methodically executed a long-term strategy of offsetting slowing hardware sales growth with revenue from software services -- and that now accounts for more than a quarter of the company's sales. Apple's advertising business is expected to reach $6 billion by 2025, which would make it larger than both Snapchat and Twitter's ad business. [...] The quarter also represented Apple's biggest ever for software sales.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Threads, Meta's Twitter rival, is struggling to retain users roughly a month after its highly publicized launch, according to fresh industry estimates showing that app engagement has fallen to new lows. From a report: The data from market research firms Similarweb and Sensor Tower highlight the challenges facing Meta as it seeks to exploit the opening created by the chaos surrounding Twitter's management. Threads' daily active user count is down 82% from launch as of July 31, according to Sensor Tower, with just eight million users accessing the app each day. That is the lowest it has been since the day after the app's release when daily active users peaked at roughly 44 million, Sensor Tower said. People are also opening the app less frequently and spending less time there, Sensor Tower added. On its launch day, Threads users opened the app an average of 14 times and spent an average of 19 minutes scrolling through it, the company reported. By the end of the month, however, those figures had fallen sharply.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Waymo's fourth robotaxi city will be Austin, Texas. It will be a bit of a homecoming for the Alphabet-owned self-driving company. Waymo said that it will kick off the process for a commercial robotaxi service in the city later this year. But that doesn't mean passengers can hail one of the company's driverless vehicles quite yet; Waymo's playbook is to start with manual testing, following by supervised testing, fully autonomous driving, and then, eventually, passenger services. The company has been testing its vehicles on the streets of Austin since March, laying the groundwork for the eventual launch of a commercial ridehailing service. Waymo says its driverless taxis will traverse "a large portion of the city night and day," covering spots like "the heart of downtown, Barton Hills, Riverside, East Austin, Hyde Park and more." The company makes no mention of the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, where the taxi business is typically the most lucrative. The company also noted that "autonomous vehicles help improve road safety," a claim that sounds true on the surface but is hard to prove. Waymo has released several datasets that show its vehicles to be adept at avoiding certain collisions. But humans drive billions of miles every year -- orders of magnitude more real-world driving than the comparatively tiny fleet of AVs on the road today. And while there are an unacceptable number of fatalities every year, humans are actually good drivers -- for the most part.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study found that people working in finance, sales and managerial roles are much more likely than others on average to think their jobs are useless or unhelpful to others. Phys.Org reports: The study, by Simon Walo, of Zurich University, Switzerland, is the first to give quantitative support to a theory put forward by the American anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 that many jobs were "bullshit" -- socially useless and meaningless. Researchers had since suggested that the reason people felt their jobs were useless was solely because they were routine and lacked autonomy or good management rather than anything intrinsic to their work, but Mr. Walo found this was only part of the story. He analyzed survey data on 1,811 respondents in the U.S. working in 21 types of jobs, who were asked if their work gave them "a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society" and "the feeling of doing useful work." The American Working Conditions Survey, carried out in 2015, found that 19% of respondents answered "never" or "rarely" to the questions whether they had "a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society" and "of doing useful work" spread across a range of occupations. Mr. Walo adjusted the raw data to compare workers with the same degree of routine work, job autonomy and quality of management, and found that in the occupations Graeber thought were useless, the nature of the job still had a large effect beyond these factors. Those working in business and finance and sales were more than twice as likely to say their jobs were socially useless than others. Managers were 1.9 more likely to say this and office assistants 1.6 times. [...] Law was the only occupation cited by Graeber as useless where Mr. Walo found no statistically significant evidence that staff found their jobs meaningless. Mr. Walo also found that the share of workers who consider their jobs socially useless is higher in the private sector than in the non-profit or the public sector. The study has been published in the journal Work, Employment and Society.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alibaba said Thursday it is opening up its own artificial intelligence model to third-party developers in a move that would pit it against OpenAI and Meta, which has made similar moves. CNBC reports: In April, Alibaba launched its large language model (LLM) called Tongyi Qianwen. A LLM is an artificial intelligence model trained on huge amounts of data. It is also the basis for generative AI applications, such as ChatGPT -- which generate human-like responses to user prompts. Tongyi Qianwen allows AI content generation in English and Chinese and has different model sizes, including seven billion parameters and above. A model's parameters refer to its power. Alibaba will be open-sourcing the seven-billion-parameter model called Qwen-7B, along with a version designed for conversational apps, called Qwen-7B-Chat. This means that researchers, academics and companies globally can use the model to create their own generative AI apps without needing to train their own systems, saving time and expense. Companies with more than 100 million monthly active users will require a royalty-free license from Alibaba to do so. While Alibaba might not earn licensing fees from open-sourcing its technology, the distribution will help the company get more users for its AI model.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Travel rewards programslike those offered by airlines and hotels tout the specific perks of joining their club over others. Under the hood, though, the digital infrastructure for many of these programs -- including Delta SkyMiles, United MileagePlus, Hilton Honors, and Marriott Bonvoy -- is built on the same platform. The backend comes from the loyalty commerce company Points and its suite of services, including an expansive application programming interface (API).But new findings, published today by a group of security researchers, show that vulnerabilities in the Points.com API could have been exploited to expose customer data, steal customers' "loyalty currency" (like miles), or even compromise Points global administration accounts to gain control of entire loyalty programs. The researchers -- Ian Carroll, Shubham Shah, and Sam Curry -- reported a series of vulnerabilities to Points between March and May, and all the bugs have since been fixed. "The surprise for me was related to the fact that there is a central entity for loyalty and points systems, which almost every big brand in the world uses," Shah says. "From this point, it was clear to me that finding flaws in this system would have a cascading effect to every company utilizing their loyalty backend. I believe that once other hackers realized that targeting Points meant that they could potentially have unlimited points on loyalty systems, they would have also been successful in targeting Points.com eventually." One bug involved a manipulation that allowed the researchers to traverse from one part of the Points API infrastructure to another internal portion and then query it for reward program customer orders. The system included 22 million order records, which contain data like customer rewards account numbers, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and partial credit card numbers. Points.com had limits in place on how many responses the system could return at a time, meaning an attacker couldn't simply dump the whole data trove at once. But the researchers note that it would have been possible to look up specific individuals of interest or slowly siphon data from the system over time. Another bug the researchers found was an API configuration issue that could have allowed an attacker to generate an account authorization token for any user with just their last name and rewards number. These two pieces of data could potentially be found through past breaches or could be taken by exploiting the first vulnerability. With this token, attackers could take over customer accounts and transfer miles or other rewards points to themselves, draining the victim's accounts. The researchers found two vulnerabilities similar to the other pair of bugs, one of which only impacted Virgin Red while the other affected just United MileagePlus. Points.com fixed both of these vulnerabilities as well. Most significantly, the researchers found a vulnerability in the Points.com global administration website in which an encrypted cookie assigned to each user had been encrypted with an easily guessable secret -- the word "secret" itself. By guessing this, the researchers could decrypt their cookie, reassign themselves global administrator privileges for the site, reencrypt the cookie, and essentially assume god-mode-like capabilities to access any Points reward system and even grant accounts unlimited miles or other benefits.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes: Wired Editor at Large, Steven Levy, was hit with a $52 bill for a 2.9-mile Uber ride in New York City as he headed to interview Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. "Do you know how much it cost me to go 2.9 miles to where we are now in an Uber?," Levy asked Khosrowshahi. "And he said $20, and I said, 'no it was like $52,' and he said, 'oh my God wow.'" [While Khosrowshahi attributed the head-scratching fee to "surge pricing," Levy insisted that made no sense given the trip took place at "10 a.m. on a sunny weekday and it's not like the president's in town." Uber's CEO blamed inflation for the increased rates, telling Wired during his sit-down that "everything is more expensive."] When asked for a statement, Uber shared the following: "Riders' fares are a direct result of the city's regulations." "The fact is that they're not subsidizing rides anymore," said Levy of Uber. "And the way that company operates is expensive." Uber, which had recorded more than $31 billion in losses since it launched in 2009, reported its first profit ever on Tuesday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a report from CNBC: On Tuesday, the Biden administration put the final nail in the coffin for incandescent light bulbs, the result of a decade-plus-long legislative path. The journey began in 2007 when the Energy Independence and Security Act passed. That law required the Department of Energy to evaluate whether efficiency standards for light bulbs needed to be set or amended and required a minimum standard of energy efficiency for light bulbs of 45 lumens per watt to be considered. The 2007 law required that if the DOE determined a new energy efficiency standard was necessary, it should go into effect by January 1, 2017. But politics intervened as the Trump administration appealed those rules. The Biden administration picked the issue back up. And in April 2022, the Biden administration issued a rule requiring the minimum standard efficiency of 45 lumens per watt, which became effective in July. At that time, the Department of Energy said it would have a gradual transition to the new rule so that stores with inventory would not be stuck with light bulbs they could no longer sell. In Department of Energy lingo, this is called "progressive enforcement." Full enforcement of the ban for retailers took effect on Tuesday. The DOE does not disclose its techniques for enforcing these step-wise implementation of the rule. However, the agency's new regulations will be enforced in "a fair and equitable manner," and smaller retailers are advised to reach out to the DOE to speak about existing inventory they may still have on hand, a spokesperson told CNBC. Enforcing the sale of the more energy-efficient light bulbs will save consumers nearly $3 billion per year on their utility bills, according to DOE estimates, and cut carbon emissions by 222 million metric tons over the next 30 years. That's about the quantity of emissions that 28 million homes generate in a year, the Department of Energy said. [...] Not all light bulbs are included in the ban. Exceptions include a whole slew of specific light bulb implications, including appliance lamps, black light lamps, bug lamps, colored lamps, general service fluorescent lamps, marine lamps, marine signal service lamps, mine service lamps, sliver bowl lamps, showcase lamps, and traffic signal lamp, to name a few.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pornhub operator MindGeek has blocked all users in Arkansas from the site after the state's new age verification law went into effect on Tuesday. The Verge reports: The Arkansas law, SB 66, doesn't ban Pornhub from operating in the state, but it requires porn sites to verify that a user is 18 by confirming their age with identifying documents. On Wednesday, Pornhub blocked all traffic from IP addresses based in Arkansas in protest, arguing that the law, which was intended to protect children, actually harms users. "While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk," MindGeek wrote in a message replacing the site's front page for affected users. The block also applies to other popular MindGeek adult sites, like RedTube.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft has once again come under blistering criticism for the security practices of Azure and its other cloud offerings, with the CEO of security firm Tenable saying Microsoft is "grossly irresponsible" and mired in a "culture of toxic obfuscation." The comments from Amit Yoran, chairman and CEO of Tenable, come six days after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) blasted Microsoft for what he said were "negligent cybersecurity practices" that enabled hackers backed by the Chinese government to steal hundreds of thousands of emails from cloud customers, including officials in the US Departments of State and Commerce. Microsoft has yet to provide key details about the mysterious breach, which involved the hackers obtaining an extraordinarily powerful encryption key granting access to a variety of its other cloud services. The company has taken pains ever since to obscure its infrastructure's role in the mass breach. On Wednesday, Yoran took to LinkedIn to castigate Microsoft for failing to fix what the company said on Monday was a "critical" issue that gives hackers unauthorized access to data and apps managed by Azure AD, a Microsoft cloud offering for managing user authentication inside large organizations. Monday's disclosure said that the firm notified Microsoft of the problem in March and that Microsoft reported 16 weeks later that it had been fixed. Tenable researchers told Microsoft that the fix was incomplete. Microsoft set the date for providing a complete fix to September 28. "To give you an idea of how bad this is, our team very quickly discovered authentication secrets to a bank," Yoran wrote. "They were so concerned about the seriousness and the ethics of the issue that we immediately notified Microsoft." He continued: "Did Microsoft quickly fix the issue that could effectively lead to the breach of multiple customers' networks and services? Of course not. They took more than 90 days to implement a partial fix -- and only for new applications loaded in the service." In response, Microsoft officials wrote: "We appreciate the collaboration with the security community to responsibly disclose product issues. We follow an extensive process involving a thorough investigation, update development for all versions of affected products, and compatibility testing among other operating systems and applications. Ultimately, developing a security update is a delicate balance between timeliness and quality, while ensuring maximized customer protection with minimized customer disruption." Microsoft went on to say that the initial fix in June "mitigated the issue for the majority of customers" and "no customer action is required." In a separate email, Yoran responded: "It now appears that it's either fixed, or we are blocked from testing. We don't know the fix, or mitigation, so hard to say if it's truly fixed, or Microsoft put a control in place like a firewall rule or ACL to block us. When we find vulns in other products, vendors usually inform us of the fix so we can validate it effectively. With Microsoft Azure that doesn't happen, so it's a black box, which is also part of the problem. The 'just trust us' lacks credibility when you have the current track record."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Nokia 130 and 150 are two new updated feature phones from Nokia that ship "with the form of an earlier generation of tech but the software of the current time," reports Gizmodo. From the report: The Nokia 150 is arguably the more worthy of the two; it comes in three colors and features a 2.4-inch QVGA display, a 1,450 mAh removable battery with up to a month of standby time, and a headphone jack for listening to music like we're still pirating it from the internet (though you can also tune in to the built-in FM radio, a feature you'd have to download an app to replicate on an iPhone). The rear-facing 0.3-MP VGA camera is as mediocre as it sounds; it's similar to the camera specs on an LG-made candybar phone I was carting around in 2008. You can save all your data on a MicroSD card and charge the phone with micro USB. The Nokia 130 has the same size screen and removable battery, but it doesn't have a camera, which makes sense if you were looking at one of these as a secondary device. You probably already have a smartphone that takes satisfying photos. The Nokia 130 and 150 are rated IP52, making them resistant to dust and water but not entirely waterproof. And they both have physical buttons, including a full 12-key number pad, plus navigational buttons to get around the operating system, called Series 30+ or S30+. Nokia developed the software specifically for these entry-level devices, and it made sure to include a revamped Snake game. Nokia swears there are "hours of fun in store," which seems like marketing rehashed from its '90s glory days. The Nokia 130 and 150 are primarily available abroad. Note that these two models have been around since 2016 and that this latest release is a part of the phone's upgrade cycle. The company, acquired by Finnish conglomerate HMD Mobile, has yet to reveal pricing. But previous generations started at under $50 after converting currencies. It's quite a deal compared to what you'd get with an aging, low-cost Android phone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brave Software, maker of the Brave web browser, has tuned its search engine to run on a homegrown index of images and videos in an effort to end its dependency on "Big Tech" rivals. The Register reports: On Thursday, the company said that image and video results from Brave Search -- available on the web at search.brave.com and via its browser -- will be served from Brave's own index. Search indexes are made by visiting online resources -- typically web pages, images, videos, or other files -- with a crawler bot and recording the locations of these resources in a database. And when an internet user submits a query to a search engine, the search engine checks its index (and possible other sources) to find the addresses of resources that correspond to the query keywords. There's actually a lot more to it but that's the basic idea. Brave now aims to ride the wave of discontent with "Big Tech" by highlighting its commitment to privacy and independence a" small tech. "Brave Search is 100 percent private and anonymous, which sets a high bar for image/video search to meet," the company said in a blog post provided to The Register. "Whether it's a matter of personal safety or personal preference, users should be able to discover content without their search engine reporting and profiling those results to a Big Tech company." [...] Brave argues that having its own index frees the company from content decisions made by others. "Brave is on a mission to build a user-first Web," the company said in its blog post. "That mission starts with the Brave browser and Brave Search. With the release of image and video search, we're continuing to innovate within the search industry, providing viable and preferable products for users who want choice and transparency in their search for information online."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Elon Musk's tunneling company has permission to significantly expand its operations under the city of Las Vegas. Last month, the Las Vegas City Council voted unanimously to approve the Boring Company's plan to dig more tunnels under the city, following in the steps of Clark County, which in May gave a similar thumbs-up to the tunneling concern. The company's plan calls for 68 miles of tunnels and 81 stations, served by a fleet of Tesla electric vehicles, each able to carry three passengers at a time. Despite the unanimous approval, Mayor Carolyn Goldman had a litany of concerns, including safety, low throughput of passengers, and a lack of accessibility. However, she said that "hotels are begging for transportation options." [...] Should the Boring Company see this project through to completion, 60 of the stations would be in Clark County, mostly concentrated down the Strip and the major casinos, with the remaining 21 in the city of Las Vegas.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is making it a lot easier to find and remove your contact information from its search results. From a report: The company will now send out notifications when it finds your address, phone number, or email on the web, allowing you to review and request the removal of that information from Search. All this takes place from Google's "results about you" dashboard on mobile and web, which it first rolled out last September. With the update, you can find your information on Google without actually having to conduct the search yourself. Once you input your personal information, the dashboard will automatically pull up websites that contain any matches, letting you review each webpage it appears on and then submit a request to remove it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For over a decade, Backblaze's quarterly reports on the annualized failure rates (AFRs) of its substantial hard disk drives inventory have offered a peek into long-term storage utilization. The company, known for its backup and cloud storage services, has now disclosed data for the second quarter of 2023, revealing a fascinating rise in AFRs. ArsTechnica: Today's blog post details data for 240,940 HDDs that Backblaze uses for data storage around the world. There are 31 different models, and Backblaze's Andy Klein, who authored the blog, estimated in an email to Ars Technica that 15 percent of the HDDs in the dataset, including some of the 4, 6, and 8TB drives, are consumer-grade. The dataset doesn't include boot drives, drives in commission for testing purposes, or drive models for which Backblaze didn't have at least 60 units. One of the biggest revelations from examining the drives from April 1, 2023, through June 30, 2023, was an increase in AFR from Q1 2023 (1.54 percent) to Q2 2023 (2.28 percent). Backblaze's Q1 dataset examined 237,278 HDDs across 30 models. Of course, that AFR increase alone isn't enough to warrant any panic. Since quarterly AFR numbers are "volatile," Klein told Ars Technica, Backblaze further evaluates both quarter-to-quarter and lifetime trends "to see if what happened was an anomaly or something more." So, Klein started digging further by grouping the drives by capacity. This is because, as Klein explained to Ars: "A Backblaze storage vault consists of 1,200 drives of the same size, with 60 drives in 20 storage servers. If we grouped the drives strictly by age and wanted to replace just the oldest drives in a given Backblaze vault, we would only replace those drives in the vault that met the old age criteria, not all the drives. Then, a year from now, we'd do it again, and the year after that, etc. By using the average age by drive size, we can, as appropriate, replace/upgrade all of the drives in a vault at once."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Etsy boycott initiated by UK-based sellers over its payment system has gotten the American company's attention. From a report: Etsy addressed criticism of its policy in a blog post on Aug. 1, and promised to "substantially" decrease the amount of funds held in reserve. Vendors have complained that the platform's policy, which can freeze up to 75% of earnings in reserve for as long as 45 to 90 days, is destroying businesses and placing sellers in dire financial straits. Etsy also takes fees out of the remaining 25% of funds, stripping shops of even more earnings. [...] Vendors have begun switching their shops into "holiday mode" in protest of the payments policy and are leaving for rival sites like Shopify. The UK's Office of the Small Business Commissioner (OSBC), which has been flooded with complaints, has already contacted Etsy about its reserves system, as has the UK's Minister for Enterprise, Markets and Small Businesses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Excel World Championship is coming back to ESPN this week. On Friday morning at 7AM ET, as part of ESPN's annual "The Ocho" event, a few of the world's foremost Excel experts will battle to solve puzzles on the biggest stage in sports. From a report: The Ocho is an ESPN event designed to show off otherwise un-televised sports -- Excel is on the docket alongside "2023 Slippery Stairs," the "Pillow Fight Championship," and competitions in everything from belt-sanding to sign spinning -- but it's still a big deal. When competitive Excel showed up on the network last year, the sport found a whole new audience. More than 800,000 people have since watched the full 2.5-hour competition on YouTube (ESPN showed a 30-minute edit of the battle), and the folks who started the World Championship say it changed the event's trajectory forever.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Microsoft releases new test builds of Windows, there are usually a handful of features that are announced but only actually enabled for a small subset of testers. Sometimes it's because the company is A/B testing a couple of different versions of the same thing or because Microsoft wants to roll out major changes to a few users before rolling them out to everyone. Users normally have little control over whether new features actually appear in their Windows beta installs, but Microsoft has internal software called StagingTool that its own developers can use to switch things on and off themselves. And now StagingTool has leaked to the public, thanks to a "bug bash" the company is running this week to find and fix problems before the next big batch of new Windows features releases this fall. As reported by The Verge, some bug bash participants were sent on "quests" that explicitly mentioned using the StagingTool to turn on specific features. Those quests and the tool itself have since been removed from Microsoft's servers, but StagingTool is already being freely distributed among Windows enthusiasts who want more control over the features they see.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Multiple generative AI apps have been removed from Apple's China App Store, two weeks ahead of the country's new generative AI regulations that are set to take effect on August 15. From a report: The move came after Chinese developers received notices from Apple informing them of their apps' removal. In its letter to OpenCat, a native ChatGPT client, Apple cited "content that is illegal in China" as the reason for pulling the app. In July, China announced a set of measures to regulate generative AI services, including API providers. The rules require AI apps operating in China to obtain an administrative license, which is reflected in Apple's removal notice. "As you may know, the government has been tightening regulations associated with deep synthesis technologies (DST) and generative AI services, including ChatGPT. DST must fulfill permitting requirements to operate in China, including securing a license from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT)," Apple said to OpenCat. "Based on our review, your app is associated with ChatGPT, which does not have requisite permits to operate in China."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Warner Bros. Discovery lost 1.8 million subscribers in the three months following the launch of Max. From a report: The losses weren't exclusive to the Max streaming service, though. In its earnings report on Thursday, the company reported having 95.8 million global subscribers across all of its services -- down from 97.6 million at the end of the first quarter of this year. Despite this, the executives at Warner Bros. Discovery don't seem too worried. During an earnings call, the company's chief financial officer, Gunnar Wiedenfels, attributed the downward trend to "overlapping subscriber bases between Max and Discovery Plus" as well as "expected churn" following the end of The Last of Us season 1 and the series finale of Succession. CEO David Zaslav had something similar to say, noting that "while we have seen some expected subscriber disruption, we have experienced lower than expected churn throughout this process" -- a process that involved asking HBO Max subscribers to download a new Max app to their devices in order to continue using the service. Zaslav also said that the company still expects its streaming business in the US to become profitable this year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The FCC's robocaller penalties are growing as the agency tracks down and terminates their operations -- this time resulting in a record $300 million forfeiture. From a report: But whether and when that money will be paid is, as always, something of an open question. The robocaller in this case was known by a variety of names and had been scamming people since 2018, as the FCC announcement explains: "This enterprise operated a complex scheme designed to facilitate the sale of vehicle service contracts under the false and misleading claim of selling auto warranties. Two of the central players of the operation, Roy M. Cox and Aaron Michael Jones, were under lifetime bans against making telemarketing calls following lawsuits by the Federal Trade Commission and State of Texas. The multi-national enterprise did business as Sumco Panama, Virtual Telecom, Davis Telecom, Geist Telecom, Fugle Telecom, Tech Direct, Mobi Telecom, and Posting Express."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As AMD continues to launch their full graphics product stacks based on their latest RDNA 3 architecture GPUs, the company is now preparing their next wave of professional cards under the Radeon Pro lineup. Following the launch of their high-end Radeon Pro W7900 and W7800 graphics cards back in the second quarter of this year, today the company is announcing the low-to-mid-range members of the Radeon Pro W7000 series: the Radeon Pro W7500 and Radeon Pro W7600. From a report: Both based on AMD's monolithic Navi 33 silicon, the latest Radeon Pro parts will hit the shelves a bit later this quarter. The two cards, as a whole, will make up what AMD defines as the mid-range segment of their professional video card market. And like their flagship counterparts, AMD is counting on a combination of RDNA 3's advanced features, including AV1 encoding support, improved compute and ray tracing throughput, and DisplayPort 2.1 outputs to help drive sales of the new video cards. That, and as is tradition, significantly undercutting NVIDIA's competing professional cards. Not unlike their high-end counterparts, for this generation AMD has decided to expand the size of their mid-range pro graphics lineup. Whereas the previous generation had the sole W6600 (and W6400 at entry-level), the W7000 series gets both a W7600 card and a W7500 card. Besides the obvious performance difference, the other big feature separating the two cards is power consumption. The Radeon Pro W7600 is a full-height video card running at 130W, while the W7500 is explicitly designed as a sub-75W card that can be powered entirely by a PCIe slot, coming in at a cool 70 Watts. The Radeon Pro W7600 is priced at $599 -- $50 cheaper than its predecessor -- whereas the W7500 will bring up the rear of the W7000 product stack at $429.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Korean experts said on Thursday they would set up a committee to verify claims that a room temperature superconductor has been discovered, which has driven investor frenzy as well as peer skepticism since. From a report: The Korean Society of Superconductivity and Cryogenics, a group of experts, said in a statement on Thursday it had asked Quantum Energy Research Centre to submit samples in order to verify its researchers' findings of a room-temperature superconductor material, made public last month on a website showing research before formal publication. "There has been a lot of controversy over the authenticity of the reported results at home and abroad, and other claims are being added without being peer-reviewed," the group said. "Based on data from the two archived papers and the video made public, the materials ... cannot be called room temperature superconductors at this point," it added. Superconductors, substances with no electrical resistance, are considered valuable as they can allow electrical currents to pass through without losing energy. But the handful of materials discovered so far only exhibit superconductivity at extremely high temperatures and pressures, making them impractical for widespread use.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Ray-Ban smart glasses launched by Meta almost two years ago have struggled to catch on with owners, many of whom appear to be using the devices infrequently, according to internal company data. WSJ: Less than 10% of the Ray-Ban Stories purchased since the product's launch in September 2021 are used actively by purchasers, according to a company document from February reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Meta sold a total of 300,000 of the wearable devices through February, but the company only had about 27,000 monthly active users. The device, an important part of Meta's hardware strategy, allows users to take photos and listen to music with the frames of their glasses, among other features. It has experienced a 13% return rate, according to the document. Among the top drivers of poor user experience were issues with connectivity, problems with some of the hardware features including battery life, inability for users to import media from the devices, issues with the audio on the product and problems with voice commands for the smart glasses, according to the document.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India restricted import of laptops, tablets, other personal computers and servers on Thursday, the local Ministry of Commerce and Industry said in an amendment, saying it will impose a licensing requirement for imports in a move that analysts say appears to be aimed at boosting the local manufacturing efforts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.