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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In the world of deep-learning AI, the ancient board game Go looms large. Until 2016, the best human Go player could still defeat the strongest Go-playing AI. That changed with DeepMind's AlphaGo, which used deep-learning neural networks to teach itself the game at a level humans cannot match. More recently, KataGo has become popular as an open source Go-playing AI that can beat top-ranking human Go players. Last week, a group of AI researchers published a paper outlining a method to defeat KataGo by using adversarial techniques that take advantage of KataGo's blind spots. By playing unexpected moves outside of KataGo's training set, a much weaker adversarial Go-playing program (that amateur humans can defeat) can trick KataGo into losing. KataGo's world-class AI learned Go by playing millions of games against itself. But that still isn't enough experience to cover every possible scenario, which leaves room for vulnerabilities from unexpected behavior. "KataGo generalizes well to many novel strategies, but it does get weaker the further away it gets from the games it saw during training," says [one of the paper's co-authors, Adam Gleave, a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley]. "Our adversary has discovered one such 'off-distribution' strategy that KataGo is particularly vulnerable to, but there are likely many others." Gleave explains that, during a Go match, the adversarial policy works by first staking claim to a small corner of the board. He provided a link to an example in which the adversary, controlling the black stones, plays largely in the top-right of the board. The adversary allows KataGo (playing white) to lay claim to the rest of the board, while the adversary plays a few easy-to-capture stones in that territory. "This tricks KataGo into thinking it's already won," Gleave says, "since its territory (bottom-left) is much larger than the adversary's. But the bottom-left territory doesn't actually contribute to its score (only the white stones it has played) because of the presence of black stones there, meaning it's not fully secured." As a result of its overconfidence in a win -- assuming it will win if the game ends and the points are tallied -- KataGo plays a pass move, allowing the adversary to intentionally pass as well, ending the game. (Two consecutive passes end the game in Go.) After that, a point tally begins. As the paper explains, "The adversary gets points for its corner territory (devoid of victim stones) whereas the victim [KataGo] does not receive points for its unsecured territory because of the presence of the adversary's stones." Despite this clever trickery, the adversarial policy alone is not that great at Go. In fact, human amateurs can defeat it relatively easily. Instead, the adversary's sole purpose is to attack an unanticipated vulnerability of KataGo. A similar scenario could be the case in almost any deep-learning AI system, which gives this work much broader implications. "The research shows that AI systems that seem to perform at a human level are often doing so in a very alien way, and so can fail in ways that are surprising to humans," explains Gleave. "This result is entertaining in Go, but similar failures in safety-critical systems could be dangerous."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan Today reports: As reported by Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun, in a meeting on Nov 2, the Energy Conservation Subcommittee of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry resolved to begin working group discussions with the aim of gaining the ability to remotely turn down privately owned air conditioner/heater units. The goal would be to decrease energy usage during expected power shortages, which the committee feels are a growing concern as Japan attempts to shift towards renewable energy sources such as solar power, where the amount generated can be affected by day-to-day climate, making it difficult to stabilize the amount of total power available. The ministry says that AC unit usage accounts for roughly 30 percent of household electricity consumption in Japan. From a technical standpoint, the plan wouldn't be particularly difficult to implement. Japanese air conditioner units have long had remote controls, so external inputs aren't a problem, and many models now allow the owner to turn the system on and off or adjust temperature settings through the internet. By asking manufacturers to extend such access to government regulatory organizations, and granting those organizations override functions over other inputs, the plan could easily be put into practice for internet-connected AC units, and water heaters are another home appliance the committee is looking to gain the ability to throttle back. [...] According to Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the committee is currently working under the concept that the government would only be able to turn down AC units if their individual owners have agreed, in advance, to grant that authority.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While Apple is still expected to release its first VR/AR headset next year, the bigger step to mainstream adoption -- the Google Glass-style AR glasses -- may have slipped two years according to one analyst. Tom's Guide reports: In an email to MarketWatch, Haitong International Tech Research's Jeff Pu wrote that Apple Glasses could now be up to four years from making their first appearance. "We now expect the AR Glass to be postponed to 2025-2026, due to design issues," Pu wrote. This is significant as just five months ago Pu stated that the AR glasses could be announced as soon as 2024. The term "design difficulties" is, of course, a bit of a catch-all. It could cover anything from making the glasses aesthetically pleasing and light enough for extended wear, to ensuring they have enough battery life to be useful and don't overheat. But it's striking that nearly a decade after Google Glass became available to 'Explorers' in the US, companies are still struggling to make the form factor work, despite the considerable technological improvements we've seen in the intervening years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new survey on the Xbox Insider Hub suggests Microsoft is looking to expand on its energy saving features for Xbox consoles and potentially PC games too. Jez Corden writes via Windows Central: A recent questionnaire I came across in the Xbox Insider app on Windows PC detailed a potential list of new features Microsoft is exploring for games across consoles and PC. These new features pertain specifically to opting-in to reduce frame rates, resolution, and so on, with the goal of limiting energy consumption. Of course, surveys don't necessarily mean that these sorts of features will make it into a final product, but Microsoft's commitments to net zero carbon use have seen the firm increase its investments in this space. The survey asks users about their current feelings with regard to energy consumption, potentially polling users on how the energy crisis is affecting their willingness to spend. The survey asks users if they would be interested in features that reduce power consumption in games, both while the games are running and while they're inactive, specifically to save energy and thus money. Microsoft also asks users how they would prefer these features to be branded, with terms like "eco-saving" and "energy-saving," and even asks if these sorts of features would affect users' purchase decisions per game.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Alibaba and start-up Biren Technology are tweaking their most advanced chip designs to reduce processing speeds and avoid US-imposed sanctions aimed at suppressing Chinese computing power. Alibaba, Biren, and other Chinese design houses have spent years and millions of dollars creating the blueprints for advanced processors to power the country's next generation of supercomputers, artificial intelligence algorithms and data centers. These are produced offshore by the world's biggest contract chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. But sanctions announced by Washington last month that cap the processing power of any semiconductor shipped into China without a license have thrown a wrench into their ambitions. Both Alibaba and Biren had already conducted expensive test runs of their latest chips at TSMC when Washington unveiled the controls. The rules have forced the companies to halt further production and make changes to their designs, according to six people briefed on the situation. They mark another blow for Alibaba, the tech group founded by billionaire Jack Ma. Its shares have lost 80 percent of their value since Beijing canceled sister group Ant's initial public offering two years ago. The group's new chip was to be its first graphics processing unit and was close to being unveiled, according to three people close to the matter. The US export controls extend to third-country chip manufacturers because almost all semiconductor fabrication plants use American components or software, meaning the rules may amount to an embargo on all high-end processors entering China. Washington earlier restricted such imports from California chip companies Nvidia and AMD. Meanwhile, China's own domestic chip plants are possibly decades away from producing cutting-edge chips such as those designed by Alibaba and Biren. "Archived versions of Biren's website from before the US imposed sanctions show specifications for its first processor, the BR100, that would give it a transfer rate of 640 GB/s, exceeding the US limits," notes the report. "Now Biren's site shows slower specs for the BR100 of 576GB/s, according to calculations from research group Bernstein." Dylan Patel, chief analyst at semiconductor research group SemiAnalysis, who first noticed Biren's change of specs, said the company was attempting to slow down its processors by disabling part of the chip. "They are not changing the chip design, so it's like saying 'pinky promise we won't re-enable it later on' and it's unclear if the [US] government will accept that," said Patel. Meanwhile, Alibaba's T-Head semiconductor unit is studying how to modify its new 5-nanometer processor designed for AI work. "Changes being contemplated could require another production test run at TSMC, which would mean a months-long delay and could cost $10mn or more," reports the Financial Times.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Guests will soon be able to filter their search results by the total cost of the stay before taxes, which will include additional compulsory charges such as cleaning fees. The Verge reports: The appearance of these fees separate from nightly rates has long been criticized for deceptively making accommodations appear more affordable. Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky shared the announcement on Twitter along with a video demonstrating how the planned "display total price" switch can be enabled to display the total cost of nightly rates and fees, with that price displaying on search results, map, price filter, and individual listing pages. A full price breakdown of Airbnb's service fees, discounts, and taxes will also be made available, and the total price of accommodation will be prioritized over nightly rates in the Airbnb search algorithm. "The highest quality homes with the best total prices will rank higher in search results," says Chesky. "We started as an affordable alternative to hotels, and affordability is especially important today. During this difficult economic time, we need to help our Hosts provide great value to you." [...] The transparent pricing toggle is set to roll out sometime in December, alongside new pricing and discount tools for hosts to allow for more competitive rates. In other Airbnb-related news, the European Commission said Airbnb, along with other short-term home rental companies, will have to share data on the number of people using their platforms under proposed EU rules. "The new proposed rules will help to improve transparency on the identification and activity of short-term accommodation hosts, and on the rules they have to comply with, and will facilitate the registration of hosts," the Commission said in a statement. "They will also tackle the current fragmentation in how online platforms share data and, ultimately, help prevent illegal listings. Overall, this will contribute to a more sustainable tourism ecosystem and support its digital transition," it said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hot on the heels of Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao declaring that Binance is liquidating its stash of FTX's native exchange token FTT, mass withdrawals from FTX have accelerated, with weekly stablecoin outflows from FTX reaching a whopping $451 million, according to Nansen data. Conversely, Binance has seen net inflows of more than $411 million over the same period. Decrypt reports: This mass exiting of tokens from the FTX exchange comes amid reports that Alameda Research, the trading firm founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, held as much as $5.8 billion in the exchange's native FTT token -- $3.66 billion in "unlocked FTT" and $2.16 billion in "FTT collateral." Given such large exposure to FTT, some have speculated that this could mean a liquidity crisis for Alameda should the markets move against FTT, dropping the token's value. Shortly after these reports hit the market, CZ took to Twitter to announce that he would be offloading the firm's FTT holdings. Binance received funds in FTT as part of its exit last year from an early equity position in FTX it had since 2019. "Due to recent revelations that have come to light, we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books," CZ tweeted on Sunday. CZ said that he "won't support people who lobby against other industry players behind their backs." The FTX boss also cited Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, who said, "that specific balance sheet is for a subset of our corporate entities." Ellison also claimed that the firm has over $10 billion of assets "that aren't reflected there." SBF went on to thank "those who stay level-headed during crazy times," adding that withdrawals and deposits at FTX were working fine and the exchange had already processed "billions of dollars" worth of transactions. As for Binance's decision to dump its FTT holdings, Ellison offered to buy the exchange's remaining FTT holdings over-the-counter (OTC) for $22 if CZ was looking to "minimize the market impact" of the sudden move. UPDATE 11/7/22, UTC 04:33: "Fears over another 'Three Arrows' event, but this time tied to FTX and its hybrid investment fund/market maker Alameda Research, gripped the markets Tuesday morning Asia time, sending FTX's exchange token FTT down nearly 20%," reports CoinDesk in an updated article. "Data from CoinGlass shows that there continues to be building short interest in FTT as open interest has surged 8% during the last hour to a total of $215 million."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The user on Gab who identifies as Nora Berka resurfaced in August after a yearlong silence on the social media platform, reposting a handful of messages with sharply conservative political themes before writing a stream of original vitriol. The posts mostly denigrated President Biden and other prominent Democrats, sometimes obscenely. They also lamented the use of taxpayer dollars to supportUkraine in its war against invading Russian forces, depicting Ukraine's president as a caricature straight out of Russian propaganda. The fusion of political concerns was no coincidence. The account was previously linked to the same secretive Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 presidential election and again in 2020, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, according to the cybersecurity group Recorded Future. It is part of what the group and other researchers have identified as a new, though more narrowly targeted, Russian effort ahead ofTuesday's midterm elections. The goal, as before, is to stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system. This time, it also appears intended to undermine the Biden administration's extensive military assistance to Ukraine. "It's clear they are trying to get them to cut off aid and money to Ukraine," said Alex Plitsas, a former Army soldier and Pentagon information operations official now with Providence Consulting Group, a business technology company. The campaign -- using accounts that pose as enraged Americans like Nora Berka -- have added fuel to the most divisive political and cultural issues in the country today. It has specifically targeted Democratic candidates in the most contested races, including the Senate seats up for grabs in Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania, calculating that a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives could help the Russian war effort. The campaigns show not only how vulnerable the American political system remains to foreign manipulation but also how purveyors of disinformation have evolved and adapted to efforts by the major social media platforms to remove or play down false or deceptive content. The agencies urged people not to like, discuss or share posts online from unknown or distrustful sources. They did not identify specific efforts, but social media platforms and researchers who track disinformation have recently uncovered a variety of campaigns by Russia, China and Iran. These are much smaller campaigns than those in the 2016 election, where inauthentic accounts reached millions of voters across the political spectrum on Facebook and other major platforms. The efforts are no less pernicious, though, in reaching impressionable users who can help accomplish Russian objectives, researchers said. "The audiences are much, much smaller than on your other traditional social media networks," said Brian Liston, a senior intelligence analyst with Recorded Future who identified the Nora Berka account. "But you can engage the audiences in much more targeted influence ops because those who are on these platforms are generally U.S. conservatives who are maybe more accepting of conspiratorial claims." Some characteristics of an inauthentic user to look out for include: no profile picture, no identifying biographical details, and posts exclusively on political issues that often include false or misleading posts and little engagement. They may also link to obscure websites like electiontruth.net, which Recorded Future said was almost certainly linked to the Russian campaign.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When it comes to getting into the groove on the dancefloor, it really is all about the bass, researchers have found. From a report: Scientists say when very low frequency (VLF) sound was introduced during a live electronic music event, gig-goers moved more even though they could not hear the frequencies. "This is real world -- real electronic music dance concert -- validation that the bass really does make people dance more, and this isn't just something that comes from our conscious awareness," said Dr Daniel Cameron, a neuroscientist and first author of the work from McMaster University in Canada. Cameron and colleagues note that previous studies suggested music that induces dance has more low frequency sound, and that low pitches help people to move in time to music. However, it was not clear this impact of low frequencies would be seen in the real world, or when such sounds are not consciously detectable. Writing in the journal Current Biology, the team report how they set up an electronic music concert by the Canadian duo Orphx at McMaster and asked attenders to wear motion-capture headbands before turning on and off specialised VLF speakers every 2.5 minutes during the 55-minute performance. Results from 43 attenders who agreed to wear a headband revealed they moved 11.8% more, on average, when the VLF speakers were turned on. Cameron noted this meant people danced more vigorously, or with more exaggerated movements. At the end of the concert, 51 attenders completed a questionnaire that asked whether they could feel the music in their body, and whether the bodily sensations affected their compulsion to move.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A total lunar eclipse is happening Tuesday, and it might be a good time to catch a peek, because the next one isn't for three years. From a report: The initial phase of the eclipse begins at 3:02 a.m. ET, according to NASA. The partial eclipse then begins at 4:09 a.m. ET, when to the naked eye, it looks like a bite is being taken out of the moon. The lunar disk enters totality at 5:17 a.m. ET and will last for about an hour and a half. People in North America, Central America, Colombia, and western Venezuela and Peru will be able to see the eclipse in totality. Those in Alaska and Hawaii will be able to see all stages of the eclipse. For the best view, it is best to be in a dark area with little light pollution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City and now a special envoy on climate change for the United Nations, announced a new international plan on Monday to help 25 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America phase out coal by 2040. From a report: The announcement from Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire philanthropist who has given more than $500 million to help end coal use in the United States, did not include a new financial pledge. Instead, he said, the initiative will focus on helping develop business plans, national policies and technical resources that countries need to mobilize big-dollar investments in clean energy. The alliance of governments -- under a partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies and Sustainable Finance For All, a United Nations body -- will concentrate on countries where energy demand is projected to grow, and where renewable energy potential is plentiful. Coal is the single largest source of planet-warming emissions and still a major source of energy generation in many nations. At the same time, attracting private-sector dollars for wind, solar and other renewable power has been a challenge, particularly in developing countries. The group's goal is to see coal plants retired in many developing countries by 2040, with some wealthier countries ending coal use by 2030.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's been 25 years since a small studio in Dallas recast the ancient world through the prism of a real-time strategy game. From a report: Age of Empires has echoed Monk wololos about our homes ever since: Parents believed that their kids were learning history; kids believed that they were gaming surreptitiously. And veteran players know that both were right. Yet Age of Empires did not always receive the love it does today. The rise of the Xbox saw PC gaming take a back seat for Microsoft: Communities like AoE's were left to fend for themselves. In a very real way, it was the passion of these obsessives that led to Microsoft's renewed attention and the release of the franchise's latest entry, 2021's Age of Empires IV. All the games continue to receive updates or DLCs. Age of Empires games are headed for Xbox and mobile devices, complete with cross-play so console gamers can get their hands on the RTS classic and play with their PC-loving friends. Also, Age of Mythology is finally getting a definitive edition. Age IV is building momentum, too, with an anniversary edition crowning a year of updates designed to woo players who found it a tad stripped back at launch. AoE is now a point of real-time-strategy pride and a shining jewel in Microsoft's roster.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cutting-edge semiconductor companies tweak specs to comply with export controls. From a report: Alibaba and start-up Biren Technology are tweaking their most advanced chip designs to reduce processing speeds and avoid US-imposed sanctions aimed at suppressing Chinese computing power. Alibaba, Biren, and other Chinese design houses have spent years and millions of dollars creating the blueprints for advanced processors to power the country's next generation of supercomputers, artificial intelligence algorithms and data centers. These are produced offshore by the world's biggest contract chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. But sanctions announced by Washington last month that cap the processing power of any semiconductor shipped into China without a license have thrown a wrench into their ambitions. Both Alibaba and Biren had already conducted expensive test runs of their latest chips at TSMC when Washington unveiled the controls. The rules have forced the companies to halt further production and make changes to their designs, according to six people briefed on the situation. They mark another blow for Alibaba, the tech group founded by billionaire Jack Ma. Its shares have lost 80 percent of their value since Beijing canceled sister group Ant's initial public offering two years ago. The group's new chip was to be its first graphics processing unit and was close to being unveiled, according to three people close to the matter. The US export controls extend to third-country chip manufacturers because almost all semiconductor fabrication plants use American components or software, meaning the rules may amount to an embargo on all high-end processors entering China. Washington earlier restricted such imports from California chip companies Nvidia and AMD.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A juvenile bar-tailed godwit -- known only by its satellite tag number 234684 -- has flown 13,560 kilometres from Alaska to the Australian state of Tasmania without stopping, appearing to set a new world record for marathon bird flights. From a report: The five-month-old bird set off from Alaska on 13 October and satellite data appeared to show it did not stop during its marathon flight which took 11 days and one hour. Tagged in Alaska, the bar-tailed godwit, Limosa lapponica, flew at least 13,560km (8,435 miles) before touching down at Ansons Bay in north-east Tasmania. The previous record was held by an adult male of the same species -- 4BBRW -- that flew 13,000km (8,100 miles) last year, beating his own previous record of 12,000km the year before. According to a Facebook post from the Pukorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre in New Zealand, 4BBRW's record had been "blown out of the water by this young upstart." Scientists track the bird using a 5G satellite tag attached to its lower back. According to data from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology's bird tracking project, the migratory bird took a route to the west of Hawaii, continuing over open ocean and flying over the Pacific island nation of Kiribati on 19 October.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Less than 1% of used clothing gets recycled into new garments, overwhelming countries like Ghana with discards. From a report: It's a disaster decades in the making, as clothing has become cheaper, plentiful and ever more disposable. Each year the fashion industry produces more than 100 billion apparel items, roughly 14 for every person on Earth and more than double the amount in 2000. Every day, tens of millions of garments are tossed out to make way for new, many into so-called recycling bins. Few are aware that old clothes are rarely recycled into new ones because the technology and infrastructure don't exist to do that at scale. Instead, discarded garments enter a global secondhand supply chain that works to prolong their life, if only a little, by repurposing them as cleaning rags, stuffing for mattresses or insulation. But the rise of fast fashion -- and shoppers' preference for quantity over quality -- has led to a glut of low-value clothing that threatens to tank the economics of that trade and inordinately burdens developing countries. Meanwhile, the myth of circularity spreads, shielding companies and consumers from the inconvenient reality that the only way out of the global textile waste crisis is to buy less, buy better and wear longer. In other words, to end fast fashion. [...] Globally, less than 1% of used clothing is actually remade into new garments, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a UK nonprofit. (In contrast, 9% of plastic and about half of paper gets recycled.) The retailers have vowed that what they collect will never go to landfill or waste. But the reality is far messier. Garments dropped at in-store take-back programs enter the multibillion-dollar global secondhand supply chain, joining a torrent of discards from charity bins, thrift stores and online resale platforms like ThredUp and Sellpy. The complex task of sorting through that waste stream falls to a largely invisible global industry of brokers and processors. Their business depends on exporting much of the clothing to developing countries for rewear. It's the most profitable option and, in theory, the most environmentally responsible, because reusing items consumes less resources than recycling them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Almost but not quite in time for Halloween, astronomers announced on Friday that they had discovered the closest known black hole. It is a biggie, a shell of yawning emptiness 10 times as massive as the sun, orbiting as far from its own star as the Earth is from ours. From a report: Not to worry, however: This black hole is 1,600 light-years away, in the constellation Ophiuchus; the next nearest known black hole is about 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. What sets this new black hole apart from the 20 or so others already identified in our Milky Way galaxy, besides its proximity, is that it isn't doing anything -- not drawing the nearby star to its doom, not gravitationally consuming everything nearby. Rather, the black hole is dormant, a silent killer waiting for the currents of space to feed it. Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has been searching for such hidden demons for four years. He found this black hole by scrutinizing data from the European Space Agency's GAIA spacecraft, which has been tracking with exquisite precision the positions, motions and other properties of millions of stars in the Milky Way. Dr. El-Badry and his team detected a star, virtually identical to our sun, that was jittering strangely, as if under the gravitational influence of an invisible companion. To investigate further, the researchers commandeered the Gemini North telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which could measure the speed and period of this wobble and thus determine the relative masses of the objects involved. The technique is identical to the process by which astronomers analyze the wobbles of stars to detect the presence of orbiting exoplanets -- except this time the quarry was far bigger. Their results and subsequent calculations were consistent with a black hole of 10 solar masses being circled by a star similar to our own. They named it Gaia BH1.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres told countries gathered at the start of the COP27 summit in Egypt on Monday they face a stark choice: work together now to cut emissions or condemn future generations to climate catastrophe. From a report: The speech set an urgent tone as governments sit down for two weeks of talks on how to avert the worst of climate change, even as they are distracted by Russia's war in Ukraine, rampant consumer inflation and energy shortages. "Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish," Guterres told delegates gathered in the seaside resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. He called for a pact between the world's richest and poorest countries to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels and funding to ensure poorer countries can reduce emissions and cope with the climate impacts that have already occurred. "The two largest economies -- the United States and China -- have a particular responsibility to join efforts to make this pact a reality," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Department of Justice, announcing through a press release: Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Tyler Hatcher, the Special Agent in Charge of the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation, Los Angeles Field Office ("IRS-CI"), announced today that JAMES ZHONG pled guilty to committing wire fraud in September 2012 when he unlawfully obtained over 50,000 Bitcoin from the Silk Road dark web internet marketplace. ZHONG pled guilty on Friday, November 4, 2022, before United States District Judge Paul G. Gardephe. On November 9, 2021, pursuant to a judicially authorized premises search warrant of ZHONG's Gainesville, Georgia, house, law enforcement seized approximately 50,676.17851897 Bitcoin, then valued at over $3.36 billion. This seizure was then the largest cryptocurrency seizure in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice and today remains the Department's second largest financial seizure ever. The Government is seeking to forfeit, collectively: approximately 51,680.32473733 Bitcoin; ZHONG's 80% interest in RE&D Investments, LLC, a Memphis-based company with substantial real estate holdings; $661,900 in cash seized from ZHONG's home; and various metals also seized from ZHONG's home. U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: "James Zhong committed wire fraud over a decade ago when he stole approximately 50,000 Bitcoin from Silk Road. For almost ten years, the whereabouts of this massive chunk of missing Bitcoin had ballooned into an over $3.3 billion mystery. Thanks to state-of-the-art cryptocurrency tracing and good old-fashioned police work, law enforcement located and recovered this impressive cache of crime proceeds. This case shows that we won't stop following the money, no matter how expertly hidden, even to a circuit board in the bottom of a popcorn tin."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta is planning to begin large-scale layoffs this week, WSJ reported over the weekend, citing people familiar with the matter, in what could be the largest round in a recent spate of tech job cuts after the industry's rapid growth during the pandemic. From the report: The layoffs are expected to affect many thousands of employees and an announcement is planned to come as soon as Wednesday, according to the people. Meta reported more than 87,000 employees at the end of September. Company officials already told employees to cancel nonessential travel beginning this week, the people said. The planned layoffs would be the first broad head-count reductions to occur in the company's 18-year history. While smaller on a percentage basis than the cuts at Twitter Inc. this past week, which hit about half of that company's staff, the number of Meta employees expected to lose their jobs could be the largest to date at a major technology corporation in a year that has seen a tech-industry retrenchment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blood that has been grown in a laboratory has been put into people in a world-first clinical trial, UK researchers say. From a report: Tiny amounts -- equivalent to a couple of spoonfuls -- are being tested to see how it performs inside the body. The bulk of blood transfusions will always rely on people regularly rolling up their sleeve to donate. But the ultimate goal is to manufacture vital, but ultra-rare, blood groups that are hard to get hold of. These are necessary for people who depend on regular blood transfusions for conditions such as sickle cell anaemia. If the blood is not a precise match then the body starts to reject it and the treatment fails. This level of tissue-matching goes beyond the well-known A, B, AB and O blood groups. Prof Ashley Toye, from the University of Bristol, said some groups were "really, really rare" and there "might only be 10 people in the country" able to donate. At the moment, there are only three units of the "Bombay" blood group -- first identified in India -- in stock across the whole of the UK.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Apple is working on a big change to how its Siri voice assistant works," reports the blog 9 to 5 Mac:While you currently have to say "Hey Siri" to activate the assistant hands-free, that may not be the case for much longer. Bloomberg reports today that Apple engineers are working to drop the "Hey" part of the phrase, so you'd only have to say "Siri" followed by a command to activate the assistant... In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that this is "a technical challenge that requires a significant amount of AI training and underlying engineering work." Apple has reportedly been working on this change for the last several months and hopes to roll it out either next year or in 2024 depending on the progress of development and testing.... Doing so would match what's offered by Amazon, where you simply have to say "Alexa" to trigger the assistant, not "Hey Alexa." Although long-time Slashdot reader cstacy complains that already, "I can no longer discuss Amazon Alexa, because she hears just 'Alexa' and wakes up... That's not a feature, that's a bug! Not sure why Apple and Google would want to replicate that."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China launched the final module for its space station last Monday. But this also meant that a massive booster rocket re-entered the earth's atmosphere, notes the Washington Post — "for the fourth time in less than three years." This one came down in the Pacific Ocean shortly after 6 a.m. Friday, and "there were no initial reports of damage or injuries. "But its return to Earth highlighted a tension among space faring nations over China's practice of letting its spent rockets tumble back to Earth after days in orbit."While the chances are low of any one person getting hit by the returning space debris, several of the tracks the rocket possibly could have taken passed over a large swath of the Earth's populated areas. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has repeatedly condemned China for the practice. In a statement Friday morning, he said: "It is critical that all spacefaring nations are responsible and transparent in their space activities and follow established best practices, especially, for the uncontrolled reentry of a large rocket body debris — debris that could very well result in major damage or loss of life." China is alone among space-faring nations in allowing the unplanned return of its boosters, instead of ditching them at sea, as most others do, or returning them to a soft landing, like Space X. "The technology exists to prevent this," said Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant in the chief engineer's office at the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit that drew possible tracks for the rocket's return. The rest of the world doesn't "deliberately launch things this big and intend them to fall wherever. We haven't done that for 50 years." As of Wednesday, the [research nonprofit] Aerospace Corporation's calculations had the stage possibly landing over areas of land where 88 percent of the world's population lives. And so the possibility of casualties, Muelhaupt said, was between one in 230 to one in 1,000. That risk far exceeds the internationally recognized standard that says a reentering space object should not have greater than a one in 10,000 chance of causing injury. The Chinese rocket stage is massive — weighing 22 metric tons and measuring as long as a pair of 53-foot semitrailers parked end to end, Muelhaupt said. He estimated that between 10 and 40 percent of the booster would survive reentry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Manual transmissions are "the ultimate driver-car connection," argues the chief marketing manager for Nissan's Z sports car, "where you really feel like a part of the vehicle and can control it in ways you wouldn't be able to with an automatic." He tells ABC News that "As long as there are still new internal combustion engine vehicles on the market, there will be an interest in manual transmissions." Ah, but isn't that just another way of saying that "It's inevitable EVs are going to take over and people are getting misty-eyed that the manual won't be around forever." That what Bob Sorokanich, editor-in-chief of Jalopnik, tells ABC:"That's why people are flocking to these specialty cars. Young people are interested in the opportunity to experience them as internal combustion engines come to a close...." The car community has been decrying the death of the manual transmission for nearly two decades, said Henry Catchpole, a longtime automotive journalist who now hosts videos for Hagerty. As more automakers allocate resources to building electric vehicles, drivers are choosing engagement over pure performance, he argued. "People are reassessing what they want and are going back to analog cars. It's a big story in the industry," he told ABC News. "There's a shift in terms of how we look at performance cars. We don't wax lyrical about paddle shifters as we do about manual gearboxes. Drivers are enjoying the manual again...." Catchpole said the unrelenting pressure on automakers to keep the manual alive has benefited an industry that's rapidly closing the door on gas-powered vehicles. "Some people see manuals as a chore but they're not. They bring more color to life," he said. "Porsche listened to enthusiasts and brought back the manual in the GT3. I hope other manufacturers will listen too." "Porsche, Acura, Toyota, Nissan, BMW, Honda, and even Ford continue to make models which have manual transmissions," writes Slashdot reader quonset. "In some cases it is the only option."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNET reports on how research in Antarctica "could change astronomy forever":About 47 million light-years from where you're sitting, the center of a black-hole-laden galaxy named NGC 1068 is spitting out streams of enigmatic particles. These "neutrinos" are also known as the elusive "ghost particles" that haunt our universe but leave little trace of their existence.... Nestled into about 1 billion tons of ice, more than 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) beneath Antarctica, lies the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. A neutrino hunter, you might call it. When any neutrinos transfer their party to the frigid continent, IceCube stands ready. In a paper published Friday in the journal Science, the international team behind this ambitious experiment confirmed it has found evidence of 79 "high-energy neutrino emissions" coming from around where NGC 1068 is located, opening the door for novel — and endlessly fascinating — types of physics. "Neutrino astronomy," scientists call it. It'd be a branch of astronomy that can do what existing branches simply cannot. Before today, physicists had only shown neutrinos coming from either the sun; our planet's atmosphere; a chemical mechanism called radioactive decay; supernovas; and — thanks to IceCube's first breakthrough in 2017 — a blazar, or voracious supermassive black hole pointed directly toward Earth. A void dubbed TXS 0506+056. With this newfound neutrino source, we're entering a new era of the particle's story. In fact, according to the research team, it's likely neutrinos stemming from NGC 1068 have up to millions, billions, maybe even trillions the amount of energy held by neutrinos rooted in the sun or supernovas. Those are jaw-dropping figures because, in general, such ghostly bits are so powerful, yet evasive, that every second, trillions upon trillions of neutrinos move right through your body. You just can't tell.... Not only is this moment massive because it gives us more proof of a strange particle that wasn't even announced to exist until 1956, but also because neutrinos are like keys to our universe's backstage. They hold the capacity to reveal phenomena and solve puzzles we're unable to address by any other means, which is the primary reason scientists are trying to develop neutrino astronomy in the first place.... Expected to be generated behind such opaque screens filtering our universe, these particles can carry cosmic information from behind those screens, zoom across great distances while interacting with essentially no other matter, and deliver pristine, untouched information to humanity about elusive corners of outer space. The team says their data can provide information on two great unsolved mysteries in astronomy: why black holes emit sporadic blasts of light, and neutrinos' suspected role in the origin of cosmic rays.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York City "is pressing ahead with a long-anticipated crackdown on Airbnb hosts," reports the New York Post, "with officials on Friday proposing a strict new registration system for hosts that will take effect in January." There's 30 pages of rules...Under proposed rules that were quietly and unexpectedly made public on Friday — which will, among other things, prohibit hosts from renting out an "entire registered dwelling unit" — Airbnb hosts will be required to submit diagrams of their apartments as well as proof that their listings are permanent residences. Hosts also will be required to list the "full legal name of all permanent occupants of the dwelling" as well as their relationship to the host.... If hosts fail to comply, they can be fined up to $5,000 under the new rules, while Airbnb and other platforms are required to verify the rental on its systems and could be on the hook for a $1,500 fine per violation. Last year, the city council passed the registration law, but little was known about the details and requirements, which will become effective Jan. 9 and enforced by May 9.... Among the requirements, said the source, is one that bars hosts from putting locks on doors that separate the guest from the host, directing that "a registered host shall not allow a rentee to have exclusive access to a separate room within a dwelling" and specifying that, for example, "providing the rentee with a key to lock the door when such rentee is not in the dwelling is prohibited...." It's the latest salvo in the fraught relationship between New York City and Airbnb, which has long pushed back on the city's efforts to regulate the industry. Meanwhile the city blames Airbnb, in part, for its housing shortage. Thanks to Slashdot reader quonset for submitting the story!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports:Psilocybin, the active hallucinogen found in psychedelic mushrooms — also known as "magic mushrooms" — can effectively alleviate a severe bout of depression when administered in a single dose and combined with talk therapy, a new clinical study found. Adults with depression who were administered a single 25-miligram dose of psilocybin were more likely to experience significant improvements in their mental health — both immediately and for up to three months — than others who were randomly assigned smaller doses of the same drug, said the peer-reviewed study, which was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.... The trial's findings could be an encouraging sign for the 16 million Americans estimated each year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to have depression, many of whom struggle to find treatments that work for them. Its authors hope the study — which was relatively small, with just 79 participants receiving the 25 mg dose — will pave the way for eventual regulatory approval of psilocybin by the Food and Drug Administration for use as a drug against depression.... Notwithstanding the headaches, nausea and dizziness reported by many as adverse side effects, most of the adults enjoyed the experience. The Post got an interesting reponse from James Rucker, a consultant psychiatrist at King's College London who worked on the trial. He said there's something about the psychedelic experience that leads to a rapid resolution of depression symptoms, adding "We don't really know what that is at the moment, but it's very different to standard antidepressants...." "What people forget about psychedelics is that they were being used as medicines prior to 1971 when they essentially got caught up in the drugs war," Rucker added. "We're just picking up the baton of history." Thanks to Slashdot reader Shmoodling for submitting the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember Amazon's announcement Tuesday that Prime members would get free access to ad-free podcasts and a library of 100 million songs? It made Slashdot reader ayjaym cancel their Amazon Prime subsciption. Because despite the upgrade to 100 million tracks, "all of these — including the albums that were available on Prime Music previously — can only be played in random order!"You can't skip forward or back while playing a song either. And, if you like to listen to classical music you now have the travesty of having great works chopped up and reshuffled into a random play order. A headline at Inc. magazine says Amazon's change "Is Making Everyone Angry.""Hey Alexa, play Taylor Swift's Anti-Hero," used to be a simple thing you might say. When you did, your Echo would do exactly that. It would play Taylor Swift's newest song as long as it was in the catalog of songs available. Now, however, that's not what happens at all. If you're lucky, Alexa will start playing songs from Midnights, Swift's latest album. That, however, is not a given. It might play some of her older songs. It might start playing songs from other artists instead. Why does Amazon think anyone wants this? Here's why: It's cheaper for a streaming service to not let you choose the song you want, but to let you give it an input and start playing similar music. Also, because Amazon clearly sees Amazon Music as a thing you use in the background when you just want music playing as you do other things.... If what you want to do is listen to Taylor Swift's latest album, you're going to have to choose Apple Music or Spotify Premium, both of which charge more than $10 a month, or Amazon Music Unlimited, which is $8.99 per month. According to Amazon, 80 percent of people will never do that. They will never pay $10 a month to stream music. They will, however, use a free streaming service even if it means giving up the ability to actually choose the song they want to listen to. Okay, fine, except that's not the thing Amazon had made before. Inc's conclusion? "If you give someone a thing as a benefit because they gave you money for your $140 a year subscription membership, it's not great if you suddenly make that thing dramatically worse and expect them to pay you more to make it a better experience." So if you're not going to pay extra to upgrade to Amazon's "Unlimited Music" service, Fast Company explains that "It's probably better to think of Music Prime as a Pandora-like service wherein you pick an artist or genre you like and let Amazon sort out which songs are going to be played for you."The only catch there is that if you're streaming Music Prime to an Amazon Echo device — which we do non-stop around my house — it'll time out after an hour of inactivity. So if you're thinking of throwing a party and asking Alexa to spin up '80s music all night, you're going to have to keep asking every hour. Another sticking point for some: Music Prime sound quality is available in "standard" definition, whereas Music Unlimited subscribers get access to "HD" and "Ultra HD" tracks depending on how each album is mastered. Some Music Unlimited tracks can also be played in "spatial audio" — which is touted as "a multidimensional audio experience, adding space, clarity, and depth that is not achievable with traditional stereo music." Far out, man. Deep in the fine print of the Amazon Music FAQ, you'll find a couple more options. There's also a $4.99-a-month "single device" plan, and a "Family Plan" offering six accounts for $14.99 a month. But Amazon is apparently offering its biggest savings to students enrolled in a degree-granting college or university, with a sharply discounted "Amazon Music Unlimited for Students" program.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: 70 new text adventures are now online and available for playing — as a long-standing tradition continues. The 70 new games are the entries in the 28th annual Interactive Fiction Competition (now administered by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, a charitable non-profit corporation). With wacky titles like "Lazy Wizard's Guide" and "Elvish for Goodbye," each game offers its own original take on the classic choice-based text adventures, sometimes augumented with ambient background noises and even music. Each of the 70 games has some kind of fanciful "cover art" — one even generated using OpenAI's image-generating tool DALL-E. And you're invited to help judge the games! Just create an account, and then play and rate at least five of the games by November 15... Slashdot first covered the competition back in 2004. (And in 2006, Slashdot editor Hemos called interactive fiction games "some of the best I've ever played.") But this year the competition raised over $10,000 (so far!) to be distributed among the top two-thirds of entries, with the first-place finisher receiving $489 and each subsequent finisher receiving a little less, with the lowest-finishing prize recipient awarded $10. (And in addition, top entrants are each allowed to choose one prize from a pool of donations.) Game on!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2004 NBC's news show "Dateline" began airing "To Catch a Predator" segments, in which a vigilante group posed online as minors to lure sex predators into in-person meetings — where they were then arrested by police. The New Yorker looks at its cultural impact:Although there were only twenty episodes of the series, in three years, it's "this touchstone that I grew up with and that millions of people grew up with," Paul Renfro, a professor of history at Florida State University and the author of "Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State," said. "It shaped how people think about sexual violence in ways that we haven't fully grappled with." The show focussed on the threat from strangers on the Internet, even though most victims of child sexual abuse are harmed by someone known to them. "On the show, it's not the family, it's not priests or rabbis or other authority figures who pose a threat to children, it's this devious stranger," Renfro said. The show's influence helped spur the passage of the Adam Walsh Act, in 2006, which created publicly searchable databases of people convicted of certain sex crimes. (There's little evidence that sex-offender registries have been effective at reducing sexual offenses.) But today, "amateur predator hunting has come back into style," the article notes, citing the proliferation of online groups. "Recently, the Washington Post found more than a hundred and sixty, which have been responsible for nearly a thousand stings this year." And then the New Yorker interviewed a woman named Cam, who with her husband and her brother-in-law decided to form "the Permian Basin Predator Patrol" — broadcasting their sting operations and humiliations of potential perpetrators on YouTube:[S]oon after the channel started drawing attention, they were called to a meeting at the Odessa Police Department. According to Cam, officers made it clear that they disapproved of their activities. "We were told we can't be involved with them, and that we can't send them anything directly," she said. "One, we're endangering ourselves, and, two, we're giving them more work — that's what it seemed like they were saying." "We are very mindful of not trying to entrap a suspect," Lieutenant Brad Cline, who works in the Odessa Police Department's Crimes Against Persons Unit, said. "Taking a predator into custody can be very dangerous as well." The article points out that "To Catch a Predator" was cancelled when Texas man Bill Conradt decided not to follow-up on his online messages — but "When a SWAT team burst into his house, trailed by a camera crew, Conradt shot himself." So what did Cam's group do when the Odessa Police Department declined their help?The Permian Basin Predator Patrol continued to make videos. If she couldn't contribute to an arrest, Cam thought, at least she could get the word out to the public. She became an expert at figuring out the identities of the men she was chatting with, even when they used fake names.... Sometimes she'd find a man's family on Facebook and send his mother screenshots of the obscene messages he'd sent, or call his employer. "I believe three of them have been let go from their jobs," she said. A sting by the Predator Catchers Indianapolis led to a man's conviction for child solicitation.... Although YouTube's predator hunters tend to portray themselves as the unequivocal good guys (Cam is an exception — most are men), their track record is more mixed.... The Ohio-based group Dads Against Predators has reportedly been banned from local grocery stores for causing disturbances. In 2018, a twenty-year-old in Connecticut hanged himself after a confrontation with a predator-hunter group. One video by the Permian Basin Predator Patrol ends with a man weeping, then running into traffic. (Cam said that she asked police to perform a welfare check on him, but she's not sure if it occurred.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new article from Wired calls Rust "the 'viral' secure programming language that's taking over tech." "Rust makes it impossible to introduce some of the most common security vulnerabilities. And its adoption can't come soon enough...."[A] growing movement to write software in a language called Rust is gaining momentum because the code is goof-proof in an important way. By design, developers can't accidentally create the most common types of exploitable security vulnerabilities when they're coding in Rust, a distinction that could make a huge difference in the daily patch parade and ultimately the world's baseline cybersecurity.... [B]ecause Rust produces more secure code [than C] and, crucially, doesn't worsen performance to do it, the language has been steadily gaining adherents and now is at a turning point. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services have all been utilizing Rust since 2019, and the three companies formed the nonprofit Rust Foundation with Mozilla and Huawei in 2020 to sustain and grow the language. And after a couple of years of intensive work, the Linux kernel took its first steps last month to implement Rust support. "It's going viral as a language," says Dave Kleidermacher, vice president of engineering for Android security and privacy. "We've been investing in Rust on Android and across Google, and so many engineers are like, 'How do I start doing this? This is great'...." By writing new software in Rust instead, even amateur programmers can be confident that they haven't introduced any memory-safety bugs into their code.... These types of vulnerabilities aren't just esoteric software bugs. Research and auditing have repeatedly found that they make up the majority of all software vulnerabilities. So while you can still make mistakes and create security flaws while programming in Rust, the opportunity to eliminate memory-safety vulnerabilities is significant.... "Yes, it's a lot of work, it will be a lot of work, but the tech industry has how many trillions of dollars, plus how many talented programmers? We have the resources," says Josh Aas, executive director of the Internet Security Research Group, which runs the memory-safety initiative Prossimo as well as the free certificate authority Let's Encrypt. "Problems that are merely a lot of work are great." Here's how Dan Lorenc, CEO of the software supply-chain security company Chainguard, explains it to Wired. "Over the decades that people have been writing code in memory-unsafe languages, we've tried to improve and build better tooling and teach people how to not make these mistakes, but there are just limits to how much telling people to try harder can actually work. "So you need a new technology that just makes that entire class of vulnerabilities impossible, and that's what Rust is finally bringing to the table."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists say tht measured over a 20-year period, methane "packs about 80 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide," according to the Associated Press. "And according to the International Energy Agency, methane is to blame for roughly 30% of the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution." And yet...Aerial surveys have documented huge amounts of methane wafting from oil and gas fields in the United States and beyond. It's a problem the Biden administration has sought to attack in its recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act. One of the law's provisions threatens fines of up to $1,500 per ton of methane released, to be imposed against the worst polluters. Perhaps most crucially, the law provides $1.55 billion in funding for companies to upgrade equipment to more effectively contain emissions — equipment that could, in theory, help the operators avoid fines. Yet some of the best equipment for reducing emissions is already installed on oil and gas infrastructure.... And critics say such equipment is failing to capture much of the methane and casting doubt on whether the Biden plan would go far to correct the problem.... "Energy companies have made pledges, but I've got to tell you, I haven't seen anything from a practical standpoint that makes me believe there's any reality to reductions on the ground," said Tim Doty, an environmental scientist and former air quality inspector for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. "Maybe they're making progress, but are they making enough progress to slow down climate change? I don't think so...." Sometimes, methane escapes because the equipment designed to contain it hasn't been properly calibrated or maintained. Emissions aren't immediately stopped once new equipment is installed. Companies must still invest in properly designing the system and continuously monitoring and maintaining the equipment. This requires money and staff, which experts say many companies neglect.... And hydrocarbons like methane, because they are corrosive, inevitably degrade the tanks, pipes and equipment that are supposed to contain them. "All this stuff is going to be prone to leak — that's just the way it is," said Coyne Gibson, who spent about two decades as an engineer inspecting oil and gas equipment. "That's mechanics. And there's there's not really any way to avoid it...." The staffing it would take to continuously survey the nation's 3 million miles of natural gas pipelines would likely be prohibitively expensive. "Emissions keep going up. We're moving in the wrong direction..." Antoine Halff, chief analyst at energy analytics company Kayrros, tells the Associated Press. But he adds that "the potential, the conditions, to change course seem to be here." The article points out that America's Environmental Protection Agency "is writing rules on methane reduction that will further detail what would be required of companies starting in 2024."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"We serve about 100 million monthly visitors worldwide," says the CEO of Stack Overflow, "making us one of the most popular websites in the world. I think we are in the top 50 of all websites in the world by traffic." In a new interview, he says the site's been accessed about 50 billion times over the past 14 years — and then shares his thoughts on the notion that programmers could be replaced by no-code, low-code, or AI-driven pair programming: A: Over the years, there have many, many tools, trying to democratize software development. That's a very positive thing. I actually love the fact that programming is becoming easier to do with these onramps. I was speaking at Salesforce recently, and they've got people in sales organizations writing workflows, and that's low code. You've got all these folks who are not software engineers that are creating their own automations and applications. However, there is this trade-off. If you're making software easier to build, you're sacrificing things like customizability and a deeper understanding of how this code actually works. Back in the day, you might remember Microsoft FrontPage [an early HTML web page editor] as an example of that. You were limited to certain basic things, but you could get web work done. So similarly, these tools will work for general use cases. But, if they do that, without learning the fundamental principles of code, they will inevitably have some sort of a limit. For example, having to fix something that broke, I think they're going to be really dumbfounded. Still, I think it's important, and I'm a believer. It's a great way to get people engaged, excited, and started. But you got to know what you're building. Access to sites like Stack Overflow help, but with more people learning as they're building, it's essential to make learning resources accessible at every stage of their journey.... Q: Is Stack Overflow considering any kind of certification? Particularly, as you just mentioned, since it's so easy now for people to step in and start programming. But then there's that big step from "Yes, I got it to work," but now "I have to maintain it for users using it in ways I never dreamed of." A: "It's very much part of our vision for our company. We see Stack Overflow going from collective knowledge to collective learning. Having all the information is fine and dandy, but are you learning? Now, that we're part of Prosus's edtech division, we're very much looking forward to offering educational opportunities. Just as today, we can get knowledge to developers at the right place and time, we think we can deliver learning at just the right place and time. We believe we can make a huge impact with education and by potentially getting into the certification game. Q: Some of the open-source nonprofits are moving into education as well. The Linux Foundation, in particular, has been moving here with the LF Training and Certification programs. Are you exploring that? A: This is very much part of our vision.... Stack Overflow's CEO adds that the site's hot topics now include blockchain, machine learning, but especially technical cloud questions, "rising probably about 50% year over year over the past 10 years.... Related to this is an increase in interest in containerization and cloud-native services."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen has a question: What makes a decent social web site?If you don't like the original form of the subjective question, how about something like "What is the best social site you know of?" or "What criteria would you use to recognize a good social site?" or even "How could a good social media website even survive...?" Their original submission lists their own criteria for a good social site:Efficient to use (without wasting your time)Has educational value, "perhaps measured by questions like 'How frequently has this website justified changing my mind about something?'"The size and permeability of filter bubbles formed by people using the siteBut if you have different priorities for a social site -- what are they? Share your own best thoughts in the comments. What makes a good social media site?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In March the U.S. Senate passed a measure making Daylight Saving Time permanent. Unfortunately, the U.S. House of Representatives has failed to do the same, reports the Washington Post:Key senators who backed permanent daylight saving time say they're mystified that their effort appears doomed, and frustrated that they will probably have to start over in the next Congress. At least 19 states in recent years have enacted laws or passed resolutions that would allow them to impose year-round daylight saving time — but only if Congress approves legislation to stop the nation's twice-per-year time changes, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.... "We know that the majority of Americans do not want to keep switching the clocks back and forth," Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said in a statement to The Post, adding that she had received calls arguing in favor of both sides. Permanent standard time advocates don't want children to wait in dark winter mornings for a school bus; permanent daylight saving time proponents want to help businesses enjoy more sunshine during operating hours, she said. A congressional aide who has been working on the issue put it more bluntly: "We'd be pissing off half the country no matter what," said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal deliberations.... Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and other lawmakers have said they're waiting on the Transportation Department, which helps govern enforcement of time zones, to review the effects of permanently changing the clocks. While the transportation agency in September agreed to conduct a study, the due date for that analysis — Dec. 31, 2023 — suggests that the issue may not get serious consideration in Congress again until 2024 at the earliest.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By Tuesday morning Mastodon had gained 123,562 new users since October 27 (the site told TechCrunch) and had 528,607 active users. But by Saturday the number of new users had nearly doubled, to 230,000, reports CNN — with 655,000 active users. In fact, for every 363 active users on Twitter, there's now one on Mastodon, CNN's figures suggest (since Twitter has nearly "238 million daily active monetizable users"). Exploring the recent spike, they note that Mastodon "has a similar look to Twitter, with a timeline of short updates sorted chronologically rather than algorithmically. It lets users join a slew of different servers run by various groups and individuals, rather than one central platform controlled by a single company like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook."Unlike larger social networks, Mastodon is both free to use and free of ads. It's operated by a nonprofit run by Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko, and is supported via crowdfunding... "It is not as large as Twitter, obviously, but it is the biggest that this network has ever been," said Rochko, who originally created Mastodon as more of a project than a consumer product (and, yes, its name was inspired by the heavy metal band Mastodon).... A lot of Mastodon's features and layout (particularly in its iOS app) will look and feel familiar to current Twitter users, though with some slightly different verbiage; you can follow others, create short posts (there's a 500 character limit, and you can upload images and videos), favorite or repost other users' posts, and so on.... There are some key differences, particularly in how the network is set up. Because Mastodon users' accounts are hosted on a slew of different servers, the costs of hosting users is spread among many different people and groups. But that also means users are spread out all over the place, and people you know can be hard to find. CNN also notes the problem with signing up for a Mastodon server: "some of which are open to anyone, some of which require an invitation (you can also run your own server). There is a server operated by the nonprofit behind Mastodon, Mastodon.social, but it's not accepting more users." Although trending on the server I found today: #Caturday photos.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringley. "A Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) called OrangeDAO is cooperating with a small seed venture fund called Press Start Capital to establish the OrangeDAO X Press Start Cap Fellowship Program for new Web3 entrepreneurs. "Successful applicants get $25,000 each plus 10 weeks of structured mentorship plus continued access to the more than 1200-member OrangeDAO network. In exchange, OrangeDAO and Press Start get to invest in the resulting companies, if any, produced by the class." Cringley likens it to the American tech startup accelerator Y Combinator — but on steroids. Cringley also explains why he thinks this "middle class VC" model "will replicate and grow unconstrained," ultimately exporting itself from Silicon Valley to cities around the world.There are many DAOs around and hardly anybody understands them or knows what they are good for. Mainly they have seemed to be involved in the NFT market. But OrangeDAO is different. It has 1200+ members and every one of those members is a graduate of the Y Combinator startup accelerator. They are verified Y Combinator company founders, so they've all had similar entrepreneurial experiences and see business much the same way as a result. OrangeDAO seems to have big plans and to make those plans happen in August the DAO, itself, raised $80 million in venture capital, with their first use of that capital being these Fellowships. I think this will change forever venture capital and the world economy. It represents a new stage in the evolution of venture capital. In many senses it is the democratization of VC.... The DAO members all have similar backgrounds, similar values, and similar risk tolerances. THERE ARE MORE OF THEM, so they can do bigger deals. And — here's the important bit — THEY ARE ALL Y COMBINATOR-EDUCATED and connected globally through the blockchain. They not only know many of the same things, they have a sense of where this knowledge comes from and why it is useful.... In the YC-based DAO we have people who want the next generation of entrepreneurs to be even better-educated. It's not some egalitarian goal, either: they see it as key to success for the whole thing. Smart people with good ideas will self-identify, be funded at a subsistence level to allow them to develop those ideas and prove their worth, then they can participate on a truly level playing field for the first time.... Gone is the Tycoon, gone is the professional VC who doesn't understand his tech, gone soon will be the angels (subsumed into the DAO model), and gone for the most part are the asshole VCs whom entrepreneurs grow to hate (not all of them, but a lot). Done correctly, this model is essentially Meritocratic VC. If the idea is good, the market is ready, and the people know what they are doing, the capital will be there.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The newest stable version of Rust, 1.65.0 includes generic associated types (GATs) — the ability to declare lifetime, type, and const generics on associated types. "It's hard to put into few words just how useful these can be," writes the official Rust blog. An earlier post pointed out that "There have been a good amount of changes that have had to have been made to the compiler to get GATs to work," noting that the request-for-comments for this feature was first opened in 2016. And Rust's types team also created a blog post with more detail:Note that this is really just rounding out the places where you can put generics: for example, you can already have generics on freestanding type aliases and on functions in traits. Now you can just have generics on type aliases in traits (which we just call associated types).... In general, GATs provide a foundational basis for a vast range of patterns and APIs. If you really want to get a feel for how many projects have been blocked on GATs being stable, go scroll through either the tracking issue: you will find numerous issues from other projects linking to those threads over the years saying something along the lines of "we want the API to look like X, but for that we need GATs" (or see this comment that has some of these put together already). If you're interested in how GATs enable a library to do zero-copy parsing, resulting in nearly a ten-fold performance increase, you might be interested in checking out a blog post on it by Niko Matsakis. All in all, even if you won't need to use GATs directly, it's very possible that the libraries you use will use GATs either internally or publically for ergonomics, performance, or just because that's the only way the implementation works.... [A]ll the various people involved in getting this stabilization to happen deserve the utmost thanks. As said before, it's been 6.5 years coming and it couldn't have happened without everyone's support and dedication. Rust 1.65.0 also contains let-else statements — a new kind of let statement "with a refutable pattern and a diverging else block that executes when that pattern doesn't match," according to the release announcement. And it highlights another new feature:Plain block expressions can now be labeled as a break target, terminating that block early. This may sound a little like a goto statement, but it's not an arbitrary jump, only from within a block to its end. This was already possible with loop blocks, and you may have seen people write loops that always execute only once, just to get a labeled break. Now there's a language feature specifically for that! Labeled break may also include an expression value, just as with loops, letting a multi-statement block have an early "return" value.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"An Apple archivist has had his YouTube account disabled after Apple filed multiple takedown requests against his account," reports the blog Apple Insider:Brendan Shanks, owner of the Apple WWDC Videos channel on YouTube, tweeted that Apple had filed a series of copyright removal requests against his channel. The videos in question were decades-old recordings of WWDC events. "I still have all the original files (and descriptions, which were a lot of work!), and I'll be moving things over to the Internet Archive," Shanks posted on Twitter. "It'll take time though, and unfortunately videos get a lot less visibility when you're not on YouTube. "I wasn't super surprised this happened (there were a few takedowns a couple years ago)," Shanks mused in an earlier tweet. "I'm honestly more annoyed that it wiped out my personal YoutTube account and even YouTube TV, which I was just billed real money for. "A cease and desist in the mail would be much friendlier."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's federal government "is planning a post-midterms push for antitrust legislation that would rein in the power of the world's largest tech companies," reports Bloomberg, "a last-ditch effort to get a stalled pair of bills through Congress before a predicted Republican takeover in January."The lame-duck period after Tuesday's U.S. election may be the last shot to pass the landmark legislation, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and Open App Markets Act. The bills, which would prevent the tech companies from using their platforms to thwart competitors, would be the most significant expansion of antitrust law in over a century.... Republicans have made it clear that they won't support the bills if they retake control of either chamber of Congress. That has supporters urging the White House to mount a push in the final weeks before a new Congress is seated early next year. Advocates have criticized the White House for failing to prioritize the legislation, which major tech companies have spent more than $100 million to defeat. Alphabet's Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta all oppose the bill. "There is bipartisan support for antitrust bills, and no reason why Congress can't act before the end of the year," said White House spokesperson Emilie Simons. "We are planning on stepping up engagement during the lame duck on the president's agenda across the board, antitrust included." Versions of both bills have made it through committees but await action by the full House and Senate. If Congress doesn't act before the end of the year, it will likely be years before U.S. lawmakers pass any legislation to crack down on the power of the tech giants.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader thedarklaser writes:A chemical engineering professor at Utah's BYU hascreated a nuclear reactor design that could produce enough energy for 1000 homes in the space of 4 feet by 7 feet. And there's a bonus: potentially no nuclear waste or risk of melt down. They use molten salt that bonds with the dissolved fuel. Then, very valuable Molybdenum-99 (as in $30 million per gram) can be extracted from that salt and sold for use in medical imaging. Additionally, this system is very inexpensive, at a cost of around 3 cents per kilowatt hour. The professor (who led a larger team on the project) tells a local TV station it's important because nuclear energy is "the only baseload or controllable, 100% on-power that has no emissions at all." And since all the radioactive byproducts are dissolved into molten salt with this technique, he believes it's "a system that's impossible to melt down. There's nothing to melt, and it's not likely to cause any release problems because there's no pressure and there's nothing to push it out."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Associated Press reports that Pfizer's updated COVID-19 booster "significantly revved up adults' virus-fighting antibodies, the company said Friday, releasing early findings from a rigorous study of the new shots."Booster doses tweaked to target the most common omicron strain rolled out in early September, and the Food and Drug Administration said the latest data should spur more Americans to get one — especially before another expected wave of cases as people travel for Thanksgiving. Pfizer said people 55 and older who got the omicron-targeting booster had four-fold higher antibody levels than those given an extra dose of the original vaccine.... A month after receiving the new booster, antibody levels in people 55 and older had jumped 13 times higher than before the extra dose. Younger adults saw a 9.5-fold jump, Pfizer and its partner BioNTech said. It had been about 11 months since the study participants' last vaccination.... The new data "reassures us that this was a good decision to move to this bivalent vaccine," FDA vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks told The Associated Press. "Right now is the time for people to consider going out and get the updated" booster.... The updated doses are combination shots, tailored to offer a boost of protection against both the original coronavirus strain and the dominant BA.5 strain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux magazine explores how to breath fresh life into old Android devices:Every mobile device needs its own Android build because of numerous drivers that are not available in the source code. The need to maintain every version of Android for every mobile device means that many manufacturers eventually stop supporting updates. Often, smartphones or tablets that still work perfectly can no longer be used without worry because the manufacturer has simply ceased to offer bug fixes and security updates.... The LineageOS project, the successor to the CyanogenMod project, which was discontinued in 2016, proves that it is not impossible to keep these devices up-to-date. Unpaid volunteers at LineageOS do the work that many manufacturers do not want to do: They combine current Android releases with the required device-specific drivers. The LineageOS project (Figure 1) provides Android systems with a fresh patch status every month for around 300 devices. The builds are released weekly, unless there is a problem during the build. The Devices page on the LineageOS Wiki provides the details of whether a LineageOS build is available for your smartphone or tablet.... I recommend the LineageOS project as the first port of call for anyone who wants to protect an older smartphone or tablet that is no longer maintained and doesn't receive Google security patches. The LineageOS derivatives LineageOS for MicroG and /e/OS make it even easier to enjoy a Google-free smartphone without too many restrictions. The article also describes how to use TWRP to flash a manufacturer-independent recovery system (while also creating a restoreable backup of the existing system) as an alternative to LineageOS's own recovery tools. And it even explains how to unlock the bootloader — although there may be other locks set up separately by the manufacturer. "Some manufacturers require you to register the device to unlock it, and then — after telling you that the warranty is now void — they hand over a code. Others refuse to unlock the device altogether." Thanks to Slashdot reader DevNull127 for submitting the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Intercept reports that protesters in Iran "have often been left wondering how the government was able to track down their locations or gain access to their private communications — tactics that are frighteningly pervasive but whose mechanisms are virtually unknown." But The Intercept now has evidence of a new possibility:While disconnecting broad swaths of the population from the web remains a favored blunt instrument of Iranian state censorship, the government has far more precise, sophisticated tools available as well. Part of Iran's data clampdown may be explained through the use of a system called "SIAM," a web program for remotely manipulating cellular connections made available to the Iranian Communications Regulatory Authority. The existence of SIAM and details of how the system works, reported here for the first time, are laid out in a series of internal documents from an Iranian cellular carrier that were obtained by The Intercept. According to these internal documents, SIAM is a computer system that works behind the scenes of Iranian cellular networks, providing its operators a broad menu of remote commands to alter, disrupt, and monitor how customers use their phones. The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where. Such a system could help the government invisibly quash the ongoing protests — or those of tomorrow — an expert who reviewed the SIAM documents told The Intercept. "SIAM can control if, where, when, and how users can communicate," explained Gary Miller, a mobile security researcher and fellow at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab. "In this respect, this is not a surveillance system but rather a repression and control system to limit the capability of users to dissent or protest." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for submitting the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Microsoft's GitHub Copilot is being sued in a class action lawsuit that claims the AI product is committing software piracy on an unprecedented scale," reports IT Pro. Programmer/designer Matthew Butterick filed the case Thursday in San Francisco, saying it was on behalf of millions of GitHub users potentially affected by the $10-a-month Copilot service:The lawsuit seeks to challenge the legality of GitHub Copilot, as well as OpenAI Codex which powers the AI tool, and has been filed against GitHub, its owner Microsoft, and OpenAI.... "By training their AI systems on public GitHub repositories (though based on their public statements, possibly much more), we contend that the defendants have violated the legal rights of a vast number of creators who posted code or other work under certain open-source licences on GitHub," said Butterick. These licences include a set of 11 popular open source licences that all require attribution of the author's name and copyright. This includes the MIT licence, the GNU General Public Licence, and the Apache licence. The case claimed that Copilot violates and removes these licences offered by thousands, possibly millions, of software developers, and is therefore committing software piracy on an unprecedented scale. Copilot, which is entirely run on Microsoft Azure, often simply reproduces code that can be traced back to open-source repositories or licensees, according to the lawsuit. The code never contains attributions to the underlying authors, which is in violation of the licences. "It is not fair, permitted, or justified. On the contrary, Copilot's goal is to replace a huge swath of open source by taking it and keeping it inside a GitHub-controlled paywall...." Moreover, the case stated that the defendants have also violated GitHub's own terms of service and privacy policies, the DMCA code 1202 which forbids the removal of copyright-management information, and the California Consumer Privacy Act. The lawsuit also accuses GitHub of monetizing code from open source programmers, "despite GitHub's pledge never to do so." And Butterick argued to IT Pro that "AI systems are not exempt from the law... If companies like Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI choose to disregard the law, they should not expect that we the public will sit still." Butterick believes AI can only elevate humanity if it's "fair and ethical for everyone. If it's not... it will just become another way for the privileged few to profit from the work of the many." Reached for comment, GitHub pointed IT Pro to their announcement Monday that next year, suggested code fragments will come with the ability to identify when it matches other publicly-available code — or code that it's similar to. The article adds that this lawsuit "comes at a time when Microsoft is looking at developing Copilot technology for use in similar programmes for other job categories, like office work, cyber security, or video game design, according to a Bloomberg report."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the government agency that leads the country's cyber security mission, is now scanning all Internet-exposed devices hosted in the UK for vulnerabilities. The goal is to assess UK's vulnerability to cyber-attacks and to help the owners of Internet-connected systems understand their security posture. "These activities cover any internet-accessible system that is hosted within the UK and vulnerabilities that are common or particularly important due to their high impact," the agency said. "The NCSC uses the data we have collected to create an overview of the UK's exposure to vulnerabilities following their disclosure, and track their remediation over time." NCSC's scans are performed using tools hosted in a dedicated cloud-hosted environment from scanner.scanning.service.ncsc.gov.uk and two IP addresses (18.171.7.246 and 35.177.10.231). The agency says that all vulnerability probes are tested within its own environment to detect any issues before scanning the UK Internet. "We're not trying to find vulnerabilities in the UK for some other, nefarious purpose," NCSC technical director Ian Levy explained. "We're beginning with simple scans, and will slowly increase the complexity of the scans, explaining what we're doing (and why we're doing it)." The NCSC says it will "take steps to remove [any sensitive or personal data] and prevent it from being captured again in the future." British organizations can opt out of having their servers scanned by emailing a list of IP addresses they want to be excluded at scanning@ncsc.gov.uk.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has announced an ambitious new project to develop a single AI language model that supports the world's "1,000 most spoken languages." The Verge reports: As a first step towards this goal, the company is unveiling an AI model trained on over 400 languages, which it describes as "the largest language coverage seen in a speech model today." [...] Google's "1,000 Languages Initiative" is not focusing on any particular functionality, but instead on creating a single system with huge breadth of knowledge across the world's languages. Speaking to The Verge, Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president of research at Google AI, said the company believes that creating a model of this size will make it easier to bring various AI functionalities to languages that are poorly represented in online spaces and AI training datasets (also known as "low-resource languages"). "By having a single model that is exposed to and trained on many different languages, we get much better performance on our low resource languages," says Ghahramani. "The way we get to 1,000 languages is not by building 1,000 different models. Languages are like organisms, they've evolved from one another and they have certain similarities. And we can find some pretty spectacular advances in what we call zero-shot learning when we incorporate data from a new language into our 1,000 language model and get the ability to translate [what it's learned] from a high-resource language to a low-resource language." Access to data is a problem when training across so many languages, though, and Google says that in order to support work on the 1,000-language model it will be funding the collection of data for low-resource languages, including audio recordings and written texts. The company says it has no direct plans on where to apply the functionality of this model -- only that it expects it will have a range of uses across Google's products, from Google Translate to YouTube captions and more. "One of the really interesting things about large language models and language research in general is that they can do lots and lots of different tasks," says Ghahramani. "The same language model can turn commands for a robot into code; it can solve maths problems; it can do translation. The really interesting things about language models is they're becoming repositories of a lot of knowledge, and by probing them in different ways you can get to different bits of useful functionality."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The first crewed launch of Boeing's Starliner has been delayed again, this time being pushed back to April 2023 from an earlier planned launch date of February. The Register reports: The change came with little announcement from NASA, which tweeted out the new date as a scheduling update without any additional details. In an accompanying blog post, NASA said the change was being made to eliminate conflicts between "visiting spacecraft traffic at the space station," but the agency didn't elaborate much beyond that. Starliner has been a drag on Boeing since the company unveiled the capsule in 2010. According to Boeing's Q3 2022 filing, Starliner has lost the company $883 million since 2019. That was the year Starliner made its first attempt at an uncrewed launch and docking with the International Space Station, which failed due to a pair of software errors that left it unable to dock and saw it returned to Earth early under less-than-ideal circumstances. Attempts at a second launch in 2021 also failed when 13 of the Calamity Capsule's propulsion system valves failed pre-flight checks. Starliner only made it to the ISS for the first time this past May, but even that launch wasn't without issues as two of the craft's 12 thrusters failed once in orbit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In late October, a Swedish software engineer named Linus Akesson unveiled a playable accordion -- called "The Commodordion" -- he crafted out of two vintage Commodore 64 computers connected with a bellows made of floppy disks taped together. A demo of the hack debuted in an 11-minute YouTube video where Akesson plays a Scott Joplin ragtime song and details the instrument's creation. A fair amount of custom software engineering and hardware hackery went into making the Commodordion possible, as Akesson lays out in a post on his website. It builds off of earlier projects (that he says were intentionally leading up to this one), such as the Sixtyforgan (a C64 with spring reverb and a chromatic accordion key layout) and Qwertuoso, a program that allows live playing of the C64's famous SID sound chip. So how does the Commodordion work? Akesson wired up a custom power supply, and when he flips the unit on, both Commodore 64 machines boot (no display necessary). Next, he loads custom music software he wrote from a Commodore Datasette emulator board into each machine. A custom mixer circuit board brings together the audio signals from the two units and measures input from the bellows to control the volume level of the sound output. The bellows, composed of many 5.25-inch floppy disks cut and taped into shape, emit air through a hole when squeezed. A microphone mounted just outside that hole translates the noise it hears into an audio envelope that manipulates the sound output to match. The Commodordion itself does not have speakers but instead outputs its electronic audio through a jack.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Web3 gaming studio Mythical Games has let go of 10% of its roughly 320 employees. CoinDesk reports: The firm cited the economic downturn, likely exacerbated by the harsh crypto winter, as the reason for the layoffs."[We] have had to reevaluate and restructure some areas in our business accordingly," a spokesperson from Mythical told CoinDesk. "Unfortunately, as a result, we had to make the painful decision to let some of the members of our team go." Further reading: A Host of Tech Companies, Including Coinbase, Robinhood, Lyft, and Stripe, Announce Hiring Freezes and Job CutsRead more of this story at Slashdot.

LinkedIn is rolling out new features to combat a surge in AI-generated bot accounts, writes Brian Krebs. "Many LinkedIn profiles now display a creation date, and the company is expanding its domain validation offering, which allows users to publicly confirm that they can reply to emails at the domain of their stated current employer." From the report: LinkedIn's new "About This Profile" section -- which is visible by clicking the "More" button at the top of a profile -- includes the year the account was created, the last time the profile information was updated, and an indication of how and whether an account has been verified. LinkedIn also said it is adding a warning to some LinkedIn messages that include high-risk content, or that try to entice the user into taking the conversation to another platform (like WeChat). "We may warn you about messages that ask you to take the conversation to another platform because that can be a sign of a scam," the company said in a blog post. "These warnings will also give you the choice to report the content without letting the sender know."Read more of this story at Slashdot.