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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II will require players to register with a phone number on Battle.net to play the game, in order to make players responsible for their actions. The game is set for release later this month on October 28th. The Verge reports: It's a repeat of the practice that caused issues for Overwatch 2 players last week, PCGamer reports. A Battle.net support page lists the upcoming CoD shooter as one of its three games that "require that you add a phone number to your Battle.net account" to play, alongside Overwatch 2 and 2019's Modern Warfare. The phone verification system, which Activision Blizzard calls SMS Protect, is meant to cut down on toxic behavior from players, preventing them from creating endless new accounts to evade bans or to cheat. "Limiting the number of free accounts that a single person can create helps keep players accountable for their actions and, in turn, reduces toxicity and cheating and ensures a positive community experience for all players," Activision Blizzard's support page reads. The problem is that SMS Protect is designed for text-enabled mobile phones, and doesn't treat all phone numbers equally. A separate Battle.net support page notes that "mobile phones with prepaid plans may not work with the phone notification service." It also doesn't work with VoIP numbers. That restricts the service to players with postpaid cellular plans, which may not be affordable or easily accessible to many players around the world. Requiring players to provide a phone number isn't new (Dota 2 and Rainbow Six Siege both require them for ranked play) but there haven't been widespread reports of problems with prepaid phone plans with these previous implementations. One player we spoke to was blocked from playing Overwatch 2 when they entered the same number they'd used to successfully play Dota 2 for years. It's unclear whether Activision Blizzard's phone number requirements will apply equally for Modern Warfare II players across both Battle.net and Steam, given the game is available across both PC digital stores.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser wants to dismiss the country's cybersecurity chief due to possible contacts with people involved with Russian security services, German media reported late on Sunday, citing government sources. Reuters reports: Arne Schoenbohm, president of the BSI federal information security agency, could have had such contacts through the Cyber Security Council of Germany, various outlets reported. Schoenbohm was a founder of the association, which counts as a member a German company that is a subsidiary of a Russian cybersecurity firm founded by a former KGB employee, they wrote. "These accusations must be decisively investigated," said Konstantin von Notz, the head of the parliamentary oversight committee for Germany's intelligence agencies.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It's still possible to learn a lot of interesting things about old operating systems. Sometimes, those things are already documented (on a blog post) that miraculously still exist. One such quirk showed up recently when someone noticed how Microsoft made sure that SimCity and other popular apps worked on Windows 95. A recent tweet by @Kalyoshika highlights an excerpt from a blog post by Fog Creek Software co-founder, Stack Overflow co-creator, and longtime software blogger Joel Spolsky. The larger post is about chicken-and-egg OS/software appeal and demand. The part that caught the eye of a Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast co-host is how the Windows 3.1 version of SimCity worked on the Windows 95 system. Windows 95 merged MS-DOS and Windows apps, upgraded APIs from 16 to 32-bit, and was hyper-marketed. A popular app like SimCity, which sold more than 5 million copies, needed to work without a hitch. Spolsky's post summarizes how SimCity became Windows 95-ready, as he heard it, without input from Maxis or user workarounds: "Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95." Spolsky (in 2000) considers this a credit to Microsoft and an example of how to break the chicken-and-egg problem: "provide a backwards compatibility mode which either delivers a truckload of chickens, or a truckload of eggs, depending on how you look at it, and sit back and rake in the bucks." Windows developers may have deserved some sit-back time, seeing the extent of the tweaks they often have to make for individual games and apps in Windows 95. Further in @Kalyoshika's replies, you can find another example, pulled from the Compatibility Administrator in Windows' Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK). A screenshot from @code_and_beer shows how Windows NT, upon detecting files typically installed with Final Fantasy VII, will implement a fittingly titled compatibility fix: "Win95VersionLie." Simply telling the game that it's on Windows 95 seems to fix a major issue with its operation, along with a few other emulation and virtualization tweaks. "Mike Perry, former creative director at Sim empire Maxis (and later EA), noted later that there was, technically, a 32-bit Windows 95 version of Sim City available, as shown by the 'Deluxe Edition' bundle of the game," adds Ars. "He also states that Ross worked for Microsoft after leaving Maxis, which would further explain why Microsoft was so keen to ensure people could keep building parks in the perfect grid position to improve resident happiness."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Price tag for a recently approved ALS drug illustrates broad industry problems. From a report: Like many patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS -- also known as Lou Gehrig's disease -- Layne Oliff didn't have any time to waste. Even before the drug Relyvrio was approved late last month by the Food and Drug Administration, he has had his own do-it-yourself method: he gets sodium phenylbutyrate in liquid form from a New Jersey pharmacy and taurursodiol online from Amazon. That costs him over $7,000 a year, but he says it has been well worth it because he feels the combination has helped stabilize a disease that often causes death within a few years. Now that the drug combining those two known compounds has been approved in the U.S., the official list price is going to be $158,000 for a year's supply, or over 20 times more than he was spending. While that may be excellent news for Amylyx, which makes the drug and whose shares are up 159% over the past 6 months, the exorbitant price tag is bad news for the U.S. healthcare system. Patients won't be footing the entire bill themselves -- insurers pick up most of the tab, which is finalized after rebates are made by pharmaceutical companies to get the drug covered. And of course making the drug available through the proper channels will be a more affordable and more reliable way for patients to take the medication, especially those who can't afford the out-of-pocket costs Mr. Oliff was able to pay for his unorthodox, but doctor-supervised method. But the jarring price difference underscores just how out of whack drug prices have become in the U.S. Each time a drug is priced up in the stratosphere, it sets a precedent for the next manufacturer to do the same, sending drug costs in an upward spiral with no real ceiling except for public outcry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What's going on in the metaverse these days, you might ask. Looking at two of the biggest companies with over $1 billion valuations, the answer is surprising: Not much, or at least not enough to bring users back every day. From a report: According to data from DappRadar, the Ethereum-based virtual world Decentraland had 38 active users in the past 24 hours, while competitor The Sandbox boasted 522 active users in that same time. An active user, according to DappRadar, is defined as a unique wallet address' interaction with the platform's smart contract. For example, logging onto The Sandbox or Decentraland to make a purchase with SAND or MANA, each platform's respective native utility token, is counted as an "active use." This means that DappRadar's compilation of daily active users doesn't account for people who log in and mosey around a metaverse platform or drop in briefly for an event, such as a virtual fashion week. It also likely means that these spaces are not where people are making transactions such as buying non-fungible tokens (NFT). A developer might defend the low daily stats with the familiar phrase, "don't hate the player, hate the game" but it seems it's not just one quiet day for the two metaverse platforms. The largest number of daily users ever on Decentraland was 675, according to DappRadar. For The Sandbox, that number was larger at about 4,503.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Angus Chen, reporting for StatNews: For a while, scientists thought the trillions of microbes on our bodies lived in landscapes connected to the outside world -- our skin, hair, and gut -- but research in the last few years has shown that's not so. When Ravid Straussman, a cancer biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, looked deeper, he and several other research groups around the world found bacteria in the milieu of tumors. Then, he and other scientists began wondering: if tumors are home to bacteria, then what about another major resident of our microbiome, fungi? Now, two new papers published in Cell, one from Straussman's lab and collaborators at the University of California San Diego and another from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Duke University, have found genetic footprints of fungi in tumors across the human body. Together, the studies provide a "nice, rigorous association" between fungi and cancer, said Ami Bhatt, an associate professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford University who did not work on either paper. "It provides pretty compelling evidence there may be rare fungi within tumors," she said. But the work raises far more questions than it answers. "Are they alive or not? And assuming they really are there, then why are they there? And how did they get there?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Florida-headquartered company has been ordered to pay about $73,000 in compensation and other fees after firing a Netherlands-based remote worker who refused to keep their webcam on all day, NL Times reports. The Verge: The company, Chetu, said the unnamed employee was required to attend a virtual classroom with their webcam turned on for the entire day and their screen remotely monitored. But when the employee refused, saying that leaving their webcam on for "9 hours a day" made them feel uncomfortable and was an invasion of their privacy, the company dismissed them, citing âoerefusal to workâ and "insubordination."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Samsung has confirmed the first third-party smart TV makers to ship with its Tizen operating system (OS), with several manufacturers preparing to launch Tizen-powered TVs this year across Europe and Australasia. From a report: Tizen, for the uninitiated, is a Linux-based OS hosted by the Linux Foundation for more than a decade, though Samsung has been the primary developer and driving force behind the project, using it across myriad devices, including smartwatches, kitchen appliances, cameras, smartphones and TVs. Although Samsung has essentially abandoned Tizen in smartphones and smart watches, TVs have remained fertile ground for Tizen to flourish, chiefly due to the fact that Samsung is the biggest selling TV maker globally. But while recent figures from Dataxis show that Tizen's market share in 2020 was roughly one-third in terms of installation base, the number has been slowly creeping downward with the likes of Android TV and Roku edging upward.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than a dozen public-facing airport websites, including those for some of the nation's largest airports, appeared inaccessible Monday morning, and Russian-speaking hackers claimed responsibility. From a report: No immediate signs of impact to actual air travel were reported, suggesting the issue may be an inconvenience for people seeking travel information. "Obviously, we're tracking that, and there's no concern about operations being disrupted," Kiersten Todt, Chief of Staff of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said Monday at a security conference in Sea Island, Georgia. The 14 websites include the one for Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. An employee there told CNN there were no operational impacts. The Los Angeles International Airport website was offline earlier but appeared to be restored shortly before 9 a.m. Eastern.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Christopher Slayton spent two months exploring black holes, identifying the colors of Saturn's rings and looking at his home planet from outer space. Mr. Slayton, 18, didn't have to leave his desk to do so. He set out to build the entire observable universe, block by block, in Minecraft, a video game where users build and explore worlds. From a report: By the end, he felt as if he had traveled to every corner of the universe. "Everyone freaks out about the power and expansiveness of the universe, which I never really got that much," he said. But after working for a month and 15 days to build it and additional two weeks to create a YouTube video unveiling it, "I realized even more how beautiful it is." Mr. Slayton, known as ChrisDaCow on his Minecraft-focused YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok accounts, has been playing the game for almost a decade, and he's not a user of any other games, he said. He started posting videos of his "builds," which are landscapes he creates inside the game, on YouTube in 2019. This channel has become his main priority since he graduated high school this spring. [...] Exploring and learning concepts via Minecraft can be seen as a generational shift, said Ken Thompson, an assistant professor of digital game design at the University of Connecticut. About two-thirds of Americans play video games, according to a 2022 industry report. Professor Thompson said young people, such as Mr. Slayton, could apply problem solving and critical thinking when tackling projects such as the universe creation. "There are very serious applications," he said, adding, "then there's also this wonderful science side of it where we're experimenting with systems that are otherwise really hard to conceptualize." In 2022, some students at his university held a commencement ceremony in Minecraft, organized by the gaming club, after the in-person event was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. They created the campus and avatars representing students and even faculty to stage the virtual gathering.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Millions of smallholder farmers in Bangladesh pump huge amounts of groundwater for irrigation, helping to triple the country's rice production and possibly mitigate floods during monsoon season. From a report: Intensive irrigation and other agricultural improvements since the 1980s have enabled Bangladesh to produce enough food each year to be nearly self-sufficient. "In Bangladesh we rely heavily on groundwater for irrigation," says Kazi Matin Ahmed at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. He says Bangladesh has a lot of groundwater but there are concerns it could be depleted. Using millions of groundwater measurements from 465 sites across Bangladesh, Ahmed and his colleagues estimated how much groundwater was pumped by more than 16 million farmers between 1988 and 2018. Together, the farmers operate more than 1 million diesel and electric pumps to flood rice paddies during the dry season, which has enabled more food to be produced on more land. Thanks to irrigation and other agricultural improvements, rice production in the 2018-2019 season was more than triple what it was in the early 1970s. At roughly 25 per cent of the sites, the records showed depleting groundwater levels. At around 40 per cent levels during the dry season and monsoon remained steady. In the remaining 35 per cent, levels declined during the dry season due to irrigation but aquifers were completely refilled during the monsoon.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Global PC shipments declined in calendar Q3 by 15 percent year-on-year thanks to reduced demand and lingering supply chain issues, according to number cruncher IDC. From a report: The Q3 slowdown is similar to that seen in Q2 2022, when shipments crashed by 15.3 percent year-on-year. The slowed growth didn't just start this year. Signs first emerged in Q3 2021 as Chromebooks hit market saturation. For perspective, volumes still remain higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Shipments also aren't as low as they could be thanks to companies like Apple that drove business with promotions. As industry-wide supply hit record lows, Apple supply increased to make up for lost orders during China's Q2 lockdowns, according to IDC research manager Jitesh Ubrani. [...] Apple came in fourth place in terms of market share for Q3 PC shipments behind Lenovo (first), HP (second), and Dell (third). While other companies declined in year-on-year growth, Apple soared with a net positive 40.2 percent increase in shipments year-on-year to 10.06 million Macs.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: At the 1,000-bed not-for-profit Kasturba Hospital in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, doctors are grappling with a rash of antibiotic-resistant "superbug infections." This happens when bacteria change over time and become resistant to drugs that are supposed to defeat them and cure the infections they cause. Such resistance directly caused 1.27 million deaths worldwide in 2019, according to The Lancet, a medical journal. Antibiotics -- which are considered to be the first line of defence against severe infections -- did not work on most of these cases. India is one of the countries worst hit by what doctors call "antimicrobial resistance" -- antibiotic-resistant neonatal infections alone are responsible for the deaths of nearly 60,000 newborns each year. A new government report paints a startling picture of how things are getting worse. Tests carried out at Kasturba Hospital to find out which antibiotic would be most effective in tackling five main bacterial pathogens have found that a number of key drugs were barely effective. A new report by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) says that resistance to a powerful class of antibiotics called carbapenems - it defeats a number of pathogens - had risen by up to 10% in just one year alone. The report collects data on antibiotic resistance from up to 30 public and private hospitals every year. "The reason why this is alarming is that it is a great drug to treat sepsis [a life-threatening condition] and sometimes used as a first line of treatment in hospitals for very sick patients in ICUs," says Dr Kamini Walia, a scientist at Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and lead author of the study.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After almost a decade of talks, the nations of the world have committed to drastically lower emissions of planet-warming gases from the world's airplanes by 2050, a milestone in efforts to ease the climate effects of a fast-growing sector. From a report: The target to reach "net zero" emissions -- a point in which air travel is no longer pumping any additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- would require the aviation industry to significantly step up its climate efforts. Previously, companies had relied on offsetting aviation's emissions growth through tree-planting programs or through yet-to-be-proven technology to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. But to reach net zero, companies and governments would need to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in increasingly efficient planes and cleaner fuels to sharply reduce emissions from air travel itself. And even those investments are unlikely to be enough, compelling countries and companies to adopt policies to curb flying itself, by scrapping fuel subsidies or halting airport expansion plans, for example, or ending frequent flier programs. That puts the onus on the world's richest countries, which account for the bulk of global air travel. The richest 20 percent of people worldwide take 80 percent of the flights, according to estimates by the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit think tank. The top 2 percent of frequent fliers take about 40 percent of the flights. Emissions from global commercial aviation made up about 3 percent of global emissions in 2019, and had surged more than 30 percent over the previous decade before the coronavirus pandemic hit and traffic slumped. But air travel has come back with a vengeance, making action to address rising emissions imperative. The aviation industry has been slow to address its emissions, which aren't covered by the Paris accord, the 2015 agreement among the nations of the world to fight climate change. Instead, a United Nations-like body called the International Civil Aviation Organization has overseen the climate talks. Those talks quickly became a microcosm of the politics involved in global climate negotiations, with less wealthy nations arguing that they should not face the same restrictions as richer nations.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You know how grocery stores have rolls of tear-off plastic bags in their produce sections for holding vegetables and fruit? Last week California's governor signed a law that will force supermarkets to discontinue them before 2025, reports the Bay Area Newsgroup, replacing them with either recycled paper bags or bags made of compostable plastic:"This kind of plastic film is not recyclable...." said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for Californians Against Waste, an environmental group that supported the bill. "It flies around landfills and flies out of trucks. It gets stuck on gears at recycling facilities. And it contaminates compost. It's a problematic product we want to get rid of...." "We're not banning the bags," Lapis said. "We are just requiring a more-sustainable type of bags. You'll still have a place to put your fruits and vegetables that won't leak." The article notes that Trader Joe's is already using compostable produce bags, and Eben Schwartz, marine debris manager for the California Coastal Commission suggests that consumers can also just try opting for paper bags. "It's significantly more recyclable. And it will break down if it finds its way into the marine environment." But he also offered one more piece of advice: "Decide whether you really need your bananas in a bag. You probably don't."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Your boss probably has enough data about your digital activities to get a snapshot of your workday — without using any special monitoring software...." reports the Washington Post. "Workers should be aware that many online work apps offer data about their daily activities...."Commonly used network-connected apps such as Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Office give managers the ability to find everything from the number of video meetings in which you've actively participated, to how much you chatted online with co-workers and the number of documents you saved to the cloud.... At the beginning of 2022, global demand for employee monitoring software increased 65 percent from 2019, according to internet security and digital rights firm Top10VPN. But popular work apps also offer data. On Microsoft 365, an account administrator can pull data — though it may not be easy and would be tracked in compliance logs — on how many emails workers sent, how many files they saved on a shared drive and how many messages they sent as well as video meetings they participated in on the messaging and video tool Microsoft Teams. Google Workspace, Google's suite of work tools, allows administrators, for security and audit purposes, to see how many emails a user sent and received, how many files they saved and accessed on Google Drive, and when a user started a video meeting, from where they joined meetings, and who was in a meeting. Select administrators on both services can also access the content of emails and calendar items. On paid Slack accounts, managers can see how many days users have been active and how many messages they've sent over a set period of time. Zoom allows account administrators to see how many meetings users participated in, the length of the meetings, and whether users enabled their camera and microphone during them. And if employees have company-issued phones or use office badges or tech that requires them to sign in at the office, managers can track phone usage and office attendance. To be sure, several software companies say their reports are not for employee evaluation and surveillance. Microsoft has stated that using technology to monitor employees is counterproductive and suggested that some managers may have "productivity paranoia." In the help section of its website, Slack states that the analytics data it offers should be "used for understanding your whole team's use of Slack, not evaluating an individual's performance." "Several workplace experts agree on one thing: The data doesn't properly represent a worker's productivity," the article concludes. "Activities such as in-person mentoring, taking time to brainstorm, sketching out a plan or using offline software won't appear in the data. And measuring quantity might discount the quality of one's work or interactions."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's one of the largest airlines in the world. But now Futurism reports that United Airlines "is projecting it could have electric powered commercial flights by the tail end of this decade, potentially laying the groundwork for a much more environmentally friendly future for air travel.""Initially we want to fly on routes that are 200 miles or less," Mike Leskinen, president of United Airlines Ventures, told CNBC [at CNBC's ESG Impact Virtual Conference on Thursday]. "But as that energy density increases, that same aircraft will have a range of 250 miles, 300 miles, which is going to give us a lot more utility here connecting our hubs." In other words, the battery-powered planes will get a chance to prove themselves in regional, short-haul flights, according to Leskinen. United set their plans in motion last year, purchasing 100 battery-powered planes that can seat 19 passengers from the Swedish startup Heart Aerospace. Its founder Anders Forslund, who also attended the conference, said that the planes will be able to recharge in "under half an hour," which is about on par with industry standards. The airplane won't be taking off any time soon, however, as it still requires certification, but Forslund predicts they'll get approval by 2028. For the long-haul flights, United has already announced plans to use sustainable fuel in its efforts to be carbon neutral by 2050.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom's Hardware reports:We recently broke the news that Intel's Alder Lake BIOS source code had been leaked to 4chan and Github, with the 6GB file containing tools and code for building and optimizing BIOS/UEFI images. We reported the leak within hours of the initial occurrence, so we didn't yet have confirmation from Intel that the leak was genuine. Intel has now issued a statement to Tom's Hardware confirming the incident: "Our proprietary UEFI code appears to have been leaked by a third party. We do not believe this exposes any new security vulnerabilities as we do not rely on obfuscation of information as a security measure. This code is covered under our bug bounty program within the Project Circuit Breaker campaign, and we encourage any researchers who may identify potential vulnerabilities to bring them our attention through this program...." The BIOS/UEFI of a computer initializes the hardware before the operating system has loaded, so among its many responsibilities, is establishing connections to certain security mechanisms, like the TPM (Trusted Platform Module). Now that the BIOS/UEFI code is in the wild and Intel has confirmed it as legitimate, both nefarious actors and security researchers alike will undoubtedly probe it to search for potential backdoors and security vulnerabilities.... Intel hasn't confirmed who leaked the code or where and how it was exfiltrated. However, we do know that the GitHub repository, now taken down but already replicated widely, was created by an apparent LC Future Center employee, a China-based ODM that manufactures laptops for several OEMs, including Lenovo. Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Iran's state-run broadcaster was apparently hacked on air Saturday," reports the BBC, "with a news bulletin interrupted by a protest against the country's leader." While such incidents are "historically rare," they add that more recently,this incident follows "widespread open dissent"It comes after at least three people were shot dead when protesters clashed with security forces in new unrest over the death of Mahsa Amini. s Amini was detained in Tehran by morality police for allegedly not covering her hair properly. The 22-year-old Iranian Kurd died in custody on 16 September, three days after her arrest. Her death has sparked an unprecedented wave of protest across the country. Saturday's TV news bulletin at 21:00 (17:30 GMT) was interrupted with images which included Iran's supreme leader with a target on his head, photos of Ms Amini and three other women killed in recent protests. e of the captions read "join us and rise up", whilst another said "our youths' blood is dripping off your paws". The interruption lasted only a few seconds before being cut off. Thanks to Nodsnarb and ttyler (long-time Slashdot reader #20,687) for sharing the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Scammers are leveraging the vulnerabilities in the global supply chain, as well as the public's continuing need for new batteries, to sell a wide variety of counterfeits or unauthorized replicas online," warns America's FBI. "Do not fall victim to online fraudsters or unauthorized dealers or manufacturers."Counterfeit batteries do not go through the same standardized testing as original equipment manufacturer batteries and can adversely impact the safety and health of the consumer.... Avoid aftermarket batteries when possible because they may be dangerous.... Consumers should avoid all third-party purchases of batteries, as they can appear to be legitimate OEM batteries but are likely counterfeit.... [B]atteries sold at deep discounts or at significantly lower-than-average prices are likely counterfeit. The FBI warns you should always avoid batteries that:are not properly packaged;have misprinted or misspelled labels;have labels that peel off; ordo not have official manufacturer batch numbers."The FBI's warning is not specific to laptops or smartphones," notes ZDNet, "which makes sense given that batteries are now found in everything from cars, scooters, e-bikes, e-cigarettes and trains to drones and more." Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Look at the full moon! Tonight it may appear larger and more orange than usual, reports Space.com, "taking on a fitting appearance for the fall season and for the build-up to Halloween."This is the result of something called the 'moon illusion' and the fact it is being viewed close to the horizon. The orange color comes about because as we look at the full moon close to the horizon, the light that it reflects towards us is passing through more of the Earth's atmosphere than when it is close to overhead. Molecules in Earth's atmosphere are really good at scattering photons of blue light which have shorter wavelengths than red light. This means that blue photons bounce around the sky before hitting our eyeâS — âS and that's why the sky is blue. Longer wavelength red photons slip right through these molecules and straight to our eye for the most part. When red photons reflected by the moon have to pass through the thickest part of the atmosphere at the horizon, the chance of them being bounced around is increased. That's why the moon appears redder when we look at it close to the horizon....Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2008 California's voters approved the first bonds for a $33 billion San Francisco-to-Los Angeles bullet train. 14 years later, the New York Times is now calling the project "a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become... too big to fail...."Political compromises, the records show, produced difficult and costly routes through the state's farm belt. They routed the train across a geologically complex mountain pass in the Bay Area. And they dictated that construction would begin in the center of the state, in the agricultural heartland, not at either of the urban ends where tens of millions of potential riders live. The pros and cons of these routing choices have been debated for years. Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California's two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes.... Fourteen years later, construction is now underway on part of a 171-mile "starter" line connecting a few cities in the middle of California, which has been promised for 2030. But few expect it to make that goal. Meanwhile, costs have continued to escalate. When the California High-Speed Rail Authority issued its new 2022 draft business plan in February, it estimated an ultimate cost as high as $105 billion. Less than three months later, the "final plan" raised the estimate to $113 billion. The rail authority said it has accelerated the pace of construction on the starter system, but at the current spending rate of $1.8 million a day, according to projections widely used by engineers and project managers, the train could not be completed in this century.... As of now, there is no identified source of funding for the $100 billion it will take to extend the rail project from the Central Valley to its original goals, Los Angeles and San Francisco, in part because lawmakers, no longer convinced of the bullet train's viability, have pushed to divert additional funding to regional rail projects.... The Times's review, though, revealed that political deals created serious obstacles in the project from the beginning. Speaking candidly on the subject for the first time, some of the high-speed rail authority's past leaders say the project may never work.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The iPhone 14's new Crash Detection feature, which is supposed to alert authorities when it detects you've been in a car accident, has an unexpected side effect," reports the Verge. "It dials 911 on rollercoasters."According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the feature has had law enforcement sent to amusement parks on numerous occasions after mistaking a thrill ride's twists, turns, and hard braking for a real emergency.... If the sensors detect that you've been in an accident, your iPhone will display an alert and call emergency services if you don't dismiss it within 20 seconds. When it calls law enforcement, it will play an audio message that alerts authorities you've been in a crash, and also provides them with your location.... [WSJ reporter Joanna Stern] says Warren County, where Kings Island is located, received six emergency calls triggered by park rides since the iPhone 14's release. She also points out that other users have experienced similar issues in amusement parks across the country. "My time on the crash-detection beat has proven that the feature can absolutely save a life," Stern acknowledged on Twitter. "There's already proof of it helping in real crashes. But there are situations where it works and it shouldn't and others where it doesn't work and it should. "Such is the story of technology!" Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the story.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Our new robot overlords are making a whole lot of progress in the space of AI music generation," quips TechCrunch, discussing a new project called "Harmonai" backed by Stability AI (creators of the open source AI image generator Stable Diffusion):In late September, Harmonai released Dance Diffusion, an algorithm and set of tools that can generate clips of music by training on hundreds of hours of existing songs.... Dance Diffusion remains in the testing stages — at present, the system can only generate clips a few seconds long. But the early results provide a tantalizing glimpse at what could be the future of music creation, while at the same time raising questions about the potential impact on artists.... Google's AudioLM, detailed for the first time earlier this week, shows... an uncanny ability to generate piano music given a short snippet of playing. But it hasn't been open sourced. Dance Diffusion aims to overcome the limitations of previous open source tools by borrowing technology from image generators such as Stable Diffusion. The system is what's known as a diffusion model, which generates new data (e.g., songs) by learning how to destroy and recover many existing samples of data. As it's fed the existing samples — say, the entire Smashing Pumpkins discography — the model gets better at recovering all the data it had previously destroyed to create new works.... It's not the most intuitive idea. But as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and other such systems have shown, the results can be remarkably realistic. Its lyrics are gibberish, TechCrunch concedes — though their article also features several audio clips (including a style transfer of Smash Mouth's vocals onto the Tetris theme). And the article also notes a new tool letting artists opt of of being used in AI training sets, before raising the obvious concern... The project's lead stresses that "All of the models that are officially being released as part of Dance Diffusion are trained on public domain data, Creative Commons-licensed data and data contributed by artists in the community." But even with that, TechCrunch notes that "Assuming Dance Diffusion one day reaches the point where it can generate coherent whole songs, it seems inevitable that major ethical and legal issues will come to the fore." For example, beyond the question of whether "training" is itself a copyright violation, there's the possibility that the algorithm might accidentally duplicate a copyrighted melody...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Russian-speaking hackers on Wednesday claimed responsibility for knocking offline state government websites in Colorado, Kentucky and Mississippi, among other states," reports CNN, calling it "the latest example of apparent politically motivated hacking following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.... The websites in Colorado, Kentucky and Mississippi were sporadically available Wednesday morning and afternoon as administrators appeared to try to bring them online."The Kentucky Board of Elections' website, which posts information on how to register to vote, was also temporarily offline on Wednesday, but it was not immediately clear what caused that outage. The board of elections' website is also managed by the Kentucky government, though the hackers did not specifically list the board as a target.... Websites like that of the Kentucky Board of Elections are not directly involved in the casting or counting of votes, but they can provide useful information for voters.... The hacking group claiming responsibility for Wednesday's website outage is known as Killnet and stepped up their activity after Russia's February invasion of Ukraine to target organizations in NATO countries. They are a loose band of so-called "hacktivists" — politically motivated hackers who support the Kremlin but whose ties to that government are unknown. The group also claimed responsibility for briefly downing a US Congress website in July, and for cyberattacks on organizations in Lithuania after the Baltic country blocked the shipment of some goods to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad in June.... Officials at the FBI and CISA reiterated this week that any efforts by hackers to breach election infrastructure are "unlikely to result in largescale disruptions or prevent voting." Government Technology supplies some context:Amsterdam-based threat intelligence technology and services provider EclecticIQ's Threat Research team said in a blog post that Killnet appears to only have the capacity to launch DDoS attacks with short-term impact, and falls short of dealing lasting damage to victims' network infrastructure. "Analysts believe that Killnet supporters are novice users with zero or limited experience with DDoS attacks, based on an analysis of Telegram messaging data and open-source reporting," EclecticIQ wrote. CNN described Killnet's typical attacks as "crude hacks that temporarily knock websites offline but don't do further damage to infrastructure. "Killnet thrives off of public attention and bravado, and cybersecurity experts have to strike a balance between being mindful of Killnet's online antics and not hyping a low-level threat."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader silverjacket writes:Research presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning shows that when recommender systems use reinforcement learning to increase engagement, they can have the side effect of shifting our preferences to increase engagement. The researchers also showed ways to detect and reduce such manipulation. Google and Facebook have used reinforcement learning in their recommender systems but didn't respond to questions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post calls it "the gauzy, schmaltzy, vaguely creepy orchestral music unofficially dubbed the QAnon anthem." They also report that it's been "unceremoniously yanked from YouTube and Spotify for violating a harassment policy and alleged copyright infringement, respectively." NBC News reports:In an email to NBC News, composer Will Van De Crommert wrote that he was "exploring legal options" and that "this particular track, which was originally entitled Mirrors, is available to license online. I however was not notified of any licenses for political rallies, nor did I authorize such use." A YouTube representative said in an email Monday that the company "removed the video in question for violating our harassment policy, which prohibits content targeting someone by suggesting they're complicit in a conspiracy theory used to justify real-world violence, such as QAnon." A Spotify representative said that "the content in question was removed following an infringement claim...." Van De Crommert said the uploads in question are identical to his and that he has no association with the account that put his music online alongside QAnon language. "I do not align with the views of QAnon, and this individual has unlawfully distributed my music under their own name," he said. The Post credits the song's morose strings for its impact, describing it as "the kind of stock sentimental, algorithmically emotional pablum regularly employed to sell us trucks, insurance, petrochemicals, diapers, more trucks, pharmaceuticals, whole-grain bread and presidents."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite warnings that AI will rob humans of jobs, "Somehow we sacks of meat — though prone to exhaustion, distraction, injury and sometimes spectacular error — remain in high demand," writes New York Times columnist Farhad Majoo. AI has yet to replace humans in supposedly at-risk professions like truck driving and fast-food services. Majoo's conclusion? "Humans have been underestimated."It turns out that we (well, many of us) are really amazing at what we do, and for the foreseeable future we are likely to prove indispensable across a range of industries, especially column-writing. Computers, meanwhile, have been overestimated. Though machines can look indomitable in demonstrations, in the real world A.I. has turned out to be a poorer replacement for humans than its boosters have prophesied. What's more, the entire project of pitting A.I. against people is beginning to look pretty silly, because the likeliest outcome is what has pretty much always happened when humans acquire new technologies — the technology augments our capabilities rather than replaces us. Is "this time different," as many Cassandras took to warning over the past few years? It's looking like not. Decades from now I suspect we'll have seen that artificial intelligence and people are like peanut butter and jelly: better together. It was a recent paper by Michael Handel, a sociologist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that helped me clarify the picture. Handel has been studying the relationship between technology and jobs for decades, and he's been skeptical of the claim that technology is advancing faster than human workers can adapt to the changes. In the recent analysis, he examined long-term employment trends across more than two dozen job categories that technologists have warned were particularly vulnerable to automation. Among these were financial advisers, translators, lawyers, doctors, fast-food workers, retail workers, truck drivers, journalists and, poetically, computer programmers. His upshot: Humans are pretty handily winning the job market. Job categories that a few years ago were said to be doomed by A.I. are doing just fine. The data show "little support" for "the idea of a general acceleration of job loss or a structural break with trends pre-dating the A.I. revolution," Handel writes. Handel notes that despite AI's high performance in analyzing X-rays, the number of (human) radiologists keeps increasing, with worries that the supply of (human) radiologists may not keep up with demand. One Stanford radiologist recently argued that instead, "The right answer is: Radiologists who use A.I. will replace radiologists who don't."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Starting with the Ubuntu 16.04 edition and including the later LTS versions, Canonical will offer expanded security coverage for critical, high, and medium Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) to all of Ubuntu's open-source applications and toolchains for ten years," reports ZDNet. "Yes, you read that right, you get security patches not just for the operating system, but for all of Ubuntu's open-source applications for a decade."Most of these are server programs, such as Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Drupal, Nagios, Redis, and WordPress. But, it also includes such developer essentials as Docker, Node.js, phpMyAdmin, Python 2, and Rust. Altogether, Canonical is supporting more than 23,000 packages. Indeed, it's now offering security for, as Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's CEO, said, "Security coverage to every single package in the Ubuntu distribution." Canonical isn't doing this on its own. It's offering free, improved security in partnership with the security management company Tenable. Robert Huber, Tenable's Chief Security Officer, said, "Ubuntu Pro offers security patch assurance for a broad spectrum of open-source software. Together, we give customers a foundation for trustworthy open source." Beyond ordinary security, Canonical is backporting security fixes from newer application versions. This enables Ubuntu Pro users to use the Ubuntu release of their choice for long-term security without forced upgrades. Happy to keep using Ubuntu 20.04? No problem. You can run it until April 2030. Knock yourself out.... Users can obtain a free personal Ubuntu Pro subscription at ubuntu.com/pro for up to five machines. This free tier is for personal and small-scale commercial use. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Ubuntu's parent company company Canonical, explains in a new video that Ubuntu "is now the world's most widely used Linux..." "What makes most proud, though, is that we have found a way to make this available free of charge to anybody for their personal and for small-scale commercial use.... full commercial use for you, and any business you own, on up to five machines."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"One of the largest hospital chains in the U.S. was hit with a suspected ransomware cyberattack this week," reports NBC News, "leading to delayed surgeries, hold ups in patient care and rescheduled doctor appointments across the country."CommonSpirit Health, ranked as the fourth-largest health system in the country by Becker's Hospital Review, said Tuesday that it had experienced "an IT security issue" that forced it to take certain systems offline. While CommonSpirit declined to share specifics, a person familiar with its remediation efforts confirmed to NBC News that it had sustained a ransomware attack. CommonSpirit, which has more than 140 hospitals in the U.S., also declined to share information on how many of its facilities were experiencing delays. Multiple hospitals, however, including CHI Memorial Hospital in Tennessee, some St. Luke's hospitals in Texas, and Virginia Mason Franciscan Health in Seattle all have announced they were affected. One Texas woman, who spoke to NBC News on the condition of anonymity to protect her family's medical privacy, said that she and her husband had arrived at a CommonSpirit-affiliated hospital on Wednesday for long-scheduled major surgery, only for his doctor to recommend delaying it until the hospital's technical issues were resolved. The surgeon "told me it could potentially delay post-op care, and he didn't want to risk it," she said. Wednesday the company confirmed that "We have taken certain systems offline."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An experienced poker player lost to a relative newcomer. But then, "Somehow, the Robbi Jade Lew-Garrett Adelstein scandal diving the poker world just got weirder," reports the New York Post:An internal investigation conducted by Hustler Casino Live — which streamed the game from Los Angeles — has shown that one of their High Stakes Poker Productions employees stole three $5,000 chips from Lew's stack after the broadcast concluded on September 29. The employee, Bryan Sagbigsal, was terminated from his position after he admitted to taking $15,000 in chips from Lew's stack... The $15,000 worth of chips taken by Sagbigsal was seen as some as him taking his cut of a cheating scam. "There is zero evidence that I cheated," Lew posted on Twitter, "simply because I did not. I have been thrust into a bizarre situation where I am being asked to prove my innocence continually, and as of yet, there is not a single thread of direct evidence illustrating my guilt. My accusers, now having exhausted buzzing seats, camera rings, microphone water bottles, and other spy paraphernalia, have now moved on to me having an alleged conspiring relationship with someone I do not know... who, in fact, stole from me." As a precaution the casino's technology and security protocols are now being audited — but the publicity seems good for business. Hustler Casino Live is now calling the hand "The most insane hero call in poker history," and it's already racked up over half a million views on YouTube. Here's what I see. (Am I missing something?) After three of the five "community" cards were dealt face up, Garrett Adelstein had four of the five cards needed for a straight flush — leaving nine clubs in the deck left to draw for a flush, and an additional six that would've at least given him a straight. But with no help from the fourth "community" card, Garrett had just a 53% chance of winning. He bet $10,000, but instead of backing down Robbi raised him by $10,000. Garrett then tried an even larger bet, daring Robbi to go all-in with her $109,000 in chips — or fold. Did she sense that this suddenly-higher bet was a bluff? With nothing but a high-card jack, Robbi refused to fold — and won the hand when the fifth card failed to help either her or Garrett.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares this report from the National Review:PayPal has backtracked on a published policy that would have fined users $2,500 for spreading "misinformation," claiming the update had gone out "in error." "An 'Acceptable Use Policy' notice recently went out in error that included incorrect information. PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy. Our teams are working to correct our policy pages. We're sorry for the confusion this has caused," a spokesperson told National Review in a written statement.... The policy update had appeared to authorize the company to pull a significant sum of money from the accounts of users who spread "misinformation," among other newly listed offenses.... Changes included prohibitions on "the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials" that "promote misinformation." While the prior policy already forbade "hate," "intolerance," and discrimination, the new one would have explicitly applied to specific "protected groups" and "individuals or groups based on protected characteristics...." The firm's current rulebook doesn't list these terms. It's unclear whether PayPal will also pull back these specific prohibitions on "discriminatory" language, or if it is only scrubbing the "misinformation" clause.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Iran's government is trying to limit internet access, reports CNBC — while Iranians are trying a variety of technologies to bypass the blocks:Outages first started hitting Iran's telecommunications networks on September 19, according to data from internet monitoring companies Cloudflare and NetBlocks, and have been ongoing for the last two and a half weeks. Internet monitoring groups and digital rights activists say they're seeing "curfew-style" network disruptions every day, with access being throttled from around 4 p.m. local time until well into the night. Tehran blocked access to WhatsApp and Instagram, two of the last remaining uncensored social media services in Iran. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and several other platforms have been banned for years. As a result, Iranians have flocked to VPNs, services that encrypt and reroute their traffic to a remote server elsewhere in the world to conceal their online activity. This has allowed them to restore connections to restricted websites and apps. On September 22, a day after WhatsApp and Instagram were banned, demand for VPN services skyrocketed 2,164% compared to the 28 days prior, according to figures from Top10VPN, a VPN reviews and research site. By September 26, demand peaked at 3,082% above average, and it has continued to remain high since, at 1,991% above normal levels, Top10VPN said.... Mahsa Alimardani, a researcher at free speech campaign group Article 19, said a contact she's been communicating with in Iran showed his network failing to connect to Google, despite having installed a VPN. "This is new refined deep packet inspection technology that they've developed to make the network extremely unreliable," she said. Such technology allows internet service providers and governments to monitor and block data on a network. Authorities are being much more aggressive in seeking to thwart new VPN connections, she added.... VPNs aren't the only techniques citizens can use to circumvent internet censorship. Volunteers are setting up so-called Snowflake proxy servers, or "proxies," on their browsers to allow Iranians access to Tor — software that routes traffic through a "relay" network around the world to obfuscate their activity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"John Galvan was arrested at 18 and spent 35 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit," writes the Innocence Project, a nonprofit specializing in legal exoneration. "In 2007, John Galvan was about 21 years into a life sentence for a crime he didn't commit when he saw something on the prison television he thought might finally help him prove his innocence and secure his freedom: A re-run of an episode of the Discovery Channel's MythBusters." At the time of his arrest, they write, Galvan had been handcuffed to a wall for hours, physically beaten, and ultimately "agreed to give a confession that was completely fabricated by the detectives to end the abuse" — that Galvan had started a fire in an apartment building "by throwing a bottle filled with gasoline at the building and then tossing a cigarette into the pool of gasoline on the porch to ignite it." And then 21 years later...In his cell, a 39-year-old John watched as the hosts of MythBusters struggled repeatedly to ignite a pool of gasoline with a lit cigarette, despite fervent attempts. Based on the ignition temperature of gasoline and the temperature range of a lit cigarette, the show's hosts had initially hypothesized that a lit cigarette might be able to ignite spilled gasoline as they had seen on TV and in movies. But after several failed attempts to start a fire, including rolling a lit cigarette directly into a pool of gasoline, the team determined it was highly unlikely that dropping a cigarette into gasoline could cause a fire.... The show's findings were confirmed in 2007, by experiments conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), which made more than 2,000 attempts to ignite gasoline with a cigarette under various conditions. The bureau's experiments even included a vacuum that increased the cigarette's temperature to the level it would typically reach when being sucked and spraying a mist of gasoline directly onto the lit cigarette. All of the attempts failed. "Despite what you see in action movies, dropping a lit cigarette on to a trail of gasoline won't ignite it, assuming normal oxygen levels and no unusual circumstances," said Richard Tontarski, a forensic scientist and then chief of the ATF's fire research laboratory. In 2017, when John finally had his evidentiary hearing on his post-conviction claims, [his attorney Tara] Thompson and his legal team presented multiple alibi witnesses, in addition to seven witnesses who testified to being tortured by the same officers who had coerced his confession, documents showing that police had fabricated probable cause to arrest him, and an arson expert who testified that John's false confession was scientifically impossible.... In 2019, the appellate court granted John post-conviction relief on the grounds of actual innocence — a rarity in Illinois — largely based on the abuse used to coerce a false confession from John. The court concluded that without John's false confession, which he did not give voluntarily, "the State's case was nonexistent." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Sleeping Kirby for sharing the story!Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Mastercard has launched software that allows banks to identify and potentially block customer purchases from cryptocurrency exchanges that have been linked to fraud..." reports Barron's:"Crypto Secure" allows card issuers to assess the regulatory risk of dealing with crypto exchanges and other digital asset platforms, as well as decide which purchases to approve, Mastercard said. The solution, which taps blockchain data, allows banks to see where cardholders are buying crypto and assess their overall exposure to the digital asset space, which is rife with fraud and under continuing scrutiny from regulators. A report on Yahoo Finance says the solutions will "infuse added security and reliability into crypto purchases made across a worldwide network of 2,400 exchanges," noting that the initiative "reinforces Mastercard's efforts to bolster its presence in the growing crypto ecosystem." Mastercard's president of cyber and intelligence business told CNBC that "The idea is that the kind of trust we provide for digital commerce transactions, we want to be able to provide the same kind of trust to digital asset transactions for consumers, banks and merchants." The Mastercard executive "declined to disclose the overall dollar value of fiat-to-crypto volumes from its network of 2,400 crypto exchanges," but did say the number of transactions per minute now runs into the "thousands." And when CNBC asked if Mastercard was changing its strategy after a recent drop in crypto prices, he retorted that market cycles always come and go. "I think you've got to take the longer view that this is a big marketplace now and evolving and is probably going to be much, much bigger in the future."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Made from fossil fuels refined with "extreme temperatures and significant amount of water and energy," plastics are also a climate problem, warns CNN. So "by the time we start talking about recycling, the damage is already done." One former regional administrator for America's Environmental Protection Agency is now even calling plastics "the new coal."The process of making plastic is so energy intensive that if the plastics industry were a country, it would be the fifth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, according to a 2021 report from Beyond Plastics.... The plastic industry is responsible for at least 232 million tons of planet-warming emissions each year, according to the Beyond Plastics report. That's the same amount as the average emissions released by 116 coal-fired power plants in 2020, according to the report's authors. It's also the same annual emissions as around 50 million cars, according to the EPA. And more plastic-making facilities continue to come online.... [P]lastic recycling doesn't work, Enck said, because most of what we think we're recycling just ends up in the landfill. It also doesn't address the planet-warming emissions that comes from making it in the first place.... Ultimately, the world needs large-scale change to address the climate impact of the fossil fuel and plastics industries, said Jacqueline Savitz [chief policy officer for the conservation non-profit Oceana]. Oceana, for example, is working with local volunteers from cities and counties around the country to help pass new laws to reduce single-use plastics, in hopes of sparking change at the national level. "We think that if we could start to reduce single-use plastics at the local level with local ordinances, that can start to become more of the norm," she said. "Then we can start taking it to higher levels of government, even getting to the point of getting national policies that will drive reductions in plastic use." Ultimately, Savitz said consumers need to continue urging major corporations to provide plastic-free solutions and help support refill and reuse programs to encourage society to shy away from plastic use and stave off the worst impacts of the climate crisis. "Our country is burning and flooding and hurricanes are coming earlier and earlier," she told CNN. "I really think it's shocking that one of the things that's really leading to that is plastics, and it's hurting us in other ways, too. So if we could find a way to reduce our production of plastics as a country and as a global society, we'd be taking a bite out of climate change." CNN suggests ways you can reduce your own plastic consumption, including: Saying no to bottled water. "Get a couple of canteens and cut a major source of plastic out of your life."Going beyond just reusable grocery bags. "You can easily go a step further by not using the plastic produce bags the store provides for your apples and broccoli..."And when shopping, try to choose products packaged in paper over those packaged in plastic.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Apple won a massive reduction in a 1.1 billion euro ($1.1 billion) antitrust fine from French competition regulators," reports CNBC, "in a blow to the ambitions of European authorities to crack down on the dominance of Big Tech companies."The Paris appeals court on Thursday lowered the fine to 371.6 million euros, roughly a third of the value of the original penalty and a reduction of 728.4 million euros, an Apple spokesperson confirmed.According to Reuters, the amount was slashed because the court decided to drop one of the charges related to price fixing, and lower the rate originally used to calculate the fine.... In 2020, the French competition watchdog fined Apple 1.1 billion euros for allegedly pressuring premium resellers into fixing prices of non-iPhone products, such as its Mac and iPad computers, and abusing the economic dependence of its outside resellers. Tech Data and Ingram Micro, two global electronics wholesalers, were also fined 76.1 million euros and 62.9 million euros, respectively. The regulator accused Apple, Tech Data and Ingram Micro of agreeing not to compete and preventing independent resellers from competing with each other, "thereby sterilizing the wholesale market for Apple products." Apple response, according to Reuters: "While the court correctly reversed part of the French Competition Authority's decision, we believe it should be overturned in full and plan to appeal. "The decision relates to practices from more than a decade ago that even the (French authority) recognised are no longer in use."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"After 433 gamblers won a lottery drawing in the Philippines last weekend, people across the country debated a thorny question," reports the New York Times. "At what point does randomness begin to look a little too much like a racket?"Some Filipinos accused the state-owned company behind the roughly $4 million prize drawing of fraud, a charge that was swiftly denied. Lawmakers said that they planned to investigate the winning draw as a way of securing the lottery's integrity. How was it possible, skeptics asked, that 433 people had all picked the same winning combination of six numbers — 09-45-36-27-18-54? Or that all six figures turned out to be multiples of nine? Others said that the outcome was a simple case of good luck. (The winning numbers could be in any order.) Statisticians noted that it was not mathematically impossible for 433 winners to strike it big.... A few [critics] noted that some officials from the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office, which sold nearly $443 million in tickets in the first half of this year, have been convicted of bribery and other charges over the past decade, including one case in which they pocketed prize money.... Lawmakers in both the House and Senate said this week that they planned to investigate the contentious draw. One of those legislators, Aquilino Pimentel III, the minority leader of the Senate, told The Times in a text message on Wednesday that while the result was "not impossible," it seemed "highly improbable...." Professor Chua Tin Chiu, a statistician at the National University of Singapore, said the criticism was an example of humans misunderstanding the nature of randomness. "Some time ago, there was news about a person that struck the jackpot more than once in his lifetime," he said. "Would that be possible? Yes. Are the chances very low? Yes. Is it going to happen to someone? Yes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"The Rust programming language is getting so popular that the team behind it is creating a team that's dedicated to defining the default Rust coding style," reports ZDNet:Each language has style guides and, if they're popular enough, may have multiple style guides from major users, like Google, which has its guide for C++ — the language Chrome is written in. Python's Guido van Rossum's posted his styling conventions here. Rust, which reached version 1.0 in 2015, has a style guide in the "rustfmt" or 'Rust formatting tool' published on GitHub. The tool automatically formats Rust code to let developers focus on output and aims to reduce the steep learning curve confronting new Rust developers. The guide instructs developers to "Use spaces, not tabs" and says "each level of indentation must be 4 spaces", for example.... But the team responsible for writing the style guide between 2016 and 2018 has "by design" come to end, so now it's now been decided to create the Rust style team, consisting of Josh Triplett, Caleb Cartwright, Michal Goulet, and Jane Lusby. The crew will first tackle a "backlog of new language constructs that lack formatting guidance" and move on to "defining and implementing the mechanisms to evolve the default Rust style, and then begin introducing style improvements." The work includes minor language changes, big structural changes, and backwards compatibility and the style team wants to craft the tool to make it current for easier coding in Rust, and help adoption. New constructs "by default, get ignored and not formatted by rustfmt," according to a blog post by the Rust style team, "and subsequently need formatting added. Some of this work has fallen to the rustfmt team in recent years, but the rustfmt team would prefer to implement style determinations made by another team rather than making such determinations itself." The post also notes that the backwards compatibility maintained by rustfmt "also prevents evolving the Rust style to take community desires into account and improve formatting over time."rustfmt provides various configuration options to change its default formatting, and many of those options represent changes that many people in the community would like enabled by default... but [rustfmt] cannot make this the default without causing continuous integration failures in existing projects. We need a way to evolve the default Rust style compatibly, similar in spirit to the mechanisms we use for Rust editions: allowing existing style to continue working, and allowing people to opt into new style. To solve both of these problems, RFC 3309 has revived the Rust style team, with three goals: - Making determinations about styling for new Rust constructs- Evolving the existing Rust style- Defining mechanisms to evolve the Rust style while taking backwards compatibility into account We don't plan to make any earth-shattering style changes; the look and feel of Rust will remain largely the same. Evolutions to the default Rust style will largely consist of established rustfmt options people already widely enable, or would enable if they were stable. We expect that the initial work of the style team will focus on clearing a backlog of new language constructs that lack formatting guidance. Afterwards, we will look towards defining and implementing the mechanisms to evolve the default Rust style, and then begin introducing style improvements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was Florida's deadliest hurricane in 87 years, tied for the fifth-strongest hurricane to make landfall in the continental U.S. and killing more than 100 people after veering south into unexpected areas. But a Rutgers University health psychologist suggests other factors might've made Hurricane Ian more deadly:Ian also underwent rapid intensification, perhaps influenced by climate change, which meant that its wind speeds increased dramatically as it passed over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico before landfall. Emergency managers typically need at least 48 hours to successfully evacuate areas of southwest Florida. However, voluntary evacuation orders for Lee County were issued less than 48 hours prior to landfall, and for some areas were made mandatory just 24 hours before the storm came ashore. This was less than the amount of time outlined in Lee County's own emergency management plan. While the lack of sufficient time to evacuate was cited by some as a reason why they stayed behind, there are other factors that may also have suppressed evacuations in some of the hardest hit areas. In order to correctly follow evacuation orders, people need to first know their evacuation zone. Research from other areas of the country indicates that many people don't. That's why the evacuation zone locator websites in the affected counties were crucial. However, so many people were checking their zones that some of these websites crashed in the days before the storm. The article asks whether the early voluntary evacuation order "lulled some residents into being less concerned" and ultimately compounded problems. "In areas where evacuation orders were issued later, people who weren't expecting to evacuate needed to find and understand this evacuation zone information quickly...." "People need to know that they are in an area being asked to evacuate — and waiting until the storm is on its way to find out their zone may be too late. Emergency managers need to educate people in advance of imminent storms while also developing more robust websites to handle the queries in the days before the storm."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In the early 2000s, Americans who wanted to catch the local weather forecast at any time might turn on their TV and switch over to Weatherscan, a 24-hour computer-controlled weather forecast channel with a relaxing smooth jazz soundtrack. After 23 years, The Weather Channel announced that Weatherscan will be shutting down permanently on or before December 9. But a group of die-hard fans will not let it go quietly into the night. Launched in 1999, Weatherscan currently appears in a dwindling number of local American cable TV and satellite markets. It shows automated local weather information on a loop, generated by an Intellistar computer system installed locally for each market. Declining viewership and the ubiquity of smartphone weather apps are the primary reasons it's going offline. There are also technical issues with maintaining the hardware behind the service. "Weatherscan has been dying a slow death over the course of the last 10 years because the hardware is aging," says Mike Bates, a tech hobbyist who collects and restores Weather Channel computer hardware as part of a group of die-hard fans who follow insider news from the company. "It's 20 years old now, and more and more cable companies have been pulling the service." [...] Hobbyists like Bates (who goes by "techknight" on Twitter) have collected the hardware necessary to run their own Weatherscan stations out of their homes. Some have also created software that simulates the service in a browser. [...] However, getting Weatherscan to run locally was a team effort, primarily by friends named Ethan, Brian, and Jesse. One of the Intellistar computer models behind the service runs FreeBSD on a Pentium 4-based PC in a blue rack-mount enclosure. It includes an ATI card for generating the graphics and a proprietary PowerPC-based card that pulls it all together to make it broadcast-ready. To get Weatherscan working at home, the group of friends found decommissioned Intellistar units on eBay and used forensic tools to reconstruct data from the hard drives, piecing together a working version of the Weatherscan software from multiple sources. Since then, they have exhibited their work at shows like the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest last month.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Department of Energy has proposed regulations to financially reward cybersecurity modernization at power plants by offering rate deals for everything from buying new hardware to paying for outside help. The Register reports: In a notice of proposed rulemaking published earlier this week (which nullified a similar 2021 plan), the DoE said the time was right "to establish rules for incentive-based rate treatments" for utilities making investments in cybersecurity technology. The DoE said these included products and services, and information like plans, policies, procedures and other info related to cybersecurity tech. [...] In addition to stimulating voluntary security improvements, the proposed policy also encourages utilities to join cyber threat information sharing programs, and mandates regular reports for the duration of incentives. The DoE's proposal includes a long list of things it said would be eligible for incentive-based rate treatments. While it's too long to include here, the DoE's language about what it will allow means it could essentially include anything that could "materially improve cybersecurity," be that a product, service or info-sharing program. The DoE said that hardware incentives would have a five-year depreciation period, while activities would cease to be incentivized once they become mandatory. As for how the rewards would be applied, the proposal specifies two methods: A return on equity (RoE) of 200 base points (2 percent) that would be applied to transmission rates, and a cost-recovery deferral that would allow them to amortize equipment purchased and treated as a regulatory asset.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shortages of gas, which generated 40 per cent of UK electricity last year, could mean planned three-hour blackouts in some areas to protect supplies for heating homes and buildings, system operators warned. From a report: The margins between peak demand and power supply are expected to be sufficient and similar to recent years in the National Grid Electricity System Operator's (ESO) base case scenario for this winter. But in the face of the "challenging" winter facing European energy supplies following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the grid operator is also planning for what would happen if there were no imports of electricity from Europe and insufficient gas supplies. To tackle a loss of imports from France, Belgium and the Netherlands, there are two gigawatts of coal-fired power plants on stand-by to fire up if needed to meet demand. People are being encouraged to sign up with their electricity supplier for a scheme which will give them money back on their bills to shift their use of power away from times of high demand to help prevent blackouts. That could mean putting on the dishwasher or washing machine overnight or charging an EV at off-peak times. In addition, larger businesses will be paid for reducing demand, for example by shifting their times of energy use or switching to batteries or generators in peak times. The "demand flexibility service" will run from November to March, and it is expected to swing into action 12 times whatever happens to ensure people get rewarded for being part of the scheme - with additional use if needed to protect supplies. It is hoped it will deliver 2GW of power savings to balance supply and demand. Without the scheme, there might be days when it was cold and still â" creating high demand and low levels of wind power -- when there would be a potential need to interrupt supply to some customers for limited periods, National Grid ESO's winter outlook said. The ESO also warned that if there is not enough gas to keep the country's power stations going in January it could force distributors to cut off electricity to households and businesses for three-hour blocks during the day. It said the number of people left without electricity would depend on how many gas power stations would be forced to shut down because there is not enough gas. But this was the worst-case scenario that the grid operator presented. Its base case assumes that when Britain needs more electricity, cables that link the country to its European neighbors will be enough to keep the lights on. It does not assume that there is any "material reduction of consumer demand due to high energy prices."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an exclusive excerpt from William Shatner's new book, "Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder," the Star Trek actor reflects on his voyage into space on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space shuttle on Oct. 13, 2021. Then 90 years old, Shatner became the oldest living person to travel into space, but as the actor and author details below, he was surprised by his own reaction to the experience. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: I looked down and I could see the hole that our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. It was as if there was a wake trailing behind where we had just been, and just as soon as I'd noticed it, it disappeared. I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely all of that has thrilled me for years but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold... all I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her. Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong. I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things -- that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film "Contact," when Jodie Foster's character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, "They should've sent a poet." I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn't out there, it's down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound. It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna... things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral. I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the "Overview Effect" and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others. Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet's fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: "There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity." It can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart. In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware -- not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is rolling out support for third-party widget development and new video calling functions for Chat from Microsoft Teams in its latest developer build of Windows 11. The new features in Preview Build 25217 are available for folks enrolled in the Windows Insider program. The Verge reports: Now, developers can create and test widgets that can be added to the Windows 11 widgets panel. New third-party widgets can only be tested locally on the latest Insider Preview build for now, but can later appear in the Microsoft Store for the shipping version of their apps once the build is formally released to the public. Microsoft says that Widgets can only be created for packaged Win32 apps at this time, but support for Progressive Web App (PWA) Widgets is planned as part of Microsoft Edge 108. The Insider preview also includes a sneak peek (for a limited group of Insiders) at a new video calling experience for Chat from Microsoft Teams on Windows 11. When you open Chat from the taskbar, you'll soon be able to see a preview of your own video feed, allowing you to fix your appearance or spot any background issues before starting a call. Microsoft hopes to make this experience more broadly available in the coming months, but a 'small subset of users' will already have access to the feature as part of a sneak preview release. You can launch Chat from your Windows 11 taskbar yourself to check if you're one of the lucky few selected. The Insider Preview Build 25217 also contains a few other feature updates, including improved cloud suggestions and integrated search suggestions for Simplified Chinese, and some design changes to the Microsoft Store. Now, the store makes it clearer if a game is included as part of Game Pass to spare you from accidentally purchasing a game you may have free access to. The Game Pass library is also getting a performance boost and some more simplified options.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EU antitrust regulators are asking games developers whether Microsoft will be incentivized to block rivals' access to "Call of Duty" maker Activision Blizzard's best-selling games, according to an EU document seen by Reuters. From the report: EU antitrust regulators are due to make a preliminary decision by Nov. 8 on whether to clear Microsoft's proposed $69 billion acquisition of Activision. The EU competition enforcer also asked if Activision's trove of user data would give the U.S. software giant a competitive advantage in the development, publishing and distribution of computer and console games, the EU document shows. The planned acquisition, the biggest in the gaming industry, will help Microsoft better compete with leaders Tencent and Sony. After its decision next month the European Commission is expected to open a four-month long investigation, underscoring regulatory concerns about Big Tech acquisitions. Games developers, publishers and distributors were asked whether the deal would affect their bargaining power regarding the terms for selling console and PC games via Microsoft's Xbox and its cloud game streaming service Game Pass. Regulators also wanted to know if there would be sufficient alternative suppliers in the market following the deal and also in the event Microsoft decides to make Activision's games exclusively available on its Xbox, its Games Pass and its cloud game streaming services. They asked if such exclusivity clauses would reinforce Microsoft's Windows operating system versus rivals, and whether the addition of Activision to its PC operating system, cloud computing services and game-related software tools gives it an advantage in the video gaming industry. They asked how important the Call of Duty franchise is for distributors of console games, third-party multi-game subscription services on computers and providers of cloud game streaming services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arm might not think RISC-V is a threat to its newfound foothold in the datacenter, but growing pressure on Chinese chipmaking could ultimately change that, Forrester Research analyst Glenn O'Donnell tells The Register. From the report: Over the past few years the US has piled on export bans and trade restrictions on Chinese chipmakers in an effort to stall the country's semiconductor industry. This has included barring companies with ties to the Chinese military from purchasing x86 processors and AI kit from the likes of Intel, AMD, and Nvidia. "Because the US-China trade war restricts x86 sales to China, Chinese infrastructure vendors and cloud providers need to adapt to remain in business," O'Donnell said. "They initially pivoted to Arm, but trade restrictions exist there too. Chinese players are showing great interest in RISC-V." RISC-V provides China with a shortcut around the laborious prospect of developing their own architecture. "Coming up with a whole new architecture is nearly impossible," O'Donnell said. But "a design based on some architecture is very different from the architecture itself." So it should come as no surprise that the majority of RISC-V members are based in China, according to a report published last year. And the country's government-backed Chinese Academy of Sciences is actively developing open source RISC-V performance processors. Alibaba's T-Head, which is already deploying Arm server processors and smartNICs, is also exploring RISC-V-based platforms. But for now, they're largely limited to edge and IoT appliances. However, O'Donnell emphasizes that there is no technical reason that would prevent someone from developing a server-grade RISC-V chip. "Similar to Arm, many people dismiss RISC-V as underpowered for more demanding applications. They are wrong. Both are architectures, not specific designs. As such, one can design a powerful processor based on either architecture," he said. [...] One of the most attractive things about RISC-V over Softbank-owned Arm is the relatively low cost of building chips based on the tech, especially for highly commoditized use cases like embedded processors, O'Donnell explained. While nowhere as glamorous as something like a server CPU, embedded applications are one of RISC-V's first avenues into the datacenter. [...] These embedded applications are where O'Donnell expects RISC-V will see widespread adoption, including in the datacenter. Whether the open source ISA will rise to the level of Arm or x86 is another matter entirely.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the Italian city of Naples, some climate change solutions may be as ancient as the coastal outpost itself, according to researchers who are studying how the area's historic waterways could bring relief from extreme heat as the world warms. From a report: Architects and design students in Italy and the United States are collaborating on an initiative to map ancient aqueducts and water systems in Naples. Known as the Cool City Project, the goal is to assess how this existing infrastructure -- in some cases, centuries old and hidden underground -- could combat life-threatening heat waves in one of the most densely populated parts of Europe and one of the oldest cities in the world. "Naples is sometimes called the capital of the midday sun because of where it's located in the south of Italy," said Nick De Pace, an architect and professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. "It's a dense city in an area that is already dealing with geothermal heating. And then on top of that, you have climate change." [...] To start, the researchers are using laser-scanning technology to map Naples' extensive aqueduct system and underground canals. The idea is to examine if reviving these ancient waterways, or resurfacing them, could counter the urban heat island effect. "Daylighting portions of a canal could have a cooling effect in the summer, just like how you can feel a cooling effect from basements," De Pace said. "Then, you can also divert some of that water to new green spaces in the city where you have plants and other things to cool things down." Naples is a compelling place to test such ideas because the city already has a rich history with water, said Alexander Valentino, an architect and Cool City collaborator who is based in Naples.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the original decentralized-finance protocols that was set up to challenge the legacy banking system is moving $500 million into short-term US Treasuries and corporate bonds. From a report: MakerDAO, the so-called decentralized autonomous organization that supports the crypto stablecoin DAI, is shifting $500 million worth of the token to the fixed-income obligations, which have traditionally been havens for conventional investors during times of turmoil. The move aims to diversify MakerDAO's balance sheet, limit exposure to any one asset and expand revenue, according to a statement issued by the DAO on Thursday. The allocation of DAI will promote the usability of digital assets in the traditional space, extending DAI's influence beyond crypto, the statement said. The community behind MakerDAO, which was launched in 2015, agreed to put 80% of the fund in short-term Treasuries and 20% to investment-grade corporate bonds, after an initial vote was put in place in late June.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Twitter is seemingly working to remind people that interesting tweets are something you should click, load, and view while logged into the company's ad-funded service, not merely see in a screenshot. That's why some users are seeing a "Share Tweet?" pop-up whenever the Twitter app notices them taking a screenshot. Social media analyst Matt Navarra noted the two kinds of nudge prompts in a tweet: "Copy link" and "Share Tweet." TechCrunch noted that some of its staff members were receiving the prompt and pointed to another tweet in which Twitter provided both "Copy link" and "Share Tweet" buttons. Twitter makes money when people visit the site in a browser or load it in Twitter's official apps, then see sponsored tweets or pre-roll advertisements on native videos (users can also sign up for a Twitter Blue subscription). Screenshots, whether shared directly or on competing social platforms, don't create revenue. Engaging with Twitter itself could encourage people to sign up and do more of that. Twitter reported 237.8 million "average monetizable daily active usage" in Q2 2022, up 16.6 percent compared to the same quarter in 2021. The company claims this increase was driven by "ongoing product improvements" and "global conversation around current events." It makes sense why Twitter, the corporate entity, prefers tweet links to screenshots, enough so to A/B/C test a prompt that can make users feel like the Twitter app is both closely watching and scolding them. But for Twitter, the cultural entity, screenshots are enormously valuable, likely more so than links alone. If you've been engaging in Internet culture for years, you've seen why.Read more of this story at Slashdot.