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A new survey from investment bank Piper Sandler found that teens in the U.S. consume more videos on YouTube than Netflix. CNBC reports: Teens polled by the bank said they spent 29.1% of their daily video consumption time on Google-owned YouTube, beating out Netflix for the first time at 28.7%. Time on YouTube rose since the spring, adding nearly a percentage point, while Netflix fell more than two percentage points. The data point shows that the streaming business is getting more competitive, and highlights YouTube's strong position as a free provider of online video, especially among young people. "We wonder if this is a push or a pull in regards to the changing consumption habits, as content on YouTube appears to be improving over time and the streaming industry becomes more and more competitive," Piper Sandler analysts wrote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Croatian energy company has discovered an underwater lake of superheated water that meets all the requirements for the construction of a 16MW geothermal power plant. The Next Web reports: The find was the result of a two-year study by state-run power company Bukotermal that sought to find suitable sites for the exploitation of the energy source, generated by heat from the Earth's core. The research verified the presence of a geothermal water source at Lunjkovec -- Kutnjak field, located in the Varazdin County, close to the border with Hungary. The underground lake, located at a depth of 2.4 kilometers, has an average temperature of 142.03 degrees Celsius. To date, over 2.5 million euros has been invested in the project. However, according to Alen Pozgaj, CEO of Bukotermal, the total cost to build the plant would be around 50 million euros. The news comes just days after the Croatian Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development awarded five licenses for the exploration of geothermal waters to firms from Croatia, the United Kingdom, and Turkey. [...] For now, Bukotermal has a six-month timeframe to propose how it will exploit the newly discovered geothermal pool. The company plans to construct one or more geothermal power plants and heat utilization facilities at the site, with construction expected to start within two years time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: A world-first trial of a gene therapy to cure a form of deafness has begun, potentially heralding a revolution in the treatment of hearing loss. Up to 18 children from the UK, Spain and the US are being recruited to the study, which aims to transform treatment of auditory neuropathy, a condition caused by the disruption of nerve impulses traveling from the inner ear to the brain. Participants will be monitored for five years to gauge whether their hearing improves, with initial results expected to be published next February. Auditory neuropathy can be due to a variation in a single gene -- known as the OTOF gene -- which produces a protein called otoferlin. This protein typically allows the inner hair cells in the ear to communicate with the hearing nerve. Mutations in the OTOF gene can be identified by genetic testing. However, [Professor Manohar Bance, an ear surgeon at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust who is leading the trial in the UK] said it was a condition often missed when newborn babies were screened for potential hearing problems. "This is one of the few conditions where everything works except the transmission between the hair cells and the nerve. So everything else looks fine when you test it, but they can't hear anything. So these poor kids' [difficulties] end up being missed," Bance added. The new gene therapy aims to deliver a working copy of the faulty OTOF gene using a modified, non-pathogenic virus. It will be delivered via an injection into the cochlea under general anaesthetic. Bance estimates that about 20,000 people across the US and five European countries -- the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy -- have auditory neuropathy due to OTOF mutations, underlining the potential significance of a successful treatment.[...] "If it works, it's 'one and done'" but the cost to health systems "is something that worries me," he added, noting that gene therapies could be priced in "the million dollar range" per patient. However, he hoped that "economies of scale" as the technology developed further would ultimately allow them to be provided more cheaply.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shares a report from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC): CBC and Radio-Canada have announced they'll no longer carry the National Research Council (NRC) time signal. Monday marked the last time it was broadcast, ending the longest running segment on CBC Radio. In a statement, spokesperson Emma Iannetta described the signal as a "wonderful partnership," but confirmed it's being dropped. Given the range of CBC platforms from traditional over-the-air radio, to satellite and the internet, the long dash undergoes a range of delays by the time it's heard, leading to accuracy concerns from the NRC, she wrote. Iannetta added that nowadays most people use their phones to get the time, though many CBC listeners have a "fondness" for the signal. For many, the relationship with the time signal goes far beyond fondness. It's allowed sailors to set their instruments for navigation, kept railway companies running on time and helped Canadians stay punctual. In a 2019 interview with Day 6 on the occasion of the signal's 80th birthday, Laurence Wall, one of its current voices, reflected on its origin and importance. His memories include taxi drivers recognizing his voice from daily announcements and hearing from a young man living in Hong Kong who would stay up past midnight just to hear the time signal because it reminded him of home. Beyond emotional connections, the signal has a practical history too. Wall said when it started out, timekeeping was relatively primitive, with watches and clocks that needed to be regularly set in order to stay accurate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emilia David reports via The Verge: Adobe and other companies have established a symbol that can be attached to content alongside metadata, establishing its provenance, including whether it was made with AI tools. The symbol, which Adobe calls an "icon of transparency," can be added via Adobe's photo and video editing platforms like Photoshop or Premiere and eventually Microsoft's Bing Image Generator. It will be added to the metadata of images, videos, and PDFs to announce who owns and created the data. When viewers look at a photo online, they can hover over the mark, and it will open a dropdown that includes information about its ownership, the AI tool used to make it, and other details about the media's production. Adobe developed the symbol with other companies as part of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a group that looks to create technical standards to certify the source and provenance of content. (It uses the initials "CR," which confusingly stands for content CRedentials, to avoid being confused with the icon for Creative Commons.) Other members of the C2PA include Arm, Intel, Microsoft, and Truepic. C2PA owns the trademark for the symbol. Andy Parsons, senior director of Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative, tells The Verge that the symbol acts as a "nutrition label" of sorts, telling people the provenance of the media. The presence of the symbol is meant to encourage the tagging of AI-generated data, as Parsons said it creates more transparency into how content was created. While the small symbol is visible in the image, the information and the symbol are also embedded in the metadata, so it will not be Photoshopped out.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom Mitchelhill reports via CoinTelegraph: Crypto exchange FTX used hidden Python code to misrepresent the value of its insurance fund -- a pool of funds meant to prevent user losses during huge liquidation events -- according to testimony from FTX co-founder Gary Wang. In a damning testimony on Oct. 6, FTX's former chief technology officer, Gary Wang, said that FTX's so-called $100 million insurance fund in 2021 was fabricated and never contained any of the exchanges' FTX tokens (FTT) as claimed. Instead, the figure shown to the public was calculated by multiplying the daily trading volume of the FTX Token by a random number close to 7,500. When the prosecution surfaced the above tweet -- among other public statements of its value -- and asked Wang whether this amount was accurate, he replied with a single word: "No." "For one, there is no FTT in the insurance fund. It's just the USD number. And, two, the number listed here does not match what was in the database." An exhibit in the Oct. 6 trial shows the alleged code used to generate the size of the so-called "Backstop Fund" or public insurance fund. FTX's insurance fund was designed to protect user losses in case of huge, sudden market movements and its value was often touted on its website and social media. According to Wang's testimony, however, the amount contained within the fund was often insufficient to cover these losses. [...] In addition to revealing the allegedly fraudulent nature of FTX's insurance fund, Wang claimed that Bankman-Fried prompted him and Nishad Singh to implement an "allow_negative" balance feature in the code at FTX, which allowed Alameda Research to trade with near-unlimited liquidity on the crypto exchange.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: As part of its MAX conference, Adobe traditionally shows off some of its more forward-looking tech, which may or may not end up in its Creative Cloud apps at some point in the future. The idea here is to show what its engineers are working on; right now, as you can imagine, that's a lot of generative AI. With Firefly now being part of Photoshop and now also Illustrator, the next frontier here is video and unsurprisingly, that's where Adobe's most interesting "sneak" of this year comes in. Project Fast Fill is, at its core, the generative fill the company introduced in Photoshop, but for video. Project Fast Fill simply lets editors remove objects from a video or change backgrounds as if they were working with a still image, all with a simple text prompt. Users only have to do this once and the edit will then propagate to the rest of the scene. Adobe says this even works in very complex scenes with changing lighting conditions. Over the course of the last few months, we've seen an increase in AI-powered tools across video editors, including Adobe Premiere Pro competitors like Davinci Resolve. These typically start with voice recognition for captions and object recognition for masking, but generative fill may just be the kind of feature where Adobe has a major advantage, thanks to its work on building its own Firefly models.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX quietly published a new "Starlink Direct to Cell" webpage highlighting the company's forthcoming cell service for mobile phones. MobileSyrup reports: The new 'Starlink Direct to Cell' page boasts "seamless access to text, voice, and data for LTE phones across the globe" and notes that the company is targeting text capabilities in 2024, followed by voice and data capabilities in 2025. Internet of Things (IoT) support may also arrive in 2025. Starlink also advertises that the direct-to-cell system would work with "existing LTE phones wherever you can see the sky" and wouldn't require any changes to hardware, firmware, or special apps. The page also explains that Starlink Direct to Cell would use "an advanced eNodeB modem" that "acts like a cellphone tower in space." The system would allow network integration "similar to a standard roaming partner." Last year, SpaceX announced a partnership with T-Mobile, allowing users' mobile phones to connect directly with Starlink satellites in orbit. SpaceX said it was hoping to launch the service later this year but the company has been mum on the progress.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader Shakrai writes: T-Mobile, formerly known as the "Un-carrier", confirmed plans today to force customers on older/cheaper plans onto newer/more expensive ones. Astute observers of the cellular industry will surely recall the former CEO, John Legere, assuring customers that they would always be able to keep their existing plans and prices would never rise without their consent. They will also observe that this comes nearly three years to the day after T-Mobile merged with Sprint, with one of the conditions for that merger being they would not raise prices for three years. It's also worth noting that T-Mobile continues to buyback its shares, recently announced thousands of layoffs, and is now paying a dividend. T-Mobile tells CNET that users on its older plans will see "an increase of approximately $10 per line with the migration," starting with their November bill. Those who sign up for AutoPay can save $5 per line (on up to eight lines per account), the spokesperson noted. "The company adds that those who don't want to have their plan changed will be able to reverse the move, but they'll need to call T-Mobile's Customer Care support line to make that happen," reports CNET. "The carrier is giving users a period of time to call in and reverse the forced switch, but how long that period will be is unknown at this point. It's also unknown whether customers who go back will be able to stay on their older plans for good or if a reversal simply buys a little more time before they're again compelled to switch."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed SB 244, or the Right to Repair Act, into law, making it easier for owners to repair devices themselves or to take them to independent repair shops. Because California is one of the world's largest economies, this iFixit-cosponsored bill may make it easier for people all over the US to repair their devices. The law, which joins similar efforts in New York, Colorado, and Minnesota, is tougher than some of its predecessors. Manufacturers must make available appropriate tools, parts, software, and documentation for seven years after production for devices priced above $100. (Less expensive devices only have to have these materials available for three years.) [...] The bill is effective on electronics made and sold after July 1st, 2021. Though the bill is fairly sweeping, there are carve-outs for game consoles and alarm systems. Further reading: Cory Doctorow: Apple Sabotages Right-to-Repair Using 'Parts-Pairing' and the DMCARead more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have used the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR to create chickens that have some resistance to avian influenza, according to a new study that was published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday. From a report: The study suggests that genetic engineering could potentially be one tool for reducing the toll of bird flu, a group of viruses that pose grave dangers to both animals and humans. But the study also highlights the limitations and potential risks of the approach, scientists said. Some breakthrough infections still occurred, especially when gene-edited chickens were exposed to very high doses of the virus, the researchers found. And when the scientists edited just one chicken gene, the virus quickly adapted. The findings suggest that creating flu-resistant chickens will require editing multiple genes and that scientists will need to proceed carefully to avoid driving further evolution of the virus, the study's authors said. The research is "proof of concept that we can move toward making chickens resistant to the virus," Wendy Barclay, a virologist at Imperial College London and an author of the study, said at a news briefing. "But we're not there yet." Some scientists who were not involved in the research had a different takeaway. "It's an excellent study," said Dr. Carol Cardona, an expert on bird flu and avian health at the University of Minnesota. But to Dr. Cardona, the results illustrate how difficult it will be to engineer a chicken that can stay a step ahead of the flu, a virus known for its ability to evolve swiftly. "There's no such thing as an easy button for influenza," Dr. Cardona said. "It replicates quickly, and it adapts quickly."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft says Chinese state-backed hackers are exploiting a "critical"-rated zero-day vulnerability in Atlassian software to break into customer systems. From a report: The technology giant's threat intelligence team said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that it has observed a nation-state threat actor it calls Storm-0062 exploiting a recently disclosed critical flaw in Atlassian Confluence Data Center and Server. Microsoft has previously identified Storm-0062 as a China-based state-sponsored hacker. Microsoft said it observed in-the-wild abuse of the maximum rated 10.0 vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-22515, since September 14, some three weeks before Atlassian's public disclosure on October 4. A bug is considered a zero-day when the vendor -- in this case Atlassian -- has zero time to fix the bug before it is exploited. Atlassian updated its advisory this week to confirm it has "evidence to suggest that a known nation-state actor" is exploiting the bug, which the company says could allow a remote attacker to create unauthorized administrator accounts to access Confluence servers. Atlassian's Confluence is a widely popular collaborative wiki system used by corporations around the world to organize and share work.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Qualcomm's annual "Snapdragon Summit" is coming up later this month, and the company appears ready to share more about its long-planned next-generation Arm processor for PCs. ArsTechnica: The company hasn't shared many specifics yet, but yesterday we finally got a name: "Snapdragon X," which is coming in 2024, and it may finally do for Arm-powered Windows PCs what Apple Silicon chips did for Macs a few years ago (though it's coming a bit later than Qualcomm had initially hoped). Qualcomm has been making chips for PCs for years, most recently the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (you might also know it as the Microsoft SQ3, which is what the chip is called in Surface devices). But those chips have never quite been fast enough to challenge Intel's Core or AMD's Ryzen CPUs in mainstream laptops. Any performance deficit is especially noticeable because many people will run at least a few apps designed for the x86 version of Windows, code that needs to be translated on the fly for Arm processors. So why will Snapdragon X be any different? It's because these will be the first chips born of Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia in 2021. Nuvia was founded and staffed by quite a few key personnel from Apple's chipmaking operation, the team that had already upended a small corner of the x86 PC market by designing the Apple M1 and its offshoots. Apple had sued Nuvia co-founder and current Qualcomm engineering SVP Gerard Williams for poaching Apple employees, though the company dropped the suit without comment earlier this year. The most significant change from current Qualcomm chips will be a CPU architecture called Oryon, Qualcomm's first fully custom Arm CPU design since the original Kryo cores back in 2015. All subsequent versions of Kryo, from 2016 to now, have been tweaked versions of off-the-shelf Arm Cortex processors rather than fully custom designs. As we've seen in the M1 and M2, using a custom design with the same Arm instruction set gives chip designers the opportunity to boost performance for everyday workloads while still maintaining impressive power usage and battery life.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony Interactive Entertainment has announced plans to launch cloud streaming for PlayStation 5 this month. From a report: The feature, which will be available to PlayStation Plus Premium members, will receive a staggered rollout. Sony is targeting an October 17 launch for Japan, October 23 for Europe and October 30 for North America. "Select PS5 games will be available for streaming, and we're planning to have hundreds of PS5 titles to support this new benefit," said Hideaki Nishino, SIE's senior VP of platform experience. Supported titles will include Game Catalogue offerings like Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Horizon Forbidden West, Ghost of Tsushima, Mortal Kombat 11 and Saints Row IV. Some PS5 digital titles that players own will be available for streaming too including Resident Evil 4, Dead Island 2, Genshin Impact, Fall Guys and Fortnite. Game Trials for PS5 titles like Hogwarts Legacy, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and The Calisto Protocol will also be available. Sony said DLC and in-game purchases will be available for PS5 game streaming too.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: You could be entitled to a small chunk of a $16 million class action settlement against anime streaming service Crunchyroll. The Sony-owned company settled a data privacy lawsuit this week that will result in about $30 settlements for individuals impacted, according to firm behind the class action. The complaint, filed in September 2022, claims that Sony shared individual Crunchyroll viewing information with third-party sites without user's permission. That means Google or Facebook might have seen your anime watch history without your knowledge. It's a violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act, which makes it illegal to video streaming services to disclose personally identifiable information without the individual's consent. Crunchyroll denies wrongdoing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The jackpot from a seven-year mission to bring back bits of an asteroid was unveiled on Wednesday. From a report: NASA officials in Houston displayed images of salt-and-pepper chunks of rock and particles of dark space dust that were brought back to Earth from the asteroid, Bennu, and described initial scientific observations about the material. The mission, Osiris-Rex, concluded in September when a capsule full of asteroid was jettisoned through Earth's atmosphere and recovered in the Utah desert. The first pieces of materials that leaked outside the container were analyzed using a variety of laboratory techniques, revealing just the earliest findings. Scientists found water molecules trapped in clay minerals -- water from asteroids similar to Bennu could have filled Earth's oceans. "The reason that Earth is a habitable world, that we have oceans and lakes and rivers and rain, is because these clay minerals, like minerals, like the ones we're seeing from Bennu, landed on Earth four billion years ago," Dante Lauretta, the mission's principal investigator, said during a NASA event on Wednesday. The materials also contained sulfur, key for many geological transformations in rocks. "It determines how quickly things melt and it is also critical for biology," said Dr. Lauretta, who displayed microscopic images and 3-D visualizations of the material. The scientists also found magnetite, an iron oxide mineral that can play an important role as a catalyst in organic chemical reactions. "We're looking at the kinds of minerals that may have played a central role in the origin of life on Earth," Dr. Lauretta said. The samples are also chock-full of carbon, the element that is the building block for life.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Federal Trade Commission is proposing a new rule that it hopes will put an end to hidden junk fees that some businesses often add as a surprise when consumers are checking out. From a report: The agency is currently seeking public comment on the rule, known as the Trade Regulation Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, after having already collected 12,000 comments last year from individuals, businesses, law enforcement groups, and others on how deceptive fees affect them. FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement that "by hiding the total price, these junk fees make it harder for consumers to shop for the best product or service and punish businesses who are honest upfront." FTC adds that tackling junk fees through its nearly 100-year-old legal mandate that covers "unfair and deceptive acts or practices" is not enough. A new rule with more precise language can do a better job with specifics, the agency argues: "It is an unfair and deceptive practice and a violation of this part for any Business to offer, display, or advertise an amount a consumer may pay without Clearly and Conspicuously disclosing the Total Price."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US Space Force has temporarily banned the use of web-based generative AI tools and so-called large language models that power them, citing data security and other concerns, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday, citing a memo. From the report: The Sept. 29 memorandum, addressed to the Guardian Workforce, the term for Space Force members, pauses the use of any government data on web-based generative AI tools, which can create text, images or other media from simple prompts. The memo says they "are not authorized" for use on government systems unless specifically approved. Chatbots and tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT have exploded in popularity. They make use of language models that are trained on vast amounts of data to predict and generate new text. Such LLMs have given birth to an entire generation of AI tools that can, for example, search through troves of documents, pull out key details and present them as coherent reports in a variety of linguistic styles. Generative AI "will undoubtedly revolutionize our workforce and enhance Guardian's ability to operate at speed," Lisa Costa, Space Force's chief technology and innovation officer, said in the memo. But Costa also cited concerns over cybersecurity, data handling and procurement requirements, saying that the adoption of AI and LLMs needs to be "responsible."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Utah became the latest state Tuesday to file a lawsuit against TikTok, alleging the company is "baiting" children into addictive and unhealthy social media habits. From a report: TikTok lures children into hours of social media use, misrepresents the app's safety and deceptively portrays itself as independent of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, Utah claims in the lawsuit. "We will not stand by while these companies fail to take adequate, meaningful action to protect our children. We will prevail in holding social media companies accountable by any means necessary," Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit, which was filed in state court in Salt Lake City. Arkansas and Indiana have filed similar lawsuits while the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to decide whether state attempts to regulate social media platforms such as Facebook, X and TikTok violate the Constitution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hell freezes over and pigs fly south to their winter feeding grounds. Microsoft has published guidance on how to download and install Linux. From a report: The Seattle-area proprietary OS vendor has published a helpful guide entitled "How to download and install Linux," inspiring reactions from incredulity to amusement. In the humble opinion of The Reg FOSS Desk, it really isn't bad at all. Microsoft suggests four alternative installation methods: using Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, using a local VM, using a cloud VM, or on bare metal. It almost feels cruel to criticize it, but it seems that this really amounts to two methods. WSL version 2 is a VM. It's right there in the screenshots, where it says: Installing: Virtual Machine PlatformVirtual Machine Platform has been installed. So the choices boil down to either on the metal, or in a VM. That leaves only the question of what kind of VM: the built-in one, an add-on VM, or a cloud VM. Perhaps the subtext of the article is something more subtle. Could it be a tacit admission that you might need a free-of-charge OS for your PC? The Windows 10 upgrade program that began back in 2015 was meant to end a year later. In fact, it didn't. We described a documented workaround in 2016, but the free upgrades continued to work, even in 2020. Which? magazine reported it was still working in July 2023.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For months, Alphabet's Google and Discord have run an invitation-only chat for heavy users of Bard, Google's artificial intelligence-powered chatbot. Google product managers, designers and engineers are using the forum to openly debate the AI tool's effectiveness and utility, with some questioning whether the enormous resources going into development are worth it. From a report: "My rule of thumb is not to trust LLM output unless I can independently verify it," Dominik Rabiej, a senior product manager for Bard, wrote in the Discord chat in July, referring to large language models -- the AI systems trained on massive amounts of text that form the building blocks of chatbots like Bard and OpenAI's ChatGPT. "Would love to get it to a point that you can, but it isn't there yet." "The biggest challenge I'm still thinking of: what are LLMs truly useful for, in terms of helpfulness?" said Googler Cathy Pearl, a user experience lead for Bard, in August. "Like really making a difference. TBD!" [...] Two participants on Google's Bard community on chat platform Discord shared details of discussions in the server with Bloomberg from July to October. Dozens of messages reviewed by Bloomberg provide a unique window into how Bard is being used and critiqued by those who know it best, and show that even the company leaders tasked with developing the chatbot feel conflicted about the tool's potential. Expounding on his answer about "not trusting" responses generated by large language models, Rabiej suggested limiting people's use of Bard to "creative / brainstorming applications." Using Bard for coding was a good option too, Rabiej said, "since you inevitably verify if the code works!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe has developed an experimental AI-powered upscaling tool that greatly improves the quality of low-resolution GIFs and video footage. From a report: This isn't a fully-fledged app or feature yet, and it's not yet available for beta testing, but if the demonstrations seen by The Verge are anything to go by then it has some serious potential. Adobe's "Project Res-Up" uses diffusion-based upsampling technology (a class of generative AI that generates new data based on the data it's trained on) to increase video resolution while simultaneously improving sharpness and detail. In a side-by-side comparison that shows how the tool can upscale video resolution, Adobe took a clip from The Red House (1947) and upscaled it from 480 x 360 to 1280 x 960, increasing the total pixel count by 675 percent. The resulting footage was much sharper, with the AI removing most of the blurriness and even adding in new details like hair strands and highlights. The results still carried a slightly unnatural look (as many AI video and images do) but given the low initial video quality, it's still an impressive leap compared to the upscaling on Nvidia's TV Shield or Microsoft's Video Super Resolution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A California judge has thrown out a $32.5 million verdict win for Sonos against Google after two of Sonos' patents were deemed unenforceable and invalid. As a result, Google has started to re-introduce software features it had removed due to Sonos' lawsuit. In a decision dated October 6, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said that Sonos had wrongfully linked its patent applications for multi-room audio technology to a 2006 application in order to make them appear older and claim that its inventions came before Google's products, as first reported by Reuters. "Sonos filed the provisional application from which the patents in suit claim priority in 2006, but it did not file the applications for these patents and present the asserted claims for examination until 2019," the decision (PDF) reads. "By the time these patents issued in 2019 and 2020, the industry had already marched on and put the claimed invention into practice. In fact, in 2014, five years before Sonos filed the applications and presented the claims, accused infringer Google LLC shared with Sonos a plan for a product that would practice what would become the claimed invention." The decision states that the two companies were exploring a potential collaboration, but that it never materialized. Alsup goes on to note that Google began introducing its own products that featured multi-room audio technology in 2015, and also that Sonos waited until 2019 to pursue claims on the invention. "This was not a case of an inventor leading the industry to something new," Alsup wrote. "This was a case of the industry leading with something new and, only then, an inventor coming out of the woodwork to say that he had come up with the idea first - wringing fresh claims to read on a competitor's products from an ancient application." "We recently made a change to speaker groups for Nest speakers, displays, and Chromecast where certain devices can only belong to one speaker group at a time in the Google Home app," the company wrote in a blog post. "A federal judge has found that two patents that Sonos accused our devices of infringing are invalid. In light of this legal decision we're happy to share that we will be rolling back this change."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom Singleton reports via the BBC: A man got so fed up with foxes and badgers fouling in his garden that he adapted cameras to help repel them. James Milward linked the Ring cameras at his Surrey home to a device that emits high frequency sounds. He then trained the system using hundreds of images of the nocturnal nuisances so it learned to trigger the noise when it spotted them. Mr Milward said it "sounds crazy" but the gadget he called the Furbinator 3000 has kept his garden clean. Getting the camera system to understand what it was looking at was not straightforward though. "At first it recognised the badger as an umbrella," he said. "I did some fine tuning and it came out as a sink, or a bear if I was lucky. Pretty much a spectacular failure." He fed in pictures of the animals through an artificial intelligence process called machine learning and finally, the device worked. The camera spotted a badger, and the high frequency sound went off to send the unwanted night-time visitor on its way and leave the garden clean for Mr Milward's children to play in. The code for the Furbinator 3000 is open source, with detailed instructions available in Milward's Medium post.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amanda Hoover reports via Wired: As few as 2 percent of New York City's previous 22,000 short-term rentals on Airbnb have been registered with the city since a new law banning most listings came into effect in early September. But many illegal short-term rental listings are now being advertised on social media and lesser known platforms, with some still seemingly being listed on Airbnb itself. The number of short-term listings on Airbnb has fallen by more than 80 percent, from 22,434 in August to just 3,227 by October 1, according to Inside Airbnb, a watchdog group that tracks the booking platform. But just 417 properties have been registered with the city, suggesting that very few of the city's short-term rentals have been able to get permission to continue operating. The crackdown in New York has created a "black market" for short-term rentals in the city, claims Lisa Grossman, a spokesperson for Restore Homeowner Autonomy and Rights (RHOAR), a local group that opposed the law. Grossman says she's seen the short-term rental market pick up steam on places like Facebook since the ban. "People are going underground," she says. New York's crackdown on short-term rentals has dramatically reshaped the vacation rental market in the city. People are using sites like Craigslist, Facebook, Houfy, and others, where they can search for guests or places to book without the checks and balances of booking platforms like Airbnb. Hotel prices are expected to rise with more demand. After the rule change, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the company would be shifting attention away from New York, which was once its biggest market. "I was always hopeful that New York City would lead the way -- that we would find a solution in New York, and people would say, 'If they can make it in New York, they can make it anywhere,'" Chesky said during an event in September. "I think, unfortunately, New York is no longer leading the way -- it's probably a cautionary tale."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Major corporations like Apple and Disney will be forced to disclose their carbon emissions under a new Californian law approved on Monday. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill -- passed by the state legislature -- requiring companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to report greenhouse gas emissions. Similar efforts are moving slowly at the federal level. Mr Newsom praised the law's aims, but questioned how it will be carried out. "This important policy, once again, demonstrates California's continued leadership with bold responses to the climate crisis," Mr Newsom wrote in a signing statement. "However, the implementation deadlines in this bill are likely infeasible." He added that he is "concerned about the overall financial impact of this bill on businesses." The California Air Resources Board must put a system in place for reporting emissions by January 1, 2025, a little more than a year from now, under the law.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: Microsoft has stopped developing VBScript after a 27-year relationship and plans to remove the scripting language entirely in a future Windows release. The Windows biz said on Monday that VBScript, short for Visual Basic Scripting Edition, has been deprecated in an update to its list of "Deprecated features for Windows client." "VBScript is being deprecated," Microsoft said. "In future releases of Windows, VBScript will be available as a feature on demand before its removal from the operating system." VBScript debuted in 1996 and its most recent release, version 5.8, dates back to 2010. It is a scripting language, and was for a while widely used among system administrators to automate tasks until it was eclipsed by PowerShell, which debuted in 2006. "Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition brings active scripting to a wide variety of environments, including Web client scripting in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Web server scripting in Microsoft Internet Information Service," Redmond explains in its help documentation. Unfortunately, Microsoft never managed to get other browser makers to support VBScript, so outside of Microsoft-exclusive environments, web developers tended to favor JavaScript for client-side tasks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andrew Tarantola reports vai Engadget: Just seven months after its beta debut, Adobe's Firefly generative AI is set to receive a trio of new models as well as more than 100 new features and capabilities, company executives announced at the Adobe Max 2023 event on Tuesday. The Firefly Image 2 model promises higher fidelity generated images and more granular controls for users and the Vector model will allow graphic designers to rapidly generate vector images, a first for the industry. The Design model for generating print and online advertising layouts offers another first: text-to-template generation. Firefly Image 2 is the updated version of the existing text-to-image system. Like its predecessor, this one is trained exclusively on licensed and public domain content to ensure that its output images are safe for commercial use. It also accommodates text prompts in any of 100 languages. Adobe's AI already works across modalities, from still images, video and audio to design elements and font effects. As of Tuesday, it also generates vector art thanks to the new Firefly Vector model. Currently available in beta, this new model will also offer Generative Match, which will recreate a given artistic style in its output images. This will enable users to stay within bounds of the brand's guidelines, quickly spin up new designs using existing images and their aesthetics, as well as seamless, tileable fill patterns and vector gradients. The final, Design model, is geared heavily towards advertising and marketing professionals for use in generating print and online copy templates using Adobe Express. Users will be able to generate images in Firefly then port them to express for use in a layout generated from the user's natural language prompt. Those templates can be generated in any of the popular aspect ratios and are fully editable through conventional digital methods. The Firefly web application will also receive three new features: Generative Match, as above, for maintaining consistent design aesthetics across images and assets. Photo Settings will generate more photorealistic images (think: visible, defined pores) as well as enable users to tweak images using photography metrics like depth of field, blur and field of view. The system's depictions of plant foliage will reportedly also improve under this setting. Prompt Guidance will even rewrite whatever hackneyed prose you came up with into something it can actually work from, reducing the need for the wholesale re-generation of prompted images.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A set of merge requests were opened to drop X.ORG (X11) from GNOME desktop," writes Slashdot reader motang. Phoronix reports: This merge request would remove the X11 session targets within gnome-session: "This is the first step towards deprecating the x11 session, the systemd targets are removed, but the x11 functionality is still there in so you can restore the x11 session by installing the targets in the appropriate place on your own. X11 has been receiving less and less testing. We have been defaulting to the wayland session since 2016 and it's about time we drop the x11 session completely. Let's remove the targets this cycle and maybe carry on with removing rest of the x11 session code next cycle." That was followed by this merge request that would land later on -- more than likely, one cycle later -- for actually removing the X11 session code. Dropping that code would lighten up gnome-session by 3.6k lines of code directly.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Here's how your computer should work, according to Mustafa Abdelhai, the co-founder and CEO of a startup called Deta. Instead of a big empty screen full of icons, your desktop should be an infinite canvas on which you can take notes or watch movies or run full apps just by drawing a rectangle on the screen. Instead of logging in to a bunch of cloud services over which you ultimately have no control, you should be able to download software like PC users did 20 years ago, and the stuff you download should be completely yours. All your apps should talk to each other, so you can move data between them or even use multiple apps' features simultaneously. You should be able to use AI to accomplish almost anything. And it should all happen in a browser tab. For the last couple of years, the Berlin-based Deta has been building what it calls "the personal cloud computer." The product Deta is launching today is called Space OS, and the way Abdelhai explains it, it's the first step in putting the personal back in the personal computer. "Personal computing took a dive at the turn of the century," he says, "when cloud computing became the big thing. We all moved to the cloud, moved our data, and we don't own it anymore. It's just somebody else's computer." Deta wants to give it back. [...] Deta's idea is both a very new one and a very old one. It harkens back to the early days of computers when you bought software in a box at a store and installed it on your computer. The cloud era, of course, made computing vastly easier and more powerful but also systematically ate away at the idea that you could control anything on your devices. It's an interesting thought experiment, actually: if every cloud service shut down tomorrow, what would be left on your phone or your laptop? Odds are, not much. Deta's trying to undo that a bit, to embrace the cloud and the expansive universe of apps while giving you back the feeling that your computer -- and everything on it -- is yours and no one else's. Because your computer should be yours -- even if it's on somebody's server.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to analyst forecasts, Samsung Electronics is expected to report a nearly 80% plunge in earnings in the third quarter. CNBC reports: The South Korean technology giant will issue earnings guidance on Wednesday. Analysts polled by LSEG expect operating profit of 2.3 trillion Korean won ($1.7 billion) for the September quarter, a 78.7% year-on-year decline. Revenue is expected to come in at 67.8 trillion won, a fall of 11.6%, according to LSEG consensus forecasts. Samsung's semiconductor business -- typically the company's cash cow -- is expected to post a more than 3 trillion won loss for the third quarter, according to analyst forecasts, as it continues to face headwinds. Memory chip prices have fallen dramatically this year due to a glut caused by oversupply and low demand for end products like smartphones and laptops. This has hit Samsung's profits hard. In its last earnings reports in July, the company predicted a pick-up in demand for chips in the second half of the year, although this does not appear to be playing out as fast as many had hoped. The tech giant has cut production in a bid to help shore up prices, though the effect is not likely to be seen in the third-quarter results. Daiwa Capital Markets said in a note earlier this month that it expects Samsung earnings to miss consensus estimates "due to the higher cost burden from the memory production cut and ongoing soft demand" for its chip manufacturing unit, known as the foundry business. Daiwa analyst SK Kim sees operating profit for the third quarter at 1.65 trillion won, much lower than the average analyst estimate of 2.3 trillion won.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Waymo is significantly expanding its robotaxi service in San Francisco. According to The Verge, the company's driverless ridehail operations will now be available to tens of thousands of people across 47 square miles of the city. From the report: To be sure, Waymo's service isn't yet available to anyone who downloads the Waymo app and wants to ride. The Alphabet-owned company is in the process of onboarding riders from its waitlist, which it expects to complete in short order. "This territory expansion applies to those riders who currently have access to our service and all those to be added from the waitlist in the near future," Waymo spokesperson Christopher Bonelli said in an email. "We are still seeing very strong demand, so we want to scale responsibly to maintain service quality and good user experience." Growing the number of people who want to pay Waymo for trips is incredibly important for the company, which spent at least $1.1 billion on autonomous vehicles between 2009 and 2015 -- a figure that has assuredly grown exponentially in the proceeding years. Waymo will need to increase its revenue significantly if it hopes to turn autonomous vehicles into the profitable business that tech prognosticators have been promising for years. [The company needs more paying customers as it seeks to increase revenue so it can afford to expand to new cities like Los Angeles.]Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facebook may have to overhaul its entire ad-targeting system after a California court ruled (PDF) last month that the platform's practice of routinely targeting ads by age, gender, and other protected categories violates a state anti-discrimination law. The decision came after a 48-year-old Facebook user, Samantha Liapes, fought for years to prove that Facebook had discriminated against her as an older woman using the platform's ad-targeting system to shop for life insurance policies. Liapes filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook in 2020. In her complaint, Liapes alleged that "Facebook requires all advertisers to choose the age and gender of its users who will receive ads, and companies offering insurance products routinely tell it to not send their ads to women or older people." Further, she alleged that Facebook's ad-delivery algorithm magnifies the problem by using these required inputs to serve the ads to "lookalike audiences." Through its algorithm, Liapes alleged that she found that Facebook "discriminates against women and older people," by intentionally excluding them from seeing certain life insurance ads. This, Liapes alleged, caused harm by preventing her from signing up for deals that "often change and may expire" -- deals which she said were disproportionately being advertised on Facebook to younger and/or male audiences. As evidence, Liapes pointed to ads that Facebook did not serve to her -- allegedly because advertisers used the platform's Audience Selection and Lookalike Audience tools to exclude her -- as an older woman [...]. "As a result, she had a harder time learning about those products or services," Liapes' complaint alleged. [...] Initially, a court agreed with Facebook's arguments that Liapes had not provided sufficient evidence establishing Facebook's intent or demonstrating harms caused, but rather than amend her complaint, Liapes appealed. Then, in what tech law expert Eric Goldman on his blog called a "shocking conclusion," a California court last month reversed that initial decision, finding instead that Facebook's ad-targeting tools are not neutral, discriminate against users by age and gender, and are not immune under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Goldman -- who joked that Liapes wanting more Facebook ads is "a desire shared by almost no one" -- said that the potential impact of this ruling goes beyond possibly shaking up Facebook's ad system. It also seemingly implicates every other ad network by finding that "any gender- or age-based ad targeting for any product or service (and targeting based on any other protected characteristics) could violate the Unruh Act." If the ruling is upheld, that could "have devastating effects on the entire Internet ecosystem," Goldman warned. "The court's single-minded determination to find a valid discrimination claim under these conditions casts a long and troubling shadow over the online advertising industry," Goldman wrote in his blog. "Who needs new privacy laws if the Unruh Act already bans most ad targeting?" "The opinion never expressly says that the Unruh Act regulates ad targeting," Goldman told Ars. "It takes some reading between the lines to reach that conclusion."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: StorageReview went through the remarkable journey of testing a $3 SSD from AliExpress. The Goldenfir-brand SSD was reportedly given to the storage site by one of its Discord users for testing. The good news is that Goldenfir is actually using an SSD controller for its NAND drive. The controller is a Yeestor YS9083XT, which the Chinese company announced as a SATA3.2 controller in 2019. [...] StorageReview tested the drive by putting it into a Lenovo SR635 1U server with an AMD Epyc 7742 processor and 512GB of DDR4-3200 RAM. StorageReview also decided to, admittedly "unfairly," put it up against Kingston's DC600M entry-level enterprise SATA drive. You can guess what happens next. With a 64GB file and the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, StorageReview reported that the "Kingston drive finished the entire test before this piece of turd [the $3 drive] could even build its test." With the VDBench workload benchmark filling up the entire drive, the $3 drive hit a wall at around 15,500 IOPS when running the 4K random read test, compared to the Kingston drive's approximately 80,000. The cheap SSD ultimately finished the test at 13,000 IOPS and 10,225 ms, compared to the Kingston's 78,000 IOPS and 1,630 ms.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Climate breakdown is already changing the taste and quality of beer, scientists have warned. From a report: The quantity and quality of hops, a key ingredient in most beers, is being affected by global heating, according to a study. As a result, beer may become more expensive and manufacturers will have to adapt their brewing methods. Researchers forecast that hop yields in European growing regions will fall by 4-18% by 2050 if farmers do not adapt to hotter and drier weather, while the content of alpha acids in the hops, which gives beers their distinctive taste and smell, will fall by 20-31%. "Beer drinkers will definitely see the climate change, either in the price tag or the quality," said Miroslav Trnka, a scientist at the Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and co-author of the study, published in the journal Nature Communications. "That seems to be inevitable from our data." Beer, the third-most popular drink in the world after water and tea, is made by fermenting malted grains like barley with yeast. It is usually flavoured with aromatic hops grown mostly in the middle latitudes that are sensitive to changes in light, heat and water. Climate-induced decline in the quality and quantity of European hops calls for immediate adaptation measures (Nature).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Damage to an undersea gas pipeline and telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia appears to have been caused by "external activity," Finnish officials said Tuesday, adding that authorities were investigating. From a report: Finnish and Estonian gas system operators on Sunday said they noted an unusual drop in pressure in the Balticconnector pipeline after which they shut down the gas flow. The Finnish government on Tuesday said there was damage both to the gas pipeline and to a telecommunications cable between the two NATO countries. Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, Prime Minister Petteri Orpo stopped short of calling the pipeline leak sabotage, but said it could not have been caused by regular operations. "According to a preliminary assessment, the observed damage could not have occurred as a result of normal use of the pipe or pressure fluctuations. It is likely that the damage is the result of external activity," Orpo said. Finland's National Bureau of Investigation was leading an investigation into the leak, Orpo said, adding that the leak occurred in Finland's economic zone.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony announced new PlayStation 5 models that will likely be unofficially called the "PS5 Slim." From a report: The new model has the same horsepower on the inside, but it has a smaller form factor with an attachable disc drive and a 1TB SSD. The new model's detachable drive means you can buy the Digital Edition and change your mind later, essentially adding the drive as an $80 modular accessory. [...] Sony says the new PS5 has 30 percent lower volume, and its weight is 18 percent and 24 percent lighter than the original. The model with the disc drive will cost $500.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Adobe on Tuesday said it is rolling out new image-generation technology that can draw inspiration from an uploaded image and match its style, in its latest push to compete with startups challenging its core business. From a report: Image-generating technology from firms like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have threatened Adobe's customer base of creative professionals who use its tools like Photoshop. The San Jose, California-based company has responded by aggressively developing its own version of the technology and injecting it into its software programs. Adobe, which has promised its customers that generated images will be safe from legal challenges, said those customers have used the tools to generate three billion images, a billion of them in the last month alone. The new generation of tools announced on Tuesday will include a feature called "Generative Match". Like Adobe's earlier tool, it will allow users to generate an image from a few words of text. But it will also allow users to upload as few as 10 to 20 images to use as a basis for the generated images. Ely Greenfield, Adobe's chief technology officer for digital media, said the company aims to let big brands upload a handful of photos of a product or character and then use generative technology to automatically make hundreds or thousands of images for various needs like websites, social media campaigns and print advertisements.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Valve says it has no plans for a macOS version of the recently released game Counter-Strike 2, the follow-up title replacing the hugely popular FPS Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. From a report: Valve confirmed its decision and gave its reasons in a newly published Steam support FAQ: "As technology advances, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue support for older hardware, including DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems. Similarly, we will no longer support macOS. Combined, these represented less than one percent of active CS:GO players. Moving forward, Counter-Strike 2 will exclusively support 64-bit Windows and Linux."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The chief executive of RISC-V International says that possible government restrictions on the open-source technology will slow down the development of new and better chips, holding back the global technology industry. From a report: The comments come after Reuters last week reported that a growing group of U.S. lawmakers are calling on the Biden administration to impose export control restrictions around RISC-V, the open-source technology overseen by the RISC-V International nonprofit foundation. RISC-V technology can be used as an ingredient to create chips for smartphones or artificial intelligence. Major U.S. firms such as Qualcomm and Alphabet's Google have embraced RISC-V, but so too have Chinese firms such as Huawei, which the U.S. lawmakers argue constitutes a national security concern. In a blog post, Calista Redmond, chief of RISC-V International, which coordinates work among companies on the technology, said RISC-V is no different than other open technology standards like Ethernet, which helps computers on the internet talk with each other. "Contemplated actions by governments for an unprecedented restriction in open standards will have the consequence of diminished access to the global marketplace of products, solutions, and talent," Redmond wrote. "Bifurcating on the standards level would lead to a world of incompatible solutions that duplicate effort and close off markets."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Members of the vintage Mac community are in desperate need of a new supply of a specific, discontinued dongle that has become increasingly rare and extremely expensive on the secondary market. From a report: "Bring Back the Belkin F2E9142-WHT ADC to DVI Cable for Vintage Apple Macs!," a change.org petition created this week by vintage Mac enthusiast Grant Woodward reads. "I am deeply concerned about the discontinuation of the Belkin F2E9142-WHT ADC to DVI cable. This essential piece of technology has become increasingly rare and difficult to find since it went out of production," the petition reads. "For those unfamiliar with its significance, this cable allows vintage Apple Macintosh computers to connect with more recent monitors, breathing new life into these iconic machines. It is an invaluable tool for restoring, collecting, and preserving these pieces of computing history." As Woodward notes, the adapter in question allows an older generation of Power Mac G3 and G4 from the early 2000s to connect to newer monitors.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wiredmikey writes: A zero-day vulnerability named 'HTTP/2 Rapid Reset' has been exploited by malicious actors to launch the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in internet history. One of the attacks seen by Cloudflare was three times larger than the record-breaking 71 million requests per second (RPS) attack reported by company in February. Specifically, the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset DDoS campaign peaked at 201 million RPS, while Google's observed a DDoS attack that peaked at 398 million RPS. The new attack method abuses an HTTP/2 feature called 'stream cancellation', by repeatedly sending a request and immediately canceling it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Business interest in AI PCs is fizzing, at least according to IDC, even though the analyst admits "use cases have yet to be fully articulated." From a report: Such is the hype around generative AI since ChatGPT was made publicly available that big software and hardware brands are looking to shoe horn the tech into every nook and cranny. Just last week HP boss Enrique Lores and Lenovo exec Luca Rossi joined in by confirming both companies are working on a range of AI PCs for general availability between July next year and early 2025. Neither went into fine technical detail on what those machines will have inside because they aren't close to release. IDC research veep for Devices & Displays, Linn Huang, didn't pour any cold water on the hype this week when he said: "Generative AI could be a watershed moment for the PC industry. While uses cases have yet to be fully articulated, interest in the category is already strong. AI PCs promise organizations the ability to personalize the user experience at a deeper level all while being able to preserve data privacy and sovereignty." That's quite a billing. HP and Lenovo certainly seem to think there's margin potential. Huang agreed. "As more of these devices launch next year, we expect a significant boost to overall selling prices."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union will do all it can to halt fossil fuel use as part of its "ambitious" position at the upcoming COP28 climate summit despite some differences among EU countries, the bloc's new climate chief Wopke Hoekstra said on Monday. From a report: "Our ambition is indeed to do as much as possible, also in terms of driving out fossil fuels," Hoekstra told journalists after a meeting with Spain's acting Energy Minister Teresa Ribera. The European Union's own green agenda is facing growing political resistance from governments and lawmakers concerned about the cost of the proposals for voters. European Parliament elections will be held next year as citizens throughout the bloc are facing cost of living pressures. "Our goal will be one of ambition for the COP, from every single aspect: mitigation, adaptation, renewables," Hoekstra said, even though "if you zoom out and look at the 27 member states, you might see differences." Hoekstra declined to give details on the EU negotiating mandate for the COP28. "In our view there is no alternative to driving out fossil fuel asap," he said. "The saying is that it takes two to tango. In this case, it takes almost 200."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has announced that passkeys, touted by the tech giant as the "beginning of the end" for passwords, are becoming the default sign-in method for all users. From a report: Passkeys are a phishing-resistant alternative to passwords that allow users to sign into accounts using the same biometrics or PINs they use to unlock their devices, or with a physical security key. This removes the need for users to rely on the traditional username-password combination, which has long been susceptible to phishing, credential stuffing attacks, keylogger malware, or simply being forgotten. While security technologies multi-factor authentication and password managers add an extra layer of security to password-protected accounts, they are not without flaws. Authentication codes sent via text messages can be intercepted by attackers, for example, and password managers can (and have been) hacked.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: An audio clip posted to social media on Sunday, purporting to show Britain's opposition leader Keir Starmer verbally abusing his staff, has been debunked as being AI-generated by private-sector and British government analysis. The audio of Keir Starmer was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by a pseudonymous account on Sunday morning, the opening day of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. The account asserted that the clip, which has now been viewed more than 1.4 million times, was genuine, and that its authenticity had been corroborated by a sound engineer. Ben Colman, the co-founder and CEO of Reality Defender -- a deepfake detection business -- disputed this assessment when contacted by Recorded Future News: "We found the audio to be 75% likely manipulated based on a copy of a copy that's been going around (a transcoding). As we don't have the ground truth, we give a probability score (in this case 75%) and never a definitive score ('this is fake' or 'this is real'), leaning much more towards 'this is likely manipulated' than not," said Colman. "It is also our opinion that the creator of this file added background noise to attempt evasion of detection, but our system accounts for this as well," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A physicist from the University of Portsmouth has explored whether a new law of physics could support the theory that we're living in a computer simulation. Phys.Org reports: Dr. Melvin Vopson has previously published research suggesting that information has mass and that all elementary particles -- the smallest known building blocks of the universe -- store information about themselves, similar to the way humans have DNA. In 2022, he discovered a new law of physics that could predict genetic mutations in organisms, including viruses, and help judge their potential consequences. It is based on the second law of thermodynamics, which establishes that entropy -- a measure of disorder in an isolated system -- can only increase or stay the same. Dr. Vopson had expected that the entropy in information systems would also increase over time, but on examining the evolution of these systems he realized it remains constant or decreases. That's when he established the second law of information dynamics, or infodynamics, which could significantly impact genetics research and evolution theory. A new paper, published in AIP Advances, examines the scientific implications of the new law on a number of other physical systems and environments, including biological, atomic physics, and cosmology. Key findings include: - Biological systems: The second law of infodynamics challenges the conventional understanding of genetic mutations, suggesting that they follow a pattern governed by information entropy. This discovery has profound implications for fields such as genetic research, evolutionary biology, genetic therapies, pharmacology, virology, and pandemic monitoring.- Atomic physics: The paper explains the behavior of electrons in multi-electron atoms, providing insights into phenomena like Hund's rule; which states that the term with maximum multiplicity lies lowest in energy. Electrons arrange themselves in a way that minimizes their information entropy, shedding light on atomic physics and stability of chemicals.- Cosmology: The second law of infodynamics is shown to be a cosmological necessity, with thermodynamic considerations applied to an adiabatically expanding universe supporting its validity. "The paper also provides an explanation for the prevalence of symmetry in the universe," added Dr. Vopson. "Symmetry principles play an important role with respect to the laws of nature, but until now there has been little explanation as to why that could be. My findings demonstrate that high symmetry corresponds to the lowest information entropy state, potentially explaining nature's inclination towards it." "This approach, where excess information is removed, resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing waste code to save storage space and optimize power consumption. And as a result supports the idea that we're living in a simulation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal regulators have issued a preliminary "yellow" warning to Dominion Energy after cracks were discovered again in a backup emergency fuel line at their South Carolina nuclear plant. ABC News reports: Small cracks have been found a half-dozen times in the past 20 years in pipes that carry fuel to emergency generators that provide cooling water for a reactor if electricity fails at the V.C. Summer plant near Columbia, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It is the second most serious category and only seven similar warnings have been issued across the country since 2009, nuclear power expert David Lochbaum told The State newspaper after reviewing records from federal regulators. A crack first appeared on a diesel fuel pipe in 2003, and similar pipes have had other cracks since then. During a 24-hour test of the system in November, a small diesel fuel leak grew larger, according to NRC records. The agency issued the preliminary yellow warning because of the repeated problems.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Many electric utilities are putting up lots of new power lines as they rely more on renewable energy and try to make grids more resilient in bad weather. But a Vermont utility is proposing a very different approach: It wants to install batteries at most homes to make sure its customers never go without electricity. The company, Green Mountain Power, proposed buying batteries, burying power lines and strengthening overhead cables in a filing with state regulators on Monday. It said its plan would be cheaper than building a lot of new lines and power plants. The plan is a big departure from how U.S. utilities normally do business. Most of them make money by building and operating power lines that deliver electricity from natural gas power plants or wind and solar farms to homes and businesses. Green Mountain - a relatively small utility serving 270,000 homes and businesses -- would still use that infrastructure but build less of it by investing in television-size batteries that homeowners usually buy on their own. "Call us the un-utility," Mari McClure, Green Mountain's chief executive, said in an interview before the company's filing. "We're completely flipping the model, decentralizing it." Green Mountain's plan builds on a program it has run since 2015 to lease Tesla home batteries to customers. Its filing asks the Vermont Public Utility Commission to authorize it to initially spend $280 million to strengthen its grid and buy batteries, which will come from various manufacturers. The company expects to invest an estimated $1.5 billion over the next seven years -- money that it would recoup through electricity rates. The utility said the investment was justified by the growing sum it had to spend on storm recovery and to trim and remove trees around its power lines. The utility said it would continue offering battery leases to customers who want them sooner. It will take until 2030 for the company to install batteries at most homes under its new plan if regulators approve it. Green Mountain says its goal to do away with power outages will be realized by that year, meaning customers would always have enough electricity to use lights, refrigerators and other essentials. Green Mountain would control the batteries, allowing it to program them to soak up energy when wind turbines and solar panels were producing a lot of it. Then, when demand peaked on a hot summer day, say, the batteries could release electricity. Under the proposal, the company would initially focus on delivering batteries to its most vulnerable customers, putting some power lines underground and installing stronger cables to prevent falling trees from causing outages.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Korea firms Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will be allowed to supply U.S. chip equipment to their Chinese factories indefinitely without separate U.S. approvals. Reuters reports: "Uncertainties about South Korean semiconductor firms' operations and investments in China have been greatly eased; they will be able to calmly seek long-term global management strategies," said Choi Sang-mok, senior presidential secretary for economic affairs. The U.S. has already notified Samsung and SK Hynix of the decision, indicating that it is in effect, Choi said. The U.S. Department of Commerce is updating its "validated end user" list, denoting which entities can receive exports of which technology, to allow Samsung and SK Hynix to keep supplying certain U.S. chipmaking tools to their China factories, the presidential office said. Once included in the list, there is no need to obtain permission for separate export cases. Samsung and SK Hynix, the world's largest and second-largest memory chipmakers, had invested billions of dollars in their chip production facilities in China and welcomed the move.Read more of this story at Slashdot.