Slashdot

A vulnerability in the "Advanced Custom Fields" plugin for WordPress is putting more than two million users at risk of cyberattacks, warns Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad. The Register reports: A warning from Patchstack about the flaw claimed there are more than two million active installs of the Advanced Custom Fields and Advanced Custom Fields Pro versions of the plugins, which are used to give site operators greater control of their content and data, such as edit screens and custom field data. Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad uncovered the vulnerability on February 5, and reported it to Advanced Custom Fields' vendor Delicious Brains, which took over the software last year from developer Elliot Condon. On May 5, a month after a patched version of the plugins was released by Delicious Brains, Patchstack published details of the flaw. It's recommended users update their plugin to at least version 6.1.6. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-30777 and with a CVSS score of 6.1 out of 10 in severity, leaves sites vulnerable to reflected XSS attacks, which involve miscreants injecting malicious code into webpages. The code is then "reflected" back and executed within the browser of a visitor. Essentially, it allows someone to run JavaScript within another person's view of a page, allowing the attacker to do things like steal information from the page, perform actions as the user, and so on. That's a big problem if the visitor is a logged-in administrative user, as their account could be hijacked to take over the website. "This vulnerability allows any unauthenticated user [to steal] sensitive information to, in this case, privilege escalation on the WordPress site by tricking the privileged user to visit the crafted URL path," Patchstack wrote in its report. The outfit added that "this vulnerability could be triggered on a default installation or configuration of Advanced Custom Fields plugin. The XSS also could only be triggered from logged-in users that have access to the Advanced Custom Fields plugin."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to CoinDesk, crypto exchange Bittrex has filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. state of Delaware, "months after announcing it would wind down operations in the country and weeks after being sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)." From the report: The exchange believes it has more than 100,000 creditors, with estimated liabilities and assets both within the $500 million to $1 billion range, according to a court filing shared by Randall Reese of Chapter 11 Dockets, a bankruptcy tracker. Bittrex's U.S. branch has had a rough 2023 so far, laying off 80 people in February and announcing in March that it would end all operations by the end of April. These changes have not affected Bittrex Global, the non-U.S. crypto exchange. Despite Bittrex's impending exit from the U.S., the SEC sued it in mid-April on allegations it operated a national securities exchange, broker and clearing agency. The SEC also sued former Bittrex CEO Bill Shihara and Bittrex Global. Bittrex Global CEO Oliver Linch said last month that the exchange intended to fight these charges in court, but a bankruptcy proceeding may make this more difficult.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), the New York Times is getting around $100 million from Google over the next three years as part of a deal that allows Google to feature Times content on some of its platforms. Reuters reports: The deal includes the Times' participation in Google News Showcase, a product that pays publishers to feature their content on Google News and some other Google platforms, according to the report, which cited people familiar with the matter. The Times in February announced an expansion of its agreement with Google that included content distribution and subscriptions.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Activision Blizzard's latest financial report, the video game company's PC platform outperformed consoles by $27 million at the start of 2023, "continuing a trend with the Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch 2 publisher that's been consistent for nearly a year now," reports PC Gamer. From the report: Between January 1 and March 31, Activision made $666 million on PC versus $639 on console. Its PC segment also outsold its console business throughout half of last year, though console did outsell PC overall for Activision in 2022. This is a notable change: As far back as far as I can look at Activision's publicly available financial reports, console has always been king. This was the case in the early 2000s at the peak of Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero, in the 2010s when Call of Duty was on the rise, and even after Activision bought Blizzard in 2008 (WoW subscriptions were still big, but not Call of Duty big). Activision's latest financial report marks the third quarter in a row that PC outsold console, and there's reason to believe the trend will continue throughout 2023. Activision attributes its 74% increase in PC revenue since this time last year to the success of Call of Duty and Overwatch 2, but it also specifically highlights higher revenues for WoW: Dragonflight and Diablo Immortal (two games that aren't on console). Blizzard is currently the largest factor in the PC's growth within Activision. While Blizzard games are only making about half as much as Call of Duty, 72% of that revenue is on PC and just 8% is on console. Call of Duty's revenue is more evenly split: 59% console, 26% PC, and 15% mobile. Blizzard's console audience could grow significantly when Diablo 4 launches in June simultaneously on PC and consoles (a first for the series). Zoom out on Activision's numbers, and you can see the PC is gaining ground in Activision's yearly reports, too. Last year, the company recorded the smallest gap between console and PC revenue in recent history: just $100 million. That's several hundred million less than 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017. If the year goes on like this, 2023 could be the year that the PC becomes Activision's second-biggest platform behind mobile (Candy Crush continues to crush).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: NextGen Healthcare, a U.S.-based provider of electronic health record software, admitted that hackers breached its systems and stole the personal data of more than 1 million patients. In a data breach notification filed with the Maine attorney general's office, NextGen Healthcare confirmed that hackers accessed the personal data of 1.05 million patients, including approximately 4,000 Maine residents. In a letter sent to those affected, NextGen Healthcare said that hackers stole patients' names, dates of birth, addresses and Social Security numbers. "Importantly, our investigation has revealed no evidence of any access or impact to any of your health or medical records or any health or medical data," the company added. TechCrunch asked NextGen Healthcare whether it has the means, such as logs, to determine what data was exfiltrated, but company spokesperson Tami Andrade declined to answer. In its filing with Maine's AG, NextGen Healthcare said it was alerted to suspicious activity on March 30, and later determined that hackers had access to its systems between March 29 and April 14, 2023. The notification says that the attackers gained access to its NextGen Office system -- a cloud-based EHR and practice management solution -- using client credentials that "appear to have been stolen from other sources or incidents unrelated to NextGen." "When we learned of the incident, we took steps to investigate and remediate, including working together with leading outside cybersecurity experts and notifying law enforcement," Andrade told TechCrunch in a statement. "The individuals known to be impacted by this incident were notified on April 28, 2023, and we have offered them 24 months of free fraud detection and identity theft protection." NextGen was also the victim of a ransomware attack in January this year, adds TechCrunch. The stolen data, including employee names, addresses, phone numbers and passport scans, appears to be available on the dark web.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At its annual Google I/O developers conference on Wednesday, Google is planning to announce a number of generative AI updates, including launching a general-use large language model (LLM) called PaLM 2. CNBC reports: According to internal documents about Google I/O viewed by CNBC, the company will unveil PaLM 2, its most recent and advanced LLM. PaLM 2 includes more than 100 languages and has been operating under the internal codename "Unified Language Model." It's also performed a broad range of coding and math tests as well as creative writing tests and analysis. At the event, Google will make announcements on the theme of how AI is "helping people reach their full potential," including "generative experiences" to Bard and Search, the documents show. Pichai will be speaking to a live crowd of developers as he pitches his company's AI advancements. Google first announced the PaLM language model in April of 2022. In March of this year, the company launched an API for PaLM alongside a number of AI enterprise tools it says will help businesses "generate text, images, code, videos, audio, and more from simple natural language prompts." Last month, Google said its medical LLM called "Med-PaLM 2" can answer medical exam questions at an "expert doctor level" and is accurate 85% of the time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has given its largest ever award of almost $279 million to a whistleblower whose information was crucial in an enforcement action by the regulator. The SEC did not reveal the case involved, but the award shows there is a significant incentive for whistleblowers to come forward with accurate information about potential securities law violations. Reuters reports: The award is more than double the $114 million that it had issued in October 2020. "As this award shows, there is a significant incentive for whistleblowers to come forward with accurate information about potential securities law violations," said Gurbir Grewal, director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, in a statement. "The whistleblower's sustained assistance including multiple interviews and written submissions was critical to the success of these actions," said Creola Kelly, chief of the SEC's Office of the Whistleblower. Payments to whistleblowers are made out of an investor protection fund that was established by Congress and financed entirely through monetary sanctions paid to the SEC by securities law violators. Awards to whistleblowers can range from 10% to 30% of the money collected when the monetary sanctions exceed $1 million.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: This year's DEF CON AI Village has invited hackers to show up, dive in, and find bugs and biases in large language models (LLMs) built by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others. The collaborative event, which AI Village organizers describe as "the largest red teaming exercise ever for any group of AI models," will host "thousands" of people, including "hundreds of students from overlooked institutions and communities," all of whom will be tasked with finding flaws in LLMs that power today's chat bots and generative AI. Think: traditional bugs in code, but also problems more specific to machine learning, such as bias, hallucinations, and jailbreaks -- all of which ethical and security professionals are now having to grapple with as these technologies scale. DEF CON is set to run from August 10 to 13 this year in Las Vegas, USA. For those participating in the red teaming this summer, the AI Village will provide laptops and timed access to LLMs from various vendors. Currently this includes models from Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Stability. The village people's announcement also mentions this is "with participation from Microsoft," so perhaps hackers will get a go at Bing. We're asked for clarification about this. Red teams will also have access to an evaluation platform developed by Scale AI. There will be a capture-the-flag-style point system to promote the testing of "a wide range of harms," according to the AI Village. Whoever gets the most points wins a high-end Nvidia GPU. The event is also supported by the White House Office of Science, Technology, and Policy; America's National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate; and the Congressional AI Caucus.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook says it is not dead. Facebook also wants you to know that it is not just for "old people," as young people have been saying for years. From a report: Now, with the biggest thorn in its side -- TikTok -- facing heightened government scrutiny amid growing tensions between the U.S. and China, Facebook could, perhaps, position itself as a viable, domestic-bred alternative. There's just one problem: young adults like Devin Walsh (anecdote in the story) have moved on. [...] Today, 3 billion people check it each month. That's more than a third of the world's population. And 2 billion log in every day. Yet it still finds itself in a battle for relevancy, and its future, after two decades of existence. For younger generations -- those who signed up in middle school, or those who are now in middle school, it's decidedly not the place to be. Without this trend-setting demographic, Facebook, still the main source of revenue for parent company Meta, risks fading into the background -- utilitarian but boring, like email.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Perhaps woken by news of its next premier first-party title already looking really impressive on emulators, Nintendo has moved to take down key tools for emulating and unlocking Switch consoles, including one that lets Switch owners grab keys from their own device. From a report: Simon Aarons maintained a forked repository of Lockpick, a tool (along with Lockpick_RCM) that grabbed the encryption keys from a Nintendo Switch and allowed it to run officially licensed games. Aarons tweeted on Thursday night that Nintendo had issued DMCA takedown requests to GitHub, asking Lockpick, Lockpick_RCM, and nearly 80 forks and derivations to be taken down under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which largely makes illegal the circumvention of technological protection measures that safeguard copyrighted material. Nintendo's takedown request (RTF file) notes that the Switch contains "multiple technological protection measures" that allow the Switch to play only "legitimate Nintendo video game files." Lockpick tools, combined with a modified Switch, let users grab the cryptographic keys from their own Switch and use them on "systems without Nintendo's Console TPMs" to play "pirated versions of Nintendo's copyright-protected game software." GitHub typically allows repositories with DMCA strikes filed against them to remain open while their maintainers argue their case. Still, it was an effective move. Seeing Nintendo's move on Lockpick, a popular Switch emulator on Android, Skyline, called it quits over the weekend, at least as a public-facing tool you can easily download to your phone. In a Discord post (since removed, along with the Discord itself), developer "Mark" wrote that "the risks associated with a potential legal case are too high for us to ignore, and we cannot continue knowing that we may be in violation of copyright law."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple failed to revive a long-running copyright lawsuit against cybersecurity firm Corellium over its software that simulates the iPhone's iOS operating systems, letting security researchers to identify flaws in the software. From a report: The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Monday ruled that Corellium's CORSEC simulator is protected by copyright law's fair use doctrine, which allows the duplication of copyrighted work under certain circumstances. Apple argued that Corellium's software was "wholesale copying and reproduction" of iOS and served as a market substitute for its own security research products. Corellium countered that its copying of Apple's computer code and app icons was only for the purposes of security research and was sufficiently "transformative" under the fair use standard. The three-judge panel largely agreed with Corellium, finding that CORSEC "furthers scientific progress by allowing security research into important operating systems" and that iOS "is functional operating software that falls outside copyright's core."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Broad-spectrum antibiotics are akin to nuclear bombs, obliterating every prokaryote they meet. They're effective at eliminating pathogens, sure, but they're not so great for maintaining a healthy microbiome. Ideally, we need precision antimicrobials that can target only the harmful bacteria while ignoring the other species we need in our bodies, leaving them to thrive. Enter SNIPR BIOME, a Danish company founded to do just that. Its first drug -- SNIPR001 -- is currently in clinical trials. The drug is designed for people with cancers involving blood cells. The chemotherapy these patients need can cause immunosuppression along with increased intestinal permeability, so they can't fight off any infections they may get from bacteria that escape from their guts into their bloodstream. The mortality rate from such infections in these patients is around 15-20 percent. Many of the infections are caused by E. coli, and much of this E. coli is already resistant to fluoroquinolones, the antibiotics commonly used to treat these types of infections. The team at SNIPR BIOME engineers bacteriophages, viruses that target bacteria, to make them hyper-selective. They started by screening 162 phages to find those that would infect a broad range of E. coli strains taken from people with bloodstream or urinary tract infections, as well as from the guts of healthy people. They settled on a set of eight different phages. They then engineered these phages to carry the genes that encode the CRISPR DNA-editing system, along with the RNAs needed to target editing to a number of essential genes in the E. coli genome. This approach has been shown to prevent the evolution of resistance. After testing the ability of these eight engineered phages to kill the E. coli panel alone and in combination, they decided that a group of four of them was the most effective, naming the mixture SNIPR001. But four engineered phages do not make a drug; the team confirmed that SNIPR001 remains stable for five months in storage and that it does not affect any other gut bacteria.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Windows 11's Settings panel has been seen with a number of adverts in test builds of the OS, in what's becoming a sadly familiar theme for preview builds of late. From a report: As spotted by German tech site Deskmodder, this was flagged up by a respected source for Microsoft leaks, Albacore, on Twitter. Albacore shared some screenshots of the new home page for the Settings app, as uncovered by digging into a Windows 11 preview from the Canary channel (the earliest test builds). The first screen grab (on the left in the above tweet) shows an ad for Microsoft 365 at the top of the panel, telling users what they get with the service and that they can try it for free (for a trial period). Under that, there's a prompt to 'finish setting up your account,' which refers to completing the setup of your Microsoft Account. The other screenshots also have prompts relating to the Microsoft Account, this time urging users to sign into the account, one of which is shown on the Settings home page and another in the Accounts section. In the latter, users are told to 'Sign in to get the most out of Windows.'Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Singapore's government is taking the first steps toward codifying a new internet safety law that would grant it wide-ranging powers over content, access and communication online. From a report: The Online Criminal Harms Bill, introduced for a first reading in parliament on Monday, is aimed at cracking down on illicit activities like scams, misinformation, cybercrime drug trafficking and the spread of exploitative images. It is part of a wider "suite of legislation" to protect Singaporeans online, the Ministry of Home Affairs said in a statement. The bill is likely to pass into law without strong opposition, as most proposed legislation does in the city-state's parliament. It would grant the government broad powers to restrict content online: from blocking the communication of certain material or web addresses to removing apps from mobile stores or restricting accounts on social networks. It further advocates a proactive approach to preventing malicious cyber activity, allowing those powers to be used on the suspicion that a given website or account may be used in such acts. The bill also includes a provision for service providers to appeal the government's directives.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel plans a fresh wave of layoffs in the wake of a steep decline in revenue over the last six months. The chipmaker, Oregon's largest corporate employer, blames a weak global economy. From a report: "We are focused on identifying cost reductions and efficiency gains through multiple initiatives, including some business and function-specific workforce reductions in areas across the company," Intel said in a written statement. "These are difficult decisions, and we are committed to treating impacted employees with dignity and respect," Intel said. Dylan Patel with the technology research firm SemiAnalysis first reported the pending cuts over the weekend. Intel didn't say what else it's cutting, in what areas, or how these layoffs compare to a prior round of job cuts that ended last winter. Intel laid off more than 500 employees in California in job cuts announced last fall, according to filings there with state workforce agencies. It laid off employees in Oregon, too, but didn't make a similar filing here, suggesting that the layoffs represented a smaller percentage of the company's local workforce. Intel employs more than 22,000 at its Washington County campuses.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Truecaller will soon start making its caller identification service available over WhatsApp and other messaging apps to help users spot potential spam calls over the internet, the company told Reuters on Monday. From a report: The feature, currently in beta phase, will be rolled out globally later in May, Truecaller Chief Executive Alan Mamedi said. Telemarketing and scamming calls have been on the rise in countries like India, where users gets about 17 spam calls per month on average, according to a 2021 report by Truecaller. "Over the last two weeks, we have seen a spike in user reports from India about spam calls over WhatsApp," Mamedi said, noting that telemarketers switching to internet calling was fairly new to the market.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amid broader venture-capital doldrums, it is boom times for startups touting generative artificial intelligence tech. From a report: Before their startup had customers, a business plan or even a formal name, former Google AI researchers Niki Parmar and Ashish Vaswani were fielding interest from investors eager to back the next big thing in artificial intelligence. At Google, Ms. Parmar and Mr. Vaswani were among the co-authors of a seminal 2017 paper that helped pave the way for the boom in so-called generative AI. Earlier this year, only weeks after striking out on their own, they raised funds that valued their fledgling company -- now called Essential AI -- at around $50 million, people familiar with the company said. While most of Silicon Valley's venture-capital ecosystem remains in the doldrums, investors this year have been pouring funds into companies like Essential specializing in generative AI systems that can create humanlike conversation, imagery and computer code. Many of the companies getting backing are new and unproven. Analysts at research firm PitchBook predict that venture investment in generative AI companies will easily be several times last year's level of $4.5 billion. That is driven in part by Microsoft's $10 billion investment in January into OpenAI, the startup behind the wildly popular ChatGPT bot. In comparison, such investment totaled $408 million in 2018, the year OpenAI released the initial version of the language model powering ChatGPT. Entrepreneurs and their backers are hoping generative AI will change business activities from movie production to customer service to grocery delivery. PitchBook estimates the market for such AI applications in enterprise technology alone will rise to $98 billion in 2026 from nearly $43 billion this year. As with the recently ended bull run of broader startup investing, though, investors often are jumping into AI startups even when it isn't clear how they will make a profit -- especially since the computational power required to train AI services can sometimes amount to tens of millions of dollars a year or more. The sudden influx of capital is also encouraging many AI researchers, some without management or operations experience, to start their own companies, adding to competition.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While American leaders fret that China might eventually overtake the U.S. in developing artificial intelligence, Beijing is already way ahead of Washington in enacting rules for the new technology. From a report: Chinese officials will close consultation Wednesday on a second round of generative AI regulation, building on a set of rules governing deepfakes agreed in 2022. The Biden administration is behind both allies and adversaries on AI guardrails. While officials in Washington talk about delivering user rights and urge CEOs to mitigate risks, Beijing and Brussels are actually delivering rights and mitigating risks. If China can be first on AI governance, it can project those standards and regulations globally, shaping lucrative and pliable markets. At the same time, Beijing's speedy regulation achieves three goals at home:Delivers tighter central government control of debate. Builds up hybrid corporate entities that are meshed with the Chinese Communist Party. Boosts trust in AI -- already among the highest levels globally -- which drives consumer uptake and spurs growth.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, doubled down on his criticisms of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chief Gary Gensler Monday, but added the exchange would not leave the U.S. despite the regulatory uncertainty the company is facing in the country. From a report: The SEC earlier this year served Coinbase with a Wells Notice, a letter that the regulator sends to a company or firm at the conclusion of an SEC investigation that states the SEC is planning to bring an enforcement action against them. At the heart of the regulator's dispute with Coinbase, and a host of other crypto companies, is the allegation that it is selling unregistered securities to investors. Coinbase disputes this. "The SEC is a bit of an outlier here," Armstrong told CNBC's Dan Murphy in an interview in Dubai Monday. "There's kind of a lone crusade, if you will, with Gary Gensler, the chair there, and he has taken a more anti-crypto view for some reason...I don't think he's necessarily trying to regulate the industry as much as maybe curtail it. But he's created some lawsuits, and I think it's quite unhelpful for the industry in the U.S. writ large, but it also is an opportunity for Coinbase to go get that clarity from the courts that we feel will really benefit the crypto industry and also the U.S. more broadly."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the age of large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT, AI is poised to make a weird internet even weirder -- turning the content-driven social media apps, news sites and media platforms of today into future uncanny valleys that blur the line between man and machine. As advances in AI make it more difficult to discern bots from humans, Sam Altman, the co-founder of Open AI -- the company behind ChatGPT -- thinks blockchains can help. Altman's crypto project, Worldcoin, rose to prominence last year with a controversial, Silicon Valley vision for a universal basic income (UBI): a crypto token that can be distributed in equal quantity to everyone in the world. Worldcoin is back again this week with a new launch -- this one poised to be its biggest yet. World App, Worldcoin's crypto wallet, built on the Ethereum sidechain Polygon, is the first product from the elusive identity upstart that anyone, anywhere will be able to download. The new app is one part minimalist crypto wallet, and one part passport for the AI era. It's Worldcoin's biggest swing yet to redefine itself in the eyes of consumers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For 16 years, Rik Farrow has been an editor for the long-running nonprofit Usenix. He's also been a consultant for 43 years (according to his biography at Usenix.org) — and even wrote the 1988 book Unix System Security: How to Protect Your Data and Prevent Intruders. Today Farrow stopped by Slashdot to share his thoughts on Codon. rikfarrow writes:Researchers at MIT decided to build a compiler focused on speeding up genomics processing... Recently, they have posted their code on GitHub, and I gave it a test drive. "Managed" languages produce code for a specific runtime (like JavaScript). Now Farrow's article at Usenix.org argues that Codon produces code "much faster than other managed languages, and in some cases faster than C/C++." Codon-compiled code is faster because "it's compiled, variables are typed at compile time, and it supports parallel execution." But there's some important caveats:The "version of Python" part is actually an important point: the builders of Codon have built a compiler that accepts a large portion of Python, including all of the most commonly used parts — but not all... Duck typing means that the Codon compiler uses hints found in the source or attempts to deduce them to determine the correct type, and assigns that as a static type. If you wanted to process data where the type is unknown before execution, this may not work for you, although Codon does support a union type that is a possible workaround. In most cases of processing large data sets, the types are known in advance so this is not an issue... Codon is not the same as Python, in that the developers have not yet implemented all the features you would find in Python 3.10, and this, along with duck typing, will likely cause problems if you just try and compile existing scripts. I quickly ran into problems, as I uncovered unsupported bits of Python, and, by looking at the Issues section of their Github pages, so have other people. Codon supports a JIT feature, so that instead of attempting to compile complete scripts, you can just add a @codon.jit decorator to functions that you think would benefit from being compiled or executed in parallel, becoming much faster to execute... Whether your projects will benefit from experimenting with Codon will mean taking the time to read the documentation. Codon is not exactly like Python. For example, there's support for Nvidia GPUs included as well and I ran into a limitation when using a dictionary. I suspect that some potential users will appreciate that Codon takes Python as input and produces executables, making the distribution of code simpler while avoiding disclosure of the source. Codon, with its LLVM backend, also seems like a great solution for people wanting to use Python for embedded projects. My uses of Python are much simpler: I can process millions of lines of nginx logs in seconds, so a reduction in execution time means little to me. I do think there will be others who can take full advantage of Codon. Farrow's article also points out that Codon "must be licensed for commercial use, but versions older than three years convert to an Apache license. Non-commercial users are welcome to experiment with Codon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slack sees the future:Imagine if every time you hop into a channel, you'll be able to get up to speed on unread Slack messages in one click — whether you're jumping in midway through a project or catching up from being out of the office. In the future, with generative AI built seamlessly into the user experience, conversation summaries will be there when you need them, the moment you start scrolling through a channel. With AI assistance built natively into Slack's message composer and canvas, a new surface for curating information, Slack GPT could also help you tweak your drafts until the words are just right. In a few clicks, you'll be able to distill content, adjust the tone, and more, right from where you're already writing. In fact, Slack "previewed generative AI tools on Thursday," reports the Register, "currently under development and bundled under the banner Slack GPT."Customers will be able to use large language models like Anthropic's Claude as well as OpenAI's GPT to instruct the chatbots to perform other tasks, like search or answering questions. Slack is also working on Workflow Builder — a no-code automation tool that will enable users to add generative prompts to automatically perform tasks for them, like setting up alerts or writing and sharing documents... Other tools, like its forthcoming Einstein GPT app, are aimed at supporting existing Salesforce services in its CRM software. Users of Salesforce Customer 360 data and Data Cloud — like customer service agents, sales reps, or marketers — can access language models to generate leads, write emails, schedule meetings, or draft plans. Einstein GPT will also be able to handle code, so developers can ask chatbots to write short programs or fix bugs. It's not clear when Slack GPT or Einstein GPT will be generally available. Integration with Anthropic's Claude, however, is available now, whilst integration with ChatGPT is currently in beta. Workflow Builder is scheduled to be released in summer this year. From Slack's announcement:Say you have a workflow that alerts you when a new lead comes in from Sales Cloud, ensuring sales reps can quickly respond. Imagine if ChatGPT could take your workflow a few steps further, using CRM data from a sales lead to draft a personalized prospecting email for you? Put it in a document, share it in a channel, and every sales rep now has a head start when they follow up on the lead.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elizabeth Holmes hasn't spoken to the media since 2016. Now convicted on criminal fraud charges — and counting down the days until she reports for prison — Holmes finally breaks the silence in a profile published today in the New York Times. "I made so many mistakes," Holmes says, "and there was so much I didn't know and understand, and I feel like when you do it wrong, it's like you really internalize it in a deep way," Billy Evans, Ms. Holmes's partner and the father of their two young children, pushes a stroller with the couple's 20-month-old son, William... At one point, I tell her that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had pulled out of portraying her in a movie. She replied, almost reflectively, "They're not playing me. They're playing a character I created." So, why did she create that public persona? "I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn't have good technical ideas," said Ms. Holmes, who founded Theranos at 19. "Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn't..." Her top lieutenant at Theranos, and much older boyfriend at the time, Ramesh Balwani, was found guilty of 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud at Theranos. He began a 13-year prison sentence last month. On Thursday, his legal team filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit... She said Mr. Balwani did not control her every interaction or statement at Theranos, but she "deferred to him in the areas he oversaw because I believed he knew better than I did," and those areas included the problematic clinical lab... Ms. Holmes's story of how she got here — to the bright, cozy house and the supportive partner and the two babies — feels a lot like the story of someone who had finally broken out of a cult and been deprogrammed. After her relationship with Mr. Balwani ended and Theranos dissolved, Ms. Holmes said, "I began my life again." But then I remember that Ms. Holmes was running the cult... What does she think would have happened if she hadn't garnered so much early attention as the second coming of Silicon Valley? Ms. Holmes does not blink: "We would've seen through our vision." In other words, she thinks if she'd spent more time quietly working on her inventions and less time on a stage promoting the company, she would have revolutionized health care by now. This kind of misguided talk is the one consistent thread in my reporting on who Ms. Holmes really is. She repeatedly says that Theranos wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme for her; she never sold her shares and didn't come out of it wealthy. Ms. Holmes's parents said they borrowed $500,000 against their Washington, D.C.-area home to post Ms. Holmes's bond... She maintains the idealistic delusion of a 19-year-old, never mind that she's 39 with a fraud conviction, telling me she is still working on health care-related inventions and would continue to do so behind bars. "I still dream about being able to contribute in that space," Ms. Holmes said. "I still feel the same calling to it as I always did and I still think the need is there." If your head is exploding at how divorced from reality this sounds, that's kind of the point. When Ms. Holmes uses the messianic vernacular of tech, I get the sense that she truly believes that she could have — and, in fact, she still could — change the world, and she doesn't much care if we believe her or not... It's this steadfast (or unhinged?) belief that has kept Ms. Holmes fighting, even though a guilty plea would have likely helped her chances of remaining free.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"I write all novel client-side code as JavaScript instead of TypeScript, and it's a delight," says the creator of Ruby on Rails. Posting on Twitter, David Heinemeier Hansson opined that TypeScript "sucked out much of the joy I had writing JavaScript. I'm forever grateful that Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto didn't succumb to the pressure of adding similar type hints to Ruby." When it comes to static vs dynamic typing, "I've heard a million arguments from both sides throughout my entire career," Hansson wrote on his blog today, "but seen very few of them ever convinced anyone of anything." But wait — he thinks we can all get along:Personally, I'm unashamedly a dynamic typing kind of guy. That's why I love Ruby so very much. It takes full advantage of dynamic typing to allow the poetic syntax that results in such beautiful code. To me, Ruby with explicit, static typing would be like a salad with a scoop of ice cream. They just don't go together. I'll also confess to having embraced the evangelical position for dynamic typing in the past. To the point of suffering from a One True Proposition affliction. Seeing the lack of enthusiasm for dynamic typing as a reflection of missing education, experience, or perhaps even competence. Oh what folly. Like trying to convince an introvert that they'd really like parties if they'd just loosen up a bit... These days, I've come to appreciate the magnificence of multiplicity. Programming would be an awful endeavor if we were all confined to the same paradigm. Human nature is much too varied to accept such constraint on its creativity...But it took a while for me to come to these conclusions. I'm a recovering solutionist. So when I see folks cross their heart in disbelief that anyone, anywhere might fancy JavaScript over TypeScript, I smile, and I remember the days when I'd recognize their zeal in the mirror. Hansson also sees the "magnificence of multiplicity" in positions about functional vs object-oriented programming. "Poles on both these axes have shown to deliver excellent software over the decades (and awful stuff too!)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"An alarming new study has found that even when plastic makes it to a recycling center, it can still end up splintering into smaller bits that contaminate the air and water," reports Wired:This pilot study focused on a single new facility where plastics are sorted, shredded, and melted down into pellets. Along the way, the plastic is washed several times, sloughing off microplastic particles — fragments smaller than 5 millimeters — into the plant's wastewater. Because there were multiple washes, the researchers could sample the water at four separate points along the production line. (They are not disclosing the identity of the facility's operator, who cooperated with their project.) This plant was actually in the process of installing filters that could snag particles larger than 50 microns (a micron is a millionth of a meter), so the team was able to calculate the microplastic concentrations in raw versus filtered discharge water — basically a before-and-after snapshot of how effective filtration is. Their microplastics tally was astronomical. Even with filtering, they calculate that the total discharge from the different washes could produce up to 75 billion particles per cubic meter of wastewater. Depending on the recycling facility, that liquid would ultimately get flushed into city water systems or the environment. In other words, recyclers trying to solve the plastics crisis may in fact be accidentally exacerbating the microplastics crisis, which is coating every corner of the environment with synthetic particles. "It seems a bit backward, almost, that we do plastic recycling in order to protect the environment, and then end up increasing a different and potentially more harmful problem," says plastics scientist Erina Brown, who led the research while at the University of Strathclyde. "It raises some very serious concerns," agrees Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former US Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator, who wasn't involved in the paper. "And I also think this points to the fact that plastics are fundamentally not sustainable." Wired ponts out that more than half the microplastics can be captured with a filtration system. "Without it, the researchers calculated that this single recycling facility could emit up to 6.5 million pounds of microplastic per year. Filtration got it down to an estimated 3 million pounds." But one of the paper's co-authors shared their discouraging conclusion. "The recycling centers are potentially making things worse by actually creating microplastics faster and discharging them into both water and air. I'm not sure we can technologically engineer our way out of that problem."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CoinDesk reports that Binance "temporarily paused bitcoin withdrawals Sunday morning U.S. time as the Bitcoin blockchain became overwhelmed with pending transactions and sky-high fees."The company resumed withdrawals within two hours of its initial Twitter posting about the withdrawals. On-chain data shows that there are nearly 400,000 unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions, which is higher than anything seen during the bull runs of 2018 and 2021. The average transaction fee has also doubled since March, pushing it to a two-year high. The current transaction fee is just over $8, a 309% change from a year ago. In an earlier CoinDesk article, an executive at Luxor Technologies, a full-stack Bitcoin mining pool, blamed the rising fees on the adoption of the new BRC-20 token standard, a new way to "inscribe" additional data during transactions.But meanwhile, an anonymous reader shared another report from Mashable about Binance:Bloomberg reported that the crypto exchange (currently the world's largest) is facing a U.S. Department of Justice probe over possibly allowing Russians to move money in a way that would violate U.S. sanctions... It's worth noting that no formal accusation has been made against Binance, as this is just a probe. It may be some time before accusations manifest — if they manifest at all. In 2021, Binance was under a similar investigation related to possible money laundering. But another Reuters article adds that Bloomberg's sources "also said that Binance is discussing the possibility of settling with the Department of Justice regarding previous allegations that the exchange was also used to move money to circumvent U.S. sanctions against Iran." And elsewhere, Reuters reports: Israel has seized around 190 crypto accounts at crypto exchange Binance since 2021, including two it said were linked to Islamic State and dozens of others it said were owned by Palestinian firms connected to the Islamist Hamas group, documents released by the country's counter-terror authorities show... In a blog post after its publication, Binance said that Reuters was "deliberately leaving out critical facts." The exchange has been "working closely with international counter-terrorism authorities" on the seizures, Binance said. "With regard to the specific organizations mentioned in the article, it's important to clarify that bad actors don't register accounts under the names of their criminal enterprises," it said... Under Israeli law, the country's defense minister can order the seizure and confiscation of assets that the ministry deems related to terrorism... The seizures by Israel's National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing highlight how governments are targeting crypto companies in their efforts to prevent illegal activity. Binance, founded in 2017 by CEO Changpeng Zhao, says on its website it reviews information requests from governments and law enforcement agencies on a case-by-case basis, disclosing information as legally required. Binance has also said it checks users for connections to terrorism and has "continued to invest tremendous resources to enhance its compliance program," it told U.S. senators in March in response to their requests for information on Binance's regulatory compliance and finances.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's consumer-protecting federal agency has a division overseeing advertising practices. Its web site includes a "business guidance" section with "advice on complying with FTC law," and this week one of the agency's attorney's warned that the FTC "is focusing intensely on how companies may choose to use AI technology, including new generative AI tools, in ways that can have actual and substantial impact on consumers." The warning came in a blog post titled "The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust."In the 2014 movie Ex Machina, a robot manipulates someone into freeing it from its confines, resulting in the person being confined instead. The robot was designed to manipulate that person's emotions, and, oops, that's what it did. While the scenario is pure speculative fiction, companies are always looking for new ways — such as the use of generative AI tools — to better persuade people and change their behavior. When that conduct is commercial in nature, we're in FTC territory, a canny valley where businesses should know to avoid practices that harm consumers... As for the new wave of generative AI tools, firms are starting to use them in ways that can influence people's beliefs, emotions, and behavior. Such uses are expanding rapidly and include chatbots designed to provide information, advice, support, and companionship. Many of these chatbots are effectively built to persuade and are designed to answer queries in confident language even when those answers are fictional. A tendency to trust the output of these tools also comes in part from "automation bias," whereby people may be unduly trusting of answers from machines which may seem neutral or impartial. It also comes from the effect of anthropomorphism, which may lead people to trust chatbots more when designed, say, to use personal pronouns and emojis. People could easily be led to think that they're conversing with something that understands them and is on their side. Many commercial actors are interested in these generative AI tools and their built-in advantage of tapping into unearned human trust. Concern about their malicious use goes well beyond FTC jurisdiction. But a key FTC concern is firms using them in ways that, deliberately or not, steer people unfairly or deceptively into harmful decisions in areas such as finances, health, education, housing, and employment. Companies thinking about novel uses of generative AI, such as customizing ads to specific people or groups, should know that design elements that trick people into making harmful choices are a common element in FTC cases, such as recent actions relating to financial offers , in-game purchases , and attempts to cancel services . Manipulation can be a deceptive or unfair practice when it causes people to take actions contrary to their intended goals. Under the FTC Act, practices can be unlawful even if not all customers are harmed and even if those harmed don't comprise a class of people protected by anti-discrimination laws. The FTC attorney also warns against paid placement within the output of a generative AI chatbot. ("Any generative AI output should distinguish clearly between what is organic and what is paid.") And in addition, "People should know if an AI product's response is steering them to a particular website, service provider, or product because of a commercial relationship. And, certainly, people should know if they're communicating with a real person or a machine..." "Given these many concerns about the use of new AI tools, it's perhaps not the best time for firms building or deploying them to remove or fire personnel devoted to ethics and responsibility for AI and engineering. If the FTC comes calling and you want to convince us that you adequately assessed risks and mitigated harms, these reductions might not be a good look. " Thanks to Slashdot reader gluskabe for sharing the post.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Norwegian company named ENRX "wants to inductively charge electric vehicles with 200 kW while driving on a section of highway in Florida," according to the "electric mobility industry" news site electrive.com. "A one-mile section of a four-lane highway near Orlando is to be electrified."ENRX has teamed up with the Central Florida Expressway Authority and the Aspire Engineering Research Center for an initiative to build a one-mile (1.6-kilometre) section on a four-lane highway near Orlando that will inductively charge the batteries of moving electric vehicles at 200 kW. The principle is clear: the electric vehicle batteries are fitted with a special receiver pad and charged as they drive over the coils embedded in the road. In the process, the energy is transferred from these coils to the receiver pad mounted on the vehicle floor, which according to ENRX should provide "a safe, wireless power supply" even at motorway speeds. Advantages of the 'Next Generation Electric Roadway system' mentioned include interoperability, different output power levels for different vehicle and battery types, or user-defined distance between the ground and the vehicle. In addition, the system (on the infrastructure side) is supposed to be maintenance-free after installation... "When you can charge while driving, range anxiety and frequent charging stops will be a thing of the past," says ENRX CEO Bjørn Eldar Petersen... "Dynamic charging can reduce the need for large battery capacities, allowing cars to be equipped with lighter and more affordable battery packs." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader aduxorth for sharing the news.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This year's Kentucky Derby was won by a 15-to-1 longshot named Mage, reports sports magazine the Athletic. It was only the horse's third race — but the story gets even stranger:Mage is owned by a collective of horse racing fans that doesn't follow your standard ownership structure. Fans can purchase shares of a horse for as little as $50. It's a publicly owned racehorse. Mage has 391 owners on the Commonwealth app. Many were at the 2023 Kentucky Derby wearing Mage hats and they were shown on NBC's lead up to the Kentucky Derby. The Commonwealth app even tried to arrange watch parties for the horse race across the country. Shareholders own 25% of the racehorse, reports Sporting News:Although horses are the most common commodity, there are golfers on the app as well, specifically Joey Vrzich and Cooper Dossey, whom it says are "coming Spring 2023." Commonwealth has a partnership with WinStar Farm, a premiere breeder of thoroughbreds... "Together we are going to revolutionize the ownership experience and give the world access to horses that were once unavailable to the public," Brian Doxtator, CEO of Commonwealth said, per the collective's website. According to Action Network's Darren Rovell, Commonwealth owners will be paid out $94.52 per share (prior to taxes) for the win. Before the race the Athletic sports magazine asked seven experts for their picks — and only one of them had even mentioned Mage. (The Athletic's senior sports betting editor correctly picked Mage and "Angel of Empire" to finish somewhere in the top three positions.) But just for fun, the Athletic also asked three AI chatbots — and none of them picked the winner: Bing AI: That's a tough question. I don't have a personal preference, but based on the odds and the past performances, I think Forte has a good chance of winning. He has been very consistent and impressive in his races, and he has a top trainer and jockey. He also has a favorable post position at No. 14, which gives him some room to maneuver and avoid traffic. But as I said, anything can happen in the Kentucky Derby, and there are many other talented horses in the field. It will be an exciting race to watch. Google Bard: I like the chances of Tapit Trice to win the 2023 Kentucky Derby. He is the second-lowest odds horse at 5-1, and has won twice and finished second twice in six career races. He has one of the best pedigrees a horse could ask for, being sired by Justify, the 2018 Triple Crown winner. He is also coming off an impressive showing in the 2023 Blue Grass Stakes, where he finished second just barely behind Verifying. Here are some other horses that I like to finish in the money... The Kentucky Derby is always a tough race to predict, but I think these horses have a good chance of winning or finishing in the money. [Bard then listed five more of the 18 horses — one of which ultimately finished third.] Chat GPT: As an artificial intelligence language model, I don't have personal opinions or preferences. However, based on the current information I have, I cannot accurately predict the winner of the Kentucky Derby. Horse racing involves many variables, including the skill of the jockey, the health and performance of the horse, and even the weather conditions on race day. The outcome of any given race is always uncertain and subject to chance. It's important to note that gambling can be risky, and I don't encourage it.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Friday Bill Gates visited Kemmerer, Wyoming (population: 2,656) — where a coal plant was shutting down after 50 years. But Gates was there "to celebrate the latest step in a project that's been more than 15 years in the making: designing and building a next-generation nuclear power plant..." The new plant will employ "between 200 and 250 people," Gates writes in a blog post, "and those with experience in the coal plant will be able to do many of the jobs — such as operating a turbine and maintaining connections to the power grid — without much retraining."It's called the Natrium plant, and it was designed by TerraPower, a company I started in 2008. When it opens (potentially in 2030), it will be the most advanced nuclear facility in the world, and it will be much safer and produce far less waste than conventional reactors. All of this matters because the world needs to make a big bet on nuclear. As I wrote in my book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster , we need nuclear power if we're going to meet the world's growing need for energy while also eliminating carbon emissions. None of the other clean sources are as reliable, and none of the other reliable sources are as clean... Another thing that sets TerraPower apart is its digital design process. Using supercomputers, they've digitally tested the Natrium design countless times, simulating every imaginable disaster, and it keeps holding up. TerraPower's sophisticated work has drawn interest from around the globe, including an agreement to collaborate on nuclear power technology in Japan and investments from the South Korean conglomerate SK and the multinational steel company ArcelorMittal... I'm excited about this project because of what it means for the future. It's the kind of effort that will help America maintain its energy independence. And it will help our country remain a leader in energy innovation worldwide. The people of Kemmerer are at the forefront of the equitable transition to a clean, safe energy future, and it's great to be partnering with them. Gates writes that for safety the plant uses liquid sodium (instead of water) to absorb excess heat, and it even has an energy storage system "to control how much electricity it produces at any given time..." "I'm convinced that the facility will be a win for the local economy, America's energy independence, and the fight against climate change.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Fortune:For eight years now, as millennials have entered their thirties and forties, also known as "homebuying age," Bank of America has surveyed over 1,000 members of the generation once a year for its Home Work series. And for 2023's edition... older millennials (age 31-41) are almost three times as likely to move into a house than an apartment, the survey found... Migration patterns during the pandemic have clearly established that most homebuyers have wanted to flee big cities, with some "zoomtowns" such as Boise benefiting in particular. But the survey reveals something even more drastic. In a section called "suburban nation," BofA reveals that 43% to 45% of millennials — of every age — expect to buy a house in the suburbs. "We expect the ability to work from home to remain an incentive for young families to seek out more remote suburban and rural markets where housing may be more affordable," wrote the BofA team led by research analyst Elizabeth Suzuki. And remote work is still robust, they added. Millennials are also looking toward the suburbs for wealth-building. A majority (two-thirds) of them believe that they'll buy a home in the next two years, citing a return on investment as the number one reason for purchasing. The interest is pervasive across the generation, and maybe means that the suburb is in for a new and better revival. And a 2021 study from Pew Research Center found that one in five adults preferred city life, compared to one quarter of adults in 2018... Millennials reported to BoA that the pandemic increased their likelihood of buying a home...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader indominabledemon shared this article from TechSpot:Games today use highly-detailed textures that can quickly fill the frame buffer on many graphics cards, leading to stuttering and game crashes in recent AAA titles for many gamers... [T]he most promising development in this direction so far comes from Nvidia — neural texture compression could reduce system requirements for future AAA titles, at least when it comes to VRAM and storage.... In a research paper published this week, the company details a new algorithm for texture compression that is supposedly better than both traditional block compression (BC) methods as well as other advanced compression techniques such as AVIF and JPEG-XL. The new algorithm is simply called neural texture compression (NTC), and as the name suggests it uses a neural network designed specifically for material textures. To make this fast enough for practical use, Nvidia researchers built several small neural networks optimized for each material... [T]extures compressed with NTC preserve a lot more detail while also being significantly smaller than even these same textures compressed with BC techniques to a quarter of the original resolution... Researchers explain the idea behind their approach is to compress all these maps along with their mipmap chain into a single file, and then have them be decompressed in real time with the same random access as traditional block texture compression... However, NTC does have some limitations that may limit its appeal. First, as with any lossy compression, it can introduce visual degradation at low bitrates. Researchers observed mild blurring, the removal of fine details, color banding, color shifts, and features leaking between texture channels. Furthermore, game artists won't be able to optimize textures in all the same ways they do today, for instance, by lowering the resolution of certain texture maps for less important objects or NPCs. Nvidia says all maps need to be the same size before compression, which is bound to complicate workflows. This sounds even worse when you consider that the benefits of NTC don't apply at larger camera distances. Perhaps the biggest disadvantages of NTC have to do with texture filtering. As we've seen with technologies like DLSS, there is potential for image flickering and other visual artifacts when using textures compressed through NTC. And while games can utilize anisotropic filtering to improve the appearance of textures in the distance at a minimal performance cost, the same isn't possible with Nvidia's NTC at this point.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from BGR:Last year, Microsoft Edge surpassed Safari as the second most popular desktop browser. Now, new data from Statcounter shows that Apple's browser has finally regained second place. The full ranking shows that Google Chrome remains the most used browser... It's also interesting to note that after Firefox almost surpassed Safari in February of 2022, the browser is still losing its base to Microsoft Edge and Safari... Even the all-mighty Google Chrome has lost a bit of userbase, as it had 66.64% of users last April and now has 66.13%. The final rankings (with data from April 2023):Google Chrome: 66.13%Safari: 11.87%Microsoft Edge: 11%Firefox: 5.65%Opera 3.09%Internet Explorer: 0.55%Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:Ocean surface heat is at record-breaking levels. Temperatures began climbing in mid-March and skyrocketed over the course of several weeks, leaving scientists scrambling to figure out exactly why. Temperatures have fallen since their peak in April — as they naturally do in the spring — but they are still higher than they have ever been on record for this time of year.... The record may not seem huge — it's nearly two-tenths of a degree higher than the previous record in 2016 — but given how much heat is needed to warm up this huge body of water, "it's a massive amount of energy," Matthew England, professor of ocean and climate dynamics at the University of New South Wales, Australia, told CNN... Some scientists are concerned the scale of these new records could mark the start of an alarming trend. Others say record-breaking temperatures like these are always concerning but to be expected given the human-caused climate crisis. All agree the consequences are likely to be significant. Warmer oceans bleach coral, kill marine life, increase sea level rise and make the ocean less efficient at absorbing planet-warming pollution — the warmer oceans get, the more the planet will heat. The science leader at the British Antarctic Survey told CNN that "it's probably too early" to blame El Niño." In fact, the world just emerged from a 3-year La Niña cooling event in March. So instead, CNN gets a different explanation fro Gregory C. Johnson, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:"It's a little bit like we've had the freezer door open for a while and it's helped to cool the planet," Johnson said. But even while that freezer has been open, background temperatures have continued to rise. Now the freezer is closed, everything is hotter than before. Later CNN adds that some scientists are concerned "climate change might be progressing in ways climate models have not predicted."One surprising reason could be the reduction of aerosols in the atmosphere. In 2020, regulations were introduced to limit the amount of sulfur in the fuel ships used — a policy aimed at addressing air pollution. Though air pollution has a significant impact on human health, it also acts as an artificial sunscreen and reflects sunlight away from the Earth. One theory is the absence of aerosols may have turned up the heat, said Karina von Schuckmann [an oceanographer at Mercator Ocean International in France].Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Washington Post reports:TurboTax will begin sending checks next week to nearly 4.4 million low-income Americans whom the company deceived into paying for tax services that should have been free, New York Attorney General Letitia James said. The checks, part of a $141 million settlement reached in May 2022 between TurboTax owner Intuit and all 50 states and the District of Columbia, are for people who were eligible to file taxes for free through an IRS partner program but were "tricked" into paying TurboTax between 2016 and 2018, James (D) said in a statement Thursday. The company was also accused of knowingly misleading customers and blocking its landing page for its IRS Free File Program, a public-private partnership with the IRS, from showing up on search engines such as Google. Because Intuit and other companies agreed to participate in that program, the IRS agreed not to offer its own free electronic tax services. Intuit admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement. Customers who qualify will receive between $29 and $85, depending on the number of years they paid for the services... Consumers who are eligible for the payments do not need to file a claim and will be notified by email, James's office said Thursday. Checks will be sent automatically and will be mailed throughout May. "TurboTax's predatory and deceptive marketing cheated millions of low-income Americans who were trying to fulfill their legal duties to file their taxes," said Attorney General James. "Today we are righting that wrong and putting money back into the pockets of hardworking taxpayers who should have never paid to file their taxes." James described it as an effort "to stand up for ordinary Americans and hold companies who cheat consumers accountable," specifically calling out Intuit "for deceiving millions of low-income Americans into paying for tax services that should have been free."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from Futurism:We'd need an astronomical amount of resources to construct a Dyson sphere, a giant theoretical shell that would harvest all of a given star's energy, around the Sun. In fact, as science journalist Jaime Green explores in her new book "The Possibility of Life," we'd have to go as far as to demolish a Jupiter-sized planet to build such a megastructure, a concept first devised by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960... Not everybody agrees that constructing a Dyson sphere would end up being such a huge undertaking. In an interview with Green, astrophysicist Jason Wright compared such an effort to [the city of] Manhattan, a human and interconnected "megastructure," which was constructed over a long period of time, bit by bit... "It's just every generation made it a little bigger...." "If the energy is out there to take and it's just gonna fly away to space anyway, then why wouldn't someone take it?" Wright told Green.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix shares some overlooked news from AMD's openSIL presentation at the OCP Regional Summit in April. Specifically, that AMD openSIL — their open-source x86 silicon initialization library — "is planned to eventually replace AMD's well known AGESA [BIOS utility]" around 2026, and "it will be supported across AMD's entire processor stack — just not limited to EPYC server processors as some were initially concerned..."Raj Kapoor, AMD Fellow and AMD's Chief Firmware Architect, in fact began the AMD openSIL presentation by talking about the challenges they've had with AGESA in adapting it to Coreboot for Chromebook purposes with Ryzen SoCs... With AMD openSIL not expected to be production ready until around 2026, this puts it roughly inline for an AMD Zen 6 or Zen 7 introduction. The proof of concept code for AMD Genoa is expected to come soon... The presentation also noted that beyond AMD openSIL code being open-source, the openSIL specification will also be open. AMD "invites every silicon vendor" to participate in this open-source system firmware endeavor.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

All across North America today, over 2,000 comic book stores are celebrating Free Comic Book Day. As it enters its third decade — the event started in 2001, according to Wikipedia — there'll be over two dozen free comic books to choose from this, and enthusiastic stores trying to dial up the fun even more. 16 stores are also giving away Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania in special "ant-sized" boxes — the size of penny — with tiny versions of the cover art from the full-sized Blu-Ray disc boxes (along with a code for a digital version of the movie). The Bleeding Cool site has a running list of stores doing additional special "cool stuff," including cookie giveaways, discounts on paperbacks and comic books, and personal appearances by comic book writers and artists. Geek-friendly free comic books this year:Dark Horse Comics' Star Wars/ Avatar: The Last Airbender D.C. Comics is offering Dawn of DC — Knight Terrors Marvel is offering several multi-character books, including Spider-Man/Venom, the Avengers/X-Men, and a sampler of the upcoming graphic novel biography of Stan Lee IDW's free comics include the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles There's also the official prequel to the new Street Fighter 6 video gameAlso available: Runescape: Untold Tales/God Wars Fantagraphics even has a preview of its upcoming Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers book. Archie Horror Presents: The Cursed Library Bleeding Cool also has previews the artwork from Star Trek: Prelude to Day of Blood, a teaser for a coming "comic book crossover event between IDW's main Star Trek comic and the Star Trek: Defiant series" (that's also accompanied by a Lower Decks comic book story). Just remember, in 2017 NPR had this advice for visiting comics fans. "While you're there, buy something... The comics shops still have to pay for the 'free' FCBD books they stock, and they're counting on the increased foot traffic to lift sales."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Supported by conversations with nearly a dozen former employees, 9to5Mac details the downfall of Brydge -- "a once thriving startup making popular keyboard accessories for iPad, Mac, and Microsoft Surface products." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: According to nearly a dozen former Brydge employees who spoke to 9to5Mac, Brydge has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs within the past year after at least two failed acquisitions. As it stands today, Brydge employees have not been paid salaries since January. Customers who pre-ordered the company's most recent product have been left in the dark since then as well. Its website went completely offline earlier this year, and its social media accounts have been silent since then as well. Those former Brydge employees largely attribute the company's failure to mismanagement during growth, misleading statements from its two co-CEOs, and an overall hostile working environment that led to a high turnover rate.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the first time, astronomers have observed a star swallowing a planet. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. MIT News reports: The planetary demise appears to have taken place in our own galaxy, some 12,000 light-years away, near the eagle-like constellation Aquila. There, astronomers spotted an outburst from a star that became more than 100 times brighter over just 10 days, before quickly fading away. Curiously, this white-hot flash was followed by a colder, longer-lasting signal. This combination, the scientists deduced, could only have been produced by one event: a star engulfing a nearby planet. What of the planet that perished? The scientists estimate that it was likely a hot, Jupiter-sized world that spiraled close, then was pulled into the dying star's atmosphere, and, finally, into its core. A similar fate will befall the Earth, though not for another 5 billion years, when the sun is expected to burn out, and burn up the solar system's inner planets. "For decades, we've been able to see the before and after," says lead author Kishalay De, a postdoc in MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. "Before, when the planets are still orbiting very close to their star, and after, when a planet has already been engulfed, and the star is giant. What we were missing was catching the star in the act, where you have a planet undergoing this fate in real-time. That's what makes this discovery really exciting."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: The creamy fruit and nectar-rich flowers of the milk fruit tree are irresistible to Xenohyla truncata, a tree frog native to Brazil. On warm nights, the dusky-colored frogs take to the trees en masse, jostling one another for a chance to nibble the fruit and slurp the nectar. In the process, the frogs become covered in sticky pollen grains -- and might inadvertently pollinate the plants, too. It's the first time a frog -- or any amphibian -- has been observed pollinating a plant, researchers reported last month in Food Webs. Scientists long thought only insects and birds served as pollinators, but research has revealed that some reptiles and mammals are more than up to the task. Now, scientists must consider whether amphibians are also capable of getting the job done. It's likely that the nectar-loving frogs, also known as Izecksohn's Brazilian tree frogs, are transferring pollen as they move from flower to flower, the authors say. But more research is needed, they add, to confirm that frogs have joined the planet's pantheon of pollinators.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, BMW announced plans to charge a $18 per month subscription for heated seats. Now, Mercedes is considering making better EV engine performance an added subscription surcharge. "Mercedes-Benz electric vehicle owners in North America who want a little more power and speed can now buy 60 horsepower for just $60 a month or, on other models, 80 horsepower for $90 a month," reports CNN. "They won't have to visit a Mercedes dealer to get the upgrade either, or even leave their own driveway. The added power, which will provide a nearly one second decrease in zero-to-60 acceleration, will be available through an over-the-air software patch." Techdirt reports: If you don't want to pay monthly, Mercedes will also let you pay a one time flat fee (usually several thousand dollars) to remove the artificial restrictions they've imposed on your engine. That's, of course, creating additional upward pricing funnel efforts on top of the industry's existing efforts to upsell you on a rotating crop of trims, tiers, and options you probably didn't want. It's not really clear that regulators have any interest in cracking down on charging dumb people extra for something they already owned and paid for. After all, ripping off gullible consumers is effectively now considered little more than creative marketing by a notable segment of government "leaders" (see: regulatory apathy over misleading hidden fees in everything from hotels to cable TV).Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Dave Knott shares the four class of 2023 inductees into the Video Game Hall Of Fame. They were announced today at The Strong National Museum of Play. From the press release: Barbie Fashion Designer : "The 1996 hit Barbie Fashion Designer emerged at a time when many games were marketed to male players. Published by Digital Domain/Mattel Media, it proved that a computer game targeted to girls could succeed, selling more than 500,000 copies in two months. The game helped greatly expanded the market for video games and in the process opened important -- and ongoing -- discussions about gender and stereotypes in gaming. Barbie Fashion Designer was also innovative in bridging the gap between the digital and the physical, allowing players to design clothes for their Barbie dolls and print them on special fabric." Computer Space : "Nutting Associate's Computer Space appeared in 1971 and was the first commercial video game. Inspired by the early minicomputer and previous World Video Game Hall of Fame inductee -- Spacewar! (1962) -- the coin-operated Computer Space proved that video games could reach an audience outside of computer labs. While not a best-seller, it was a trailblazer in the video game world and inspired its creators to go on to establish Atari Inc., a video game giant in the 1970s and 1980s." The Last of Us : "Released by Naughty Dog and Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2013, The Last of Us jumped into an oversaturated field of post-apocalyptic zombie games and quickly stood out among the rest with its in-depth storytelling, intimate exploration of humanity, thrilling game jumps and cutscenes, and its memorable characters. More than 200 publications named it the game of the year in 2013. Its story has since made the jump to Hollywood, inspiring an HBO adaptation in 2023 watched weekly by millions." Wii Sports : "Wii Sports launched with the Nintendo Wii home video game system in 2006 and introduced motion-based technology to living rooms across the world. With a simple swipe of the controller, players could serve a tennis ball, hurl a bowling bowl, throw a left hook, or drive a golf ball. The simple mechanics made the game accessible to almost anyone -- allowing it to be played by young children and seniors alike -- and helped to redefine the idea of who is a "gamer." Ultimately, the game helped Nintendo to sell more than 100 million Wii consoles worldwide." These titles managed to beat out several other incredibly popular titles, including Angry Birds, Age of Empires, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, GoldenEye 007, NBA 2K, FIFA International Soccer, Quake, and Wizardry.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Internet users are turning to VPN services as a means to circumvent Utah's new law requiring porn sites to verify users' ages. The spike in VPN searches appears to be directly related to Pornhub's decision on Tuesday to completely disable its websites for people living in the state. TechRadar reports: Google searches for virtual private networks (VPNs) have been skyrocketing since, with a peak registered on May 3, the day the new law came into force. By downloading a VPN service, pornography fans will be able to keep accessing Pornhub and similar sites with ease. That's because a virtual private network is security software able to spoof users' IP address (digital location and device identifier). Hence a surge of interest in VPNs across Utah as people will simply need to connect to a server located in a US state or foreign country where the restriction isn't yet enforced. "Utah's age-verification law shows a worrying trend to further restrict digital freedoms and disregard data privacy across the US," said a spokesperson of secure VPN provider Private Internet Access (PIA). "Private Internet Access is a long-time advocate of greater digital privacy, and we urge lawmakers to consider other ways of protecting children online, including education, guidance from parents, and open conversations about safe internet usage, rather than relying on increasingly intrusive digital regulations which disregard people's privacy and online freedom." You can see the spike in "virtual private network" searches via Google Trends. "Search queries for VPN were at peak popularity in Utah just before 4 a.m. EST Tuesday, according to the trends data," notes Newsweek. "Other related queries in the past week include searches for VPN extensions like Hola and Fox Speed."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Following the announcement of the bill in March, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele signed a law today eliminating income, property, capital gains, and other tariffs on technology innovations. Watcher Guru reports: The announcement reinforces El Salvador's perspective as a haven for technology development. Additionally, Bukele stated that the new act protects "technology innovations, software and app programming, AI, computer, and communications hardware manufacturing." The Innovations and Technology Manufacturing Incentives Act will likely attract tech developments to the country. Moreover, the elimination of taxes presents an economic benefit to a host of companies. Conversely, El Salvador continues to maintain its commitment to a variety of tech innovations that are being developed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Waymo is doubling its commercial robotaxi service area in the Phoenix metro area to include Scottsdale, nearly all of Tempe and larger sections of Chandler and Mesa. The updated service area is 180 square miles, or about one-third of the 517-square-mile Phoenix metro area. "Importantly, it connects downtown to Arizona State University in Tempe and other East Valley suburbs," adds TechCrunch. From the report: The former Google self-driving project under Alphabet is also adding a second location that accesses the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Riders can already get to the airport by taking a Waymo robotaxi to the 44th Street Phoenix SkyTrain Station, which has frequent round-the-clock trains to the main terminals. Waymo robotaxis will now pick up and drop off passengers at the new 24th Street PHX SkyTrain Station. A larger service area, particularly one that allows for riders to take driverless Waymo vehicles from one suburb to downtown or to the airport, is critical for the company to grow its business and generate more revenue. The expansion will also help the company scale beyond the 10,000 autonomous trips that public riders take each week in Phoenix and San Francisco combined, Waymo Chief Product Officer Saswat Panigrahi said in a media briefing. Panigrahi did not disclose what percentage of those rides were in Phoenix, where it can charge. "We're clearly excited about the trajectory we're going to be on and we believe we can hit 10x of that scale by next summer, roughly," Panigrahi said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bloomberg (paywalled), Microsoft is helping finance AMD's expansion into AI chips. Meanwhile, AMD is working with Microsoft to create an in-house chipset, codenamed Athena, for the software giant's data centers. Paul Thurrott reports: Athena is designed as a cost-effective replacement for AI chipsets from Nvidia, which currently dominates this market. And it comes with newfound urgency as Microsoft's ChatGPT-powered Bing chatbot workloads are incredibly expensive using third-party chips. With Microsoft planning to expand its use of AI dramatically this year, it needs a cheaper alternative. Microsoft's secretive hardware efforts also come amid a period of Big Tech layoffs. But the firm's new Microsoft Silicon business, led by former Intel executive Rani Borkar, is growing and now has almost 1,000 employees, several hundred of which are working on Athena. The software giant has invested about $2 billion on this effort so far, Bloomberg says. (And that's above the $11 billion it's invested in ChatGPT maker OpenAI.) Bloomberg also says that Microsoft intends to keep partnering with Nvidia too, and that it will continue buying Nvidia chipsets as needed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple reported stronger-than-anticipated iPhones sales in its second-fiscal quarter earnings report today. "The highlight of Apple's report was iPhone sales, which grew from the year-ago quarter even as the broader smartphone industry contracted nearly 15% during the same time," reports CNBC, citing an IDC estimate. "IPhone revenue grew 2% during the quarter, suggesting that parts shortages and supply chain issues that had hampered the product for the last few years, including an iPhone factory shutdown late last year, had finally abated." From the report: Here's how the company did versus Wall Street expectations per Refinitiv consensus expectations: EPS: $1.52 vs. $1.43 expected Revenue: $94.84 billion vs. $92.96 billion expected Gross margin: 44.3% vs. 44.1% expected Apple reported $24.16 billion in net income during the quarter versus $25.01 billion last year. Overall revenue was down 3% from last year's $97.28 billion in sales. Here's how Apple's individual product lines did versus StreetAccount consensus expectations: iPhone revenue: $51.33 billion vs. $48.84 billion expected Mac revenue: $7.17 billion vs. $7.80 billion expected iPad revenue: $6.67 billion vs. $6.69 billion expected Other Products revenue: $8.76 billion vs. $8.43 billion expected Services revenue: $20.91 billion vs. $20.97 billion expectedRead more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The City of Dallas in Texas has confirmed a ransomware attack has downed key services, including 911 dispatch systems. City officials confirmed on Wednesday that a number of the city's servers had "been compromised with ransomware," causing widespread service outages. The Dallas Police Department (DPD) website is currently offline. The City of Dallas website displays a message stating that "the City is experiencing a service outage and is working to restore services," and the city wrote on a page that contains updates about the incident that all courts were closed on Wednesday and would be closed again on Thursday. DPD spokesperson Melinda Gutierrez confirmed to TechCrunch that the outage has also impacted Computer Aided Dispatch, or "CAD" systems, which are used by dispatchers and 911 operators to prioritize and record incident calls. Local media reported that this has forced 911 call takers to manually write down instructions for responding officers. "There is no effect to 911 calls at this time, and they continue to be dispatched for service," Gutierrez added. "The outage is not affecting police response." Printers on the City of Dallas network reportedly began printing out ransom notes on Wednesday morning. As per a copy the note, the Royal ransomware gang has claimed responsibility for the attack, and a URL included on the note directed to a contact form on Royal's dark web victims site. The note said critical data was encrypted, and threatened to publish it online if a ransom demand is not met. The City of Dallas has not yet been listed on Royal's dark web leak site and it's not yet known what types of data has been stolen. City officials have not responded to TechCrunch's questions. The full impact of the ransomware attack remains unknown. In a statement, the city said it was "actively working to isolate the ransomware to prevent its spread, to remove the ransomware from infected servers, and to restore any services currently impacted. The City is currently working to assess the complete impact, but at this time, the impact on the delivery of City services to its residents is limited."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EU has been warned that it risks handing control of artificial intelligence to US tech firms if it does not act to protect grassroots research in its forthcoming AI bill. From a report: In an open letter coordinated by the German research group Laion, or Large-scale AI Open Network, the European parliament was told that "one-size-fits-all" rules risked eliminating open research and development. "Rules that require a researcher or developer to monitor or control downstream use could make it impossible to release open-source AI in Europe," which would "entrench large firms" and "hamper efforts to improve transparency, reduce competition, limit academic freedom, and drive investment in AI overseas," the letter says. It adds: "Europe cannot afford to lose AI sovereignty. Eliminating open-source R&D will leave the European scientific community and economy critically dependent on a handful of foreign and proprietary firms for essential AI infrastructure." The largest AI efforts, by companies such as OpenAI and Google, are heavily controlled by their creators. It is impossible to download the model behind ChatGPT, for instance, and the paid-for access that OpenAI provides to customers comes with a number of restrictions, legal and technical, on how it can be used. By contrast, open-source AI efforts involve creating an AI model and then releasing it for anyone to use, improve or adapt as they see fit.Read more of this story at Slashdot.