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Rishi Sunak will become Britain's next prime minister, prevailing in a chaotic Conservative Party leadership race on Monday after his remaining rival for the position, Penny Mordaunt, withdrew. He will be Britain's third leader in seven weeks and the first prime minister of color in its history. From a report: The 42-year-old former chancellor of the Exchequer who is the son of Indian immigrants, Mr. Sunak won the contest to replace the ousted Liz Truss, who resigned under pressure last Thursday after her economic agenda caused turmoil. Boris Johnson, the prime minister before Ms. Truss, pulled out of the race on Sunday night, clearing a path for Mr. Sunak, who challenged Ms. Truss last summer but lost in a vote of the party's members. As the only surviving candidate this time, Mr. Sunak was not subjected to another vote of the membership. It was a head-spinning reversal of fortune for Mr. Sunak, whose resignation from Mr. Johnson's cabinet in July set in motion the events that brought down his boss over a series of scandals and pitched Britain into weeks of political upheaval.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Linus Torvalds has backed the idea of possibly removing Intel 486 (i486) processor support from the Linux kernel," reports Phoronix:After the Linux kernel dropped i386 support a decade ago, i486 has been the minimum x86 processor support for the mainline Linux kernel. This latest attempt to kill off i486 support ultimately arose from Linus Torvalds himself with expressing the idea of possibly requiring x86 32-bit CPUs with "cmpxchg8b" support, which would mean Pentium CPUs and later: Maybe we should just bite the bullet, and say that we only support x86-32 with 'cmpxchg8b' (ie Pentium and later). Get rid of all the "emulate 64-bit atomics with cli/sti, knowing that nobody has SMP on those CPU's anyway", and implement a generic x86-32 xchg() setup using that try_cmpxchg64 loop. I think most (all?) distros already enable X86_PAE anyway, which makes that X86_CMPXCHG64 be part of the base requirement. Not that I'm convinced most distros even do 32-bit development anyway these days.... We got rid of i386 support back in 2012. Maybe it's time to get rid of i486 support in 2022? Towards the end of his post, Torvalds makes the following observation about i486 systems. "At some point, people have them as museum pieces. They might as well run museum kernels. "Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember back in 2014 when every iTunes music library suddenly started showing U2's new album, Songs of Innocence? In a new memoir (excerpted by the Guardian), U2's lead singer Bono says he's very sorry — and explains exactly how it happened:"Free music?" asked Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, with a look of mild incredulity. "Are you talking about free music...? But the whole point of what we're trying to do at Apple is to not give away music free. The point is to make sure musicians get paid." "No," I said, "I don't think we give it away free. I think you pay us for it, and then you give it away free, as a gift to people. Wouldn't that be wonderful...?" Tim was not convinced. "There's something not right about giving your art away for free," he said. "And this is just to people who like U2?" "Well," I replied, "I think we should give it away to everybody. I mean, it's their choice whether they want to listen to it." See what just happened? You might call it vaunting ambition. Or vaulting. Critics might accuse me of overreach. It is..... At first I thought this was just an internet squall. We were Santa Claus and we'd knocked a few bricks out as we went down the chimney with our bag of songs. But quite quickly we realised we'd bumped into a serious discussion about the access of big tech to our lives. The part of me that will always be punk rock thought this was exactly what the Clash would do. Subversive. But subversive is hard to claim when you're working with a company that's about to be the biggest on Earth. For all the custard pies it brought Apple — who swiftly provided a way to delete the album — Tim Cook never blinked. "You talked us into an experiment," he said. "We ran with it. It may not have worked, but we have to experiment, because the music business in its present form is not working for everyone." If you need any more clues as to why Steve Jobs picked Tim Cook to take on the leadership of Apple, this is one. Probably instinctively conservative, he was ready to try something different to solve a problem. When it went wrong, he was ready to take responsibility. "A study six months later found that only a quarter of iTunes users actually listened to at least one Song of Innocence," remembers Rolling Stone. Elsewhere in the excerpt, Bono talks about actually meeting with Steve Jobs in 2004, a conversation that resulted in the iconic "Vertigo" iPod ad. Then a new single, U2 offered the track to Apple to use for free, though the band attempted to get "some Apple stock" in exchange. "'Sorry,' said Steve. 'That's a dealbreaker,'" Bono wrote. Instead, U2 settled for their own branded iPod. Bono suggested it be black and red, according to his article in the Guardian — describing Steve Jobs' reaction as "nonplussed."Apple, he said, is about white hardware. "You wouldn't want a black one." He thought for a moment. "I can show you what it would look like, but you will not like it." When, later, he showed the design to us, we loved it. So much that he'd ask Jony Ive, the company's design genius, to look at it again, and OK, maybe even experiment with a red component on the device, too. To reflect our Atomic Bomb album cover....Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steam launched in 2003 — and as recently as 2015, its record for concurrent users logged into the service was 10 million people, reports Kotaku (growing to 14 million in 2017, and by March of 2020, rising up to 20 million). But now it's jumped another 50% — just two and a half years:We got to 28 million users earlier this year — more than the entire populations of countries like Australia and Taiwan — and now, in late October, we've hit the nice round number of 30 million, with the peak number of users logged on earlier today standing at 30,032,005. Note that this isn't the number of people playing at any one time, just the number of people logged into the platform, a feat that's often achieved simply by turning your PC on. If you want to know the number of users actually in a game at that time, SteamDB figures put the peak at around 8.5 million, which is still an enormous figure, and a big jump (proportionally) even from earlier in 2022, when the highest number of active players stood at "between seven and eight million".Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Time magazine teamed up with a London based non-profit newsroom called the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in an investigation that reveals that "horrific" videos "are part and parcel of everyday work for TikTok moderators in Colombia."They told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism about widespread occupational trauma and inadequate psychological support, demanding or impossible performance targets, punitive salary deductions and extensive surveillance. Their attempts to unionize to secure better conditions have been opposed repeatedly. TikTok's rapid growth in Latin America — it has an estimated 100 million users in the region — has led to the hiring of hundreds of moderators in Colombia to fight a never-ending battle against disturbing content. They work six days a week on day and night shifts, with some paid as little as 1.2 million pesos ($254) a month, compared to around $2,900 for content moderators based in the U.S.... The nine moderators could only speak anonymously for fear they might lose their jobs, or undermine their future employment prospects.... The TikTok moderation system described by these moderators is built on exacting performance targets. If workers do not get through a huge number of videos, or return late from a break, they can lose out on a monthly bonus worth up to a quarter of their salary. It is easy to lose out on the much-needed extra cash. Ãlvaro, a current TikTok moderator, has a target of 900 videos per day, with about 15 seconds to view each video. He works from 6am to 3pm, with two hours of break time, and his base salary is 1.2m pesos ($254) a month, only slightly higher than Colombia's minimum salary.... He once received a disciplinary notice known internally as an "action form" for only managing to watch 700 videos in a shift, which was considered "work avoidance". Once a worker has an action form, he says, they cannot receive a bonus that month.... Outsourcing moderation to countries in the global south like Colombia works for businesses because it is cheap, and workers are poorly protected.... For now... TikTok's low-paid moderators will keep working to their grueling targets, sifting through some of the internet's most nightmarish content. The moderators interviewed all had "contractor" status with Paris-based Teleperformance, which last year reported €557 million ($620m) in profit on €7.1 billion ($8.1 billion) in revenue. In fact, Teleperformance has more than 7,000 content moderators globally, according to stats from Market Research Future, and the moderators interviewed said that besides TikTok, Teleperformance also provided content moderators to Meta, Discord, and Microsoft.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gartner, the prestigious tech research and consulting firm, has released its annual predictions for "strategic tech trends" in the coming year. Forbes offers a summary. Some highlights: Digital Immune Systems. [A]ntiquated development and testing approaches are no longer sufficient for delivering robust and resilient business-critical solutions that also provide a superior user experience. A Digital Immune System combines several software engineering strategies such as observability, automation, and extreme testing to enhance the customer experience by protecting against operational and security risks. By 2025, Gartner predicts that organizations that invest in building digital immunity will increase end-user satisfaction through applications that achieve greater uptime and deliver a stronger user experience. Applied Observability. The path to data-driven decision making includes a shift from monitoring and reacting to data to proactively applying that data in an orchestrated and integrated way across the enterprise. Doing so can shorten the time it takes to reach critical decisions while also facilitating faster, more accurate planning. Gartner notes observable data as an organization's "most precious monetizable asset" and encourages leaders to seek use cases and business capabilities in which this data can deliver competitive advantage. "By 2025, Gartner predicts that 50% of CIOs will have performance metrics tied to the sustainability of the IT organization," Forbes writes. But they also note that Gartner is predicting platform engineering — "a curated set of reusable self-service tools, capabilities, and processes" to speed up and optimize development. "Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams." They're also predicting "adaptive" AI that can change after being deployed. But Forbes summarizes Gartner's related prediction, that AI leaders "increasingly must bake governance, trustworthiness, fairness, reliability, efficacy and privacy into AI operations" to improve adoption and user acceptance. This will include tools that "make AI models easier to interpret and explain while improving overall privacy and security." PC Magazine offers this summary of a related prediction from Gartner: "By 2025, without sustainable AI practices, AI will consume more energy than the average European country, offsetting any environmental gains that AI creates by 25%." Gartner also predicts a phasing out of marketing that uses social media sites' data about individuals — and that fully virtual workspaces "will account for 30% of the investment growth in metaverse technologies and will 'reimagine' the office experience through 2027," writes PC Magazine:[Gartner Fellow Daryl Plummer] said people need to reimagine how work will be done. He said that few people want to go back to the office full-time, but that virtual participants in calls often feel like second-class citizens. A fully immersive world is an answer to this, he said, with the interactive experience more important than information exchange. He believes metaverse experiences will be where people collaborate in ways they couldn't do in the office, blurring the line between home and work. By 2025, "labor volatility" will cause 40% of organizations to report a material business loss, forcing a shift in talent strategy from acquisition to resilience. Plummer talked about revamping the way talent is valued. He said people don't want to do just one thing, but want to be "versatilists," which makes them more valuable to the company and less likely to leave.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Verge says Facebook "might ban news sharing in Canada if the country passes legislation forcing the company to pay news outlets for their content." They cite a post Friday from Facebook's parent company Meta, and a recent report in the Wall Street Journal.If this type of law sounds familiar, it's because Australia introduced a similar one last year, called the News Media Bargaining Code, which also requires Facebook and Google to pay for news included on the platforms. Although Australia eventually passed the law, it wasn't without significant pushback from Facebook and Google. Facebook switched off news sharing in the country in response, and Google threatened to pull its search engine from the country. While Google later walked back on its plans after striking deals with media organizations, Facebook reversed its news ban only after Australia amended its legislation. Facebook's temporary ban not only affected news outlets but also ripped down posts from government agencies, like local fire and health departments. Earlier this year, a group of Facebook whistleblowers claimed the move was a negotiation tactic, alleging Facebook used an overly broad definition of what's considered a news publisher to cause chaos in the country. The company maintains the disorder was "inadvertent." Now Facebook's prepared to put a block on news in Canada if the country doesn't change its legislation.... "If this draft legislation becomes law, creating globally unprecedented forms of financial liability for news links or content, we may be forced to consider whether we continue to allow the sharing of news content on Facebook in Canada as defined under the Online News Act," Meta states.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Israel has deployed a new kind of robotic weapon over a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, reports Euronews. "The twin gun turrets can fire tear gas, stun grenades, and sponge-tipped bullets." "Operated by trained soldiers, they track their targets using AI." Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: A Euronews video features footage of Sharone Aloni, Research and Development VP of Sharp Shooter, demonstrating one of the company's devices with an automatic Fire Control System. "Inside here, you have the computer running all the artificial intelligence, computer vision algorithms, which makes this what we call a true fire control system," Aloni says. "It's not only just relying on static information. It actually considers the human, the soldier, which is not stable. He's under pressure. He's tired. Sometimes he didn't get enough training. And also, the target is usually dynamic, and it's moving all the time." The company's web site promises the systems "significantly increase weapon accuracy." And according to Euronews, Israel's army "says the tech protects soldiers, who can fire more accurately at a distance."But Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch's director for Israel and Palestine, counters that when he hears claims of a reduction in risks, "that's often a one-sided kind of risk. It might minimize the risk for the occupying force or the army deploying it, but often it invariably increases the risk to affected communities." Sophisticated weapons systems "will lack elements of human control and agency that are often the difference between life and death." Euronews adds that "Palestinians and human rights experts say the weapons are dehumanizing, dangerous and unaccountable." Sharp Shooter has a response to that, according to Eurnoews: the robotic guns are not fully automated, so a soldier must always pull the trigger, with the system only firing "after algorithms assess factors like wind speed, distance and velocity." And Michal Mor, Sharp Shooter's CEO and founder, also describes its utility in fighting a terrorist. "Usually the terrorist will be inside a civilian environment with many people that we do not want to hurt. "We're enabling the soldier to look through his fire control system, to make sure that the target that he wants to hit is the legitimate target. Once he locks on the target, the system will make sure that the round will be released when he presses the trigger, only on the legitimate target, and none of the bystanders can be hit by the weapon." The Israeli army stressed to Euronews that their deployment isn't using live rounds, and can only fire tear gas, stun grenades, and sponge-tipped bullets. A resident of the refugee camp tells Euronews that the gun "is very fast, even faster than the soldiers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's the tale of a company manufacuring precision card-shuffling machines for casinos — and a gang of hustlers who used a hidden video camera to film the shuffler's insides. "The images, transmitted to an accomplice outside in the casino parking lot, were played back in slow motion to figure out the sequence of cards in the deck," remembers the BBC, "which was then communicated back to the gamblers inside. The casino lost millions of dollars before the gang were finally caught." So the company turned for help to a mathematician/magician:The executives were determined not to be hacked again. They had developed a prototype of a sophisticated new shuffling machine, this time enclosed in an opaque box. Their engineers assured them that the machine would sufficiently randomise a deck of cards with one pass through the device, reducing the time between hands while also beating card-counters and crooked dealers. But they needed to be sure that their machine properly shuffled the deck. They needed Persi Diaconis. Diaconis, a magician-turned-mathematician at Stanford University, is regarded as the world's foremost expert on the mathematics of card shuffling. Throughout the surprisingly large scholarly literature on the topic, his name keeps popping up like the ace of spades in a magician's sleight-of-hand trick. So, when the company executives contacted him and offered to let him see the inner workings of their machine — a literal "black box" — he couldn't believe his luck. With his collaborator Susan Holmes, a statistician at Stanford, Diaconis travelled to the company's Las Vegas showroom to examine a prototype of their new machine. The pair soon discovered a flaw. Although the mechanical shuffling action appeared random, the mathematicians noticed that the resulting deck still had rising and falling sequences, which meant that they could make predictions about the card order. To prove this to the company executives, Diaconis and Holmes devised a simple technique for guessing which card would be turned over next. If the first card flipped was the five of hearts, say, they guessed that the next card was the six of hearts, on the assumption that the sequence was rising. If the next card was actually lower — a four of hearts, for instance — this meant they were in a falling sequence, and their next guess was the three of hearts. With this simple strategy, the mathematicians were able to correctly guess nine or 10 cards per deck — one-fifth of the total — enough to double or triple the advantage of a competent card-counter.... The executives were horrified. "We are not pleased with your conclusions," they wrote to Diaconis, "but we believe them and that's what we hired you for." The company quietly shelved the prototype and switched to a different machine. The article also explains why seven shuffles "is just as close to random as can be" — rendering further shuffling largely ineffective.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Iran has one nuclear power plant. The email system of the company operating it was just breached, according to Iran's civil nuclear arm. The Associated Press reports:An anonymous hacking group claimed responsibility for the attack on Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, demanding Tehran release political prisoners arrested in the recent nationwide protests. The group said it leaked 50 gigabytes of internal emails, contracts and construction plans related to Iran's Russian-backed nuclear power plant in Bushehr and shared the files on its Telegram channel. It was unclear whether the breached system contained classified material. The hack comes as Iran continues to face nationwide unrest...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Engadget writes:After nearly three weeks of escalating rhetoric, The Wire is retracting its reporting on Meta. On Sunday, the nonprofit publication said it had discovered "certain discrepancies" with the material that had informed its reporting on the social media giant since October 6th. "The Wire believes it is appropriate to retract the stories," the outlet said, pointing to the fact it could not authenticate two emails that were critical to its previous coverage of Meta. One of the emails The Wire said it could not verify includes a message the outlet had attributed to Meta spokesperson Andy Stone. "Our investigation, which is ongoing, does not as yet allow us to take a conclusive view about the authenticity and bona fides of the sources with whom a member of our reporting team says he has been in touch over an extended period of time," The Wire said. "We are still reviewing the entire matter, including the possibility that it was deliberately sought to misinform or deceive The Wire." The Wire had reported Meta "had given an influential official from India's ruling party the extraordinary power to censor Instagram posts that he didn't like," according to the Washington Post. But it took a weird turn when The Wire published a video of a takedown request, according to Engadget. "One day later, Meta said an internal investigation found the video showed a Workspace account created on October 13th, suggesting someone made the account to back up The Wire's reporting."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Auto industry insiders have waxed poetic about the safety benefits of the 'software-defined vehicle' — which also enables revenue-boosting data collection and subscriptions that make it safer to be an auto executive too," writes Wired. "Less talked about are the consequences of computerized cars at the auto shop."Fixing complex vehicles requires increasingly expert and expensive knowledge, and tools that are in limited supply.... [T]he upshot can be that it takes longer to get your car fixed. The trend is worsened by an ongoing decline in the number of U.S. auto shops, driven by consolidation and owners taking retirement.... There are now significantly fewer places to get your car fixed in the U.S. than there were just five years ago. One industry publication found that for every active service bay inside U.S. auto shops there were 225 cars and trucks on the road in 2016. Now there are 246 vehicles per bay. Pandemic supply-chain jams for computer chips and auto parts, and a nationwide labor shortage of car technicians, have worsened the problem. Cars took an average of 2.1 days longer to repair in 2021 than in 2019, according to CCC Intelligent Solutions, which sells software to automotive and insurance agencies, nearly 11 days in all. Industry experts say the problem will only get worse. "In 10 years, I see a lot fewer shops, and I see a lot more people looking for shops," says Rick White, who coaches auto repair shop owners through his company, 180biz. An industry survey taken late last year found 96 percent of shops reporting delays, with an average scheduling backlog of 3.4 weeks, compared to 1.7 weeks in late 2019.... Some brands of vehicle can only be calibrated with specialized and expensive tools.... In all, it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire the tools and make the shop adjustments to repair just a few car makes. That's before the cost of training workers to use those tools, with shops paying thousands each year to keep their staff certified to fix specific cars. Investing for the future, then, can set shop owners back by millions. Wired interviewed the former owner of a collision repair shop. Their assessment? Shop owners are just "fed up... we went from a very simple industry to a very complex industry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"It might be a while before you can buy a 'Roomba for laundry'," jokes Slashdot reader Tony Isaac, pointing out that "while robots have been developed that can fold specific types of laundry, there's still not a good robot that can do the job quickly, or for all types." But NPR reports laundry-folding robots are getting closer:As NPR has reported, machines need clear rules in order to function, and it's hard for them to figure out what exactly is going on in those messy piles That's not to say that it's completely impossible. University of California, Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel spent years teaching a robot how to fold a towel, eventually cutting that process down from 20 minutes to a whopping minute and a half. And Silicon Valley-based company FoldiMate raised hopes and eyebrows when it showed off a prototype of its eponymous laundry-folding robot at the Consumer Electronics Show in early 2019. It said the machine could fold some 25 pieces of laundry — except for small items like socks and large items like sheets — in under five minutes, with an estimated price tag of $980. It's unclear what happened to that company — its website is down and it hasn't tweeted since April 2020. Its sole competitor, a Japanese company with an AI-powered prototype, filed for bankruptcy. In sum, most robots have not generally been equipped for the task. But an international group of researchers say their new method could change that — or at least speed up the process. Researchers are calling the new method, SpeedFolding. It's a "reliable and efficient bimanual system" — meaning it involves two hands — that's able to smooth and fold a crumpled garment in record speed (for robots, that is). SpeedFolding can fold 30 to 40 strewn-about garments per hour, compared to previous models that averaged three to six garments in that same time span, according to researchers. They say their robot can fold items in under two minutes, with a success rate of 93%. "Real-world experiments show that the system is able to generalize to unseen garments of different color, shape, and stiffness," they add. According to the article, the team will be presenting their paper at a robotics conference in Kyoto this month, and they've also posted a one-minute video on YouTube. (Their solution involves both an overhead camera and a novel neural network called BiManual Manipulation Network that "studied 4,300 human and machine-assisted actions in order to learn how to smooth and fold garments from a random configuration." "While researchers describe SpeedFolding as a significant improvement, it's not likely to hit the market anytime soon," notes NPR. "For one, Ars Technica tracked down a robot similar to the one they used and found that it retails for $58,000."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IEEE Spectrum reports that "Standard electric-vehicle batteries can recharge much of their range in just 10 minutes with the addition of a thin sheet of nickel inside them, a new study finds."This could provide a welcome and economically attractive alternative to expensive EVs that carry massive and massively expensive battery packs. If faster-charging options were available, enabling the EV's sticker price to drop substantially, some researchers suspect consumers' EV phobia and industry dogma against "range anxiety" could be overcome.... In the new study, researchers experimented with a lithium-ion battery with a roughly 560-kilometer range when fully charged. (The battery's energy density was 265 watt-hours-per-kilogram.) By adding an ultrathin nickel foil to its interior [to heat the battery quickly], they could recharge it to 70 percent in 11 minutes for a roughly 400-km range, and 75 percent in 12 minutes for a roughly 440-km range. "Our technology enables smaller, faster-charging batteries to be deployed for mass adoption of affordable electric cars," says study senior author Chao-Yang Wang, a battery engineer at Pennsylvania State University.... The scientists detailed their findings online in the journal Nature. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader gunner2028 for sharing the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Computer science professor Moshe Y. Vardi is the Senior Editor of Communications of the ACM. And he's concerned about the state of cybersecurity today: In 2017, I wrote: "So here we are, 70 years into the computer age and after three ACM Turing Awards in the area of cryptography (but none in cybersecurity), and we still do not seem to know how to build secure information systems." What would I write today? Clearly, I would write: "75 years," but I would not change a word in the rest of the sentence.... The slow progress in cybersecurity is leading many to conclude the problem is not due to just a lack of technical solution but reflects a market failure, which disincentivizes those who may be able to fix serious security vulnerabilities from doing so. As I argued in 2020, the computing fields tend to focus on efficiency at the expense of resilience. Security usually comes at a cost in terms of performance, a cost that market players seem reluctant to pay. To discuss the market-failure issue and how to address it, the Computing Community Consortium organized in August this year a visioning workshop on Mechanism Design for Improving Hardware Security. The opening talk was given by Paul Rosenzweig, an attorney who specializes in national security law. He argued that technological development is founded, at the end, on human behavior. So, the key to good cybersecurity is to incentivize humans. Thus, the answer lies in the economics of cybersecurity, which is, mostly, a private domain with lots of externalities, where prices do not capture all costs.... As the philosopher Helen Nissenbaum pointed out in a 1996 article, while computing vendors are responsible for the reliability and safety of their product, the lack of liability results in lack of accountability. She warned us more than 25 years ago about eroding accountability in computerized societies. The development of the "move-fast-and-break-things" culture in this century shows that her warning was on the mark.... If we want to address the cyber-insecurity issue, we should start by welcoming liability into computing. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader shanen for sharing the articleRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Bill Gates's climate-oriented venture fund "is plowing more money into climate adaptation," reports MIT Technology Review:To date, the fund has focused on "climate mitigation," which largely concentrates on driving down climate pollution. Climate adaptation refers to developing ways of bolstering protections against the dangers of climate change, rather than just preventing it. The firm's new focus will include ways to help farmers and communities grapple with increasingly common or severe droughts [possibly through advanced desalination technology or systems that pull moisture out of the air], and helping crops remain productive as the world becomes hotter, wetter, or drier; potentially through indoor farming and genetic alteration. Strengthening the infrastructure of global ports, which face growing threats from sea-level rise and increasingly powerful storms, will also be investigated. "Investment opportunities there could include dynamic mooring systems that automatically respond to storm surges, cranes that can operate safely in hotter and harsher conditions, and ships that are more rugged," said Eric Toone, technical lead for Breakthrough Energy Ventures' investment committee, in an interview with MIT Technology Review. "Mitigation's just not going to get us there fast enough, and suffering is unacceptable...." Toone says. "So while our focus will continue to be on mitigation, we will expand our scope to include adaptation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Harry Halpin helped create uniform cryptography standards for the World Wide Web Consortium, reports Quanta magazine — but "he also wanted to protect the lower, foundational level: the network through which the information is transmitted. "In 2018, he started Nym Technologies to take on this problem.... Halpin spoke with Quanta from Nym's headquarters in Neuchâtel, Switzerland." Halpin: The trickier problem is this: How do I communicate with you so that no one else knows I'm communicating with you, even if our messages are encrypted? You can get a sense of what people are saying from the pattern of communication: Who are you talking with, when are your conversations, how long do they last...? There are two key elements: One is the "mixnet," a technology invented by David Chaum in 1979 that my team has improved. It relies on the premise that you can't be anonymous by yourself; you can only be anonymous in a crowd. You start with a message and break it into smaller units, communications packets, that you can think of as playing cards. Next, you encrypt each card and randomly send it to a "mixnode" — a computer where it will be mixed with cards from other senders. This happens three separate times and at three separate mixnodes. Then each card is delivered to the intended recipient, where all the cards from the original message are decrypted and put back into the proper order. No person who oversees mixing at a single mixnode can know both the card's origin and its destination. In other words, no one can know who you are talking to. Q: That was the original mixnet, so what improvements have you made? Halpin: For one thing, we make use of the notion of entropy, a measure of randomness that was invented for this application by Claudia Diaz, a computer privacy professor at KU Leuven and Nym's chief scientist. Each packet you receive on the Nym network has a probability attached to it that tells you, for instance, the odds that it came from any given individual.... Our system uses a statistical process that allows you both to measure entropy and to maximize it — the greater the entropy, the greater the anonymity. There are no other systems out there today that can let users know how private their communications are. Q: What's the second key element you referred to? Halpin: Mixnets, as I said, have been around a long time. The reason they've never taken off has a lot to do with economics. Where do the people who are going to do the mixing come from, and how do you pay them? We think we have an answer. And the kernel of that idea came from a conversation I had in 2017 with Adam Back, a cryptographer who developed bitcoin's central "proof of work" algorithm. I asked him what he would do if he were to redesign bitcoin. He said it would be great if all the computer processing done to verify cryptocurrency transactions — by solving so-called Merkle puzzles that have no practical value outside of bitcoin — could instead be used to ensure privacy. The computationally expensive part of privacy is the mixing, so it occurred to me that we could use a bitcoin-inspired system to incentivize people to do the mixing. We built our company around that idea.... A new paper that came out in June shows that this approach can lead to an economically sustainable mixnet.... We are not building a currency system or trying to replace the dollar. We just want to provide privacy to ordinary people.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Google is giving Apple a taste of its own medicine," reports Business Insider, arguing that the latest update to Android's messaging app "is going to make texting between iPhone and Androids even more annoying than it already is." [Alternate URL]The updates are great if you're an Android user. Google Messages' new features include the ability to reply to individual messages, star them, and set reminders on texts. But these features and some other updates to Messages are RCS-enabled, meaning they're not going to be very compatible with SMS, which is the texting standard that iMessage switches to when messaging someone without an iPhone. iPhones exchange messages using iMessage, Apple's proprietary messaging system, but revert to SMS when texting an Android. One feature that's part of Google's payback to Apple is that now, when Messages users react to an SMS text with an emoji, iPhone users will get a text saying the other person reacted to their text with a description of whatever emoji the person used. It's similar to when iMessage users react to an SMS text, with the recipient getting a "so and so loved" message instead of seeing the heart emoji reaction.... In August, Android launched a page on its website calling Apple out for refusing "to adopt modern texting standards when people with iPhones and Android phones text each other." The page has buttons that take users to Twitter to tweet at Apple to "stop breaking my texting experience. #GetTheMessage" with a link to Android's page urging Apple to "fix texting." "We would much prefer that everybody adopts RCS which has the capability to support proper reactions," Jan Jedrzejowicz, Google Messages product manager, said in a briefing before the Messages updates were announced. "But in the event that's not possible or hasn't happened yet, this feels like the next best thing." Recently, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he doesn't get a lot of feedback from iPhone users that Apple needs to fix messaging between iPhones and Androids. Apple doesn't have much incentive to do so, either. In legal documents from a 2021 lawsuit between Epic Games and Apple, an Apple executive said "Moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disinformation has "metastasized" since experts began raising alarms about the threat, reports the New York Times. "Despite years of efforts by the media, by academics and even by social media companies themselves to address the problem, it is arguably more pervasive and widespread today."Not long ago, the fight against disinformation focused on the major social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. When pressed, they often removed troubling content, including misinformation and intentional disinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, however, there are dozens of new platforms, including some that pride themselves on not moderating — censoring, as they put it — untrue statements in the name of free speech.... The purveyors of disinformation have also become increasingly sophisticated at sidestepping the major platforms' rules, while the use of video to spread false claims on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram has made them harder for automated systems to track than text.... A report last month by NewsGuard, an organization that tracks the problem online, showed that nearly 20 percent of videos presented as search results on TikTok contained false or misleading information on topics such as school shootings and Russia's war in Ukraine. "People who do this know how to exploit the loopholes," said Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook who now leads Anchor Change, a strategic consultancy. With the [U.S.] midterm elections only weeks away, the major platforms have all pledged to block, label or marginalize anything that violates company policies, including disinformation, hate speech or calls to violence. Still, the cottage industry of experts dedicated to countering disinformation — think tanks, universities and nongovernment organizations — say the industry is not doing enough. The Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University warned last month, for example, that the major platforms continued to amplify "election denialism" in ways that undermined trust in the democratic system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thursday a Forbes senior writer reported:A China-based team at TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, planned to use the TikTok app to monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens, according to materials reviewed by Forbes. The team behind the monitoring project — ByteDance's Internal Audit and Risk Control department — is led by Beijing-based executive Song Ye, who reports to ByteDance cofounder and CEO Rubo Liang. The team primarily conducts investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees. But in at least two cases, the Internal Audit team also planned to collect TikTok data about the location of a U.S. citizen who had never had an employment relationship with the company, the materials show. It is unclear from the materials whether data about these Americans was actually collected; however, the plan was for a Beijing-based ByteDance team to obtain location data from U.S. users' devices. Challenging the article, TikTok responded on Twitter that their service "does not collect precise GPS location information from U.S. users, meaning TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the way the article suggested." But Forbes' senior writer thinks that's a misleading denial, writing on Twitter that "We never mentioned GPS in the story. In fact, we quoted their spokesperson saying they collect approximate location via IP address. Not using GPS does not mean they could not use that approximate location to monitor certain individuals." TikTok also acknowledged on Twitter that they do have a team that will "acquire information they need to conduct internal investigations of violations of the company codes of conduct," but says the team follows a specific set of policies and processes "as is standard in companies across our industry." In Forbes' article, TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said that TikTok collects approximate location information (based on IP addresses) to "among other things, help show relevant content and ads to users, comply with applicable laws, and detect and prevent fraud and inauthentic behavior." But Forbes' senior writer said in their article that "the material reviewed by Forbes indicates that ByteDance's Internal Audit team was planning to use this location information to surveil individual American citizens, not to target ads or any of these other purposes."The Internal Audit and Risk Control team runs regular audits and investigations of TikTok and ByteDance employees, for infractions like conflicts of interest and misuse of company resources, and also for leaks of confidential information. Internal materials reviewed by Forbes show that senior executives, including TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, have ordered the team to investigate individual employees, and that it has investigated employees even after they left the company. TikTok's response on Twitter? Behavior like that would be a firing ofference. "Any use of internal audit resources as alleged by Forbes would be grounds for immediate dismissal of company personnel." TikTok also said on Twitter that their service "has never been used to 'target' any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists, nor do we serve them a different content experience than other users." The response of Forbes' senior writer? "I'm glad they say TikTok hasn't been used to 'target' some specific groups. I am nonetheless concerned that they planned to use it to monitor specific Americans, which is what we reported. "Also, for what it's worth, they didn't answer this question when we asked it to them on Wednesday.... Neither TikTok nor ByteDance denied anything we reported, either in the pre-publication process, when we told them what we planned to report and asked for comment, or since then. They have also not requested a story update." Thanks to Slashdot reader koavf for submitting the storyRead more of this story at Slashdot.

"Farmers have urged whoever succeeds Liz Truss as UK prime minister to abandon plans to ban solar energy from most of England's farmland," reports the Guardian, "arguing that it would hurt food security by cutting off a vital income stream."Truss, who resigned on Thursday, and her environment secretary, Ranil Jayawardena, hoped to ban solar from about 41% of the land area of England, or about 58% of agricultural land, the Guardian revealed last week. They planned to do this by reclassifying less productive farmland as "best and most valuable", making it more difficult to use for energy infrastructure. Members of the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), which represents 33,000 landowners, told the Guardian having solar on their less productive land allowed them to subsidise food production during less successful years, as well as providing cheap power for their estates and homes in their local area. One farmer made the case succinctly to the Guardian. "We make unequivocally more from our solar panels than from farming."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vice reports:Sure, you may be trying to cut down on screen time by tracking your minutes in an app on the very same smartphone you're trying to unplug from, but how about a smartphone that doesn't even have a screen to stare at in the first place? Enter MyManu's Titan screenless smartphone... Titan is a set of eSim-enabled, voice controlled earbuds with embedded live voice translation.... So, what can you do with a "screenless smartphone, anyway? According to MyManu, you can make calls, send messages, listen to music or other streamed content, and even translate speech into over 30 languages using its built-in MyJune app — so basically, all of the "phone" parts of having a smartphone minus the hours of fucking around on apps, games, and social media. Its web site promises the phone allows you to:Interact without constant screen glareGet better sleep, reduce eyestrain and headachesReduce anxietyAvoid nasty bacteria or viruses [from constantly touching your screen]The downside? There's no screen....Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post spotlights millions of workers newly allowed to work remotely since the pandemic — including the head of Block's global policy partnerships who moved to a tiny town in Michigan to be closer to her grandfather. And on the plus side, there's a 34-year-old who "has spent the last two years jet-setting across Spain, Italy, Greece and her motherland of Romania. She's also thrown herself into road cycling..." Remote workers say they enjoy connecting with nature, exploring the world and spending more time with family, noting that their outlook on work has changed forever. But it's not rosy all the time: Some say their new lifestyles have introduced complications like time-zone coordination, a different approach to connecting with colleagues, slow internet connectivity, the fear of missing out in-person, and sorting out international health care and travel restrictions.... Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and co-CEO of Australian software company Atlassian, moved to a farm two hours south of the company's Sydney headquarters.... "We decided that ... nobody had to come back to an office," he said. "That reduced pressure." For Cannon-Brookes, allowing his employees to work from anywhere seemed to make the most sense. But he admits Atlassian had to do a lot of retooling to make the policy functional. It had to adjust salaries based on location, coordinate time zones so that teams could work together, create moments for in-person interactions and recruit in areas it hadn't explored. While it's still working social connection, Atlassian now has a larger hiring pool and happier employees, he says. And many got to be with family. "There's a number of people who've sent beautiful, tearful messages, especially older employees who have worked awhile and realized how unusual this is," he said. Atlassian software developer Christina Bell, 27, says the change allowed her to keep her job to spend time with her grandmother, who was diagnosed with cancer, in her homeland of New Zealand. "We went to the beach, did puzzles together, had quality time," she said of her grandmother who was an early supporter of her engineering interests. "In a good twist of events, my nana is in remission, and she's still with us a year and a half later. I'm making the most of our time." Quality time with family is a common thread among several workers who moved thanks to new work policies.... Some workers found relief leaving their cities for nature. That was the case for Naomi Barnett of Spotify and Helen Prowse of Block.... Tempe, Ariz., resident Devin Miller, who works in Yelp's people operations department, says the permanent shift to remote work made room for a new ritual: occasionally working from a cabin in the mountainous town of Pinetop-Lakeside, Ariz. There, he can watch a herd of elk parade across the front yard and take a conference call from a swinging hammock — assuming his internet signal isn't weak. "It's a total refresh for both of us," he said, referring to his partner. "Being stuck in our house put a lot of pressure on our relationship."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First released in 1998, the BSD-licensed software Zeek (originally named "Bro") is about to get more widely adopted, writes long-time Slashdot reader skinfaxi:Zeek, the open source network security monitoring platform, is being integrated into Windows and "is now deployed on more than one billion global endpoints," according to an announcement from Corelight. From Corelight's press release: Corelight, the leader in open network detection and response, today announced the integration of Zeek, the world's most popular open source network security monitoring platform, as a component of Microsoft Windows and Defender for Endpoint. The integration will help security teams respond to the most challenging attacks by providing "richer signals for advanced threat hunting, complete and accurate discovery of IoT devices, and more powerful detection and response capabilities." Originally created by Corelight co-founder and chief scientist Dr. Vern Paxson while at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Zeek transforms network traffic into compact and high-fidelity logs, file content, and behavioral analytics to accelerate security operations. Vital funding for Zeek came initially from the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy's Office of Science. As adoption increased, Corelight was founded to provide a financial model and corporate sponsor for the project.... "Microsoft is strongly committed to supporting open source projects and ecosystems," said Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president for Microsoft. "We're proud to be working with Zeek and are thrilled to bring this level of network intelligence and monitoring to our customers." "This is an amazing development for Zeek and its community of contributors and users," said Paxson. "I never imagined that the tool I developed for network monitoring would find broader application in defending endpoints — but that's part of the creative magic of open source development. "We are grateful for Microsoft's contributions and support, and we are excited that the project's impact, and that of the community of contributors, will increase so dramatically."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hardcore overclocker Elmor "officially broke the CPU frequency world record with Intel's brand-new Core i9-13900K 24-core processor," reports Tom's Hardware — by hitting "a staggering 8.812GHz using liquid nitrogen cooling, dethroning the 8-year reigning champion, the FX-8370, by 90MHz."That's right; it took eight years for a new CPU architecture to dethrone AMD's FX series processors. Those chips are infamous for their mediocre CPU performance at launch; however, these chips scaled incredibly well under liquid nitrogen overclocking.... Elmor accomplished this monumental feat thanks to Intel's new highly-clocked 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPU architecture. Out of the box, the Core i9-13900K can run over 5.5GHz on all P-cores while also hitting 5.8GHz under lightly threaded workloads. The 13900K is, by far, Intel's highest-clocking chip to date.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A U.S. judge in Texas ruled on Friday that people killed in two Boeing 737 MAX crashes are legally considered 'crime victims,'" reports Reuters, "a designation that will determine what remedies should be imposed."In December, some crash victims' relatives said the U.S. Justice Department violated their legal rights when it struck a January 2021 deferred prosecution agreement with the planemaker over two crashes that killed 346 people. The families argued the government "lied and violated their rights through a secret process" and asked U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor to rescind Boeing's immunity from criminal prosecution — which was part of the $2.5 billion agreement — and order the planemaker publicly arraigned on felony charges. O'Connor ruled on Friday that "in sum, but for Boeing's criminal conspiracy to defraud the (Federal Aviation Administration), 346 people would not have lost their lives in the crashes." Paul Cassell, a lawyer for the families, said the ruling "is a tremendous victory" and "sets the stage for a pivotal hearing, where we will present proposed remedies that will allow criminal prosecution to hold Boeing fully accountable." Boeing did not immediately comment.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RedMonk has released its latest quarterly rankings of popular programming languages, arguing that "The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends." Their methodology? "We extract language rankings from GitHub and Stack Overflow, and combine them for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction." Below are this quarter's results: 1. JavaScript2. Python3. Java4. PHP5. C#6. CSS7. C++7. TypeScript9. Ruby10. C11. Swift12. R12. Objective-C14. Shell15. Scala15. Go17. PowerShell17. Kotlin19. Rust19. Dart Their analysis of the latest rankings note "movement is increasingly rare.... the top 20 has been stable for multiple runs. As has been speculated about in this space previously, it seems increasingly clear that the hypothesis of a temporary equilibrium of programming language usage is supported by the evidence.... [W]e may have hit a point of relative — if temporary — contentment with the wide variety of languages available for developers' usage." And yet this quarter TypeScript has risen from #8 to #7, now tied with C++, benefiting from attributes like its interoperability with an existing popular language with an increased availability of security-related features. "There is little suggestion at present that the language is headed anywhere but up. The only real question is on what timeframe."Unlike TypeScript, Go's trajectory has been anything but clear. While it grew steadily and reasonably swiftly as languages go, it has appeared to be stalled, never placing higher than 14th and having dropped into 16 for the last three runs. This quarter, however, Go rose one spot in the rankings back up to 15. In and of itself, this is a move of limited significance, as the further one goes down the rankings the less significant the differences between them are, ranking-wise. But it has been over a year since we've seen movement from Go, which raises the question of whether there is any room for further upward ascent or whether it will remain hovering in the slot one would expect from a technically well regarded but not particularly versatile (from a use case standpoint) language. Like Go, Kotlin had spent the last three runs in the same position. It and Rust had been moving in lockstep in recent quarters, but while Rust enters its fourth consecutive run in 19th place, Kotlin managed to achieve some separation this quarter jumping one spot up from 18 to 17.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: As the US escalates its campaign to undermine the Chinese semiconductor industry, Europe is trying -- with some success -- to avoid becoming collateral damage. At the center of the maneuvering is ASML, the Dutch manufacturer of chipmaking equipment and Europe's most valuable tech company. It's one of the very few producers of the sophisticated lithography machines needed to make midgrade semiconductors, and the only manufacturer of the equipment needed to make the most cutting-edge chips. That puts ASML in the spotlight for policymakers. ASML has never sold its extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, or EUVs, to Chinese clients. The Biden administration, as part of its attempt to keep China from developing the capability to make advanced semiconductors, has been trying to push the Dutch government to withhold ASML's older machines called immersion deep ultraviolet lithography machines, or DUVs, that can be used in combination with other technology to make advanced chips. The European Commission, as well as the Dutch and German governments, have undertaken a coordinated lobbying campaign to oppose restrictions on a critical European company while US competitors continue to do business with Chinese companies, according to officials who spoke under the condition of anonymity because the talks are sensitive. They've argued in part that such restrictions are now pointless given that ASML, which generated 15% of its revenue in China last year, has already sold many of these machines to Chinese companies. When the US did push ahead in early October with more severe restrictions against doing business in China, its specific policies came as a relief to ASML and its political supporters. ASML wasn't hit directly by the new restrictions, which did make it harder for its US peers, such as Applied Materials and Lam Research, to sell advanced chip gear to China. Both companies warned investors that the new restrictions would significantly affect their financial performance. The US Department of Commerce, which is responsible for the majority of rulemaking and enforcement, won't comment directly on specific companies or its negotiations with other governments. ASML is not an American company, limiting the US's power over its operations. But it commonly uses parts from the US, which gives Washington a degree of leverage. In the past, export controls have applied to products when at least 25% of their components are sourced from the US. But senior US officials now say products that contain any US components or intellectual property could be subjected to Washington's export approval process. Such a broad interpretation of the rules would be difficult for a company like ASML to work around. "Europeans feared the new US policy would include provisions affecting immersion DUVs," adds Bloomberg. According to SML's chief executive officer, Peter Wennink, the company's initial assessment is that the new restrictions don't apply to ASML's products shipped out of the Netherlands. Roger Dassen, the chief financial officer, also said the direct impact is fairly limited, thanks to "the fact that we are a European company with limited US technology in it." However, Bloomberg notes ASML's shares "dropped as much as 19% in the days after the Oct. 7 announcement, although they partially recovered after it posted strong earnings." "The US runs the risk of setting off a confrontation with Europe if it chooses to go ahead with new restrictions on immersion DUV machines," concludes the report. "It's unclear what chance officials have to convince their Dutch counterparts to impose additional restrictions on DUV sales, but there's little doubt the two allies aren't yet on the same page. China is the Netherlands's third-biggest trading partner after Germany and Belgium."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A leaker has claimed that Apple is working on a version of macOS exclusive for the M2 iPad Pro, with it expected at some point in 2023. Apple Insider reports: Leaker Majin Bu's sources have shared that Apple is working on a "smaller" version of macOS exclusively for the M2 iPad Pro. It is said to be codenamed Mendocino and will be released as macOS 14 in 2023. Testing is being done with a 25% larger macOS UI so it is suitable for touch. However, apps run on the product would still be iPad-optimized versions, not macOS ones. It isn't clear why Apple would move the iPad to a macOS interface in a half-step like this. Those clamoring for macOS on iPad do so for the software more than the interface. [...] The other possible explanation is this wasn't macOS at all. Apple could be working to bring iPadOS even closer to macOS by adding a Menu Bar and other Mac-like interactions. It already introduced a Mac windowing feature in iPadOS 16 called Stage Manager, this could be the next iteration. Majin Bu also suggests that the exclusivity to M2 iPad Pro could be a marketing push. If the feature is only available on that iPad, more people would buy it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at Cardiff University have identified a peculiar twisting motion in the orbits of two colliding black holes, an exotic phenomenon predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity. Phys.Org reports: Their study, which is published in Nature and led by Professor Mark Hannam, Dr. Charlie Hoy and Dr. Jonathan Thompson, reports that this is the first time this effect, known as precession, has been seen in black holes, where the twisting is 10 billion times faster than in previous observations. The binary black hole system was found through gravitational waves in early 2020 in the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors. One of the black holes, 40 times bigger than our Sun, is likely the fastest spinning black hole to be found through gravitational waves. And unlike all previous observations, the rapidly revolving black hole distorted space and time so much that the binary's entire orbit wobbled back and forth. This form of precession is specific to Einstein's theory of general relativity. These results confirm its existence in the most extreme physical event we can observe, the collision of two black holes. In the fastest example previously measured from orbiting neutron stars called binary pulsars, it took over 75 years for the orbit to precess. The black-hole binary in this study, colloquially known as GW200129 (named after the date it was observed, January 29, 2020), precesses several times every second -- an effect 10 billion times stronger than measured previously. "So far most black holes we've found with gravitational waves have been spinning fairly slowly," said Dr. Charlie Hoy, a researcher at Cardiff University during this study, and now at the University of Portsmouth. "The larger black hole in this binary, which was about 40 times more massive than the Sun, was spinning almost as fast as physically possible. Our current models of how binaries form suggest this one was extremely rare, maybe a one in a thousand event. Or it could be a sign that our models need to change."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BetaNews: Slack developer Felix Rieseberg released Windows 95 as an Electron app four years ago, updating it shortly afterwards to allow it to run gaming classics like Doom. Now he rolls out a new version which can run on any Windows, Mac or Linux system. Based on the Electron framework, Rieseberg's Windows 95 is written entirely in JavaScript, so it doesn't run as smoothly as it would if it was a native app, but you shouldn't let that put you off. This is the second update of the year, which brings it up to version 3.1.1 and includes two important changes: - Upgraded from Electron v18 to Electron v21 (and with it, Chrome and Node.js) - Upgraded v86 (sound is back!) The earlier update (in June) brought the software up to 3.0.0 and introduced the following changes: - Upgraded from Electron v11 Electron v18 (and with it, Chrome and Node.js) - Upgraded v86 (now using WASM) - Upgraded various smaller dependencies - Much better scaling on all platforms - On Windows, the link to OSFMount was broken and is now fixed. - On Windows, you can now see a prettier installation animation. - On Windows, windows95 will have a proper icon in the Programs & Features menu. You can download the latest version of the Windows 95 app for Windows, macOS, and Linux at their respective links.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

France has become the latest country to pull out of the controversial energy charter treaty (ECT), which protects fossil fuel investors from policy changes that might threaten their profits. The Guardian reports: Speaking after an EU summit in Brussels on Friday, French president, Emmanuel Macron, said: "France has decided to withdraw from the energy charter treaty." Quitting the ECT was "coherent" with the Paris climate deal, he added. Macron's statement follows a recent vote by the Polish parliament to leave the 52-nation treaty and announcements by Spain and the Netherlands that they too wanted out of the scheme. The European Commission has proposed a "modernization" of the agreement, which would end the writ of the treaty's secret investor-state courts between EU members. That plan is expected to be discussed at a meeting in Mongolia next month. A French government official said Paris would not try to block the modernization blueprint within the EU or at the meeting in Mongolia. "But whatever happens, France is leaving," the official said. While France was "willing to coordinate a withdrawal with others, we don't see that there is a critical mass ready to engage with that in the EU bloc as a whole," the official added. The French withdrawal will take about a year to be completed, and in that time, discussion in Paris will likely move on to ways of neutralizing or reducing the duration of a "sunset clause" in the ECT that allows retrospective lawsuits. Progress on that issue is thought possible by sources close to ongoing legal negotiations on the issue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) has announced the launch of its fully operational metaverse, initially designed for activities such as immersive training courses for forensic investigations. Decrypt reports: Unveiled at the 90th Interpol General Assembly in New Delhi, the INTERPOL Metaverse is described as the "first-ever Metaverse specifically designed for law enforcement worldwide." Among other things, the platform will also help law enforcement across the globe to interact with each other via avatars. "For many, the Metaverse seems to herald an abstract future, but the issues it raises are those that have always motivated INTERPOL -- supporting our member countries to fight crime and making the world, virtual or not, safer for those who inhabit it," Jurgen Stock, Interpol's secretary general said in a statement. One of the challenges identified by organizations is that something that is considered a crime in the physical world may not necessarily be the same in the virtual world. "By identifying these risks from the outset, we can work with stakeholders to shape the necessary governance frameworks and cut off future criminal markets before they are fully formed," said Madan Oberoi, Interpol's executive director of Technology and Innovation. "Only by having these conversations now can we build an effective response." In a live demonstration at the event, Interpol experts took to a Metaverse classroom to deliver a training course on travel document verification and passenger screening using the capabilities of the newly-launched platform. Students were then teleported to an airport where they were able to apply their newly-acquired skills at a virtual border point. Additionally, Interpol has created an expert group that will be tasked with ensuring new virtual worlds are "secure by design." The report notes that Interpol has also joined "Defining and Building the Metaverse," a World Economic Forum initiative around metaverse governance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is working on a PC Manager app that's designed to boost your computer's performance. The Verge reports: Much like CCleaner, a beta version of Microsoft's PC Manager includes storage management and the ability to end tasks quickly and control which apps start up with Windows. Much of this functionality is already baked into Windows, but this PC Manager app puts it all in one useful location. There's even a browser protection section that makes it easier to change default browsers than what exists in Windows right now. The storage manager feature includes the ability to manage apps or remove those that are rarely used, and there's also a full cleanup scan available or a scan to find large files on your drives. The process management feature is a more simplified version of the Task Manager so you can quickly kill processes that might be eating up RAM. Hitting the main "boost" button will clear temporary files and free up memory, which could be useful on older PCs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: Renters filed a lawsuit (PDF) this week alleging that a company that makes price-setting software for apartments and nine of the nation's biggest property managers formed a cartel to artificially inflate rents in violation of federal law. The lawsuit was filed days after ProPublica published an investigation raising concerns that the software, sold by Texas-based RealPage, is potentially pushing rent prices above competitive levels, facilitating price fixing or both. [...] RealPage's software uses an algorithm to churn through a trove of data each night to suggest daily prices for available rental units. The software uses not only information about the apartment being priced and the property where it is located, but also private data on what nearby competitors are charging in rents. The software considers actual rents paid to those rivals -- not just what they are advertising, the company told ProPublica. ProPublica's investigation found that the software's design and reach have raised questions among experts about whether it is helping the country's biggest landlords indirectly coordinate pricing -- potentially in violation of federal law. In one neighborhood in downtown Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of more than 9,000 apartments were controlled by just 10 property managers, who all used RealPage pricing software in at least some of their buildings. RealPage told ProPublica that the company "uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner." The company also said that landlords who use employees to manually set prices "typically" conduct phone surveys to check competitors' rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior. "RealPage's revenue management solutions prioritize a property's own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors' rents," a company statement said, "and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing." The lawsuit said that RealPage's software helps stagger lease renewals to artificially smooth out natural imbalances in supply and demand, which discourages landlords from undercutting pricing achieved by the cartel. Property managers "thus held vacant rental units unoccupied for periods of time (rejecting the historical adage to keep the 'heads in the beds') to ensure that, collectively, there is not one period in which the market faces an oversupply of residential real estate properties for lease, keeping prices higher," it said. Such staggering helped the group avoid "a race to the bottom" on rents, the lawsuit said. RealPage brags that clients -- who agree to provide RealPage real-time access to sensitive and nonpublic data -- experience "rental rate improvements, year over year, between 5% and 12% in every market," the lawsuit said. RealPage encourages property companies to have daily calls with a RealPage pricing adviser and discourages deviating from the rent price suggested by the software, the lawsuit said. A RealPage representative told ProPublica that the company "strongly denies the allegations and will vigorously defend against the lawsuit." RealPage "uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner." The company also said that landlords who use employees to manually set prices "typically" conduct phone surveys to check competitors' rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior. "RealPage's revenue management solutions prioritize a property's own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors' rents," a company statement said, "and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google unveiled a new open source security project on Thursday centered around software supply chain management. The Record reports: Given the acronym GUAC -- which stands for Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition -- the project is focused on creating sets of data about a software's build, security and dependency. Google worked with Purdue University, Citibank and supply chain security company Kusari on GUAC, a free tool built to bring together many different sources of software security metadata. Google has also assembled a group of technical advisory members to help with the project -- including IBM, Intel, Anchore and more. Google's Brandon Lum, Mihai Maruseac, Isaac Hepworth pitched the effort as one way to help address the explosion in software supply chain attacks -- most notably the widespread Log4j vulnerability that is still leaving organizations across the world exposed to attacks. "GUAC addresses a need created by the burgeoning efforts across the ecosystem to generate software build, security, and dependency metadata," they wrote in a blog post. "GUAC is meant to democratize the availability of this security information by making it freely accessible and useful for every organization, not just those with enterprise-scale security and IT funding." Google shared a proof of concept of the project, which allows users to search data sets of software metadata. The three explained that GUAC effectively aggregates software security metadata into a database and makes it searchable. They used the example of a CISO or compliance officer that needs to understand the "blast radius" of a vulnerability. GUAC would allow them to "trace the relationship between a component and everything else in the portfolio." Google says the tool will allow anyone to figure out the most used critical components in their software supply chain ecosystem, the security weak points and any risky dependencies. As the project evolves, Maruseac, Lum and Hepworth said the next part of the work will center around scaling the project and adding new kinds of documents that can be submitted and ingested by the system.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bruce66423 shares a report from the BBC: A hacker who stole two unreleased songs from Ed Sheeran and sold them on the dark web has been jailed for 18 months. Adrian Kwiatkowski traded the music by Sheeran and 12 songs by rapper Lil Uzi Vert in exchange for cryptocurrency. The 23-year-old, from Ipswich, managed to get hold of them after hacking the performers' digital accounts, the Crown Prosecution Service said. Kwiatkowski admitted 19 charges, including copyright infringement and possessing criminal property. He had made 131,000 pounds ($148,000) from the music, City of London Police said. According to police, seven devices, including a hard drive that contained 1,263 unreleased songs by 89 artists, were seized. A document saved on the hard drive summarised the method he had used to obtain them along with a stash of Bitcoin which was seized. In August, Kwiatkowski pleaded guilty at Ipswich Magistrates Court to three charges of unauthorised access to computer material, 14 charges of selling copyrighted material, one charge of converting criminal property and two charges of possession of criminal property. Chief crown prosecutor Joanne Jakymec said Kwiatkowski had "complete disregard" for the musicians' creativity, hard work and lost earnings. "He selfishly stole their music to make money for himself by selling it on the dark web," she said. "We will be pursuing ill-gotten gains from these proceeds of crime."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The Biden administration is exploring the possibility of new export controls that would limit China's access to some of the most powerful emerging computing technologies, according to people familiar with the situation. The potential plans, which are in an early stage, are focused on the still-experimental field of quantum computing, as well as artificial intelligence software, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing private deliberations. Industry experts are weighing in on how to set the parameters of the restrictions on this nascent technology, they said. The efforts, if implemented, would follow separate restrictions announced earlier this month aimed at stunting Beijing's ability to deploy cutting-edge semiconductors in weapons and surveillance systems. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, in a speech last month on technology, competitiveness and national security, referred to "computing-related technologies, including microelectronics, quantum information systems and artificial intelligence" as among developments "set to play an outsized importance over the coming decade." He also noted the importance of export controls to "maintain as large of a lead as possible" over adversaries. Expanding the wall around advanced technologies risks further antagonizing China and forcing other countries to pick sides between the world's two top economies. The new ideas have been shared with US allies, according to the people. Officials are still determining how to frame the controls on quantum computing, which will probably focus on the level of output and the so-called error correction rate, the people said. [...] The Biden administration is also working on an executive order for an outbound investment review mechanism that would scrutinize money heading to certain Chinese technologies, and the quantum computing and artificial intelligence controls could be included, one of the people said. That could incorporate some aspects similar to a measure pushed by senators Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, and John Cornyn, a Texas Republican.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study finds that some people really are "mosquito magnets" and it probably has to do with the way they smell. From a report: The researchers found that people who are most attractive to mosquitoes produce a lot of certain chemicals on their skin that are tied to smell. And bad news for mosquito magnets: they stay loyal to their favorites over time. "If you have high levels of this stuff on your skin, you're going to be the one at the picnic getting all the bites," said study author Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University in New York. There is folklore about who gets bitten more, but many claims are not backed up with strong evidence, said Vosshall. The researchers designed an experiment pitting people's scents against each other, explained study author Maria Elena De Obaldia. Their findings were published Tuesday in the journal Cell. They asked 64 volunteers from the university and nearby to wear nylon stockings around their forearms to pick up their skin smells. The stockings were put in separate traps at the end of a long tube, then dozens of mosquitos were released. "They would basically swarm to the most attractive subjects," De Obaldia said. "It became very obvious right away." Scientists held a round-robin tournament and ended up with a striking gap: the biggest mosquito magnet was around 100 times more attractive to the mosquitoes than the last place finisher.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

French police said Friday they're investigating multiple cuts to fiber-optic cables in France's second-largest city. Operators said the cables link Marseille to other cities in France and Europe and that internet and phone services were severely disrupted. From a report: The disruptions in Marseille were a taste of what analysts warn could be far larger problems in other cases if cables are systematically attacked. The vulnerability of fiber-optic cables, especially those underwater, and other key infrastructure was highlighted by the sabotage last month in the Baltic Sea of natural gas pipelines from Russia. The damage in the city in southern France also appeared to resemble suspected acts of sabotage to other cables in the country earlier this year. French cable operator and internet service provider Free said its repair teams were mobilized before dawn Wednesday to deal with "an act of vandalism on our fiber infrastructure." It said the attacks were simultaneous and on multiple spots of its fiber network near Marseille. Photos that Free published on Twitter showed multiple cables completely severed in their concrete housings buried in the ground. It said the cuts led to major disruptions to its network and phone services in the Marseille area.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Communications to Shetland, the Scottish archipelago that lies across the sea from Norway and more than 100 miles north of mainland Britain, have been severely disrupted after a subsea cable was damaged. From a report: Police have declared a major incident after the south subsea cable between the islands and the mainland was cut. The force said some landlines and mobiles were not usable and that officers were patrolling to try to reassure residents. Repairs to another cable connecting Shetland and Faroe are ongoing after it was damaged last week. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said it was an emergency situation for the island. The Scottish government's resilience committee had met and was working with partner agencies to ensure support was provided, she added. She said the assumption was the damage was accidental, adding: "There is nothing to suggest otherwise, but work is continuing to assess exactly what the cause of the problem has been." MP for Orkney and Shetlands Alastair Carmichael told the BBC he had raised the issue with the UK government, but understood it could be days before communications were restored. He said the priority was fixing the issue but that resilience would also need to be looked at in future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. has rules limiting federal officials' stock-market investing. They can be waived. The Wall Street Journal: Mark Wu held more than $1 million of Amazon.com stock when President Biden tapped him to help craft a trade policy that would benefit U.S. technology companies and online retailers. Ethics officials at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said they gave Mr. Wu two options: Get rid of the stock or recuse himself from digital trade issues. He did neither. For several months, Mr. Wu continued working on the trade matter while keeping the shares. He had "not followed the requirements," the U.S. Trade Representative's chief of staff told him in a June 2021 phone call, an email describing the call shows. Eventually, Mr. Wu quit, citing family issues. He kept his Amazon stock. Mr. Wu said he didn't work on trade issues specific to Amazon and left the government when the restrictions became too much of a burden on his family. The U.S. has a law aimed at preventing the nation's thousands of obscure but powerful federal officials from using their influence on regulations, policies and investigations to benefit themselves. With penalties up to $50,000 and five years in prison, the law is supposed to ensure that officials in the executive branch don't work on any matter that could affect their personal finances. It doesn't. It has exceptions. Violations often go unpunished. When a problematic holding is identified, if the official resists selling it, the rules often are waived. The result is a system that largely relies on government employees to police their own stock investing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canonical blog: Codenamed "Kinetic Kudu," this interim release improves the experience of enterprise developers and IT administrators. It also includes the latest toolchains and applications with a particular focus on the IoT ecosystem. Ubuntu 22.10 delivers toolchain updates to Ruby, Go, GCC and Rust. OpenSSH in Ubuntu 22.10 is configured by default to use systemd socket activation, meaning that sshd will not be started until an incoming connection request is received. This reduces the memory footprint of Ubuntu Server on smaller devices, VMs or LXD containers. Ubuntu 22.10 also comes with a new debuginfod service to help developers and admins debug programs shipped with Ubuntu. Debugging tools like gdb will automatically download the required debug symbols over HTTPS. Ubuntu 22.10 now supports MicroPython on a variety of microcontrollers, including the Raspberry Pi Pico W. rshell, thonny and mpremote are all available in the Ubuntu repositories. The Ubuntu graphics stack transition to kms means developers can run Pi-based graphical applications using frameworks like Qt outside of a desktop session and without Pi specific drivers. This complements expanded support for a range of embedded displays for the Raspberry Pi, including the Inky eInk HAT series, Hyperpixel range and the Raspberry Pi Official Touchscreen. [...] All users will benefit from the refinements in GNOME 43, including GTK4 theming for improved performance and consistency. Quick Settings now provide faster access to commonly used options such as wifi, bluetooth, dark mode and power settings.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Not content with doing $28.8 billion in revenue in 2021, YouTube has recently gone on the hunt for more revenue-generating strategies. Now, the Google division has announced a price hike for YouTube Premium family plans. From a report: As 9to5Google was the first to spot, the family plan is jumping over 27 percent in the US, from $17.99 to $22.99, with other regions also seeing price hikes. Instead of making an official announcement, Google is quietly emailing existing subscribers. So far, it does not seem like the single-person YouTube Premium price (still $11.99 per month) is going up. The family plan lets a user share ad-free YouTube Premium with up to five same-household family members for a discounted rate. On iOS, all the prices are higher if you sign up through the App Store, which charges a 30 percent fee on every transaction. In Apple land, YouTube Premium's family plan was always $22.99, and now it's jumping up to $29.99 a month. You can avoid the Apple tax by just paying Google directly through the YouTube website.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple's head of hardware design, Evans Hankey, is leaving the iPhone maker three years after taking the job, creating a significant hole at the top of a company famous for its slick-looking products, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing sources. From the report: Hankey was named to the post in 2019 to replace Jony Ive, the company's iconic design chief for two decades. Before taking her current role as vice president of industrial design, Hankey spent several years at Apple reporting to Ive. Since then, she has reported to Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams. The departure was announced inside the Cupertino, California-based technology giant this week, with Hankey telling colleagues that she will remain at Apple for the next six months. Hankey oversees several dozen industrial designers, and the company hasn't named a replacement. Her pending exit marks the first time that Apple will be without a de facto design chief since co-founder Steve Jobs retook control of the company in the late 1990s and appointed Ive to the job. Richard Howarth, a key designer on both Ive's and Hankey's teams, briefly held the role of head of industrial design, reporting to Ive, between 2015 and 2017.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has decided the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) -- its offering that runs Android VMs which behave just like another application in Windows -- is sufficiently stable that it can be designated version 1.0 and made available to all. From a report: While it's lovely that Windows can now run Android VMs, Hendrixson's tweet needs a little parsing. The "50,000 apps" he mentions are only available from the Amazon.com app store -- not the larger Google Play digital tat bazaar. Google's apps aren't in the Amazonian store, nor are Microsoft's. I couldn't find Twitter, WhatsApp, Slack, any of the banks I use, or the Australian government apps I need to access services. In fact it's tough work to find apps other than games in the store -- and when a search term does bear fruit it delivers what look like knockoff apps that scream "here be dragons."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Would you pay for a username on social media? Telegram is hoping yes. From a report: The messaging app is soon to launch a username auction platform on The Open Network (TON) blockchain, the company said in an official channel on Thursday. Telegram founder Pavel Durov revealed the project in August, citing inspiration from the success of a recent TON auction for their wallet usernames. Some, including "casino.ton," sold for over $200,000. "If TON has been able to achieve these results, imagine how successful Telegram with its 700 million users could be if we put reserved @ usernames, group and channel links for auction," he said. But Durov isn't stopping there. "Other elements of the Telegram ecosystem, including channels, stickers or emoji, could later also become part of this marketplace," he added. Paying for usernames isn't new. Over half a million people have paid for usernames on Ethereum through the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), according to Non Fungible's market tracker. It's not just a web3 phenomenon either. It's becoming harder and harder to get the desired username on platforms like Twitter and Instagram and some people are going to great lengths to obtain them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has sued medical technology company Masimo in Delaware federal court, accusing its new W1 line of smartwatches of infringing several Apple Watch patents. From a report: The two lawsuits said Masimo copied Apple's technology while seeking bans on sales and imports of Apple Watches in earlier intellectual-property cases against the tech giant in California and at a U.S. trade tribunal. Apple said Masimo "carefully studied Apple's IP" during those cases and claimed a Masimo spinoff received confidential information about the Apple Watch. Apple accused Masimo of trying to use the litigation to remove Apple's watches from the market to "make way for Masimo's own watch." Irvine, California-based Masimo said in a statement that Apple's lawsuits are "retaliatory" and "appear to be an attempt to avoid the court in which the parties have been litigating their dispute for the past three years." Masimo, which specializes in health-monitoring devices for medical patients, sued Apple in California federal court in 2020.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK regulator Ofcom proposed changes to net neutrality rules carried over from the European Union to give telecommunications and internet providers more flexibility. From a report: Internet service providers should be allowed to offer a broader range of premium packages on a wider variety of parameters such as latency, and could include discounted tariffs during off-peak hours, according to proposals from the watchdog published Friday. "The net neutrality rules constrain the activities of broadband providers, and could be restricting their ability to develop new services and manage their networks," Ofcom said in the report. Net neutrality is shorthand for rules that intend to ensure traffic carried over telecom networks is treated equally, without favoring certain services or content. Debates over such regulations often prove controversial due to tensions over what constitutes an open and free internet and fears consumers could suffer if it becomes harder to compare prices. The report proposed that telecom providers be allowed to not charge a customer's overall allowance for certain services, like public health advice.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon says over half a dozen hardware vendors have indicated that they cannot enter into a TV manufacturing relationship with the e-commerce group over fear of retaliation from Google, escalating tension with the search giant with whom it competes on several businesses. From a report: The revelation, officially shared by Amazon for the first time, was made by the company's unit in India to the Competition Commission of India as part the antitrust watchdog's years-long investigation into Google over claims that it abuses the dominant position in Android. Google does abuse its dominant position in Android, the regulator said Thursday in a statement, slapping a $162 million fine on Thursday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.