Slashdot

Civil rights lawyers and Democratic senators are pushing for legislation that would limit U.S. law enforcement agencies' ability to buy cellphone tracking tools to follow people's whereabouts, including back years in time, and sometimes without a search warrant. From a report: Concerns about police use of the tool known as "Fog Reveal" raised in an investigation by The Associated Press published earlier this month also surfaced in a Federal Trade Commission hearing three weeks ago. Police agencies have been using the platform to search hundreds of billions of records gathered from 250 million mobile devices, and hoover up people's geolocation data to assemble so-called "patterns of life," according to thousands of pages of records about the company. Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, something that defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases in which the technology was used. Panelists and members of the public who took part in the FTC hearing also raised concerns about how data generated by popular apps is used for surveillance purposes, or "in some cases, being used to infer identity and cause direct harm to people in the real world, in the physical world and being repurposed for, as was mentioned earlier, law enforcement and national security purposes," said Stacey Gray, a senior director for U.S. programs for the Future of Privacy Forum.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Holiday bargain shopping is starting extra early this year. And that could be good news for shoppers, even if it signals slightly worrisome things for the economy. From a report: E-commerce giant Amazon announced plans Monday for "a new two-day global shopping event" exclusive to members of its Prime loyalty program. Dubbed Prime Early Access Sale, the promotion is similar to Prime Day, the annual sale held in July to generate a bonanza of orders and new subscribers. Rival retail giants Walmart and Target have already signaled plans to kick off holiday sales earlier than ever, setting the stage for a long holiday shopping season with significant discounts. With warehouses and store shelves suddenly full of inventory after two years of supply chain disruptions, deals will be easier to come by than since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, say retail experts. Amazon's bonus sales event may be a sign that retailers are concerned that Americans will keep a tight grip on their wallets this holiday season because of fears over inflation, rising interest rates and predictions of an oncoming recession. An Amazon spokesperson said that the company -- with annual sales of more than $470 billion last year -- added the second online sale to help overcome such worries. "In light of inflation and economic head winds, we want to help members save throughout the season," said Amazon spokesperson Deanna Zawilinski. [...] Helping fuel the sales competition is an oversupply of merchandise -- including clothes, toys, electronics, furniture and other popular consumer goods -- that retailers ordered to meet expected consumer demand but that were delayed for months because of supply chain problems. The items are now taking up valuable space in warehouses and store shelves. With a recent surge in inflation and rising gasoline prices, Americans haven't been spending on such items as much as retailers anticipated. Store owners and retail operators now need to move those items off the shelves to make way for new holiday merchandise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The PC beta for Modern Warfare 2 was only online for just over a weekend, but cheat developers quickly managed to create wallhacks anyway, according to videos created by multiple cheat developers. From a report: The news highlights the constant cat and mouse game between cheat developers and the companies that make competitive video games, and shows that Modern Warfare 2 will be no different. Warzone, the massively popular free-to-play battle royale game built on top of Call of Duty's mainline games, was notoriously overrun by cheaters before publisher Activision and the development studios working on the game introduced a new anti-cheat mechanism called Ricochet. "I started developing a MW2 beta cheat right away. I was done the same day, the first day of the beta. My users got access once the cheat was complete & tested," Zebleer, the pseudonymous administrator of Phantom Overlay, a cheat provider that has a long history of selling cheats for Warzone, told Motherboard in an email. [...] EngineOwning, another cheat developer, published a video to their Twitter account over the weekend appearing to show their own product in action, although it didn't seem to be ready for the beta. "Our MW2 cheat is now done and we're currently in close testing," the tweet read. "This means our cheat will be ready when the game launches, with all the features you'd expect." The Anti-Cheat Police Department, a researcher who has tracked the cheating ecosystem and who reports offending players, claimed in their own tweet that "Ricochet has this shitty cheat detected they are just a scam operation at this point."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is suing former MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth, the former CEO of MoviePass' parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY), alleging they mislead investors that the company could make a profit at its $10-a-month plan. From a report: A complaint filed late Monday, reviewed by Insider, said the duo made "false or misleading statements" in financial filings and in the press. "Faced with debilitating negative cash flows -- rather than tell the public the truth -- Farnsworth and Lowe devised fraudulent tactics to prevent MoviePass's heavy users from using the service, and falsely and misleadingly informed the public that usage had declined naturally or due to measures the company had employed to combat subscribers' purported violations of MoviePass's terms and conditions of service," the complaint said. The lawsuit also named former MoviePass Vice President Khalid Itum as a defendant. The complaint accused Itum of submitting false invoices and receiving more than $310,000 from both MoviePass and HMNY.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel has announced an intriguing new app called Unison, which aims to "seamlessly" connect Intel-powered computers to smartphones -- not just Android phones but iOS devices as well. From a report: Following what Intel says is a "simple pairing process," the Unison app will allow PCs to replicate four key features of the connected phone. They can answer and make calls; they can share photos and files (pictures taken with the phone will show up in a specific Unison gallery on the PC); they can send and receive texts; and they can receive (and, in some cases, respond to) notifications that the phone receives -- though if Unison is closed, they'll go to the Windows notification center. "The advantage we can bring to a PC user that's got a well-designed Windows PC is not having to choose their device based on the PC they have. They have an iPhone, they have an Android phone, any device they want to use will be able to connect with this capability," Josh Newman, Intel's VP of mobile innovation, told The Verge. "When you're ... on your laptop, and you get notifications or texts on your phone, you can keep it in your bag and get right back into the flow of your work."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Codenamed Raptor Lake, Intel says it has made some improvements to the CPU architecture and the Intel 7 manufacturing process, but the strategy for improving their performance is both time-tested and easy to understand: add more cores, and make them run at higher clock speeds. From a report: Intel is announcing three new CPUs today, each with and without integrated graphics (per usual, the models with no GPUs have an "F" at the end): the Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K, and Core i5-13600K will launch on October 20 alongside new Z790 chipsets and motherboards. They will also work in all current-generation 600-series motherboards as long as your motherboard maker has provided a BIOS update, and will continue to support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory. Raptor Lake uses the hybrid architecture that Intel introduced in its 12th-generation Alder Lake chips last year -- a combination of large performance cores (P-cores) that keep games and other performance-sensitive applications running quickly, plus clusters of smaller efficiency cores (E-cores) that use less power -- though in our testing across laptops and desktops, it's clear that "efficiency" is more about the number of cores can be fit into a given area on a CPU die, and less about lower overall system power consumption. There have been a handful of other additions as well. The amount of L2 cache per core has been nearly doubled, going from 1.25MB to 2MB per P-core and from 2MB to 4MB per E-core cluster (E-cores always come in clusters of four). The CPUs will officially support DDR5-5600 RAM, up from a current maximum of DDR5-4800, though that DDR5-4800 maximum can easily be surpassed with XMP memory kits in 12th-generation motherboards. The maximum officially supported DDR4 RAM speed remains DDR4-3200, though the caveat about XMP applies there as well. As far as core counts and frequencies go, the Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs each pick up one extra E-core cluster, going from four E-cores to eight. The Core i9 gets two new E-core clusters, boosting the core count from eight all the way up to 16. All E-cores have maximum boost clocks that are 400MHz higher than they were before.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of more than a dozen companies launched an organization to advocate for less-restrictive software licensing rules, targeting cloud providers like Microsoft, whose contract policies have been under fire from rivals, customers and lawmakers. From a report: The Coalition for Fair Software Licensing argues that software agreements need to be more flexible and predictable for customers, including allowing the use of cloud services and programs from different providers. "Cloud customers around the world have long been subjected to repeated financial harm as a result of legacy providers' restrictive software licensing practices," said Ryan Triplette, executive director of the new association, which was announced on Tuesday. The group's member companies, coming from industries including health care, financial services and technology, are remaining anonymous for now due to fear of retaliation, she said in an interview. Microsoft, Oracle and other software giants have been criticized by competitors and clients for limiting the interoperability of products and services, sometimes making it more expensive to use them with rival offerings or prohibiting it entirely.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission should investigate how data brokers including Equifax and Experian have amassed payroll records about most Americans, a small rival urged in a letter to the agency on Monday that was seen by Reuters. From the report: For decades, companies such as Equifax have acquired employee work histories and compensation data from employers to help lenders, landlords, hiring managers and other customers perform background checks of individuals. But these big databases are vulnerable to theft and error, and workers are sometimes surprised their records are included, according to privacy activists. Equifax said it follows all laws and welcomes additional voices in the industry. In the letter to the FTC, San Mateo, California-based startup Certree said that Equifax and Experian are providing financial incentives like a slice of their revenue to employers to gain exclusive access to payroll data. Equifax also has deals with payroll software vendors that help employers process paychecks. The letter describes the agreements as anticompetitive and potentially unlawful.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alex Mashinsky -- chief executive and cofounder of bankrupt cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network -- is stepping down. From a report: Mr. Mashinsky submitted his letter of resignation to the Special Committee of the Board of Directors on Tuesday, according to Mr. Mashinsky's law firm "I regret that my continued role as CEO has become an increasing distraction, and I am very sorry about the difficult financial circumstances members of our community are facing," Mr. Mashinsky said in his resignation letter. Mr. Mashinsky launched Celsius in 2017 with two partners, often pitching it as a safer and better alternative than traditional banks. Celsius had the same basic model as a consumer bank -- such as taking deposits and making loans -- though it paid far more on deposits than a federally regulated bank. In less than five years, Celsius grew into one of the biggest crypto lenders, with more than $20 billion in assets at its peak, the company said last year. That all changed when cryptocurrency started plunging this year. In June, Celsius paused all withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy in July, saying that it owed customers nearly $4.7 billion in crypto.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell ramped up his criticism of decentralized finance on Tuesday, saying the monetary policy normalization worldwide has "revealed significant structural issues in the DeFi ecosystem" and exposed "conflict of interest," as he called for more appropriate regulation. From a report: "Within the DeFi ecosystem, there are these very significant transparency, lack of transparency [issues]," he said at a conference hosted by the Banque of France. From the financial stability standpoint, Powell said, "the interaction between the DeFi ecosystem and traditional banking system and traditional financial system is not that large at this point. So we were able to witness the DeFi winter that did not have significant impacts on the banking system and broader financial stability. That's a good thing. I think it demonstrates the weaknesses in, and the work that needs to do be done around regulation carefully and thoughtfully. It gives us a little bit of time, but that situation will not persist indefinitely. Ultimately that's not a stable equilibrium and we need to be very careful about how crypto activities are taken within regulatory parameter. In any case, wherever they take place, there is a real need for more appropriate regulation so that as DeFi expands and starts to touch more retail customers, more appropriate regulation is in place."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA's DART spacecraft successfully slammed into a distant asteroid at hypersonic speed on Monday in the world's first test of a planetary defense system, designed to prevent a potential doomsday meteorite collision with Earth. From a report: Humanity's first attempt to alter the motion of an asteroid or any celestial body played out in a NASA webcast from the mission operations center outside Washington, D.C., 10 months after DART was launched. The livestream showed images taken by DART's camera as the cube-shaped "impactor" vehicle, no bigger than a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, streaked into the asteroid Dimorphos, about the size of a football stadium, at 7:14 p.m. EDT (2314 GMT) some 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth. The $330 million mission, some seven years in development, was devised to determine if a spacecraft is capable of changing the trajectory of an asteroid through sheer kinetic force, nudging it off course just enough to keep Earth out of harm's way. Whether the experiment succeeded beyond accomplishing its intended impact will not be known until further ground-based telescope observations of the asteroid next month. But NASA officials hailed the immediate outcome of Monday's test, saying the spacecraft achieved its purpose.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Ukrainian government on Monday warned that the Kremlin is planning to carry out "massive cyberattacks" targeting power grids and other critical infrastructure in Ukraine and in the territories of its allies. "By the cyberattacks, the enemy will try to increase the effect of missile strikes on electricity supply facilities, primarily in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine," an advisory warned. "The occupying command is convinced that this will slow down the offensive operations of the Ukrainian Defence Forces." Monday's advisory alluded to two cyberattacks the Russian government carried out -- first in 2015 and then almost exactly one year later -- that deliberately left Ukrainians without power during one of the coldest months of the year. The attacks were seen as a proof-of-concept and test ground of sorts for disrupting Ukraine's power supply. "The experience of cyberattacks on Ukraine's energy systems in 2015 and 2016 will be used when conducting operations," the Ukrainian government said on Monday. It's hard to assess the chances of a successful hacking campaign against Ukraine's power grids. Earlier this year, Ukraine's CERT-UA said it successfully detected a new strain of Industroyer inside the network of a regional Ukrainian energy firm. Industroyer2 reportedly was able to temporarily switch off power to nine electrical substations but was stopped before a major blackout could be triggered. [...] But researchers from Mandiant and elsewhere also note that Sandworm, the name for the Kremlin-backed group behind the power grid hacks, is among the most elite hacking groups in the world. They are known for stealth, persistence, and remaining hidden inside targeted organizations for months or even years before surfacing. Besides an attack on electrical grids, Monday's advisory also warned of other forms of disruptions the country expected Russia to ramp up. "The Kremlin also intends to increase the intensity of DDoS attacks on the critical infrastructure of Ukraine's closest allies, primarily Poland and the Baltic states," the advisory stated. "We don't have any direct knowledge or data to make an assessment on Ukraine's capability to defend its grid, but we do know that CERT-UA stopped the deployment of INDUSTROYER.V2 malware that targeted Ukraine's electric substations earlier this year," Chris Sistrunk, technical manager of Mandiant Industrial Control Systems Consulting, wrote in an email. "Based on that, and what we know about the Ukrainian people's overall resolve, it's increasingly clear that one of the reasons cyberattacks in Ukraine have been dampened is because its defenders are very aggressive and very good at confronting Russian actors."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix is forming an in-house game studio in Helsinki, Finland to create "world-class" original games without ads or in-app purchases. Engadget reports: While it's too soon for details of the games themselves, Zynga and EA alumnus Marko Lastikka will serve as director. Helsinki is a good fit as the home to some of the "best game talent" on the planet, according to Netflix. This includes The Walking Dead mobile developer Next Games (which Netflix bought in March). Netflix has purchased multiple developers, including Boss Fight and Oxenfree creator Night School Studio, but hasn't built a developer from scratch until now. You won't see the first fruits of this internal studio for "years," Netflix says. Still, this and recent acquisitions show how the company's gaming strategy is evolving. Where Netflix initially depended on outsiders' games, including slightly tweaked versions of existing titles, it's increasingly focused on truly unique projects you won't find elsewhere. In theory, more people will subscribe to Netflix with the game library in mind.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Noam Izenberg, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University's applied physics laboratory, is making a case for sending a crewed mission to examine Venus en route to Mars. "Venus gets a bad rap because it's got such a difficult surface environment," said Izenberg in a report presented at the International Astronautical Congress in Paris last week. "The current Nasa paradigm is moon-to-Mars. We're trying to make the case for Venus as an additional target on that pathway." The Guardian reports: There are notable downsides. Walking on the surface would be an unsurvivable experience, so astronauts would have to gaze down at the planet from the safety of their spacecraft in a flyby mission. In its favor, however, Venus is significantly closer, making a return mission doable in a year, compared with a potentially three-year roundtrip to Mars. A flyby would be scientifically valuable and could provide crucial experience of a lengthy deep-space mission as a precursor to visiting Mars, according to a report presented at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Paris last week. Izenberg said there were practical arguments for incorporating a Venus flyby into the crewed Mars landing that Nasa hopes to achieve by the late 2030s. Although the planet is in the "wrong" direction, performing a slingshot around Venus -- known as a gravity assist - could reduce the travel time and the fuel required to get to the red planet. That would make a crewed flyby trip to Venus a natural stepping stone towards Nasa's ultimate goal. "You'd be learning about how people work in deep space, without committing yourself to a full Mars mission," he said. "And it's not just going out into the middle of nowhere -- it would have a bit of cachet as you'd be visiting another planet for the first time." "We need to understand how we can get out of the cradle and move into the universe," he added. There is also renewed scientific interest in Venus. The discovery of thousands of exoplanets raises the question of how many might be habitable, and scientists want to understand how and why Venus, a planet so similar to our own in size, mass and distance from the sun, ended up with infernal surface conditions. Izenberg said a Venus flyby "doesn't yet have traction" in the broader space travel community, although there are advocates within Nasa, including its chief economist, Alexander Macdonald, who led the IAC session. Of course, there are those who push back against such an idea. "It's really not a nice place to go. It's a hellish environment and the thermal challenges for a human mission would be quite considerable," said Prof Andrew Coates, a space scientist at UCL's Mullard space science laboratory. He said Venus was rightly a focus of scientific exploration, but that "a human flyby really wouldn't add very much."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hill: Passenger rail service Amtrak is aiming to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 to reduce its impact on the environment. Amtrak on Thursday announced efforts to hit that mark will involve reducing the use of diesel fuel and phasing in renewable fuels in its network over the next decades. The rail service said it plans to reach 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2030 by investing in new fuel-cell, hydrogen and battery technologies. Funds from President Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law will be used to help Amtrak develop a more sustainable fleet, expand service and revamp part of the rail's aging infrastructure. The legislation includes $66 billion in rail funding, the largest federal investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak. Amtrak executives said setting clear goals to reduce emissions is particularly important for attracting "a new generation of travelers who are conscious of their environmental impact." Amtrak last year announced a $7.3 billion investment to procure 83 new trains that will operate mostly along the Northeast Corridor, which include some of the first hybrid-electric powered trains. The trains will start replacing older trains, some of which are nearly 50 years old, in 2024. The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., making up 27 percent of total emissions in 2020. Rail makes up just 2 percent of transportation emissions, while cars and trucks make up more than 80 percent.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. lawmakers and TikTok are hammering out a plan, under which the short-form video app would make changes to its data security and governance without requiring its parent firm, China's ByteDance to sell it, the New York Times reported on Monday. Reuters reports: TikTok and the Biden administration have drafted a preliminary agreement to resolve national security concerns but are still deciding on a potential agreement, the Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter. A TikTok spokesperson declined to comment on the report but said the app was confident about being able to "fully satisfy all reasonable U.S. national security concerns." TikTok's parent company ByteDance was ordered to divest the company more than two years ago over fears that U.S. user data could be passed on to China's communist government.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AMD engineer K Prateek Nayak recently uncovered that a 20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel still being applied to modern AMD systems is responsible in some cases for hurting performance on modern Zen hardware. Fortunately, a fix is on the way for limiting that workaround to old systems and in turn helping with performance for modern systems. Phoronix reports: Last week was a patch posted for the ACPI processor idle code to avoid an old chipset workaround on modern AMD Zen systems. Since ACPI support was added to the Linux kernel in 2002, there has been a "dummy wait op" to deal with some chipsets where STPCLK# doesn't get asserted in time. The dummy I/O read delays further instruction processing until the CPU is fully stopped. This was a problem with at least some AMD Athlon era systems with a VIA chipset... But not a problem with newer chipsets of roughly the past two decades. With this workaround still being applied to even modern AMD systems, K Prateek Nayak discovered: "Sampling certain workloads with IBS on AMD Zen3 system shows that a significant amount of time is spent in the dummy op, which incorrectly gets accounted as C-State residency. A large C-State residency value can prime the cpuidle governor to recommend a deeper C-State during the subsequent idle instances, starting a vicious cycle, leading to performance degradation on workloads that rapidly switch between busy and idle phases. One such workload is tbench where a massive performance degradation can be observed during certain runs." At least for Tbench, this long-time, unconditional workaround in the Linux kernel has been hurting AMD Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC performance in select workloads. This workaround hasn't affected modern Intel systems since those newer Intel platforms use the alternative MWAIT-based intel_idle driver code path instead. The AMD patch evolved into this patch by Intel Linux engineer Dave Hansen. That patch to limit the "dummy wait" workaround to old systems is already queued into TIP's x86/urgent branch. With it going the route of "x86/urgent" and for fixing a overzealous workaround that isn't needed on modern hardware, it's likely this patch will be submitted this week still for the Linux 6.0 kernel rather than needing to wait until the next (v6.1) merge window.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Ever since American manufacturing entered a long stretch of automation and outsourcing in the late 1970s, every recession has led to the loss of factory jobs that never returned. But the recovery from the pandemic recession has been different: American manufacturers have now added enough jobs to regain all that they shed -- and then some. The resurgence has not been driven by companies bringing back factory jobs that had moved overseas, nor by the brawny industrial sectors and regions often evoked by President Biden, former President Donald J. Trump and other champions of manufacturing. Instead, the engines in this recovery include pharmaceutical plants, craft breweries and ice-cream makers. The newly created jobs are more likely to be located in the Mountain West and the Southeast than in the classic industrial strongholds of the Great Lakes. American manufacturers cut roughly 1.36 million jobs from February to April of 2020, as Covid-19 shut down much of the economy. As of August this year, manufacturers had added back about 1.43 million jobs, a net gain of 67,000 workers above pre pandemic levels. Data suggest that the rebound is largely a product of the unique circumstances of the pandemic recession and recovery. Covid-19 crimped global supply chains, making domestic manufacturing more attractive to some companies. Federal stimulus spending helped to power a shift in Americans' buying habits away from services like travel and restaurants and toward goods like cars and sofas, helping domestic factory production -- and with it, job growth -- to bounce back much faster than it did in the previous two recessions. In recessions over the last half century, factories have typically laid off a greater share of workers than other employers in the economy, and they have been slower to add jobs back in recoveries. Often, companies have used those economic inflection points to accelerate their pace of outsourcing jobs to foreign countries, where wages are significantly lower, and to invest in technology that replaces human workers. [...] This time was different. Factory layoffs roughly matched those in the services sector in the depth of the pandemic recession. Economists attribute that break in the trend to many U.S. manufacturers being deemed "essential" during pandemic lockdowns, and the ensuing surge in demand for their products by Americans. Manufacturing jobs quickly rebounded in the spring of 2020, then began to climb at a much faster pace than has been typical for factory job creation in recent decades. Since June 2020, under both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, factories have added more than 30,000 jobs a month."Sectors that hemorrhaged employment in recent recessions have fared much better in this recovery," reports the NYT. They include furniture makers, textile mills, paper products companies and computer equipment makers. "Mr. Biden has pushed a variety of legislative initiatives to boost domestic manufacturing, including direct spending on infrastructure, tax credits and other subsidies for companies like battery makers and semiconductor factories, and new federal procurement requirements that benefit manufacturers located in the United States," adds the report -- all of which could help encourage factory job growth in the coming months and years. Furthermore, the rising tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade and technology could encourage more companies to leave China for the United States, particularly cutting-edge industries like clean energy and advanced computing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple said Monday it is assembling its flagship iPhone 14 in India as the U.S. technology giant looks to shift some production away from China. CNBC reports: "The new iPhone 14 lineup introduces groundbreaking new technologies and important safety capabilities. We're excited to be manufacturing iPhone 14 in India," the company said in a statement. Apple's main iPhone assembler, Foxconn, is manufacturing the devices at its Sriperumbudur factory on the outskirts of Chennai. The Cupertino, California, giant has been manufacturing iPhones in India since 2017 but these were usually older models. This time with the iPhone 14, Apple is producing its latest model in India for the first time, close to the device's launch. Apple introduced the iPhone 14 earlier this month. Apple will sell India-produced phones locally but also export them to other markets globally. Customers in India will begin receiving the locally manufactured devices in the next few days. Earlier this month, JPMorgan analysts said that Apple will move 5% of its global production for the iPhone 14 to India by late 2022. The company could also make 25% of all iPhones by 2025 in India.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canada has said it is dropping all remaining Covid border restrictions, including vaccine requirements for travelers. The BBC reports: As of 1 October, travelers will also no longer need to provide proof of Covid vaccination, to undergo any testing or to isolate and quarantine. The mask mandate on planes and trains will also be lifted. The ArriveCan app -- used to upload health documents when entering Canada -- will become optional. Federal health minister Jean-Yves Duclos said in an announcement on Monday that Canada is "in a much better position" than it was earlier in the pandemic, in part due to availability of Covid-19 vaccines and treatment options. The country's high vaccination rate - with around 82% of the population having received two doses - and a falling death rate are also factors. The report notes that vaccine mandates for travelers entering the U.S. remain in place. Further reading: Japan To Allow Visa-Free Travel After 2 1/2 Years of Mostly Closed BordersRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In the heart of midtown Manhattan lies a multibillion-dollar problem for building owners, the city and thousands of workers. Blocks of decades-old office towers sit partially empty, in an awkward position: too outdated to attract tenants seeking the latest amenities, too new to be demolished or converted for another purpose. It's a situation playing out around the globe as employers adapt to flexible work after the Covid-19 pandemic and rethink how much space they need. Even as people are increasingly called back to offices for at least some of the week, vacancy rates have soared in cities from Hong Kong to London and Toronto. "There's no part of the world that is untouched by the growth of hybrid working," said Richard Barkham, global chief economist for commercial real estate firm CBRE Group Inc. In some cases, companies are simply cutting back on space to reduce their real estate costs. Others are relocating to shiny new towers with top-of-the-line amenities to attract talent and employees who may be reluctant to leave the comforts of working from home. Left behind are older buildings outside of prime locations. The US is likely to have a slower office-market recovery than Asia and Europe because it began the pandemic with a higher vacancy rate, and long-term demand is expected to drop around 10% or more, Barkham said. New York, America's biggest office real estate market, is at the center of the issue. A study this year by professors at Columbia University and New York University estimated that lower tenant demand because of remote work may cut 28%, or $456 billion, off the value of offices across the US. About 10% of that would be in New York City alone. The implications of obsolete buildings stretch across the local economy. Empty offices have led to a cascade of shuttered restaurants and other street-level businesses that depended on daytime worker traffic. And falling building values mean less property-tax revenue for city coffers. A strip on Manhattan's Third Avenue, from 42nd to 59th streets, shows the problem of older properties in stark terms. While New York leasing demand has bounced back toward pre-pandemic levels, the corridor has 29% of office space available for tenants, nearly double the amount four years ago and above the city's overall rate of 19%, according to research from brokerage firm Savills. "There's no easy fix for landlords, who rely on rental income to pay down debt," notes the report. "Some cities are exploring options to turn downtown offices to residential buildings: Calgary, for instance, has an incentive program for such redevelopments. While New York has had some conversions, the hefty costs and zoning and architectural restrictions make it a difficult proposition."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"I believe that Niemann has cheated more - and more recently - than he has publicly admitted," GM Magnus Carlsen wrote in a much-anticipated statement about GM Hans Niemann's alleged cheating. The world champion posted the statement on Twitter just moments ago. Chess.com reports: Carlsen starts by saying that he is "frustrated" about the situation like the whole chess community is. He then uses the word "cheating," finally becoming more concrete after the mysterious tweet that he sent on September 5, with a video in which Jose Mourinho can be seen saying: "I prefer really not to speak; if I speak I'm in big trouble." Carlsen then confirms what has been mentioned by GM Fabiano Caruana in a recent podcast: that the world champion already considered withdrawing from the Sinquefield Cup before the first round, when he heard that Niemann was the last-minute replacement for GM Richard Rapport. The most important phrase in the statement reads: "I believe that Niemann has cheated more â" and more recently -- than that he has publicly admitted." Carlsen, however, doesn't specify if he is referring to online chess or over-the-board chess. Regarding online chess, Niemann has admitted to having cheated twice on Chess.com, when he was 12 and when he was 16 years old, and that he regrets that. In a statement posted on September 9, IM Danny Rensch wrote on behalf of Chess.com: "We have shared detailed evidence with him concerning our decision, including information that contradicts his statements regarding the amount and seriousness of his cheating on Chess.com." Carlsen, who lost his game to Niemann before leaving the Sinquefield Cup, reveals in his statement that he is suspicious about Niemann's play in that game as well. The big question, whether the world champion has hard evidence that shows Niemann has cheated, remains unclear from the statement. It seems Carlsen is restricted for legal reasons, as he writes: "Unfortunately, at this time I am limited in what I can say without explicit permission from Niemann to speak openly."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Federal Communications Commission approved a long-delayed proposal to crack down on spam texts Friday night after Axios asked agency members why it hadn't moved on the issue. From a report: The number of spam text messages -- which can include links or other tricks designed to steal money or personal information -- has exploded, with the volume now exceeding that of robocalls.The proposal, which passed on a 4-0 vote, seeks comment on requiring cellphone companies to block texts from numbers known to be illegal or fraudulent. It had been awaiting a vote at the FCC for nearly a year. The FCC will review feedback on the proposal before writing final rules, a process that can take months. The measure also seeks comment on whether carriers should use third-party analytics providers to inform blocking efforts, and whether the agency should push the wireless industry to authenticate text messages like it does for phone calls to deter robocalls, a senior FCC official told Axios. "The American people are fed up with scam texts, and we need to use every tool we have to do something about it," chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, told Axios ahead of the agency's vote.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Helium was touted as the best real-world use case of Web3 technology. But as it struggles to generate revenue, a Forbes investigation found that executives and their friends quietly hoarded the majority of wealth at the project's inception. From a report: A review of hundreds of leaked internal documents, transaction data and interviews with five former Helium employees suggest that as Helium insiders touted the democratized spirit of their "People's Network," they quietly amassed a majority of the tokens earned at the project's start, hoarding much of the wealth generated in its earliest and most lucrative days. Forbes identified 30 digital wallets that appear to be connected to Helium employees, their friends and family and early investors. This group of wallets mined 3.5 million HNT -- almost half of all Helium tokens mined within the first three months of the network's launch in August 2019, according to a Forbes analysis that was confirmed by blockchain forensics firm Certik. Within six months, more than a quarter of all HNT had been mined by insiders -- valued at roughly $250 million when the price of Helium peaked last year. Even after the crypto price crashed, the tokens are still worth $21 million today. Cryptocurrency companies typically compensate early investors and employees for building their offerings with an allotment of tokens, and disclose these rewards in blog posts or white papers. While Helium and its executives have publicly discussed their incentive plan -- a scheme called Helium Security Tokens, or HST, which guarantees about a third of all HNT for insiders -- they haven't previously disclosed the additional windfall taken from Helium's public token supply, worth millions, that was identified by Forbes. This means that at a time when Helium rewards per hotspot were at their highest, insiders claimed a majority of tokens, while little more than 30% went to Helium's community. Each hotspot earned an average 33,000 HNT in August 2019, according to blockchain data; today, each hotspot only earns around 2 HNT per month. Some insiders exploited vulnerabilities known to the company to increase their hauls even more.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A beautiful blue flaw in a gem-quality diamond from Botswana is actually a tiny fragment of Earth's deep interior -- and it suggests our planet's mantle contains oceans' worth of water. Scientific American: The flaw, technically called an inclusion, looks like a fish eye: a deep blue center surrounded by a white haze. But it's really a pocket of the mineral ringwoodite from 660 kilometers down, at the boundary between the upper and lower mantle. This is just the second time scientists have found this mineral in a chunk of crystal from this zone, and the sample is the only one of its kind currently known to science. The last example was destroyed during an attempt to analyze its chemistry. [...] The discovery indicates that this very deep zone of Earth is soggy, with vast amounts of water locked up tight within the minerals there. Though this water is chemically bound to the minerals' structure and doesn't flow around like an actual ocean, it does likely play an important role in how the mantle melts. This in turn affects big-picture geology, such as plate tectonics and volcanic activity. For example, water could contribute to the development of areas of mantle upwelling known as plumes, which are hotspots for volcanoes. The stunning bit of diamond-encased mantle was discovered by Tingting Gu, a mineral physicist now at Purdue University, who was at the time doing research at the Gemological Institute of America. Her job was to study rare inclusions found in diamonds. Inclusions are undesirable for jewelry because they cloud a diamond's sparkle. But they're often interesting to scientists because they trap bits of the environment where the diamond formed millennia earlier. The vast majority of diamonds form between about 150 to 200 km below Earth's surface. But a handful come from much deeper. It is often difficult to pinpoint exactly how deep, but the new sample was remarkably accommodating on that front, Gu and her colleagues reported on Monday in a study published in Nature Geoscience. Ringwoodite can only form at incredibly high pressures. It is not found in Earth's crust, but it is sometimes seen trapped in meteorites that underwent major cosmic trauma. In Earth's mantle, ringwoodite exists at the pressures present down to 660 km.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beijing's long-distance bus drivers have been told to wear electronic wristbands that use emotion-sensing technology to monitor their state of mind. From a report: The move was initiated by the state-run Beijing Public Transport Holding Group, which says it is aimed at protecting public safety. But legal experts have raised privacy concerns and say the wristbands could cause bus drivers undue distress and potentially lead to discrimination. Some 1,800 wristbands were distributed to bus drivers on cross-province and highway routes on Wednesday, the official Beijing Daily reported. It is unclear how many drivers will be required to wear the devices. The report said they would be used to monitor the drivers' vital signs and emotional state in real time to improve safety.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following one of the biggest data breaches in Australian history, the government of Australia is planning to get stricter on requirements for disclosure of cyber attacks. From a report: On Monday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Australian radio station 4BC that the government intended to overhaul privacy legislation so that any company suffering a data breach was required to share details with banks about customers who had potentially been affected in an effort to minimize fraud. Under current Australian privacy legislation, companies are prevented from sharing such details about their customers with third parties. The policy announcement was made in the wake of a huge data breach last week, which affected Australia's second-largest telecom company, Optus. Hackers managed to access a vast amount of potentially sensitive information on up to 9.8 million Optus customers -- close to 40 percent of the Australian population. Leaked data included name, date of birth, address, contact information, and in some cases, driver's license or passport ID numbers. Reporting from ABC News Australia suggested the breach may have resulted from an improperly secured API that Optus developed to comply with regulations around providing users multifactor authentication options.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The British pound on Monday briefly hit a record low against the dollar, extending losses after Britain's new government on Friday announced a sweeping economic overhaul centered around tax cuts and deregulation. Citibank called the move a "huge, unfunded gamble for the U.K. economy." From a report: The pound slumped as low at $1.035 on Monday, breaking the 1985 record, and although it bounced up from those depths it remains down about 19 percent this year. The pound has also fallen against the euro, although not by as much. In other markets, yields on British government bonds hit multiyear highs, meaning that borrowing costs are rising steeply as the government prepares to issue more debt to pay for subsidies on energy bills and other policies. What does the weaker pound mean for the British economy? The drop in the pound poses concerns, since a weaker currency makes imports more expensive. It also makes it more expensive for Britons to travel abroad, since their money doesn't go as far as it did before. British companies, many of which rely on materials imported from other countries, may raise prices to compensate for their higher costs -- putting pressure on inflation, which is already running near 40-year highs. [...] People and companies abroad buying goods and services from Britain could benefit from cheaper prices. And businesses in Britain that generate revenue elsewhere will earn more when that money is converted back into pounds. For Americans and others spending dollars or euros while traveling to Britain, their trips will be more affordable than they would have been even a few months ago. Further reading: Fed official warns UK tax cuts increase risk of global recession.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most mission scientists would wince at the thought of their spacecraft being smashed to smithereens. But for those behind Nasa's Dart probe, anything short of total destruction will be chalked up as a failure. From a report: The $330m spacecraft is due to slam head-on into an asteroid about 11m kilometres above the Indian Ocean soon after midnight on Monday. The impact, at nearly seven kilometres a second, will obliterate the half-tonne probe, all in the name of planetary defence. Not that Dimorphos, the asteroid in question, poses any threat to humanity. The Dart, or double asteroid redirection test, is an experiment, the first mission ever to assess whether asteroids can be deflected should one ever be found on a collision course with Earth. A well-placed nudge could avert Armageddon, or so the thinking goes, and spare humans the same fate as the dinosaurs. "It's a very complicated game of cosmic billiards," said Prof Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer and member of the Nasa Dart investigation team at Queen's University Belfast. "What we want to do is use as much energy [as we can] from Dart to move the asteroid." With telescopes constantly scanning the skies, scientists hope to have some notice if an asteroid were ever to present a major threat. "If we are able to see far enough in advance and know that an asteroid might be a problem, pushing it out of the way will be much safer than the big Hollywood idea of blowing it up," said Catriona McDonald, a PhD student at Warwick University. The Dart mission launched from Vandenberg space force base in November last year. On Monday night, mission controllers will hand control to Dart's software and let the probe steer itself into oblivion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter nunya_bizns writes: President Vladimir Putin on Monday granted Russian citizenship to former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, nine years after he exposed the scale of secret surveillance operations by the National Security Agency (NSA). Snowden, 39, fled the United States and was given asylum in Russia after leaking secret files in 2013 that revealed vast domestic and international surveillance operations carried out by the NSA, where he worked. U.S. authorities have for years wanted him returned to the United States to face a criminal trial on espionage charges.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica and 13 other European telecoms providers on Monday made their strongest push for Big Tech to share network costs, citing the energy crisis and EU climate change goals. From a report: The call comes as the European Commission prepares to seek feedback from both sides before making a legislative proposal that could force tech companies to help pay for the roll-out of 5G and fibre cables across the 27-country European Union. The sector which invests some 50 billion euros ($48.5 billion) annually in infrastructure, needs more funding and urgently, the chief executives of the companies said in a statement. "Costs of planning and construction works are increasing. Prices for fibre optic cables, for example, have almost doubled in the first semester 2022. Similarly, the hikes in energy prices and in the prices of other inputs are also hitting the connectivity sector," they said. "Timely action is a must: Europe missed out on many of the opportunities offered by the consumer internet. It must now swiftly build strength for the age of the metaverses," the CEO's said. Europe's telecoms operators argue that U.S. tech firms such as Alphabet's Google, Meta and Netflix account for more than half of internet traffic and should bear some of the cost of upgrading infrastructure. Big Tech has rebuffed such requests, saying they are already investing in equipment and technologies to deliver content more efficiently.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Walmart is making its first move into the metaverse. Starting Monday, the retailer will unveil two immersive experiences on Roblox's virtual platform. Walmart Land will feature fashion, beauty and entertainment items, while Walmart's Universe of Play will showcase toys, the company announced. From a report: Walmart follows companies from Nike to VF in a bid to get consumers' attention via virtual universes, where elements of video conferencing, gaming, social media and e-commerce blend together. Roblox has a community of more than 52 million daily users, and many of them are younger people, who are particularly valuable targets for corporate powerhouses. "This is the first major initiative that we have in the metaverse," William White, Walmart's chief marketing officer, said in an interview. "This is another step for us in reaching our customers in unexpected ways." Walmart Land will offer a virtual store where Roblox users can use badges and coins earned on the platform to buy merchandise for their avatars. There will also be a "physics-defying Ferris wheel" that provides a bird's-eye view of the virtual world, plus unlockable tokens and badges that can be earned in games and competitions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Interpol has issued a red notice for Do Kwon, requesting law enforcement agencies worldwide to search and arrest the Terraform Labs founder whose blockchain startup collapsed earlier this year. From a report: The collapse of Terra cryptocurrency (Luna) and the so-called stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) wiped out investors' $40 billion, prompting an uproar that caused the prosecutors to launch investigations into Kwon and his colleagues. He faces charges in South Korea, the prosecutors said Monday.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Are smartphones ever entirely secure? It depends on one's definition of "secure," particularly when dealing with corporate environments. Most companies with bring-your-own-device policies install apps or agents on workers' smartphones to help secure them, leveraging the management capabilities built into operating systems like Android and iOS. But those might not be sufficient. That's what Cloudflare argues, anyway, in the pitch for the new services it's launching this week. Today, the company announced Zero Trust SIM and Zero Trust for Mobile Operators, two product offerings targeting smartphone users, the companies securing corporate phones and the carriers selling data services. Let's start with Zero Trust SIM. Designed to secure all data packets leaving a smartphone, Zero Trust SIM -- once launched in the U.S. (to start) -- will be available as an eSIM deployable via existing mobile device management platforms to both iOS and Android devices. It'll be locked to a specific device, mitigating the risk of SIM-swapping attacks, and usable either in a standalone configuration or in tandem with Cloudflare's mobile agent, WARP. In a recent email interview, Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming made the case that Zero Trust SIM can accomplish what VPNs and other secure layers can't: cell-level protection. A SIM card can act as another security factor, and -- in combination with hardware keys -- make it nearly impossible to impersonate an employee, he argued. "Zero Trust SIM provides defense in depth. A VPN layer is one of those components, but doesn't remove the need to still deploy cellular connectivity across all of your mobile devices today, and traditional 'AnyConnect-style' VPNs do nothing to stop attackers moving laterally once they're inside the VPN," Graham-Cumming said. "We continue to see organizations breached due to challenges securing their applications and networks, and what was once a real-estate budget is quickly becoming a 'secure my remote and distributed workforce' budget from an IT security perspective." Specifically, Graham-Cumming said that Zero Trust SIM will enable Cloudflare to rewrite DNS requests leaving a device to instead use Cloudflare Gateway for DNS filtering.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: Florida-based tech startup Undefined Technologies announced its unique ionic propulsion drone has passed an outdoor flight test, meaning it's on track for commercial release in 2024, according to a report from New Atlas. The drone, called Silent Ventus, uses proprietary technology to ionize the oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the surrounding air to create an "ionic wind" that propels the machine in the direction it wants to go. According to Undefined, the drone could be used for cargo. Though it's not been used for large-scale drone projects on Earth before, ionic propulsion isn't a new technology. In fact, it's currently one of the best technologies humans currently possess for deep space exploration propulsion and other space applications. According to Undefined, its "Air Tantrum" ionic propulsion technology produces up to 150 percent more thrust than current ion thruster technologies. Earlier this year, the company released footage of a two-and-a-half-minute indoor flight test, saying the drone emitted 85 decibels of noise. Now, it claims it's flown a prototype for four and a half minutes, though it's only released one minute, 17 seconds of footage. The drone firm also says it achieved a noise level below 75 dB. It's now aiming to secure further investment to build a zero-emissions cargo delivery drone by 2023 that could fly for 15 minutes and make less than 70 dB. Undefined claims its "silent" 70-dB drones will lead to far fewer noise complaints in areas that will be served by urban cargo delivery drones in the future. However, it's worth pointing out that Undefined had yet to test its drone with large payloads, which will require extra thrust and will likely make more noise.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In compliance with the country's nuclear phase-out law, Belgium's Doel 3 reactor was shut down on Friday after being in operation for 40 years. From a report: Despite the energy crisis in Europe, the nuclear reactor in the town of Doel, north of the port city of Antwerp, will close on Friday. This is the first time a nuclear reactor will be permanently shut down in Belgium. The Doel 3 reactor, one of four reactors of the Doel Nuclear Power Plant, will disconnect from the grid at 21.15 local time due to the nuclear phase-out law enforced by past governments. The 1,006 megawatt-hours capacitated reactor was built in 1978, was grid connected in 1982, and operated for 40 years. Belgium hosts a total of seven reactors, four of which are at the Doel Nuclear Power Plant close to the Dutch border, while three are located at the Tihange Nuclear Power Plant, close to the Germany and Luxembourg border. The electricity produced by these reactors meets about half of the country's needs. After the Russia-Ukraine war, Belgium decided to extend the operation period of the Doel 4 and Tihange 3 reactors by 10 years to avoid energy supply shortages. The reactors were previously planned to close in 2025. Decisions taken by previous governments prescribed that the Doel 3 and the Tihange 2 reactors would shut down in September and February next year, respectively. With the looming energy crisis, however, the current government started to work on extending the operation period of these reactors. Negotiations between the operators and the government concluded that it was not technically and legally possible to postpone the Doel 3 shutdown process at this stage.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), astronomers have detected a new radio pulsar in a binary system with a massive non-degenerate companion star. The discovery of the pulsar, which received designation PSR J2108+4516, was detailed in a paper published September 14 on the arXiv pre-print server. Phys.Org reports: Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars emitting a beam of electromagnetic radiation. They are usually detected in the form of short bursts of radio emission; however, some of them are also observed via optical, X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes. Now, an international team of astronomers led by Bridget C. Andersen of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, reports the finding of a new rare type of a binary pulsar -- hosting a massive companion. The detection was made using CHIME, a radio telescope possessing a very wide field of view, large collecting area and high sensitivity across the 400-800 MHz range. All in all, the team acquired almost three years of near-daily CHIME/Pulsar observations of PSR J2108+4516 extending from October 20, 2018 to September 3, 2021. Profile drifts over pulse phase indicated that the pulsar was experiencing significant acceleration from orbiting with a massive binary companion. The observations of PSR J2108+4516 revealed that it has a spin period of about 0.58 seconds and orbital period of 269 days. The orbital eccentricity was found to be at a level of approximately 0.09 and the pulsar's characteristic age was estimated to be around 2.1 million years. The surface magnetic field of PSR J2108+4516 was measured to be some 1.2 trillion Gauss. When it comes to the companion object, the results suggest that its mass should be between 11.7 and 113 solar masses. The study found that the companion is a bright OBe star, known as EM* UHA 138, located at a distance of about 10,600 light years. The researchers estimate that the mass of this star is most likely between 17 and 23 solar masses. Summing up the results, the astronomers underlined that PSR J2108+4516 is the sixth young pulsar with a massive non-degenerate companion so far detected. The authors of the paper added that PSR J2108+4516 may serve as a rare laboratory for the exploration of massive star winds and circumstellar disks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kia is planning to manufacture its electric vehicles in the US, according to South Korean media sources Maeil Business and SBS (via The EV Officials). The Verge reports: The automaker currently builds its flagship electric car and North American sales hit, the Kia EV6, in South Korea at its Hwasung plant. But now, Kia will shift some of its EV assembly to the US by 2024, according to the report. Manufacturing EVs in the US would allow Kia to qualify for new incentives that were included in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, which requires automakers to build EVs in North America to qualify. Kia and its parent company, Hyundai, had threatened legal action against the US over what they see as a "discriminatory" policy. Other provisions will exclude automakers from incentives if they use Chinese-sourced minerals and battery components, which could effectively cut off almost every domestic EV manufacturer once the law goes into effect. Hyundai and Kia combined currently hold the second-highest market share for electric vehicles in the US, a position that could be at risk if customers can't take advantage of the new federal incentives (and man, are EVs getting expensive).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, were exposed to potentially harmful radiation while staying at the US ambassador's residence in Moscow in 1959, according to declassified Secret Service documents. Nixon, who was vice-president at the time, was not informed of the threat, and the state department was only informed in 1976, when a member of his Secret Service detail, James Golden, revealed that detection equipment had measured significant levels of radiation in and around the Nixons' sleeping quarters at the residence, Spaso House. Golden said he was later told by the state department that he had been exposed to "massive dosages" of ionizing radiation produced by an atomic battery used by Soviet spies to power bugging devices hidden in the building. However, Golden had doubts about that explanation and it was not confirmed. After Secret Service agents denounced Soviet dirty tricks in earshot of the listening devices in the residence, the radiation stopped. "We sat down on the beds facing each other and began berating the Russians in loud voices cursing them for pulling a trick like this and wondering in loud voices why they were taking us for fools and asking each other if they thought they were going to get away with doing this," Golden testified. Before his Moscow visit, Nixon was asked by another member of his Secret Service detail, John Sherwood, whether he wanted radiation detection devices taken on the trip. Sherwood pointed out that Soviet officials visiting the US had asked for Geiger counters. The vice-president turned down Geiger counters, but yes to more discreet dosimeters -- though he said he would not wear one himself and did not want it known that the matter had been discussed. On the first evening of the visit, on 23 July 1959, the dosimeter readings climbed rapidly, leading a senior military official in the entourage, Adm Hyman Rickover, an expert on nuclear naval propulsion, to suspect that there had been a nuclear accident. Rickover and the US ambassador, Llewellyn Thompson, agreed not to tell Nixon. Golden was skeptical of the analysis by the state department's medical division that the radiation came from atomic batteries used to power listening devices inside Spaso House. He pointed out that the radiation had stopped while he was in the building, so no one could have come in and removed the batteries. He concluded the state department experts were not being frank with him. The incident was reported after Golden's revelations in 1976, but this is the first time the underlying documentation has been made available online, after a request to the Nixon presidential library from the National Security Archive at George Washington University.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this year, the International Organization for Migration reported that more than 3 million refugees fleeing war-torn Ukraine were "at heightened risk of exploitation." Human trafficking cases, they warned, involved refugees more likely to leave home suddenly without secure financial resources and "less likely to be identified in the immediate aftermath of mass displacement." Since February, the European Union announced (PDF) that the number is even larger, counting more than 5.4 million people who "have arrived in the European Union since the beginning of the war in Ukraine." "All relevant stakeholders have recognized that the threat of trafficking in human beings is high and imminent," EU's human trafficking plan states. Since women and children represent the majority of refugees fleeing, the plan says they are believed to be most at risk. To respond, the EU began monitoring online and offline human trafficking risks, and experts called for countries across Europe to start working together to shield refugees during this uncertain time of conflict. This week, the EU's law enforcement agency focused on cybercrimes, Europol, reported that it had done exactly that by coordinating the first online EU-wide hackathon. By bringing together law enforcement authorities from 20 countries to aid in their investigations, the hackathon targeted criminal networks using social platforms and websites to map out the online criminal landscape of human trafficking across Europe. In particular, Europol noted in its report, "investigators targeted human traffickers attempting to lure Ukrainian refugees." "The Internet and human trafficking are interlinked," Europol stated in its report, which identified 30 online platforms "related to vulnerable Ukrainian refugees," 10 specifically targeting refugees for human trafficking. Europol identified 80 persons/usernames (with 30 possibly exploiting Ukrainian refugees), 11 suspected human traffickers (five believed to be targeting Ukrainian refugees), and 45 possible victims, 25 of which were Ukrainian. Countries involved in the hackathon were Austria, Albania, Belgium, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine. Online platforms probed during the hackathon included "a wide range of websites" and "social media, dating platforms, advertising and aid platforms, forums and messaging applications."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple could decide to release its remaining products for 2022, which includes an updated iPad Pro, Mac mini, and 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, through a press release on its website rather than a digital event, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. MacRumors reports: In his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman said that Apple is currently "likely to release its remaining 2022 products via press releases, updates to its website and briefings with select members of the press" rather than a digital event. Rumors had suggested that Apple was planning a second fall event in October that would focus on the Mac and iPad, but that may no longer be the case. Apple has three things on the roster for the remainder of 2022: an 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the M2 chip, an updated Mac mini with the M2 and yet announced "M2 Pro" chip, and updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros. Apple announced the M2 chip in June for the redesigned MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro earlier this June at WWDC. Other than the new chip, the updates to the Mac and iPad will be relatively incremental upgrades with no major design changes rumored for the products. Apple has released products via press release in the past, such as the AirPods Max and the original AirPods Pro.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a new report from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), China now has almost half of all the world's robot installations and that it is increasing its lead rapidly. Engineering.com reports: The IFR, which exists to "promote research, development, use and international co-operation in the entire field of robotics," has been reporting that China has been the world leader in implementing industrial robots for the last 8 years. We have not been paying attention. In 3 years, China has almost doubled the number of industrial robot installations. With its 243,000 robot installations in 2020, China has almost half of all the industrial robots in the world, according to the Wall Street Journal. A majority of new industrial robots are used in electronics manufacture (for circuit boards, consumer electronics, etc.) and in automobile assembly, particularly in the surging production of electric vehicles (EVs).One must wonder why China, a country with so much cheap manual labor available, would opt for expensive robots with their special demands for tech support. China may have a giant population (1.4 billion people), but its workforce is actually decreasing, says the IFR, due to an increasing segment of its population aging and a growing competition for service jobs. China also expects a leveling off of its rural-to-urban migration. China's government is determined not to let a declining workforce cause a drop in manufacturing, and as only a centralized, authoritarian government can, it has made robotizing a national priority and has mobilized its forces. China's latest five-year plan for the robotics industry, released in December 2021 by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), aims for nothing less than making China a world leader in robot technology and industrial automation. And it appears to be working. China went from 10 robots per ten thousand employees 10 years ago to 246 robots per ten thousand employees in 2020, the ninth best ranking in the world. To keep the robots state of the art and operational, China's Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security introduced 18 new occupational titles in June, including "robotics engineering technician."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The vast majority of electric vehicle owners charge their cars at home in the evening or overnight. We're doing it wrong, according to a new Stanford study. From the report: In March, the research team published a paper on a model they created for charging demand that can be applied to an array of populations and other factors. In the new study, published Sept. 22 in Nature Energy, they applied their model to the whole of the Western United States and examined the stress the region's electric grid will come under by 2035 from growing EV ownership. In a little over a decade, they found, rapid EV growth alone could increase peak electricity demand by up to 25%, assuming a continued dominance of residential, nighttime charging. To limit the high costs of all that new capacity for generating and storing electricity, the researchers say, drivers should move to daytime charging at work or public charging stations, which would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This finding has policy and investment implications for the region and its utilities, especially since California moved in late August to ban sales of gasoline-powered cars and light trucks starting in 2035. [...] Current time-of-use rates encourage consumers to switch electricity use to nighttime whenever possible, like running the dishwasher and charging EVs. This rate structure reflects the time before significant solar and wind power supplies when demand threatened to exceed supply during the day, especially late afternoons in the summer. Today, California has excess electricity during late mornings and early afternoons, thanks mainly to its solar capacity. If most EVs were to charge during these times, then the cheap power would be used instead of wasted. Alternatively, if most EVs continue to charge at night, then the state will need to build more generators -- likely powered by natural gas -- or expensive energy storage on a large scale. Electricity going first to a huge battery and then to an EV battery loses power from the extra stop. At the local level, if a third of homes in a neighborhood have EVs and most of the owners continue to set charging to start at 11 p.m. or whenever electricity rates drop, the local grid could become unstable. Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. The research team compared several scenarios of charging infrastructure availability, along with several different residential time-of-use rates and commercial demand charges. Some rate changes made the situation at the grid level worse, while others improved it. Nevertheless, a scenario of having charging infrastructure that encourages more daytime charging and less home charging provided the biggest benefits, the study found. "The findings from this paper have two profound implications: the first is that the price signals are not aligned with what would be best for the grid -- and for ratepayers. The second is that it calls for considering investments in a charging infrastructure for where people work," said Ines Azevedo, one of the co-senior authors of the study. "We need to move quickly toward decarbonizing the transportation sector, which accounts for the bulk of emissions in California," Azevedo continued. "This work provides insight on how to get there. Let's ensure that we pursue policies and investment strategies that allow us to do so in a way that is sustainable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Neal Stephenson's Lamina1 blockchain technology startup dropped a white paper today on building the open metaverse. It's quite the manifesto. In the document, the company said its mission is to deliver a Layer 1 blockchain, interoperating tools and decentralized services optimized for the open metaverse -- providing communities with infrastructure, not gatekeepers to build a more immersive internet. The effort includes some new original content: Under active early-stage development, Neal Stephenson's THEEE METAVERSE promises a richly-imagined interactive virtual world with an unforgettable origin story, the paper said. Built on the Lamina1 chain, creators will come to experience Neal's vision and stay to develop their own. Stay tuned for more details, the paper said. [...] In the paper, Stephenson said, "Inexorable economic forces drive investors to pay artists as little as possible while steering their creative output in the directions that involve the least financial risk." The aim is to correct the sins of the past. The paper said that Web2 introduced a period of rapid innovation and unprecedented access to entertainment, information and goods on a global scale. Streamlined tools and usability brought creators and innovators to the web en masse to build digital storefronts, engage and transact with their customers. Owning and controlling that growing ecosystem of content and personal data became a primary, lucrative initiative for major corporations. Consumer behavior, recorded on centralized company servers, offered constant, privileged insight into how to monetize human emotion and attention, Lamina1 said. At its best, Web3 envisions a better world through the thoughtful redesigning of our online lives, instituting stronger advocacy for our interests, our freedom and our rights, the company said. Much as Web2 flourished with the maturity of tools and services that offered creators and consumers ease of use, the open metaverse will benefit from open protocols for payments and data, and a set of interoperating decentralized services to support virtual worlds. Lamina1 will be the rallying point for an ecosystem of open source tools, open standards and enabling technologies conceived and co-developed with a vibrant community of creators. [...] Lamina1 said it approaches the open metaverse with a multi-pronged approach: Layer 1 blockchain, metaverse-as-a-Service (MaaS), community economic participation and incentives and original content. Lamina1 said it uses a high-speed Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm, customized to support the needs of content creators -- providing provenance for creatorship and enabling attributive and behavioral characteristics of an object to be minted, customized and composed on-chain. "We chose to start with Avalanche, a robust generalized blockchain that delivers the industry's most scalable and environmentally-efficient chain for managing digital assets to date. This starting point provides Lamina1 with a flexible architecture and an extendable platform to support our goals in data storage, interoperability, integration incentives, carbon-negative operation, messaging, privacy, high-scale payments and identity," the white paper said. Lamina1 said its metaverse services work will explore creating a metaverse browser and it will align itself with the Metaverse Standards Forum. To enlist community support, the company isn't aligning with Big Tech. "We march waving the pirate flag at the front of the cultural movement, asking both creators and consumers to join the fight for greater agency and ownership -- the fight for an economy that is imagined, produced and owned by its creators," Lamina1 said. "It's going to be hard, and it's going to take heart, but the upside of providing a maker direct access to their market is staggering." The paper added, "At Lamina1, we believe two things will power expansion and growth in the metaverse -- a straightforward and principled approach to serving a diverse, open and self-sustaining community of makers, and a powerful ecosystem of content and experiences that will drive fans and funding directly to the platform."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TikTok says it plans to ban all fundraising activity soon -- only six weeks before the November midterm elections. The Verge reports: In a blog post, TikTok's president of global business solutions, Blake Chandlee, said the company would immediately turn off all advertising and monetization features, like gifting and tipping, for politicians and parties on the platform. Additionally, accounts belonging to governments, politicians, and political parties will have to apply for verification. Over the next few weeks, TikTok expects to roll out a sweeping ban on campaign fundraising altogether. The ban will prohibit politicians and parties from using the platform to direct viewers to their campaign websites to make donations. TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza told The Verge on Tuesday that the company plans to enforce these new rules "through a combination of technology and human moderation." "We will work with governments, politicians, and political parties to verify their account either when they submit a verification request, or if we identify an account we believe belongs to a government, politician, or political party, we will confirm the authenticity of the account and begin the verification process."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Psychiatrists in Brussels can now prescribe free visits to cultural venues to people suffering from depression, stress or anxiety. The Guardian reports: Delphine Houba, a Brussels deputy mayor in charge of culture, believes the project is the first of its kind in Europe. The first objective is to reinforce access to culture after the pressured days of lockdown, she told the Observer. "I want everybody back in our cultural institutions... but we know that, even before Covid, for some people it [was] not easy to open the door of a museum, they don't feel at ease, they don't think that it's for them. And I really want to show that cultural venues are for everybody." The second goal, she said, is to give doctors "a new tool in the healing process." The young socialist politician was inspired by a similar project in Canada, where doctors have been issuing prescriptions to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts since 2018. In Brussels, the pilot project is running for six months, involving five museums that are directly under the control of city authorities. These include the city's history museum, a centre for contemporary art, and the fashion and lace museum. Patients may also discover the sewer museum, which allows them to stroll 10 meters underground along the banks of the Senne, the hidden river of Brussels, largely paved over in the 19th century. Or they could explore the collection of outfits belonging to the Manneken Pis, the statue of a peeing boy that has become a symbol of Belgium's self-deprecating humor "Anything could have therapeutic value if it helps people get a good feeling and get in touch with themselves," said Dr Johan Newell, a psychiatrist at Brugmann University Hospital, which is taking part in the pilot scheme. He expects museum prescriptions would suit people suffering from depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorders, psychosis and bipolar disorder. "I think almost anyone could benefit from it," he said. "It would probably be more adapted for people who are already a little bit further on in the recovery process," rather than those who are severely ill, he said. Museum prescriptions, Newell stressed, were a voluntary addition to medication, psychotherapy, individual or group therapy, as well as exercise, healthy eating and other forms of relaxation. "It's just one extra tool that could help people get out of the house: to resocialize, reconnect with society." Newell suggests that the pilot could eventually be expanded to include other museums, cinemas, hospitals and groups of patients.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A new proposal passed by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) cements the state as the first to ban natural gas heaters and furnaces. The decision, which was passed unanimously, aims to phase out sales of the space heater and water heater appliances by 2030. The commitment is part of a broader range of environmental efforts passed by the board this week to meet the federal 70 parts per billion, 8-hour ozone standard over the next 15 years. Residential and commercial buildings in California account for approximately five percent of the state's total nitrogen oxide emissions due to natural gas combustion, according to the originally proposed plan (PDF), released in August 2022. In addition, space and water heating make up nearly 90 percent of all building-related natural gas demand. When burned, natural gas does emit less carbon dioxide than oil or coal. However, natural gas leaks pose health risks to homeowners, as they contain varying levels of volatile chemicals linked with cancer. The new regulations will rely on adoption of heat pump technologies, which are being sold to electrify new and existing homes. Although the proposal does not include gas stoves, several cities and towns in the state currently ban or discourage use of gas stoves in new buildings. California's Public Utilities Commission also eliminated subsidies for new natural gas hookups last week, marking the first state to do so. The move will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lower utility bills for consumers. "While this strategy will clean the air for all Californians, it will also lead to reduced emissions in the many low-income and disadvantaged communities that experience greater levels of persistent air pollution," said CARB Chair Liane Randolph in a statement. "California needs more federal action to clean up harmful diesel pollution from primarily federally controlled sources, from locomotives and ocean-going vessels to aircraft, which are all concentrated in communities that continue to bear the brunt of poor air quality. We simply cannot provide clean air to Californians without the federal government doing its part."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

James Earl Jones is stepping away from the role of Darth Vader after nearly 40 years. According to Vanity Fair, he has signed off on using archival voice recordings to recreate the iconic voice with artificial intelligence. From a report: "He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character," Matthew Wood, a Lucasfilm veteran of 32 years, told the outlet. "So how do we move forward?" The company has enlisted the assistance of Respeecher, a Ukrainian startup that uses AI technology to craft new conversations from revitalized old voice recordings. Respeecher's relationship with Lucasfilm began with the Disney+ series "The Book of Boba Fett," for which they recreated the voice of young Luke Skywalker. The two also teamed for the voice performance of Darth Vader on the series "Obi-Wan Kenobi," which debuted on Disney's streamer this summer. Bogdan Belyaev, the 29-year-old speech artist, was tasked with delivering the new recordings to Lucasfilm, but tragedy struck on Feb. 24 when Russia invaded the country. As air raid sirens powered through the city of Lviv, Belyaev hurried to finish the project and send his work back to Skywalker Sound in Northern California. "If everything went bad, we would never make these conversions delivered to Skywalker Sound," he says. Following the debut of "Obi-Wan Kenobi," Jones' family informed Wood that they were pleased with the result of the synthesis between the actor's voice and Respeecher's technical work. Jones is credited for "guiding the performance" of Darth Vader in the Disney+ series, with Wood describing the actor as a "benevolent godfather."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Martin Brinkmann writes via gHacks: From next year onward, extensions for Google Chrome and most other Chromium-based browsers, will have to rely on a new extension manifest. Manifest V3 defines the boundaries in which extensions may operate. Current Chromium extensions use Manifest V2 for the most part, even though the January 2023 deadline is looming over the heads of every extension developer. Google is using its might to push Manifest v3, and most Chromium-based browsers, including Microsoft Edge, will follow. [...] Mozilla announced early on that it will support Manifest v3 as well, but that it would continue to support important APIs that Google limited in Manifest v3. Probably the most important of them all is the WebRequest API. Used by content blockers extensively to filter certain items, it has been replaced by a less powerful option in Manifest v3. While Manifest v3 does not mean the end for content blocking on Chrome, Edge and other Chromium-based browsers, it may limit abilities under certain circumstances. Users who install a single content blocker and no other extension that relies on the same relevant API may not notice much of a change, but those who like to add custom filter lists or use multiple extensions that rely on the API, may run into artificial limits set by Google. Mozilla reaffirmed this week that its plan has not changed. In "These weeks in Firefox: issue 124," the organization confirms that it will support the WebRequst API of Manifest v2 alongside Manifest v3. Again, a reminder that Mozilla plans to continue support for the Manifest v2 blocking WebRequest API (this API powers, for example, uBlock Origin) while simultaneously supporting Manifest v3.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, people in cars stuck behind blue delivery trucks in traffic have echoed media reports criticizing Amazon for clogging American roadways. It's well-known that the Amazon drivers steering these fleets of trucks and vans don't actually work for Amazon but are hired by companies contracted by Amazon, and Amazon has repeatedly denied liability for any dangerous driving reported, though. Because Amazon has contracts with more than 50,000 firms, just how dangerous Amazon's contracted drivers really are remains a question that is hard to track. However, The Information reported last year that horrific car crashes are part and parcel of Amazon's culture of convenience. And then more recently, The Wall Street Journal provided another window into how deadly America's favorite speedy delivery service can be. Since 2015, WSJ reported this week, "Trucking companies hauling freight for Amazon have been involved in crashes that killed more than 75 people." To arrive at this number, WSJ partnered with Jason Miller -- a Michigan State University professor who researches transportation safety -- to analyze various sources of government data from "3,512 trucking companies that were inspected by authorities three or more times while hauling trailers for Amazon since February 2020." The resulting report, WSJ said, "for the first time showed how the safety performance of Amazon's trucking contractors compared with their peers." And their results didn't appear good for Amazon. For example, a review of Department of Transportation data on unsafe driving scores of more than 1,300 Amazon trucking contractors from February 2020 to early August 2022 found that contractors who worked the most with Amazon were "more than twice as likely as all other similar companies to receive bad unsafe driving scores." WSJ also found evidence of dozens of companies that Amazon contracted that had "conditional" ratings, which is like DOT putting them on probation -- a black mark that typically alienates most firms from contracting them. One Illinois-based company contracted by Amazon "scored worse than the level DOT officials consider problematic" every month of WSJ's review period. "First and foremost, the insinuation that Amazon puts more value on meeting deadlines than on human lives is categorically false," said Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel. "Any accident involving one of our partners or community members is a tragedy, and we always work with our contractors to prevent accidents or learn from them, so they don't happen again." The safety director of Amazon's freight unit, Steve DasGupta, noted that Amazon contractors had "a rate of fatalities per vehicle mile about 7 percent lower than the industry average in 2020." The company also told said it has "suspended all contractors involved in car crashes described in WSJ's report, suspended or terminated 80 percent of contracts where WSJ found unsafe driving scores, and made changes to its screening process," reports Ars.Read more of this story at Slashdot.