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Apple has criticised powers in the UK's Online Safety Bill that could be used to force encrypted messaging tools like iMessage, WhatsApp and Signal to scan messages for child abuse material. From a report: Its intervention comes as 80 organisations and tech experts have written to Technology Minister Chloe Smith urging a rethink on the powers. Apple told the BBC the bill should be amended to protect encryption. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) stops anyone but the sender and recipient reading the message. Police, the government and some high-profile child protection charities maintain the tech -- used in apps such as WhatsApp and Apple's iMessage -- prevents law enforcement and the firms themselves from identifying the sharing of child sexual abuse material. But in a statement Apple said: "End-to-end encryption is a critical capability that protects the privacy of journalists, human rights activists, and diplomats. "It also helps everyday citizens defend themselves from surveillance, identity theft, fraud, and data breaches. The Online Safety Bill poses a serious threat to this protection, and could put UK citizens at greater risk. "Apple urges the government to amend the bill to protect strong end-to-end encryption for the benefit of all."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Investigations triggered by the cracking of encrypted phones three years ago have so far led to more than 6,500 arrests worldwide and the seizure of hundreds of tons of drugs, French, Dutch and European Union prosecutors said Tuesday. From a report: The announcement underscored the staggering scale of criminality -- mainly drugs and arms smuggling and money laundering -- that was uncovered as a result of police and prosecutors effectively listening in to criminals using encrypted EncroChat phones. "It helped to prevent violent attacks, attempted murders, corruption and large-scale drug transports, as well as obtain large-scale information on organised crime," European Union police and judicial cooperation agencies Europol and Eurojust said in a statement. The French and Dutch investigation gained access to more than 115 million encrypted communications between some 60,000 criminals via servers in the northern French town of Roubaix, prosecutors said at a news conference in the nearby city of Lille. As a result, 6,558 suspects have been arrested worldwide, including 197 "high-value targets." Seized drugs included 30.5 million pills, 103.5 metric tons (114 tons) of cocaine, 163.4 metric tons (180 tons) of cannabis and 3.3 metric tons (3.6 tons) of heroin. The investigations also led to nearly 740 million euros ($809 million) in cash being recovered and assets or bank accounts worth another 154 million euros ($168 million) frozen.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the span of half a year, ChatGPT has become one of the world's best-known internet brands. Now its creator, OpenAI, has bigger plans for the chatbot: CEO Sam Altman privately told some developers OpenAI wants to turn it into a "supersmart personal assistant for work." From a report: With built-in knowledge about an individual and their workplace, such an assistant could carry out tasks such as drafting emails or documents in that person's style and with up-to-date information about their business. The assistant features could put OpenAI on a collision course with Microsoft, its primary business partner, investor and cloud provider, as well as with other OpenAI software customers such as Salesforce. Those firms also want to use OpenAI's software to build AI "copilots" for people to use at work. But for OpenAI, building new ChatGPT capabilities will be the focus of its commercial efforts, according to Altman's comments and two other people with knowledge of the company's plans. Companies are still in the first innings of making money from the latest crop of AI services, and the race is on to figure out what products and business models will create the most value. Large-language models that allow ChatGPT and other software to understand conversational commands are relatively new, although Microsoft is already charging a 40% premium to Office 365 customers that want to use OpenAI's LLMs to automate tasks such as creating PowerPoint presentations based on text documents, summarizing meetings or drafting email responses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios chief, Matt Booty, was encouraging Xbox CFO Tim Stuart to spend big money on acquiring game content in 2019 to set the company up to battle Sony in subscriptions. From a report: The revelation comes in an email thread that's part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing. "We (Microsoft) are in a very unique position to be able to go spend Sony out of business," said Booty in a December 2019 email, referencing spending $2 billion or $3 billion in 2020 to avoid competitors getting ahead in content at a later date. "It is practically impossible for anyone to start a new video streaming service at scale at this point," said Booty, referencing competitors like Google, Amazon, and Sony. Booty described content as a moat and that only Sony could really compete with Xbox Game Pass: "In games, Google is 3 to 4 years away from being able to have a studio up and running. Amazon has shown no ability to execute on game content. Content is the one moat that we have, in terms of a catalog that runs on current devices and capability to create new. Sony is really the only other player who could compete with Game Pass and we have a 2 year and 10 million subs lead." Microsoft argues the email is old and that it never pursued such a strategy anyway.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google users who add "Reddit" to searches for specific topics found this ineffective when numerous Reddit forums went dark this month. This happened as many popular forum moderators turned pages private to protest Reddit's decision to charge developers for data access, resulting in inaccessible or unhelpful search results. The incident, CNBC reports, has prompted Google to search for a better fix. An anonymous reader shares a report: It's an issue that Google executives say is at least partially resolved by a new feature called Perspectives that was unveiled on Monday. The Perspectives tab, available now on mobile web and the Google app in the U.S., promises to surface discussion forums and videos from social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and Quora. At an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's senior vice president in charge of search, told employees that the company was working on ways for search to display helpful resources in results without requiring users to add "Reddit" to their searches. Raghavan acknowledged that users had grown frustrated with the experience. "Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that's iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy," Raghavan said. "We need to make users happy."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has been increasingly moving Windows to the cloud on the commercial side with Windows 365, but the software giant also wants to do the same for consumers. From a report: In an internal "state of the business" Microsoft presentation from June 2022, Microsoft discuses building on "Windows 365 to enable a full Windows operating system streamed from the cloud to any device." The presentation has been revealed as part of the ongoing FTC v. Microsoft hearing, as it includes Microsoft's overall gaming strategy and how that relates to other parts of the company's businesses. Moving "Windows 11 increasingly to the cloud" is identified as a long-term opportunity in Microsoft's "Modern Life" consumer space, including using "the power of the cloud and client to enable improved AI-powered services and full roaming of people's digital experience." Windows 365 is a service that streams a full version of Windows to devices. So far, it's been limited to just commercial customers, but Microsoft has been deeply integrating it into Windows 11 already. A future update will include Windows 365 Boot, which will enable Windows 11 devices to log directly in to a Cloud PC instance at boot instead of the local version of Windows. Windows 365 Switch is also built into Windows 11 to integrate Cloud PCs into the Task View (virtual desktops) feature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this month, shares of big health insurance companies fell after UnitedHealth Group warned that healthcare utilization rates were up. At a conference the company had said that it was seeing a higher-than-expected pace of hip replacements, knee surgeries and other elective procedures. In a new note out Monday, UBS Group AG analysts led by Andrew Mok offer a surprising theory about one factor that could be driving a higher pace of injuries: pickleball. As everyone knows, the racket game has become a booming (and sometimes controversial) sport and business. And per UBS, not only are "Picklers" competing with the public for use of park and court space, they're also driving up healthcare capacity utilization and costs. The firm estimates between $250-500 million in costs attributable to pickle injuries in 2023. So how does it arrive at this number? First, it establishes that growth has been absolutely mammoth, with huge and accelerating numbers of participants. This year is expected to see a 150% jump in players, to 22.3 million. Of this 22.3 million, UBS estimates that seniors make about a third of "core players" or those who play it at least eight times a year. Pickleball players also have incomes that tend to skew high (with almost half having income of over $100K per year.)Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: When former Samsung executive Choi Jinseog won a contract with Taiwan's Foxconn in 2018, he tapped his former employer's supplier network to steal secrets to help his new client set up a chip factory in China, a sealed indictment by South Korean prosecutors alleges. Prosecutors announced the indictment on June 12, saying the theft caused more than $200 million in damages to Samsung Electronics, based on the estimated costs Samsung spent to develop the stolen data. The announcement did not name Choi and gave only limited details, although some media subsequently identified Choi and his links with Foxconn. The unreleased 18-page indictment, reviewed by Reuters, provides details in the case against Choi, including how he is alleged to have stolen Samsung's trade secrets and details about the planned Foxconn plant. Choi, who has been detained in jail since late May, denied all the charges through his lawyer, Kim Pilsung. Choi's Singapore-based consultancy Jin Semiconductor won the contract with Foxconn around August 2018, according to the indictment. Within months, Choi had poached "a large number" of employees from Samsung and its affiliates and illegally obtained secret information related to building a chip factory from two contractors, prosecutors allege. Jin Semiconductor illegally used confidential information involving semiconductor cleanroom management obtained from Cho Young-sik who worked at one of the contractors, Samoo Architects & Engineers, the indictment alleges. Clean rooms are manufacturing facilities where the enclosed environment is engineered to remove dust and other particles that can damage highly sensitive chips. Samoo had participated in the 2012 construction of Samsung's chip plant in Xian, China. Prosecutors allege Choi's company also illegally obtained blueprints of Samsung's China plant from Chung Chan-yup, an employee at HanmiGlobal, which supervised its construction and floor layouts involving the chip manufacturing process. They have yet to establish how the information on floor layout was obtained, according to the indictment. Choi signed a preliminary consulting contract in around 2018 with Foxconn to build the chip factory potentially in Xian, his lawyer said. However, Foxconn ended the contract just a year later and only paid salaries related to the project, the lawyer said. He declined to comment on why Foxconn ended the contract or to provide further details, citing the sensitivity of the matter. The person with direct knowledge of the case said prosecutors found Foxconn had agreed to provide 8 trillion won ($6 billion) to build the factory, and Foxconn also paid several million dollars to Choi's company every month until it pulled out of the contract for reasons the indictment did not disclose. Jin Semiconductor's financial statement in 2018 said it entered into an arrangement with "a major customer" for the provision of qualified manpower in the next five years. The customer paid an advance of $17,994,217 to the company, according to the statement. Choi's lawyer said his client may be a scapegoat in a campaign by the South Korean government, caught in a rivalry between China and the United States, seeking seek to slow China's progress in chip manufacturing. [...] Choi is charged along with five other former and current Jin Semiconductor employees and a Samsung contractor employee. Trial is set to begin on July 12, court records show.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Smartwatches are being sent to random military members loaded with malware, much like malware distribution via USB drives in the past," writes longtime Slashdot reader frdmfghtr. "Recipients are advised not to turn them on and report the incident to their local security office." Defense News reports: The Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division, or CID, in an announcement last week warned the watches may contain malware, potentially granting whoever sent the peripherals "access to saved data to include banking information, contacts, and account information such as usernames and passwords." A more innocuous tactic may also be to blame: so-called brushing, used in e-commerce to boost a seller's ratings through fake orders and reviews. The CID, an independent federal law enforcement agency consisting of thousands of personnel, did not say exactly how many smartwatches were so far distributed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carl Zimmer writes in The New York Times: In its first week, a fertilized human egg develops into a hollow ball of 200 cells and then implants itself on the wall of the uterus. Over the next three weeks, it divides into the distinct tissues of a human body. And those crucial few weeks remain, for the most part, a black box. "We know the basics, but the very fine details we just don't know," said Jacob Hanna, a developmental biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Dr. Hanna and a number of other biologists are trying to uncover those details by creating models of human embryos in the lab. They are coaxing stem cells to organize themselves into clumps that take on some of the crucial hallmarks of real embryos. This month, Dr. Hanna's team in Israel, as well as groups in Britain, the United States and China, released reports on these experiments. The studies, while not yet published in scientific journals, have attracted keen interest from other scientists, who have been hoping for years that such advances could finally shed light on some of the mysteries of early human development. Ethicists have long cautioned that the advent of embryo models would further complicate the already complicated regulation of this research. But the scientists behind the new work were quick to stress that they had not created real embryos and that their clusters of stem cells could never give rise to a human being. "We do it to save lives, not create it," said Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology, who led another effort. [...] If scientists can create close, reliable models of embryos, they will be able to run large-scale experiments to test potential causes of pregnancy failures, such as viral infections and genetic mutations. The models could lead to other medical advances too, noted Insoo Hyun, a member of the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics who was not involved in the new studies. "Once you get the embryo models in place and you can rely on them, that can be an interesting way to screen drugs that women take when they're pregnant," he said. "That would be an enormous benefit." Dr. Hanna [...] also saw a possibility of using embryo models as a new form of stem-cell treatment for diseases such as cancer.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Someone has created a ChatGPT app for Windows 3.1 PCs. WinGPT brings a very basic version of OpenAI's ChatGPT responses into an app that can run on an ancient 386 chip. It's built by the same mysterious developer behind Windle, a Wordle clone for Microsoft's Windows 3.1 operating system. "I didn't want my Gateway 4DX2-66 from 1993 to be left out of the AI revolution, so I built an AI Assistant for Windows 3.1, based on the OpenAI API," says the developer in a Hacker News thread. WinGPT is written in C using Microsoft's standard Windows API and connects to OpenAI's API server using TLS 1.3, so there's no need for a separate modern PC. That was a particularly interesting part of getting this app running on Windows 3.1, alongside managing the memory segmentation architecture on 16-bit versions of Windows and building the UI for the app. Neowin notes that the ChatGPT responses are only brief due to the limited memory support that can't handle the context of conversations. The icon for WinGPT was also designed in Borland's Image Editor, a clone of Microsoft Paint that's capable of making ICO files. "I built most of the UI in C directly, meaning that each UI component had to be manually constructed in code," says the anonymous WinGPT developer. "I was surprised that the set of standard controls available to use by any program with Windows 3.1 is incredibly limited. You have some controls you'd expect -- push buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, edit boxes -- but any other control you might need, including those used across the operating system itself, aren't available."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fossil fuels continue to dominate the global energy market. According to the industry's Statistical Review of World Energy report, global energy demand rose 1% last year, but fossil fuels still accounted for 82% of supply. Reuters reports: The stubborn lead of oil, gas and coal products in covering most energy demand cemented itself in 2022 despite the largest ever increase in renewables capacity at a combined 266 gigawatts, with solar leading wind power growth, the report said. "Despite further strong growth in wind and solar in the power sector, overall global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions increased again," said the president of the UK-based global industry body Energy Institute, Juliet Davenport. "We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris Agreement." The annual report, a benchmark for the industry, was published for the first time by the Energy Institute together with consultancies KPMG and Kearny after they took it over from BP (BP.L), which had authored the report since the 1950s. Scientists say the world needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions by around 43% by 2030 from 2019 levels to have any hope of meeting the international Paris Agreement goal of keeping warming well below 2C above pre-industrial levels. You can view some highlights from the report here.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Moderators of popular Reddit communities have posted open letters to the company, requesting affordable API pricing for third-party apps, improved moderation tools and accessibility options, and a senior-level Moderator Advocate role at Reddit. The Verge reports: More than 8,000 subreddits went dark earlier this month in protest of the company's planned API pricing changes that will force apps like Apollo and rif is fun for Reddit to shut down on June 30th. Some subreddits continued to stay dark after the original 48-hour plan, but many moderators have reopened their communities after feeling pressure from Reddit itself. (A few communities have found some creative ways to reopen.) The open letters are largely the same, calling for "a return to the productive dialogue that has served us in the past" between users and administrators (Reddit employees) and listing out a series of requests (taken from r/Funny's letter). [...] The letters conclude by saying that while the company has "all but entirely eroded" its trust with those who wrote the letters, "we hope that together, we can begin to rebuild it." The writers have asked for a response from Reddit by June 29th -- a day before many third-party apps are set to shut down.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pirate ebook repository Z-Library has released a dedicated desktop application that should make it easier to access the site going forward. The service is at the center of a criminal crackdown and has lost hundreds of domain names, which in part triggered the development of this new software. TorrentFreak reports: Over the past few months, Z-Library users accessed the site through a dedicated URL, which redirected them to a 'personal' domain that provided access to the library. This worked well but the entire operation could easily be wiped out by yet another round of domain seizures. The new desktop launcher, which is available on the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms, will automatically redirect users to the right place, without being tied to a single domain name. The new desktop launcher, which is available on the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms, will automatically redirect users to the right place, without being tied to a single domain name. In addition to simplifying access, the new Z-Library launcher software is able to connect over the Tor network. This can help to evade blocking efforts while adding an extra privacy layer. The software may trigger a warning noting that it's from an unverified developer. According to Z-Library, this is a standard notice but, aside from the copyright infringement angle, people should always treat third-party applications with caution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rapid changes, fueled by AI, are impacting the large pockets of the internet, argues a new column. An excerpt: In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed. Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There's the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an "AI editor" expects "output of 200 to 250 articles per week." ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with "AI-generated junk." Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don't. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and "AI is tearing Wikipedia apart." The old web is dying, and the new web struggles to be born. The web is always dying, of course; it's been dying for years, killed by apps that divert traffic from websites or algorithms that reward supposedly shortening attention spans. But in 2023, it's dying again -- and, as the litany above suggests, there's a new catalyst at play: AI.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: Americans hate their internet service providers (ISPs) more than any other segment of the consumer economy -- except gas stations. A fresh set of rankings from the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) reveals that few consumers are happy with the way their ISPs conduct business, preferring them only over trips to the pump in a list of 43 major industries. The rankings come courtesy of the ACSI's most recent telecommunications study, which the organization publishes annually. The study covers subscription TV services, video streaming services, and ISPs of both the fiber and non-fiber variety. Using interviews with 22,061 American consumers conducted between April 2022 and March 2023, this year's telecommunications study investigates just how happy people are with their ISPs, then pits that data against that of several other industries. This year, ISPs ranked lower than the endlessly frustrating automobile, banking, and health insurance industries, as well as 39 others that people tend to have an easier time with, such as breweries and athletic shoes. On a satisfaction scale of 1 to 100, ISPs earned a lackluster 68, which consists of fiber's 75-point and non-fiber's 66-point satisfaction scores combined. The ACSI used customers' input on a number of experiential data points, from choosing a plan to actually using their home Wi-Fi networks, to calculate both scores and combine them based on usage. Although fiber customers found their internet to be relatively reliable and their bills easy to understand, earning an 80 in both categories, non-fiber customers weren't as impressed at 72 and 75, respectively. Unsurprisingly, both fiber and non-fiber customers enjoyed reaching out to their providers' customer service teams the least out of 14 total data points. There was only one industry that ranked lower than ISPs. As much as Americans generally dislike the way ISPs manage hardware, pricing, customer service, outages, and more, they dislike gas stations even more, giving the category a measly score of 65. While the ACSI doesn't share respondents' reasoning (it's a telecommunications study, after all), it's easy to see why consumers might not enjoy spending obscene money to fill their tanks at dusty roadside stops.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta has introduced a new VR subscription service called Meta Quest+ that costs $7.99 a month. Subscribers will get access to two new games each month, which they can play as long as the subscription is active. CNBC reports: Meta Quest+ costs $7.99 a month and is compatible with the Quest 2, the Quest Pro and the upcoming Quest 3. The subscription service marks Meta's latest effort to generate recurring revenue from its Reality Labs unit, which is developing virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. New games will launch for Meta Quest+ subscribers on the first of each month. The games can be played as long as the subscription is active. In July, subscribers will get the games "Pixel Ripped 1995" and "Pistol Whip." Users will then receive "Walkabout Mini Golf" from Mighty Coconut and "Mothergunship: Forge" from Terrible Posture Games in August. Meta Quest+ is available in the Meta Quest Store starting Monday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a memo to House staffers this morning, the chamber's Chief Administrative Officer Catherine L. Szpindor said it is placing new guardrails around use of ChatGPT by congressional offices. Axios reports: Szpindor wrote that offices are "only authorized" to use the paid ChatGPT Plus. Unlike the free service, she said, the $20-per-month subscription version "incorporates important privacy features that are necessary to protect House data." She said in addition to other versions of ChatGPT, no other large language models are authorized for use. Szpindor also laid out an array of regulations on how to use the tool. Offices are allowed to use the tool for "research and evaluation only" and can experiment on how it can improve their operations, but are "not authorized to incorporate it into regular workflow." Offices should only input "non-sensitive" data, she added, instructing staffers not to "paste into the chat bot any blocks of text that have not already been made public." She instructed offices to enable privacy settings, which are disabled by default, to "ensure that your history is not preserved and your interactions are not incorporated back into the large language model."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: One of the cybercriminals behind 2020's major Twitter hack was sentenced to five years in U.S. federal prison on Friday. Joseph O'Connor (AKA "PlugwalkJoe"), a 24-year-old British citizen, previously pleaded guilty to seven charges associated with the digital attack. He was arrested in Spain in 2021 and extradited to the U.S. in April of this year. In addition to the five years of jail time, O'Connor was also sentenced to three additional years under supervised release and ordered to pay back more than $790,000 in illicitly obtained funds, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York. Previously, Graham Ivan Clark, another one of the hackers involved who was 17 at the time of the attack, pleaded guilty to related charges and was sentenced to three years in prison. With all charges combined, O'Connor faced a maximum of 77 years in prison, per a Reuters report, while prosecutors called for a seven-year sentence. Ultimately, he will likely only serve about half of his five years, after having already spent nearly 2.5 years in pre-trial custody, Judge Jed S. Rakoff said during the Friday hearing, according to TechCrunch. Along with his fellow hackers, O'Connor "used his sophisticated technological abilities for malicious purposes -- conducting a complex SIM swap attack to steal large amounts of cryptocurrency, hacking Twitter, conducting computer intrusions to take over social media accounts, and even cyberstalking two victims, including a minor victim," according to a previous statement given by prosecuting U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. [...] An investigation by the New York State Department of Financial Services determined that the breach was made possible because Twitter "lacked adequate cybersecurity protections," according to an October 2020 report. O'Connor and co were able to gain access to the social platform's internal systems through a simple scheme of calling Twitter employees posing as the company IT department. They were able to trick four Twitter workers into providing their login credentials. The FBI launched its own investigation, which found that O'Connor and his co-conspirators had managed to transfer account ownership to unauthorized users -- sometimes themselves, and sometimes to others willing to pay for the accounts. O'Connor himself paid $10,000 to take over one specific, unnamed account, according to a Department of Justice press statement from May. In addition to the Twitter hack, O'Connor also pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $800,000 from a crypto company by SIM swapping at least three executives' phone numbers. He further admitted to blackmailing an unnamed public figure via Snapchat and swatting a 16-year-old girl.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A "last-minute" government amendment to a bill is an effort to "muzzle" critics of the Data Protection Commission (DPC) and will make the commission's decision-making "even more opaque," a civil liberties group has claimed. From a report: The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has urged all parties in the Dail to challenge the proposed amendment to the Courts and Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2022 when it comes up for final debate on Wednesday. The amendment provides that the Commission may direct information deemed by it to be confidential not be disclosed. Failure to comply with a non-disclosure notice issued by the commission will be an offence liable on summary conviction to a $5,450 fine. Dr Johnny Ryan of the ICCL said the amendment "will gag people from speaking about how the DPC handles their complaint and from speaking about how big tech firms or public bodies are misusing their data."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon plans to tap thousands of U.S. small businesses, from bodegas to florists, to deliver its packages by the end of the year. From a report: Amazon on Monday will start actively recruiting existing small businesses in 23 states including Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, South Dakota, and Washington. At least 20 dense cities across the country, including Boston, New York, Los Angeles and Seattle, will be targeted by the program. The company is interested in working with a wide range of businesses such as florists, coffee shops, clothing stores, among others. Amazon notes they don't need delivery experience to make the partnership work. Dubbed Amazon Hub Delivery, this is the tech and logistics giant's latest attempt to expand its "last mile" network -- the last stage in logistics where packages are ultimately delivered to customers -- through external workforces.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

India will cut tariffs for daytime power use but charge a premium when electricity demand peaks during the night, in a bid to manage surging demand and boost the use of renewable energy. From a report: The new policy, outlined by the federal power ministry, will come into effect from April 2024 for commercial and industrial consumers and a year later for most other consumers except those in the agricultural sector. It is aimed at encouraging price-sensitive consumers to run their air-conditioners for fewer hours at night, which would in turn reduce the strain on overworked fossil-fuel power plants and lower the risk of nighttime power cuts. It would also help slash emissions. India faced its worst electricity shortages in six years during the year ended March 2023, as searing heat and a surge in economic activity meant supply was not able to keep up with demand that grew at its fastest pace in 33 years. During so-called "solar hours", tariffs will be 10%-20% less than normal levels, while tariffs during peak night hours when air-conditioning use is cranked up after people come home from work will be 10-20% higher.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Joe Biden is getting closer to distributing more than $40 billion in funding to support broadband expansion nationwide as part of his administration's goal to connect all Americans to high-speed internet by 2030. From a reportL: The funding, authorized in Biden's 2021 bipartisan infrastructure package, will be distributed proportionally to states based on need with each state receiving at least $100 million. Monday's allocations were made using broadband coverage maps that were recently updated to include more than one million new locations. "Just like Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered electricity to every home in America through his Rural Electrification Act, the announcement is part of President Biden's broader effort to deliver investments, jobs, and opportunities directly to working and middle-class families across the country," a White House official said in a statement Monday. States will be expected to submit their plans for using the funding by December. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), housed in the Commerce Department, plans to approve these plans before next spring when it will begin allocating 20 percent of a state's authorized funding and infrastructure deployment can begin. By the end of 2025, at least 80 percent of the funding will be allocated.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2016, an artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo from Google's DeepMind AI lab made history by defeating a champion player of the board game Go. Now Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's cofounder and CEO, says his engineers are using techniques from AlphaGo to make an AI system dubbed Gemini that will be more capable than that behind OpenAI's ChatGPT. From a report: DeepMind's Gemini, which is still in development, is a large language model that works with text and is similar in nature to GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT. But Hassabis says his team will combine that technology with techniques used in AlphaGo, aiming to give the system new capabilities such as planning or the ability to solve problems. "At a high level you can think of Gemini as combining some of the strengths of AlphaGo-type systems with the amazing language capabilities of the large models," Hassabis says. "We also have some new innovations that are going to be pretty interesting." Gemini was first teased at Google's developer conference last month, when the company announced a raft of new AI projects. AlphaGo was based on a technique DeepMind has pioneered called reinforcement learning, in which software learns to take on tough problems that require choosing what actions to take like in Go or video games by making repeated attempts and receiving feedback on its performance. It also used a method called tree search to explore and remember possible moves on the board. The next big leap for language models may involve them performing more tasks on the internet and on computers. Gemini is still in development, a process that will take a number of months, Hassabis says. It could cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, said in April that creating GPT-4 cost more than $100 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Supreme Court refused to revive a lawsuit by music website Genius Media accusing Alphabet's Google of stealing millions of song lyrics. From a report: The justices left in place a ruling that tossed out the suit, which accused Google of violating a contract with Genius by using its song lyrics in search results without attribution. It's the latest victory at the Supreme Court for Google, which earlier this year won a battle over whether its video-streaming platform YouTube can be held liable for hosting terrorist videos. There are deep disagreements over how copyright laws apply to online speech and aggregation. The lower court said Genius does not own any of the copyrights to its lyrics -- instead, those are held by the songwriters and publishers. Genius claimed that Google violated its contract by scraping lyrics and boosting them in Google Search results without any attribution. Genius, which claimed the saga caused millions of dollars in losses for the website, initially sued Google in 2019. In order to drum up attention and prove its case, Genius said it used a secret code spelling out the word "red-handed" to prove Google was stealing its lyrics. "We appreciate the court's decision, agreeing with the Solicitor General and multiple lower courts that Genius' claims have no merit," Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said Monday. "We license lyrics on Google Search from third parties, and we do not crawl or scrape websites to source lyrics."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

shilly writes: John B. Goodenough, professor at The University of Texas at Austin who is known around the world for the development of the lithium-ion battery, died Sunday at the age of 100. Goodenough was a dedicated public servant, a sought-after mentor and a brilliant yet humble inventor. His discovery led to the wireless revolution and put electronic devices in the hands of people worldwide. In 2019, Goodenough made national and international headlines after being awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his battery work, an award many of his fans considered a long time coming, especially as he became the oldest person to receive a Nobel Prize. "John's legacy as a brilliant scientist is immeasurable -- his discoveries improved the lives of billions of people around the world," said UT Austin President Jay Hartzell. "He was a leader at the cutting edge of scientific research throughout the many decades of his career, and he never ceased searching for innovative energy-storage solutions. John's work and commitment to our mission are the ultimate reflection of our aspiration as Longhorns -- that what starts here changes the world -- and he will be greatly missed among our UT community." Goodenough served as a faculty member in the Cockrell School of Engineering for 37 years, holding the Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair of Engineering and faculty positions in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Throughout his tenure, his research continued to focus on battery materials and address fundamental solid-state science and engineering problems to create the next generation of rechargeable batteries.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Australia's prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has told residents they should turn their smartphones off and on again once a day as a cybersecurity measure -- and tech experts agree. From a report: Albanese said the country needed to be proactive to thwart cyber risks, as he announced the appointment of Australia's inaugural national cybersecurity coordinator. "We need to mobilise the private sector, we need to mobilise, as well, consumers," the prime minister said on Friday. "We all have a responsibility. Simple things, turn your phone off every night for five minutes. For people watching this, do that every 24 hours, do it while you're brushing your teeth or whatever you're doing." The Australian government's advice is not new. In 2020, the United State's National Security Agency issued best-practice guidelines for mobile device security, which included rebooting smartphones once a week to prevent hacking.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JP Morgan has been fined $4 million by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for deleting millions of email records dating from 2018 relating to its Chase Bank subsidiary. From a report: The Financial services outfit apparently deleted somewhere in the region of 47 million electronic communications records from about 8,700 electronic mailboxes covering the period January 1 through to April 23, 2018. Many of these, it turns out, were business records that were required to be retained under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the SEC said in a filing detailing its ruling. Worse still, the stuffup meant that it couldn't produce evidence that that the SEC and others subpoenaed in their investigations. "In at least 12 civil securities-related regulatory investigations, eight of which were conducted by the Commission staff, JPMorgan received subpoenas and document requests for communications which could not be retrieved or produced because they had been deleted permanently," the SEC says. The trouble for JP Morgan can be traced to a project where the company aimed to delete from its systems any older communications and documents that were no longer required to be retained. According to the SEC's summary, the project experienced "glitches," with those documents identified for deletion failing to be deleted under the processes implemented by JPMorgan.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An ancient Nevada lakebed could become a vast source of the lithium used in electric car batteries, reports the Associated Press. But "NASA says the same site - flat as a tabletop and undisturbed like none other in the Western Hemisphere - is indispensable for calibrating the razor-sharp measurements of hundreds of satellites orbiting overhead."At the space agency's request, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has agreed to withdraw 36 square miles (92 square kilometers) of the eastern Nevada terrain from its inventory of federal lands open to potential mineral exploration and mining. NASA says the long, flat piece of land above the untapped lithium deposit in Nevada's Railroad Valley has been used for nearly three decades to get measurements just right to keep satellites and their applications functioning properly. "No other location in the United States is suitable for this purpose," the Bureau of Land Management concluded in April after receiving NASA's input on the tract 250 miles (400 kilometers) northeast of Las Vegas... In Railroad Valley, satellite calculations are critical to gathering information beamed from space with widespread applications from weather forecasting to national security, agricultural outlooks and natural disasters, according to NASA, which said the satellites "provide vital and often time-critical information touching every aspect of life on Earth." That increasingly includes certifying measurements related to climate change. Thus the Nevada desert paradox, critics say. Although lithium is the main ingredient in batteries for electric vehicles key to reducing greenhouse gases, in this case the metal is buried beneath land NASA says must remain undisturbed to certify the accuracy of satellites monitoring Earth's warming atmosphere... The area's unchanged nature has allowed NASA to establish a long record of images of the undisturbed topography to assist precise measurement of distances using the travel time of radio signals and assure "absolute radiometric calibration" of sensors on board satellites. "Activities that stand to disrupt the surface integrity of Railroad Valley would risk making the site unusable," Jeremy Eggers, a spokesman for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told The Associated Press. One company with most of the mining rights says the tract's withdrawal will put more than half the site's value out of reach, according to the article. But the Associated Press got a supportive quote for the move from the satellite imaging company Planet Labs, which has relied on NASA's site to calibrate more than 250 of its satellites since 2016. "As our nation becomes ever more impacted by an evolving and changing environment, it is critical to have reliable and accurate data and imagery of our planet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Associated Press reports from the Paris Air Show, where developers of electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (or eVTOLs) demonstrated their surprisingly quiet electrically-powered craft. And in one year the Paris region "is planning for a small fleet of electric flying taxis to operate on multiple routes when it hosts the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games next summer."Unless aviation regulators in China beat Paris to the punch by green-lighting a pilotless taxi for two passengers under development there, the French capital's prospective operator - Volocopter of Germany - could be the first to fly taxis commercially if European regulators give their OK... The limited power of battery technology restricts the range and number of paying passengers they can carry, so eVTOL hops are likely to be short and not cheap at the outset. And while the vision of simply beating city traffic by zooming over it is enticing, it also is dependent on advances in airspace management. Manufacturers of eVTOLs aim in the coming decade to unfurl fleets in cities and on more niche routes for luxury passengers, including the French Riveria. But they need technological leaps so flying taxis don't crash into each other and all the other things already congesting the skies or expected to take to them in very large numbers - including millions of drones. Starting first on existing helicopter routes, "we'll continue to scale up using AI, using machine-learning to make sure that our airspace can handle it," said Billy Nolen of Archer Aviation Inc. It aims to start flying between downtown Manhattan and Newark's Liberty Airport in 2025. That's normally a 1-hour train or old-fashioned taxi ride that Archer says its sleek, electric 4-passenger prototype could cover in under 10 minutes. Nolen was formerly acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. regulator that during his time at the agency was already working with NASA on technology to safely separate flying taxis. Just as Paris is using its Olympic Games to test flying taxis, Nolen said the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics offer another target for the industry to aim for and show that it can fly passengers in growing numbers safely, cleanly and affordably. "We'll have hundreds, if not thousands, of eVTOLs by the time you get to 2028," he said in an interview with The Associated Press at the Paris show. The "very small" hoped-for experiment with Volocopter for the Paris Games is "great stuff. We take our hats off to them," he added. "But by the time we get to 2028 and beyond ... you will see full-scale deployment across major cities throughout the world." The article includes a skeptical quote from Richard Aboulafia of aerospace consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory. "You and I can take air taxis right now. It's called a helicopter."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The "BepiColombo" mission, a joint European-Japanese effort, "has recently completed its third of six planned flybys of Mercury, capturing dozens of images in the process," reports the Byte:At its closest, the spacecraft soared within just 150 miles of Mercury. This occurred on the night side of the planet, however, too dark for optimal imaging. Instead, the first and nearest image was taken 12 minutes after the closest approach, at the still impressive proximity of some 1,100 miles above the surface. Now the ESA has spliced together 217 images from that flyby into a short video, which culminates with a zoomed-in closeup of Mercury's cratered surface. And the music in that video had a little help from AI, reports Phys.org:Music was composed for the sequence by ILA (formerly known as Anil Sebastian), with the assistance of AI tools developed by the Machine Intelligence for Musical Audio group, University of Sheffield. Music from the previous two flyby movies - composed by Maison Mercury Jones' creative director ILA and Ingmar Kamalagharan - was given to the AI tool to suggest seeds for the new composition, which ILA then chose from to edit and weave together with other elements into the new piece. The team at the University of Sheffield has developed an Artificial Musical Intelligence (AMI), a large-scale general-purpose deep neural network that can be personalized to individual musicians and use cases. The project with the University of Sheffield is aimed at exploring the boundaries of the ethics of AI creativity, while also emphasizing the essential contributions of the (human) composer. From the ESA's announcement:BepiColombo's next Mercury flyby will take place on 5 September 2024, but there is plenty of work to occupy the teams in the meantime... BepiColombo's Mercury Transfer Module will complete over 15 000 hours of solar electric propulsion operations over its lifetime, which together with nine planetary flybys in total - one at Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury - will guide the spacecraft towards Mercury orbit. The ESA-led Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the JAXA-led Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter modules will separate into complementary orbits around the planet, and their main science mission will begin in early 2026. One spaceflight blog notes the propulsive energy required for an eventual entry into the orbit of Mercury "is greater than that of a mission to fly by Pluto. "Only one other spacecraft has orbited Mercury, and that was NASA's MESSENGER probe, which orbited the planet from 2011 to 2015."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week the Linux Foundation shared an update on the Zephyr Project, a small real-time operating system for connected, resource-constrained and embedded devices:The project recently achieved several milestones including surpassing 80,000 commits since it was released in open source in 2015. This is an average of almost 2 commits per hour, which was made recently by 490 individuals, including 166 first-timers, who contributed to the 3.4 release. Zephyr RTOS supports over 450 boards running embedded microcontrollers from Arm and RISC-V to Tensilica, NIOS, ARC and x86 as single and multicore systems... Zephyr RTOS has a growing set of software libraries that can be used across various applications and industry sectors such as Industrial IoT, wearables, machine learning and more. It is built with an emphasis on broad chipset support, security, dependability, long-term support releases and a growing open source ecosystem... The Zephyr community will be at the Zephyr Developer Summit, which takes place on June 27-30 in Prague, Czech Republic, and virtually as part of the first-ever Embedded Open Source Summit. [Register here for virtual attendance.] Arduino will be joining Zephyr's Technical Steering Committee, along with Technology Innovation Institute and the American multinational semiconductor company Analog Devices (or ADI, who will also be joining its governing board). Arduino's CEO said "We believe that Zephyr OS is a truly special project that will play a significant role in the Arduino ecosystem and will be a big priority for us." As a "Platinum"-level sponsor, ADI joins Antmicro, Baumer, Google, Intel, Meta, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Oticon, Qualcomm Innovation Center and T-Mobile.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

96,000 American students took this year's [Java-based] AP Computer Science A test. And more than a third - a full 34% - missed question #4. It asks test-takers to write two methods for the class BoxOfCandy - one that moves a Candy object to the first row (of a column), and one that finds and returns a Candy object of a specfic flavor, removing it from the box. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares some thoughts:- "If 34% of students are not getting any points, it's a test question problem, not a student one," argued one commenter on Twitter. [Question 4 is 5-pages long.] - Here's a stab at an Excel VBA solution to Question 4 for comparison-to-Java purposes. It's a little bit clunkier due to how VBA functions return results compared to Java, but it's still pretty concise and allows code to be easily tested and results to be easily visualized using the 2D Excel worksheet grid. - AI-powered Bing refuses to provide the answer to the question that completely eluded 32,000+ AP CS A exam takers ("I'm sorry but I cannot provide you with the answer to that question. It is not ethical to share the answers to an exam question". [But] it does tip one off to a suggested Java solution for Q4 that can be found in A+ Computer Science's 2023 AP CS A Exam Review.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

GCC is the GNU project's free and open-source cross-platform compiler collection. Now an anonymous reader shared this announcement from the mailing list for GCC:The GCC Steering Committee has decided to adopt a Code of Conduct for interactions in GCC project spaces, including mailing lists, bugzilla, and IRC. The vast majority of the time, the GCC community is a very civil, cooperative space. On the rare occasions that it isn't, it's helpful to have something to point to to remind people of our expectations. It's also good for newcomers to have something to refer to, for both how they are expected to conduct themselves and how they can expect to be treated... At this time the CoC is preliminary: the code itself should be considered active, but the CoC committee (and so the reporting and response procedures) are not yet in place. There's also an official FAQ, and GCC's Code of Conduct begins with this introduction. "Like the free software community as a whole, the GCC community is made up of a mixture of professionals and volunteers from all over the world, working on every aspect of the project - including mentorship, teaching, and connecting people." Where this leads to issues and unhappiness, "we have a few ground rules that we ask people to adhere to... [T]ake it in the spirit in which it's intended - a guide to make it easier to enrich all of us, the project, and the broader communities in which we participate."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"One of the biggest pain points that comes with driving an electric vehicle is the time it takes to charge the battery," writes CNET. "Startup Ample's new technology can give drivers a full charge in about the same time it takes to fill a gas tank."Ample's model runs on the idea that the fastest charge is the one you never have to do. Its next-generation battery-swapping station can replace the battery on an electric vehicle in about five minutes... Ample currently operates 12 first-generation swapping stations in the San Francisco Bay Area, mainly serving Uber delivery vehicles. The company expects to launch its next-generation station in the US, as well as Japan and Spain, later this year. Their drive-through stations work with "just about any" kind of electric vehicle (including larger delivery vehicles), according to CNET's video report. Basically the company uses an "interface tray" that locks under the car (where the battery would go) containing its own charged battery cells. When a car drives in, a robotic system simply removes that tray and replaces it with another with fully-charged battery cells. The company's co-founder argues this makes charging stations more like gas stations which service every kind of car - and adds that it's incredibly easy to deploy. "There's no construction involved... It comes in pre-built parts. You go through, connect them, test them - and you're up and running." They've already got a deal with American EV automaker Fisker.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader silverjacket writes:Researchers at Oxford and elsewhere developed a method that figures out the most likely number and size of dimension in which to format a string of bits, with applications to interpreting messages from extraterrestrial intelligence (METI), if we were to receive them. The new method "looks at every possible combination of dimension number and size," according to Science News:The researchers also measure each possible configuration's global order by seeing how much an image compression algorithm can shrink it without losing information - mathematically, randomness is less compressible than regular patterns... Hector Zeni [one of the creators of this method] "notes that in Carl Sagana(TM)s sci-fi novel Contact, the characters spend a lot of time figuring out that a message received from aliens is in three dimensions (specifically a video). aoeIf you have our tools, you would solve that problem in seconds and with no human intervention.aAn algorithm that pieces together smaller algorithmic components in order to explain or predict data - this new method is just one way to do it - may also help us one day achieve artificial general intelligence, Zenil says. Such automated approaches don't depend on human assumptions about the signal. That opens the door to discovering forms of intelligence that might think differently from our own.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Finland's University of Jyvaskyla has an announcement: an experiment performed in its accelerator lab "has succeeded in producing a previously unknown atomic nucleus." Dubbed "190-Astatine," it's made from 85 protons and 105 neutrons..The nucleus is the lightest isotope of astatine discovered to date. Astatine is a fast-decaying, and therefore rare element. It has been estimated that in the Earth's crust, there is no more than one tablespoon of astatine... The new isotope was produced in the fusion of 84Sr beam particles and silver target atoms. The isotope was detected among the products by using the detectors of RITU recoil separator... "The studies of new nuclei are important for understanding the structure of atomic nuclei and the limits of known matter," says Doctoral Researcher Henna Kokkonen from the Department of Physics, University of Jyvaskyla.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blizzard's Battle.net online service was the target of an apparent DDoS attack, "since at least the early hours of Sunday morning," reports Engadget, "making it difficult, if not impossible, to play Diablo IV, World of Warcraft and other Blizzard titles." It was just 20 minutes ago that they tweeted that the DDOS attacks "have ended." Engadget notes Blizzard's customer support account had tweeted at 10:24AM EST, "We continue to actively monitor an ongoing DDoS attack which is affecting latency/connections to our games." When players launched Battle.net on PC, a notification warned "We are currently experiencing a DDoS attack, which may result in high latency and disconnections for some players..." On Reddit, some players reported they hadn't been able to play Blizzard's latest game for at least 10 to 12 hours. Engadget predicts, "At the very least, you can bet this incident will likely renew calls for Blizzard to add an offline mode to Diablo IV."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader internet-redstar writes:In little longer than 1 year, RHEL7 and CentOS 7 will go EOL. Large enterprises with thousands of these servers are struggling to meet that deadline. Now they also have the option to use Project78 from Linux Belgium which offers a Cloud and OnPrem version to aid in the transition to RHEL 8 or Rocky Linux 8. It promises a 100% success rate for in-place OS upgrading and a 95% success rate for application migrations in a Upgrade-as-a-Service package. In April Red Hat's senior technical marketing manager shared their thoughts about next year's end of life for CentOS Linux and the End-of-Maintenance for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (along with some tips):The good news is that these events won't require a complete infrastructure overhaul. Tools are available to move from your current configuration to a place where you'll have years of support. While June of '24 may sound a ways off, do not delay. It will be here faster than you think. Start planning now. Start moving soon. Give yourself plenty of runway, and don't forget that we aren't just your software vendor at Red Hat. We are your partners and are here to help you with these transitions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from USA Today:A new study reinforces the importance of lowering cholesterol in people at risk for, but who haven't had a heart attack or stroke. The study looked at a statin alternative, called bempedoic acid, and found that as it reduced levels of LDL cholesterol, it also lowered the risk for heart attack, stroke and death. Researchers are quick to say bempedoic acid shouldn't be used instead of statins. It's far more expensive and doesn't have the decades-long track record of safety and effectiveness. But for people who can't tolerate statins or a high enough dose to bring their cholesterol levels down adequately, the new study suggests it's important to find alternatives, and that bempedoic acid can be at least part of the solution.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Interesting Engineering reports:Chinese authorities have officially given the green light to commission a working thorium-based molten salt nuclear reactor. Currently under construction since 2018, the reactor in question, "Thorium Molten Salt Reactor - Liquid Fuel 1" (TMSR-LF1), is being built at the Hongshagang Industrial Cluster, Wuwei City, Gansu Province. If successful, the TMSR-LF1 has the potential to open doors for developing and constructing a more extensive demonstration facility by 2030. Additionally, it could lead to constructing a TMSR fuel salt batch pyro-process demonstration facility, which would enable the utilization of the thorium-uranium cycle by the early 2040s... It runs on a combination of thorium and uranium-235, enriched at 19.75 percent by weight, and can operate at a maximum temperature of 650C for up to 10 years. The liquid fuel design is based on the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment conducted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960s... China intends to construct a reactor with a capacity of 373 MWt by 2030 if the TMSR-LF1 succeeds. Thorium is more abundant than uranium, notes the South China Morning Post - and China is thought to have one of the world's largest thorium reserves. But a thorium reactor should also produce less waste, and using molten salts as both a fuel and a coolant "potentially eliminates the need for large quantities of water, which is a significant advantage in areas where water resources are limited." India has also been pursuing thorium-based nuclear technologies, including MSRs. The Indian Molten Salt Breeder Reactor project, initiated in the 1980s, aimed to develop a thorium-based breeder reactor. However, the project has faced challenges related to materials compatibility, fuel reprocessing and overall system complexity and has not progressed to commercial-scale use... China reportedly plans to sell small thorium reactors to other countries as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing's global infrastructure plan. Thanks to Slashdot reader sonlas for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"User protests against Reddit's plan to charge new fees to access its content are about to enter their third week," writes Axios. 2,503 subreddits remain dark, including at least three with more than 20 million subscribers apiece, the Guardian points out, arguing that CEO Steve Huffman "may win, but the short history of the web is littered with the corpses of predecessors who alienated their fanbases." The New York Times adds that in an interview Wednesday, "Mr. Huffman said his goal had been to make Reddit better for newcomers and veteran users and to build a lasting business. "He said he regretted that developers were surprised by the company's pricing changes and wished he had been more upfront about how the changes would affect them..."Reddit is now further away from a public offering than it was last year, Mr. Huffman said, but will continue building its business. He added that the community revolt was a part of what made Reddit Reddit and said he and his team planned to continue engaging with top moderators who were upset with the changes. "For better or for worse, this is a very uniquely Reddit moment," he said. "This could only happen on Reddit." The Times also spoke to a man who moderates 80 different forums on Reddit - and has been volunteering to moderate Reddit forums for 11 years. He calls Huffman's API move "really demoralizing... I take all this abuse for you, and keep your website clean, and this is how you repay us?'" He's now active in Reddit's "Save3rdPartyApps" subreddit, "which was formed to organize protests on the site that are allowed under Reddit's rules."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters reports:The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is working on a platform for central bank digital currencies (CDBCs) to enable transactions between countries, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said on Monday. "CBDCs should not be fragmented national propositions... To have more efficient and fairer transactions we need systems that connect countries: we need interoperability," Georgieva told a conference attended by African central banks in Rabat, Morocco. "For this reason at the IMF, we are working on the concept of a global CBDC platform," she said. The IMF wants central banks to agree on a common regulatory framework for digital currencies that will allow global interoperability. Failure to agree on a common platform would create a vacuum that would likely be filled by cryptocurrencies, she said... Already 114 central banks are at some stage of CBDC exploration, "with about 10 already crossing the finish line", she said. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader Zak3056 shared this report from the Washington Post:U.S. Navy acoustic sensors detected the likely implosion of the Titan submersible hours after the vessel began its fatal descent on Sunday, U.S. Navy officials said Thursday, a revelation that means the sprawling search for the vessel was conducted even though senior officials already had some indication the Titan was destroyed... The acoustic detection was one significant piece of information, but the search had to continue to exhaust all possibilities, said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies... The United States has used a network of devices to detect undersea noises for decades. The fact that the Titan's implosion was detected this way isn't surprising, Cancian said. "I would be surprised if they hadn't heard it." A Las Vegas financier had bought tickets on the ill-fated submarine for himself, plus his 20-year-old son Sean and a friend. The son now tells People that "The whole reason my dad didn't go was because I told him, 'Dude, this submarine cannot survive going that deep in the ocean.'" OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush told the financier that their submarine was safer than crossing the street. "He was a good guy, great heart, really believed in what he was doing and saying," the financier tells People. "But he didn't want to hear anything that conflicted with his world view, and he would just dismiss it... He was so passionate about this project, and he was such a believer. He drank his own Kool-Aid, and there was just no talking him out of it." For Sean, the first red flag that alarmed him about Rush was his arrival in Las Vegas, where Sean, Jay and Rush were set to meet. He says they asked why Rush was landing at a North Las Vegas airport rather than the commercial airports like McCarran. "He's like, 'Yeah, I built this plane with my hands, and I'm test-flying it right now.' And we're like, 'What?' That was my first red flag," he explains. OceanGate's CEO later even tried offering the financier a substantial discount on the three tickets, calling his son "uninformed." OceanGate had also claimed their submarine was designed and engineered in collaboration with experts from NASA, Boeing and the University of Washington - but now ABC News says the company exaggerated those partnerships:OceanGate's founder and CEO Stockton Rush - who was aboard the missing vessel - made similar statements about his company's partnerships during an interview with CBS News correspondent David Pogue in 2022, who asked about the construction of the Titan submersible, which Rush said used some minor parts purchased from consumer retailers like Camping World. "The pressure vessel is not MacGyvered at all because that's where we worked with Boeing and NASA, [and] University of Washington," Rush said... Kevin Williams, the executive director of the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory, told ABC News the school and laboratory were also not involved in the "design, engineering or testing" of the Titan submersible. Victor Balta, a UW spokesperson, added that OceanGate and UW's Applied Physics Laboratory initially signed a $5 million collaborative research agreement, but the two entities "parted ways" after only $650,000 of work was completed. That research only resulted in the development of another OceanGate submersible, the shallow-diving Cyclops I submersible, according to Balta. The steel-hulled Cyclops I is only rated to reach 500 meters, compared to the Titan, which is constructed from carbon fiber and titanium to reach depths of 4,000 meters, the company said... When asked about the details of those relationships with OceanGate, a Boeing representative told ABC News that the aerospace company was not involved in designing or building the deep-sea submersible. "Boeing was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it," a Boeing spokesperson told ABC News in a statement... In a statement to ABC News, NASA confirmed it consulted on materials and manufacturing for the Titan submersible pursuant to an agreement with OceanGate. "NASA did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities, which was done elsewhere by OceanGate," the statement said. CNN reports that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are now exploring whether "criminal, federal, or provincial laws may possibly have been broken."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:Working from home appears to be here to stay, especially for women and college-educated workers, according to economic data released Thursday that revealed how Americans spent their time in 2022. The data, from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), suggests that the pandemic changes that upended the workplace, family life and social interactions continue to have a lasting effect on life in the United States. Many white-collar workers who hunkered down at home during pandemic shutdowns have returned to the office, but extraordinarily high numbers have not. For many, remote work appears to be a new normal... Working from home "is a permanent shift," said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. "We're now seeing many companies start as remote-first companies." The new data is a "continuation of what we've been seeing" in the American workforce, she said... The annual survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau asks thousands of Americans how they spent the past 24 hours of their lives across different categories of activities. Results from 2019 through 2021 showed that the pandemic dramatically shifted how much time people spend working at home. The new data suggests those changes persisted through 2022, even as much of life returned to normal as more people got vaccinated and boosted against the coronavirus, and case counts fell... There is a clear benefit to remote work for employees, Pollak said. Working from home saves time and money on commuting, and many employees want the flexibility to work from anywhere, to better support their parents or children. She said remote work also is "part of the reason for this huge spike in new business formation. It has lowered the barriers to starting a business." The 2022 figures show 34% of workers over the age of 15 still said they were working at home - and 54% of workers with a workers with a bachelor's degree or higher. (Meanwhile, workers without a high school diploma "were even less likely to work from home in 2022 than they were before the pandemic.") The Post also reports another interesting finding in the data. "Americans ages 20 to 24 are the only group that spent more time socializing than before the pandemic. Teenagers, and adults ages 55 to 64, reported an overall decline in time spent socializing since before the pandemic."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Motherboard reports:Scientists are currently searching for the submerged remains of an interstellar object that crashed into the skies near Papua New Guinea in January 2014 and probably sprinkled material from another star system into the Pacific Ocean, according to an onboard diary by Avi Loeb, the Harvard astronomer who is leading the expedition. The effort, which kicked off on June 14, aims to recover what is left of the otherworldly fireball using a deep-sea magnetic sled. The team has already turned up "anomalous" magnetic spherules, steel shards, curious wires, and heaps of volcanic ash, but has not identified anything that is unambiguously extraterrestrial - or interstellar - at this point. However, Loeb is optimistic that the crew will identify pieces of Interstellar Meteor 1 (IM1), the mysterious half-ton object that struck Earth nearly a decade ago, which he thinks could be an artifact, or "technosignature," from an alien civilization... The fireball that sparked the hunt smashed into the atmosphere on January 8, 2014, and was detected by NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which keeps track of extraterrestrial impacts using a network of sensors around the world. Years later, Loeb and his student, Amir Siraj, concluded that the meteor's high velocity at impact suggested that it was interstellar in origin, a hypothesis that was ultimately supported by the United States Space Command using classified sensor data. Today Loeb posted on Medium that "by now, we have 25 spherules from the site of the first recognized interstellar meteor," with a cumulative weight of about 30 milligrams - estimated to be one part in ten million of the original fireball's mass:The success of the Interstellar Expedition constitutes the first opportunity for astronomers to learn about interstellar space by using a microscope rather than a telescope. It opens the door for a new branch of observational astronomy. Updates about the expedition are running on the Mega Screen in New York's Times Square, Motherboard reports. And Loeb writes that "If further analysis of the 50 milligrams retrieved from IM1's site will inform us that IM1's composition requires a technological origin, we will know that we are not alone." He also shared an email that responded to his online diaries:I had a heart attack four weeks ago and am now in rehab. I read your IM1 diary every day and it always gives me new courage to face life. There are still so many things to discover and I want to live long enough to see some of them. I wish you and your team all the best.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares news from Bakersfield, California:Four men were arrested in the shooting death of a 61-year-old Bakersfield woman who died after police said she confronted suspects who reportedly stole her car, according to a news release issued Wednesday. Victoria Anne Marie Hampton tracked her reportedly stolen car with an Apple air tag on March 19 without telling law enforcement, according to the Bakersfield Police Department. The coroner reported she was shot at 6:32 p.m. Two of the four suspects were 19 years old, one was 18, and one was 23.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Thursday San Francisco's mayor London Breed "proposed remaking the city's struggling downtown by tearing down abandoned retail space..." reports CNN, "and building new structures to reshape the struggling city..."Breed's comments come as San Francisco faces empty offices, a cratering commercial real estate market, and an exodus of retailers from its once-bustling downtown area, especially as pandemic work-from-home policies saw many residents leaving for less expensive parts of the country... Breed argued that an overall shift to online shopping post-pandemic has contributed to declining foot traffic in the area. "You can convert certain spaces. A Westfield Mall could become something completely different than what it currently is," she said. "We can even tear down the whole building and build a whole new soccer stadium. We can create lab space or look at it as another company in some other capacity," she added... Many tech companies in the city were quick to switch to remote work or flexible hybrid policies over the last few years, resulting in many workers filtering out of the city. Office vacancies in San Francisco have reached a 30-year high, negatively impacting the city's commercial real estate market and local retailers and restaurants, which have experienced declining sales and foot traffic. "Would I like for everyone to come back to the office five days a week? Of course, I would. But is that going to happen? Probably not. So, let's make some adjustments to do everything we can to reimagine what parts of San Francisco can be," Breed said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings," writes the New York Times. The Harvard Crimson student newspaper has the details:At least four papers authored by Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino contain fraudulent data, three business school professors allege... The professors wrote that they first contacted Harvard Business School in fall 2021 with concerns of academic misconduct by Gino. "Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we had accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud. We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data," the three wrote in a blog post last week. "Perhaps dozens." Their allegations appear in several blog posts on a blog called Data Colada - the first of which offers this update:As you can see on her Harvard home page (.htm), Gino has gone on "administrative leave", and the name of her chaired position at Harvard Business School is no longer listed... We have learned (from knowledgeable sources outside of Harvard) that a few days ago Harvard requested that three of the four papers in our report be retracted. A fourth paper, discussed in today's post, had already been retracted, but we understand that Harvard requested the retraction notice be amended to include mention of this (additional) fraud. The business professors concluded there was fraud based on a quirk of Microsoft's Excel files:A little known fact about Excel files is that they are literal zip files, bundles of smaller files that Excel combines to produce a single spreadsheet. (If curious or incredulous, run any .xlsx file in your computer through the program you use for unzipping files; you will find a bunch of files organized in folder.) For instance, one file in that bundle has all the numeric values that appear on a spreadsheet, another has all the character entries, another the formatting information (e.g., Calibri vs. Cambria font), etc. Most relevant to us is a file called calcChain.xml. CalcChain tells Excel in which order to carry out the calculations in the spreadsheet. It tells Excel something like "First solve the formula in cell A1, then the one in A2, then B1, etc." CalcChain is short for 'calculation chain'. The image below shows how, when one unzips the posted Excel file, one can navigate to this calcChain.xml file. CalcChain is so useful here because it will tell you whether a cell (or row) containing a formula has been moved, and where it has been moved to. That means that we can use calcChain to go back and see what this spreadsheet may have looked like back in 2010, before it was tampered with...! We used calcChain to see whether there is evidence that the rows that were out of sequence, and that showed huge effects on the key dependent variables, had been manually tampered with. And there is. In addition, a second blog post notes that one study on honesty had also asked college students what year they were in school - and somehow 35 had all replied with a non-answer, giving as their year in school "Harvard." And suspiciously, all but one of these 35 entries were especially likely to confirm the authors' hypothesis. "This strongly suggests that these 'Harvard' observations were altered to produce the desired effect." The New York Times points out that this paper "has been cited hundreds of times by other scholars, but more recent work had cast serious doubt on its findings."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases..." Red Hat posted this week on its blog, arguing that "The engagement around CentOS Stream, the engineering levels of investment, and the new priorities we're addressing for customers and partners now make maintaining separate, redundant, repositories inefficient." Long-time Slashdot reader slack_justyb notes this means patches and changes will now hit CentOS Stream before actually hitting RHEL, which "will make it difficult for other distributions such as Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux to provide assured binary compatibility as their only source now will be ahead of what RHEL is actually using." "Some commentators are pointing out that it's possible to sign up for a free Red Hat Developer account, and obtain the source code legitimately that way," writes the Register. "This is perfectly true, but the problem is that the license agreement that you have to sign to get that account prevents you from redistributing the software." Hackaday notes that beyond the the GPL v2 license on the kernel, Red Hat also has "an additional user agreement that terminates access to updates if the code is re-published." Rocky Linux officially "remains confident in its ability to continue as a bug-for-bug compatible and freely available alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, despite changes in accessibility."While this decision does change the automation we use for building Rocky Linux, we have already created a short term mitigation and are developing the longer term strategy. There will be no disruption or change for any Rocky Linux users, collaborators, or partners... The project pledges to keep its promise to maintain the full life-span of support for Rocky 8 and 9, and to continue to produce future RHEL-compatible versions as long as the option remains, allowing organizations to maintain the flexibility, control, and freedom they rely upon for their critical infrastructure. This is the open source way. Gregory Kurtzer, founder of the Rocky Linux project, calls Red Hat's move "a minor inconvenience for the Rocky Linux team," but with "no disruption to Rocky Linux users. Moving forward we are becoming even more stable, supported, and secure." AlmaLinux also weighs in: Can you just use CentOS Stream sources? No, we are committed to remaining a downstream RHEL clone, and using CentOS Stream sources would make us upstream of RHEL. CentOS Stream sources, while being upstream of RHEL, do not always include all patches and updates that are included in RHEL packages. Is Red Hat trying to kill downstream clones? We cannot speak to Red Hat's intentions, and can only point to the things they have said publicly. We have had an incredible working relationship with Red Hat through the life of AlmaLinux OS and we hope to see that continue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.