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Logitech has acquired Loupedeck -- the company behind the self-titled editing console beloved by streamers and creative professionals -- for an undisclosed sum, according to a press release published on Tuesday. From a report: It's one of many recent steps that Logitech has taken to gain some ground in the streaming market against competing companies like Elgato, having similarly acquired Mevo -- a camera hardware and software company specializing in livestreaming -- in 2021. According to the press release, the partnership between Logitech and Loupedeck is designed to provide "a more seamless experience for creators," which could potentially provide Loupedeck hardware with more specialized presets out of the box and better integration with Streamlabs -- the streaming platform acquired by Logitech back in 2019.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An experimental drug can slow progression of Alzheimer's disease in those who start taking it when the disease is still in its early stages. Nature: The drug, a monoclonal antibody called donanemab, does not improve symptoms. But among people who started taking it at the earliest stages of Alzheimer's, 47% had no disease progression on some measures after one year, compared with 29% who took a placebo. The drug does not provide as much benefit to people at later stages or those with a common genetic variation that raises the risk of the disease. The results are "very encouraging," says neurologist Reisa Sperling at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, particularly because they are similar to those of a similar drug called lecanemab. "It makes me feel we are on the right track." Donanemab's manufacturer Eli Lilly, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, presented the results of the 1,736-person trial today at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference (AAIC) in Amsterdam, and published them1 in JAMA. The company released partial results in May, but researchers still had questions about the drug's safety and efficacy in certain groups.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The four astronauts assigned to soar beyond the far side of the Moon on NASA's Artemis II mission settled into their seats inside a drab classroom last month at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It was one in a series of noteworthy moments for the four-person crew since NASA revealed the names of the astronauts who will be the first people to fly around the Moon since 1972. There was the fanfare of the crew's unveiling to the public in April and an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. There will, of course, be great anticipation as the astronauts close in on their launch date, currently projected for late 2024 or 2025. But many of the crew's days over the next 18 months will be spent in classrooms, on airplanes, or in simulators, with instructors dispensing knowledge they deem crucial for the success of the Artemis II mission. In the simulator, the training team will throw malfunctions and anomalies at the astronauts to test their ability to resolve a failure that -- if it happened in space -- could cut the mission short or, in a worst-case scenario, kill them. "In order to do those things, what knowledge do we have to impart to them? What skills do we have to teach them?" said Jacki Mahaffey, NASA's leading training officer for the Artemis II mission. "Overall, our goal is we've got a little bit in the classroom, but the more that we can get the crew in front of the displays in the vehicle mockups and really kind of immersed in that environment, the sooner, the better. Commander Reid Wiseman and his crewmates -- pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen -- were named to the Artemis II crew on April 3. Much of their time over the next two-and-a-half months was devoted to making a public relations tour, giving interviews, going to NASA centers around the country, visiting Capitol Hill, and meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Mahaffey said they also got a pre-training pep talk from Charlie Duke, who walked on the Moon on the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972. NASA hasn't trained a crew to fly to the Moon since Apollo 17 at the end of 1972, the last time astronauts walked on the lunar surface.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Qualcomm and Meta will enable the social networking company's new large language model, Llama 2, to run on Qualcomm chips on phones and PCs starting in 2024, the companies announced today. From a report: So far, LLMs have primarily run in large server farms, on Nvidia graphics processors, due to the technology's vast needs for computational power and data, boosting Nvidia stock, which is up more than 220% this year. But the AI boom has largely missed the companies that make leading edge processors for phones and PCs, like Qualcomm. Its stock is up about 10% so far in 2023, trailing the NASDAQ's gain of 36%. The announcement on Tuesday suggests that Qualcomm wants to position its processors as well-suited for A.I. but "on the edge," or on a device, instead of "in the cloud." If large language models can run on phones instead of in large data centers, it could push down the significant cost of running A.I. models, and could lead to better and faster voice assistants and other apps.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Plexamp, the music player originally incubated by the Labs division of media company Plex, is now free, the company announced today. From a report: The project was first launched in 2017 as Plex's own spin on the classic Winamp media player app, offering visualizations to accompany your tunes, tools for programming mixes, and more recently, a ChatGPT-powered "Sonic Sage" feature that builds unique playlists from users' music libraries. However, after its expansion from desktop to mobile, Plexamp was only available to subscribers. Now, Plex says the Plexamp app will become free, allowing users to play tracks from their own library or the TIDAL music streaming service with high-quality audio and support for lossless audio. The app also includes gapless playback, loudness leveling, and smooth transitions between tracks, among other things. In addition to Library Radio, a feature used to rediscover your music, users can create playlists with Plexamp to match their current mood: like "brooding, cathartic, confident, intense, playful, poignant, swaggering, and wistful," the company says.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta Platforms is making its artificial intelligence large language model, Llama 2, available for commercial use through partnerships with major cloud providers including Microsoft. Bloomberg: Meta isn't charging for access or usage of the model it developed, the company said. Instead, by opening up the technology to other companies, Meta says it will benefit from improvements that can be made when more developers use, stress test and identify problems with it. Making the large language model, or LLM, more widely accessible, also establishes Meta alongside other tech giants as having a key contribution to the AI arms race. Meta is spending record amounts on AI infrastructure, and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has said incorporating AI improvements into all the company's products and algorithms is a priority. Meta took on the cost of training the models. Cloud providers including Microsoft, Amazon and Hugging Face are hosting the tools and providing the computing power to run them. The commercial rollout of Llama 2 is the first project to debut out of the company's generative AI group, a new team assembled in February. To prepare the new model for release, Meta employees and third-parties ran safety tests called "red-teaming exercises." It's a separate model from the one Meta uses for its own products.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At its annual Inspire conference, Microsoft announced a number of new AI features headed to Azure, perhaps the most notable of which is Vector Search. From a report: Available in preview through Azure Cognitive search, Vector Search uses machine learning to capture the meaning and context of unstructured data, including images and text, to make search faster. Vectorization, an increasingly popular technique in search, involves converting words or images into vectors, or series of numbers, that encode their meaning -- allowing them to be processed mathematically. Vectors enable machines to structure and make sense of data, enabling them to understand, for example, that words close together in "vector space" -- like "king" and "queen" -- are related and quickly surface them from a database of millions of words. [...] Rounding out the AI unveilings at Inspire, Microsoft announced the public preview of Real-time Diarization, an AI-driven speech service that can identify which of several people are speaking in real time. The company also announced the general availability of Custom Neural Voice, which taps AI to closely reproduce an actor's voice or create an original synthetic voice. Previously, Custom Neural Voice was in limited access, meaning that customers had to apply and be approved by Microsoft in order to use it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the Microsoft Inspire partner event today, the Windows maker announced pricing for its AI-infused Copilot for Microsoft 365. From a report: The suite of contextual artificial intelligence tools, the fruit of the company's OpenAI partnership, will cost $30 per user for business accounts each month. In addition, the company is launching Bing Chat Enterprise, a privacy-focused version of the AI chatbot with greater security and peace of mind for handling sensitive business data. Revealed in March, Microsoft 365 Copilot is the company's vision of the future of work. The GPT-4-powered suite of tools lets you generate Office content using natural-language text prompts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spain's antitrust watchdog imposed fines worth a total 194.1 million euros ($218.03 million) on Amazon and Apple for colluding to limit the online sale of devices from Apple and competitors in Spain. From a report: The two contracts the companies signed on Oct. 31, 2018 granting Amazon the status of authorized Apple dealer included anti-competitive clauses that affected the online market for electronic devices in Spain, CNMC, as the watchdog is known, said in a statement. "The two companies restricted without justification the number of sellers of Apple products on the Amazon website in Spain," it said. More than 90% of the existing retailers who were using Amazon's market place to sell Apple devices were blocked as a result, CNMC added. Amazon also reduced the capacity of retailers in the European Union based outside Spain to access Spanish customers, the regulator said. It also restricted the advertising Apple's competitors were allowed to place on its website when users searched for Apple products, CNMC said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

VanMoof -- the independent e-bike maker that once bragged about being the "most funded e-bike company in the world" -- has been declared bankrupt in the Netherlands. The company had entered into a so-called "suspension of payment" proceeding with court-assigned administrators just last week. From a report: According to a statement released by VanMoof, the court of Amsterdam withdrew the suspension of payment proceeding of the Dutch legal entities VanMoof Global Holding BV, VanMoof BV and VanMoof Global Support BV, and declared each entity bankrupt. VanMoof legal entities outside the Netherlands are not in insolvency proceedings. Two administrators have been appointed as trustees and are continuing to assess the situation at VanMoof and the possibility of a restart. That includes exploring an asset sale to a third party so that VanMoof could continue operations. So basically, a company could buy up VanMoof's operations and assets without having to take responsibility for the company's outstanding debt. The bankruptcy decision came quickly, despite the court having previously issued a two month cooling off period that protected VanMoof from creditors. It's understood that this can happen in cases where administrators can easily see that a company has exhausted all available cash and any options for financing and sale.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Tesla has officially launched its new 'Charge on Solar' feature to let its electric car owners charge their vehicles with sunshine. Tesla describes the feature: "With Charge on Solar, your Tesla vehicle can charge using only excess solar energy produced by your Tesla solar system. Using excess energy to charge your electric vehicle maximizes the value of your home's solar system. Use the Tesla app to set Charge on Solar limits and have your vehicle charge using extra solar energy." If you have all the required hardware and software, you can go to your Tesla app, and under "Charge on Solar," you will be able to set your charge limit using excess solar energy. Tesla writes about the charge limit: "Your vehicle will charge from solar and the grid when your current charge level is below the left sun slider. After your vehicle's charge level passes the sun slider, your vehicle automatically switches to only charge on excess solar up to your charge limit. Solar power and home loads are variables so if you ever want to charge faster, you can simply increase the lower charge limit to a desired range." There's also a scheduling feature that stops charging with solar after a specific time if you know that your energy consumption will increase at a specific time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a local report, the FBI used a Nintendo Switch to locate an abducted 15-year-old girl, who had been missing for 11 days back in August 2022. Kotaku reports: When the girl went missing on August 3, folks in Virginia put up fliers to locate her. Keitra Coleman, a volunteer with the local nonprofit Hear Their Voices (which helps find missing and exploited children, domestic violence victims, and people experiencing homelessness), told ABC15 they were on the case. [...] Unfortunately, no one was able to pinpoint her location -- until the girl booted up her Nintendo Switch to watch YouTube videos and download a game. A friend saw that she was online and informed the authorities. With Nintendo's cooperation, the FBI culled the Switch's IP address, uncovered her location, and moved in to arrest Roberts. Retired Arizona DPS Director Frank Milstead, who was not involved with the case, told ABC15 that police agencies often use digital device tracking info to apprehend suspected criminals and find missing people. "Thanks to the local police department's quick response and FBI Norfolk's ingenuity, we were able to locate the missing victim through her gaming account and reunite her with her family," an FBI representative said in a statement to Kotaku. "As the world evolves, so does the FBI and how we solve cases. This is just one example of that. And while criminals might think crossing state lines will help them get away, this case also serves as a reminder that because of the FBI's wide reach and partnership with local law enforcement -- these predators will be caught, and they will pay the consequences."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dale Vince, the green energy tycoon and founder of Ecotricity, is planning to launch Britain's first electric airline called Ecojet. The Guardian reports: Ecojet, styled as a "flag carrier for green Britain," will launch early next year with a 19-seater plane traveling on a route between Edinburgh and Southampton. The planes will run initially on kerosene-based fuel for the first year, before being retrofitted with engines that convert green hydrogen into electricity. The airline will launch with several green-striped 19-seater planes capable of traveling for 300 miles. Vince hopes to expand the number of routes out to cover all of Britain's big cities. Staff will wear environmentally friendly uniforms, and serve plant-based meals. A second phase, 18 months later, will result in 70-seater planes capable of flying to Europe being introduced. The company is in the process of applying for a license from the Civil Aviation Authority and securing takeoff and landing slots at airports. However, the process of launching an airline is regarded as slow, and Ecojet will not launch as an electric plane operator, starting by using kerosene-based fuel instead. [...] Vince said Ecojet would "price match" existing airlines on air fares and was intended to attract a mass market, beyond environment-conscious consumers. He said he would invest one million pounds initially but plans to raise further funds next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A phone-recorded video posted to Reddit shows a wooden desk strewn with various office supplies. On a monitor on the desk, a video begins to play: an Amazon delivery driver, being recorded by a driver-facing camera in their van, leans out of their window to talk to a customer. Though the video is cute, the setup is not: The camera's AI tracks their movements, surrounding them with a bright green box. Below them on the monitor's screen, a yellow line marks the length of the clip sent to the driver's dispatcher. Above them sits a timecode and a speed marker of "0 MPH." The driver opens their door, and moments later, a small French bulldog leaps into the van, tail wagging. The driver is delighted. The person behind the camera laughs a little. [...] The desk set-up looks consistent with that of an Amazon delivery service partner (DSP), the small-business contractors responsible for Amazon's door-to-door deliveries. The DSPs usually operate out of Amazon delivery warehouses, where they are given a desk like the one in the video, in a small area of the warehouse, out of which they select routes, dispatch drivers, and monitor their actions on the road with the help of the cameras. The video is one of a slew of in-van surveillance videos recently posted to Reddit, a phenomenon which hasn't frequently been seen on the site before. Over the past two weeks, many users in the Amazon delivery service partner drivers subreddit (r/AmazonDSPDrivers) have shared video footage from the cameras, either directly or by recording it on their phone from a monitor within the warehouse. It is clear that many of the videos are not being posted by the subject of the video themselves, and highlights the fact that Amazon drivers, who already have incredibly difficult jobs, are being monitored at all times. When Motherboard first wrote about the "Biometric Consent" form drivers had to sign that allows them to be monitored while on the job, Amazon insisted that the program was about safety only, and that workers shouldn't be worried about their privacy: "Don't believe the self-interested critics who claim these cameras are intended for anything other than safety," a spokesperson told us at the time. But this video, and a rash of others that have recently become public, shows that access to the camera feeds is being abused. [...] It's not clear why there has been a sudden spate of videos being posted publicly. One current Amazon delivery driver said that the drivers themselves did not have access to the videos -- only Amazon, Netradyne, and the relevant DSPs did.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Daniel Belquer, the "Chief Vibrational Officer" of Music: Not Impossible, developed a haptic suit with vibrating plates to enhance the live music experience for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. The suit, showcased at an event called "Silent Disco: An Evening of Access Magic" at Lincoln Center, provided unique textures and sensations corresponding to the music, creating an inclusive environment for all attendees, regardless of hearing ability. NPR reports: His team started by strapping vibrating cell phone motors to bodies, but that didn't quite work. The vibrations were all the same. Eventually, they worked with engineers at the electronic components company Avnet to develop a light haptic suit with a total of 24 actuators, or vibrating plates. There's 20 of them studded on a vest that fits tightly around the body like a hiking backpack, plus an actuator that straps onto each wrist and ankle. When you wear the suit, it's surprising how much texture the sensations have. It can feel like raindrops on your shoulders, a tickle across the ribs, a thump against the lower back. It doesn't replicate the music -- it's not as simple as regular taps to the beat. It plays waves of sensation on your skin in a way that's complementary to the music. A recent event at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts called "Silent Disco: An Evening of Access Magic" showcased the suit's potential. Seventy-five of them were lined up on racks at a party meant to be accessible to all. Anyone could borrow one, whether they were hearing, hard of hearing or deaf, and the line to try them out snaked around the giant disco ball that had been hung over Lincoln Center's iconic fountain. The vibrations are mixed by a haptic DJ who controls the location, frequency and intensity of feeling across the suits, just as a music DJ mixes sounds in an artful way.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite being the fastest-growing online platform in history, Meta's Threads is struggling to retain regular customer engagement. According to SimilarWeb, the Twitter rival saw daily active users decline from 49 million on July 7th to 23.6 million on July 14th. Furthermore, usage in the United States declined from 21 minutes per day to just over six minutes in the same time period. Here's are the key takeaways from the report: - On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide, according to SimilarWeb estimates. That's about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day.- By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter's audience.- Usage in the US, which saw the most activity, peaked at about 21 minutes of engagement with the app on July 7. By July 14, that was down to a little over 6 minutes.- In the first two full days that Threads was generally available, Thursday and Friday, web traffic to twitter.com was down 5% compared with the same days of the previous week. Although traffic bounced back, for the most recent 7 days of data it's still down 11% year-over-year.- On the days of peak interest in Threads, Twitter's Daily active users on Android, worldwide, were virtually unchanged, but time spent was down 4.3% -- perhaps because some users were off trying Threads. Even with that drop, however, the average total time spent on Twitter was about 25 minutes. To a large extent, Threads solves the "empty party problem" that makes it tough to start a new online community by allowing Instagram users to instantly create a Threads account, bringing their existing contacts with them. Our daily usage numbers make Meta's claim of having achieved more than 100 million total account signups in a matter of days seem reasonable. However, Threads is missing many basic features and still needs to offer a compelling reason to switch from Twitter or start a new social media habit with Threads.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, believes that for the UK to become an AI superpower, it needs to foster a culture of risk-taking and encourage large-scale investments. The BBC reports: Mustafa Suleyman added that he does not regret selling DeepMind to the US giant in 2014. "The US market is not only huge, but also more predisposed to taking big shots," he told the BBC. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wants the UK to be a global hub for AI. He has pledged 1 billion pounds in funding over the next 10 years, and founded a UK taskforce with a remit of maximising the benefits of the tech while keeping it safe. This week BBC News is focusing on AI, how the technology affects our lives and what impacts it may have in the near future. Mr Suleyman said the UK had "every chance" of becoming an AI superpower and praised its research facilities, but added there were not the same opportunities for businesses to grow as there are in the US. "I think the culture shift that it needs to make is to be more encouraging of large scale investments, more encouraging of risk taking, and more tolerant and more celebratory of failures," he said. "The truth is, the US market is not only huge, but also more predisposed to big risk taking, taking big shots and having big funding rounds." Mr Suleyman has chosen to base his new company, Inflection AI, in Palo Alto, California, which is also home to the headquarters of Google, Facebook and Tesla. Mustafa Suleyman's views represent one of the challenges facing Ian Hogarth, a British entrepreneur and investor who has been appointed to lead the UK's AI taskforce. He took up the position five weeks ago. In his first interview since getting the job, Mr Hogarth told the BBC that while the UK was a good place for start-ups, it should also be easier for them to grow. "We've had some great [tech] companies and some of them got bought early, you know - Skype got bought by eBay, DeepMind got bought by Google. I think really our ecosystem needs to rise to the next level of the challenge."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: It's not a misprint. Telecom Italia SpA, Italy's beleaguered former telephone monopoly, once pitched a plan to buy Apple. About 25 years ago a group of executives from the carrier flew to California to meet Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, with an audacious plan to buy the tech company at a time it was struggling to make headway against rivals like International Business Machines Corp. Telecom Italia, on the other hand, was flying high, ranking as the world's sixth-largest telephone company by sales. Worth about $100 billion, it had minimal debt, held stakes in dozens of tech groups around the world and employed more that 120,000 people. Although Apple's rise back from the ashes is well documented, the fate of its would-be buyer is less well known outside Italy. Today, the carrier is burdened by more than 30 billion euros in gross debt, it controls just one company outside its domestic market -- Brazil's No. 3 phone operator -- and it employs only a third as many people as it did when its executives made their pitch to Jobs. Most tellingly, Telecom Italia now finds itself in the position of needing to sell off its landline network just to get its debt pile under control. The sale would be a transformational deal and, if successful, the first such divestiture for a European carrier. In a small twist of fate, the likely buyer is a US company, though it's not a tech giant like Apple but private equity powerhouse KKR & Co. With progress being made toward a disposal of the network, Telecom Italia's one truly valuable asset, now seems as good a time as any to ask, what happened to this once-promising company? [...] Regardless of the outcome of the network battle, the carrier won't look the same after the dust has settled. "Telecom Italia's future will now be mostly linked to its capacity of being more agile and luring new customers with more profitable services," said Laura Rovizzi, chief executive at Rome-based strategy and regulation consultant Open Gate Italia. And the carrier's service unit, basically all that would remain of Telecom Italia after a network selloff, would itself probably need to weigh a transformational deal with a tech company to guarantee its competitive footprint, she added. With so many uncertainties ahead, there's probably only one safe bet for Telecom Italia. The carrier won't be trying to buy Apple again.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Norway's data protection regulator has accused Meta of violating user privacy by tracking their activities, threatening to fine the company $100,000 per day if it fails to take corrective action. "It is so clear that this is illegal that we need to intervene now and immediately," said Tobias Judin, head of Norway's privacy commission, Datatilsynet. Engadget reports: The move follows a European court ruling banning Meta from harvesting user data like location, behavior and more for advertising. Datatilsynet has referred its actions to Europe's Data Protection Board, which could widen the fine across Europe. The aim is to put "additional pressure" on Meta, Judin said. (Norway is a member of the European single market, but not technically an EU member.) Meta told Reuters that it's reviewing Datatilsynet's decision and that the decision wouldn't immediately impact its services. "We continue to constructively engage with the Irish DPC, our lead regulator in the EU, regarding our compliance with its decision," a spokesperson said. "The debate around legal bases has been ongoing for some time and businesses continue to face a lack of regulatory certainty in this area."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is preparing to launch its first M3 Apple Silicon Macs in October, according to Mark Gurman in his latest Power On newsletter for Bloomberg. 9to5Mac reports: Following the usually new iPhone launch event in September, where we are expecting the iPhone 15 and Apple Watch Series 9 and new Apple Watch Ultra, Apple is reportedly lining up new Macs for an October debut. Likely models include a new M3 iMac, M3 13-inch MacBook Air, and M3 MacBook Pro. For the M3 chip, we are expecting similar core counts to the M2 but with enhanced performance and efficiency thanks to the move to a new 3-nanometer silicon fabrication process. It may seem weird for the first M3 Macs so soon after the M2 cycle wrapped up a" with products like the M2 Ultra Mac Studio and 15-inch MacBook Air only debuting last month a" but there has been much speculation that the latter parts of the M2 lineup were delayed due to supply chain issues. And while an M3 MacBook Air may be ready to go in October, M3 updates for products like MacBook Pro and Mac Studio are further out. Gurman does not specifically say Apple will hold an October event, or whether new Macs would arrive via press release. The decision on whether to hold a formal event has probably not yet been finalized, but you can imagine Apple would want to hold an event for a significant new Mac launch.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: JumpCloud, a cloud-based IT management service that lists Cars.com, GoFundMe, and Foursquare among its 5,000 paying customers, experienced a security breach carried out by hackers working for a nation-state, the company said last week. The attack began on June 22 as a spear-phishing campaign, the company revealed last Wednesday. As part of that incident, JumpCloud said, the "sophisticated nation-state sponsored threat actor" gained access to an unspecified part of the JumpCloud internal network. Although investigators at the time found no evidence any customers were affected, the company said it rotated account credentials, rebuilt its systems, and took other defensive measures. On July 5, investigators discovered the breach involved "unusual activity in the commands framework for a small set of customers." In response, the company's security team performed a forced-rotation of all admin API keys and notified affected customers. As investigators continued their analysis, they found that the breach also involved a "data injection into the commands framework," which the disclosure described as the "attack vector." The disclosure didn't explain the connection between the data injection and the access gained by the spear-phishing attack on June 22. Ars asked JumpCloud PR for details, and employees responded by sending the same disclosure post that omits such details. Investigators also found that the attack was extremely targeted and limited to specific customers, which the company didn't name. JumpCloud says on its website that it has a global user base of more than 200,000 organizations, with more than 5,000 paying customers. They include Cars.com, GoFundMe, Grab, ClassPass, Uplight, Beyond Finance, and Foursquare. JumpCloud has raised over $400 million from investors, including Sapphire Ventures, General Atlantic, Sands Capital, Atlassian, and CrowdStrike. The company has also published a list of IP addresses, domain names, and cryptographic hashes used by the attacker that other organizations can use to indicate if they were targeted by the same attackers. JumpCloud has yet to name the country of origin or other details about the threat group responsible.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK government's plan to cope with the climate crisis has been condemned as "very weak" by experts, who say not enough is being done to protect lives and livelihoods. From a report: Responding to the document, which was leaked to the Guardian, one highlighted its failure to adequately protect people in the UK from extreme heat. The heatwave in 2022, when temperatures surpassed 40C for the first time, led to the early deaths of more than 3,000 people, wildfires, buckled rail lines and farmers struggling with drought. Southern Europe is in the grip of a searing heatwave. Another expert said there was a "yawning gap" in measures to restore nature, which is a vital part of adapting to climate change. The National Adaptation Programme is expected to be published on Tuesday by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which is required by law to produce a plan every five years. In March, the government's official advisers, the Climate Change Committee, said its publication would be a "make-or-break moment." Ministers have been criticised for years over the failure to make adequate plans for the impacts of global heating. The CCC said in March that the UK was "strikingly unprepared" and that there had been a "lost decade" in action on adaptation. It said heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms would intensify in the coming years until carbon emissions reached net zero.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As unprecedented weather leads to increasing climate anxiety, there's a raft of different apps catering for every kind of forecast. From a report: Preoccupation with weather apps is commonplace in our current unsettled atmosphere. On social media there is almost as much chat about weather apps as there is about the weather: much of it is ire about inaccurate forecasts; some of it is from users who admit checking weather apps more than seems logical. There is still palpable grief, in the wake of the closure of the short-term weather prediction app Dark Sky, late last year, after its acquisition by Apple. In April, when Apple's weather app went down, there was such outrage that the temporary glitch became an international news story. Fifty per cent of US smartphone users regularly use weather apps; according to Statista, weather apps will make approximately $1.5bn in revenue in 2023, a leap from $530m in 2017. Jeremiah Lasquety-Reyes, a senior analyst for Statista, says this new weather app ecosystem is only going to grow, owing to the climate crisis, as well as a general trend towards "digitizing one's life and schedule." There are certainly plenty out there, catering to a variety of needs: more than 10,000 apps have the word "weather" in the title in Android and iPhone app stores.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eGenesis has started transplanting gene-edited pigs' hearts into infant baboons -- and humans may be next. From a report: The baby baboon is wearing a mesh gown and appears to be sitting upright. "This little lady ... looks pretty philosophical, I would say," says Eli Katz, who is showing me the image over a Zoom call. This baboon is the first to receive a heart transplant from a young gene-edited pig as part of a study that should pave the way for similar transplants in human babies, says Katz, chief medical officer at the biotech company eGenesis. The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has developed a technique that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to make around 70 edits to a pig's genome. These edits should allow the organs to be successfully transplanted into people, the team says. As soon as next year, eGenesis hopes to transplant pig hearts into babies with serious heart defects. The goal is to buy them more time to wait for a human heart. Before that happens, the team at eGenesis will practice on 12 infant baboons. Two such surgeries have been performed so far. Neither animal survived beyond a matter of days. But the company is optimistic, as are others in the field. Many recipients of the first liver transplants didn't survive either -- but thousands of people have since benefited from such transplants, says Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, who has worked with rival company United Therapeutics. Babies born with heart conditions represent "a great population to be focusing on," he says, "because so many of them die." Over 100,000 people in the US alone are waiting for an organ transplant. Every day, around 17 of them die. Researchers are exploring multiple options, including the possibility of bioprinting organs or growing new ones inside people's bodies. Transplanting animal organs is another potential alternative to help meet the need.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wix, a longtime fixture of the web building space, is betting that today's customers don't particularly care to spend time customizing every aspect of their site's appearance. TechCrunch: The company's new AI Site Generator tool, announced today, will let Wix users describe their intent and generate a website complete with a homepage, inner pages and text and images -- as well as business-specific sections for events, bookings and more. Avishai Abrahami, Wix's co-founder and CEO, says that the goal was to provide customers with "real value" as they build their sites and grow their businesses. [...] AI Site Generator takes several prompts -- any descriptions of sites -- and uses a combination of in-house and third-party AI systems to create the envisioned site. In a chatbot-like interface, the tool asks a series of questions about the nature of the site and business, attempting to translate this into a custom web template. ChatGPT generates the text for the website while Wix's AI creates the site design and images.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bill requiring social media companies, encrypted communications providers and other online services to report drug activity on their platforms to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) advanced to the Senate floor Thursday, alarming privacy advocates who say the legislation turns the companies into de facto drug enforcement agents and exposes many of them to liability for providing end-to-end encryption. From a report: The bipartisan Cooper Davis Act -- named for a Kansas teenager who died after unknowingly taking a fentanyl-laced pill he bought on Snapchat -- requires social media companies and other web communication providers to give the DEA users' names and other information when the companies have "actual knowledge" that illicit drugs are being distributed on their platforms. Many privacy advocates caution that, if passed in its current form, the bill could be a death blow to end-to-end encryption services because it includes particularly controversial language holding companies accountable for conduct they don't report if they "deliberately blind" themselves to the violations. Officials from the DEA have spent several months honing the bill with key senators, Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) said Thursday. Providers of encrypted services would face a difficult choice should the bill pass, said Greg Nojeim, Senior Counsel & Director of Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "They could maintain end-to-end encryption and risk liability that they had willfully blinded themselves to illegal content on their service and face the music later," Nojeim said. "Or they could opt to remove end-to-end encryption and subject all of their users who used to be protected by one of the best cybersecurity tools available to new threats and new privacy violations."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US aviation regulators are turning to a small Swiss technology startup to rethink how helicopter pilots are trained. From a report: The Federal Aviation Administration will evaluate virtual reality technology in flight simulators for the first time, taking delivery of systems from Zurich-based Loft Dynamics, the company said Monday. The technology combines VR headsets with a frame replicating the control panel and cockpit of a helicopter, but at a scale significantly smaller than traditional full-motion setups. Two simulators -- one to train pilots on Airbus SE's H125 helicopter and another for the Robinson R22 -- have been installed at the FAA's R&D facility in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The FAA often explores the use of new technologies in aviation and has extensive development programs, many of which don't result in commercial deployments. While this is the first time the regulator will review VR headsets as a training tool, it's for the narrow helicopter market and wouldn't apply to commercial planes. Additionally, the agreement with Loft Dynamics does not equate to certification of its tech in the US.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thousands of writers including Nora Roberts, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Michael Chabon and Margaret Atwood have signed a letter asking artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI and Meta to stop using their work without permission or compensation. From a report: It's the latest in a volley of counter-offensives the literary world has launched in recent weeks against AI. But protecting writers from the negative impacts of these technologies is not an easy proposition. According to a forthcoming report from The Authors Guild, the median income for a full-time writer last year was $23,000. And writers' incomes declined by 42% between 2009 and 2019. The advent of text-based generative AI applications like GPT-4 and Bard, that scrape the Web for authors' content without permission or compensation and then use it to produce new content in response to users' prompts, is giving writers across the country even more cause for worry. "There's no urgent need for AI to write a novel," said Alexander Chee, the bestselling author of novels like Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night. "The only people who might need that are the people who object to paying writers what they're worth." Chee is among the nearly 8,000 authors who just signed a letter addressed to the leaders of six AI companies including OpenAI, Alphabet and Meta. "It says it's not fair to use our stuff in your AI without permission or payment," said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of The Author's Guild. The non-profit writers' advocacy organization created the letter, and sent it out to the AI companies on Monday. "So please start compensating us and talking to us."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A year ago, we compiled a model list of Macs spanning over two decades, complete with their launch dates, discontinuation dates, and all the available information about the macOS updates each model received. We were trying to answer two questions: How long can Mac owners reasonably expect to receive software updates when they buy a new computer? And were Intel Macs being dropped more aggressively now that the Apple Silicon transition was in full swing? The answer to the second question was a tentative "yes," and now that we know the official support list for macOS Sonoma, the trendline is clear. Macs introduced between 2009 and 2015 could expect to receive seven or eight years of macOS updates -- that is, new major versions with new features, like Ventura or Sonoma -- plus another two years of security-only updates that fix vulnerabilities and keep Safari up to date. Macs released in 2016 and 2017 are only receiving about six years' worth of macOS updates, plus another two years of security updates. That's about a two-year drop, compared to most Macs released between 2009 and 2013. The last of the Intel Macs are still on track to be supported for longer than the last PowerPC Macs were in the mid-to-late 2000s, but they're getting fewer years of software update support than any other Macs released in the last 15 years.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Everyone seems to be buying a mechanical keyboard company these days. Corsair has one-upped them all by buying its own mechanical keyboard company. From a report: The Fremont, California-based peripheral maker today announced that it's acquiring "certain assets" from Drop for an undisclosed, all-cash deal. "Drop has been acquired by Corsair," Drop CEO Jef Holove wrote in a blog post confirming the news. "I am sure front-of-mind for you is what this will mean for Drop and our focus on our discerning, engaged enthusiast community -- especially at a time when we've been watching other players in the community struggle or outright fold. Obviously, we are convinced this move is good for us, for you and for the hobby, and I'll give you a sense of why here." The executive called the Portland-based company "small but mighty," relative to a product portfolio that includes several keyboards, keycaps and audio accessories. Mechanical keyboards are the company's bread and butter, and it makes fine hardware. I've been using the Drop Shift keyboard now for several months. The firm is also notable for high-profile branding exercises that include keycaps featuring Lord of the Rings and Marvel IP.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disney CEO Bob Iger is citing the studio's output increase for Disney+ as one reason for "some disappointments" as of late. From a report: Speaking to CNBC's David Faber at the Sun Valley Conference, Iger admitted the studio screwed with audience expectations by offering up so much streaming content. The negative impact of that has been commercial disappointments in theaters, be it "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" not even reaching $500 million worldwide or disappointing openings for summer tentpoles "Elemental" and "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny." "There have been some disappointments. We would have liked some of our more recent releases to perform better," Iger said. "It's reflective not as a problem from a personnel perspective, but I think in our zeal to basically grow our content significantly to serve mostly our streaming offerings, we ended up taxing our people way beyond -- in terms of their time and their focus -- way beyond where they had been. Marvel's a great example of that. They had not been in the TV business at any significant level. Not only did they increase their movie output, but they ended up making a number of television series, and frankly, it diluted focus and attention. That is, I think, more of the cause than anything."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Passengers have flooded the FAA with complaints about narrow seats and scant legroom. From a report: Passengers have been sounding off for years about airline seating -- no legroom, thin cushions, too narrow. Now politicians are listening. A bill introduced in Congress last month to update aircraft evacuation standards would compel federal regulators to study seat sizes and spacing. Tito Echeverria, who used to travel frequently as a plant manager for a manufacturing company, has had too many awkward interactions with other squished travelers. "You end up having to consistently rub legs with someone, even though you're not really trying to," said Echeverria, 32, from Ontario, Calif. "You're just freaking there next to them." U.S. regulations cover aisle width and the number of seats allowed on planes, but not minimum seat sizes. The Federal Aviation Administration has said in court it isn't required to set seat standards unless it finds they are necessary to protect passenger safety. In late 2019 and early 2020, it simulated emergency evacuations and found seat size and spacing didn't adversely affect the process. Last year, the FAA sought public feedback on whether seat sizes posed safety issues, and it got an earful. More than 26,000 public comments poured in over a three-month stretch. "Airplane seat sizes are appalling," one commenter wrote. "They are built for people from the '40s and '50s. They cannot remotely accommodate a person over 6 feet or 200 pounds. It's literally painful to fly today."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Millions of US military emails have been misdirected to Mali through a "typo leak" that has exposed highly sensitive information, including diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers. Financial Times: Despite repeated warnings over a decade, a steady flow of email traffic continues to the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali, as a result of people mistyping .MIL, the suffix to all US military email addresses. The problem was first identified almost a decade ago by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch internet entrepreneur who has a contract to manage Mali's country domain. Zuurbier has been collecting misdirected emails since January in an effort to persuade the US to take the issue seriously. He holds close to 117,000 misdirected messages -- almost 1,000 arrived on Wednesday alone. In a letter he sent to the US in early July, Zuurbier wrote: "This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Stability AI, the startup behind the image-generating model Stable Diffusion, is launching a new service that turns sketches into images," reports TechCrunch. Stable Doodle is online now and "free, but subject to limits," according to TechCrunch's article. And their reporter adds that the example images selected by the company to showcase their new technology "looked quite good, at least in comparison to the doodle that inspired them.""Stable Doodle is geared toward both professionals and novices, regardless of their familiarity with AI tools," Stability AI writes in a blog post shared with TechCrunch via email. "With Stable Doodle, anyone with basic drawing skills and online access can generate high-quality original images in seconds..." In addition to a sketch, Stable Doodle accepts a prompt to guide the image generation process, such as "A comfy chair, 'isometric' style" or "Cat with a jeans jacket, 'digital art' style." There's a limit to the customization, though - at launch, Stable Doodle only supports 14 styles of art. Stability AI envisions Stable Doodle serving as a tool for designers, illustrators and other professionals to "free up valuable time" and "maximize efficiency" in their work. At the same time, the company cautions that the quality of output images is dependent on the detail of the initial drawing and the descriptiveness of the prompt, as well as the complexity of the scene being depicted. "Ideas drawn as sketches can be immediately implemented into works to create designs for clients, material for presentation decks and websites or even create logos," the company proposes.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Register shares its collection of "signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux."- The team developing Linux for Apple Silicon Macs said they didn't have the manpower to work on X.org support. - A year ago, the developers of the Gtk toolkit used by many Linux apps and desktops said that the next version may drop support for X11... - One of the developers of the Budgie desktop, Campbell Jones, recently published a blog post with a wildly controversial title that made The Reg FOSS desk smile: "Wayland is pretty good, actually." He lays out various benefits that Wayland brings to developers, and concludes: "Primarily, what I've learned is that Wayland is actually really well-designed. The writing is on the wall for X, and Wayland really is the future." Partly as a result of this, it looks likely that the next version of the Budgie desktop, Budgie 11, will only support Wayland, completely dropping support for X11. The team point out that this is not such a radical proposition: there was a proposal to make KDE 6 sessions default to Wayland as long ago as last October... - The GNOME spin of Fedora has defaulted to Wayland since version 25 in 2017, and the GNOME flavor of Ubuntu since 21.04. - [T]here's now an experimental effort to get Wayland working on OpenBSD. The effort happened at the recent OpenBSD hackathon in Tallinn, Estonia, and the developer's comments are encouraging. It's already available as part of FreeBSD.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Logan Parson's first flight by himself ended with airport officials taking the teenager into custody and whisking him away into an interrogation room," reports the Independent. The teen was "denied boarding to an American Airlines flight," reports the Washington Post. "He hadn't committed a crime, nor was he accused of being unruly. "His offense? Attempting to make use of a money-saving hack that gutsy fliers use every year." Direct flights to major cities are so expensive, it can actually be cheaper to book a flight with stops in two cities - and then skip the flight to that second city. The Post points out that while passengers can save money with this so-called "hidden-city ticket" trick - or skiplagging - "most carriers regard it as a form of fraud." From North Carolina TV station WJZY:In a statement to WJZY, American Airlines said, "Purchasing a ticket without intending to fly all flights to gain lower fares (hidden city ticketing) is a violation of American Airlines terms and conditions and is outlined in our Conditions of Carriage online...." Other major airlines, like Delta and United, also prohibit hidden city ticketing. Even [skip-lagging resource] Skip Lagged warns there may be consequences of hidden city ticketing, like your checked luggage moving on to the final destination instead of where you stop or losing frequent flyer miles you've accrued. The Arizona Republic adds:According to American and Southwest's contracts of carriage, they can cancel any unused part of a ticket, refuse to let the passenger and their bags fly, not issue a refund and charge the customer for what the ticket would have cost for the full route. Airlines may ban a passenger from flying with them in the future. Some airlines have challenged the practice in court but without success. In November 2014, United Airlines sued Skiplagged.com and its founder in court, claiming trademark infringement, according to court documents. A judge dismissed the suit the following year. The Washington Post shares another warning:Chris Dong, a Los Angeles-based travel writer and points expert who used to skiplag, says you especially can't do this on a round-trip flight. "Airlines will cancel your return flight if you're a 'no show' for any segment of a booked itinerary," Dong said in an email. While the teen's father told WJZY that his son was "interrogated a little bit" before being "taken to a security room," American Airline says their records don't show that the teen was taken to a security room. Instead, they've told the Post that "Our records indicate the customer was questioned only at the ticket counter about their travel, while attempting to check-in for their flight."The fact that the teen was denied boarding underscores how serious airlines take skiplagging. It makes sense, since the practice saps revenue from them on two fronts: Not only do passengers underpay - potentially by hundreds of dollars per ticket - but the seat on the tossed leg could have been sold to someone else. Most contracts of carriage from major airlines expressly forbid skiplagging as a result. The Post also got this quote from Clint Henderson, an industry expert and managing editor for the Points Guy. "The airlines are getting increasingly sophisticated and smart about it. I expect that will get even more prevalent as technology improves further."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Verge reports that Sony "has agreed to a 10-year deal for Call of Duty with Microsoft to keep the franchise on PlayStation after the proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition."Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer says Sony and Microsoft have agreed to a "binding agreement" to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. This ends a bitter battle between the companies that has been waged both privately and publicly over the past year after Microsoft announced its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard in January 2022... Kari Perez, head of global communications at Xbox, confirmed the 10-year commitment to The Verge. Perez later confirmed to The Verge that the deal is only for Call of Duty, though. That makes the deal similar to a 10-year agreement between Microsoft and Nintendo, but not the various deals Microsoft has struck with Nvidia and other cloud gaming platforms to bring Call of Duty and other Xbox / Activision games to rival services... Microsoft has always maintained it would keep Call of Duty on PlayStation, arguing it doesn't make financial sense to pull the game from Sony's consoles. Xbox chief Spencer tried to settle the argument in November before appearing in court last month and reiterating, under oath, that Call of Duty would remain on PlayStation 5. All eyes are now on the regulatory situation in the UK, after Microsoft's proposed deal was blocked there earlier this year. The Financial Times writes that the Sony-Microsoft agreement "signalled a truce between the two gaming giants after a bruising 18-month battle that had seen the Japanese company become the biggest opponent to the acquisition. It follows regulatory breakthroughs for Microsoft on both sides of the Atlantic last week that have left it on brink of clinching victory for a deal that is expected to reshape the gaming industry." The Verge also shares this interesting detail:Tensions over the fate of Microsoft's Activision Blizzard deal really came to a head when [Sony's] Jim Ryan spoke to Activision CEO Bobby Kotick on February 21st, 2023 - the same day Microsoft, Activision, Sony, and others were meeting with EU regulators. Ryan said to Kotick, "I don't want a new Call of Duty deal. I just want to block your merger." Jim Ryan confirmed the meeting during testimony in the FTC v. Microsoft hearing. "I told him [Bobby Kotick] that I thought the transaction was anti-competitive, I hoped that the regulators would do their job and block it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's how long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam summarizes a radically new tiny-but-powerful "opposed-piston engine" created by INNengine of Granada, Spain. "500cc, 120 horsepower, under 40 kilograms (85 pounds). No cylinder head in the motor, no camshaft, no crankshaft, no valves, and no oil mixed in with the fuel." The company calls it "a single-stroke combustion cycle," though the engine itself still has a compression stroke and an exhaust stroke, reports The Drive:Despite having four cylinder banks, the INNengine (depending on its configuration) actually has eight pistons. This is because the engine is an opposed-piston motor, meaning that each piston's compression stroke is performed against a second piston placed in the same cylinder bank rather than a static cylinder head. It still only has four combustion chambers, though, which means it sounds similar to a four-cylinder engine... The mechanical configuration also allows for better engine balance. That means typical drawbacks of an internal combustion motor (often referred to as noise, vibration, and harshness) are minimalized. Once combustion happens, the piston is pushed back against the plate and forces the plate to rotate. This motion is synced between each half of the motor via a shared shaft - meaning, no extra timing components... Is it likely that we'll see INNengine's combustion tech powering the wheels of a car? Probably not, at least not directly hooked up to a gearbox. The Mazda featured in INNengine's demo video was a great concept, but the company seems to be instead targeting the EV market as a range extender, especially since that's the way the industry is ultimately headed. If the tech had debuted a few decades ago or more, perhaps there would have been a chance of adoption in the main market (cue Felix Wankel's notorious rotary). But messing with perfection in this day and age, especially as combustion tech could be on the way out, seems a bit unlikely to take off. That's why a range extender would appear to be the most logical path forward for this tech, especially if we want more lightweight, cost-effective EVs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week Bill Gates said "there are more reasons than not to be optimistic that we can manage the risks of AI while maximizing their benefits."One thing that's clear from everything that has been written so far about the risks of AI - and a lot has been written - is that no one has all the answers. Another thing that's clear to me is that the future of AI is not as grim as some people think or as rosy as others think. The risks are real, but I am optimistic that they can be managed. As I go through each concern, I'll return to a few themes: - Many of the problems caused by AI have a historical precedent. For example, it will have a big impact on education, but so did handheld calculators a few decades ago and, more recently, allowing computers in the classroom. We can learn from what's worked in the past. - Many of the problems caused by AI can also be managed with the help of AI. - We'll need to adapt old laws and adopt new ones - just as existing laws against fraud had to be tailored to the online world. Later Gates adds that "we need to move fast. Governments need to build up expertise in artificial intelligence so they can make informed laws and regulations that respond to this new technology." But Gates acknowledged and then addressed several specific threats:He thinks AI can be taught to recognize its own hallucinations. "OpenAI, for example, is doing promising work on this front.Gates also believes AI tools can be used to plug AI-identified security holes and other vulnerabilities - and does not see an international AI arms race. "Although the world's nuclear nonproliferation regime has its faults, it has prevented the all-out nuclear war that my generation was so afraid of when we were growing up. Governments should consider creating a global body for AI similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency."He's "guardedly optimistic" about the dangers of deep fakes because "people are capable of learning not to take everything at face value" - and the possibility that AI "can help identify deepfakes as well as create them. Intel, for example, has developed a deepfake detector, and the government agency DARPA is working on technology to identify whether video or audio has been manipulated.""It is true that some workers will need support and retraining as we make this transition into an AI-powered workplace. That's a role for governments and businesses, and they'll need to manage it well so that workers aren't left behind - to avoid the kind of disruption in people's lives that has happened during the decline of manufacturing jobs in the United States."Gates ends with this final thought: "I encourage everyone to follow developments in AI as much as possible. It's the most transformative innovation any of us will see in our lifetimes, and a healthy public debate will depend on everyone being knowledgeable about the technology, its benefits, and its risks. "The benefits will be massive, and the best reason to believe that we can manage the risks is that we have done it before."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered yet another astounding discovery," reports CNN, "spying an active supermassive black hole deeper into the universe than has ever been recorded."The black hole lies within CEERS 1019 - an extremely old galaxy likely formed 570 million years after the big bang - making it more than 13 billion years old. And scientists were perplexed to find just how small the celestial object's central black hole measures. "This black hole clocks in at about 9 million solar masses," according to a NASA news release. A solar mass is a unit equivalent to the mass of the sun in our home solar system - which is about 333,000 times larger than the Earth. That's "far less than other black holes that also existed in the early universe and were detected by other telescopes," according to NASA. "Those behemoths typically contain more than 1 billion times the mass of the Sun - and they are easier to detect because they are much brighter." The ability to bring such a dim, distant black hole into focus is a key feature of the Webb telescope, which uses highly sensitive instruments to detect otherwise invisible light... The relative smallness of the black hole at CEER 1019's center is a mystery for scientists. It's not yet clear how such a small black hole formed in the early days of the universe, which was known to produce much larger gravity wells. NASA's announcement emphasized the power of the James Webb Space Telescope. "Not only could the team untangle which emissions in the spectrum are from the black hole and which are from its host galaxy, they could also pinpoint how much gas the black hole is ingesting and determine its galaxy's star-formation rate." The survey also recorded evidence of eleven new galaxies - which are still "churning out new stars," according to NASA. A member of the team says these new galaxies, "along with other distant galaxies we may identify in the future, might change our understanding of star formation and galaxy evolution throughout cosmic history."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The University of Southampton has an announcement. Slashdot reader pyroclast shared this report from ScienceDaily:Today an international team of researchers has chosen the location which best represents the beginnings of what could be a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Working Group have put forward Crawford Lake, in Canada, as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) for the Anthropocene. A GSSP is an internationally agreed-upon reference point to show the start of a new geological period or epoch in layers of rock that have built up through the ages. It's been proposed by some geologists that we are now living in the Anthropocene - a new geological epoch in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the world's climate and environment. The concept has significant implications for how we consider our impact on the planet. But there is disagreement in the scientific community about when the Anthropocene began, how it is evidenced and whether human influence has been substantial enough to constitute a new geological age, which usually span millions of years. To help answer these questions, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) set up the Anthropocene Working Group. "The sediments found at the bottom of Crawford Lake provide an exquisite record of recent environmental change over the last millennia," says Dr Simon Turner, Secretary of the Anthropocene Working Group from UCL. "Seasonal changes in water chemistry and ecology have created annual layers that can be sampled for multiple markers of historical human activity. It is this ability to precisely record and store this information as a geological archive that can be matched to historical global environmental changes which make sites such as Crawford Lake so important...." Professor Andrew Cundy, Chair in Environmental Radiochemistry at the University of Southampton and member of the Anthropocene Working Group, explains: "The presence of plutonium gives us a stark indicator of when humanity became such a dominant force that it could leave a unique global 'fingerprint' on our planet. In nature, plutonium is only present in trace amounts. But in the early-1950s, when the first hydrogen bomb tests took place, we see an unprecedented increase and then spike in the levels of plutonium in core samples from around the world. We then see a decline in plutonium from the mid-1960s onwards when the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty came into effect." Other geological indicators of human activity include high levels of ash from coal-fired power stations, high concentrations of heavy metals, such as lead, and the presence of plastic fibres and fragments. These coincide with 'The Great Acceleration' - a dramatic surge across a range of human activity, from transportation to energy use, starting in the mid-20th century and continuing today. "Evidence from the sites will now be presented to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which will decide next year whether to ratify the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's an ongoing study (started in 2004) that examines the effects of alcohol (and other common substances) on mood, performance, and behavior. Started by Dr. Andrea King, a professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago, its latest result is a study called "Holding your liquor: Comparison of alcohol-induced psychomotor impairment in drinkers with and without alcohol use disorder."They found that drinkers with alcohol use disorder (or AUD, traditionally known as alcoholism) displayed less impairment on fine motor and cognitive tasks than light or heavy social drinkers after consuming a standard intoxicating dose - equivalent to four to five drinks that produce breathalyzer readings of 0.08-0.09%, i.e., the threshold for drunk driving." Yet when those drinkers with AUD consumed a higher amount akin to their usual drinking habits - equivalent to seven to eight drinks and breathalyzer readings of 0.13% - they showed significant impairment on those same tasks, more than double their impairment at the standard intoxicating dose that did not return to baseline performance three hours after drinking. "There's a lot of thinking that when experienced drinkers (those with AUD) consume alcohol, they are tolerant to its impairing effects," said Andrea King, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at UChicago and senior author of the study. "We supported that a bit, but with a lot of nuances. When they drank alcohol in our study at a dose similar to their usual drinking pattern, we saw significant impairments on both the fine motor and cognitive tests that was even more impairment than a light drinker gets at the intoxicating dose..." While they did show less overall alcohol impairment on the motor and cognitive tests, at the 30-minute interval they had similar slowing on the fine motor test as the light drinkers. They also recovered quicker to their baseline levels, supporting the notion that they had more tolerance and can "hold their liquor" better than people who don't drink as much. However, people with AUD do not often stop drinking at four or five drinks and engage in high intensity drinking. Thus, a subset of the drinkers with AUD in the study participated in a separate session where they drank a beverage more consistent with their regular drinking habits, equivalent to about seven or eight drinks. At this higher dose of alcohol, they showed more than double the amount of mental and motor impairment than after they had the standard intoxicating dose. They also never got back to their baseline level of performance, even after three hours. Their level of impairment even exceeded that of the light drinkers who consumed the standard dose, suggesting that the physical effects of the alcohol add up the more someone drinks, experienced or not. "I was surprised at how much impairment that group had to that larger dose, because while it's 50% more than the first dose, we're seeing more than double the impairment," King said. More than 140,000 people die from excessive alcohol use in the U.S. each year, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - and 30% of traffic fatalities still involve alcohol intoxication. "I'm hoping we can educate people who are experienced high-intensity drinkers who think that they're holding their liquor or that they're tolerant and won't experience accidents or injury from drinking," said Dr. King. "Their experience with alcohol only goes so far, and excessive drinkers account for most of the burden of alcohol-related accidents and injury in society. This is preventable with education and treatment." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader WankerWeasel for sharing the article.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader quonset shared this report from CNN:Forty years ago this summer, a new movie floated the prospect of the world being destroyed by artificial intelligence run amok - anticipating current anxieties about where the technology could potential lead - a year before the "Terminator" introduced the futuristic threat known as Skynet. At the time, "WarGames" spoke to another issue very much on the minds of movie-goers: The danger of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, years before the Berlin Wall and Soviet regime fell... Yet a recent re-viewing of the movie... makes its spin on AI seem even more pointed and timely - the idea that in seeking an emotionally detached, people-free solution to a problem, we might sow the seeds for our own destruction... The AI, in this case, is more sensible than its creators, as opposed to the more malevolent force featured in the new "Mission: Impossible" sequel. Yet the apprehension that has entered the chat - as underscored by recent congressional hearings regarding the perils associated with the technology - is that future iterations of AI won't be so benevolent, and might actually be smarter than the resourceful teenagers that we can deploy to thwart them... As Ryan Britt wrote recently at Inverse.com, what really makes "WarGames" scary isn't that the computer is evil, but rather its potentially dire inability to recognize nuance the way a human can. "In 'WarGames,' the computer doesn't understand the difference between a game and real life," Britt noted. CNN says the movie deals with questions that have "simply continued to evolve" as "reality has caught up with science fiction."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post begins a recent article with the story of an 18-year-old drug dealer with mental health issues named Zachary Burkard, who shot two unarmed 17-year-olds with a "ghost gun" he built from a kit bought online. The father of one of those 17-year-olds thinks "They've just made it entirely too easy to get these guns... A child can buy one. There's no background checks. You don't even need a bank account. You can go to 7-Eleven and get a debit card, put money on it and buy a gun."The families of the two teens, with the help of the anti-gun-violence group Everytown for Gun Safety, are now suing the distributor of the parts Burkard used to make his ghost gun, 80P Builder of Florida, and the manufacturer, Polymer80 of Nevada, for gross negligence in providing a teenager with a weapon when he was not legally able to buy a handgun from a federally licensed dealer. The case, those who track the weapons say, demonstrates a frightening phenomenon... Teenagers have discovered the ease with which they can acquire the parts for a ghost gun, and they have been buying, building and shooting the homemade guns with alarming frequency. Everytown for Gun Safety compiled a list of more than 50 incidents involving teens and ghost guns since 2019. Among them: - In Brooklyn Park, Minn., police arrested two teens with ghost guns in December after authorities said one of them attempted to shoot someone outside their car but instead killed their friend inside it.- In New Rochelle, N.Y., a 16-year-old created a "ghost gun factory" in his bedroom last year, police said, before killing another 16-year-old... The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) estimated that Polymer80 was responsible for more than 88 percent of the ghost guns recovered by police between 2017 and 2021, though there are nearly 100 manufacturers selling parts, or full kits, which can be made into unserialized guns, a list compiled by Everytown shows. Teens are hardly the only users. Last year, police departments seized at least 25,785 ghost guns nationwide, the Justice Department said recently, and those are just the weapons submitted by police to ATF for tracing, even though they don't have serial numbers and largely cannot be traced. In 2021, the number of guns recovered was 19,344, meaning seizures rose 33 percent the following year. ATF has linked ghost guns to 692 homicides and nonfatal shootings through 2021, including mass killings and school shootings... [This May] in Baltimore, authorities arrested three 14-year-olds after armed robberies and an armed carjacking. Police said one of them had a ghost gun. And in Valdosta, Ga., authorities said, a 16-year-old bought a ghost gun kit online in 2021 and assembled her own Glock-style pistol. One day while some friends were at her house, the teen accidentally shot a 14-year-old in the head, leaving him partially paralyzed, with severe brain damage and permanent physical and cognitive issues, his family's lawyer Melvin Hewitt said. While some states have passed regulations, last year America's national firearm-regulating agency also declared parts of ghost guns to be firearms, according to the article, in an attempt to close a commonly-cited loophole. The parts makers challenged the new rule in court, lost twice, then won in a conservative federal court in Texas. The U.S. Justice Department may now appeal that decision to the higher Fifth Circuit court, and if it loses there "could appeal to the Supreme Court."Dudley Brown, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, said he is against all regulation of privately made firearms, calling the practice of building weapons a "long and storied tradition in America."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear quotes the South China Morning Post:After a 13-year legal tussle, semiconductor equipment giant Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment of China (AMEC) has won an intellectual property infringement case against US competitor Lam Research Corp in a Shanghai court, as US-China technology rivalry in the semiconductor field rages on. The Shanghai People's High Court gave a final ruling requiring Lam Research to destroy "one technical document and two photographs" relating to an AMEC plasma etching machine that Lam illegally obtained, according to a statement by AMEC on Tuesday. The court has also banned two individual defendants from Lam from using AMEC's proprietary trade secrets. The court ordered Lam Research to pay damages and legal fees to AMEC for the infringement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new article in Game Rant points out that the 2013 game Grand Theft Auto V was "the most successful piece of fictional media ever made, amassing almost 8 billion dollars." So with a sequel planned, it was a big deal when 50 minutes of authentic pre-release footage was leaked by a U.K. teenager. Game Rant reports that the trial of that teenager has begun. But a group of psychiatrists has just declared that the teenager "is unable to stand trial, so instead, the jury will decide if he committed these alleged crimes instead of delivering a verdict based on his guilt."18-year-old Arion Kurtaj, a member of the hacker group named Lapsus$, attempted to blackmail Rockstar Games by releasing the Grand Theft Auto 6 source code online. Kurtaj has a history of hacking into giant companies, like when he caused nearly three million dollars of damage to Uber by releasing private information... This story almost feels like a side mission in Grand Theft Auto 6, but it's all true. Kurtaj also had an unnamed partner in crime who demanded a four million dollar ransom from EE, a British mobile company. The two hackers were known as "key players" in Lapsus$. Lapsus$ has members all over the world and is suspected to be highly organized. The group has attacked companies as big as Samsung, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Ubisoft. Kurtaj has been charged with three counts of blackmail, as well as nine other offenses, including fraud.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader caseih writes: A thoughtful post on the Adafruit Blog chronicles the problems facing open-source hardware companies, and how more and more companies, including Sparkfun, Arduino and Prusa, are becoming more and more proprietary. In Arduino's case, they are deliberately trying to stamp out the clones undercutting them. The new Arduino Pro is not open source in any way, and the web site has now removed references to being an open source company. As always there are subtleties and nuances. In the case of Prusa, not only are Chinese companies taking Prusa designs and source to make proprietary, closed-source products, they are also actively patenting designs and algorithms they've taken from open source. The original submission ends with a question. "With Red Hat recently taking a step towards becoming a proprietary software company (which happens to use and work on open source projects) and now these reports, what are Slashdotters' thoughts on the future? "Are truly open source companies doomed to failure, especially when overseas companies do not respect or even understand the principles of open source development?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wikipedia notes that "Today, the Moon has no active volcanoes even though a significant amount of magma may persist under the lunar surface." But this week the New York Times reports that "The rocks beneath an ancient volcano on the moon's far side remain surprisingly warm, scientists have revealed using data from orbiting Chinese spacecraft."The findings, which appeared last week in the journal Nature, help explain what happened long ago beneath an odd part of the moon. The study also highlights the scientific potential of data gathered by China's space program, and how researchers in the United States have to circumvent obstacles to use that data... The Chinese orbiters both had microwave instruments, common on many Earth-orbiting weather satellites but rare on interplanetary spacecraft. The data from Chang'e-1 and Chang'e-2 thus provided a different view of the moon, measuring the flow of heat up to 15 feet below the surface - and proved ideal for investigating the oddity... At Compton-Belkovich, the heat flow was as high as 180 milliwatts per square meter, or about 20 times the average for the highlands of the moon's far side. That measure corresponds to a temperature of minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit about six feet below the surface, or about 90 degrees warmer than elsewhere. "This one stuck out, as it was just glowing hot compared to anywhere else on the moon," said Matthew Siegler, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, headquartered in Tucson, Ariz., and who led the research... "Now we need the geologists to figure out how you can produce that kind of feature on the moon without water, without plate tectonics," Dr. Siegler said. Universe Today believes this could help scientists better understand the moon's past. "What makes this finding unique is the source of the hotspot isn't active volcanism, such as molten lava, but from radioactive elements within the now-solidified rock that was once molten lava billions of years ago." Thanks to Slashdot reader rolodexter for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared Thursday's report from eSecurity Planet:After Microsoft warned earlier this week that some drivers certified by the Windows Hardware Developer Program (MWHDP) are being leveraged maliciously, a Cisco Talos security researcher said the number of malicious drivers could number in the thousands. Talos researcher Chris Neal discussed how the security problem evolved in a blog post. "Starting in Windows Vista 64-bit, to combat the threat of malicious drivers, Microsoft began to require kernel-mode drivers to be digitally signed with a certificate from a verified certificate authority," Neal wrote. "Without signature enforcement, malicious drivers would be extremely difficult to defend against as they can easily evade anti-malware software and endpoint detection." Beginning with Windows 10 version 1607, Neal said, Microsoft has required kernel-mode drivers to be signed by its Developer Portal. "This process is intended to ensure that drivers meet Microsoft's requirements and security standards," he wrote. Still, there are exceptions - most notably, one for drivers signed with certificates that expired or were issued prior to July 29, 2015. If a newly compiled driver is signed with non-revoked certificates that were issued before that date, it won't be blocked. "As a result, multiple open source tools have been developed to exploit this loophole," Neal wrote. And while Sophos reported that it had uncovered more than 100 malicious drivers, Neal said Cisco Talos "has observed multiple threat actors taking advantage of the aforementioned Windows policy loophole to deploy thousands of malicious, signed drivers without submitting them to Microsoft for verification...." "Microsoft, in response to our notification, has blocked all certificates discussed in this blog post," he noted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared Thursday's report from eSecurity Planet:After Microsoft warned earlier this week that some drivers certified by the Windows Hardware Developer Program (MWHDP) are being leveraged maliciously, a Cisco Talos security researcher said the number of malicious drivers could number in the thousands. Talos researcher Chris Neal discussed how the security problem evolved in a blog post. "Starting in Windows Vista 64-bit, to combat the threat of malicious drivers, Microsoft began to require kernel-mode drivers to be digitally signed with a certificate from a verified certificate authority," Neal wrote. "Without signature enforcement, malicious drivers would be extremely difficult to defend against as they can easily evade anti-malware software and endpoint detection." Beginning with Windows 10 version 1607, Neal said, Microsoft has required kernel-mode drivers to be signed by its Developer Portal. "This process is intended to ensure that drivers meet Microsoft's requirements and security standards," he wrote. Still, there are exceptions - most notably, one for drivers signed with certificates that expired or were issued prior to July 29, 2015. If a newly compiled driver is signed with non-revoked certificates that were issued before that date, it won't be blocked. "As a result, multiple open source tools have been developed to exploit this loophole," Neal wrote. And while Sophos reported that it had uncovered more than 100 malicious drivers, Neal said Cisco Talos "has observed multiple threat actors taking advantage of the aforementioned Windows policy loophole to deploy thousands of malicious, signed drivers without submitting them to Microsoft for verification...." "Microsoft, in response to our notification, has blocked all certificates discussed in this blog post," he noted.Read more of this story at Slashdot.