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Long-time Slashdot reader Dr_Ish writes: It is not too common for the world of academic philosophy to be changed by a new discovery, or innovation. Perhaps the last time this happened in a major way can be traced back to Turing's famous (1950) "Computational Machinery and Intelligence" paper "Mind," where Turing proposed that computational systems could exhibit mind-like properties. However, it appears to be in the process of happening again. In a series of recent papers and a book that was published last week, philosopher Prof. Paco Calvo from the University of Murcia, has made a compelling case that plants exhibit cognitive properties, such as memory, planning, intelligence and perhaps even numerical abilities... His book, Calvo, P. with Lawrence, N. "Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence was published in the UK last week. It will appear in North America in March next year. From the Guardian's review of the book:Calvo writes that intelligence is "not quite as special as we like to think". He argues that it's time to accept that other organisms, even drastically different ones, may be capable of it.... In the course of his book, Calvo describes many experiments that reveal plants' remarkable range, including the way they communicate with others nearby using "chemical talk", a language encoded in about 1,700 volatile organic compounds.... Other studies show that some plants retain a memory of where the sun will rise, in order to turn their leaves towards the first rays. They store this knowledge — an internal model of what the sun is going to do — for several days, even when kept in total darkness. The conclusion must be that they constantly collect information, processing and retaining it in order to "make predictions, learn, and even plan ahead".Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bitcoin represents 40% of the $1 trillion outstanding crypto assets, according to Forbes' director of data and analytics. "An estimated 46 million adult Americans already own it according to New York Digital Investment Group..." "But can you trust what your crypto exchange or e-brokerage reports about trading in the most important digital currency?"One of the most common criticisms of bitcoin is pervasive wash trading (a form of fake volume) and poor surveillance across exchanges. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission defines wash trading as "entering into, or purporting to enter into, transactions to give the appearance that purchases and sales have been made, without incurring market risk or changing the trader's market position." The reason why some traders engage in wash trading is to inflate the trading volume of an asset to give the appearance of rising popularity. In some cases trading bots execute these wash trades in tokens, increasing volume, while at the same time insiders reinforce the activity with bullish remarks, driving up the price in what is effectively a pump and dump scheme. Wash trading also benefits exchanges because it allows them to appear to have more volume than they actually do, potentially encouraging more legitimate trading. There is no universally accepted method of calculating bitcoin daily volume, even among the industry's most reputable research firms. For instance, as of this writing, CoinMarketCap puts the latest 24-hour trading of bitcoin at $32 billion, CoinGecko at $27 billion, Nomics at $57 billion and Messari at $5 billion.... As part of Forbes research into the crypto ecosystem using 2021 data, we ranked the 60 best exchanges in March. More recently we conducted a deeper-dive into the bitcoin trading markets.... Our study evaluated 157 crypto exchanges across the world. Here are our main findings: - More than half of all reported trading volume is likely to be fake or non-economic. Forbes estimates the global daily bitcoin volume for the industry was $128 billion on June 14. That is 51% less than the $262 billion one would get by taking the sum of self-reported volume from multiple sources.... - The biggest problem areas regarding fake volume are firms that tout big volume but operate with little or no regulatory oversight that would make their figures more credible, notably Binance, MEXC Global and Bybit. Altogether, the lesser regulated exchanges in our study account for approximately $89 billion of the true volume (they claim $217 billion). Forbes adds that their report "builds on top of the important work done by other digital asset researchers such as Bitwise, which estimated in a March 2019 white paper that 95% of CoinMarketCap's bitcoin trading volume was fake and/or non-economic." Their article includes some other interesting findings, including an observation that Tether "continues to be a dominant player in the crypto trading economy, especially when it comes to trades against bitcoin. Its current market capitalization is $68 billion, despite questions about its reserves." Thanks to Slashdot reader rrconan for sharing the article...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The IEEE's official publication, IEEE Spectrum, has released its ninth annual ranking of the top programming languages. The results?Python remains on top but is closely followed by C. Indeed, the combined popularity of C and the big C-like languages — C++ and C# — would outrank Python by some margin. Java also remains popular, as does Javascript, the latter buoyed by the ever-increasing complexity of websites and in-browser tools (although it's worth noting that in some quarters, the cool thing is now deliberately stripped-down static sites built with just HTML and simple CSS). But among these stalwarts is the rising popularity of SQL. In fact, it's at No. 1 in our Jobs ranking, which looks solely at metrics from the IEEE Job Site and CareerBuilder. Having looked through literally hundreds and hundreds of job listings in the course of compiling these rankings for you, dear reader, I can say that the strength of the SQL signal is not because there are a lot of employers looking for just SQL coders, in the way that they advertise for Java experts or C++ developers. They want a given language plus SQL. And lots of them want that "plus SQL...." Job listings are of course not the only metrics we look at in Spectrum. A complete list of our sources is here, but in a nutshell we look at nine metrics that we think are good proxies for measuring what languages people are programming in. Sources include GitHub, Google, Stack Overflow, Twitter, and IEEE Xplore [their library of technical content]. The raw data is normalized and weighted according to the different rankings offered — for example, the Spectrum default ranking is heavily weighted toward the interests of IEEE members, while Trending puts more weight on forums and social-media metrics. Python is still #1 in their "Trending" view of language popularity, but with Java in second place (followed by C, JavaScript, C++ and C# — and then SQL). PHP is next — their 8th-most-trending language, followed by HTML, Go, R, and Rust.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What's the deal with that supposed 30TB external SSD being sold for just $31.40 on China-based online shopping site AliExpress? It's also listed on Walmart's website for just $39 — but first, listen to cybersecurity researcher calling himself "Ray [REDACTED]".Scammer gets two 512MB Flash drives. Or 1 gigabyte, or whatever. They then add hacked firmware that makes it misreport its size... when you go to WRITE a big file, hacked firmware simply writes all new data on top of old data, while keeping directory (with false info) intact. Ars Technica goes over the details:On the inside, this "SSD" looks like two small-capacity microSD cards hot glued to a USB 2.0-capable board. This board's firmware has been modified so that each of these cards reports its capacity as "15.0TB" to the operating system, for a total of 30TB, even though the actual capacity of the cards is much lower.... It preserves the directory structure of whatever you're copying, but when it's "copying" your data, it just keeps writing and rewriting over the tiny microSD cards. Everything will look fine until you go to access a file, only to find that the data isn't there. Replies to Ray Redacted's thread are full of alternate versions of this scam, including multiple iterations of the hot-glued microSD version and at least one that hid a USB thumb drive inside a larger enclosure. Fake USB storage devices are neither new nor rare, though this one makes spectacularly egregious claims about its price-per-gigabyte. When it comes to buying storage online, common-sense advice is best: stick to name brands, buy from trustworthy sellers.... and know that if a deal seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"When members of the ENS DAO community go to its eth.link website, all they'll see now is an empty page with a green domain expiration notice banner at the top," reports CoinDesk. "That's because the only person with the authority to renew the domain, Virgil Griffith, is serving a 63-month prison sentence for helping North Koreans use cryptocurrencies to circumvent sanctions and has been unable to renew the domain from prison."According to a notice domain registrar GoDaddy published on its website late Friday, eth.link expired on July 26 and is set to return to a domain registry on Sept. 5, where it will be up for grabs for anyone who is able to take it. ENS DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that governs the Ethereum Name Service protocol, a Web3 version of a Domain Name Service provider. ENS is the protocol behind the numerous .eth names that have popped up throughout the Ethereum community. Users have bought .eth names as a way to own their own domains. ENS names can then be tied to your wallet address, making it easier for users to send and receive crypto (instead of having to type out a long, complex Ethereum address).... The DAO relied on the eth.link site to provide access to information about all ENS names. ENS DAO is already advising its users to switch over to eth.limo, another community operated domain.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PINE64's August update included photos of their first prototype for its upcoming Star64 single-board computer, "the first true RISC-V single-board computer from us...but as I wrote last month it certainly isn't the last RISC-V piece of hardware you'll be seeing from us."Just as a short recap: Star64 comes with a StarFive JH7110 64bit CPU sporting quad SiFive FU740 cores clocked at 1.5GHz. The SOC is equipped with BXE-2-32 from Imagination Technologies, which is said to be a solid mid-range GPU. Star64 will be available in two configurations — with 4Gb and 8GB of RAM, similarly to the Quartz64. Both hardware versions include USB 3.0 and a PCIe slot as well as two native Gigabit Ethernet NICs.... Along the long leading edges you'll find PCIe on one end and GPIO on the other. At one end of the board you'll find a digital video output, a double-stacked Gigabit Ethernet port and a 12V barrel plug for power. On the opposite side, you'll find 3x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, an audio jack as well as a power button. There are also two U.FL ports for antennas — one for bluetooth and the other for WiFi.... The Star64 also has an MiPi display output complete with a touch panel (TP) input, a 12V power port, a CSI camera port and an eMMC slot. A micro SD card slot can be found at the bottom of the PCB. Similarly to the RockPro64 and Quartz64, the 12V port on the Star64 can be used for powering other hardware directly from the board — a popular example is powering one or multiple SSDs connected to a PCIe SATA adapter. I'll add that, at least in theory, the Star64 would make a great network-attached storage device because of its SoCs low thermals and idle power. I am looking forward to seeing NAS-focused Linux or BSD* OSes available for the board. Speaking of software, efforts to support the SoC in Linux have already begun. I've been told that both Debian and Fedora are already being ported to the StarFive JH7110, which is great news. We are certain that many other OSes will follow swiftly — especially once we start delivering the Star64 to interested developers. On the subject of availability: the Star64 will be available in a few weeks time, and will initially be available to developers. Given the interest in the Star64's and the SoC powering I hope to see functional distributions available for the board soon after launch. The announcement also included an update on their PinecilV2 smart mini portable soldering iron (built with a 32-bit RISC-V SoC). "The Pinecil V2 landed earlier this month and sold out almost instantly. The next production run of the ought to be available soon however..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The war in Ukraine has "reshaped" energy markets, reports the Washington Post, with gas and oil shortages driving up the price of fossil fuels. The end result? "From Japan to Germany to Britain to the United States, leaders of countries that had stopped investing in nuclear power are now considering building new power plants or delaying the closure of existing ones."The shift is especially notable in Japan and Germany, where both turned decisively against nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster.... This week, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced that his government is considering constructing next-generation nuclear power plants with the goal of making them commercially operational in the 2030s. The government may also extend the operational life of its current nuclear power plants. German policymakers, meanwhile, are considering prolonging the life of three final nuclear power plants that had been scheduled to go offline at the end of the year. The reprieve would be temporary — just a year or two to get through the current energy crisis — but it would still mark a significant policy reversal that has been a major focus of Germany political life for the last decade... Any decision in Germany would have to be approved by [German Economy Minister Robert] Habeck and his Green party — which was founded decades ago to focus on abolishing nuclear power. It remains a core policy position of the party — but so is opposition to Russia's war in Ukraine and a desire to be as strong as possible against the Kremlin. "We are in really special times," said Dennis Tänzler, a director of Adelphi, a Berlin-based climate think tank. "The bottom line is that German climate and energy policy has been shaped since Fukushima by a cross-party consensus that overall the technological risks, the security risks, are just too great." Even some prominent nuclear critics appear open to keeping existing plants online for longer, though they oppose building any new ones. "There's no connection between building nuclear power plants and dealing with the price spike caused by the loss of Russian gas," since they take at least a decade to construct, said Tom Burke, the chairman of E3G, a London-based climate think tank. But, he said, extending the life of existing reactors could make sense. "If you can do it safely, and it's worthwhile economically to do it, I don't see any good reason not to extend the life of nuclear reactors," he said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Rand Corporation is an American (nonprofit) think tank. And veliath (Slashdot reader #5,435) spotted their recent warning about "a plausible scenario that could soon take place in the metaverse."A political candidate is giving a speech to millions of people. While each viewer thinks they are seeing the same version of the candidate, in virtual reality they are actually each seeing a slightly different version. For each and every viewer, the candidate's face has been subtly modified to resemble the viewer.... The viewers are unaware of any manipulation of the image. Yet they are strongly influenced by it: Each member of the audience is more favorably disposed to the candidate than they would have been without any digital manipulation. This is not speculation. It has long been known that mimicry can be exploited as a powerful tool for influence. A series of experiments by Stanford researchers has shown that slightly changing the features of an unfamiliar political figure to resemble each voter made people rate politicians more favorably. The experiments took pictures of study participants and real candidates in a mock-up of an election campaign. The pictures of each candidate were modified to resemble each participant. The studies found that even if 40 percent of the participant's features were blended into the candidate's face, the participants were entirely unaware the image had been manipulated. In the metaverse, it's easy to imagine this type of mimicry at a massive scale. At the heart of all deception is emotional manipulation. Virtual reality environments, such as Facebook's (now Meta's) metaverse, will enable psychological and emotional manipulation of its users at a level unimaginable in today's media.... We are not even close to being able to defend users against the threats posed by this coming new medium.... In VR, body language and nonverbal signals such as eye gaze, gestures, or facial expressions can be used to communicate intentions and emotions. Unlike verbal language, we often produce and perceive body language subconsciously.... We must not wait until these technologies are fully realized to consider appropriate guardrails for them. We can reap the benefits of the metaverse while minimizing its potential for great harm. They recommend developing technology that detect the application of this kind of VR manipulation. "Society did not start paying serious attention to classical social media — meaning Facebook, Twitter, and the like — until things got completely out of hand. Let us not make the same mistake as social media blossoms into the metaverse."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Google employees are receiving regular notifications from management of Covid-19 infections," CNBC report Friday — "causing some to question the company's return-to-office mandates."The employees, who spoke with CNBC on the condition of anonymity, said since they have been asked to return to offices, infections notifications pop up in their email inboxes regularly.... The company began requiring most employees to return to physical offices at least three days a week in April. Since then, staffers have pushed back on the mandate after they worked efficiently for so long at home while the company enjoyed some of its fastest revenue growth in 15 years. Google has offered full-time employees the option to request permanent remote work, but it's unclear how many workers have been approved. Google's Covid-19 outbreak in Los Angeles is currently the largest of any employer in LA., according to the city's public health dashboard. Deadline.com first reported that the tech giant's trendy Silicon Beach campus in Venice, Calif., recorded 145 infections while 135 cases were recorded at the company's large Playa Vista campus. Staffers have been filling Memegen, an internal company image-sharing site, with memes about the increased number of exposure notifications they're receiving. One meme, which was upvoted 2,840 times, showed a photo of an inbox with the email subject from a San Francisco-based facilities manager stating "We're so excited to see you back in the office!" and a subsequent email subject line stating "Notification of Confirmed COVID-19 Case...." Some employees said they received a spike in notifications from the Mountain View, Calif. headquarters and in San Francisco offices after the company held a return-to-office celebration, where Grammy award-winning artist Lizzo performed for thousands of employees at the Shoreline Amphitheater, near Google's main campus. Defending the safety of working on-site, a Google spokesperson told CNBC they hadn't been experiencing a sudden recent spike in their Covid cases, arguing that instead the hundreds of Covid cases had been occurring over "the last few months."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

United Launch Alliance has been developing a heavy-lift space vehicle since 2014 (with investment from the U.S. military) called the Vulcan Centaur. So CNN reports that the ashes of the late Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols "will head to deep space on a Vulcan rocket."Nichols' cremated remains will be aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight, which will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Celestis, Inc., is a private company that conducts memorial spaceflights. Among the remains also aboard the flight will be the ashes of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry; his wife, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who played various roles in the show and films; and James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in the films and TV series.... The spaceflight will travel beyond NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and into interplanetary deep space. In addition to cremated remains, capsules onboard will also carry complete human genome DNA samples from willing participants. People can participate in the flight — by having DNA or loved ones' remains in a spaceflight container — for a price starting at $12,500, and reservations close August 31. (Celestis offers other voyages that don't travel as far, but can cost less than $5,000.) Ahead of the flight's liftoff, Celestis will host a three-day event with mission briefings, an astronaut-hosted dinner, launch site tours, an on-site memorial service and launch viewing. All events will be shown via webcast, according to Celestis. An announcement on the flight's site invites fans of Nichelle Nichols to "share your own story about how she inspired you and it will be sent into deep space aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight — the Enterprise Flight, launching later in 2022."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Debian currently doesn't load non-free firmware by default on its systems," reports Phoronix, "even when it means no working hardware support/acceleration without those binary elements. Not loading the non-free firmware can also mean missing out on security updates or for addressing usability issues." Now the Debian community is discussing three proposals on how non-free firmware should be handled going forward (before a vote in September). Proposal A and B both start with the same two paragraphs:We will include non-free firmware packages from the "non-free-firmware" section of the Debian archive on our official media (installer images and live images). The included firmware binaries will normally be enabled by default where the system determines that they are required, but where possible we will include ways for users to disable this at boot (boot menu option, kernel command line etc.). When the installer/live system is running we will provide information to the user about what firmware has been loaded (both free and non-free), and we will also store that information on the target system such that users will be able to find it later. The target system will also be configured to use the non-free-firmware component by default in the apt sources.list file. Our users should receive security updates and important fixes to firmware binaries just like any other installed software. But Proposal A adds that "We will publish these images as official Debian media, replacing the current media sets that do not include non-free firmware packages," while Proposal B says those images "will not replace the current media sets," but will instead be offered alongside them. And Proposal C? "The Debian project is permitted to make distribution media (installer images and live images) containing packages from the non-free section of the Debian archive available for download alongside with the free media in a way that the user is informed before downloading which media are the free ones.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every Friday Politico interviews someone about "The Future in Five Questions". This week they interviewed Neal Stephenson (who they describe as "the sci-fi author who coined the term 'metaverse' and now a Web3 entrepreneur in his own right.") Stephenson began by sharing his thoughts on a big idea that's underrated. Neal Stephenson: Desalination. It's an incredibly obvious, kind of simple process. Nothing is more basic than having water to drink, so it's kind of hiding in plain sight, but coupled with cheap energy from photovoltaics it's going to make big changes in the world. When you look at how much water, or a lack thereof, has shaped where people live and how people make food, the notion that we might be able to engineer ways to get fresh water in a new way could be revolutionary. What's a technology you think is overhyped? Stephenson: I'm going to go with an oldie: rockets. It's just a historical accident that chemical rockets became our only way of putting stuff into space, and if we had started at a different time we would have ended up doing something that works better. One alternative would be beaming energy from the ground to vehicles, using lasers or microwaves. That seems like a doable project right now. There's nuclear propulsion, which I think is probably never going to happen at scale, because it's politically impossible, but even something as simple as constructing a very tall building or a tall tower and using that as a launch platform, or as a way to accelerate things up upward, could really change the economics of spaceflight. Stephenson also says the book that most shaped his conception of the future was Robert Heinlein's 1958 novel Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. And the biggest surprise of 2022 was Ukraine's strong response after Russia's invasion. "Most people who are paying attention have understood that drones and other new technologies are going to change the way wars get fought, but we're seeing it unfold and mutate in real time in Ukraine. "These guys are taking old Cold War grenades and disassembling them, and putting on homemade fuses and attaching 3D printed fins and dropping them out of consumer-grade drones, to a significant effect on the battlefield...." In 2004 Neal Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot's readers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is trying "to make it easier for developers to create Android apps that connect in some way across a range of devices," reports the Verge. Documentation for the software development kit says it will simplify development for "multi-device experiences." "The Cross device SDK is open-source and will be available for different Android surfaces and non-Android ecosystem devices (Chrome OS, Windows, iOS)," explains the documentation, though the current developer preview only works with Android phones and tablets, according to the Verge. But they report that Google's new SDK "contains the tools developers need to make their apps play nice across Android devices, and, eventually non-Android phones, tablets, TVs, cars, and more."The SDK is supposed to let developers do three key things with their apps: discover nearby devices, establish secure connections between devices, and host an app's experience across multiple devices. According to Google, its cross-device SDK uses Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ultra-wideband to deliver multi-device connectivity.... [I]t could let multiple users on separate devices choose items from a menu when creating a group food order, saving you from passing your phone around the room. It could also let you pick up where you left off in an article when swapping from your phone to a tablet, or even allow the passengers in a car to share a specific map location with the vehicle's navigation system. It almost sounds like an expansion of Nearby Share, which enables users on Android to transfer files to devices that use Chrome OS and other Androids. In April, Esper's Mishaal Rahman spotted an upcoming Nearby Share update that could let you quickly share files across the devices that you're signed into Google with. Google also said during a CES 2022 keynote that it will bring Nearby Share to Windows devices later this year. "This SDK abstracts away the intricacies involved with working with device discovery, authentication, and connection protocols," argues Google's blog post, "allowing you to focus on what matters most — building delightful user experiences and connecting these experiences across a variety of form factors and platforms."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Over the past year, nuclear fusion has inched closer to reality," the Washington Post reported Friday. "Scientists are mere years from getting more energy out of fusion reactions than the energy required to create them, they said. Venture capitalists are pumping billions into companies, racing to get a fusion power plant up and running by the early 2030s. The Biden administration, through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Department of Energy, is creating tax credits and grant programs to help companies figure out how to deploy this kind of energy." (One fusion company's CEO argues that "Once the technology is shown to work, it's less risky, and the next buyer of that technology could get a commercial loan.") But even with all this new excitement, challenges still remain, nuclear scientists warn:The U.S. energy grid would need a significant redesign for fusion power plants to become common. The price of providing fusion power is still too high to be feasible. "We're at a very exciting place," said Dennis G. Whyte, director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. "But we also have to be realistic in the sense that it's still very hard...." Phil Larochelle, a partner at the venture capital firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures, said private money is flowing into fusion at such high levels because scientific advancements, such as better magnets, have made cheap nuclear fusion a likelier possibility. Going forward, Larochelle noted that getting nuclear fusion to market probably will require formal cost-sharing programs with the government, which he said could be similar to how NASA is partnering with SpaceX for space travel innovation. "In both the U.S. and the U.K., there's now kind of new government programs and support for trying to get to a [fusion] pilot," he said. "It's a good kind of risk-sharing between public and private [sectors]." Despite the growing government collaboration, Whyte said, a few challenges remain. The effects of climate change are increasingly irreversible, and the clock is ticking, he said, making fusion energy a crucial need. Companies will have to figure out how to deploy the technology widely. Doing it cheaply is most important, he said. "What I worry about is that we'll get to a system where we can't actually make it economically attractive fast enough," he added. Moreover, to create an electricity grid through which fusion technology provides large amounts of power, many things need to happen. Universities need to churn out scientists more capable of working on fusion technology. Fusion power companies need to build devices that create more energy than they consume. Scientific and manufacturing materials must be constructed in difficult ways if power plants want to scale. "Can we get there?" Whyte asked. "I think we can if we get our act together in the right way. But there's no guarantee of that."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Facebook's corporate parent has reached a tentative settlement in a lawsuit alleging the world's largest social network service allowed millions of its users' personal information to be fed to Cambridge Analytica," reports the Associated Press: Terms of the settlement reached by Meta Platforms, the holding company for Facebook and Instagram, weren't disclosed in court documents filed late Friday. The filing in San Francisco federal court requested a 60-day stay of the action while lawyers finalize the settlement. That timeline suggested further details could be disclosed by late October. The accord was reached just a few weeks before a Sept. 20 deadline for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his long-time chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, to submit to depositions during the final phases of pre-trial evidence gathering, according to court documents... The lawsuit, which had been seeking to be certified as a class action representing Facebook users, had asserted the privacy breach proved Facebook is a "data broker and surveillance firm," as well as a social network. Some background from UPI:The Facebook users sued the platform in June 2018, accusing it of violating privacy rules when it shared personal data with Cambridge Analytica and other third parties.... In March 2018, whistleblower and Cambridge Analytica co-founder Christopher Wylie revealed the data mining company was holding onto Facebook user data without the users' consent even after Facebook told the company to delete it. Reuters describes Cambridge Analytica as "the now-defunct British political consultancy." Politico reports that now lawyers for both Facebook and the plaintiffs have "asked the judge to put the lawsuit on hold for 60 days to allow the parties to 'finalize a written settlement agreement' and present it for preliminary approval by the court."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Google launched a carbon emissions tool for its flight tracker last fall," remembers Gizmodo, "allowing consumers to see the individual emissions created by each flight they were browsing..." "But last month the tech giant quietly shifted the algorithm to exclude a crucial component of the overall greenhouse gas impact of air travel." The BBC reports:Flights now appear to have much less impact on the environment than before. "Google has airbrushed a huge chunk of the aviation industry's climate impacts from its pages" says Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace. With Google hosting nine out of every 10 online searches, this could have wide repercussions for people's travel decisions. The company said it made the change following consultations with its "industry partners". It affects the carbon calculator embedded in the company's "Google Flights" search tool.... [I]n July, Google decided to exclude all the global warming impacts of flying except CO2. Some experts say Google's calculations now represent just over half of the real impact on the climate of flights. "It now significantly understates the global impact of aviation on the climate", says Professor David Lee of Manchester Metropolitan University, the author of the most comprehensive scientific assessment of the contribution of air travel to global warming. Flying affects the climate in lots of ways in addition to the CO2 produced by burning aviation fuel. These include the creation of long thin clouds high up in the atmosphere — known as contrails — which trap heat radiated by the Earth, leading to a net warming effect on our planet. These additional warming impacts mean that although aviation is only responsible for around 2% of global CO2 emissions, the sector is actually responsible for around 3.5% of the warming caused by human activity.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"At the onset of the outbreak, scientists thought they knew when and how the monkeypox virus was spread, what the disease looked like and who was most vulnerable," remembers the New York Times. "The 47,000 cases identified worldwide have upended many of those expectations."Some had headaches or depression, confusion and seizures. Others had severe eye infections or inflammation of the heart muscle. At least three of the six deaths reported so far were linked to encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. "We really are seeing a very, very wide range of presentation," said Dr. Boghuma Titanji, an infectious disease physician at a clinic in Atlanta that serves people living with H.I.V. Scientists now know that the monkeypox virus lurks in saliva, semen and other bodily fluids, sometimes for weeks after recovery. The virus has always been known to spread through close contact, but many researchers suspect the infection may also be transmitted through sex itself.... "It's no longer correct to say it can't be transmitted asymptomatically," said Dr. Chloe Orkin, an infectious disease physician at Queen Mary University of London. "I think that it means that our working model of how it's spread is incorrect." Early in the outbreak, [America's Centers for Disease Control] said that "people who do not have monkeypox symptoms cannot spread the virus to others." The agency changed that phrasing on July 29 to say that "scientists are still researching" the possibility of asymptomatic transmission. In a statement to The New York Times, an agency spokeswoman acknowledged recent evidence that asymptomatic cases were possible but said that it was still uncertain whether people without symptoms could spread the virus and that more research was needed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Since 2012 researchers in the Georgia Tech Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory have uncovered 47,337 malicious plugins across 24,931 unique WordPress websites through a web development tool they named YODA," warns an announcement released Friday:According to a newly released paper about the eight-year study, the researchers found that every compromised website in their dataset had two or more infected plugins. The findings also indicated that 94% of those plugins are still actively infected. "This is an under-explored space," said Ph.D. student Ranjita Pai Kasturi who was the lead researcher on the project. "Attackers do not try very hard to hide their tracks and often rightly assume that website owners will not find them." YODA is not only able to detect active malware in plugins, but it can also trace the malicious software back to its source. This allowed the researchers to determine that these malicious plugins were either sold on the open market or distributed from pirating sites, injected into the website by exploiting a vulnerability, or in most cases, infected after the plugin was added to a website. According to the paper written by Kasturi and her colleagues, over 40,000 plugins in their dataset were shown to have been infected after they were deployed. The team found that the malware would attack other plugins on the site to spread the infection. "These infections were a result of two scenarios. The first is cross-plugin infection, in which case a particular plugin developer cannot do much," said Kasturi. "Or it was infected by exploiting existing plugin vulnerabilities. To fix this, plugin developers can scan for vulnerabilities before releasing their plugins for public use." Although these malicious plugins can be damaging, Kasturi adds that it's not too late to save a website that has a compromised plugin. Website owners can purge malicious plugins entirely from their websites and reinstall a malware free version that has been scanned for vulnerabilities. To give web developers an edge over this problem, the Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory has made the YODA code available to the public on GitHub.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Polygon reports that during a streaming event, the publisher of the Magic: the Gathering card game promised a new themed set of cards commemorating Doctor Who's 60th anniversary. But that's not their only new set: The Lord of the Rings: Tales from Middle-earth is also releasing in Q3 of 2023, but it will be a fully draftable booster set and legal in modern format of competitive play.... Individual cards portray familiar heroes and villains including Frodo, Gandalf and the Balrog. In order to capture the scale of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy battles, the set will also feature new borderless scene cards. Each has a piece of art that can stand alone, but 18 of them will come together to produce a particularly epic scene from the trilogy — such as the Battle of the Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King. The art from Tyler Jacobson, who's provided illustrations for more than 100 Magic cards and for Dungeons & Dragons books including The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, is full of small details including the Dark Tower Barad-dûr in the background. The article points out that the game publisher has previously published crossover decks for The Walking Dead and Fortnite. This story is for long-time Slashdot reader tezbobobo, who argued earlier this week that Slashdot's been remiss in its coverage of Magic: the Gathering news:For years I've seen Dungeons & Dragons, Sony Playstation and Nethack show up occassionally on the front page of Slashdot. So where are the rest of the nerd games? Magic: the Gathering has one of the most loyal and active fanbases, and the creators have been churning out new and interesting cards for decades. Even as it tops the trading card pile, it's made inroads into the digital sphere, with online version in Arena and Magic Online. It's available on PC, Mac, Ipad.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), a state-run firm with a monopoly on online booking of train tickets, has scrapped its plan to monetize customer data after its tender drew concerns from many. TechCrunch: The Indian firm informed the local stock exchange Friday that it was scrapping its proposal because the Indian government had withdrawn the personal data protection bill. In a tender earlier, the firm had proposed appointing a consultant for digital data monetization on rail passengers' data. The tender sought to explore studying customers' behavioral data, their frequency of journeys, as well as geography, the kind of ticket they purchase and mobile number and gender. The plan, had it been approved, would have helped the firm increase its revenue by more than $125 million, according to an estimation by the firm.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Are there better ways to fight misinformation? "Researchers at Google, the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol tested a different approach that tries to undermine misinformation before people see it," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) Instead of using the term "debunking," they're calling it "pre-bunking...."The researchers found that psychologically "inoculating" internet users against lies and conspiracy theories — by pre-emptively showing them videos about the tactics behind misinformation — made people more skeptical of falsehoods afterward, according to an academic paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.... The users were taught about tactics such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence, or the use of conflicting explanations to assert that something is true, so that they could spot lies. Researchers tested some participants within 24 hours of seeing a pre-bunk video and found a 5 percent increase in their ability to recognize misinformation techniques. One video opens with a mournful piano tune and a little girl grasping a teddy bear, as a narrator says, "What happens next will make you tear up." Then the narrator explains that emotional content compels people to pay more attention than they otherwise would, and that fear-mongering and appeals to outrage are keys to spreading moral and political ideas on social media. The video offers examples, such as headlines that describe a "horrific" accident instead of a "serious" one, before reminding viewers that if something they see makes them angry, "someone may be pulling your strings." Beth Goldberg, one of the paper's authors and the head of research and development at Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Google, said in an interview that pre-bunking leaned into people's innate desire to not be duped. "This is one of the few misinformation interventions that I've seen at least that has worked not just across the conspiratorial spectrum but across the political spectrum," Ms. Goldberg said. Jigsaw will start a pre-bunking ad campaign on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok at the end of August for users in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, meant to head off fear-mongering about Ukrainian refugees who entered those countries after Russia invaded Ukraine. It will be done in concert with local fact checkers, academics and disinformation experts. The researchers don't have plans for similar pre-bunking videos ahead of the midterm elections in the United States, but they are hoping other tech companies and civil groups will use their research as a template for addressing misinformation.... The effects of pre-bunking last for only between a few days and a month.... The researchers wrote that pre-bunking worked like medical immunization: "Pre-emptively warning and exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation can cultivate 'mental antibodies' against fake news."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the Washington Post earlier this week:On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Twitter's former head of security, Peiter Zatko, had filed a whistleblower complaint with federal regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, accusing Twitter of "Lying about Bots to Elon Musk...." "Twitter executives have little or no personal incentive to accurately 'detect' or measure the prevalence of spam bots," the complaint alleges, adding "deliberate ignorance was the norm" among its executive team. The same article notes that three people familiar with Twitter's spam-detection, processes said Twitter's "internal bot prevalence numbers" were almost always less than 5%. (And the article reminds readers that Musk himself had waived his right to perform "due diligence" prior to striking the deal.) But here's that Tuesday article's most prescient sentence. "The judge has rejected Musk's requests for information from more than 20 company leaders — including Zatko — but the whistleblower claims could open the door for them to make further requests, legal experts said." Sure enough, Friday night CBS News reported that the judge "ordered both Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to turn over more information to opposing lawyers..."Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick on Thursday ordered Twitter to provide Musk's attorneys more data regarding the company's estimates that less than 5% of the accounts on its platform are fake. The judge also rejected Musk's attempts to shield details about analyses he used in his attempt to terminate the deal. That work was done by data scientists who examined live-feed information from Twitter about public user accounts to test the company's daily-user counts.... The judge rejected more comprehensive data requests from Musk's attorneys as "absurdly broad," noting that a literal reading of the request would require Twitter to produce "trillions upon trillions of data points" reflecting all data collected on roughly 200 million accounts over three years. But McCormick did order Twitter to produce information on 9,000 accounts that were reviewed in connection with company's fourth-quarter audit, a data subset that has been described as a "historical snapshot." McCormick also ordered Twitter to turn over documents regarding other metrics, regardless of whether they expressly address "monetizable daily active users," or mDAU. Musk's attorneys have suggested that a comparison of Twitter's mDAU with other metrics, such as "User Active Minutes," could support their theory that the company has fraudulently misled investors and securities regulators about the scope of activity on its platform.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the past year, crypto companies like FTX, Coinbase and Crypto.com have shelled out tens of millions of dollars to attract new customers. "Fortune favors the brave," Matt Damon famously said in a Crypto.com TV spot as he tried to induce Americans to open their digital wallets. Now a core metric of how successful they were has been returned, and experts say it's an eye-opening one: not successful at all. From a report: The number of people who invested in crypto has not expanded since last September before the push began, according to a new study led by Pew Research Center. The results, released Tuesday, build off an initial survey in September. Back then, Pew researchers asked 10,371 Americans if they have "ever invested in, traded, or used a cryptocurrency." Some 16 percent said they had. Last month, the nonprofit asked another sample group -- slightly smaller, at 6,034 Americans -- the same question. The number hadn't grown, with the same 16 percent saying they had at some point invested or traded in the alternate currency. The results suggest that, despite numerous splashy campaigns by crypto interests, the great majority of Americans remain immune to their sales pitches. "It's pretty striking that for all the spectacular commotion around crypto in the last year, the number of people who invest or trade in crypto didn't budge," said Lee Rainie, Pew Research Center's director of internet and technology research, who spearheaded the study. "Attempts to bring in new buyers to the market didn't seem to move the needle at all."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thursday Ukraine's largest nuclear power plant was cut off from the country's electricity grid, causing "widespread power outages across southern Ukraine," according to the New York Times. Friday afternoon it was reconnected to Ukraine's national power grid, the Times adds — "but its time offline renewed concerns about the safe operation of the plant..." The Guardian notes it's the first such disconnection in nearly 40 years. Three other power lines connecting the reactors to the grid "had already been taken out during the war," though when the fourth and final line went out, "the plant still received supplies of electricity from one remaining backup line connected to the nearby conventional power plant." (Though two other lines to that power plant were already also down.) "Disconnecting the plant from the grid is dangerous because it raises the risk of catastrophic failure of the electricity-run cooling systems for its reactors and spent fuel rods.... If all external connections go down, it must rely on diesel-fuelled generators for power. If they break down, engineers only have 90 minutes to stave off dangerous overheating." (Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskiy pointed out that during the break in power, back-up diesel generators did indeed immediately kick in to ensure continuous power supply, according to Reuters.) But is Russia executing a larger strategy here? Earlier, Russian engineers informed plant workers that the nuclear plant would be switched to Russia's power network in the event of an emergency, according to the head of Ukraine's atomic energy company. Speaking to the Guardian, he adds that the plant's workers were told that "The precondition for this plan was heavy damage of all lines which connect Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to the Ukrainian system" — and he worries that Russia is now attempting to create those preconditions. He's not the only one thinking that. Voice of America interviewed a nuclear engineer at the plant who claims that Russian troops have several times "bombed places that cannot affect the safe operation of the power plant. I think that the Russians are trying to discredit the armed forces of Ukraine for the purpose of propaganda.... At the same time, the Russians deliberately damaged the high-voltage power lines that connect the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant with the Ukrainian power system.... [T]he Russians want to arrange a small accident and stop Zaporizhzhia for a short time, then supply us with electricity from Crimea and automatically switch the nuclear power plant to the Russian energy system." He also claims to have seen Russian military equipment stored in the plant. For example, "Different types of Russian artillery and missile installations are located both inside the territory of the nuclear power plant and around it, on the perimeter, near the Kakhovka Reservoir." The last power line connecting the reactors to the grid was disconnected by fires "caused by shelling," the Guardian reported. The New York Times reports on the aftermath:Ukrainian engineers were able to restore damaged external power lines after repeated shelling on Thursday, ensuring the facility was able to meet its own power needs and continue to operate safely, according to Ukrainian and international officials, but efforts to reconnect it to the grid took longer. With fires raging around the plant, new shelling in and around the facility on a near daily basis and an exhausted and stressed team of Ukrainian engineers tasked with keeping the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant running safely, however, calls for international intervention grew louder. Negotiations with Ukraine and Russia to allow safety experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit and inspect the plant appeared to be making progress, as U.N. officials indicated they expected an agreement soon. "We are in active consultations for an imminent I.A.E.A. mission," a spokesman for the agency said. The stakes are high. "Nowhere in the history of this world has a nuclear power plant become a part of a combat zone, so this really has to stop immediately," Bonnie Denise Jenkins, the State Department's under secretary for arms control and international security, told reporters in Brussels on Thursday. Russian actions, she said, "have created a serious risk of a nuclear incident — a dangerous radiation release — that could threaten not only the people and environment of Ukraine, but also affect neighboring countries and the entire international community." Here's the opinion of that nuclear engineer at the Ukrainian nuclear plant (interviewed by Voice of America). "The expectation is that after the [International Atomic Energy] agency's conclusion, international pressure on Moscow will intensify, and Russia will be required to withdraw heavy weapons and troops from the nuclear power plant. "I think this is unrealistic. The Russians will not leave here by their own will. Without a war, it is impossible."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crop of expensive fantasy adaptations from Amazon and HBO Max served up at subsidised prices. Financial Times: Since 2016, the veteran US television executive John Landgraf has been predicting the arrival of "peak TV" -- the moment when the number of new scripted shows reaches an all-time high. The streaming boom has proved him wrong every time but he gamely made the prediction again this month, telling guests at the Television Critics Association press tour that 2022 would mark "the peak of the peak TV era." Landgraf, chair of Disney's FX network, conceded that he could be wrong this time too. But there is little doubt that this autumn will present audiences with a flood of some of the most expensive television ever produced. On September 2, Amazon Prime will release its adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, with an estimated budget of $465mn for the first season -- almost enough to make Top Gun: Maverick three times over. HBO Max's House of the Dragon -- the prequel to Game of Thrones -- is reported to have cost $200mn for the season's 10 episodes. At Disney Plus, Star Wars: Andor will lead a large slate of new programmes that include a Pinocchio remake, She Hulk, and a spin-off of the Cars franchise. These shows are being served up to consumers at subsidised prices by streaming platforms making record losses. The only profitable exception is Netflix, but the industry pioneer's market value has plunged almost $200bn over the past year because of slowing subscriber growth. Its share price is languishing at a four-year low. The forthcoming crop of new programming was given the green light during a headier time, when Wall Street cheered as streaming services committed lavish sums to compete. But faith in the streaming business model -- and investor tolerance for profligate spending -- has waned as Netflix's once-blistering subscription growth has gone into reverse. [...] On top of that, there are growing concerns that inflation will bite into discretionary spending, including on streaming services. "Everyone [in Hollywood] is throwing big dollars after big things," said Niels Juul, who was an executive producer of Martin Scorsese's Netflix film The Irishman. "But [subscribers] are inundated now to the point where they are looking at their monthly bills and saying, 'Something's got to go -- I've got $140 worth of subscriptions here!'" Even so, Tom Harrington at Enders Analysis said consumers were still getting a better deal than the streaming companies themselves. "People get through $100mn of TV in a day and say: 'what's next?' From a consumer point of view that is great. But for a video operator, it's clearly unsustainable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has confirmed to Sky News that criminals are posting counterfeit packages designed to appear like Office products in order to defraud people. From the report: One such package seen by Sky News is manufactured to a convincing standard and contains an engraved USB drive, alongside a product key. But the USB does not install Microsoft Office when plugged in to a computer. Instead, it contains malicious software which encourages the victim to call a fake support line and hand over access to their PC to a remote attacker. Microsoft launched an internal investigation into the suspect package after being contacted by Sky News. The company spokesperson confirmed that the USB and the packaging were counterfeit and that they had seen a pattern of such products being used to scam victims before. They added that while Microsoft had seen this type of fraud, it is very infrequent. More often when fraudulent products are sold they tend to be product keys sent to customers via email, with a link to a site for downloading the malicious software.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A small study on the therapeutic effects of using psychedelics to treat alcohol use disorder found that just two doses of psilocybin magic mushrooms paired with psychotherapy led to an 83 percent decline in heavy drinking among the participants. Those given a placebo reduced their alcohol intake by 51 percent. From a report: By the end of the eight-month trial, nearly half of those who received psilocybin had stopped drinking entirely compared with about a quarter of those given the placebo, according to the researchers. The study, published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry, is the latest in a cascade of new research exploring the benefits of mind-altering compounds to treat a range of mental health problems, from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder to the existential dread experienced by the terminally ill. Although most psychedelics remain illegal under federal law, the Food and Drug Administration is weighing potential therapeutic uses for compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA, the drug better known as Ecstasy. Dr. Michael Bogenschutz, director at NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine and the study's lead investigator, said the findings offered hope for the nearly 15 million Americans who struggle with excessive drinking -- roughly 5 percent of all adults. Excessive alcohol use kills an estimated 140,000 people each year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

China is using two massive drones to seed rainclouds in Sichuan province to try to end a devastating drought that has choked power output and disrupted supply chains of global giants like Apple and Tesla. From a report: The China Meteorological Administration launched drones in northern and southeastern Sichuan on Thursday morning, and the aircraft will eventually cover an area of 6,000 square kilometers in operations lasting through Monday, state-owned CCTV reported. Seeding works by dropping an ice-forming agent like silver iodide into a cloud that already contains ample moisture. Rain droplets gather around the agent, gaining weight until they begin to fall. China has a long history of using the technology to water crop fields, cool blistering cities and make sure skies are clear for events like the Olympics.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The hackers that breached Twilio earlier this month also compromised more than 130 other organizations during their hacking spree that netted the credentials of close to 10,000 employees. TechCrunch: Twilio's recent network intrusion allowed the hackers to access the data of 125 Twilio customers and companies -- including end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal -- after tricking employees into handing over their corporate login credentials and two-factor codes from SMS phishing messages that purported to come from Twilio's IT department. At the time, TechCrunch learned of phishing pages impersonating other companies, including a U.S. internet company, an IT outsourcing company and a customer service provider, but the scale of the campaign remained unclear. Now, cybersecurity company Group-IB says the attack on Twilio was part of a wider campaign by the hacking group it's calling "0ktapus," a reference to how the hackers predominantly target organizations that use Okta as a single sign-on provider. Group-IB, which launched an investigation after one of its customers was targeted by a linked phishing attack, said in findings shared with TechCrunch that the vast majority of the targeted companies are headquartered in the U.S. or have U.S.-based staff. The attackers have stolen at least 9,931 user credentials since March, according to Group-IB's findings, with more than half containing captured multi-factor authentication codes used to access a company's network.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter alfabravoteam writes: Password management company LastPass has published information about a security incident. "We have determined that an unauthorized party gained access to portions of the LastPass development environment through a single compromised developer account and took portions of source code and some proprietary LastPass technical information," reads the official message published. They also clarify that no user data was lost. "We never store or have knowledge of your Master Password," the firm said in an FAQ. "We utilize an industry standard Zero Knowledge architecture that ensures LastPass can never know or gain access to our customers' Master Password", they inform. Hence, no action is required to users to follow.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After offering them for over a decade, Heroku announced this week that it will eliminate all of its free services -- pushing users to paid plans. From a report: Starting November 28, the Salesforce-owned cloud platform as a service will stop providing free product plans and shut down free data services and soon (on October 26) will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year. In a blog post, Bob Wise, Heroku general manager and Salesforce EVP, blamed "abuse" on the demise of the free services, which span the free plans for Heroku Dynos and Heroku Postgres as well as the free plan for Heroku Data for Redis. [...] Wise went on to note that Heroku will be announcing a student program at Salesforce's upcoming Dreamforce conference in September, but the details remain a mystery at this point. For the uninitiated, Heroku allows programmers to build, run and scale apps across programming languages including Java, PHP, Scala and Go. Salesforce acquired the company for $212 million in 2010 and subsequently introduced support for Node.js and Clojure and Heroku for Facebook, a package to simplify the process of deploying Facebook apps on Heroku infrastructure. Heroku claims on its website that it's been used to develop 13 million apps to date.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Zuckerberg says waking up every day as chief executive of Meta is like getting punched in the stomach. From a report: "You wake up in the morning, look at my phone, you get like a million messages, right, of stuff that come in. It's usually not good," Mr. Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in an episode on his show that aired Thursday. "It's almost like every day you wake up and you're, like, punched in the stomach," Mr. Zuckerberg said. "Now I need to, like, go reset myself and be able to kind of be productive and not be stressed about this." After processing the information he's given, he said he spends an hour or two doing physical activity such as surfing or mixed martial arts.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Justice Department lawyers are in the early stages of drafting a potential antitrust complaint against Apple, Politico reported Friday, citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter -- a sign that a long-running investigation may be nearing a decision point and a suit could be coming soon. From the report: Various groups of prosecutors inside DOJ are assembling the pieces for a potential lawsuit, the individual said, adding that the department's antitrust division hopes to file suit by the end of the year. Still, the Justice Department has made no decisions whether or when to sue Apple, the world's most valuable public company, cautioned that person and one other familiar with the probe -- and it's still possible no case will be filed. Both were granted anonymity to discuss a confidential investigation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Academic journals will have to provide immediate access to papers that are publicly funded, providing a big win for advocates of open research and ending a policy that had allowed publishers to keep publications behind a paywall for a year, according to a White House directive. The New York Times: In laying out the new policy, which is set to be fully in place by the start of 2026, the Office of Science and Technology Policy said that the guidance had the potential to save lives and benefit the public on several key priorities -- from cancer breakthroughs to clean-energy technology. "The American people fund tens of billions of dollars of cutting-edge research annually," Dr. Alondra Nelson, the head of the office, said in a statement. "There should be no delay or barrier between the American public and the returns on their investments in research." Advocates for open-research access, like Greg Tananbaum, the director of the Open Research Funders Group, called the guidance "transformational" for researchers and the broader public alike. He said it built off a 2013 memorandum that was also important in expanding the public's access to research but fell short in some areas. The 2013 guidance applied to federal agencies with research and development expenditures of $100 million or more, about 20 of the largest agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. The guidance announced on Thursday covers nearly all federal bodies, a major expansion that includes about 400 or more entities, several experts said. The directive also requires that publications be made available in machine-readable formats to ensure use and reuse, a component that open-access advocates hailed as a game-changer for accessibility.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The company behind the bright green marijuana-themed trucks that crowd Manhattan's tourist districts is now paying the price for repeatedly breaking the law. They haven't been fined for selling anything illicit, but for being top contributors to one of the city's other infamous scourges: illegal parking. From a report: The New York City department of finance confirmed to the Guardian that Weed World Candies had paid $200,000 in parking fines to get back several vehicles that had been towed in June by the city's sheriff's office. But while Weed World is apparently getting on the right side of the law, its payments only equal a fraction of the $534.5m the city is owed in unpaid parking fines, according to the agency, as serial offenders skirt the rules in one of the world's most maddening places to get around. In Midtown Manhattan, where competition for parking is cutthroat in a grid of cramped and chaotic roadways, trucks habitually stop in bike lanes, forcing cyclists into busy traffic; cars double-park as drivers sprint into bodegas to buy their increasingly expensive bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches. Police often turn a blind eye, amid allegations that they illegally park their personal cars and harassed a cyclist who reported them.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The vaccine manufacturer Moderna sued Pfizer and BioNTech on Friday, claiming that its rivals' Covid-19 shot violates its patents protecting its groundbreaking technology. NPR reports: The lawsuit alleges the two companies used certain key features of technology Moderna developed to make their COVID-19 vaccine. It argues that Pfizer and BioNtech's vaccine infringes patents Moderna filed between 2010 and 2016 for its messenger RNA or mRNA technology. All three companies' COVID-19 vaccines used mRNA technology which is a new way to make vaccines. In the past, vaccines were generally made using parts of a virus, or inactivated virus, to stimulate an immune response. With mRNA technology, the vaccine uses messenger RNA created in a lab to send genetic instructions that teach our cells to make a protein or part of a protein that triggers an immune response. In October 2020, Moderna pledged not to enforce its COVID-19 related patents while the pandemic was ongoing, according to a statement from the company. In March this year, it said it will stick to its commitment not to enforce its COVID-19 related patents in low and middle-income countries, but expects rival companies like Pfizer to respect its intellectual property.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter founder and former chief executive Jack Dorsey says he regrets the social media platform became a company. From a report: "The biggest issue and my biggest regret is that it became a company," Dorsey tweeted in response to a question about whether Twitter turned out the way he had envisioned. Dorsey stands to receive $978 million if the agreement for billionaire Elon Musk to buy Twitter is completed. When asked about what structure he wished Twitter would operate under, Dorsey said that it should be "a protocol" and that Twitter should not be owned by a state or another company. If it were a protocol, Twitter would operate much like email, which is not controlled by one centralized entity, and people using different email providers are able to communicate with one another.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S wireless carrier T-Mobile will use Elon Musk-owned SpaceX's Starlink satellites to provide mobile users with network access in parts of the United States, the companies announced on Thursday, outlining plans to connect users' mobile phones directly to satellites in orbit. From a report: The new plans, which would exist alongside T-mobile's existing cellular services, would cut out the need for cell towers and offer service for sending texts and images where cell coverage does not currently exist, key for emergency situations in remote areas, Musk said at a flashy event on Thursday at his company's south Texas rocket facility. Starlink's satellites will use T-Mobile's mid-band spectrum to create a new network. Most phones used by the company's customers will be compatible with the new service, which will start with texting services in a beta phase beginning by the end of next year.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

joshuark shares a report from PCMag: The official Windows developer documentation team at Microsoft decided to ask Microsoft Archivist Amy Stevenson "What was the largest piece of software we ever shipped?" The answer may surprise you... [T]he award goes to Microsoft C/C++ compiler with the Windows SDK, which was released in 1992 and weighed over 40 pounds. It included Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 in a box that was more than two feet long and allowed a developer to produce MS-DOS, Windows, and OS/2 applications. As Stevenson points out, "we never did that again," and the next product launched was Visual C++.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: According to GLHF sources, Amazon will announce today that it has put in a formal offer to acquire Electronic Arts (EA), the publisher behind Apex Legends, FIFA, Madden, and more. Rumors have been circling online for a few weeks about a potential EA buyout, with Apple, Disney, and Amazon listed as potential buyers. As per our sources, Amazon has finally made an offer. It's a smart business move from Amazon, which is also making big moves in television. After the success of The Witcher and Arcane on Netflix -- both shows built around big video games -- Amazon could potentially use EA's franchises as settings for new shows. Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dead Space -- there's plenty of potential in EA's library for transmedia opportunities.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Telegraph: Academics from Japan have found that ethanol helps make plants more drought-resistant (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) and better able to survive an extended bout of dry weather. Experiments found that getting plants drunk helps crops flourish while sober plants become shrunken and disheveled. Plants lose water through their leaves when pores called stomata open to allow it to escape, but ethanol helps keep these closed, the scientists found, thus improving water retention. Genetic analysis of the plant also showed that plants switch on drought-fighting genes when ethanol is picked up by the roots. This not only stopped the loss of water through the vent-like stomata but also saw the plant activate a process where it actually uses the alcohol for fuel. Photosynthesis, the vital process that plants use to make energy from sunlight, needs water, but in the study, published in the journal Plant and Cell Physiology, the team found the plant can do this with ethanol instead in times of drought to further conserve dwindling supplies while also still making energy. This metabolizing of alcohol also means that shops would not be stocked with alcohol-infused foods if an alcohol-aided plant was harvested as it would have long ago been turned into energy by the plant. "There are some interesting questions to ask about WHY this pathway exists in plants," adds Slashdot reader Bruce66423. "The article doesn't talk about the concentration needed."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: Astronomers have found carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere of a Saturn-size planet 700 light-years away -- the first unambiguous detection of the gas in a planet beyond the Solar System. The discovery, made by the James Webb Space Telescope, provides clues to how the planet formed. The result also shows just how quickly Webb may identify a spate of other gases, such as methane and ammonia, which could hint at a planet's potential habitability for life. [...] For its first exoplanet observations, astronomers targeted the hot gas giant WASP-39b, which orbits its star every 4 days in an orbit much tighter than Mercury's. The first data were taken on 10 July and the team started work on them a few days later. Even in raw data based on a single transit across the star, the spectral dip of CO2 "sticks out like a sore thumb," says Webb team member Jacob Bean of the University of Chicago. There have been some tentative detections of the gas before, he says, but none of them held up under scrutiny. Webb's spectrum was "the right size, the right shape, and in the right position," Bean says. "CO2 just popped out." Finding CO2 is valuable because it is a clue to a planet's "metallicity" -- the proportion of elements heavier than helium in its makeup. Hydrogen and helium produced in the big bang are the starting materials for all the visible matter in the universe, but anything heavier was forged later in stars. Researchers believe a good supply of heavy elements is crucial for creating giant planets. When planets form out of a disk of material around a new star, heavier elements form solid grains and pebbles that glom together into a solid core that eventually is massive enough to pull in gases with its own gravity and grow into a gas giant. With Webb, finding "important chemicals will be the norm rather than the exception," says one expert. He predicts that when Webb starts to study cooler planets closer in size to Earth, there will be some real surprises -- perhaps some gases that could indicate whether the planets are amenable to life. "It's anyone's guess," he says. "A whole zoo of chemicals is possible." The findings first appeared on the preprint server arXiv yesterday and they will appear in Nature in the near future.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: In a monumental leap in stem cell research, an experiment led by researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK has developed a living model of a mouse embryo complete with fluttering heart tissues and the beginnings of a brain. The research advances the recent success of a team comprised of some of the same scientists who pushed the limits on mimicking the embryonic development of mice using stem cells that had never seen the inside of a mouse womb. In the past, researchers in embryology have focused largely on plucking choice stem cells from parts of an embryo that would grow into an animal and encouraging them to proliferate in glassware full of specially selected nutrients. Over the years, this method has resulted in clumps of cells containing the basic starting structures of a gut and a fold of tissues called the neural tube. What the so-called 'gastruloid' model contains in form, however, it lacks in function. Many features expected to develop alongside these tissues aren't present, making it harder to draw parallels between the model and an authentic growing embryo. There are ways to encourage brain-like structures to appear, as well as functioning heart tissue and a more complex gut tube. Yet workarounds based on comparatively simple hormonal soups can only go so far. Mixing stem cells representative from these three major tissue groups and improving on previous methods for their development in vitro (that means in a dish) into an embryoid, the team found their model could progress under its own steam to develop a nervous system equivalent to a natural mouse embryo at 8.5 days post-conception. The step is a small one, equivalent to just a single day of development for an unborn mouse. But a lot can happen in that 24 hours of gestation. The synthetic embryoid also contained foundational heart tissue that twitched out a beat and the beginnings of a gut, as well as the start of structures that in an actual embryo could build parts of the skeleton, muscles, and other tissues beneath the skin. On its own, the model wouldn't continue to develop into anything like a thriving baby mouse. Science is far from able to produce anything so advanced as a functional organ from stem cells alone, let alone an entire animal. While the resemblance is quite significant in research, it is -- so to speak -- only skin deep, lacking the signals that would see it transform into the fully-formed organism it models. Having a collection of tissues that authentically reflects development outside of a body provides researchers with the opportunity to not only observe, but ethically test genetic changes that could help improve our understanding of how our bodies grow. The findings appear in a study published in the journal Nature.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world's largest comprehensive database on Japanese anime, Anime Taizen, was opened to the public today, August 25, at 13:00 (JST). Taizen means "A book that collects all things related to the matter" in Japanese. Crunchyroll reports: Since 2015, The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) has been promoting the "Anime NEXT_100" project to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Japanese animation. As a major initiative of the project, this database was first released on a trial basis on October 22, 2021, and after confirming functionality and operation, and making improvements and updates, it has now been released to the public. As of the end of July 2022, Anime Taizen has approximately 15,000 registered titles, mainly Japanese commercial anime works released from 1917 to the present. In addition to title name searches, the database has search functions for chronology, Japanese syllabary, keywords, etc. As a result of the research to date, the number of episodes amounts to approximately 180,000.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The popular nutrition and weight loss app MyFitnessPal is moving its free barcode scanning feature behind the paywall. The Verge reports: For years, users with free accounts have been able to use this tool to scan food barcodes for easy logging and tracking of daily calorie intake, but the company recently announced that beginning October 1st, a premium account will be required. MyFitnessPal's daily calorie counting is a key component of the app, with the barcode scanner offering a shortcut to finding nutritional value for a specific food item in the app's vast database of food. Much of that database is user-generated, with both free and premium users able to add any food by entering the nutrition facts and barcode off a label. Once October 1st rolls around, free users will still be able to search the database for their food entries, but the barcode scanner will cost $19.99 per month or $79.99 for an annual plan, along with other premium features. And any new users that create a free account on or after September 1st will be shut out from scanning barcodes even earlier unless they pay. "By losing the barcode scanner, MyFitnessPal is doing its users an egregious disservice," writes The Verge's Antonio G. Di Benedetto. "Losing weight and being cognizant of what you eat is hard enough." "MyFitnessPal is obviously looking to maximize profits, but if the popular r/loseit subreddit is any indication, many users may consider switching to competing apps like Cronometer, Loseit, or Macros over this loss."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New research claims that of five major Big Tech firms, Google tracks more private data about users than any other -- and Apple tracks the least. AppleInsider reports: Apple has previously introduced App Tracking Transparency specifically to protect the privacy of users from other companies. However, a new report says that Apple is also avoiding doing any more tracking itself than is needed to run its services. According to StockApps.com, Apple "is the most privacy-conscious firm out there." "Apple only stores the information that is necessary to maintain users' accounts," it continues. "This is because their website is not as reliant on advertising revenue as are Google, Twitter, and Facebook." The StockApps.com report does not list what it describes as the "data points" that Big Tech firms collect for every user. However, it says they include location details, browser history, activity on third-party websites, and in Google's case, also emails in Gmail. It also doesn't detail its methodology, but does say that it used marketing firm digitalinformationworld to investigate Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Of these five, Google reportedly tracks 39 separate data points per user, while Apple tracks only 12. Unexpectedly, Facebook is stated as tracking only 14 data points, while Amazon tracks 23, and Twitter tracks 24.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Americans addicted to Amazon could soon be wooed by a Chinese tech giant most of them have never heard of. Pinduoduo is planning to expand its reach to the US next month, according to reports in Bloomberg and Reuters. The company is known for delivering goods at rock-bottom prices -- while putting its employees through conditions that a prominent labor activist says should horrify Americans. Described by its founder, the former Google employee Colin Huang, as a cross between "Costco and Disneyland," Pinduoduo has ridden a wave of meteoric Chinese tech growth to become one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world since its founding in 2015. Pinduoduo targeted China's smaller cities and more rural areas, where consumers tend to be less wealthy and more cost-conscious, says JS Tan, an MIT graduate student who researches the Chinese tech industry. Its signature feature is "group buying," which allows users to organize people to make mass purchases directly from manufacturers at a steep discount. Because Pinduoduo is heavily integrated with WeChat, China's top social media platform, it's a snap for users to gather up friends, family and internet strangers to order big batches of everything from electronics to baby formula to groceries -- something that became a lifeline during China's strict Covid lockdowns. "Pinduoduo is known for its extreme overtime," said Li Qiang, a veteran labor activist and founder of the non-profit China Labor Watch. "The competition is extremely intense, and the conditions are much crueler than in America." Two Pinduoduo employees died within a two-week period from December 2020 to January 2021, igniting a national scandal. The first worker, 22-year-old Zhang Fei, died on 29 December, when she was heading home around 1.30am after a series of extremely long shifts. The second worker, an engineer in his 20s, jumped to his death on 9 January after abruptly asking for leave from the company and traveling home the same day. The controversy grew when days later, a Pinduoduo employee who called himself Wang Taixu said he had been fired by the company after posting a photo of a colleague being taken into an ambulance after collapsing. Wang subsequently published a lengthy video on the video-sharing site Bilibili detailing labor abuses he had witnessed at the company; he alleged that some workers were made to work as many as 380 hours a month, which the company denied. "I think that for American tech workers, this definitely isn't a good thing," said Li. "In terms of manufacturing costs, American companies have no way to compete with Pinduoduo. If Pinduoduo succeeds, it could take Chinese-style labor practices and bring them to America."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chinese search engine giant Baidu revealed its first quantum computer on Thursday and is ready to make it available to external users, joining the global race to apply the technology to practical uses. Reuters reports: The Baidu-developed quantum computer, dubbed "Qianshi," has a 10-quantum-bit (qubit) processor, Baidu said in a statement. The Beijing-based company has also developed a 36-qubit quantum chip, it said. Governments and companies around the world for years have touted the potential of quantum computing, a form of high-speed calculation at extraordinarily cold temperatures that will bring computers to unprecedented processing speeds. However, current real-world applications in the field are still very basic and limited to a small group of early clients.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It turns out, software testers are relying more on automation than ever before, driven by a desire to lower testing costs and improve software quality and user experience. VentureBeat shares the findings from a new report by Kobiton: Kobiton asked 150 testers in companies with at least 50 employees across a range of industries. [...] For context, there are two kinds of software testing: manual and automated. Manual is still common but it's not ideal for repetitive tests, leading many testers to choose automation, which can expedite development and app performance. To wit, 40% of testers responding to Kobiton's study said their primary motivation for using automation is improving user experience. "In a study we conducted two years ago, half the testers we asked said their automation programs were relatively new, and 76% said they were automating fewer than 50% of all tests," said Kevin Lee, CEO of Kobiton. "Nearly 100% of testers participating in this year's study are using automation, which speaks to how far the industry has come." Testing managers are prioritizing new hires with automation experience, too. Kobiton's study found that automation experience is one of the three skills managers are most interested in. And how is automation being used? A plurality (34%) of respondents to Kobiton's survey said they are using automation for an equal mix of regression and new feature testing. And it's made them more efficient. Almost half (47%) of survey respondents said it takes 3-5 days for manual testing before a release, whereas automated tests can have it done in 3-6 hours.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN Travel: The future of environmentally friendly travel might just be here -- and it's Germany that's leading the charge, with the first ever rail line to be entirely run on hydrogen-powered trains, starting from Wednesday. Fourteen hydrogen trains powered by fuel cell propulsion will exclusively run on the route in Bremervorde, Lower Saxony. The 93 million euro ($92.3 million) deal has been struck by state subsidiary Landesnahverkehrsgesellschaft Niedersachsen (LVNG), the owners of the railway, and Alstom, builders of the Coradia iLint trains. The Elbe-Weser Railways and Transport Company (EVB), which will operate the trains, and gas and engineering company Linde, are also part of the project. The trains, five of which which debut Wednesday, will gradually replace the 15 diesel trains that currently run on the route, with all 14 running exclusively by the end of the year. Just 1 kilo of hydrogen fuel can do the same as around 4.5 kilos of diesel. The trains are emissions-free and low-noise, with only steam and condensed water issuing from the exhaust. They have a range of 1,000 kilometers (621 miles), meaning they can run for an entire day on the network on a single tank of hydrogen. A hydrogen filling station has already been established on the route. The trains can go at a maximum of 140 kph, or 87mph, though regular speeds on the line are much less, between 80-120 kph.Read more of this story at Slashdot.